Palmer Luckey

I want you to imagine something. In the early hours of a massive surprise invasion of Taiwan, China unleashes its full arsenal. The United States attempts to respond, but it quickly becomes clear. We don't have enough. Not enough weapons. Not enough platforms to carry those weapons. Taiwan falls within weeks, and the world wakes up to a new reality, one where the world's dominant power is no longer a democracy. Despite the incredible technological progress happening all around us, our defense sector was stuck in the past. So I founded a company called Anduril. At our core, we're about fostering peace. We deter conflict by making sure our adversaries know they can't compete.

Now, while we make dozens of different hardware products, our core system is a piece of software, an AI platform called Lattice, that lets us deploy millions of weapons without risking millions of lives. We also built counter -drone technology, like Roadrunner here, which is a twin -turbo -jet -powered reusable counter -drone interceptor that we took from napkin sketch to real -world combat -validated capability in less than 24 months. And we did it using our own money. For centuries, military power was derived by size. More troops, more tanks, more firepower. But over the last few decades, the defense industry has spent far too long hand crafting exquisite, almost impossible to build weapons.

Meanwhile, China has studied how we fight, and they've invested in the technologies and the mass that counter our specific strategies. We'll never meet China's numerical advantage through traditional means, nor should we try. What we need isn't more of these same systems. We need fundamentally different capabilities. We need autonomous systems that can augment our existing manned fleets. We need intelligent platforms that can operate in contested environments where human -piloted systems simply cannot. That is how we reclaim our deterrence. This is how we prevent a repeat of Pearl Harbor.

We all agree that robots shouldn't be able to decide who to kill. But the problem is that leads to impossible situations where, for example, if you really say that a robot can't decide which target to strike, that means that somebody to stop you, all they have to do is jam your signal. I don't really want the balance of power in the entire world to be decided by who has better radio frequency RF engineers. Like, that's quite crazy. That puts a lot of power in the hands of the nerds who draw antennas and schematics. You really need autonomy. Even if someone can jam your systems, they can still execute their mission.

They can still do their best. The same thing they say, oh, well, you agree that a gun should, an AI should never be able to decide when to pull the trigger. And the point that I've made over and over again is there's no moral high ground in a landmine that can't tell the difference between Russian armor and a school bus. And you acting like it is, oh, yes, of course, AI should never pull the trigger. People have proposed, well, what if we just make jamming a war crime? I'm not kidding. This is like an actual UN proposal as well. What if we just make everything remotely piloted, but we make it a war crime to jam the link?

Could you imagine what a fragile system that would be? Everybody builds these militaries. And then the moment that some dude goes to a truck stop and buys a cell phone jammer from a guy in the parking lot and turns it on, their military falls apart. Like dragged in front of the Hague. It's a nonsense proposal that people take seriously. There's another reason that you don't necessarily want to have, it's not just jamming. Autonomous systems allow you to turn off your radios so that you don't have to transmit. Right now, if I do a remotely piloted drone, I'm by definition constantly emitting a signal. And that means that there's a signal that someone can figure out how to localize, how to track.

And so people say, we should just have all these things we remotely piloted. A person should always be watching the feed. I say, what you're really saying is every U.S. drone needs to have a transponder beacon on it that says, here I am, here I am, here I am, come and get me, come and get me. You can even build missiles that are rad -seeking missiles that go after electromagnetic radiation. They don't even need cameras. They just have a set of antennas on them and they just fly at the signal that's being emitted and then blow it up. It's very effective. We've been doing it since Vietnam.

So the other reason you need autonomy is so that you don't have to have systems emitting. That's one of the most powerful things manned systems can do today that something like an MQ -9 cannot. An MQ -9 has to be transmitting. There are ways to track that. A guy in an airplane can turn all of his radios off and be fully stealth. And the only way to mimic that without a person being in it is to make an AI brain that's really smart.

The reason I started Anderil is because I perceived that we were running a very dangerous experiment in this country. We were, for the first time, completely divorcing our most innovative technology companies from the Department of Defense. That's never happened in history. And that was because they were, well, there were cultural reasons, ideological reasons, but mostly it came down to money. I wanted to be clear, we're not just a neutral company. We're not here to say, oh, we're just here to make money. We're just here to make something for everyone. We are taking sides. We are going to fight for the things that our country values, that our allies around the world have in common.

When you're building a defense company, you're not building weapons because the weapons are cool, because the blade is bright, or for the keenness of the edge. You're doing it really for that which it protects. And I remind my employees of that all the time. We're not just trying to build cool stuff. The stuff is cool, but we're doing it for a greater purpose. And we need to always remember that.

A lot of the worst ethical decisions that we have made as a country in war have been when we are not in a good position to win. You want to use technology in the most ethical way in war. It's much easier to do that when you are so immensely powerful, meaning your intelligence apparatus and surveillance apparatus for watching your enemy systems is so good. You can basically fight with your hands behind your back. You say, you know what? We're not going to take a pot shot at that thing when it's rolling by a civilian building. We know we're going to be able to kill it at any instant that we choose.

It's when you have limited capabilities that you start to say, you know what? We have to take whatever shot we can get. Is that an enemy soldier or is that a farmer? I don't know and I'm not willing to risk those five guys over there. I'm going to take the shot.

I actually hope that I do get to sell weapons to China. I hope that I do get to sell weapons to North Korea. And that sounds crazy until you remember the example of Japan. There was a time we were fighting a world war against these guys. And now we are the backbone of their defense strategy. They just double their defense budget. And most of that's going to come to the United States for our weapon systems. It tells me that just about anything is possible. I can imagine a world where we're out there doing counter -narcotics operations and counter -bioweapon operations against terror cells. That would be a really, really good reflection of the state of the world, wouldn't it?

Most government contracts are on what's called a cost plus basis, where they get paid for time and materials, which incentivizes them to actually work slowly, to pick expensive solutions rather than cheap solutions. You get paid typically a few percent on top of whatever your materials are. So you're actually incentivized to make your materials cost as high as possible, number of hours as high as possible. Because if I'm getting 20 % on a $500 million project, it's better if it's a billion dollars. And it won't be 20%, it'll be like 4%, 5%. Even at the very beginning of the process, they will architect things in such a way that it has to be expensive to build.

Because let's say that you could solve the problem for $10,000. At that point, it's not even worth doing the paperwork. We'll never architect a system that is so cheap that you can't make significant money in this model. And so what we've done is say, you know what, we're going to try to build it using our own money. And then we are going to do better than everyone else and sell it to the government.

How do we keep them from stealing innovations? Stop patenting everything. Patents are Chinese instruction manuals. You're taking your most valuable stuff. You are, look, so the Founding Fathers never predicted a world where you would have a globalized economy where the entire patent office could be downloaded every single morning and then ripped off and then used to fight a war against you. The problem that we have right now is that for 20 years or so between when you file for a patent and when somebody could launch a product that is a ripoff, it means China could just rip it off right away. And Western companies can only rip it off after 20 years.

And then you repeat this cycle over and over again for every single generation. It's killing us. We need to really fundamentally revisit the patent system. And I'm not just complaining here. I've got a possible solution. I think we need to massively expand the national security patent process.

We're not teaching engineers how to be engineers anymore. We're not teaching designers how to actually design things to be manufactured. We're teaching them how to be high -level design shops that put together design package that gets sent to the real engineers in China, and they actually figure out how to do the work. This is true even with our mechanical engineering programs, even with our electrical engineering programs. People are turning into architecture astronauts. But the real work of how am I actually going to put this together? How am I going to build a manufacturing line to make this thing? How am I going to need to figure out how to do the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 different revisions of this board to pass radio emissions and interference standards?

That's all done in China. So they are the real engineers. We've hollowed out our real engineering capacity. These days, most of the really hard work is being done by Chinese engineers.

In this case, they were making a huge deal out of the fact that we had had two aircraft that failed to release during a test. So they failed to detach from another aircraft. Also, they were making a huge deal out of a fire that we started during a test. And to be clear, this is a very, very small fire. It was about 0.00002 % of a weapons test range specifically designed to have fires on it. And the real, they said satellite imagery, reveals the extent of the damage. There was a bunch of grass that caught on fire. And then it got put out, and it was fine.

Like, nothing burnt down. Nobody was injured. It's exactly what it was like. And the crazy thing is, Anduril has started hundreds of fires during our test procedures over the course of years. This is how you actually make functional products. You test them to fail you. You push the limits. You find out where things are going wrong. Also, in this case, it was a counter -drone system. What do you think is going to happen when a system designed to destroy drones full of flammable lithium -ion batteries is tested? Do you think that's never going to end in things on fire falling onto the ground? Well, because Thank you.

You like making this explicit, you were fired from Facebook. Correct. Thank you for calling out that. I'd like to make it clear. It's I'm not trying to make myself overly victimized here, but there's so many times where executives are pushed out of their own companies and then everyone agrees to play by the rules. They've decided to spend more time with their family. VCs are excited to get back to operating. Oh, get back to operating. Yeah, that's a good one. It's, oh, eight straight years of zeros on investments, and now you're ready to go back to operating. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so I think that is not a healthy thing.

I would like to see the industry be more honest about this, if only because we all hear about the successful acquisitions, but then the other side of it, the part where they potentially are getting forced out of their companies, those parts often get smoothed over by the corporate messaging. And the problem is then future people deciding what they're going to do with their company only see that positive side and they don't understand. They don't have the real world experience to know that things don't always or even often go that way.

Mark Zuckerberg committed that he was going to put at least a billion dollars a year into research and development of VR technology, which was my passion, for at least the next 10 years. So that's what I was weighing. What is it going to take for me, as Palmer Luckey, to raise $10 billion in R &D cash? Well, to do that, I'm going to need to make some number of billions in revenue. I'm going to need to dilute myself by some certain amount. And I'm going to need to do some number of raises. And you start to do the math and you realize. Very simple math. Yeah, you say, I'm not going to be in control.

That's going to be almost impossible to do this. And here is a surefire way to maybe not be as in charge of my destiny. And of course, I ended up getting fired a few years later. So that really manifested fully the risk. But the positive side and what did happen is the commitment for Mark was $10 billion, a billion dollars a year for 10 years. But the actual number has been $60 billion. Wow. And so, I mean, you got... And they changed their name, in fact. Oh, and then actually the day that they changed their name to Meta, I actually put all of my liquid assets back into Meta stock.

So, I mean, I'm a total nutter. I really fully believe in the Metaverse future, whether people think it's a fad or not. I've been with it long enough that at least you can't accuse me of chasing the fad. You can only accuse me of being naive or stupid. I was like, Lord. I was like Lord. Lord. I was like Lord. Thank you.

My advice to people would probably be recognize that the value of your reputation is very high and that if people do not trust you, if they do not believe in what you're saying, if they 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 most strongly represent your strongest critic's view 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 you caveat it and you hedge it 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 hedge takes that everyone agrees with. If you're just restating common sentiment, maybe that's an interesting bit for some comedian to do, but it's not going to get you anywhere, not unless you're restating common sentiment in a very, very funny way. So I think one thing that I tell people is make sure that when you're saying something, you're saying something. Make sure that you are trying to persuade, 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 about things that everyone agrees with.

Like 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. Focus on the things where you're saying,