Palmer Luckey - Inventing the Future of Defense - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS]
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Welcome to this Classic episode. Classics are my favorite episodes from the past ten years, published once a month. These are N of one conversations with N of one people. Palmer Luckey is a relentless builder and original thinker. He founded Oculus, bringing virtual reality to the mainstream and is now reshaping the future of defense and technology with Andoril. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Here's a puzzle. What do OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, Vercel, Plaid, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? The answer is that they're powered by today's sponsor, WorkOS. If you'r
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Some. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Some. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is Palmer Lucky. Palmer is the founder of defense company Anderol Industries, which makes next generation military technologies for The US and its allies. Since bringing the company to life in 2017, Palmer and Andrewell have disrupted the established order in the defense industry. Prior to Andrewell, Palmer founded Oculus VR, a virtual reality business that he sold to Facebook for two billion dollars This was one of my favorite interviews in a long time. Palmer is only in his early thirties, but he's already experienced more than most people will in a forty year career. We talk
Well, it's of interest because there's a lot of money being bet by companies, but also governments on a handful of specific technological paths for electrifying vehicles, battery electric vehicles, hydrogen electric vehicles. If you can make synthetic long chain hydrocarbon fuels, in other words, synthetic gasoline, synthetic diesel, synthetic jet fuel, using carbon from the atmosphere in particular, there's a lot of ways to do it. Boiling it down, one of the ways to do it, you take water, you crack it into hydrogen and oxygen using some kind of energy source like a nuclear power plant, and th
When you find an idea like this, first of all, I'm curious how you found this one in particular, but the world's just gone through this superconductor craze, which for a hot week there, was like, well, if this is real, it changes everything. And then very quickly realized, oh, it's not real. And it seems like, again, a remote possibility and not terribly likely. So maybe there won't be floods of dollars trying to create superconductors. With something like this, how do you weigh the potential against the odds of us being able to do it with your own time and investigation?
Well, this case, it's nineteen fifties era Department of Energy documents regarding potential energy futures for The United States accounting for what they assumed would be a nuclear future. I always find it interesting when I go into an area that I don't understand to try and understand it better. Even I wanna understand what's going on in the modern day. You wanna go back to the future and say, what were people saying back then? What are the ideas that people aren't even discussing right now? Because I don't wanna be too pessimistic on present, but if you look through a lot of the academic l
We 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 one through 10, w
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