This talk was recorded LIVE at the All-In Summit in Miami!

0:00 Jason intros today's episode
2:31 Palmer Luckey on Anduril, national defense & the current thing
27:06 Bestie Q&A with Palmer
55:15 Jason gives some closing thoughts

Follow Palmer:
https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey

Follow the besties: 
https://twitter.com/chamath
https://linktr.ee/calacanis
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks
https://twitter.com/friedberg

Follow the pod:
https://twitter.com/theallinpod
https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast

Intro Music Credit:
https://rb.gy/tppkzl
https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg

Intro Video Credit:
https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect

Links referenced in the show:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/palmer-luckey-the-facebook-near-billionaire-secretly-funding-trumps-meme-machine

#allin #tech #news

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 100 days to make the event magical for everybody who was able to make it.

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 to Rachel reporting producer, Justin, Jamie, Jimmy, Dave, 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, Adina, Mar Tandis, Tim, Ilan, Antonio, Nate, Ryan, Claire, my boy, boy, Antonio Garcia Martinez, Joe Lonsdale, James, Matt, IEB, Glenn Greenwald, and of course, today's guest, the 1 and the only Mr.

And most of all, I'd like to thank my besties to Matt Sachs 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 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 Luckey'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.

But before we go to this episode, a lot of you have questions.

You have questions about the future of the all in podcast.

They're going to need a f***ing wrecking ball to take me out of here.

They're going to need to send in the National Guard because I ain't going nowhere.

we open sourced it to the fans and they've just

Going all in That was going to play at some point.

Now that the comedy routine is over, we can get started.

My first was a company called Oculus VR that I founded when I was 19 years old and living in a camper trailer.

Sold that for a few billion dollars to Facebook and then got fired a few years later and then started Andril 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 that 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 1 of the last industries to realize where things were going due to a variety of ideological reasons but also business reasons.

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 1 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, lest it ruin their careers.

You know, when I started Anduril, 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 Anderle, 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.

Even, imagine how hard it would have been to raise money if I hadn't founded Oculus, would have been impossible.

Even after we raised money and got traction, the negativity continued.

There was a really interesting cover story in Bloomberg in 2019 that called us tech's most controversial startup.

This was a year where TikTok was banning users for calling attention to the Uyghur genocide in China and banning users for posting homosexual content.

This is a year in which Adam Neumann 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, Anduril was the 1 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 we're reminded that 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 and economics.

In 1909, English economist and politician Norman Angell published an entire book called The Great Illusion.

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 1 bestseller in

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 Android and why you should all think exactly the same way that I do.

I thought that I would work on virtual reality for my entire life.

I had no plans on Leaving oculus at all and I love 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 a lot of reasons for that, some of which I'll get into later, but the decision was made for me.

I gave $9, 000 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 Brave Mind, 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 was also in the simulation, they could be taught coping skills that would reduce their dependency on medication and medical aid.

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 set of circumstances to come up.

The defense industry in America is fundamentally broken.

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 systems they do.

There's no reason to save costs because they don't get paid for making things that 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's Liberation Army and the implementation of artificial intelligence.

There's better AI in John Deere tractors than there is in any US 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 don't have a blue water navy.

They only have 1 aircraft carrier coming up on 2.

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 that 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 are going to lose at this.

It's because he thinks that that is 1 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 don't want to wrestle too many feathers in that area.

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 best talent.

They do not have access to the people that the technology industry has largely had a monopoly on in areas like autonomy, artificial intelligence, sensor fusion, high-end networking.

And then at the same time, the people 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 the 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 US ally until the late 1970s, and today, obviously, is in 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.

Gaming, fast casual dining, fintech, I could have made some ape coins, 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 unpopular, to ignore the fact that people were belittling me for it, and try to convince a bunch of brilliant people to come along with me, so that 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 Terman, 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 in...

Well, sorry, I have an error in my notes.

In the lead up to the 50s, in the early 50s.

We completed the Manhattan Project in 3 years.

We put a man on the moon in under a decade.

And just between 1951 and 1959, we built 5 generations of fighter jets, 3 generations of bombers, 2 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 1 of these things in a decade.

And I can't really blame 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.

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 can spend a whole talk talking about the ethics of defense and 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 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 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 US 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 chips bill that Congress passed, saying that the United States government is going to put

billion into building semiconductors in the United States, you have to compare that with the recent news that, well, it leaked.

But Apple has pledged to put $275 billion as 1 company into Chinese manufacturing.

You have 1 company putting in more than 5 times as much money into manufacturing advanced technology as what is supposed to be a landmark piece of US legislation.

The situation that we're in is pretty weird.

This is going to sound hyperbolic, but bear with me.

The situation we are in right now would be like if, in the buildup 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 gonna be a huge growth opportunity for us.

And our metrics just aren't gonna look the same if we wipe those off of our roadmap.

Imagine if in the buildup to the Cold War, if you had had Westinghouse and other major US 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.

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 gonna 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.

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.

Shape rotation, This is an acceptable current thing to debate.

Whether or not Will Smith was wrong to take the slap, or if he's just a representative of warrior culture, 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 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?

1, 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 plus worth of them.

And for all their differences, defense is 1 of the few things that Republicans and Democrats alike have realized transcends the partisan divide.

On 1 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 a Ukraine flag and then started saying, we stand with Ukraine.

The people who are actually tasked with solving these problems are, 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 1 or both sides misestimate their probability of winning.

If both sides agree that 1 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 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 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 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 gonna do it anyway.

1 of the people who I think embodies this type of NPC thinking of going with what's popular and not being willing to ever reverse their position even when they're proven wrong is Jason Calacanis.

Let me read about some of the things he said about me over the years.

This guy Parker Lucky, a complete and utter moron.

Palmer Luckey is just an idiot and a troll.

For him to pull the plug on the Palmer Luckey experience was brilliant.

A complete lack of moral character and leadership.

Palmer doesn't care about any of his employees, family members, or team members.

This doesn't include any of the lies he's told about me, this doesn't include any of 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.

I've explicitly told him why I've refused to be on the show.

It's because he and his crew of bullies have been vicious liars who have attacked me for years and berated me for years, and spread lies about me for 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.

These are all direct quotes from things that he's 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 shit for years, suddenly changed their tune as soon as Andro 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 acknowledgment 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 worldview.

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 shitting on me the second that it becomes popular again.

I'm coming to the end of this and I know that you guys are probably thinking, wow, this guy's pretty thin-skinned for a billionaire.

Jason and the people like him are the reason I was fired from Oculus, my own company.

The company that 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.

I was able to create Androl 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 for investors who ignore him and people like him.

The market conditions suggest there are gonna 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 spiteful hot takes that Jason, his associates, and the many people like him who make money spewing bullshit are certainly going to be putting out there.

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#AIS: Palmer Luckey on Anduril