Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. We have an exciting show for you today. This is the 15th and the final episode from the all-in summit 2022.

I wanted to take a quick moment to thank my team. They worked tirelessly over 100 days to make the event magical for everybody who was able to make it. Thanks to the audience for coming.

Next year we'll try to have twice as many of you there. Just a quick thank you to Amber Ashley Jackie, Nick, Fresh, Marine, Molly, Big Mike, Andre Times 2, Rachel Reporting Producer Justin, Jamie, Jimmy D. My brother Josh, everybody who came and supported the event. We had an incredible crew. We had an incredible time.

And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't thank the amazing speakers who joined us from all around the world. So candid. So insightful. My pal Bill Gurley, Brad Gersner, Adina, Mark, Tandist, Tim, Elon, Antonio Nate, Ryan Clare, my boy, Roboi, Antonio Garcia, Martinez, Joalansdale, James, Mattiebi, Glenn Greenwald. And of course, today's guest, the one and the only Mr. Palmer Lucky.

And most of all, I'd like to thank my besties, Chimalt, Saxon, Freiberg, who did an amazing job of hosting the event. Now, a little preamble here before we start this episode. Many of you have heard that this is a controversial episode. It is a little controversial. There may be a little twist in it. So I will be coming back after Palmer Lucky's talk to give you a little context because it might get a little confusing. I don't want to spoil the surprise for you. So enjoy this episode.

But before we go to this episode, a lot of you have questions. You have questions about the future of the All-In Podcast. And those questions are important. And they're never going to be answered. They're never going to be answered. But just so you know, I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving.

I'm not leaving.

The show goes on. This is my home. They're going to need a wrecking bolt to take me out of here. They're going to need to send in the National Guard because I ain't going nowhere. The show goes on.

So my name is Palmer Lucky. I've found two companies. My first was a company called Oculus VR that I founded when I was 19 years old and living in a camper trailer. Thank you. Thank you.

I sold that to a few billion dollars to Facebook and then got fired a few years later and then started Andral because I wanted to work in the National Security Space for a variety of reasons. And I'll get into some of those reasons today.

So the technology industry for many years has prided itself on being the first to understand where things are heading so that they can build the things that are going to be relevant for the future.

On National Security though and on the rise of our strategic adversaries, it was one of the last industries to realize where things were going due to a variety of ideological reasons but also business reasons.

Still, Silicon Valley didn't just predict the importance of defense in the 2020s. It largely took the exact wrong position, the opposite position.

First of all, you have obvious examples like big technology companies explicitly refusing to do work with the Department of Defense. Google is one big example but the worst examples are really in the startups that don't exist because people didn't want to even get into such a controversial space, less at ruin their careers.

When I started Andral, I had already sold the company for billions of dollars and investors still didn't want to invest. I still had a tough time in a lot of meetings with venture capitalists and none of the conversations with VCs that I had were about my ability to hire or execute or build products.

I believe that I could do those things even the ones who didn't like me much. The vast majority of conversations that we had were about whether or not it was even ethically okay to ever build a company that would build weapons.

And the people who turned us down, the ones who decided not to invest in Andral, actually believed that we had a good team and good people and good product market fit.

The issue is that they thought that it was inherently wrong to build tools capable of being used for violence because they believed that the idea of deterring violence through having a strong arsenal was fundamentally obsolete and itself wrong.

Even imagine how hard it would have been to raise money if I hadn't found it Oculus would have been impossible.

Even after we raised money and got traction, the negativity continued. There was a really interesting car story in Bloomberg in 2019 that called us tech's most controversial startup.

This was a year where TikTok was banning users for calling attention to the weaker genocide in China and banning users for posting homosexual content.

This is a year in which Adam Newman paid himself tens of millions of dollars for the right to use the word we.

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