Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Colossus | Investing & Business Podcasts

Palmer Luckey - Inventing the Future of Defense

·1 hr 15 min·5 clips

Palmer Luckey explains why synthetic gasoline at $1 per gallon could make electric vehicles obsolete.

Palmer Luckey joins Patrick O’Shaughnessy on Invest Like the Best for a wide-ranging conversation about innovation, invention, and building companies that make outsized impact. Luckey is the founder of Oculus VR, which he sold to Facebook for $2 billion, and Anduril Industries, a defense technology company he founded in 2017. He begins with the concept of synthetic long-chain hydrocarbon fuels—artificially manufactured gasoline and jet fuel—which he argues represent a massively underinvested path compared to the trillions flowing into battery and hydrogen electric vehicles. He traces the idea to post-WWII government documents, arguing that first-principles thinking was freer then than today, where political calculus narrows what researchers are allowed to consider. Luckey rates U.S. innovation soil at a six out of ten, citing good but insufficient engineering talent relative to China’s volume. He argues the U.S. should differentiate student loan subsidies by field of national importance, the way Japan does, rather than treating all degrees equally. His invention method involves going “back to the future”—revisiting discarded ideas from earlier eras before iteration, because technologies often failed not on merit but due to premature timing. The real-time distortion correction used in the Oculus Rift is an example: a technique rejected in the 1980s because computation was too expensive, which became trivial on modern GPUs. Luckey says his core principle is making large, material impact rather than doing what he personally finds interesting, which is why he chose Anduril—deterring authoritarian expansion—over VR games and consumer products he would prefer to build. He reflects on Anduril’s founding strategy: hiring more lawyers and lobbyists than engineers in the first months to shape DOD institutions before building the technology. He warns against the mythologized Steve Jobs model of genius founder-operators and advocates instead for hiring around your own documented weaknesses. The conversation closes on what it takes to build something enormous and how engaging with conventional institutions, rather than rejecting them, is how out-of-the-box thinkers actually change the world.

As heard by us

A founder story that keeps returning to impact, institutions, and the cost of moving late.

Palmer Luckey's conversation moves from Oculus to Anduril and lands on a plain thesis: builders who want real impact have to work through institutions, not around them.

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Why you'd press play

When you want to hear how a founder thinks about defense, speed, and impact.

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