Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Palmer Luckey
There's very little consideration for things that are better than what currently exists. You kind of preserving the status quo as the ultimate good. There's very little consideration for what is better for people, what would be better for more animals. And if you look back again the earlier parts of the United States history, there were serious proposals by the Department of Interior to say, what should the United States ecosystem look like if we could make it whatever we wanted? What animals would we have? Would we have hippos? Would we have rhinos? Why not? Why don't we put hippos in Louisiana? There was just this endless possibility, big thinking. But what's crazy is it's not even big thinking in the way that we would think of today. When people think a big thinking, they immediately jump to really hard ideas, fusion power and what if we could bio-engineer ourselves? The ideas they were having, they would have a big impact, but they're actually easy ideas. Just what if we brought some hippos, put them over there on that swamp? The big idea is what could we do economically? Would that be a good meat source? Could we use that as a better protein source that is less damaging to environments that we're trying to preserve than what we're currently doing with cows? And those types of ideas, they're not taken seriously today. People treat you like a crank if you step outside the orthodoxy.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: When you think about, I'll call it, the soil of, let's just use the United States to keep it local, the soil and the quality of the soil for potential innovation and you had to rank that today 1 through 10, what score would you give our soil today?
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: Probably give it a solid 6. It's one of those things when it comes to the talent. We've got really, really good talent. On the volume of talent, we have a lot fewer engineers graduating than our strategic adversaries like China. That's definitely counting against us. I've heard this idea pushed forward that we'll still stay ahead because there's something great about American engineers and American ingenuity we're going to stay ahead no matter how many people we have in these areas because we're just so much better. Which I feel like -- I don't say this lightly. It feels like a soft form of racism to say, "Hey, we're going to just be way better than them to the point where an American engineer is going to have to generate 10x the value on average of this other highly developed advanced nation that graduates people from advanced schools. I don't really buy into it in the long run. This is another reason I think the United States needs at least 1 billion people. The idea that we're going to compete with China geopolitically, that we're going to remain relevant when we only have a few hundred million people and they're climbing to billions of people. You have to believe that every American is going to be so much more relevant on a global basis. Is it really true? Is an American 10x more influential and impactful than an average Chinese person? I think that that's true right now today because of our head start and how we positioned ourselves over the last 100 years. But I don't think that continues to be the case. So…
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: What's the additional list of things it would take to get us from a 6 to a 10?
· Palmer Luckey
[00:00:00] S1: A lot of it, unfortunately, is on the government policy side, I say unfortunately because free markets can often move faster than governments can adjust. But one example of something I think would make a difference is to stop incentivizing people to do things that are not good for the country on a larger basis. So one example of this, and there's people who are going to light me on fire for this, but I don't think the United States should be subsidizing all educational pursuits equally with no regard for whether or not they are of national interest. The United States should not be saying we will give you equal student loans and allow you to put yourself equally in debt on the tax paradigm to get a degree in studying ancient French theater versus being a mechanical engineer. The need is so obviously disparate the position seems crazy. And there are other countries that have been doing this. Japan has been saying, hey, in our government runs schools, we are going to provide for free education in certain areas of national interest. And if you want to pursue that ancient French theater degree, by all means do so, but we're not going to rob taxpayers to pay for it. We're not going to subsidize the decisions of teenagers who don't understand what it means to serve your country and really don't even understand how to serve themselves. I think that's a really big thing. We can say, you know what, if we're going to make this a nation that rewards innovation and that promotes innovation, we need to be steering people in that direction, and we need to be conscious about the fact that not every degree is equal. Not every pursuit is equal when it comes to accomplishing those aims.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: Why aren't there 2 orders of magnitude more Thiel Fellowships?