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

26:54But the quality of that experience is going to be so much worse than something just a little bit bigger, that I think most people will opt for the thing that is a little bit bigger and a radically better experience. The real key here is a changing of social expectations. I mentioned this in abundance. The real way Apple is going to make their headset cool and acceptable to wear in public is not through engineering. It's still pretty big. It's social engineering. It's social engineering. It's marketing. They're gonna put it on the heads of the rights celebrities. They're going to put it on the heads of the right influencers.

27:25And just like that, boom, something that was lame will become cool. And it doesn't have to get any thinner lighter. Will I am? Was that a 360 speaking this year? And he wears these very large red glasses that could be a VR could be a good thing. Well, the lady Gaga did the same thing. You know, she really kicked off a trend a few years ago, wearing huge oversized sunglasses that are way too big for me. Getting ready. Getting ready. And that made it cool. I think Apple's going to do the the exact same thing. They're going to make the big thing cool. And so by the time we have the chunky sunglasses, I think we're going to be well past the question of will people wear on this?

28:01People look back on this discussion as a quaint relic. They'll say, man, can you believe people? There are people who really thought that nobody would ever dare wear VR or AR glasses in public. It's just going to be, it's going to seem bizarre to be. The social analogy is, I remember the first time I watched people with earbuds walking around the street talking to themselves. And it seemed just weird. And now it's totally socially acceptable. I mean, you can go back even further. People thought it was nuts when people were walking around with cell phones, even just talking on them. The idea that you would just be out in public using a piece of office telecommunications hardware seemed pretty bizarre.

28:41But now it's totally taken for granted. You literally would not even... Not only would you not think twice when you see on the street, you don't even think about it. Yeah, it's a fully accepted. I remember Tom Furness at the Human Interface Lab up in Seattle, had a vision of what he called the virtual retinal displays where literally you would raster scan with the laser across the back of the retina as a way to shrink the retinal display. It doesn't form any image plane except on the retina. Yeah, so are those possible? They're possible. It's one path to the future. It's not the one that I'm betting on.

29:14I think we're just going to keep brute forcing it through higher and higher pixel density on relatively traditional silicon process displays and micro displays. I could be wrong there that the thing that people don't quite understand about VRDs, these retinal displays is that you still have to project onto your eye from a wide angle. So a lot of people imagine that VRDs can from a small lens, project a large field of view, that's not possible with any reasonable permutation of the technology. It could change in a few decades, but for now, any VRD with wide field view needs to also have a large lens that is going over your eye.

29:51Until we bypass and go directly to the cortex. Until we go bypass and go directly into the brain, which I'll be honest, I'm cynical about. I think we're going to... You haven't signed up yet? I'm a big believer in BCI for arbitrary data transfer. So basically, psychic power levels of augmentation. Think in Google. Yeah, and that and also, you know, like, you know, knowing directions, having random data input from different systems, you know, reaching out and controlling things, but when it comes to replacing the visual system, I think it's extraordinarily hard to get a BCI with the particular type of bandwidth that we need to do that sufficiently well.

30:31I think it's more likely that we are just using glasses. I see a future where we have near perfect brain to computer interfaces for controlling our computers, we're still going to be wearing head mounted displays. That's my opinion. What are we doing with our hands? What do you think about the hand gestures and lack of haptics? Where do you think haptics are going to go? Well, it's no secret that I'm a big fan of VR input. I think that's probably one of the things I would have done differently than Apple. On the other hand, they have a plan for VR input that goes beyond just the finger inputs.

31:00I think they're taking a focused marketing approach, but I think they have a broader vision for the future than everything just being eyes and fingers. So, I'm a big fan of haptic input. I'm a big fan of haptic props. I'm a big fan of especially finger held tools that allow you to do high precision interactions that you simply cannot do with your eyes or with the binary inputs of touching fingers. Do we have a lot of room to grow there and have things? There's a ton of room to grow, a lot of room to grow, a lot of room to specialize. What I like to use is analogy is the keyboard. Look, looking at things and touching your fingers, that's a human interface.

31:39But a keyboard is a superhuman interface. It allows you to do things faster and better than you could do them with your voice, than you could do it even with your eyes. And a mouse is also to some of your superhuman interface. These are things that require a lot of training to use. They're not natural. Keyboards are not natural. You'd probably agree. They speak to the query. They take a long time to learn. but well, the Quarty, not the whole separate matchbox. Let's pretend that the keyboard hadn't been crippled by Quarty. It'd be even better for everybody. I think you're going to see similar devices for AR and VR in the future devices where they are specialized, where they require training, where there's a high skill ceiling, but they allow you for beyond human, superhuman levels of input and output.

32:24They're not going to be used by everybody. They're not going to be used all the time, but they are going to be used for dedicated specialized use cases like gaming, like productivity, like CAD modeling, like military combat. I'm still very excited about the future of haptics. I don't think that tapping your fingers together is the end game. I'm always looking for what I call user interface moments. These moments in time when something gets built that transforms the world. So when Andreessen creates mosaic on top of ARPA, it's a user interface moment. All of a sudden people can use this incredible, powerful tool.

33:00When Steve Jobs created the App Store, that's user interface moment. Google was a user interface moment on top of all of the web sites in the world. Do you see the Vision Pro as a user interface moment, a transitional moment in this field, or is it not that significant? Or was it going to create sort of a of a step change and approaches and usability of the virtual world. You know, that's actually gonna be hard for me to predict mostly because whether or not it becomes a step change moment is totally up to developers more than Apple. Apple's come up with a really powerful UI, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable betting against all of the other developers who are trying to come up with their own schemes.

33:49I've seen some other schemes that people have come up with around some crazy ways to interact with computers using VR headsets. And some of them I think are actually have advantages over what Apple is doing. So I'd say what Apple's done is great. I suspect that if someone beats them, they're also gonna adapt that. I mean, the app store is a good example. The app store was not part of the original vision of the iPhone. You've Steve Jobs was famously anti -native apps. He was all about web apps and not really giving anyone access us to the core hardware of the system. One of the people who was actually going toe to toe with him on that was John Carmack, who was previously the CTO of Oculus and before that obviously, yep, started in software.

34:30He was one of the people who was really aggressively pushing jobs to allow native applications on the iPhone. And I think I had a Nokia 800 mobile internet device running Nemo. And so I had my mobile app repositories on my little Linux device and I mean I basically had everything that the App Store had years ahead of time. I think that I think Apple in that case it was one where they got it wrong and they realized that they had gotten it wrong and they said okay we're going to do the App Store, we're going to copy what a lot of other people have done but we're going to do it really really well and that was transformational.

35:05So I guess I would say I'm not convinced that what Apple is showing right now is that step change. Whatever that step change is though you know Apple is going to be on it. I don't think that they're going to I don't think they're going to be stubborn about It's in the best extraordinary company. They're M .O. on just driving to perfection. That's right. You know it's going to be expensive, it's going to be white, and it's going to work really well. That's right. Last question on this topic. You depart Facebook. Yep. What would you have done differently since on Oculus? Oh, man. That's a long conversation.

35:40But I think a few things, a few things I probably would have done differently as I would have shipped a different set of hardware focused on a different set of people. And I probably would have staged it a little bit differently. There's been this consistent push at Facebook to make VR something that everybody is interested in using. But I think it's come somewhat prematurely. I wrote a blog post years ago called Free Isn't Cheap Enough. And in it, I lay out an argument for... I laid an argument not really for it. There was an argument against the idea that the thing holding VR back is cost. It was this idea that if you make a VR headset cheap enough, then everybody will want it.

36:24That might be true in the limit. You have to make the technology accessible and affordable if you eventually want to have a billion people using it. But to do that, you have to first hit a certain level of quality. There's a certain level of hardware quality, comfort, ergonomics, resolution, and especially critically content library in breadth and depth that you have to have before the average person will even care about VR. So the argument of free isn't cheap enough was that if you took current VR headset technology as of a few years ago and you lowered the price to zero dollars meaning you literally gave it to everybody in the world.

37:00I argued that the majority of people would cease using it within a few weeks. The only people left would be the hardcore techno heads, the super geeks, the hardcore gamers, a group of people I fall into myself. But I point out that cutting the costs doesn't get you to the mainstream if you're not at that particular level of quality yet. And so I'd say that was, I think one of the mistakes was trying to go to mainstream too quickly to the detriment of the growth projector. And you might say, oh, they're just trying to get it to take off period. But I think that you kind of, these things have to kind of come in stages.

37:32And so that I think kind of leaving the high end and the hardcore behind was too early, was a mistake, and I think things, like look at Facebook horizons, or you know, meta horizons now. Like meta horizons is not the thing that is going to convince the masses to use VR. And you could say, well, you gotta start building it now, to which I would say, no, you don't. You need to build the things that the people who will use it at its current state will use. You need to maximize your sales at every step of the way, rather than build, there was a thing that I said right before I left, which was that they, I pointed out that in the marketing and targeting discussions, there was too much Starbucks and not enough Mountain Dew.

38:20I don't even have to explain it for you to understand what I mean. That's hilarious. You know, it's Larry Page's toothbrush test, right? Build something that people need to use twice a day and you'll get success. That's right. And I think that things like Quest Pro were actually kind of a step directionally. Directionally, I think it was a good step, but I think it was also, it was too late and not implemented particularly well. Like one of the interesting things about Apple is their headset has all of these, you know, face tracking and eye tracking features that they're doing incredible things with.

38:53I mean, you saw these demos of how they're using it in incredible ways. Compare that with, did you even know that Quest Pro had eye tracking? I did not. It did. That's the crazy thing. They put out this headset. But when I was at Oculus, we did something called feature prototypes. We would put out publicly, would show a prototype, hardware prototype, that incorporated one new feature, and we would show to developers how you could use it. We would make software demonstrations of how you would do this. So whether it's physical tracking or controllers or low persistence, we would show how this particular feature could be used and get devs thinking about it.

39:25They're excited about it. So they were developing for it ahead of time, and then coming up with concepts, they could use what's the hardware was out. And we would never release a new feature in our hardware without showing it to Dev's way ahead of time, and showing the public what could be done with it. Quest Pro came out like, hey, we have eye tracking. We have face tracking. The only app that supports it is Horizons, and we have no other demo applications. We have nothing that shows you the magic. We have no UI examples that show you how to use this. There's no games that support it. There's no way you can actually even play with it, that except in this one app that none of you even care about.

39:57And that was a big mistake. If I was, I think Meta could have basically owned that entire eye tracking natural interaction moment because the idea of looking at things and touching your fingers to interact with them, that isn't a new Apple idea, but they're the ones that brought it out and said, we're putting a stake in the ground. This is what we're going all in on. If I were still around, I probably wouldn't have shipped a headset without any demonstrations of the killer feature of that headset. Anyway, I complain all day, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to the people that matter for giving you guys a hard time.

40:30I know you guys have a lot of issues and I understand some of the inter -political dynamics of how these things ended up this way and why they ended up this way. I'm not ignorant of the challenges, but I can't help but look and think that I would have done things. I would have made different mistakes. I'll put it that way. At least I would have made different mistakes. But you know what the good news is? You left and you started an androle. That's right. I mean, if you had been, you know, had rain and continued, you might still be there building that out. But so you leave Oculus and you start a defense company.

41:06I mean, like, where did that come from? It feels like a right turn in life. It was, but you and I have talked about this quite a bit. But I want people to hear about this. It's an interesting conversation, an important one for entrepreneurs to hear. I mean, I'd say a lot of it came out of fear and the rest was a sense of obligation and patriotism. Would you call those deep emotions for you? Oh, yeah. Can I make a point here that doing anything big and bold in the world, taking on any moonshot, is got to be connected with emotion? I agree. Because it's hard otherwise. Well, moonshots are almost never the right risk -adjusted move.

41:43They're not. They don't make any sense if your goal is to make money or start a successful company. There has to be some extra realistic factor outside of the reasonable and rational risk man. And it can be a positive aspiration, like, oh my God, I want to open the space frontier or it can be fear and I cannot allow this to go on anymore. But that's right. And that was really the combination of things. I mean, look, there were specific technologies that I had in mind that I wanted to make. There were things that I knew I could bring into the world that wouldn't be brought into the world otherwise.

42:18But the driving force for Andral was a recognition by me and other people that I respected that America used to be really good at building the tools we needed to defend ourselves and a deter conflict We used to be good at equipping our allies and partners around the world with With the same and that we had lost that that we weren't in the lead on a lot of important technologies that we didn't have a system That would allow our existing defense primes to lead in areas like autonomy artificial intelligence network systems and swarming systems. And most importantly, I realized that our big tech companies weren't refusing to work with the DOD largely because they were beholden to China.

42:58At the same time, new startups couldn't raise money because investors rightly said that there was no chance of success. They said, look, why would I invest in the defense company? When there's only two examples of success, both founded by billionaires who can really do whatever they want in the last 35 years. And that's a kind of terrifying landscape. And it was something I felt like I had to I had to try to tackle because nobody else was going to do it So first of all, I think for listeners it's important to note When Palmer was on stage at a button 360 he got when he announced the mission He got you got cheers.

43:31You had people standing up and applauding Which you know I'm proud of that, but I was also a little bit surprised. I mean there was an emotional Reaction that we's evoked well, I think there's a few things driving that First of all, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, I think has been a game changer. That's right. There are a lot of people who I think bought into the idea. You've heard, probably heard this phrase that we lived at the end of history, that all the borders are static, that the commerce is too powerful. Economic entoyment is going to keep us safe. Exactly. There will never be a major war again because there can't be, because peace is too profitable.

44:09It's a really beautiful idea. And I've had a lot of smart people lecture me on how my vision for the future was somewhere between immoral and a waste of time. I got some people saying that Andral was wrong. I got actually more people saying it's a waste of time. There's not going to be any more wars of significance. There's no fights of consequence to deter. You're just wasting your time. And I think that Russia's actions have been a wake up call. I think that G's feverish drive to secure the heavenly mandate and take back Taiwan has been another wake -up call for people. And I'd say another big wake -up call is this self -reinforcing loop where I believe that five years ago when everyone was acting like Andrew was controversial.

44:58You know when Bloomberg was running articles saying we're the most controversial company in tech. When we won wired magazines worst company in Silicon Valley. Wow, what year was that in? That would have been 2018, so a year after we started. But when all of this was going on, I honestly believe that nine out of 10 people in the tech industry did support the military. They did support the idea that our military should have better weapons than China and better weapons than Russia. But all of those nine out of 10 people believed that they were one out of 10. And I think that they wouldn't have cheered five years ago for that reason.

45:32They were worried about what their peers might think. They were worried about what the public might think. And I think that really, we've seen this tipping of the scale, where that nine out of ten feels free to say, you know what, this is important. We do need this. America is something special. We do have a particular role in this world. And there's nothing wrong with recognizing that the world needs to be met as it is, not as we wish it was. It's beautifully stated. Listen, it's still a right turn in life to go from Oculus to expense. No, it's been tough mentally. And I want to take you back to that moment because I want to hear that story.

46:08I mean, I remember talking to Elon about, you know, him driving across the country and from Wharton to California and deciding if space needed to happen. And he was going to embarrass NASA by originally sending a mouse around Mars and landing a greenhouse on Mars and he goes to Russia to buy a rocket and he realizes there are 50 year old ICBMs and he's being charged a fortune for it and this is a dead industry he could reinvent and that's a moment in time and experience in time that led him to create SpaceX. That's right. What's yours? What was going on that led you to say, I need to go and reinvent the defense industry.

46:46I need to enable it. I think probably the biggest recognition was, you know, I believed in tech, I believed in the tech industry, but I realized that our technology industry, which was really poised to revolutionize so many areas. Transportation, energy, computing obviously was completely abdicating from any responsibility to national security. I think that was the thing that was driving me. The realization that Google was not going to work with our military to protect us or our allies. The realization that Facebook was not going to do the same. The realization that really you had a whole generation of our best engineers not working with the military and that that was a unique moment in US history.

47:30This terrified me. You know, imagine if this had been the case during the run -up. But was it a dinner conversation? Was it an event that occurred? You know, it was, it was, I'd say it was more of a slow burn and it was also a development. Just evidence mounting and mounting. Exactly. I mean, look, there was a time where I didn't even think about these things. That there was no one moment. I mean, look, I was part of the problem just a certain degree. I manufactured millions of virtual reality heads that's in China. Yeah, I spent time in China and as time passed, I started to realize that this was a really unprecedented situation.

48:04There had never been a situation where a foreign adversary had more influence over our innovation ecosystem than our home nation. I mean, that's extraordinary and unprecedented. I wish I could point to a particular meeting or a particular moment, probably one moment for me that was a big deal, was a moment that was a big deal for a lot of people, which is it's not really a rational thing, but it's a psychic and mental thing. It was when the F -35 program surpassed one trillion dollars in budget. I guess if I could point to one thing when I realized things were broken, it was that. And it wasn't just me.

48:45Yeah, it was you. It was everyday Americans. It was people in Congress. They said, you know, they were just going to back up. And if it had been 990 billion, I think nobody would have thought about it quite the same. But when it surpassed trillion, a lot of people said, what the heck are we doing? How did we get here? How do we let this happen? Are we really going to let this happen over and over again? I'd say that was a big moment for me, even divorced from the problems I saw China creating in our economic incentive structure. This episode is brought to you by levels. One of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my peak vitality and longevity is to monitor my blood glucose.

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50:45So check it out levels .link slash peter. Give you two additional months of membership and it's something that I think everyone should be doing. Eventually this stuff is going to be in your body, on your body, part of our future of medicine today. It's a product that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead and hope you'll consider as well. I want to get back to the way that the government buys products and in particular in defense industry because it is so broken And I love the fact that one of your glad that a trillion dollar program broke people's minds too I mean how much think about how much more frustrating it would have been if it was something where you know I got frustrated Maybe you got frustrated, but may kind of just passed everyone else by I'm so glad that that was one of those things Well, by the way everyone got it though So would I feel right now, one of my moonshots is I'm pissed at the healthcare system, how absolutely ineffective and inefficient and broken it is, right?

51:41And so I've got my own set of disruptions wanting to do there. But I see that you did it here. Let's talk about that. You said a few things earlier that I think are important for people to hear. The defense industry, let's narrow down on defense versus government in particular, is really bad at buying from entrepreneurs. I mean, the exact structure in this room weren't it. Their contract structures don't allow it. What else do they do poorly in contracting? Oh, man. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things. I can sort of remind you. So a couple of things are pretty egregious. One is I think one of them is relying on the Fox to tell you how to kind of...

52:27build a headhouse. And not just the headhouse, but the business plan for the headhouse and the supporting farm and how you're going to hire all of the people who are going to protect the hands and what exactly they're going to. They're going to sell, looking ice cream con. Exactly. I mean, this manifests in really destructive ways. For example, until very recently, the United States Army, their plan of record for remotely piloting autonomous vehicles was that they were going to begin fielding them in the late 2030s and they were really not going to be fielding them at scale until the 2040s. Oh my God.

52:58But the reason for this is that they had the, basically the army was relying on the representations, not of cutting edge technology companies, but of large defense companies. And they were saying, this is how long it's going to take us. You're going to have to give us billions of dollars a year for decades, and then eventually will build vehicles that are able to do some of this. And now, obviously, a lot of entrepreneurs have come in and with a tiny fraction, and again, we're spending a lot of money on self -driving cars. It's a tiny fraction of the money that the defense ecosystem wanted the taxpayer to be giving them to do the problem over a much longer period of time and luckily now those schedules are Are getting pulled in?

53:36It I'd say that's pretty egregious. I'd say here's another really egregious problem that nobody's talking about except me I've been I've been I've been hitting people up in Congress on this for years people in oversight roles for years and it's our patent system I like to refer to patents as Chinese instruction manuals. You're basically taking your best technologies and your best approaches and you're putting them out in the public domain and saying, these are the things I think are most important that are most valuable. And the problem is that we have told our commercial companies that in order to protect their ability to compete in the private sector, they must put into the public domain, which is really the Chinese domain.

54:18Everything that they think is important. And to a company like, let's say Google, that makes sense. They say, well, look, I don't really mind if the Chinese military rips me off on an economic level. Right? It doesn't hurt Google's business if let's say the Chinese... You're not depending on that market share in the West. They're not competing for that market share anyway. They were never gonna make money off of the Chinese defense contractors ripping off their technology. But the United States used to be better about this. We used to be better at finding certain technologies and saying, hey, this is a massive strategic importance.

54:45This is the difference between winning and losing a war. We're not going to let you take this technology and put it out there. And there is actually a process by which you can obtain classified patents. But that process is extremely limited, very difficult to navigate, almost impossible for any startup to utilize. One of the things I would really like to see is for the US to take a proactive approach and say, you know what? We want, like, the whole idea of patents is you get a monopoly on your idea for a period of time in the United States and you get to protect your idea. And in exchange, you have to give that idea away to people who should have it.

55:20I think that we need to limit that a little bit and say, you know what, the goal of this is that you have to put it out there and you have to share it with people who we don't mind having our strategic assets. Like I was loved to see, maybe not a classified patent system, but a US only accessible patent system. Where if you're gonna go in and see this stuff, you have to be a citizen or you have to be a citizen of an allied nation, and they're gonna keep track of who's accessing these things. You're not allowed to just print it all out and put it out there into the public domain. And look, I know this sounds controversial anyone who's kind of an open source can't stop the signal, information wants to be free type of person.

55:55But the things that I've seen China take out of our tech companies, patent portfolios, and then put into the field as military technology, terrifies me because we are slow at developing and fielding new military technology. China is fast. We can't afford to also be there R &D lab. Well, let's educate the world here at least those listening about the procurement process of what a cost plus contract is. Sure. And who's taking the risk compared to the way contracting used to be done 100 years ago. Because it's changed a lot, I think mostly because of World War II where the government just needed to pour money on companies.

56:35Well, they needed to pour money on companies and they needed to get a bunch of companies that were not in the weapons business, into the weapons business. And those companies fairly said, listen, I don't know how much it's even gonna cost me to build this airplane, this tank, this weapons system. I, because that's not what I do. I can't model it as well as I can building, let's say a bunch of cars. And the government said, listen, we'll just pay you, a fixed, we'll pay for the cost, whatever it is. And then we'll make you a fixed percentage of profit on top. And that was a good system for a society in total war mode.

57:06where nobody ever would have dreamed of slowing down or pushing up expenses or trying to comp with something that was gonna take twice as long as it needed to. It just, it simply wasn't gonna happen. But we've kept that contracting system even as we've moved into, you know, times of relatively incredible peace. And that's what I'm gonna say. That's trillion dollar contracts. So trillion dollar individual contracts for individual weapon systems. And of course, the problem is with a Cosplus contract, when you get paid for your time materials and then a fixed percentage of profit on top, and especially where the government is taking on the development risk.

57:41What it really means is you make more money, in some cases, by failing than by succeeding. You make more money when you're over -schedule. You make more money when you're over -budget. You make more money when you buy the most expensive parts, the most exquisite architectures, and when you sell as many of something as possible rather than simply the right amount. And it's just a totally... Very incentives. It's a perverse incentive structure. I've talked about this many times. I'm not saying that people in the defense industry wake up in the morning and say, ah, another day, another chance to screw US taxpayers using cost -most contracts.

58:15But the incentive leads to natural incentive structures that reward certain types of thinking, certain types of behavior. And pretty soon, the people who naturally, because of those incentive -weight instructors and ways of thinking, the people who drag out the contracts, the ones who figure out how to come with exquisite, exquisite systems that make money, they're the ones who end up running the system, because the people who are extremely efficient, extremely fast, they don't make any money in that system, they often don't even get a chance to participate in it. And so unfortunately, it's a self -reinforcing problem.

58:48Yeah. And before World War II, most people probably don't realize that companies who are bidding on a government contract had to post a bond, they had to put up money for the right to bid and get the contract. And if they didn't perform, they lost. And the government was made whole. That's right. Very, very different. These were called performance bonds. They were called bid bonds and payment bonds. Well, it was also very common to have people accountable in other ways. They would structure contracts such that they would have multiple vendors building the exact same system so that if one of them stopped performing, they'd say, you're out, you're business, you're the volume that we allocated you, It's going to somebody else now.

59:31But again, in a world where 80 % of the contracts go to five companies where 30 % of the major weapons systems have only one bidder, that's insane. How can you do that? You exactly, there's no, there's no, and the companies know this. They say you literally can't take it away from me because there's nobody in the entire country who will build this. And even if there are people who maybe could, most of the people who could compete with me, the tech companies refuse to compete. I don't have any competition. I don't have to worry. I don't have to look over my shoulder. By the way, there is a model and a solution and Ender will be one of the solutions here, but looking back, you know, I spent my first 30 years in the space business and it was Lockheed Martin and Boeing and then of course they combined to create United Launch Alliance and There was orbital sciences and Thio call and this massive consolidation occurs until there's only two suppliers Yep, right, but what changed was Elon and Jeff Bezos come in and then a whole of small entrepreneurial startups.

1:00:31And the old industrial military launch complex is gonna go the way of the dodo. And though, you know, we've got companies bringing a dodo back, but that's a different story. So I'm massively impressed with the way Ender -O -L is doing it. And just since it hasn't been explicitly said, like I guess I think we've talked about how bad other the other types of business models is. I mean, our primary business model is using money to build products, which we then sell to our customers. Let's slow that down, because it's really important for people to realize what you're doing is amazing. Well, it's also the 180 degrees out of phase with everybody else.

1:01:12It's risky, but it gives you the freedom and it's the best thing for America. Well, and I'd say the best part of it is, you're right, it is risky, it is novel in the defense world, but the thing that really makes our business model special is how unspecial it is. It's not like we're coming in with this new concept, like software as a service. That was like a new idea as a model. What we're coming in is saying, well, we're gonna do business. The oldest way that business has been done. And the way the tech industry has been doing it forever. Oh, I'd say, I mean, the way that commerce has worked for thousands of years, it's the way thing where I use my money to make a thing and I stack it up in the marketplace and I wait for people to come and they give me money and I give them my thing, you know, my clay pot or whatever it is, but you'll get my, my, my, That's really what's so powerful about the model that we're pursuing is it's not really new.

1:02:01It's only new in the recent history of the United States. So it's really just getting back to the basics. And that's why I'm such a believer in this model. We're not trying to get people to shift over to some crazy subscription software as a service model as it has a short history of success. Most of what we're doing, they're things that have actually worked out for a really, really long time. And I think it's a good model because you talked about speed. I mean, there's a reason that we were the youngest company to win a federal program of records since the end of the Korean War, the AST program, the autonomous surveillance tower program, a $250 million dollar program with its own line item in Congress's budget.

1:02:39There's a reason we keep winning major programs of record. The reason we're able to move so fast is because we're not going to the government and asking them to fund our white paper and then fund a prototype and then fund an evaluation program. We're going in and saying, hey, we believed in this ourselves. We use our own money. We moved 10 times faster than you're able to move because you're not able to give money away as fast as we can spend it And then we're coming to you with the problem already solved. I think that's a really powerful model And I think it puts the risk where it should be on the people who are making the decisions about what system they're building rather than on the customer So you enter this marketplace with very strong principles I think so.

1:03:18No, they are. Opinions on me vary, but I sure think so. I'll stand up and applaud. And what do you enter first? Let me give some perspective here. How many products, contract services do you have to the extent that you can say because you deal in the defense world? Well, we've got about a dozen hardware products about half of which are publicly announced. So a lot of the new stuff we're doing we're not able to talk about yet anyway. But our core product, the thing that touches everything we build is lattice. It's kind of the AI platform that ties all of our things together, that merges data from all of the sensors that we have, all the sensors that we plug into that are not made by us, that allows people to command and control these systems, that allows small numbers of people to plan, simulate, and eventually manage and command and control large -scale conflict with huge numbers of autonomous network systems, working alongside people.

1:04:15I mean that was the first thing we worked on. And we started day one. What percentage of the company is software or AI based? We've twice as many people working on software as hardware. That's like thing people don't quite understand about us often is that we're really a software company wrapped in hardware. If you've seen Silicon Valley, the HBO television program, you remember the box Gavin Belson's signature edition. I mean we joke about that a lot where they took this compression algorithm. They just put it in a box so it could go on a rack and that was really the incredible business model.

1:04:45As soon as it was in a server rack, they were able to sell it. That's honestly a lot of what we do. Yes, we sell hardware products. We sell strike drones, and we sell surveillance systems. We sell robot submarines. We sell anti -drone systems that protect military bases and critical infrastructure. But at the end of the day, all of those things are really just hardware extensions of an artificial intelligence platform that we've been building for the last six years. We've got a couple of your products here in the room. You might just point out what's here and what's over your shoulder. Oh, sure.

1:05:21I mean, over here we've got our ghost. It's a tactical drone. It's basically a small helicopter. It can fly for a couple hours on battery power, six and a half hours on a hydrogen fuel cell, totally silent. But the really, and as an enormous payload relative to quadcopters, also very quiet. We call it ghost because it's acoustically inaudible at about a hundred years. Full of autonomous. Full of autonomous. Now, there is a manual control override, but it's used for maybe 1 % of our flights. The vast majority of the time, it's operating totally autonomously. The cool thing about it is you treat it less like a remote controlled plane and more like a really dumb helicopter pilot inside of a helicopter.

1:05:59You can go find this vehicle, go look for this thing, tell me when you find it and until then I can go and do my job. I don't have to micromanage you. And you can have one guy managing dozens of ghosts covering a huge area, finding things, looking at things, striking things. And to be able to do that with one or two people versus a huge group of hundreds of people, you know, in a piece of fixed infrastructure is a huge deal. This is Altia 600. This is an air -launched effect and loitering munition that we build. It's able to carry a significant warhead or a significant ISR payload. flies for about four hours.

1:06:34It could be shot off of a helicopter, shot out of a ground vehicle, while you'll launch by an individual ground troop. It comes out of a tube. Yep, shoots out of a tube, unfolds itself, pops out the wings, extends the wings. It's an extremely efficient design. But the thing again that makes it really powerful is that we've integrated autonomy that makes it less of an RC plane and more of an AI pilot that works alongside you. So before systems like this have existed, But let's say that I shot one of these out of a helicopter just scout ahead and look for surface tear and missile launchers as I'm flying through some air corridor You would have had to have a guy in the back of the helicopter dedicated full time to Flying it around looking at the screen trying to find things flying and orbiting around talking to the guy in the front And if you want two of them you need two guys now very quickly you end up with an entire helicopter with a team of dozen people in the back who are just flying these things around Now you don't have anything left for that helicopter.

1:07:29And so, Ladis provides all of that. And Ladis is the tool that lets the pilot push a button, launch 12 of these to cover a huge area far out in the head, and he doesn't have to do anything. He waits for them to find the threats. It waits for them to say, hey, there's something that's come up, you need to alter your course. Or alternatively, I'm going to take out that sam site and then you're going to be able to get through here more quickly. That's a type of thing that's only possible with autonomy. There's huge swaths of tactics that do not work when you have a one -to -one ratio of systems to people You have to turn that on its head and have a lot more robots than people for These tactics to work.

1:08:08I think I do remember the scene from Ironman But that's a different story any any uh, well, I mean that that's that's actually a fun fact about Ironman is he's like They don't really stress it in quite this way but Iron Man is all enabled to do the things he does because he has Jarvis. Of course. And Jarvis is not one entity. People think of Jarvis like, oh, he has one person who's assisting them. But Jarvis distributes across all of his systems, across his suit, across a lot of his other weapons systems, even across individual munitions and some munitions that is suit launches. All of those are actually guided by individual instances of the artificial intelligence.

1:08:44And so you have Iron Man multiplying himself into a powerhouse that's, because people think of him as the one, you know, the one man pile driver, he actually is a man who's amplified by AI. That is something that we are building as well. Yeah, I mean, I would imagine, well, first of all, I imagine that Jarvis as a version that's going to empower the war fighter on the ground and in whatever vehicle flying suits ever. I mean, look, they're already sort of viable today. I mean, gravity is doing this job, high -pick industries, which I guess is now, Myam and aviation. The physics totally work out and I've - Energy densities work out.

1:09:25The energy density's work out. I think one of the real problems is less the flying part and more the man part. I think there was a point in our history, probably sometime in the early 80s through the mid 2000s, where exoskeletons flying suits, kind of super soldier, super soldier exoskeletons made some sense. unfortunately the type, and when I say unfortunately, I mean, unfortunately for us as science fiction fans. That's geeks, right. The types of wars that were likely to fight in the future are not the ones that are gonna win by that. And here's the thing, if you can build a system that's good enough to wrap around a person and that you and a person can control it and keep that person safe, you probably should just have a person remotely piloting that.

1:10:08Which goes to our advantage. I love it, I love keeping the soldiers safe. But look, I mean, I want the space Marines means dropping out of orbit into the drop zone as much as any science fiction fan. But unfortunately, I suspect that that time has passed. There was a brief period where the AI wasn't quite good enough, the sensors weren't quite good enough, the communications links weren't quite good enough to imagine having fully robotic systems performing the role. We're now getting to the point where the human is the limitation, not the enabler. And as unfortunate as that is for us as science fiction fans, we should be thankful for it from the perspective of keeping our guys alive.

1:10:47Yeah, and it's the reason we're going to go to fully autonomous fighters instead of putting the, you know, the smushy meat body in the middle of the thing. Exactly. And it's the same thing. Like I don't like it from a, you know, boy, isn't that cool perspective? From a boy, isn't that cool perspective? I want manned space fighters. I want guys, you know, with, with, with, with Perfloro, what is it? Perfloro carbon. Yeah, I want pilots for Floro carbon in their lungs, sitting in their liquid G beds, pulling 400 G turns in space. That's what I want, but it's not what it's going to be. You'll do it in the virtual world.

1:11:25And it's really a shame because there was, again, a period I think probably in the late 70s through maybe the late 90s, where it actually may have made sense to have things like manned space reconnaissance planes, maybe even manned fighters, but unfortunately the... Well, that's gonna take us out of the question, does it make sense to take manned to Mars or out to the outer planet? Well, I'd say that's a philosophy question. You know, there are people who say, why send a man to Mars when we can learn everything we need to do with robots? And that really comes down to, what do you think the role of man is?

1:11:55What is man? What should we be? Where should we go? And yeah, sure, we definitely could just send robots instead of people. I'm a star Trek fan all the way down. So five of your missions, baby. Let's talk about something where I have a disconnect with you and I want to drill through this. Following your purpose versus following what you are best at. So I'm out there saying, listen, if you can do anything big and bold, it needs emotional energy. You need to be driven by that. And having something that wakes you up in the morning keeps you going at night and is purpose driven. and you're saying what?

1:12:33Well, I've told a lot of people you shouldn't follow your dreams, you should follow your talents, you should follow your skills. And I would say we might disagree with this, but there is a way that it can come around to your way of thinking. I mean, the problem is, and this is general advice, if someone has a really good dream and they're equipped to make it happen, then they should pursue it. The problem is, one, there's a lot of people with dreams that they are not equipped to pursue. They don't have the relevant talents, They don't have the relevant skills. I don't think that there's a lot of value in bashing your head against a problem that you do not have the skills to have.

1:13:06So you have kind of two choices at that point. Either you can go after something that you do have the skills to do, or you can change the set of skills that you have. If you are really so passionate about something and you recognize there's a certain set of skills to do, you could change your skills. Or you could surround yourself with the right group of people. I mean, the number one job of any executive is to make yourself obsolete. I'm all about that. But like I know a lot of people where their specific dream doesn't lend themselves to that goal And this is something I think I mentioned this in abundance 360 One of the really one of the things that gets me down about society is how bad people's dreams are You know we we started telling kids and I did a review of the literature Why don't we start telling kids follow your dreams and it was actually during the 60s and the early 70s that that really took off as an idea program, it was a space program and the number one most desired job for a kid in the late 60s was astronaut.

1:13:59Sure. And that was great. And that was me as a young kid. I was born in the 60s. But that dream drove everything I've ever done. Right. It was a guy reached, I did my calculus when I was at MIT saying, okay, my chance of becoming an astronaut are like one in five thousand. I have So, okay, I wanna go to space, the government can't be the only way to do it, so I'm gonna go and pursue commercial space. So, that dream drove me to start X Prize or National Space University, zero G, and everything else. Well, you had a good dream. Most of the time, the reason that I tell people to not follow their dreams and follow their talent is because a lot of people, and I'm talking broadly, not to the most brilliant entrepreneur in the room, I'm talking to everybody, there's a lot of people with really bad dreams.

1:14:48The number one most desired job today is YouTuber. And then after that, it's influencer. So why would we tell kids to follow their dreams when their dreams are so bad? It's not like, no, not yet. They're less likely to become it successfully than an NBA All -Star, and it doesn't matter. I mean, this idea of, I'm so repulsed by this idea that we should tell people. By the way, everybody's listening to this conversation on YouTube right now. I'm so repulsed by this idea that we have to tell people to follow their dreams and that anything that they want to do they can do and that if that's what they feel they want to do then they should do it.

1:15:29I feel like it's this ultimate manifestation of the, you know, get rich quick, feel good, you're good, you're the best dude. Everybody gets a ribbon. Everyone gets a ribbon and whatever dream you have, of course it's good and of course it's worth pursuing and I have to tell people, no your dreams, like most people's dreams suck and they shouldn't pursue them and it's also going to lead them to unhappiness. They're also going to fail at them. If you're a kid who isn't, let's say you have an average kid, the average kid is not particularly charismatic. He's not particularly good at video editing.

1:16:03He's not particularly good at any of the things that he needs to do to become a successful YouTuber, even if that was a good dream. Why do we then go and lie to these kids and tell them if you just follow your passion, anything's possible. You're lying to the kid. His life, if he pursues that path, his life will be miserable because he's doing something he's not equipped to do. He doesn't have to tell it to make it happen. Think how much happier he would be. If he could look at his skill set and say, what can I do? Or at least what skills could I acquire? And then what could I do in the world?

1:16:32There were, I have the skill to do it better than everyone else. Where's something where I can go do it? And I am punching above my weight. But having a skill and having a dream are not out of line, right? I can have a skill and apply it to a particular industry that I dream of. That's right. All right. Oh, and I would say, like, and you can definitely, look, that's definitely true. Unless your job is, unless your dream is to be a YouTube influencer, but let's say your skill is actually that you are very good at running financial models. You know, there will be a certain disconnect where that kid, I'm gonna say, listen kid, I know what you wanna be right now, but you might want to get a different dream.

1:17:14Because there's probably better things you'll do for the world and for your psyche. If you pursue the dream that you can equip yourself to excel at rather than the dream that's been implanted in you by society. That's my concern. Look, I'll make a compromise with you. Okay, please. The second that the number one job is astronaut again, then I'm gonna start telling kids to follow their dreams. I'll be all about it. By the way, you can buy your ticket to space now And it's gonna be coming down. I believe in starship. I believe um, you know, oh, I say astronaut I don't mean a government astronaut.

1:17:47I mean we look we've got we've got private astronauts now the absolutely gave out gave out wings Yeah, we drove that with the ex -price and you know my mission. I don't want to go to Mars I want to go to the moon. I want to go and start a city on the moon I think I want to take a role of mayor of my own city in the moon. That's a that's an awesome dream Yeah, absolutely and you know what else is great and asteroid mining That's the other part and the best part is I think you've probably got the skills to make it happen Well, come by those two. It's a good thing my dream isn't being, isn't being the mayor of a city.

1:18:14I don't think, I don't, I don't, you'd be a, you'd be a, it's not for me. You'd be a benign dictator. Oh, there we go. Yeah, you know what, I could be the guy who, who, who, who has the mayor in my pocket. How's that? That's not talking about that in the context of the defense industry. No, no, no, you would different me. You would different mayor, I'd different mayor. Everybody to his Peter, a quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network, I call CNN or Fox, and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet.

1:18:51I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology. How entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges. What the breakthroughs are in longevity. How exponential technologies are transforming our world? So twice a week I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do.

1:19:30If this is the kind of you use you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, Go to demandus .com, backslashblog, and learn more. Now back to the episode. So I'm gonna get to the third moonshot of ending destructive wildfires, but I wanna just read something I wrote here. I said, I believe that the smartest minds are not yet geared towards solving humanity's greatest challenges. Yep. It's something I'm trying to lead a wake up call for people to find something big and bold and significant and go after it. We have so many incredible entrepreneurs out there in the world. And I still wake up every day saying, where are they in going after the, the world's biggest problems, the world's biggest business opportunities.

1:20:18How do you think about that? Do you agree? I think that a lot of the world's biggest problems are the biggest business opportunities. At the same time, At the same time, I think there's a lot of huge business opportunities that people have not even yet begun to explore. I mean, VR is one of them, right? Sure. Like, people didn't know that that was something that needed to be, you know, made a priority. They didn't know that it really even could be done in the near term. And so, like, that was something that came out of the blue. I think there's a lot of industries that people have not yet realized are going to be absolutely massive industries.

1:20:52I mean, like, this is like just one of many examples. I mean, everyone is talking about things like healthcare and the economic impact that it has on our nation. People are talking about how we're gonna solve that. People are talking about, you know, how do we bend climate to our will? How do we make climate what we need it to be rather than just whatever it happens to be on the basis of what we accidentally do or or or even what nature does? But I'd say like right now there has not been maybe a focus on things like birth rates, you know, There's a lot of nations in the world that have hugely negative birth rates.

1:21:24And that is something that catches up with every nation in the long run. It causes huge demographic problems. It causes huge economic problems. That's for something where I think not enough people are talking about it today. It's actually a huge opportunity. I think we're gonna see huge companies built on solving just that problem. How do we get birth rates up? How do we build stronger family units that are able to stick together and provide an environment where it's good to have rising birth rates? And of course, there's people who agree with what I'm saying, but I don't think there's enough people who are looking at it as a business opportunity.

1:21:55Sure. For those who don't know the numbers, 50 years ago it was something like 5 .7 children for family globally. That's right. And this is when the population bomb book comes out and the Malthusian fallacies are portrayed. And today we're globally down to 2 .4. The replacement rate is 2 .1. The US is a bloated replacement rate as is Canada, as is most of Europe, and much of Asia. Italy's at 1 .27. Yeah, I mean, that's like freefall. That's like not existing in all hundred years. And Japan has huge problems here. It's an enormous, enormous problem. And I think of it not just as a problem for us here on Earth, I also think this is a problem for expanding into space.

1:22:36Part of it, because I think one of the big economic impetus is for expanding into space. It's what territory. Exactly. Where are the people gonna come from? And I also look at it as even a national security problem. I mean, for sure. Or the United States is a dominant economic superpower, hyperpower. But I feel like there's people who believe that the United States is a nation of 500 million people will somehow be able to economically compete with another nation like China that is 2 billion people in the future. And I think to myself, how could that possibly be the case? I mean, it can be the case right now because we have a head start and we have a higher quality of life and because we don't have this kind of challenge of pulling a country up from nothing like China has.

1:23:1818 years to bacon adult. Exactly. And like 100 years from now, with 100 years of baking, how could a 500 million person nation possibly beat a competent $2 billion, a billion person nation? You have these like to bet on their incompetence. You have to bet on them to stumble. That's not really a bet I wanna make. And so at the end of the day, our national security and our ability to self -govern itself is directly tied to how many of us there are relative to the kind of democracy of the world if you will. You know, at the end of the day, those two pillion people, they get a vote over our lives whether they're part of our democracy or not.

1:23:56That's a problem I think people are not sufficiently worried about. So yeah, like definitely the biggest problems that people have recognized, huge opportunities. I think there's all kinds of huge business opportunities that people have yet to become sufficiently alarmed about. I think that if you give it 10 or 20 years, people are going to be even more concerned about the birth rate than they are climate change. Let's talk about perceived and real problems. Jeffrey Hinton leaves Google and he's raising alarm bells about the progress of AI. I was recording a podcast recently with Mogadot, who is a chief business officer at Google X, and you wrote a book called Scary Smart.

1:24:34There is a lot of concerns. Great title, by the way. Yeah, that's a great title. It's a great book. There's a lot of concerns around not necessarily AI becoming the... SkyNet. Billionfold. Yes, I was going to go to SkyNet, but... You can just jump straight there. SkyNet is going to destroy us, but it's the use of AI in the interim. Elections are coming up, and AI is going to be used by evil doers to use Reagan's term against us. And one of the questions is, are we building AIs that have a, because they're built around defense or offense, dystopian nation that could become, or dystopian intent that could become a sky net?

1:25:23How do you think about that? And concerns, do you have those conversations? I'm concerned about it, but to be honest, I'm way more concerned about bad, evil people using very primitive AI, then I am about where the extremely smart AI is necessarily going to bring us. I think the really bad outcomes are by people with rational but destructive self -motivation. Like China's actions are very rational. They're just destructive to their neighbors and to the rest of the world. And I think you're saying the same thing with Russia. Like people think that Putin is mad, but I would say the fact that he's gotten away with so much, with so little in pushback relative to what he's done, shows that he actually may have actually made a smarter bet than people gave him credit for.

1:26:08He's pushing the edge, but not stepping over it. Exactly. And people say, oh, he's crazy. Look how he's been punished. I say, what punishment? He's getting away with it. And to be honest, the only reason he has in it is because of the bravery of Ukraine fighting him. If Ukraine were to collapse, that would be the end of the real punishment for Russia. I mean, they would just win. And return to normal status in five years. Yeah, you think the European Union's gonna pick up where Ukraine leaves off? Absolutely not. That's why Ukraine is fighting the way they are, because they know we won't, because they know they are the backstop.

1:26:41But anyway, setting that aside, I'm concerned about advanced AI and the things that it might go, but I've got a long list of things that I'm terrified about. One of them is homebrew bio weapons. I think homebrew bio weapons are a huge threat. I think they're becoming more and more especially using AI to brew them. You know, people do point that out, but I think AI maybe makes it a little bit more accessible in terms of the timeline for making it easy, but all it does is it kind of pulls in the timeline. In other words, maybe instead of five years from now, people are able to do it two years from now, but then there's going to be another hundred years after that where we need to figure out how we're going to deal with the fact that two guys in a garage can build a targeted bio -weapon that targets people of a particular race or ethnicity or neuroproclivity.

1:27:27Or at least they're gonna think that they can. There's a question as to whether they can actually build something that does what they want. That's exactly what they want. But they might believe that they can. And that's almost a danger. Or maybe they'll understand that they can't make something quite as targeted as they want. And they're okay with collateral damage. I mean, these are things that terrify me more than the kind of ultimate AI, super, new physics type of stuff that people are worried about. Or attacking our financial system using AI. I'm optimistic that we're going to be okay there, mostly because I think there's things I'm more afraid of in the next 10 and 20 years, which is I think probably the time where I'm also most afraid of bad AI stuff.

1:28:09Yeah, and the question is, can we get over the hump where super advanced AI is actually peaceful looking towards supporting life in the future? I'd say peaceful and defensive. like one question, open question, and the question right now is, can we develop AI that is smart enough, right now protecting things like our energy infrastructure from cyber attacks? That's my concern, right? Something that takes out Wall Street or energy grid. And the key is that we're going to have to apply these technologies to building defensive systems. And the good news is that unlike, unlike, unlike, unlike manned systems, I think that artificial intelligence does accrete to the defender.

1:28:49You actually do have a home field advantage of sorts, whereas with, let's say, people committing terrorism, the defender has to be right every time. The terrorist only has to get through one time. One time, I think that AI is one of those things that does lend itself to the nation -state actor on the defensive posture side. So I would hope, for example, we have amazing AI protecting our energy grid from attack long before we have hyper advanced AI that's attacking our energy grid. And I'm pretty optimistic about that based on the things that I've seen, based on the things that I know, and based on the posture of the United States in this.

1:29:26The United States has been behind on a lot of things. We've missed the boat on a lot of things. One thing that I do not think we are poised to miss the boat on is AI. This is something where it's a whole of society, right? Mark and Jason wrote a beautiful blog on if you saw it about how AI will save the world. and the point he's making is AI is the ultimate defense. Are you concerned about AI stealing jobs? Well, depending on this, this starts to get into my libertarian vent where, is there such a thing as stealing jobs or is whatever price the market offers by definition fair? Look, people were concerned about the same thing for 100 years.

1:30:05We've seen it for 100 years. And I mean, people were talking about this when there were people who were film backdrop artists who would draw these beautiful backdrops and they tried to say, oh my God, these computer tools, they're going to destroy all of these jobs. And then what happened? The size of the industry exploded. There's a hundred times more people in the business of making motion graphics and visual effects than ever existed before. To use a trite and old example, the automobile. People said, I can't believe this. All the coach builders, they're gonna know this. Yeah, awful. And now the automotive industry employs a thousand times more people than that coach industry ever could have possibly employed And so I think that it's without all the more Spanora I think what it really boils down to is that man is a beast of burden and he wants to work And I think that as holes get filled and as it work becomes Automated people will find work that is meaningful.

1:31:02We always have I think we will for quite some time and the nature that work might change I think that probably you give it. Look, if you talk to truck drivers, I see people using truck drivers as kind of their rhetorical example. Usually, these people, by the way, don't even know any truck drivers. Say, all these, basically, here's the argument. All the dumb, stupid, poor, redneck truck drivers are going to get crushed by AI. Don't you care about those dumb, poor, stupid, redneck truckers? I do. And I ask them, do you even know any truckers? Do you know what they think about AI? Because all the truckers that I know have a totally different view than that kind of like intellectual elitist, elitist view.

1:31:41So most truckers in the United States are independent operators. I don't know if you know this. They don't work for somebody else. They work for themselves. And they run a truck. And their dream for many of them is to run more trucks, to have a fleet under them where they're managing it and where they're able to kind of be in a more manageable, all the truckers I talk to you say, I would love it. If AI could take over the part where the truck is being driven around, that's not the job I want to be. basically be in the moving things around business. I want to have a whole fleet of AI trucks. I want to be managing them.

1:32:09I want to be repairing them. I want to be making sure that they're efficiently moving stuff, not breaking down on the side of the road. That's what they want. They're not thinking AI is going to destroy me in my value in this world is that I'm able to turn a steering wheel and push on a brake pedal real good. That is not where truck drivers see their value. They see it as this much larger ecosystem and constellation. And I think that that's what we're going to see with AI. You know what AI is gonna get rid of the part where you turn the steering wheel real good But all those people are going to move on to doing other jobs that are of much more value And they won't have to spend any time doing the part that they see as commoditized amazing all right third moonshot Destroying or getting rid of destructive wildfires so some numbers for folks in the past 20 years We've seen the average size of wildfires increasing by 40 % Some numbers from 2018 wildfires in the US alone created $14 .6 billion in damage.

1:33:03We saw in 2022, 7 .6 million acres burn and globally something on the order of the size of India in terms of total burned land area. And what hit me five years ago is a way that we're finding wildfires hasn't changed in 50 years. It really fundamentally hasn't changed and I was being evacuated from our home in Santa Monica and I was like this is ridiculous didn't they see when the wildfire started and why didn't they put it out at the very beginning? Yep. And so I ended up going to a friend Dick Merkin. I said, Dick, I want to create a wildfire expiry as he gave us half a million dollars to design it.

1:33:41It took five years to get the funding for it, which is ridiculous. It's been a long road for you. It's been a long road, but persistent, consistent, we finally got PG &E, the Civic Gas and Electric, the Hilton Foundation, Lockheed, we got the Gordon Moore Foundation, Mindarrou out of Australia, raised $11 million in prize money. And a few months ago, for those who didn't see it, I was very proud to have Palmer with me on stage in front of the capital building, announcing that he was gonna be the first team to compete for this way. A hundred teams now. And to win this prize, what teams have to do is monitor a thousand square acres, identify a wildfire ad ignition if it's two meters or larger if it's moving, they shouldn't be moving, put it out autonomously within 10 minutes.

1:34:31So those are the current rough rules, we'll do another iteration on it, need to get your additional feedback on a rule set. And you registered with a hundred other teams, hopefully we'll get maybe another hundred along the way. I mean, this is not the first time you thought about putting out wildfires. No, I mean, one of the very first hardware products that we built was, alongside the Andral Centretowers, was the Andral Century Tank. So it was a tracked firefighting tank, basically, a large tracked vehicle with heat resistant armor. They could carry a few tons of water or fire retardant and then fight fires in areas where you would never put a person.

1:35:12So having it fighting in the hottest parts right on the fire line right next to where it's burning in places where you would have evacuated even the hottest of hot shot firefighters and Unfortunately, we weren't able to so you actually built this. Oh, we know we built it. We have two of them So I mean we built this we're on the cover of popular mechanics. We invested a lot of money So you go you go to would you go to to show it to oh Man, well, this is probably I don't I don't think that everyone would appreciate I don't think the customers would necessarily appreciate if I told you but I'll tell you this They were government, I mean the problems we ran into were not technological, they were political.

1:35:44There were people who were very concerned about the jobs of firefighters getting automated away. And they were more concerned about those jobs than the fighting of the fires. And I'd say right, the good news is that over the last five or six years the calculus has changed. As you pointed out, wildfires have been getting worse. There have been some really destructive ones that have made people realize that we need help no matter what. In other words, we don't need, we don't need to, we're not doing this to try and automate away the jobs of firefighters. We're doing it so that they are not overwhelmed by destructive fires that they have no hope of even beginning to manage without help.

1:36:22Yeah. Does the technology, so the goal here is a fire gets detected. Which by the way, Century Tank's not what we're going to be using for the competition. It's not a good fit for your particular rules. Because we want to get too fast. Right, we want to get too fast. We want to get too fast. And I've seen it and I'm under an NDA, I can't disclose it, but it's amazing. It sure is. It's amazing. It's definitely stark industries. And for anyone out there who is wondering which system it is, I can't show it to you guys yet, but it's none of the systems that are on our website. It's nothing even close.

1:36:57It is a radically different system, one of my favorite things that we're working on right now. By the way, I'd like to say the day before something is truly a breakthrough. through it's a crazy idea. That's right. Right, I got that from Bert Routan and this is a crazy idea that Holy Cow has a chance. So do you believe the objective of ending destructive wildfires is possible? Absolutely. I think that people have taken a pretty defeatist approach over the last few decades where fires are only a problem that can be kind of managed as opposed to, you know, truly the problem is considered solved. I'm hoping that we can look at while, Destructive while far as the way we look at Polio.

1:37:37It's just it's not a thing we beat that it's done. Yeah I think that that's totally possible not with the technology of a century from now But with the technology that literally exists today. It is a matter only of Building products out of it and then getting those products into the places in the wilderness that they need to be if we can If we can do that and if we make that a priority We win that's it amazing amazing We're running sure on time, I want to respect your meaning schedule. If you were to give me an honest answer, which I know you would, how many moonshots do you have in you? Order magnitude.

1:38:14Well, it's interesting, because you probably have a number of them under. Well, the crazy idealist, a lot of them are not moonshots. To be clear, there's a lot of things where they're very, very specific technical implementations or solutions to small things that are not actually all that important. Moonshots? I'd say there's about about a half dozen that are real moonshots on there. About a half dozen that are really big things that if they could be done would be would be would be a real game changer for humanity. If I can pull off, you know, even a couple of them I will consider myself to have lived a life well led.

1:38:50Well, I think you have lived a white life well led and it's just beginning. and if our longevity work goes well, you'll have even more life to live. My last question, you're competing in an X -Prize, but if I said to you, Palmer, I'm gonna fund whatever you want. And, you know, A new X -Prize? Yeah, what X -Prize, what grand challenge do you want to inspire entrepreneurs around the world? And you don't have to live yourself to one, but, you know, what do you want entrepreneurs around the world thinking about in their shower time and scratching their heads on and pursuing? Oh man, well I mean there's a whole bunch of them.

1:39:26I mean you know you know there was a period where I was really interested in trying to solve obesity but I think there's a lot of people who are working on that problem. And there's some good drugs and even some good cheap therapies coming. Exactly, so a lot of people are already on that maybe less than they were five years, you know six, seven years ago and I was looking at the issue. I mean one of them is the birth rate problem. You know we talked about that. If someone can figure out how we can, how we can, how we can get our birth rate up, I think that would be great. But I mean, you guys want to do stuff that isn't going to be incentivized any other way.

1:39:55I think that there's going to be literally hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives to that side of things within the next couple of decades. By the way, government incentivized children, right? They do. And I think one of the problems that we've seen is that the government incentives don't really work. You know, the countries with the strongest incentives are some of the ones the lowest birth rates. It's a whole bunch of other - We're also religious incentives in some cases. And I'd say there's it's all kinds of things it's religious incentives. It's even it's even national fervor incentives You know there's a lot of people who are calling on the leaders of Italy to set a better example and say hey like if you really care about If you really care about kids, why is it that you're out of your entire cabinet?

1:40:36There's only one child Oh my god This is kind of a problem right you're higher basically like if this is really if this if these are the people if you start having sex Yeah, and you could all say, you know what, if it really is a priority and it is, in Italy they're trying to figure out how do you get around a 1 .27 replacement, birth rate, and one thing they could do is say, you know what, we're gonna show that people who have families are just as able to succeed, I'm gonna go out of my way to say, you know what, my cabinet's gonna be all people who have, maybe not large families, they're at least not the people dragging the numbers down.

1:41:11But that's not even like a government subsidy, But it's a role where government can model. They can model it. I mean, that's what we want, right? We want our leaders to be the best version of us. Elon's 10 kids. And then I'd say, but like if I were going to do a new X Prize, you know, maybe it'd have something that's not just going to be done, it's only going to be done if it's incentivized by people like you, whose job it is to make people dream. I would look to see an X Prize to raise another species to human or above levels of intelligence. So just the classic science fiction concept of uplift.

1:41:45Wow. Take a species, learn more about how intelligence works, learn how their mind works relative to a human mind. And it's one of the things where the doing itself is not the learning, right? The point is that, hey, I was able to take African great parents and make them as smart as people. And that's the end game. It's everything you have to do to get there. You have to really start to understand what intelligence is. You have to understand what consciousness is. You have to understand what the mechanisms of the brain that make us who we are are and you are now building a new benchmark To compare against people not just AI and I'll just give you just been another biological form I think that if you could if if someone could get another species to human or above levels of cognition The learnings along the way would be priceless.

1:42:31There was a movie about that. It did not end well for us humans But you know, I'd say this is true for almost every science fiction concept. They're all dystopian. Well, I talk to VR authors about this all the time. I talk to people who've written all the classic sci -fi novels about VR and I say, hey, do you really think VR is going to lead to a horrible dystopian broken future? And almost universally, their answer is, of course not. But I have to write a story. And stories need confidence. By the way, nobody's going to read a book where the plot is Palmer Lucky invents the The Oculus Rift and it brings lasting peace and economic prosperity to the world through the power of the Metaverse and everything is great and everyone loves it.

1:43:12That's not an interesting story. So instead you got to write a story where VR destroys everything. It's one of my favorite books, the Unified Corporated Man. I'm a man. VR is illegal in the future because it destroys humanity. You recommend that the book to me. I loved it. It was a fantastic book. It is fantastic. But I think books and fiction, they can be good warnings. but I think that they serve a better purpose as inspiration. So let's build what people joke about on Twitter these days, the terror vortex. Let's build the terror vortex. All right, last question, recommendation to those listening entrepreneurs who want to take on a moonshot, want to do something significant in their life.

1:43:56They've got a dream. Let's say they have the capabilities. It is either tech skills, capital skills, whatever. Any thoughts on having done a number of them, any advice? For people who want to take those skills and apply them to things that actually matter? Yes. Rather than the people who want to be YouTubers, or make better photo sharing apps. One of my biggest pieces of advice, assuming you're working on the right mission already, I mean, that's the first thing. You pick something that you're passionate about. That you're passionate about. That you're passionate about. that you either have the skills or can obtain the skills to work on competently.

1:44:32And then I'd say like the biggest advice I would be is your job is to make yourself obsolete. I mean you talk about it. You've got to find a team of people. If you are the best at anything in your company for any period of time, I'm not talking about the day you start the company. I'm not talking about the first year where everyone wears lots of hats. But if in the limit you are the best in your company at anything, it's because you've been negligent in your hiring process. I see this sometimes in companies with like, oh man, like the founder, He's still the best programmer in the company. I say what the hell is wrong with them?

1:45:02Like what what what kind of bizarre ego game is being played where the guy who's in charge of being the fundraising Backstop and the HR backstop and and everything else is also the best programmer in the company What are you talking about and I feel like you have to consciously do this and this was tough for me because I remember When I was launching Oculus I struggled with it because I did want to be the best person in the company at the things that I liked doing. And I realize, you know what, I can play house at optics and board layout and all this other stuff, but I need to hire people who are not just better than me, but who radically outclass me.

1:45:39I need to hire people who run circles around me and grind me into the dirt at the things that I like doing, and then I need to do everything else. And I think if you can get your head around that as an entrepreneur, and if you manage to hire those great people who run circles around you and everything that you like doing and everything you don't like doing, You almost can't fail. Yeah, beautiful. Palmer Lucky, thank you buddy. Thank you so much.