Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: I mean part of it is it would be great if we had 2 orders of magnitude more Peter Thiel. People have tried to weaponize it against them. Maybe this is just totally the wrong way to look at it. This is a very low conviction approach at it, but it's the first thing that pops into my mind. When you do something like a Thiel Fellowship, you create a lot of surface area for people to come after you. You have all these people who are now affiliated with you, tied to you, trading on your name, and that's true whether it goes well or goes poorly. And there's an asymmetry of value in that, probably if it goes poorly, it is going to blow back a lot more than the benefit of it going well. I'll give you a hypothetical, what if SBF was a Thiel fellow? Do we even need to talk about what the media coverage would look like? The idea speaks for itself. Imagine if not even at that level where it's going to federal court. By the way, I've been to federal court to a jury verdict twice in my short career already. I won both times at the end, but it's not that being in court is the end of a career, but it could be -- people would just be saying, how did Peter Thiel's ideals influence the criminal mind of Sam. And isn't this really a reflection of modern conservatism, blah, blah, blah. And that's probably why a lot of people who are in a position to sponsor something like a Thiel Fellowship are not necessarily incentivized to do so. They are more likely to, let's say, give an endowment or make some kind of scholarship at a school where the school is the one taking the heat. People don't give schools shit when they subsidize students that then go south. I don't think Stanford got that much heat for Elizabeth Holmes. People are okay with that idea. If you could imagine, though, whatever scholarships may have helped her had come directly from some individual of wealth. I think that you probably would have had it covered very differently. So that's my initial idea. Rich people say, the juice is worth the squeeze.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S0: Just this morning in my calendar every year, I rewatch the same video, which from you is the most impactful video I've ever seen from this technologist named Bret Victor. And the name of the video is Inventing on Principle. He's basically convincing you, you need a principle on which you're going to devote yourself to becoming an inventor. Obviously, you're an inventor, you seem like a very principled inventor to me. If I was trying to understand you and your motivations and what drives you, is there one or more principles that you feel like lie at the root of things that you spend your time on? [00:00:00] S1: It was so much easier in the Oculus days because I felt that it was more singular. I was trying to bring VR to the masses which had never been done. They've never been a successful company in history. I started when I was a VR hobbyist, there wasn't even really much of a VR hobbyist scene. The whole VR community was a small collection of military research labs and scientific research labs. There wasn't really any action. In that case, the clarity of purpose was pretty obvious. We are trying to bring VR back from the dead and use it to the fullest extent to allow anyone to experience anything. Anything that a person is capable of experiencing, any joy, any experience, any beautiful sight, any educational thing, anything that the human mind can benefit from experiencing in reality, we want to make that possible for people to experience in VR. That was the end game to make the height of human experience, successful.
· Palmer Luckey, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: It was so much easier in the Oculus days because I felt that it was more singular. I was trying to bring VR to the masses which had never been done. They've never been a successful company in history. I started when I was a VR hobbyist, there wasn't even really much of a VR hobbyist scene. The whole VR community was a small collection of military research labs and scientific research labs. There wasn't really any action. In that case, the clarity of purpose was pretty obvious. We are trying to bring VR back from the dead and use it to the fullest extent to allow anyone to experience anything. Anything that a person is capable of experiencing, any joy, any experience, any beautiful sight, any educational thing, anything that the human mind can benefit from experiencing in reality, we want to make that possible for people to experience in VR. That was the end game to make the height of human experience, successful. [00:00:00] S0: Fully immersive, haptic, vision, smell, everything.
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: Eventually everything. You start with the easier senses and then yes, you work your way down the chain. And the idea was it was kind of egalitarian and the idea was that no human experience should be limited to only a few people. Anything that is worth experiencing should be something that can be universally experienced. That was kind of the ideal. Of course, I got fired from Oculus and I'm not a part of that vision anymore, and I feel like the vision has diluted from there to maybe more commercially oriented ideals, which I can't blame them for, they sold company for billions of dollars. They get to do whatever they want with it. When it comes to ideals now, it's probably a little bit broader. I'm trying to do things that are in the U.S. interest. I'm trying to do things that are in the interest of our allies. I want to do things that are material and large. And this is one of the reasons that I set out to make Anduril specifically a large company. Some people say, "Oh, we do good things. We'll be a good small part of the world." I'm not here to do that. I am here to grow a very large company with huge impact because I think that at the end of the day, large companies struggle to not have an impact. Yes, maybe it's negative, but you're going to make a difference in the world, if you're an enormous company that is interacting with other entities to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. It's just you can't not leave a footprint when you're doing that, whereas it's very hard to make a footprint when you're a small cottage company, when you're a small lifestyle business. And so that was one of the things that attracted me to Anduril. Actually, maybe if I could boil it down to one principle. I know my Facebook About Page has said for over 10 years, making the world a different place. The point there is, obviously, I want the world to be better. I don't want to make changes that are for the worst. But I'd say more than setting out to say, I want to make the world somewhat better. It's that I want to have a big impact on the world. And of course, I try to orient that in a way that I think is to positive ends, but I don't want to do something that doesn't matter. Part of that was also with Oculus. I got addicted to the sense of purpose.
· Palmer Luckey, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
And when I was booted, I don't think that I could have just gone to something that would have been small, I think I could have found joy in running a local restaurant or in retiring or in running a golf course or a resort. I had become addicted to a sense of purpose and working to deter expansion of dictatorships that want to destroy democracy around the world. Pretty easy to feel like you're making a difference. [00:00:00] S0: What has it been like for you in this period, we're recording this in the middle of October after the attack on Israel. What's it been like operating in an environment like this when your company obviously is facing the military sort of in the world of defense, just talk me through what it's been like.
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: I don't mean this in a way to make it sound like it's not impactful here. People here understand the impact. We have a lot of people who are very involved. But I'd say, actually, it's very positive in that everyone who's at Anduril, someone who believed in our mission of building advanced technology for the U.S. and our allies that is intended to deter exactly this kind of conflict. And when we get into these kinds of conflicts to win them decisively. I've seen a lot of other companies having strife where internally, you have people on all sides of the issue and what really should be done? Is it even right to use weapons in the first place? And everyone here, I'm not saying that there's universal political agreement on every aspect of the conflict, but everyone at least agrees on the fundamentals. They agree that Israel is the victim in this attack. They agree that Hamas is absolutely in the wrong, and they agree that there are some evils in this world that can only be met or stopped with violence. That's pretty universal. You don't go to work for a weapons company unless you're able to align with those ideas. For example, we're not getting people saying, "Oh, man, really, this is just a matter of diplomacy." I think people have a pretty realistic view of the problem, which is that there are people in the world who want to kill large numbers of other people in the world to accomplish their religious or political or strategic aims. That has been the positive side of this is I think everyone at Anduril, they feel like they are at a place that is making a difference on this. I can't get into the specifics of what we are or aren't doing as it pertains to Israel specifically, but it's kind of the same with Ukraine. This is a company full of people who really believed in what we are doing and believe that other people out there in the world did not have a clear view. We came here a lot of us, including myself, because we perceive that the world's tech companies were not going to solve these problems that were of huge national importance, not just in the United States, but to just democracy real large.