0:00 By the way, you look like you're in Guantanamo. What is this video camera? It's a laptop camera. Do me a favor and just like wipe the I don't think it's smudgy. I think it's actually just a very low resolution camera. You do look like a like a a weapon stealer. So great. So I remember Grim texting me. You were at all in and he was like, "You're going to want to see this." 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 going to do it anyway. One of the people who I think embodies this type of NPC thinking is Jason Calennis. And it turned out to be this talk that broke the internet and everybody had seen it. Not a lot of people know about what went into it and the why. I I think a lot of people think of it as like a big mimemetic moment. But why did you decide to do this? What was the
0:45 background? Like how did you plan for it? Well, you know, I mean, the background for people who who don't know is Jason had really gone after me very aggressively when it came out that I had given money to a proTrump group that ran the anti-Hillary Clinton billboard. And that's all they did. And he was so aggressive about not just criticizing what I was doing, but specifically that the outcome that should take place as a result of me voting for the party that everyone voted for is that I should be fired and removed from my own company that I started as a teenager. It's some of the most anti-founder behavior I've seen and he consistently engaged in that behavior. He's not the only one. There are others. I never did anything about it. I just said, "Man, that Jason guy's a real shithead." Never said anything about it. I took the high ground for a pretty long time. Uh and then there's a
1:33 few reasons that I decided that I was going to go after him. The first is I developed a worldview over the course of years that the world is better when everyone has teeth and everyone has claws and everyone knows it. It's the armed society is polite society argument as applied to industry reputation. Uh it's good for people to know that there are consequences for lying about people, especially if you're going to aggressively advocate for them to be fired. And then specifically celebrate on your podcast when they are fired and say it's the smartest decision Mark Zuckerberg has made all year. Like if you're if you're going to do that, be careful. Yes. But then so you decide to actually show up. So here's what happened. Uh, you know, I I didn't I I didn't see I didn't see Jason for years. And then um he reached
2:19 out about five years into Anderal and he said, "Hey, Palmer, we'd love to have you on the pod." He he sent me this email and I gave him a very honest answer. I said, "I'm not going to be on your podcast. Why would I promote or help someone who lies about me and misleads his viewers and has also just generally been very hateful to me?" Now, this was just a direct reply. Yeah, this was just just to him. Another two years pass or so and I get invited to All-In Summit. He sends me these emails, Palmer, we've got to have you at All-In Summit. It's going to be amazing. We're going to have all the best entrepreneurs here. And I thought about this and and honestly, I wasn't going to do this whole stunt. Like, I wasn't planning on calling him out. I said, you know, I should probably be the bigger man. I should I should probably go to this
3:05 summit. There are a lot of people there. Elon's even speaking at allin. I should go and use this as an opportunity to propagandize my much more important mission which is that people can't wait like the the title of my talk I gave was current year is too late to start caring about current things and I said you know I'm going to go there and talk about why you can't wait till after the war in Ukraine starts to care about national security that that means you'll necessarily never be part of deterring a problem only fixing it reactively people say they want to be a proactive and not reactive but that isn't how anyone online acts and so uh I did that He his team sets up a prep call for us to go over this and I planned on bringing up like, "Hey, Jason, just so you know, you've been a real shithead." And I was going to bring it up, work through it. Um, so they set up a Zoom. I go onto the Zoom. His team is there. Jason doesn't
3:52 show up. No explanation, doesn't say anything, just doesn't show up. And so we just sat there. Was he supposed to be there? Oh, yeah. It was a prep call for me and him because he wanted me to give a talk. And then he wanted to do a Q&A at the end moderated by him. So, we're just sitting there on the line for 30 minutes and they said, "Well, I guess Jason's not going to show up, so we'll let us reschedu this." And so, uh, I of course now I had to give him [ __ ] about this. And so, they reschedule it for about two weeks later, right before the conference. And guess what? He doesn't show up again. Twice he bails. No explanation. And honestly, I know I know these other things I've talked about are a lot more high-minded. Sometimes the high-minded stuff uh the the straw that really broke the camel's back in this case was just the disrespect of not showing up. I said, "You know what? Screw this guy. What was I thinking?"
4:38 Why didn't you just say no and pull out of the conference? Like what made you do this instead of just pulling out, which is what most people do? There's two reasons. One is the classic way that people model thinking about like basically going after people who attack you, whether they're successful in attacking RPG or not. They say, "Well, just ignore them. Just let them go." And this is it's horrible advice. It is good advice for almost nobody. Maybe like Jesus Christ or the Pope can afford this strategy. Um, but in reality, your ability to affect the world, to bring things into being, to convince people to work with you, work for you, and for investors to invest with you and for you is based deeply in
5:23 your reputation. And if you don't care about what people think about you, you will necessarily accomplish less, work with fewer people, raise less money, and it's not a sliding, it's not like a binary thing. It's not you'll fail or you'll succeed, but even reputational drag can drag you further down the curve, and most people cannot afford that. So that that advice is is just terrible. So yeah, everyone says, "Palmer, just let it go." I said, "Well, first of all, I can't really afford to just let things like this go." like I I could be successful. It is valuable for me to go out there and correct the record on this stuff. But the bigger point, and this is the real reason, and I talked about it in my talk, most people don't have the ability to hit back at bullies like Jason. They're never going to get to be on stage at his own conference in front of
6:10 his own psychopants explaining why they are all a bunch of NPCs following the NPC king. And I think that it's valuable to shock those people out of the matrix a little bit and to do it on behalf of a lot of the people who who who cannot do it. By the way, I had over a dozen founders that Jason had specifically gone after and either called for them to be fired or celebrated their firings reach out and say, "Palmer, what you did has really helped me because all of these like Jason's drugged me through the dirt and now people are realizing that Jason was wrong in doing that and that I was on the other side of that." By the way, of that 12, maybe nine or 10 of them, uh, Jason was unfairly going after, one of those people is now in prison, and one of them definitely deserves to be. So, you you you got to
6:56 take it take it take it all with a grain of salt. I'm the hero of the heroes, and I'm the hero of the villains. But, uh, that's how it goes. So, you did it for the culture, and you did it for other people, and you did it for deterrence. And if Jason had simply not no-showed twice in a row, you might have let let him off the hook. I think I w I was inclined to let him off the hook. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. But I'm very glad that I did it. People talk about it a lot. And here, like, if there's one outcome that's come out of it, Jason has not tried to pull that [ __ ] with anyone in years. Yeah, I think TVPN's coming for that title. So, the ability for him to do that in the future might be lesser. But, um, when you decide to do that, this is a question from my founder, too. How much do you just full send and you just go rogue and do it? And how much is it
7:41 you coordinate with the team where the team helps you and supports you? Like where does that interplay come in? Because you have a team and it's a really good one. It is. I let them know what I'm doing. Usually I don't need their help because my specific It's very hard for people to help me because my process is so in my head. Um but like I let everybody know, you know, Shannon knew what I was up to. Everyone else knew what I was up to. Um some people thought it was a good idea. Some people thought it was a bad idea. But in in in in the end, I've been lucky to build a company of people who mostly have uh seen success born of the way I do things. And a lot of them have made a lot of money because that works. And so uh there I'd say if if I went to a traditional PR person, they'd be very skeptical of these things. Uh but it's
8:28 but but it's clearly worked out. And like another example of this was not even at uh not even at Anderoll, but I mean going back into the Oculus days, I was lucky to have a team that understood that sometimes doing unconventional things made a lot of sense. And actually Oculus I think started to do a lot more poorly when they started to really try to look like every other big company rather than asking what they should be doing on the communication side from scratch. a good example. Um, I decided that uh our first Oculus Rift that we that we delivered, like the real actual consumer product, not a game development platform. Um, I decided that I was going to deliver it myself and I went to the team and I said, I am going to deliver the first Oculus Rift myself. Um, and we we shouldn't announce that or anything, but like we should just do it. And it was funny because the team at the time
9:13 they said, "Oh yeah, like that sounds totally great. We should totally do this." Another six months passes. I think we became a little bit more Facebookified, a little more corporatized. And then something really wild happened. The first pre-order, uh, when we launched pre-orders at CES in January of 2016, do I you I don't even know if you know this. Do you know where that pre-order was from? No. Alaska. Way out in the middle of nowhere in Alaska. So, all of a sudden, we realized that I was going to have to in the middle of winter go to Alaska in the middle of nowhere to deliver this guy's roof. And to me that was like even better. I was like, "Oh my gosh, that's so cool. Like people are going to love this. We're going to live stream my first delivery." And then that was when people were like, "Oh no, like I oh, you
9:58 know, this is it. It's going to be a lot of work and you know, I I think it's going to be kind of weird in the end." I insisted on doing it. I did do it. Facebook sent a PR person to to to tail me. Um, and guess what? It was awesome. And the community loved it. And they like the this like they were like wow you this is so cool. Palmer is so passionate about this thing that he wants to kick it off and say here it is the culmination of my whole teenage life and adult life. I'm delivering it to you. And like that was a really really cool moment. Uh but it it was only possible because for I had a team around me that was willing to let me do these weird things that a big company probably wouldn't come up with on their own. And honestly, uh, uh, you know, they would
10:44 never do it today. Yeah, that sounds like also one of your more positive experiences with Facebook PR, but we can leave that for another day. It was Look, well, I mean, that that was Yeah. No, things were things were still going good. I hadn't I hadn't uh I hadn't uh supported Donald Trump yet. Yes. So, okay, two stories that fork from this one. One, speaking of apparel and footwear that don't match the environment, you used to roll up in DC wearing this before people recognized it as being you. So Scott Sanders told me this story. So you would like fly coach into DC. I remember one time we had this early talk at the CIA. You flew redeye coach got off the plane and gave the talk. But you would wear this with the flip-flops. And Scott said that when you
11:31 had hill meetings, you would have a suit where fact check you would have like a suit jacket in one cargo short pocket and pants in another cargo short pocket and have no luggage whatsoever and just show up in DC. True or false? True. Okay. So, you show up and you you probably look unhinged. And now No, no, no. Be clear. So the these days I stay at a different hotel, but back then I was staying at the Trump Hotel and it's not because it's the Trump Hotel. It's very well located, centrally located near near near the White House. I knew that they would have a good steamer, so I was always able to steam everything. And so I did not look unhinged when I was wearing my suit. I I looked quite respectable. The way I got there was unhinged. And you're right, Scott Scott saying I showed up with
12:17 everything packed in my cargo pockets uh is is is real. uh but but I looked I looked presentable by the by by by by by the next morning. So there's a separate question though of even though you look presentable you come there at you go there as an outsider and you you are speaking sort of a different language you are coming from a different background and pushing for heretical things pushing for extremely heretical things and then if someone would Google you like who knows what the results would be. How did you become accepted and work your way in? The difference between working with government and working with consumers is that with consumers, you have to sell your product to them one at a time, person by person. You do that with ads. You do that with with email campaigns. You do that with, you know, earned media. You're trying to get people to
13:02 look at your thing for 30 seconds and decide that's something I need in my life or at least I'm going to learn more about it and then decide that. Um, and so you have you kind of have a million decision makers or millions of decision makers in the government. There's a very small number of true decision makers when it comes to what technology the DoD buys. You could fit all of them, the ones who matter into a large meeting room if they stood shouldertoshoulder. And so we were lucky in that we because we're a product company that invested our own money in building things. We were able to build products rather than powerpoints and we got a number of champions. Not everybody in the room. We you get three or four people in the room to give you a shot. And then when things go well, their project goes well, which
13:48 is by the way good for their career. when they're spending less money on things that are working really well, other people look in their direction and say, "Huh, maybe there's something to this, maybe I should do the same thing." They don't have to be convinced uh based on their their ability to analyze your technology or believe what you're saying about procurement. They can learn purely by pattern matching. They say, you know, that worked for that guy. I want that for me in my life. And and so that I think that was really we got lucky that we won a few champions early on which allowed us to have sufficient proof that other people are willing to take bets and they take bigger and bigger bets. You know, you say, "Look, if I can build this for them, I can build that for you." And you do that over and over
14:34 again. And pretty soon you go from building small quadcopters to building AI fighter jets. Uh it's it's it's it's like the guy who traded the uh what is it? The paperclip for the house. Uh it's it's it it is it is it is very similar in terms of credibility. You have to do it a little bit at a time. There's nothing you can say in one meeting that makes you jump from crazy guy who just walked into my office to my most trusted confidant in terms of what we do on tech. That's it's a long slow process and you have to prove yourself the whole way. I remember there were a couple specific people like in the Marine Corps that became champions for Andreal and made it their business and their career goal to advocate for modernization of the force and then they went around they
15:21 it wasn't propaganda because it was coming from them and it was totally earnest and it was so much better than someone from the company saying buy our stuff. members of Congress too. There were people in Congress who were taking heat because they were advocating to procure in ways that were very unpopular with the rest of the defense industrial base. And you had people just breathing down their necks uh you know saying if you do this you're going to destroy the whole defense industrial base. If you force us to skin our knees when we trip and fall during development then it's going to be the end of our end of our national security. And um you know in the early days they would say that and was never going to be able to work and then later they said well and might work but only on these little things. It will never apply to big programs. And then all of a sudden you're delivering the Air Force their
16:07 first autonomous fighter jet. And uh you know now there's there's there's kind of this crazy thing going on right now where a lot of our competitors are now saying well listen Congress. Maybe it is true that Anderald can do it and maybe it is true that they can do it on big things too but we can't do what Anderald does. There's only so many companies that are as good as they are that can do things the way they do. And if you try to make us, if you hold us to the same standard you hold Andreel to, if you force us to invest like that, if you force us to take the risk, uh, then we're going to fail. To me, this is a it's a crazy strategy. In the very short term, it might work. It might convince a congressman, you know what? We have to keep this this manufacturing facility or
16:53 this factory going because if we don't subsidize it, it literally will disappear and it'll be really bad for national security. That's a short-term win. The long-term effect is you're telling everyone in DC, we are not as good as Ander and if you want to get a good value and if you want this to work, you need to go to those guys. It's almost like they're advertising for us. They're they're they're shooting themselves in the knees to get emergency healthcare. And it is a it is a bad long-term strategy, even if it gets you into the hospital. So, someone uh texted me, quote, "Palmer is very opinionated and direct. He also started Anderil already having FU money. Would he have done it the same way if he has started Anderrol without already having the cred? So how much of this like how much of what you're saying is
17:39 doable by somebody who is not a billionaire and doesn't have a big audience and doesn't already have somewhat of a cult behind them. So the the the the fu money is a big part of it. Having enough people who believed in me was also really critical. Like, you know, if I just had money, but everyone thought that I was a crazy nutter who couldn't do it, it wouldn't work. You have to remember that a lot of the people who joined Enroll in the early days came from Oculus. They were people who quit Facebook because I mean they were doing they basically said like I'm not going to work here if you're going to fire Palmer. A bunch of those people ended up coming with me. They were very much you know I guess in the cult of Palmer and uh that was that was that was definitely an advantage I had. No, most founders definitely can't make that work. you you you have to use the resources that are available to you. In my case, there was a very limited set of
18:26 investors who truly believed in me. There was a larger set of investors who didn't really believe in me or Ander, but I could strongarm into investing in my new company on the basis of reputational damage if they didn't reinvest in a founder they had previously supported. And I I used that to my advantage. I twisted their arms on that and said, "If you don't invest in me and all the other Oculus investors invest in me, I'm going to call you out on I mean, I was very explicit about it. I will talk about that. You say you invest in people, not companies. Well, time to prove it. And if you're the one odd man out, I'm going to come for you. You know, a little kindly to that, but only a little kind. Around the time of the series, A, I remember you telling people specifically, not only will I remember this, but I will tell everybody the
19:12 decision that you made, and I will routinely humiliate you. Absolutely. I mean, like, if Founders Fund wouldn't have invested, just to use a safe example, because of course they're going to because I I have a great relationship with those guys. They were the first institutional check into Oculus. They gave me a million dollars when nobody else was willing to give me anything. So, like I if if Founders Fund had told me no, I was saying, "Listen guys, I'm going to say, "Hey guys, everyone else gave me money." Oh, you know, except for Founders Fund, they say they invest in people, not not ideas, but I guess not. I guess that's a bunch of marketing baloney. I made them hundreds of millions of dollars with a multi-billion dollar exit and they couldn't even spare a million dollars for my new company. Well, who knows what that means for the future returns of their fund. But, uh, you know, like the
19:58 point is I I was I was using the levers that I had and different founders are going to have different things that are available to them. They're probably not going to have a cult behind them. Maybe they should try and develop one. Uh, they're probably not going to have my FU money. uh maybe they want to consider acquiring some. But I'll also say different types of companies different need different types of of of of levers. You couldn't start a company like Andreal unless you kind of you had it all. You need the money. You need the the following. You even need the hate of the media. You you need it all. You you you you need to be this thing that people love to hate even. So if you don't have a cult, go start one. You you you started one, but at some point there wasn't. you know, you now have like 400k something followers because I checked recently. But at one
20:44 point, I remember looking at your profile, we're like, "All right, Palmer's got 60,000 followers. That's so much. What do we do with it?" You know, at some point, if you go further further back, it was like 10, right? How did accumulate? Part of it was you built Oculus. That helped. But any advice for founders who are who are starting out now and building that call today? Well, a few things. First of all, it it's fun to be a poster and to get everybody following you on X, but it is probably more important to be known among people who are actually decision makers and allies and partners. Like, is it more valuable for me to have an extra 100,000 followers who are a bunch of internet [ __ ] lords, or is it more powerful for the CEO of Microsoft to read a piece about me where I make enough of an impact that when it comes
21:31 back around that I want to acquire some DoD program from him, it's not laughed out of the room. It's easy to grow your follower count with tactics that will sabotage you with the people that you actually need on your side. So, I like to see the follower count as a side effect of, you know, a larger strategy of of them seeing you. And if they think you're a little nuts, that's okay. If they think that you're a little out there, that's okay. But they can't think you're immoral. They can't think you're not credible. They can't think that you're incapable. It's okay if they if they question your style, but the substance has to be there. Um, in terms of how I did it, I don't know. I guess I I guess I guess it comes naturally. I mean, I started uh the mod retro forums, which was a game console for electronics enthusiasts modifying vinting game consoles, handheld game consoles, computers back in 2008 or 2009 when I
22:19 was a teenager. I grew that into a web forum with thousands of active members and and millions of monthly page views. And we were getting covered by Gadget and Gizmodo and all all those guys. And like I I I definitely had a bit of a a bit of a cult then. Uh, you there there are people who thought I was got thought I was the sharpest guy around. Whether I was or not, there's people who thought I was. And then when remember when I built Oculus, one of the reasons that we had $2.4 million in pre-orders for the Oculus Rift DK1, the development kit, the the like, you know, the right after we launched. It's because we had a fan base of people who had been following my work on various like uh gaming forums for ye months or years and they're like, "Oh man, when is Palmer going to launch his Kickstarter for his VR thing? When is
23:05 Oculus actually going to launch?" And there were a lot of people who were excited about that. So you I kind of people think about Oculus as having launched in August of 2012. You have to remember that the work I had been me posting about my open source VR headset work for years at that point had created a built-in audience. Um the last thing I'll say on that is like even pre like and and it's kind of been you very similar process. Um but but with Oculus, the really fun part is that we know one of the very last things that I managed to do before I got fired was um me and our head of hardware, Narav Patel, uh managed to get permission from Facebook to open source the Oculus Rift DK1 DK2 just like I had open sourced all of my previous work back in the forum days.
23:51 And so the Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2 are fully open source hardware and software, all the code, all the mechanicals, all the CAD. And uh I was we we we worked this out and then I think I think Narav clicked the button to go live on GitHub at Oculus Connect 2016, which was it was like one week after my whole Trump thing blew up. So I had been forced out of the office and put on leave, but they hadn't yet actually fired me. And uh that I'd say like that was that was a a great conclusion to a lot of the people who believed me in that cult which by the way helped with my reputation even going into Anderall right there's people who say you know in the end Palmer Palmer did what he said he was going to do because there were people who thought that we basically you I said it was the
24:37 Rift was going to be open source and basically we were kind of trapped into not open sourcing it for a variety of reasons including the Facebook acquisition. It was definitely good that I basically managed to fulfill that promise that I had made to that community. So if if you if you lie to your community, then you you you lose it really really fast. Yeah. Reputation compounds and trust kind of follows you from one thing to another. So you already have that cushion built up. Yep. Well, it was Gabe Newell who said, "Don't ever ever ever try to lie to the internet. They're too smart. They'll see right through it and they'll never trust you again." And the lie will live forever. You can't ever undo it and pretend you didn't say it. How'd you get your reputation back? Do I have it back? That's the real question. It's I mean like there there's still a lot of people today, reasonably intelligent people who still believe that I funded anti-semitic racist and
25:24 misogynist meme trolling campaigns on the internet and mass like not people that matter though. This is not like the days when going around Silicon Valley and couldn't get meetings or going around DC like that is true that look that that is true. I think you're mostly right. I still run into people from time to time who believe that that is the case. I mean like I mean you'll see me from time to time on Twitter pop off on some journalist who writes a story just repeating all of that stuff. And the reason I do it and we've talked about this a lot but just so that other people understand the reason I push back is because I cannot afford to ignore those lies. The reason they've stuck around for so long is because so many people still believe them. like you you you almost can't be it's it it's still quite easy to accidentally believe that these
26:11 things are true and so I have to push back because I don't actually know if people who matter are necessarily doing it like most people who matter are not going to say Palmer I read a story about you that says you funded anti-semitic memes in 2016 so I refuse to talk to you they're just not going to get back to you or they're even going to have someone politely you know say oh you know we're not we're going to go in a different fection. It It's really hard to know what people think. And so like your reputation is is it's always an active battle to try and make sure that people know what you're what you're really doing and what you're really about. Last thing I'll say on this note is it's so funny. Everyone before said that I was posting anti-semitic memes and that I was a Nazi. Like literally like the Boing Boing article said Palmer
26:57 L Palmer Ly's neonazi propaganda farm. And now everyone says I like the Jews too much because I said somewhere that I was a Zionist. So I mean some of the same people who think that I like the Jews too much thought I hated said I hated the Jews. I I wish I wish they could just pick one direction. Do I hate them? Do I love them? Is it both? Who knows? There is so much latent anti-semitism in society sadly that there is no correct amount to like the Jews. Well, like in in 2016, it was very unpopular to hate the Jews, but it was also very popular with the online left to accuse anyone who was spicy of doing it because they hate the Jews. Like, like anything that was like a money stereotype, they like, "Oh, you're doing that because they're
27:43 Jewish." Like, it was it's very interesting how you like the the Trump era opinion of Israel was so much higher on the left than it is today. It's an extraordinary transformation that the worst thing you could be that back then is a Nazi and the worst thing you could be today is a Jew. Yeah, it's interesting. How do you choose when to fight back? So, every once in a while see you just kind of, you know, merc somebody on Twitter, but you must choose your spots because you wouldn't have time in the day to fight every single person. So, like you're sort of a professional grudge holder. So, there are some recurring like recurring characters that pop back up. But with the Randas, how do you choose? So maybe like three categories. One is people who are still engage in a sustained campaign to try and smear me.
28:28 People who are in sustained fights against you. You kind of have to engage them whether you like it or not. If they have an audience because otherwise if you don't, they'll keep repeating these things until enough of their people believe that it's true that it takes you eight years to undo it. This is the problem. Me not engaging. Like the Facebook strategy of don't engage with these people was completely wrong. I never should have done it. A year of not trimming my hedges turned into a garden of weeds that could never be unpulled. Not in 10 years. So there's like the maintenance people. You're just pruning the garden. The people who always come after you are the weeds. The second group of people is um people who are, you know, picking up a lot of traction. and they're maybe you like they're not long-term enemies, but there's someone who's just like, "Oh, Palmer, you know,
29:15 Palmer Palmer Lucky who, you know, famously supplied Israel with all of the arms used in their war in Gaza." It's like, well, that that's just not true. And I I have to push back on that. And by the way, some of these fights, it's not even about whether it would be bad if it was or not. It's just I'm not going to let you lie about me. I'm going to come after you very aggressively. or like when TechCrunch, you had that reporter who I think got fired and now she's at the SF standard or the SF Chronicle. Um, but she was writing all these stories saying that the DoD doesn't buy autonomous weapons and that they are that they're questioning whether or not our systems abide with DoD norms. And I explained multiple times, I said, Marggo, you're totally wrong. The DoD has been buying autonomous weapons for decades. She's like, "Oh, well, you know, give me one example." I'm like, "Okay, here's a sea whiz. It's a turret that can blow up
30:01 boats without anyone clicking a button." She's like, "Yeah, but but you know, I'm not talking about missiles. I'm talking about something like a turret that could shoot at someone without someone pushing a button." I said, "Margot, I literally just I literally just linked you to a sea whiz. That's literally what you're talking about." It's worth pointing back at these people because unfortunately people still read Techrunch and unfortunately people still read our RS Technica. They haven't, you know, they fired some of the pedophiles that work there, but people still read it. And the the last group of people, it's people who say the quiet part out loud. Like they there's a lot of people who on the internet are really smart about coming after you and they hide it and they wrap it and they say, "Well, I'm it's not that I'm per se saying that the DoD
30:47 shouldn't buy anyone from Republicans." It's in fact I'm making this very nuanced view of why Palmer in particular should be punished. Of course, in reality, it's purely political. They just know that the real view they hold is not one that they could ever win over and mass given that half the country disagrees with them at minimum. Um, but there's other people who say the quiet part out loud and I they're kind of the useful idiot. Someone who says, you know, and is bad because X, Y, and Z. And sometimes those are that's a useful foil where you say, you know what, this is a person who has presented the the the the honest version of the argument so well that it's worth engaging with them almost to highlight that that is the real argument. Like you don't want to you don't want to hold up the person who has this contrived argument that sounds
31:33 intelligent if you don't do any research. You want to hold up the guy who's being honest about what the real critique is and engage with them. And so sometimes you have to engage with those people as well. So those are the three categories. Makes sense. you are a legendary recruiter. So Trey says that you are magnetic um with recruits like sometimes there's somebody that you guys are trying to pull out and you know rescue from Rathon and uh they've been forever uh they don't want to make a change they don't want to move and then they like shove them in a room with you and then they come out with this contract. This is how it sounds to me when I hear about it. Um obviously some of that is your aura persona reputation but I assume you have a pretty good pitch. Like what is your pitch? it. Well, the pitch is different for everybody, but for most people, like if they're coming to work here, it's look, do something that
32:18 matters. What you're doing isn't going to be something that people remember. It's not going to be something that is, you know, a durable a durable contribution to your country or your legacy. Are do you want your legacy to be that you increase the value of Google's advertising platform by 0.1% which by the way would be a huge a huge accomplishment for one person to do um that that's that you know that's probably worth billions of dollars over the course of a career. Uh or would you rather work on something that is really going to matter and if you don't do it, you the talented person who could make things happen that nobody else will do, not the way you would do it. If you don't do this job, somebody less capable is going to do it. And there's a lot of
33:04 people who that you know that carrot and stick is really motivating. Man, I want to work on something that matters. I don't want somebody less competent in this role. And it's true. What I'm doing isn't the most impactful thing that I can do. I'm I'm pretty good at making that argument making that argument to people and I I think I'm you I make an argument too that and is the place to do it. There are other places you could have impact but where are you going to find a place where you have the ability to grow a team the ability to hire other people who are like-minded to work with people who want to work quickly who want to be efficient who want to work on the most interesting technical challenges. And so it's a compounding thing. The better of a company you make it at attracting people the easier it is for me to do that. I'll say one more thing on this though. When I started Oculus, we were able to hire people from all over the country. We had people coming
33:51 from Salt Lake City, from Dallas, from New York, from Boston, even from the Bay Area. And then when we were acquired by Facebook, all of a sudden, after moving to the Bay Area, I found that I could only hire people who already were in the Bay Area. For the most part, there's there's there's a few few counter examples, but for the most part, people who live in Salt Lake City do not want to live in San Francisco. people who live in Austin or New York City don't want to live in San Monteo County. It's just it's just the way that it is. And so you ended we ended up with this pretty narrow funnel of often very mercenary-minded, very very uh you know tech in crowdfinker type people being our whole recruiting pool. And when I started Androl, I knew that I could not do that again because I'd seen the consequences
34:36 not only on the business side, but also in terms of the ideology that ends up permeating your company when you draw from one ideological bubble. I knew we needed to just like the early days of Oculus, pull people from all over the country, all walks of life, including military veterans who are distributed all over the country. And I'll tell you what, military vets do not want to live in San Francisco either. They don't want to pay $2 million to live in a crapshack. How do you keep mercenaries out? Cuz for a while, you know, in the beginning, it's always easy. You need believers because they're they're doing this for the mission because they're they're practically not getting anything else. They're not getting accolades. They're not getting a lot of money from it. People have gotten super rich and people know that if you work there, you probably continue getting super rich. Yeah. In the early days, we had this natural filter because we were so controversial. You know, Bloomberg
35:22 called us the most controversial company in tech, even as Uber's executives are federally indicted and Meta's raped over the coals for Cambridge Analytica. No, no, it's the 70 people down in Orange County and Androl that are the most controversial company in the whole technology industry. That was a useful filter, the careerists, the lily pad jumpers, the mercenaries. At the time, they did not perceive that Android would be a good thing for their ambitions and and future aspirations. as you start to be a company that's raising like 10% of all venture capital deployed in a given quarter, people start to pay attention and you do start to attract those people. And by the way, we had this at Facebook when we were acquired like Oculus was a group of misfits, the weird people who believed in VR when nobody did. Mark Zuckerberg was the original
36:07 Facebook VR misfit. He's VR boy number one globally basically ever. But what happened when he bought Oculus and he made it more mainstream and he made it into this big thing, a lot of people all of a sudden wanted to work on it who previously like they had no conviction over VR. They just said, "Oh, this is a cool hot thing to work on that will look good on my resume." And so, uh, what Anderall has done and you've seen this has been build that filter artificially. Try to not just attract the right people, but repel all of the wrong people. the the repel the wrong people who who might join. Repel the right people who the wrong people who might invest. You saw the don't work at Android campaign where we basically highlight this is how hard we
36:54 work. Everyone does field work. Everyone gets dirty. We don't do work from home. We don't have a barista. And the point but but here is what we do do. We have work that matters. We have work that's critical. You'll get to work on lots of cool things with lots of cool people. and you'll get to make a difference like that that I think that that's a really good I think that's a really good filter because in my experience the mercenaries are not looking for things that are really really hard disproportionately hard they'd rather work somewhere else that is hot and not a grind so today because the company has become so successful and because you have already proven the critics wrong and you become so unequivocally successful you're actually in some ways not the best person to model yourself after But
37:40 it's the same thing as like having FU money or being a billionaire. Not like not everybody can just turn that on right now if they're just starting. Never never People try to model advice and strategies that work for celebrities. You know, they're like, oh well, you know, if I were in if I were in his position, I just wouldn't care and I wouldn't act that way. My point is, okay, but that like that might work for Tom Cruz. It's not going to work for you, is it? like you you cannot model the strategies of people who who who are in a very very different position and expect that duplicating them will get you to where they are. Yeah. It's like the meme of the super attractive 20-year-old woman who's like everyone's so nice all the time. You can't just emulate. But um what I was going to ask you is imagine like imagine if I tried that. Imagine if I tried to go and like hot girl summer my way into in into being
38:28 hired. It would just it just wouldn't work. Right. That's the Well, we've all seen you in a bikini and I think it did work. Homer, we don't know. Oh, man. Lul Lul Luly, you're get you're treading close to dangerous territory, which is, you know, I I said people should use every lever that's available to them. So, this is the question I get to ask you as as an interviewee to the interviewer. Uh, should women use their charm? You know, is that is it Yeah, everybody should use their charm. Some people have some people have less there there are women with less charm. and they're men with more charm. But like anybody who has charm should absolutely deploy it. I got it that like if I was a woman, I think I would use everything that was available to me. Uh and like I that's just that's how I feel. I'm I'm curious
39:13 what you think. You're the expert as a woman. I mean, you've been wearing crop tops and push-up bras without even being a woman. That's true. No, that's true. I do a lot I do a lot of crossdressing cosplay. Which then is also It's so funny when people are like, "Oh, Palmer must like Palmer hates trans people." I'm like, you realize that not only have I never said scene go bad where about trans people, but that I regularly crossdress and almost exclusively cosplay as women. I think that every person should use whatever they have. And for some that's intellect, for some that's reason, for some that's charms. For for women it might be womenly charms. And you know, as long as you don't cross any lines or ethical boundaries, I agree. If you're not crossing any lines, you should do you should use whatever level there is. For a long time, there was a meme that was nearly
39:59 impossible for women to succeed in tech. And that women were just besieged uh in the brotopia of the tech industry. There are some things that make it harder by being a woman or where people are harder on you. It can be very vitriolic, but there are also advantages. And so, if you're going to take the downsides, you might as well use the upsides. So, like when I talk to and mentor younger women, I always tell them, you can get away with things in communications that men can't. like when what when you and I work together sometimes I like yell at you a little bit with affection. I interrupt you. We spar. Um if if I were like a big burly guy that might come across super aggressive in a different way, but because I'm smaller and female like it doesn't seem so aggro and I can I can actually get away with some of that. And young people too. I mean I've talked a lot about how you should abuse your
40:45 young person privilege to the fullest extent. Everyone wants to help you when you're a young motivated young person, a whiz kid. You you rich rich and successful people with not much time in their day will get an email from a 17-year-old or a 19-year-old who by the way puts in time like this is not like hey tell me how to be successful but if they're like hello Mr. Lucky or Mr. Gates or Mr. Bezos, here is who I am. Here is what I'm doing. Here's why your unique insight is relevant to my thing. I would appreciate your input on this particular item because you are a person whose opinion I respect. You would be surprised how far you can get. Now, there's age privilege. You get that when you're 17. You get it when you're 19. You might get it when you're 25. I promise you, the day you turn 30, nobody gives a [ __ ] about helping the young guy
41:31 anymore. That's not to say they're not going to help you, but they're not going to help you for the same reason. So, I always tell young people, get it all out of the way, like for as long as you are young, go and use this strategy. And by the way, don't be surprised when it stops working. You can't lean on your like by the time you're 25, stop saying I'm a 25-year-old engineer. Nobody gives a [ __ ] anymore. So, confirmed by Palmer Lucky, men also hit the wall. I I remember staffing you on an interview which which for others means I was just sort of listening in um ready to like make a loud bellowing noise if if if the reporter went off track. But um you were talking and they asked you how does it make you feel when people call you a whiz kid and you said do you remember what you said? I think I said uh I said well look you know once you're once you're 30 I don't
42:18 think you call yourself a whiz kid anymore. I think I think I'm more of a whiz man. At this point you hadn't turned 30. You said uh you said whiz man doesn't have quite the same ring to it. So I'm going to enjoy it. So I am a whiz man. I'm the whiz man. Yeah. Have things changed? To be clear, I think a whiz a whiz man really is a thing. It's a whiz kid who's now an old man. Um and like that is different than just being old. Like it's actually a risky thing. So I think Justin Bieber is a whiz man. Uh brilliant at a young age, widely recognized, now old enough that he's just another one of the people. And that's different than somebody who is, let's say, come into their own well of age and and not and not a whiz kid. This all applies to so few people. But I'll tell you, being a whiz kid does make it a little tough when you get older
43:04 because you're kind of held to that standard. And also, people kind of inherently assume that you've hit the wall, you're over the hill, and that the best you ever were was when you were that surprisingly successful for his age guy. And and people don't give you credit for that when you're older. Okay. But um to give everybody else some hope, you are making Whiz Pan look uh pretty successful and appealing the same way that Anne Hathaway makes being like a woman in her 40s look amazing. I don't know how old she is, but she she's like the whis man version of a woman. Look, I I think the key to being a whiz man, and I'll go on the record on this, is to not do a documentary or a biography. The moment that you do that, you're admitting you're over the hill.
43:50 Like you're basically saying what I've done so far that is the body that constitutes what I'm willing to be rep like I'm willing to let that be representative of who I am what I did in life. You are a whiz retiree. A whiz retiree. That Yeah. Yeah. Palmer. Who is a founder that you think is communicating really well and strongly? John Carmarmac. H why? John Carmarmac is a master communicator in ways that have really not been credited. So for example, John Carmarmac had a had a notes file, a text file that he would regularly and he would take all of his personal technical development notes and he would publish those on the internet. I think it was every single week. Like he would just
44:36 put his notes on the internet for anyone to see what he's thinking, how he's thinking about it. It was kind of the ultimate in open-source thinking at the time and I mean this is the 1990s um as he was developing Doom and Quake and uh and Wolfenstein and now people talk about you know developing in the open and you know like the only thing he had thousands of people reading his plan files every you know every day every week uh but back when there was no social media like I mean like logging into his FTP and downloading it and then and then talking about on bulletin board system. So, he he did that back then, but he's continued to be a very technical communicator who is not afraid to jump into even culture war issues and and and share his mind and and and and
45:23 speak openly about it. Um, now he he's done it a bit differently than me. He has different skills than me. He has a little bit of a different base than me. Uh, he's got different ambitions than me. But I think John Carmarmac is a underrecognized master communicator. And like like look look let let's see I have 422,000 Twitter followers. Let's see how many John has. John Carmarmac. He moss you. Here we go. 1.1 million followers. And guess what? I wish that he was working at my company. Elon wishes that he was working at SpaceX. Jensen wishes he was working at Nvidia. And uh Mark wishes he was working at Facebook. And Microsoft wants him too. Like this is a guy who's done what I talked about earlier. He's got the large social media account of
46:08 people who recognize the value there and he has cultivated an impeccable reputation despite engaging in like culture war issues. You you can name one he's probably weighed in uh at some point. Yeah, he he is underrated and he doesn't like fight it and fight it. He just puts his opinion on the record. Last question for you is what would be your best piece of advice, communications advice for other founders and something that where you don't have to be a billionaire. You don't have to have created Oculus already have a cult. But just in general, what works really well? Uh my advice to people would probably be recognize that the value of your reputation is is very high and that if people do not trust you, if they do not believe in what you're saying, if they
46:53 do not think that you're a person worth listening to, that you're going to have a hard time working with you. And you don't need to be neutral. You can be a propagandist. you can advocate for a particular point of view and you don't need to fairly or or or or or most strongly represent your strongest critic's view as as as part of that. For some people, you'll want to, but in general, I think people should recognize that if you say something where where you caveat it and you hedge it and and and you basically end up saying something that most people would agree with or everyone agree with, you might as well have said nothing at all. And you are not going to build a following of people who say, "Man, I just love Palmer's takes. I love his right down the middle, very hedged takes that everyone agrees with." Like, if you're
47:40 just restating common sentiment, maybe that's like an interesting bit for some comedian to do, but like it's not going to get you anywhere. Not unless you you're you're restating common sentiment in a very very funny way. So, I think one thing that I tell people is like make sure that when you're saying something, you're saying something. Make sure that you are being pursued. You're trying to affect change. Maybe not in everybody, but in some people. And if you make some people love what you're saying and some people hate what you're saying, that's a lot better than having when everybody lukewarm agree with you uh about things that everyone agrees with. Like don't don't waste your time communicating about the things everyone already agrees with you on. Focus on the things where you need to change their mind. And then maybe I'll say in honor of Charlie Kirk, change my
48:25 mind. Yeah, perfect. Beautiful. Thank you.
