#AIS: Palmer Luckey on Anduril

hey everybody hey everybody we have an exciting show for you today this is the 15th and the final episode from the all in summit 2022 i wanted to take a quick moment to thank my team they worked tirelessly over a hundred days to make the event magical for everybody who is able to make it thanks to the audience for coming next year we'll try to have twice as many of you there just a quick thank you to amber ashley jackie nick fresh marine molly big mike andre times 2 rachel reporting producer justin jamie jimmy d my brother josh everybody who came and supported the event we had an incredible crew we had an incredible time and of course i would be remiss if i didn't thank the amazing speakers who joined us from all around the world so candid so insightful my pal bill gurley brett gerstner edina mark tandis tim elon antonio nate ryan claire my boy or a boy antonio garcia martinez joe lonsdale james mattaiby glenn greenwald and of course today's guest the one and the only mr palmer lucky and most of all i'd like to thank my besties saks and freeberg who did an amazing job of hosting the event now a little preamble here before we start this episode many of you have heard uh that this is a controversial episode it is a little controversial there may be a little twist in it so i will be coming back after palmer lucky's talk to give you a little context because it might get a little confusing i don't want to spoil the surprise for you so enjoy this episode but before we go to this episode a lot of you have questions you have questions about the future of the online podcast and those questions are important and um they're never going to be answered they're never going to be answered but just so you know i'm not leaving i'm not leaving i'm not leaving [Applause] the show goes on this is my home they're gonna need a wrecking ball to take me out of here they're gonna need to send in the national guard because i ain't going nowhere the show goes on [Music] [Music] all right everybody pommeler lucky fantastic um so hang on did a video play that showed my stuff or no that was going to play at some point you guys want to play that video all right all i can do is stand here i don't have actually any power [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] now that the comedy routine is over we can get started so my name is palmer lucky i founded two companies my first was a company called oculus vr that i founded when i was 19 years old and living in a camper trailer thank you thank you um sold that to for a few billion dollars to facebook and then got fired a few years later and then started andrew because i wanted to work in the national security space for a variety of reasons and i'll get into some of those reasons today so the technology industry for many years has prided itself on being the first to understand where things are heading so they can build the things that are going to be relevant for the future on national security though and on the rise of our strategic adversaries it was one of the last industries to realize where things were going due to a variety of ideological reasons but also business reasons now silicon valley didn't just predict the importance of defense in the 2020s it largely took the exact wrong position the opposite position first of all you have the obvious examples like big technology companies explicitly refusing to do work with the department of defense google is one big example but the worst examples are really in the startups that don't exist because people didn't want to even get into such a controversial space unless it ruined their careers you know when i started anderl i had already sold a company for billions of dollars and investors still didn't want to invest i still had a tough time in a lot of meetings with venture capitalists and none of the conversations with vcs that i had were about my ability to hire or execute or build products everyone believed that i could do those things even the ones who didn't like me much the vast majority of conversations that we had were about whether or not it was even ethically okay to ever build a company that would build weapons and the people who turned us down the ones who decided not to invest in anderl actually believed that we had a good team and good people and good product market fit the issue is that they thought that it was inherently wrong to build tools capable of being used for violence because they believed that the idea of deterring violence through having a strong arsenal was fundamentally obsolete and itself wrong uh even you know imagine how hard it would have been to raise money if i hadn't found it oculus would have been impossible even after we raised money and got traction the negativity continued there was a really interesting uh cover story in bloomberg in 2019 they called us tech's most controversial startup this was a year where tick-tock was banning users for calling attention to the weaker genocide in in china and banning users for posting homosexual content this is a year in which adam newman paid himself tens of millions of dollars for the right to use the word we it's a year that uber was under a federal investigation for its workplace culture immediately after a board coup that ejected much of the leadership it's a time where facebook was getting hauled in front of congress to testify but of course as a tiny defense company making a handful of purely defensive base security systems that committed the crime of building technology for the military andrew was the one that claimed the belt for the world's most controversial technology company i'd say that the war in europe has totally shattered the idea that we live at the end of history every few decades we start to believe that economic ties have ended all prospect of war and every few decades reminded this isn't true that's a very popular idea especially in dc that we live at what they call the end of history it's this idea that economic ties and interconnections make the prospect of conflict fundamentally unthinkable ignoring the fact that many people see this as a matter of destiny in economics in 1909 english economist and politician norman angel published an entire book called the great illusion and it was entirely about how war in europe was impossible and that spending money on building militaries that could deter conflict was a waste of time that could be better spent building utopia he specifically argued that any european country annexing another would be as absurd as london annexing hertford and the book was actually the number one bestseller in 1909. now we've had some version of this argument for a few decades now ever since the cold war started and luckily a lot of people are waking up but unfortunately it's not because they've come to a reasoned decision based on the fundamental principles at play it's because right now supporting the military supporting defense and supporting ukraine in particular has become the current thing and in current year current thing is the thing that you have to support regardless of what you think of the underpinnings unfortunately for issues like defense and national security the stakes are too high and the relevant timeline is far too long for people to start caring about things at the moment that they need to start caring about them so today i want to talk a little bit about why i started anderle and why you should all think exactly the same way that i do so why i founded anderall i thought that i would work on virtual reality for my entire life i had no plans on leaving oculus at all and i loved virtual reality i loved virtual reality i started oculus as a teenager and i would have been there for another 50 years i said as much less than 30 days before i was fired there's there's a lot of reasons for that some of which i'll get into later uh but the decision was made for me i gave nine thousand dollars against the wrong political candidate and it was pretty unpopular in silicon valley before i worked on oculus i actually worked in an army affiliate research center on a program called bravemind which was an army project to treat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder using virtual reality exposure therapy basically putting them into virtual reality environments that would set off their symptoms and then under the guidance of a licensed therapist who's also in the simulation they could be taught coping skills it would reduce their dependency on medication and medical aid it was a really fantastic program i wasn't doing anything important on it i was just a lab technician a cable monkey but i got a lot of exposure to both the virtual reality technology side but also how broken defense procurement was how slow it was how old a lot of the technology was how the incentives were totally misaligned and ever since then i'd always wanted to make a contribution to national security if i could just took a few years for the right for the right set of circumstances to come up the defense industry in america is fundamentally broken uh you know before even getting into the specific problems of our defense industry the united states has the strongest commercial artificial intelligence industry in the world followed closely by china but at the same time the united states military and the prime contractors that dominate the military industrial complex have none of the right tools talent or incentives to apply autonomy to the system to do there's no reason to save costs because they don't get paid for making things that work they get paid for doing work and in a world where you get more prestige and more money by having more people working on bigger things there's no reason to use autonomy to reduce costs and increase capability the us military is well behind the chinese people liberate people's liberation army and the implementation of artificial intelligence there's more better ai in john deere tractors than there is in any u.s military vehicle there's better computer vision in the snapchat app on your phone than any system that the us department of defense has deployed and other countries are taking notice of this countries like russia and china do not want to compete with us toe to toe with the tools that we have people will make fun of china and say oh they have they don't have a blue water navy they only have one aircraft carrier coming up on two they could never fight us the reality is that that's not where they're going to fight us they're going to arm proxies or if they engage directly they're going to use technologies that give them an asymmetrical advantage in the areas where we are the least competent these are the areas where they are putting a lot of their resources the reason vladimir putin is saying that the ruler of the world is going to be the country that masters artificial intelligence is not because he thinks that they're going to lose at this it's because he thinks that that is one of the only ways that they're going to be able to get the best of us now the people who are building technology for our military the large defense primes i won't name any names because i'm not i i i don't wanna i don't wanna wrestle too many feathers in that area and i've never known who's in the room but the people who are building the technology for the united states military the people who spend all their time do not have access to the best talent they do not have access to the people of the technology industry has largely had a monopoly on in areas like autonomy artificial int intelligence sensor fusion high-end networking and then at the same time the people who can build who can build good software the ones who do work in these technology companies are largely prohibited from doing so and even if they're working on something that military buys let's say all the people at apple who are working on an iphone that can be sold to the us air force that same iphone is also being sold to russian intelligence that same iphone is being sold to the chinese navy working on technologies that help the united states don't give us a strategic or competitive advantage if everyone else is getting the exact same thing the other problem to consider is that asymmetric technologies like artificial intelligence are almost certainly going to empower nations that we aren't thinking about today some of them are a little more obvious like iran it was a close u.s ally until the late 1970s and today obviously isn't a very different position there's about a dozen countries in africa south america and asia that were they to acquire extremely advanced artificial intelligence either through coincidence or by proxy arming would almost certainly start to wage war on their neighbors in a very destabilizing way it would have been a mature bet for me to found a second unicorn in a different industry that wasn't so fundamentally broken uh gaming fast casual dining fintech i could have made some apecoins but there have actually been more mattress unicorns than defense unicorns in the last 35 years but i decided the best thing that i could do to try and solve this problem was to use the fact that i had a bunch of money and i had a bunch of credibility to do something that was hugely popular to ignore the fact that people were belittling me for it and tried to convince a bunch of brilliant people to come along with me so they wouldn't waste their lives spending augmented reality mustache emojis and instead they could do some work for our armed forces but it's worth looking at the past and realizing that this is a recent problem it's not something that has been the case for a very long time silicon valley was largely built on the back of defense in 1947 half of stanford's engineering budget came from the department of defense fred turman stanford dean brought dod contracts and interest to the west coast in a way that had fundamentally been limited almost entirely to the east coast and silicon valley helped power a lot of the things that are powering the modern military machine in the 1950s alone we built the pentagon well sorry i i i i have an error in my notes this is wrong um in the lead up to the 50s and the early 50s we built the pentagon in 16 months we completed the manhattan project in three years we put a man on the moon in under a decade and just between 1951 and 1959 we built five generations of fighter jets three generations of bombers two classes of carriers nuclear powered submarines and ballistic missiles to go on top of them if you look at the current state of the industry we're lucky to do even one of these things in a decade and i can't really blame the the defense industry for not working with the dod entirely it's not just an ideological problem it's also an economic problem when the cold war ended the government really became a pretty terrible customer the technology industry drifted away most engineers in silicon valley do not remember a great power conflict because they haven't lived in a world where a great power was an existential threat to the united states and so you have a lot of people who are ideologically opposed to working with the military now we could spend an entire talk i only have a few minutes to talk today we talked we spent a whole talk talking about the ethics of defense and you know what what the reasonable critiques of the military are and how you can change what you build for them in a good way but i'll i'll throw out a factor that i think most people don't think about enough even the people who do agree on working with the military there's a lot of companies in silicon valley and and and elsewhere who look at those employees who are ideologically opposed to working with the military and they use them as a smoke screen pretending that it's principled opposition that drives their decision when in reality they want access to chinese markets they want access to chinese investment they want access to other countries that are tied into these things and so they're able to use these people who are ideologically opposed to working with the military which actually make up a pretty small fraction of the u.s population as a smoke screen for their real intention which is to preserve access to those markets preserve access to those capital our largest companies are not making these decisions based on what is best for the united states certainly not what is best for the united states in the long term they're largely making the decisions based on short-term ideas that are not based in any kind of long-term thinking if you look at the recent ships bill that congress passed saying that they're the the united states government is going to put uh 50 billion 52 billion dollars into building semiconductors in the united states you have to compare that with the recent news that well it leaked it wasn't what wasn't news on purpose but apple has pledged to put 275 billion dollars as one company into chinese manufacturing you have one company putting in more than five times as much money into manufacturing advanced technology as what is supposed to be a landmark piece of u.s legislation the situation that we're in is is pretty weird uh this is going to sound hyperbolic but bear with me the situation we were in right now would be like if in the build-up to world war ii general electric had said you know what we really like the united states but we're actually very bullish on imperial japan we think it's going to be a huge growth opportunity for us and our metrics just aren't going to look the same if we wipe those off of our road map imagine if in the build up to the cold war if you had had westinghouse and other major u.s technology companies say ah you know we love manufacturing in the united states but we actually think communist manufacturing is a really interesting experiment that we need to see through and you know we're not sure that we really want to take a side on this uh the situation that we are in today is as dire or worse the only reason that it seems ridiculous and the only reason it seems hyperbolic is because conflict has not actually broken out yet if a conflict does break out we're going to look at the current situation where we are hugely strategically and economically dependent at the highest levels of our technology industry and government on an adversary that is literally committing genocide and slaving millions of people we are going to look back on ourselves and feel really stupid now the good news is that because of russia's invasion of ukraine defense is now the current thing uh in the united states there is this idea that any problem can be fixed at the last second with just a really incredible twist if we just come up with the right thing but there's a lot of problems out there that cannot be solved that way national security economic policy environmental policy these are things that require non-political bipartisan agreement on the problem decades before it becomes a really big problem those are not things that are acceptable current things uh shape rotation this is an acceptable current thing to debate uh whether or not will smith was wrong to uh to to wrong to take the slap or if he's just you know a representative of warrior culture you know that's that's a that's a fair debate to have the idea of the united states having a military that is strong enough to deter conflict should not be in that category so why is it two why is it too late to care about defense now at this exact moment in time why is it too late for everybody to suddenly change their minds uh well a few things one you go to war with the tools that you have not the tools that you wish you had or the tools that you start working on when things become a problem if you look at the weapons that were given to ukraine they were built in the 80s 90s and 2000s 40 billion dollars plus worth of them and for all their differences defense is one of the few things that republicans and democrats alike have realized transcends the partisan divide on one level it's obviously very bad that we don't have more modern weapons to give to ukraine but on the other it shows a level of foresight and planning that we've been stockpiling and building these legacy weapons systems for decades explicitly for a situation like today which has been war gamed out to the nth degree imagine if the department of defense had done nothing to prepare for war for 40 years and then as soon as war broke out they started tweeting a lot and changed their profile pictures to ukraine flag and then started saying you know we stand with ukraine uh the the people who are actually tasked with solving these problems are uh they generally have good planning but there's only so much they can do without good technology so i want to reiterate if you only start building now you've lost the chance to deter war from happening that's the real purpose of the defense industry it's not to fight wars it's not to win wars it's to prevent wars from happening wars happen when one or both sides misestimate their probability of winning if both sides agree that one side or the other is going to win typically you end up with diplomatic resolution it's when both sides disagree about the possibility of winning that conflict actually actually breaks out and so if you actually want to prevent conflict from happening in the first place you have to get involved well ahead of time if you get involved after conflict breaking out breaks out like so many companies have you're ensuring that you're only going to be a part of the killing you're only going to be a part of the bloodshed you're only going to be a part of the war you're not going to be a part of preventing the war from happening in the first place so i would argue that people in the technology industry need to work on defense not because it's the current thing but because it's the right thing i have one more thing that i want to say [Applause] thank you i talked earlier about npc thinking that prioritizes popularity over principles what i'm about to do is in very very bad taste but i'm going to do it anyway yeah we'll see one of the people who i think embodies this type of npc thinking of going with what's popular and not being willing to to to ever reverse their position even when they're proven wrong is jason calcanis let me read about some of the things he said about me over the years just just a small sampling palmer lucky hideous what an idiot a [ __ ] this guy parker lucky parker lucky a complete and utter [ __ ] jesus this kid is an idiot palmer lucky is just an idiot and a troll he is dumb so so so dumb oh no we got to keep going for him to pull the plug in the palmer lucky experience was brilliant kudos zuckerberg a complete lack of moral character and leadership palmer lucky a complete [ __ ] palmer doesn't care about any of his employees family members or team members now this doesn't include any of the lies that he's told about me this doesn't including the lies he's told about my businesses this doesn't include any of the terrible things that his co-hosts and guests have said about me over the years that went unchallenged and egged on if i'm a hideous stupid person with no morals who doesn't care about my family or my employees i shouldn't be invited here no matter how relevant ukraine is he's had many chances to retract or apologize these statements and rather than taking any of them he keeps telling people that the reason i won't be on the show is because i'm too thin-skinned because i disagree with him on some of the things he said about oculus this is not the case i've explicitly told him why i've refused to be on a show it's because he and his crew of bullies have been vicious liars who've attacked me for years and berated me for years and spread lies about me for real years in a way that i've been able to overcome that very few entrepreneurs would have the money or the resources or the credibility to do and being nice to a few people like i'm sure he's being nice to you does not excuse this this isn't debatable whether it happened or not it clearly happened it's these are all direct quotes from things that he said over the years both while i was at oculus and during my time after oculus and jason like many influential people some of them even in this room who have treated me like [ __ ] for years suddenly changed their tune as soon as andrew was on the upswing as soon as we were doing good things they started inviting me on their podcasts liking all my social media posts putting me on their innovator lists all without any acknowledgement whatsoever that they were the ones that were attacking me when it was popular kicking me while i was on the ground and treating me like garbage it's really pathetic because a lot of my remaining critics at least are basing their opinions on some kind of consistent world view a lot of other people are attacking me and the work that i do because it's popular when it's popular to attack me they attack me when it's unpopular to attack me when ukraine is being attacked they are suddenly friends and those are the same people that i know are going to go back to [ __ ] on me the second that it becomes popular again um i'm coming to the end of this and i know that you guys are probably thinking wow this guy's pretty thin skin for a billionaire that's fair that's fair [Applause] but i want to remind you something jason and the people like him are the reason i was fired for my from oculus my own company the company it was my heart and my soul for my entire teenage and adult life for him it was a game it was his show and for me it was everything and i lost everything it almost destroyed me i'm still filled with rage about it i always will be i'll end with this i was able to create andro because a small group of people were willing to give me a second chance to let me build something great in an important but controversial industry that was being constantly berated by people who thought we lived at the end of history they invested in me while jason was trying to poison my career and keep me on the ground thank god he failed thank god for investors who ignore him and people like him the market conditions suggest they're going to be a lot of founders hopefully none of the people in this room losing their startups over the next year or so and i pray that they get a second chance like i did i pray they aren't deterred from working on important but unpopular problems i pray that they will successfully claw their way back to success that they aren't deterred from working on things that really matter i pray that they manage to do this despite the inevitably stupid and hot takes sorry inevitably stupid and spiteful hot takes that jason his associates and the many people like him who make money spewing [ __ ] are certainly going to be putting out there amen thank you [Applause] join us [Applause] [Applause] great to meet you in person um jason what lessons have we learned here today well i mean i guess we were talking backstage and jason's like oh you know i had to do so much to get this guy here because i think he hates me and this was before this [ __ ] happened and i was like well maybe you shouldn't talk [ __ ] about people well the good thing is i was able to make it to this stage to say this most of the people that you've gone after this way will never have that opportunity because they won't start a second unicorn i'm only here because i managed to claw my way back and remember this is personal because it's not just you it's you you're one of the most influential certainly but it's you and really a small cadre of people that by attacking me ceaselessly made it impossible for me to continue my tenure at oculus i'm really lucky i clawed my way back because that's exceedingly rare for a company to do the person to do that [Applause] what i was hoping to talk about your new thing but i guess since we have no choice but go here what happened at facebook and maybe you can just explain that and what i i got wrong about what happened well it's not just what's wrong this is actually why i i went out of my way there's actually a lot of lies you told and spread and your co-hosts and your guests uh but i'm not even talking about those the things that i listed you'll notice these aren't material accusations these are just personal attacks you've made on my character these are just things you've said about me personally as a founder and entrepreneur vicious personal attacks separately there's all of the lies you've said about how oculus didn't have any differentiated technology it was totally commoditized anybody could have done it it really was just right thing at the right time we could spend all day talk about why these aren't true but the real reason that it became untenable for me and the real reason that i'm not in the vr industry is because people like you were enabling those lies and then being vicious about it and attacking me personally it became clear i couldn't be a representative in an industry where people are going to treat me like fairly or not imagine doing a podcast with them what's that impact you're doing a podcast i guess if you have no choice but to keep i'll just ask you do you want us to just describe what palmer's talking about can i can i try my best no no hold on what what what because my memory of of the events uh you just read all the things you said right but what is the what were we talking about at the time well there was a lot of controversy at facebook about some donations anonymous accounts things just said well so those that wasn't one thing that was over the course of years so that was just a small sampling um i had to really find a small sample you know you can't you can't ever do it but i'll tell you what this would be fired from facebook what was the controversy there because that's what i was commenting on in this well no some of those were after i was fired and you were saying it was great that i was fired um and actually by the way it's like one of your one of your co-hosts said on your show that they're glad i got fired from my politics and that line is mysteriously missing from your transcripts by the way um and there's never ever we don't edit any of the things and i didn't have a coast at the time it's probably just one of the news reporters who came on we would have interviewed them but there was a lot of controversy here's what happened i gave 9 000 to a group that ran a single anti-hillary clinton billboard that was actually the extent of it and then a huge number of people in the tech influencer space the social media talking heads and media they started saying palmer lucky is this terrible person who's funding sorry just to be clear so you made a donation and it was on an fec filing somewhere somebody pulled it out and then basically said like to a pack or something it was so it was too it was to a 501c4 i believe who used that for their political arm um so but it was it was public this was it wasn't public filing yeah yeah and so i and i actually ended up giving a quote to a reporter about it uh so you know it wasn't it wasn't uh it wasn't something that people understood what it was right but then a bunch of people just lied they said palmer lucky was funding uh people who are attacking hillary clinton supporters online there were a lot of people who i think were looking for a scapegoat to kind of be the right wing the right wing reaction to correct the record which actually was paying people to attack why why did zuck fire you what's that why did zafari oh no zuck didn't fire me he's waiting why did face face why did i'll just ask the third time why did facebook fire you there's a lot of reasons i always had good performance reviews uh but here's what it what it really boiled down to was this my favorite talk by far what it really boils down to is this uh it was clear that there were a lot of people in the media and in the tech industry who were going to continue attacking me we hoped it would blow over but they kept attacking me for months and months and months and months i was put on leave for six months i don't know if you know that uh right this is all on the heels of this one political donation correct nine thousand dollars yes and so on the heels that the hope was that it would go away now i think here's the real problem i think if trump had lost people could have said oh well you know he's just one of those eccentrics impact no he's a loser loser but whatever uh trump winning is i think what made it so you're because people continued to attack me not for the nine thousand the nine thousand dollar donation was the reason you were fired just for uh just for supporting trump [Music] as you know these things are very complex but more or less yes i mean like there's there's a direct causal line from that to me being put on leave to me not being allowed to come back and then pushed out we talk a lot about this on the pod on um mob behavior and i think uh marc andreessen said the smartest thing i've read on twitter in the year i retweeted it and i took it away and i think he pointed out that it's it feels safer to be in the mob than to not be in the mob well it always is because when you're in the mob you're part of the group but you also get to attack and it's safe to attack when you're in the group right and i think by the way what you did there one of the things i i will highlight irregardless of the content and the thing that was very brave and we don't see a lot of bravery nowadays and uh um i i i don't mean that i honestly i don't mean that to disparage jason but like that sort of behavior where you stand up and you say something that will be highly controversial and go against the mob and against the tide and maybe piss off an entire room is something that we don't see a lot of and i think that that level of bravery is also what's missing going back to the mid-20th century which allowed us to do all the things you highlighted as a country last century that we're not doing anymore i appreciate your bravery more than anything thank you yeah [Applause] yeah but but look i i don't know about the specifics with with j cal but it certainly seems that there's a lot of this we talk about this like with with brian armstrong standing up at coinbase and all the stuff that's gone on that we think i i would argue probably made twitter a highly complacent place is everyone wants to be you know you don't want to stand up and you don't want to make that change and you don't want to be brave and you want to be part of the mob of the of the crowd attacking the right well people see what happens i mean what happened to me has like this is this is i can't i can't back this up obviously this is getting into personal anecdote which is never a good way to support any idea but you know i know a lot of people who remain at facebook and they will not say anything and they will not donate to any politician yeah it's crazy who's left of bernie because they saw what happened to me and they've explicitly said i saw what happened to you because remember it wasn't just the public it was the internal reaction where people were saying oh my god like i will not work for a trump supporter this is terrible i mean actually one great example andrew bosworth he ran ads at facebook for 14 years he was put in after my departure as the head of oculus and he was the guy who was putting things on social media like i think the exact wording was if you support donald trump because you don't like hillary clinton you are a shitty human being and he's the person who's allowed to lead oculus now so it's not a problem of being aggressive being on the right side it's being on the right side of the politics and so there's a lot of people where they're just they're not going to say anything because they see what happens to me now sax is loving this and i tell when i hear somebody disagree with i'll let you guys know [Applause] the real irony here is my contributions have been very open but my advice to founders who are on the right has actually been don't be public about your political leanings because you won't accomplish anything you will just you will be terminated by the mob you should focus on building you should focus on creating value and then after you don't need the rest of the industry you can kick him to the curb and do something how do you how do you implement that philosophy um differently now at anderl so that you have a more inclusive place where folks on the left and folks on the right come together work on things that really matter i mean i think everybody agrees you're building really important things in the world so how do you do that this time around that's different from the facebook experience so a few things one i think that building working in national security has been a great filter where people aren't going to come work for you unless they're okay working in a bit of a controversial field i'm actually somewhat concerned about the ukraine conflict in that regard in that in the making of in in making defense mainstream it makes it possible for people to potentially say oh that isn't controversial now i'm going to go to this place and then i'm going to potentially attack people with their views but i think when you run a company that is inherently working on something that's controversial people on the right and on the left both feel like they're on the side of this important bipartisan issue and all of these other policy differences can kind of go to the side and the culture at anderle is everyone is free to have whatever politics they want like i'm a republican our ceo brian chimp is a democrat we both make significant contributions to our respective sizes and we have employees across spectrum and i think also it's nipping it in the bud you know it's about when somebody says something that is out of line it's about getting in early and saying hey that's not okay at this company we're we're here to talk to work on a common mission for example if we had a manager who then publicly went and said the half of my employees who support this political candidate they're terrible people they're shitty humans they'd be fired yeah yeah i'll give you a counter factual to what this is which is very aspirational which is seven or eight years ago we funded a business that actually makes seafaring drones and the whole point was to actually measure the surface flux in the oceans yeah which you can use to get a really good sense of climate change and somewhere along the way we had the chance to to do a contract with the dod but invariably there's a faction of folks inside this company that said under no circumstances are we going to put our efforts towards that and as a result then the company spent a three year detour trying to build a weather app which turned out to not be the right thing and and three years later um you know they're doing a bunch of stuff now with these government agencies um and it turns out that's the right thing to do because now they're that much closer to actually mapping the world's oceans which creates a repository of data and there's all these positive knock-on effects that sometimes folks don't see and you need strong leadership to kind of say it's what elon said yesterday you know companies are there to make products that people and organizations want to need not necessarily to fight over political ideals well i think one of the interesting things in the example you just gave like i mentioned earlier i have some empathy for people who work in companies who don't want to work on defense like i think broadly the technology industry needs to support the military and i'm glad that the conflict in ukraine has changed at least the thinking around that uh but at the individual level people should have the right to choose to work on what they think is important and so the google example was interesting because it was google employees saying hey i didn't sign up to work on weapons and i can understand that maybe they're pacifist and they say you know for religious reasons for philosophical reasons i i cannot work on this and they were upset that their work was put to work on defense without it being clear and i suspect that when the situation you're talking about it's similar objections were raised hey this is what i joined the company to do this isn't what i signed up for and so at andrew one of the ways that we've been able to get around this is being very clear like you are signing up to work with the department of defense that is that is the mission that you're signing up for and uh i mean we're we're about a third u.s service veterans at andro which is higher than any company that i'm aware of and we're about a thousand people now um and so these are people who they understand the importance of the mission right uh just shifting gears for a second i want to ask you about first let me just say that the first time i tried vr which was oculus i thought it was one of the most magical computing experiences i've ever had so i don't have you guys try to you you put the goggles on i did that and you're in the oculus trailer and it's like it was amazing i did the thing where you show like a big hole like facebook had this demo for a while or whatever and i thought i was going to fall into the hole and then i fell forward you're on the ledge of the cliff and i didn't i didn't want to like tiptoe beyond it i'm like i don't know i'm like wait i know this is not real but anyway vr is the yeah it's so funny these are i feel these mental circuits that haven't activated for years activating so i've got my talking points but yeah vr is the final computing platform it's not the next one it's the final one and people talk about augmented reality and it's very interesting i love ar we did a lot of great ar foundational work but at the end of the day if you can make a tool that allows you to experience anything and in any way that can emulate every other medium it is going to be the whole park caught on go ahead yeah well i was gonna actually ask about drones um so it's um well maybe you should answer why isn't it caught on yeah it's not it's not good enough yet people ask i'll have this debate people like well i'm not sure vr is ever really going to be a thing but explain the dimension when you say it's not good enough okay is it weight is it physical interface it's a whole bunch it's content being available you need a self-sustaining ecosystem of a broad enough variety of content that enough people can use it to create further network effects so that's part of it it's just a content thing you have to build a self-sustaining flywheel until you have that yeah apps aren't good enough yet to draw people in they're not good enough and they don't they don't have broad enough appeal there's a particular niche where we have a flywheel like there's a dozens of developers that are making many millions of dollars making games for quest too but that's its own little niche the other thing is quality its weight and its cost like the example that i like to use when arguing with people who say that vr is not going to be a thing that they spend their whole life in say okay wait imagine this what if for 99 you compare it buy a pair of sunglasses and it gives you an experience the quality of the matrix or sort of a line or whatever your sci-fi pick is and you can do anything and there's endless content it'll get there and it's like people like oh well of course i would use that right but but but but that's what vr is well then that's just a tech disagreement philosophically so how how fast we'll get there so i mean listen you created the category how far away are we it depends on the experience so the hardest things to simulate are going to be the ones that are kind of like these multi-haptic multi-element things that rely on scent and motion like surfing is going to be really really hard uh on the other hand being able to perfectly simulate the experience of being in a brightly lit fluorescent fluorescent conference room that's going to happen within 10 years like the resolution will be there the weight will be there you'll be able to perfect seamless experience you know how much of my life i've spent flying to the other side of the world to sit in fluorescent light conference rooms and then flying back if i if i can just eliminate that part of my life totally it's way better for me but it's going to start by simulating that experience where it's low dynamic range you don't need tons of haptics and then it's going to go from there exactly wait it's actually going to talk about drones yeah let's just shift gears for a second to drones so um obviously in ukraine right now the um the russian military and specifically their armors has been pulverized by the combination of the javelin plus this turkish drone this i guess yeah so i guess this has raised the profile i would imagine it's raised the profile of drones and the use of drones in the military also it points out the weakness of having kind of a large platform strategy in the case of the russian military their platform is this russian tank but so is our military we're built around air ventures big iron and the f-35 yes um and you know the abrams tank all these things i would imagine are susceptible to drones and the thing that's destroying the russians is their tank costs a couple million bucks and it can be destroyed by a drone that costs 200 thousand oh many more than a million even tens of millions throughout emp we just won a billion dollar contract with us socom special operations command to do counter drone work and so to a certain extent that what you have to do is then say okay we're gonna have these these armored systems are going to have these vessels and then we need to have technology that allows us to counter drones and it is possible to counter drones what's going on with russia is they don't have the technology to counter drones and so they're they're largely just totally can can i ask you something about this contract just general terms you said something very important before which is the military industrial complex today is basically paid to do work right not to get to a result yes how do you fight that when you're like when you when you hear a billion dollar contract is that cost plus that dod just is willing to give you so this is i mean we could do a whole talk on this but fundamentally for people don't know a cost plus contract structure is the way that most work for the department of defense is done that means you get paid for your time your materials your people and then a fixed percentage of profit on top even if you're way way way way over your budget until congress eventually takes something and then there's layers of subcontractors so the costs all out exactly and so the bad the bad thing about this is that not only the prime contractor owns the contract but everyone under them is incentivized to come up with the most expensive way of solving a problem that they can convince the government to fund so they wanted to build the most expensive system with the most expensive parts with as many hours as possible and the bids are so complex that you're only going to have one or two real bids yep and they're basically gonna be the same price and those top bids the worst part is they're not just trying to come for the most successful solution they're even encouraging the subcontractors yeah because they get a percent of that and so if i'm getting let's say six percent profit margin i want to make it as big a number as possible and i want to drag it out like and that's why this budget is ballooned like crazy despite the lack they make more money when they do poorly because they're not being paid to make things that work they're being paid to do work that's what i said it's just the act of the doing is what gets up for you what do you do so we use our own money to decide what to build how to build it when it's done we're using building our own products and when we're going to the customer we're not going to them like first of all i can't just build whatever i want i can't build a batmobile and then try to sell it to the army but i i we we talk to them about their problems they understand their problems they don't it would be cool be so big but i'm sorry sorry would you build someone in this room at batmobile if he could come up with the money look if it's if it solved a real problem if if that was the right way to solve a process all right i'm probably not but the nice thing about this is that when we go to customers we're not going to them in the white paper saying hey let the taxpayers pay for us to try this out for years and years we say we've already proven that this works it will not be a boondoggle for you it will work we go to them with a working system with a full delivery goods and services already de-risked exactly yeah and the thing is this is popular with the customers and politicians alike because it removes the risk of them getting into political boondoggles like the f-35 program being a trillion dollars so this creates this creates new budget line items because now folks are saying i can actually get [ __ ] out of this i'm going to move money from whatever [ __ ] pot of money i'm spending over here move it into this sort of a structure and then that creates competitive dynamics market that's right yeah so how does it how does it actually close the loop so for example you deliver a drone to the dod it costs ten thousand i'm making up a number it costs ten thousand dollars and it works on abc dimension and then there's whoever makes general dynamics makes the hellfire drone uh again i don't know the specifics of course uh and they want to charge 90 000 or 110 000 how do they still not get picked because it seems if you look at their um performance as public companies yep it's an incredibly steady it's almost like an inflationary line item you know that you can predict six eight nine ten percent growth consistently every year correct it is i mean the the defense companies are not high growth high margin companies they're extraordinarily predictable people basically see them as an extension of the us government it's like buying books the u.s federal budget yes exactly and when the budget goes up you see a direct proportional and linear increase let me ask you hold on hold on let me ask you a question about uh something very pragmatic knowing what you know in the in the twos you're building and uh i do appreciate the work you're doing defending the country i think it's important i told you that um and uh i lobbied you to be here uh to have your platform and to have your voice and i've probably sent you no less than 30 or 40 invites to come on the pods can't deny that and so i told you i'm willing to have any debate at any time i'm going to put aside the personal stuff but knowing what you know doing this very good work the situation in taiwan if it does materialize what would it look like today given the tools we have and would we be able to would taiwan be able to defend itself what would that look like because that seems to be the next hot spot that we may have to do well weapons get shipped in there like they are in the ukraine no that we were able to ship weapons into ukraine because we had countries like poland that were willing to at massive existential risk to themselves step forward yeah poland has been so pain to pick an unsung hero in this and getting weapons through but taiwan what's gonna happen is there's a few ways this could go it could either be just a blitzkrieg where they go in destroy the ports destroy the airports immediately occupy that's that could happen the other way this could happen could be a more drawn out blockade where they blockade the island like is the us willing to pull the trigger on a blockade it's unclear but if you can stop trade if you can economically strangle them make sure new weapons don't get to them they can be in a very very bad position and it's not clear that we or anyone else be able to do that no there's different opinions on how things are going to go i can't pretend that i know exactly what it is i can say taiwan does not have the tools today that they need to deter chinese aggression they might have had the tools they needed to deter it a decade ago but chinese chinese military has been ascendant they've been investing so heavily in new technology distribute distributed swarms high-end electronic warfare systems and all of the amphibious landing craft that they're going to need to perform an invasion they've just they've built the capability that they need it's just how vulnerable are our aircraft carriers how vulnerable are aircraft carriers they're extremely vulnerable to the point where we feel like we can't use them the problem is aircraft carriers were not designed to be a peer-to-peer uh appear to appear great powers tool for us to go toe to toe with the soviets or the chinese like the reality is if each side launches 200 missiles one of them is going to get through and it's going to end up hitting and this is especially true with satellite targeting systems they were designed in the modern day to project power to places where you have air superiority uncontested so there it's great to have a mobile base that can go somewhere and project power but it you you you cannot stop the chinese that way and also if we send a carrier out there uh and they managed to sink it that's 5000 lives lost in one hit hey farmer we got a rap but i'll say this wait i got to say one more thing on taiwan hold on a second oh not about me great go no no no not this time not this time i was bracing for impact i don't have any anti-palmer drone systems but i will be working on them next i will say this about j cal if you did that to kara swisher she would have she would have like not she would have pulled you off stage keep um he's an incredibly loyal friend he's got an incredibly um good heart and i think that you know whatever he said or did it was really brave of him to come out here and also have the conversation and he wants to have the conversation he wants to have a dialogue and he always wants to do that with all of us sometimes he conflicts a bit and he and he butts heads but i will say this about jay cal he means well and i want to kind of say that but anyway what is important about taiwan let's talk about the important stuff kira says i'm a douchey man boy and a fourth reich bro nazi so not that you remembered a lot of memory i think your cosplay stuff is cool i was brave enough to do cosplay i'm a little jealous of that i'll be honest and i would love to go cosplay with you sometime but tell us about a point on taiwan not the way to wrap the the i want to hear taiwan okay all right yes the big difference between taiwan and ukraine is that we still have a chance to make a difference so what i'm so terrified of is that all these people who say oh we stand for ukraine we have to do this this is the fight of fight of you know fight of our generation and then they're not going to do anything and then immediately after taiwan is invaded they're going to change their profile pictures to a taiwanese flag and say oh man we stand with taiwan no that's not good enough if you care about this issue there's things you can do right now and what's really amazing to me is you have people who are saying like oh man i stay with ukraine we're cutting off all of our russian business i'm like oh wow so brave you cut off an entire country that's a regulatory nightmare has an economy smaller than most u.s states sorry not most many uh yeah it's like oh wow you're so so brave for cutting off the russians and then at the same time they say oh but uh all of our expansion is in china and and i'm not gonna say anything about that i think that worse than the people who change their profile pictures are going to be the people who remain silent when taiwan is invaded and they say they just can't say anything because their business interests are so intermeshed and so intertangled and that like that china has been fighting a strategic and economic war against us for a long time and it is extremely good the last thing i'll say on this i talked about it earlier there's a uniquely american delusion probably from our own hollywood films that we can solve any problem the last second it will come in and we can speak boom deus ex machina that isn't how taiwan is going to go there is no deus ex machina we know exactly what's going to happen the war planners have figured out exactly one of several scenarios that's going to go and when it's happened we can't pretend like we didn't know um and and there isn't going to be anything that flies into safety so okay so i just want to say one more thing and then i'll let you close you and i can debate anti-hillary ads the donald trump subreddit all of those things what we cannot debate is how important it is that the united states win and that democracy wins and that freedom comes to all of these countries you and i are 100 aligned on that even if we disagree about the anti-hillary ads or any of that stuff amen i appreciate you coming and i'll debate you on anything anytime anywhere i do care about my family by the way that was the worst thing you said okay and fair enough i will apologize for that statement if i did say it wait jkl say it louder say a letter i just said if if i said something that hurt your feelings about that and it was out of line i apologize but what's more important right now is that you're here talking about the work you're doing and you and i will debate to the cows come home this other stuff i can't stop you i can't stop your credit no commentator no journalist can stop a founder i disagree with that um oh i just want you guys you can stop a lot of people i think we're overestimating my influence in the world you're a force of nature the work you do is undeniable we can debate politics as much as we want this country needs to be protected the people at google are cowards for not doing dod contracts you're not a coward you came out here you you take me on straight up as a man i appreciate it it was a little bit of a blind side but i could take it what's most important is the work you're doing that's what's most important i mean this is a soccer punch but i would say i'm from brooklyn thank you we appreciate you coming we appreciate you coming bottom line [Applause] [Music] hey everybody that was pretty crazy what an amazing moment i think we all learned a lot but i actually wanted to show you the clip of the comments that palmer referenced just to provide some context uh for those of you who are unaware the clip was from a show uh in march of 2017 episode 721 of my other podcast this week in startups and listen i'm super aware that this could come across as defensive but i think some people might not know what palmer was talking about so i'll let you decide for yourself we recorded um uh that episode episode 721 the day palmer lucky was fired from facebook and uh it was a news roundtable of the podcast i'm talking to austin peter smith who worked at inside at the time and ian thompson of the register he's a great journalist and just to clarify some uh facts here in the timeline these are from the daily beast article in which palmer was interviewed you can go read that it's in the show notes um and the facts are pretty basic palmer lucky donated some amount of money to a pro-trump political organization it was called nimble america right before the 2016 election and as you just heard during the all in summit talk palmer said it was like nine thousand dollars nimble america was part of the infamous subreddit page the donald if you remember that nimble america they basically made anti-hillary and pro-trump memes and they were self-proclaimed [ __ ] posters as we uh now talk about on the internet the organization said it was dedicated to proving quote [ __ ] posting is powerful and mean magic is real uh palmer was posting to the r donald under the anonymous reddit account called nimble rich man here was one post which palmer confirmed writing that was referenced in the clip you were about to see the american revolution was funded by wealthy individuals the same has been true of many movements for freedom and history you can't fight uh the american elite without serious firepower they will outspend you and destroy you by any and all means and here is what palmer told the daily beast in 2016 when asked about supporting nimble america i've got plenty of money money is not my issue i thought it sounded like a really jolly good time again if you're listening you might hear some other voices talking those are the two guests that i mentioned before you can watch this three minute and 22 second clip which is just a mashup of my commentary i'll see on the other side of three minutes he was supporting like i was a violent trolling but extreme trolling would be the way to do it that's right and his comment about it was really insensitive kind of that it was it was almost maybe not super um ideologically driven as much as it was like fun for him what an idiot well it actually lost and lost them a fair amount of business there are about three or four game studios that said right we're no longer developing for the oculus on this one because he came out and said basically well to overturn a trench delete then you need to be able to fund it and and fight back and you're like what an idiot that's not you're not a revolutionary this is just hit posting about politicians this is not constructive dialogue this is not an attempt to get reform the american political scene this is just oh let's be a troll yeah if you want to see like a person's true character give them a pile of money or a bunch of power and then you will see two bottles of vodka works very well on that as well it's like the sort of quick way of being a billionaire or whatever but i mean can you imagine i just want to stop for a second and just give everybody in my portfolio or the people i work with just a public service announcement if you are lucky enough to hit the jackpot and make hundreds of millions of dollars behave yourself you [ __ ] you hit the jackpot it's like somebody winning the mega ball lottery and then just going on the street and randomly punching people in the face like this guy parker lucky is a complete and utter [ __ ] for somebody to be a visionary to create something like oculus and make vr i bought the oculus it's pretty impressive i have to say i believe that vr is at least two years away from being a meaningful business opportunity but that's about the window where i like to invest so it's kind of on my radar now in fact we have one company in our incubator but jesus this kid's an idiot but this case palmer lucky's just an idiot and a troll so dumb here's the other thing i think on a leadership basis if you represent the company so you represent your company first oculus and your vision of the world behave yourself number two if you represent the company that's worth a couple of hundred billion dollars that made you a billionaire and you represent mark and jason who invested in your company and jason harwicks and you represent all the employees and all their families and everybody whose entire net worth is locked up in this you have a higher uh duty of service and this is a complete lack of moral character and leadership for someone like palmer lucky to be doing this [ __ ] posting effort i'm going to say so let's move on to the next facebook story now that we got over the palmer lucky is just a complete [ __ ] who doesn't appreciate his success or care about any of his employees family members team members if you're gonna do that kind of shenanigans if you here's a clue i hate to get totally crazy if you're doing something like this anonymously you might want to think that the anonymity plus read it plus you would be ashamed about it like think about what you're doing if it's anonymous in other words if you have to put a mask on and then you throw the brick through the window you may not want to throw the brick through the window because you weren't willing to do with your mask off okay so closing thoughts i respect palmer lucky uh for his incredible innovations both with oculus and his new company we actually agree on many things uh which actually people in the tech industry might not which is hey producing weapon systems to protect america and democracy around the world is a beautiful and important thing i respect palmer for what he's doing there and we have a disagreement about uh you know this uh meme action that he did but yeah all's well that ends well it was an interesting moment in time i don't regret exactly what i said i think what i said was fair and when i talked about it in context i was you know coming from a place that if you're gonna post stuff post it on your real name not anonymously and so there you have it folks that's the entire controversy uh thank you to palmer lucky for coming thanks to my besties for having my back uh there was this big question of if i would go out and engage the discussion of course i want to go out and engage the discussion i want to talk i don't mind a hard discussion and in fact that's what this podcast is about having hard discussions and then keeping our friendships and keeping it moving forward i look forward to hosting this podcast forever they're gonna have to take drag me out of here and i hope we can host another all-in summit and all of you can attend either virtually or in person it's great to uh have had farmer at the event and actually i hope he comes next year and shares more of the exciting work he's doing at andrew and i wish him the best [Music] and they've just gone crazy with it [Music] we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music] your feet [Music] we need to get [Music] okay wait jkl yeah hey nick nick can you queue the uh can you cue the photo what photo oh no backstage this is what happened at the last break i think we got there well this is what i said i said you're you don't have drones over my house right just to confirm and he said uh can i someone tagline that said cannot confirm or deny

Channel: All-In Podcast

Views: 212,421

Keywords: chamath, david sacks, david friedberg, jason calacanis, all in podcast, tech, news, politics, big tech, antitrust, election, covid, quarantine, stocks, stock market, tech stocks, palihapitiya, government

Id: nK0NfL2M5L4

Length: 63min 41sec (3821 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2022