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 10 years, published once a month. These are end-of-one conversations with end-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 Anduril. 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're building software for enterprises, you've probably felt the pain of integrating SSO, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by big customers.
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My guest today is Palmer Luckey. Palmer is the founder of defense company Anduril Industries, which makes next-generation military technologies for the US and its allies. Since bringing the company to life in 2017, Palmer and Anduril have disrupted the established order in the defense industry. Prior to Anduril, Palmer founded Oculus VR, a virtual reality business that he sold to Facebook for $2 billion. This was one of my favorite interviews in a long time. Palmer is only in his early 30s, but he's already experienced more than most people will in a 40-year career. We talk about innovation, invention, differentiated thinking, and so much more. Please enjoy this great discussion with Palmer Luckey.
And if you're interested in learning more about Anderle, you can listen to my business breakdown from last year with the company's CEO. You'll find the link in the show notes. Palmer, I always like starting somewhere of recent passion. You started to give me some amazing material. So we stopped and we restarted the recording here. And maybe we'll just begin with this idea that you were telling me about. I'm always interested by major changes that might happen in the world that nobody is really talking about. And until you said the word synthetic long chain hydrocarbon fuel to me five minutes ago, I'd never heard that combination of words before. So maybe you can start there and explain why that topic is of interest to you today.
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 then you bond it with carbon to make hydrocarbons.
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