Anduril and Meta Make Peace to Make War Together - EP 18 Palmer Luckey

I got like a soundboard.

Oh yeah, that's great. You have, you ever seen all the old Major League Gaming style videos people do?

Like, uh, like from the video game replay?

No, no, there was all the old MLG. I'll show, I'll show you afterwards. I'll show you afterwards. But, but, uh, but air horns are a staple of that entire, that entire genre of video.

I was excited to have the soundboard. I thought Feels good, right?

Oh yeah, that's great.

Well, and we had— this was like, uh, it felt like an emergency podcast, so I was gonna, I was gonna use that noise for the first time.

Um, or if you're gonna do an emergency, you want to pull up the old, uh, all the old air raid sirens.

I know, I didn't have a good one though. I need to download the extras somewhere. You know what came with it?

You know, uh, Cold War era air raid siren was my wake-up alarm for many years as a teenager. Are you familiar with the whole air raid siren community?

No.

There's a lot of people who actually collect and restore old air raid sirens. So for a time, you know, they were in every American town, so every town had one. And then they were— they were slowly decommissioned over time. They shifted over to more electronic systems. But a lot of these old sirens, they were actually engine-driven, if you can believe that. They weren't electrical at all.

Okay.

And so you'd have a big Chrysler or a big Ford engine hooked up to this siren mechanism. You would either have a static air raid siren mounted on a roof and people could usually get them for free if they would just remove them, or you'd have them on trailers. And so there's a whole niche community now of people who collect Chrysler, Ford, and GM-powered air raid sirens and run them at events. They get together and all run them together. I've pondered getting into that universe myself, but I'm too busy.

How do you— I mean, you know something about everything. Like, when did you—

when I got in, I got into air raid sirens because I was interested in extreme high-power audio. And, you know, all, all the speaker is, is moving air. And it turns out that the way that we've done it with very high fidelity using electrical impulses to move a, you know, a coil back and forth, to move a cone back and forth, that's actually a pretty limited way to do things. And so I, I, I then got into people who were building rotary vane subwoofers. Basically imagine like a helicopter rotor, but instead of being designed to lift something and move thrust around, it's just designed to move enormous amounts of air at a certain frequency to give you tons of bass. And that was when I found out about the principles of some of these old air raid sirens. It's actually very, very related. And so it turns out if you want to turn energy into sound, you probably do it mechanically, not electrically. And so, uh, that was, I, I, I just did, I ended up learning a lot about air raid sirens in, in the researching of extreme high-powered audio. The thing I was specifically interested in was building counter-UAS systems for this. So, Building— I wanted to build a system that could shake the inertial measurement unit of a drone at its own resonant frequency so as to make it stop working. And so the idea is with really loud sounds at just the right frequency, you could actually knock drones out of the sky by disabling their stability controls. And, uh, it's, it's since become a actually pretty well-developed technique and the limitations are well understood, but people are doing it for real now.

Okay. All right. So this was in the Anduril day.

Uh, oh no, it was even pre-Anduril.

Okay.

Yeah. I mean, there was a bunch of stuff I was thinking about and working on even pre-Anduril that was related to defense. I never built any of this stuff, but I was just fascinated. It was very clear that drones were going to be a threat even when I was just a kid. Like, I mean, I remember reading some of the very first, uh, articles about quadcopters before there were any commercial quadcopters. I mean, I remember when the Parrot AR drone came out. That was, I believe, the first commercial quadcopter.

I remember that.

And I mean, I was following that very, very closely. I strongly believed in the quadcopter architecture. The moment that they became commercial, it was clear that this was going to be a massive threat vector. I remember chatting in the ModRetro chat room with me and all my other teenage buddies, and maybe this is not a smart thing to say on a podcast, but I remember having a discussion with everybody that started with the prompt, how would you kill the president of the United States? And I was, I knew what I would do. I would use drones. And, uh, and it was, it's one of those, you start to think, what are the countermeasures you could do? Like we were talking about like, Could you build air jets like, like compressed air tanks around the perimeter of a stage to deflect them? Could you build blast shields that pop up from a stage to protect the president? Well, wait a second. It turns out that protecting a president on a stage is not the extent of the problem. He's actually— there's a lot of other times where he's in motion or unprotected. And I even at the time, I knew that that was going to be a nearly impossible problem. And it's a It's a, it's a miracle we haven't seen large-scale drone attacks in the United States. It's— we're, we're, we're very lucky that killers are mostly very mimetic. They just, they're mostly not original. They mostly just copy what's got attention before.

Right.

Uh, I mean, like the guy who did— I'm not, I'm not, not lionizing him.

I'm—

I want to be clear. I'm not one of those guys who thinks we should put bombers on the COVID of Rolling Stone, like the Boston bomber, but like the guy who did the Virginia Tech massacre, he was doing something that had not been done before at the time. And then you had all these people who copied him because of the attention that it brought. And, uh, you saw a similar thing with serial killers in, uh, in your earlier in the century.

Yeah.

Where you see this huge explosion of serial killings and then it dropped off as it went out of fashion. And so my theory here is that the same way you saw serial killings go in and then out of fashion, so too will mass shootings. And so eventually will probably drone attacks. So I'm trying to get ahead of that.

All right, well, this podcast has already begun and I haven't— I have not done any sort of formal intro, so we'll do it. So we have Palmer Luckey. I feel like you don't need a big introduction, but no, I'm Palmer Luckey.

I am the founder of Anduril Industries, which is a defense product company. Previously, I started a company called Oculus VR, which I sold to Facebook. Prior to that, I started an internet forum called ModRetro for pairing the best of vintage game consoles with modern technology, and it's still around today in a side project form of selling Game Boy knockoffs.

Have one. We have one at our house. My wife is playing Tetris on it all the time. Um, she got a lovely pink one. Colors are amazing.

Getting to do a new version of Tetris was so cool. It's one of those things where you never grow up thinking, I will get to be the director. Of a Tetris game. Uh, and then, and then you do. And I mean, this, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's pretty fun.

Okay. I'm going to ask you questions about that. And even just in your introducing yourself, we have, we're gonna, we're gonna get to, to where these worlds now collide. Um, super quick before we go a little further, just tiny housekeeping that I have to do. This, this episode made possible by the good people at E1 Ventures. E1 Ventures. Serving your venture capital needs.

Thanks, E1 Ventures.

I think they are actually an angel investor.

Through an SPV or directly?

I don't have that kind of information.

You don't have that ready?

No.

Oh man. See, this is the difference between you and me. I've, I've learned maybe not perfectly, but I've learned how to keep investors happy, having had to raise billions of dollars in venture capital over my career. Now you got it. You got to, you got to have that stuff on speed dial.

Okay. All right. Well, I will dig in. I'll dig in just real quick. Okay. So we have a lot of ground. To cover. Thank you so much for coming. Um, first guest in our, our near—

of course, I'm not in the Bay Area too often. I come up here on April 1st every year, but beyond that, uh, not, not, not, not too often.

Well, and I want to get to what brought you here. However, I do have a question. So like on the, on the, the games, I mean, you go to that level, you're actually helping design the games and, and in most cases, no.

In this particular case, so for people who don't know, uh, ModRetro, we, we, it was, it was started as an internet forum by me and a couple of my buddies like Chris Dykus when we were teenagers and we were building modify, we were modifying vintage game consoles, uh, building them into portabilize the portables, the, the, the, the, the hobby was called portabilizing. So, you know, imagine taking a Nintendo 64, turning it into a handheld using modern batteries, modern displays. And we also did a lot of Game Boy modification, making custom Game Boys, upgrading the displays. I was the first person to ever LED backlight a Game Boy. I believe I was also the first person to do an aftermarket Game Boy Pocket backlight using electroluminescent panels. Uh, Nintendo did that on the Game Boy Light, but I, I, I made a retrofit kit for that. Anyway, fast forward to the present where I have a whole bunch of money and this project I've been working on for over a decade, which is a kind of money-is-no-object version of the Nintendo Game Boy Color. What would it look like if it was, you know, kind of an heirloom tribute to the Game Boy Color? And so it has a magnesium aluminum alloy shell., a lab-grown sapphire screen window instead of plastic. As far as I know, it's the largest single piece of sapphire in any consumer product that's ever shipped. Way bigger than, let's say, like a sapphire crystal used in a Rolex watch. And, uh, it came bundled with a new version of Tetris, which was created and produced by ModRetro under license from the Tetris Company. And that was really interesting cuz we got to meet Hank and Alexey, who are the, the developer. And the guy, kind of guy who brought Tetris to the West, uh, worked directly with them to build something that was compliant with the rules of what a Tetris game should be, how it should work. I've been a Tetris fan my whole life. And so normally do I get involved in the games for the chromatic? Not usually, but in this case it was bundled with every single mod retro chromatic, just like Nintendo bundled Tetris with all the Game Boys that were sold in North America. And so that's one that you really, really gotta get right. And I had a lot of opinions and so. You either, of course, there's a whole team of people who are making sure to get it right. And I don't even deserve the majority of the credit, but still to even be in a position of, of directing something like that is, uh, is something you don't expect as a kid.

Well, that's cool. And not to do like a huge mod retro ad, um, or I didn't plan on doing this, but man, when you hold it in your hands, well, I, I had a Game Boy that I, you know, played into oblivion. Um, and yeah, when you hold your device, your, I mean, that thing is like Well built.

Oh, it's well built, well engineered. And then, you know, we did a lot of other crazy stuff that made no financial sense. Like the display is a fully custom display, very, very low pixel density. So 160 by 144, just like the original Game Boy. Um, we even had to make custom color filters for the LCD so that it had the same incorrect RGB color profile as the Game Boy Color had back in the '90s. And, uh, it's because we wanted to perfectly replicate the, you know, it's not really true. We're not trying to replicate what it was actually like to play a Game Boy. We're trying to replicate what you remember feeling like playing that Game Boy. And so people often will play their old Game Boy and they don't realize how dim the display is and just how, just how gimped the experience is or how cheap it feels. Uh, because that's not what they felt when they were a kid. It was the most expensive thing they owned. Probably it was a treasure to be prized and. It was like nothing you'd ever seen before. So we're kind of— we've got to try to— we have to try to copy and recreate that feeling you had playing it. And I think it's maybe a little bit like vinyl or Harley-Davidson motorcycles. You're not trying to capture the truth. You're trying to capture an ideal.

Yeah, well, I think you pulled it off.

Thank you. And, well, for people who are interested, you cannot buy one. They are completely— so this is the good news about you doing an ad for it. You can't buy one right now.

They're sold out.

They sold out. When did they sell out? I guess very early this year, maybe very late last year. But yeah, we, we, we, we, we, we, we started selling first edition Chromatics last summer and we just, we completely sold out. There was way more demand than I thought. We've been trying to figure out how to bring them back and do a more sustainable version. It's, it's tough because we made so many ridiculous product decisions and I was losing a lot of money on every unit and I can afford to lose money. That's not the issue. It's just it feels a little weird when you're, shipping tens of thousands of units of things where you're, where you're just shelling out for each person, each person's gift. But, you know, I guess in a way I bought more Christmas presents last year than most people would.

Wow. I had no idea. All right. Well, my heart feels pure that I was not—

We'll figure it out.

Shilling.

Yeah, you could shill for us some other time when it comes back into stock as a, as a, as a more sustainable product. But for now, you can't buy one.

Okay. All right. I'm going to shift gears to the, to the reason One reason you're here, um, you just came from Meta.

Yep.

Straight here to this, this office in Palo Alto. By the time this podcast comes out, uh, press release will have crossed the wire announcing a partnership between Andrel and Meta, which, um, just to set some context, which I'm sure we'll get into, is a, is a unlikely, um, it's an unlikely occurrence if you'd followed history. You Meta, Facebook, acquired Oculus VR. Um, you— I mean, I'll let you— let me take a crack and then you, you, you fix everything.

Sure, we'll do it.

But you, um, you know, we're, we're thrown out of the company essentially, from my read, for being a Republican. There was a billboard that was put up that was kind of like anti-Hillary Clinton.

And in high school, picture of her face with the caption, "Too big to jail," right?

It was very innocuous.

In this, this was, this was in the kind of the height of the controversy over for her handling or mishandling of classified documents.

Right. And, and man, I mean, you were, you were pilloried in the press. You were, you know, you got portrayed as, as like this, uh, hate demon. And then it was, it's, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna let you do the version of this, but, but I went back and I read some of the old stories and I read Blake Harris's, um, The History of the Future.

The History of the Future. Great, great book.

It's a great book.

He's got about 50 or 60 pages to kind of get in And also his style is interesting in that, you know, his book, like his previous books, like Console Wars, it's based all on actual internal documents. So nobody ever says anything in the book that's not directly mapped one-to-one with an email or a recording or an interview, something that he— and so it's an interesting way of storytelling where you can point to any line in it and he can say, here's, you know, here's the— you don't need citations throughout. It's just each, each thing is directly based on something. It's a very interesting way of telling a story.

Super well-researched. Also of note, I mean, And I don't think he would mind me saying this. He's a pretty liberal Democrat.

Oh, no, he's sort of guy. He's a liberal Jewish Democrat living in New York City. So you're not generally inclined to go out of his way to be unfair to, you know, Facebook or fair to a conservative.

Correct. And when you read his account of what happened and you go back, like, I remember living through this and it was, you know, it was a very heated time. Like kind of Trump hate was— I don't know, I don't know if you can find where that peaks, but it was at a quite high level. Um, and you were presented, yeah, as the demon spawn of hate memes and, and this evil mastermind. When you go back and read the actual—

evil mastermind who got Donald Trump elected because I gave $9,000 that ran a single billboard in Cleveland.

Right, right. And were you like, in hindsight, and then also when you, when you look at the book and this other reporting, I mean, it's, it's kind of crazy. Well, it is crazy. And then, okay, so, but you, you, you get tossed out of Facebook. There's, I think there's, we can get into this or not. There's like lawsuits that go on and they, I think we're holding some of your acquisition money hostage for a period of time. And then anyway, here we fight over it. Yeah. And here we are. Um, now you guys have partnered. Why are you? Okay. First tell us like what this partnership involves and then, and like how in, I mean, this is a crazy story. How in the hell this came to happen?

Sure. And for people who aren't even familiar with that, like the real, the first thing they need to do is, you know, I wasn't just fired from Facebook. Facebook acquired my company. So I started Oculus when I was 19 years old and I had been building VR headsets since I was 15 years old. And so by the time they fired me, you're talking about a decade. You're talking about basically my entire adult life and most of my teenage life.

This is your baby. This is your soul.

It was. Look, I was Oculus and Oculus was me. I was, I was. You know, it was, it was, it was everything to me. The interesting— so what we're doing is teaming up to build the world's best AR, VR, and in-between systems for the United States government, allied government, partner governments, including military, state, local law enforcement, kind of this, this entire world that's been hugely underserved by the existing XR community. There's not really a lot of work out there applying these technologies, which are critical. I think I still strongly believe that immersive computing is the future, and there's not really anyone who's bringing that technology into the military, into our government, into the places that often need it most, could save the most lives. I mean, it's just one example. Did you know the United States loses more servicemen in training than every form of combat death combined. What would it take to eliminate every form of combat death? I mean, hundreds of new technologies. It's almost unthinkable. What would it take to eliminate most training deaths? Basically just really good virtual reality simulators. I mean, it's kind of crazy how low-hanging the fruit is. And so maybe the way to put this is there's a lot of things in Meta that I invented, that my team invented before they acquired us. There's other things that I invented, that the team invented while I was at Facebook, now Meta. And there's a bunch of technology that was invented after I was fired. And this partnership is about taking that entire base of technology, IP around hardware, software in the AI, VR, AR space, and applying it to solving our military's most pressing challenges. It's taking a lot of the people who have been working on these technologies for consumer applications and adapting their work to solve national security problems at a very low cost to the taxpayer. Like, actually, thus far, all the work we've been doing together very, very quietly with Meta over the last year has not been funded by taxpayers at all. Not a single dime. It's been entirely privately funded. And we're going to— Met has put in $60 billion, has put $60 billion into their Reality Labs efforts. And I think it's, it's pretty great that the, that the American, American warfighter is going to be able to benefit from that investment.

And so, okay, two questions and then I will for sure diving in back into the very specific.

The first thing we're teaming up to go after is, you may know, Anduril took over the IVAS contract from Microsoft. Which was originally built on HoloLens, and we're teaming up to build a next-generation version of IVAS called Eagle Eye.

Okay. That's what I wanted to get into first. So I, I've written about this when, when you guys got this IVAS contract, that's a whole other thing we should probably unpack.

It's an unbelievable story. All, all just in there. You know, Anduril tried to win Eagle Eye, or not Anduril tried to win IVAS back when it was first kicking off. Uh, but that was back when Anduril was less than a couple dozen people and we were up against Microsoft. And Magic Leap, which at the time had the Magic Leap Horizons team, which was a very, very kind of covert team they were embarrassed of, uh, that was working on military and government applications. And in the end, Microsoft ended up winning the contract, not Android, which is not surprising. Uh, but in the end, we ended up, uh, cutting a deal with Microsoft where they're going to continue to do AI cloud services work on IVAS, but we were taking over kind of the core architecture and hardware element of it.

Yeah. Okay. I don't know where to begin because there's all these things that need unpacking. Just one note on that. I mean, that contract, I know it came in different tranches, but ultimately it was around $20 billion.

$22 billion appropriated by Congress.

And, and, and I'll say it, I don't know whether you'd want to or not, but you know, Microsoft kind of screwed the pooch on this, this contract. It didn't, it was about to maybe even get whacked because it had taken so long. So this is essentially to build like the Kind of the hel— like the thing we see in movies that soldiers have.

It's the thing that everyone's always wanted. You have— and people have called them different things. They've called them Call of Duty goggles. They've called it, you know, the helmet from Halo. It's a— it goes all the way back to Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers. The idea of mobile infantry that's equipped with heads-up displays that are doing ballistics calculations and thermal vision and night vision. These are old ideas that have only very recently become really technologically viable. And so, yeah, that's what IVAS is. It's the idea is to give warfighters superhuman vision, superhuman perception, superhuman hearing, and allow them to communicate with each other and large teams of autonomous systems in a totally seamless way.

And I'll, again, I'll say this so you don't have to, but maybe you will. Um, you know, so Microsoft had won this around their HoloLens technology. People can go on the internet and find stories about Soldiers vomiting, having headaches from this technology. It wasn't keeping up. You— so Anduril takes over this contract, which is in and of itself like amazing because these things don't happen. You don't have $20 billion contracts move from one company to another. Yeah. And then it keeps it alive. You know, the military funding was already there to, to do this. And now you're saying, you're saying that over— okay, now you're combining forces, so you're going to bring Anduril's defense technology expertise, Lattice software, things like that, and combine this with Facebook's—

and a lot of our own hardware too. You know, we've done a lot of stuff. So Eagle Eye is a fully— it's not just a, you know, it's not just a head-mounted display. It's a fully integrated ballistic shell with hearing protection, vision protection, head protection, onboard compute, onboard network, onboard networking, your radios. Um, and also vision augmentation systems, sensor systems that enhance your perception. And what we're doing is working with Meta to take the building blocks that they've invested enormous amounts of money and expertise in, and we're able to use those building blocks in EagleEye without having to recreate them from scratch ourselves. There's things that Anduril probably could do if we were willing to put billions of dollars of taxpayer money into it. I like, I think we could convince the Army. To give us a lot of money to recreate these things. But why would you do that when they've already been made? Why spend 5 years doing something when it's already been done in the consumer sector? Now, you wouldn't see a company like Meta going in to do something like this on their own because they, they don't want to build this, like, all up integrated military products. They're not going to build a ballistic shell, ear protection, eye protection, military-grade networking, top-secret rated secure communications channels. There's a lot of things you need to be really good at on the hardware and the software side and the government relations side, to say nothing of the sales side, to be able to do that. But they do have a lot of intellectual property and building blocks that they've built that are just as useful on the battlefield as they are on the head of any consumer.

And you're saying you guys have been working on this in secret for a year?

Maybe not quite a year, but approaching a year. We've been, we've been, we've been going back and forth, actually. The genesis of it is, is, uh, is kind of wild. Did you read that Tablet magazine?

Yes.

Our article about Andrew and me?

This was the first time I— previously you and, and Zuck and Boz, who's what, the CTO? I think you guys weren't, weren't, uh, on the friendliest terms out in the social, social networking spheres. And then all of a sudden in this Tablet piece, which was, which was excellent. And, um, I see. I think it was there. They weren't— they both in there.

Yeah.

Talking about you.

Certainly Zuck was.

Yeah.

But the guy who wrote the Tablet article reached out to Meta and said, hey, you know, I'm reporting in my piece that Palmer was fired for political reasons. And I've done a lot of digging on this. It's very clearly true. It's very clearly the case. I don't think I'm being sensationalist here. I've seen— I've seen all the documentation. And I just wanted to know if you have a comment. Here's— here's what I'm going to say. And do you have a comment on that?. And I think he expected to hear back from some PR flunky, and instead he actually got a response from Mark Zuckerberg himself saying, Palmer's a great American, Android's a great company, and I'm really glad that they're doing things to protect our national security. And, um, that kicked off, uh, we, we, we ended up, we ended up reconnecting, talking about some of the problems that are going on with America, some of the inefficiencies that exist for for just terrible reasons, why, how there are people who are dying because of— they're dying needlessly. People who are dying needlessly because of barriers between our technology industry and our national security community. And, um, we ended up, we ended up deciding that this was something that we needed to work on together. You know, Meta's been doing a lot more on the national security front. They've been doing a lot more work with the government. Do you remember last year they announced that they were partnering with a bunch of different companies and government agencies around use of Llama and open source AI in general. Yeah. Talking about the importance of open source AI for government applications, particularly national security.

Yeah. Silicon Valley found its defense religion all of a sudden. It's apparently okay for you to be a Republican.

Yeah. You know, people have—

people—

some people have come to the other side of this and said, Palmer, you know, how can you— how can you— how can you forgive these people? And I think you got to remember a few things. One, Uh, Meta is a very different company than it was 9 years ago when they fired me. I don't mean in tenor or tone. I mean, it's literally different people. A company is comprised of the people that are inside of it. Mark isn't the one who fired me directly. It was the people under him.

Really? Really?

The people— look, I'm not saying he didn't approve it.

Yeah.

But when your people that you task with making decisions come up and say, this is what we've decided we have to do. There's no other way out of this huge PR. An internal problem. We have this— our employees are insane radical leftists who are going to quit en masse if we don't get rid of Palmer. Like, what are you really going to do? Do you, do you, do you, do you trust the people that you've hired or do you, do you, do you override them? And you can override people, but only to some extent. You kind of have to trust people. And my point is, though, the people who conspired to oust me, they're not even there anymore. Some of them left of their own accord and others were fired. And so when every single person that conspired to get rid of me has been run out of the company, what is there really left to be truly angry at? Am I angry at like Facebook LLC, a Delaware corp, or Facebook Inc., a Delaware corporation, or am I mad at specific individuals who, who may have wronged me? And the other side here is politically, I think people forget that the intent of politics should be persuasion. It's not warfare. It's, it's debate.. And so if people end up coming to your side, you shouldn't shove them back and say, hey, fuck off. You had different beliefs 10 years ago. You should say, come on in, the tent's big and I'm happy to have you. And I think this isn't just a Facebook thing. It's, I think tech generally broadly has realized they do have some obligation to support national security, that working with the government is not a terrible thing. And it'd be really easy for me to just go out there and then, you know, remind everybody of what they were saying about me and about the military or even about Trump 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years ago. But I think it's, it's probably way more productive for me to just accept that I kind of won the persuasion argument and, and just, just, just live with that.

I understand.

And you know what, Boz apologized to publicly. He, he publicly said that. He said, yeah, he said the things they've said about me were not true and that he had been misinformed by people who are no longer with the company and that he even said the magic words, I'm sorry. It goes— it goes a really long way. And you're right, there had been a lot of back and forth where, you know, Boz had been saying before Palmer wasn't fired for political reasons. Politics had nothing to do with it. And I'd gone pretty aggro and said, this is ridiculous. This is like saying the sky is green. Like, even the people who hate me will admit that I was terminated for almost entirely political reasons. Even the people who hate me will admit that, you know, let's, let's, let's live in reality here. And I think it gets to the problem of large corporations where you kind of have to delegate some level of thinking. And if somebody tells you Palmer was fired for totally nonpolitical reasons, you have to dig pretty hard to find out that in fact the real problem is that 3 levels of employees below you were all deeply partisan and highly biased against a particular outcome.

Yes. Okay. But if you were to go back, I don't know, 3 years, 2 and a half years. Sure. Like if anyone saw this deal, you'd say, no fucking way.

Well, I mean, I think a few things have happened. One, we've seen willingness on the part of the US government to do new things. And I think part of that is things like the IVAS contract going from Microsoft to Android that had to be approved by the United States Army. And they did. They approved it. It's a— they approved the innovation process and it moved over. Maybe not to put too fine of a point on it, but Trump being in office makes a difference here too. There is a willingness to try new things and try to get things done very quickly. And I think there's a lot of tech companies. It's not that they agree with Trump's politics or his policies, but they know that if you had the same people in power that had been in power for the previous 4 years, that there was not going to be room for a tech company to come in and actually be allowed to make a difference, allowed to allowed to displace the incumbents, uh, with, with their revolving doors. And I think Trump winning has, has really— even people who completely disagree with Trump on every matter of policy, they say, you know, at the very least though, there is a willingness to work with us to do things that would not have been possible otherwise. I, I think, I think it would have seemed crazy 3 years ago. Yeah, I think the combination of Meta, some of their technological bets playing out in a way where they were made clear that some of these multibillion-dollar bets were not follies. They were breakthroughs. Things like building optical-grade silicon carbide optics that achieved heretofore impossible levels of field of view and acuity, combined with Trump winning, combined with Anduril doing well, combined with a willingness on the part of the government to do things in a new way, made it where me, someone like me and someone like Mark, two relatively rational actors, how could we possibly say we jointly hold the keys to changing the way that the government consumes information and fights on the battlefield? But we're not going to because we're pissed at each other like that. That, that I think if you would explain that to me 3 years ago and you said, imagine this scenario, I think I would have said, man, I don't think any of that shit's going to happen. Yeah, but if it did, Yeah, I could see that. I could see that. The crazy thing is the world around us, not, not the, not the happening.

I mean, let's put the Zuck of it all to the side for a second. Sure. Is there not some part of you that— I, I get what you're saying, the greater good, but to see Tim Cook, Sundar, up there next to Trump now, I mean, some part of you must, must vomit over to the side, you know, as if, as if, as if this is like normal behavior on their part, given the context of what they've done over the years.

I think— I mean, I've gone through my— I've gone through my— I've made my peace with it. Like, I like— yeah, look, at a visceral level, it does piss me off. In fact, if you look up some interviews right when that happened, I was saying things like that. I was like, yeah, you know, it kind of makes me like— I remember what these people were saying about me, people like me, people who share only some of my political beliefs. What you were saying about ordinary people who, like, they're acting like everyone who supports Trump must just be an awful person. I like— I remember the past. But like I said, you want— you want to persuade. And if they're persuaded, plus, you know, there's a little bit of shit eating there. Look, look, do you think— you think— you think people like Sundar want to be on that stage? There's a little bit of schadenfreude there. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'd rather they be standing there than me.

I mean, I'm kind of middle of the road, but I find this—

I find this like I mean, man, some of these people I think have really had a change of heart.

Yeah.

Others, I think it is very opportunistic. And I think actually people know what it is like. I think people look at someone like Mark and they say, wow, he really does seem to have had a change of heart. Like, you don't opportunistically— I mean, he decided, for example, Meta decided to allow national security use of their AI before Trump won. That isn't a reaction to Trump winning. That was I think a pretty principled move to do something regardless of who won. And I think actually getting it done before the election was probably important to show this is not a reaction to Biden winning or Harris winning or Trump winning. It's something that's important no matter what. Other people— it reminds me of the Patti LaBelle song, New Attitude. Are you familiar?

Sure.

I'm in control. My worries are few. Know where I'm going and I know what to do. I tidied up my point of view. I got a new attitude. They're in control. Their worries are few. They've tidied up their point of view. I think there's a lot of people who, who are in that category, uh, and I, I, I can't say I respect it, but, uh, I, I'm happy to work with them in the interim.

I did not know we were gonna get Palmer singing on here.

Um, okay, that was great.

Didn't— I didn't read the story, but I saw headlines, so maybe I shouldn't do this, but didn't the New York Times do a story this week on how Tim Cook is like the, uh, racist ally to Trump. Did you—

I haven't read that, but it wouldn't— I mean, in some ways it wouldn't surprise me.

I, I saw people, um, I mean, you realize Apple, Apple has been—

I think that they're, they're one of the worst in terms of their dependence on China, right? And, but, but you got to remember, they've been to a certain extent Shanghai'd into that position by the globalist leadership of the United States over the last 30 or 40 years, right? I mean, they, they kind of had no other option given the trade policy that the World Trade Organization was pursuing, given the global trade posture that the United States was pursuing, Apple didn't really have a choice as to where they would manufacture. They just happened to also do really well. And, and, uh, and so that's why they ended up— they're the biggest example, not because they're uniquely pro-China or anything or anti-American. It's because they're the most successful at what they do, period. And that happens to only be— that happens to force you into being dependent on China. But I mean, I, I think if you look at the last decade, Apple's been trying to get out of China in a quiet way. I don't know if you remember when they announced the Mac Pro and, you know, that was, that was made in the US. They've been surreptitiously doing small runs of MacBook Pros in the United States without saying anything. They can't make a big deal out of it because they'll get punished by the Chinese government if they, if they do that. But I, I actually can understand why someone like Tim Cook would align with a lot of what Trump is talking about. I mean, imagine you're Tim Cook. Imagine you are on paper one of the most powerful people in the world. You run a company with— what's Apple's market cap? $3 trillion. Largest employer, largest market cap, maybe the largest cash reserves of any American company. And yet you— and you— and you can't— you know, Tim Cook, whether I agree with him or not, clearly cares about social issues, right? He cares about the climate. He cares about the, the homosexuals. He cares about all the things you expect a, you know, a Democrat-type executive to care about. So he clearly does have these social views. Imagine you're in his position and you can't say something like, I think concentration camps are bad, or I think people should be allowed to practice their religion, whatever it is. I mean, that's got to be a little bit of an emasculating thing. I, if I were him, I'd be stoked about the potential opportunity to not just have yourself forced into a position where you're making more in the US and less in China, but where everyone else is forced to do so along with you. Tim Cook can't escape this hell of the elites' making without everyone being dragged along with him. And so I, I, if I were him, I'd, I'd be, I'd be close to Trump too.

Okay, um, all right, changing directions for a second. Sure. That was exciting. I hope we make sure we managed to alienate some people.

Can We can talk about it. We can talk about the hell of his own making, the globalist elites locking him in a prison.

I'm here for it. Um, okay, with these— on these new, new helmets, though, on the—

yeah, Eagle Eye.

Yeah, on Eagle Eye. So I know you guys love reporter-type questions like this. I mean, like, what is— when do these arrive? What do they look like? What, what are the— what are the near-term Goals.

So we are going to be delivering the first prototypes to the Army this year.

Okay.

Um, that's the, that, that's the intent anyway. If all, if all, if all goes according to plan the way that I hope. Um, but we've been working on the technology that underpins EagleEye for years and we've been making a really serious hardware effort for over a year at this point. And so we actually, there's an EagleEye sitting on my desk.

I was gonna say, this is like your, your favorite project, I think, right?

I can't help it. I can't help it. You're supposed to love all your children equally, but it's not even, it's not even worth pretending that I do not have a special affinity for vision augmentation. I mean, I, like, I, if, if you go back and read, um, oh man, let me, let me, let me read the, the original little bit from the—

if you, but if you combine the last, whatever, 10, 15 years of your life, you were like purpose-built.

I mean, let me, let me see. Where is it? Where is it? Let me see the original bit that I pulled from. So when I, when I started Oculus, I posted a manifesto on, um, on, on what I believed Oculus would be doing. I wrote a blog post about, about my affinity for this technology generally on, um, the blog of palmerlucky.com. It's palmerlucky.com, the number one Palmer Luckey blog on the internet. And, um, I had a good quote, which was from the first about page text for OculusVR.com that I posted in early 2012. And I said, I am a huge HMD— that's head-mounted display— I am a huge HMD nut. As far as I know, I have the largest private collection of unique HMDs in the world, totaling 43 units, not including the ones I've built myself. Part of this HMD obsession, as with any other obsession, is trying to convince other people to join in. And what a seductive dream that technology can transport us into worlds we cannot hope to experience in real life, or augment our reality to shape it closer to our desires. Unfortunately, virtual reality has risen and fallen many times, with a lot more emphasis on the latter portion. The tech has never gotten far enough to be truly convincing. And great VR hardware has been out of reach for the average person until now. Oculus is my tilt at trying to change that. The tech has improved and we can build hardware and software that is better, stronger, and faster than the old guard companies that create niche, wildly expensive products. Don't get me wrong, these companies are important and they have to solve some very tough engineering challenges to satisfy their customers. But the reality is that as gamers and dreamers, we have a different set of challenges to meet. Massive field of view to engulf your visual senses, low latency tracking to maximize presence, lightweight and comfortable for long-term use, and perhaps most importantly, prices measured in the hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands of dollars. I've worked long and hard with a lot of brilliant people to try and meet these challenges, and it's now time to put it to the test. Why the name Oculus? It is a Latin word from eye— a Latin word for eye. Someone used the word in a meeting several months ago. I thought it was a nifty word. And there you have it. And you know, I, I wrote that, I guess that would've been almost 14 years ago now.

Yeah.

And I still feel the same way. I mean, what, what a seductive vision to experience things you could never experience, to augment our view of the world with information that we could never perceive naturally. It's just, it's, it still speaks to me. So you, you're, you're right. I, it is, this is my favorite thing. I can't help it. I'm, I'm sorry to the Unreal teams that are working on non-AR/VR stuff. You have to cut me a little bit of slack. Sometimes, sometimes you, your first love sticks with you.

No, but like, to the extent that you're, again, I don't want this to sound overly fluffy or something, but to the extent that you're Tony Stark, I mean, this, I could totally see this being your core, core mission. I mean, this feels like you were—

Hey, even Tony Stark liked, uh, like, like augmented reality.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, yeah, it's actually interesting how much overlap there is there because Jarvis, you know, the vision of like the thing where it wasn't just the suit, right? It was also the augmented vision paired with this kind of AI guardian angel in the form of Jarvis. That is what we are building with Eagle Eye. Eagle Eye has an onboard AI guardian angel, maybe less in the style of Jarvis and more in the vein of Cortana from Halo. But this idea of having this ever-present companion who can operate systems, who can communicate with others, that you can offload tasks onto, that is looking out for you with more eyes than you could ever look out for yourself, right there in your helmet. That is such a powerful thing to make real.

So, and when I wrote a story about the IVAS deal, I think in my opinion, it was the only accurate story on how to read, um, how this deal shook out.

But, uh, I agreed. I read, I read the piece. Well, it's because you actually, I think, understood what was going on. And a lot of the, a B reporter. Are just like working the government contract space, they look and they're like, oh, Anderall innovated this contract for Microsoft. Interesting. And it's— you have to have a pretty deep understanding of the tech industry. Me, Anderall, Microsoft, HoloLens, like it takes a— there's a lot of synthesis that needs to happen to understand it.

If there's $20 billion that moves from one, one pie to another, there's usually a good story behind there.

You know, I hadn't fully thought about it this way, but like, just, just touching on that point.

Yeah.

It is pretty fascinating that you have a tech company win a $20 billion contract and they got way less attention than— I mean, like, there's startups that will raise $15 million and get more attention than that $22 billion contract.

It's a big deal.

And that's way more like— I mean, like, we would— we'll raise $500 million and get literally an order of magnitude more press coverage. Than this $22 billion contract. I don't, I don't know how that works.

I don't know if it's because—

yeah, I'll tell you this. The party that I had after novating the IVAS contract was a lot bigger than the party I had after raising my last round of money from investors. But I think it's not commensurately covered by the press.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I agree. When I was thinking back to some of the comments that were left under the story, I'm sure this is not new to you, but even people who I think are maybe tech enthusiasts, they still see this vision and you get this comment a lot of like, okay, it's great if you can build this thing. It's actually— it's going to be too much technology thrown at the soldier. This is actually like never will work. This is, this is like a cool thing we see in movies. I can see some use for it, but it actually hinders the soldiers more than helps and will never work.

I think that they are not, they don't have the right vision. Literally. Um, a lot of people imagine that when you're going to do something like thermal vision and night vision and ultraviolet vision and quasi-X-ray vision informed by swarms of drone building a real-time 3D model, they imagine that you're like a techno operator who's typing on the keyboard as fast as he can, managing a dozen different streams. They're also used to things like video games, which are designed for the human to be the pacing factor for what you can do. In the real world, that's not how you design military tools. You design them ideally to be transparent and invisible to the user and just seamlessly enhance their abilities. Um, and that's what we're doing with Eagle Eye. We're building a helmet that just makes you better at the things you want to do. Like people say, oh, but you really want to have all this shit on the soldier? Is it going to be too complicated to have heat vision, night vision, all?

Okay. Heavy, hot.

Look, but, but so, well, and of course, hot and heavy. Yeah. You have to make it light. You have to make it neutral. You have to make it balanced. Um, but like in terms of the complexity, like, do you think Superman deals with complexity when he looks out at the world and has heat vision and X-ray? No, he just, he's just Superman. He just perceives what he needs to perceive and he just sees the world that way. You just have to design user interfaces that way. You shouldn't be toggling between 10 different sensor menus. You should just see a seamless view that is built by kind of a, a kind of an AI interpolator that looks out into the world and says, okay, well, I know he probably wants to see all of the hot human signatures. I know he probably wants to see all the drones. IPhones, I probably know you can build technology that is transparent to the user. The reason that people I think are so cynical is because people often don't meet the bar. There's so many things that are shit. And so I think everything must be shit. And I, I just, I just don't think that. I, I, I know because I've been using Eagle Eye Prototypes and I know maybe, maybe I'm not the guy to argue that the tech is easy to use cuz I'm a hardcore techno head from birth and I can operate wacky stuff, but You could put on a normal person, they can look out into the world and do things and see things with zero training that they never would have been able to do otherwise. I'm, I'm, I'm not concerned about information overload because I'm competent. Even—

I'm sure people would look at Apple's headset and say, well, look, if the world's biggest consumer electronics company with all the money at its disposal and technology, you know, how much better could You could see limitations still in this technology that, uh, nah, nah, I, I, I think it's gonna be way easier.

I have an easier out. I have an easier job than Apple does. Um, they have to make an entertainment device and that's not just about how easy it is to use because you want military tools to be easy to use. I'll give you a specific example. Apple has to have extremely high image quality at all times, including through their pass-through, including when you're turning your head. That means that they need to come up with exposure settings that don't create too much noise and grain in the image. I don't have to do that. I'm a tool. I'm a tool for seeing better. I can crank up the gain on my sensors and see things that, you know, if I, if I were to do the same thing on an Apple product, people would say, oh my God, the sensor feels so grainy. I'm not trying to build something that's visually appealing. I'm trying to build a functional tool. Uh, here's another example. Apple has to have a fixed persistence level so they can have constant brightness across all scenes, across, you know, all types of head motion. I can say, you know what, I'm gonna ramp my persistence down and my brightness level commensurately down during fast head rotations so that I have high motion clarity rather than having blur when I turn my head very quickly. Because it's a tool and it's okay if the image gets darker briefly as I'm whipping my head to the side and then ramps back up to full brightness as soon as I stop moving. That's something I can do with Eagle Eye. If Apple did that, they'd be pilloried by people. They'd say, this is bizarre. The brightness level is changing as I look around. The image is grainy when I look at certain things. Uh, I would actually say building a tool gives you a very different level of constraints than building something that needs to preserve kind of this idealized model of what people think a screen should look like, what, how, how a movie viewed through a screen should look like. And so my job is a lot easier than Apple. I'll give you one last example. One of the things we're doing at Eagle Eye is using multiple microdisplays per eye with a tiled seam. And so you end up with this small little kind of distorted seam that's living out in your peripheral view, and you can see it really easily. I mean, it's, it's, it's there. It doesn't bother you. It doesn't make you sick, but it's definitely, it's definitely there. Apple can't make something like that. They can't make a thing where there's, it's a seamless magical experience. Except for this weird distorted bubble seam down both sides of your vision in your periphery. But for a tool, you can do that. It's not actually a problem. And so I agree, Apple has a hard challenge. They have to make something for everybody. I have to make a thing that keeps people alive. And I think, uh, I, I think, I think my job's easier than, than Apple's.

Where will these be produced?

In the United States. So our current manufacturing plan. Gets us to full-rate production in the United States with no Chinese parts, no PRC dependency. And there are a lot of challenges in doing that, but it's one that I've done before. Anduril has had to do this for our other products. We've talked a little bit about this, but I'm, I'm, I'm pretty allergic to all these debates about how it's impossible to make stuff in the United States. You probably have seen the stories about how iPhones would cost $30,000 if they made here. It's all bullshit. I know because I make stuff in the United States. The people who are saying that it will cost 100 times more are saying that because they want to make excuses for what they're doing. They want to excuse why they're in China. Look, I get it. It's hard to make stuff in the United States. It's hard to make high-tech stuff. It's really hard to make these types of integrated electronics products, but it's not 100 times harder. It's not even 10 times harder. You know, uh, you know, the Mod Retrochromatic. It's made entirely, uh, in North America. Isn't that cool? And that's a $199 Game Boy clone with extraordinarily high quality. It's not like this is a, a, you know, a million dollar, you know, military piece of hardware. This is even the Mod Retro Chromatic is a consumer product and, and, and I, I don't need China to make it. Um, so I, I often encourage people to be a little more realistic and realize, yes, you'll take a hit making stuff in the US. Yes, you will. There are certain things you won't be able to do. But it's not this impossibility that people pretend that it is.

And it's on Anduril to manufacture these, or it's a—

That's right.

Okay.

That's right. So, so, so Meta is a technology partner. They're teamed up with us, but in this case, Anduril is the prime on the contract. We're the ones owning the development, the integration, and we're responsible at the end of the day. Uh, like we, we, if, if this doesn't work, it's Anduril skinning our knees.

And you have to, the goal would be, um, well, I'm sure it's what, it's like tens of thousands of units and then one day hundreds of thousands if things go well, or—

I mean, this is probably giving up more than I should competitively, but so the way that I look at something like Eagle Eye is that it should not be one display system that does everything for everybody. It's actually an architecture that allows it— like, Eagle Eye can actually basically— it could host many different types of Vision augmentation systems. It can host, uh, head-mounted displays from multiple different companies, including companies that don't even work directly with Android. I'm building as an open architecture where the government owns those interconnects. They own the standards and they can work with other companies to build different displays that plug in. The reason for that is I don't think that we can build one display that is everything to everybody, right? The guy who is a logistician needs a different thing than the guy who's a helicopter pilot who needs something different than the guy who's a infantrymen breaking down doors in the middle of the night. And, uh, in terms of the units, which is what you're asking about, I think that within the decade you're going to see a head-mounted display of some kind on basically every single head in the DOD. They're gonna use it for different things. Some guys are just gonna be checking their emails on a secure terminal. Others are going to be shooting people in the face. And you need to be able to support all those use cases. I don't see this as just like 10,000 units or 20,000 units. I see this as outfitting the entire armed forces. And so everything I'm doing is to try and build an architecture that scales to that. Everybody doing this with different sensors, different vision systems, different processors that are tailored to their specific mission, as light and as low cost as possible for their mission. And, uh, one of the things that Anduril's doing is actually taking extremely low margin and making a very— like, we're making a very concerted effort to drive the price of the system down because, I mean, I'll just, I'll just lay it out there. Look, the Army has, call it, $20 billion to buy headsets. If I price them at $100,000 each, then that means that there's some number of headsets that can buy. If I price them at a tenth of that, they could buy 10 times as many headsets. Which world do you think Palmer Luckey wants to exist? Yeah, I want this on everybody. So I am doing my damnedest to make this as low cost as possible, way beyond probably what is rational. I'm confident I could extract more money out of the DoD by playing the game, riding the margins as high as I can, taking advantage of the fact that what we have is so far ahead of every other competitor. I do not have it in my heart to do that. And you might say, but Palmer, how are your investors going to let you get away with this? The answer is they will. They're going to let me get away with it because I am doing well as a company. We're doing well. Like, we're hitting our financial plans, we're hitting our metrics, we're growing faster than anyone ever bet we would 7 or 8 years ago. And so I'm in a position of not, not as much accountability as you might imagine. My investors aren't going to beat down my door and say, Palmer, why are you charging more money for IVAS? I can, I can, I can get away with pursuing my ideology. At least here and there on the margins.

You should do a Lockheed and just make one helmet. That way, that way you hold up and it arrives.

Well, I think, I mean, you're probably kind of referring to the F-35, right? Where you've got this one jacket that's everything.

Yeah.

I mean, that's a great thing to learn from, you know, a guy who's like, let's say a, a, uh, you know, like a, an Army aviation maintainer who's working on helicopters. Uh, he probably needs something that is like a lightweight pair of Oakleys. That is able to display work instructions, remote, you know, remote help, labeling particular things, you know, checklists. He does not need an ultra-wide field of view, thermal, UV, hyperspectral vision augmentation system like a, like, like a, like a frontline infantryman might. And so you kind of have to build something that unifies those two things so they can share one set of software, one set of apps, one set of common standards.

Maybe you want to get into this, maybe you don't. I don't know if there's a vision there or not, but in addition to the sci-fi visual stuff and all the other technology, I mean, is part of this just to rethink the helmet itself on basic level, like what it's made out of and—

We're doing a lot of really novel stuff on the actual ballistic shell to make it much We're used— I can't give away the specifics here, but, uh, I've, I've been a, I've been an exotic materials enthusiast for many years. I, years and years ago, came up with a scheme for how you could make ballistic armor that was much lighter and much stronger than had been created in the past. And, uh, we've, over the last year, been doing some testing to try and actually prove out these ideas I've wanted to do for almost a decade. And the results are extraordinary. We're seeing, we're seeing, we're seeing performance that we wouldn't have believed until we actually tried it. And I can't give away the specifics, but I can tell you this. Go ahead. Look, I can just give away this. Look, I'll tell you this. Building helmets out of homogeneous materials, meaning you take a material, make a helmet out of it. That is not the way to get the lightest, strongest thing. Composite materials where you combine multiple different materials that kind of, uh, cover each other's strengths and weaknesses almost always make for a more optimal system in terms of weight to performance. And so imagine a multi-composite where you're using not just 2 or 3, but maybe even more materials, and you're actually designing them to do their part under the different stages of destruction that a helmet goes through as the helmet deforms and is penetrated. You can build some really interesting things that are far beyond what the United States has done so far on ballistic helmets. And I'd say one of the reasons that the US hasn't done these types of technologies in the past, it's not because I'm this genius who is smarter than everybody. It's because it didn't make sense when the helmet was this thing that was supposed to cost a few hundred dollars, when a helmet was supposed to be this cheap thing that, you know, you put on your head, it needs to work. But the whole system is pretty cheap. If you're instead building this kind of very expensive thing where you've got sensors, computers, radios, displays, optics, speakers, microphones, all this stuff integrated, you now need to look at it as an integrated product. And when you look at it as an integrated product, you always want it to be lighter, right? And so you start to ask, okay, where's the best savings per dollar, the best weight savings per dollar? So if I wanted to pull 100 grams out of this helmet, how can I do that the cheapest? Well, I'll tell you what, it's not pulling 100 grams out of the electronics. It's not pulling 100 grams out of the optics. It's not pulling 100 grams out of the microphones. It turns out that the place to invest money to save weight is in the actual physical ballistic shell itself. So all of a sudden it actually makes sense in the context of an integrated system that, you know, costs quite a bit to let's say, you know, you can say, you know what, my helmet skin is going to cost $2,000. And in doing so, it's going to weigh 2 pounds less than it would have weighed otherwise. It finally makes sense. So, yeah, we're doing some really exotic stuff to do better fragmentation protection, better rifle and small arms protection, better blast protection, concussion protection, hearing protection. A helmet does a lot aside from, you know, carry your night vision system.

Okay. Since Trump has come into office, I mean, part of this is going alongside with you guys and then, and then part of it, well, a lot of this, you already had your own plans in action.

Oh yeah.

I'm not, and I'm not trying to make you pick, pick a baby, but you know, if we, if we think about, and some of these things I'm sure you can talk about less than others, but okay, you know, we've got like Golden Tome, we've got shipbuilding. I know you guys are working on solid rocket motor stuff. You've just opened this giant factory in Ohio, not to make you pick your baby. We just went through one, but you know, you have a lot going on. Um, I don't know, does one of those areas jump out at you as, as equally exciting or grab you in a particular way?

To me personally, is Palmer lucky? Absolutely not. There's nothing more exciting to me than human augments and transforming human capability directly. Palmer Luckey, the Anduril executive who's looking out for the business and my employees and our customers. Yeah. So those things are very exciting to me. I think the shipbuilding side is, is something that's really fascinating.

Can we, can we do that for a second?

I mean, sure.

Okay. Cause you know, I know I was, we have a video coming on Navier, which makes this kind of foiling boat and yeah, very familiar. Yeah.

And they're building very nice, very fancy, super.

I got to ride it. It's amazing. The, but you know, I went, they're building some of it out here, really in Alameda a bit. I know they have a, I think on the, in Maine or New Hampshire, they have another, um, part of their, their manufacturer. But yeah, well, you know, we were talking about obviously all the hurdles the US is, is woefully behind in shipbuilding, almost like really woefully behind. Uh, so I have— and then I've got other friends, you know, working on the California Forever project. Maybe there's some interest of getting a new shipyard up here in Northern— I have trouble believing this is real, right? Because, because it seems like we have such a long way to go from where we are to actually producing these things in the US.

That's true, but it— a lot of this is, is, is about an attitude adjustment. I mean, remember how fast we built naval capacity during World War II? I mean, we stood it up inside of a year. Yeah, we were cranking out many ships every single day. And, and, and so planes too. Yeah, yeah. So I, I'm, I'm actually— I'm, I'm less worried about the, the, uh, whether it's possible and more about the will. I, I know it's possible. And people will make arguments like, oh, but Palmer, back then, you know, ships didn't have to be safe. Ships didn't have to be— they didn't have to— they didn't— ships could— they'll basically point out that you can't build a ship the way you used to.

Okay, less complex for sure.

But the point that I'll make to them is that autonomy is the thing that enables you to build ships like that once again. I don't have to build a ship with crazy anti-sinking, long flotation properties if there's no people aboard. I don't have to dedicate weight, bulk, and cost to fire compartmentalization if there's no people on the ship when it gets hit. And I'm, I'm not saying you don't want to have any level of fire suppression. I'm not saying you want to make a ship that sinks at the, sinks at the first strike, but you can make a very different set of trades. You can also make trades like, you know what, I'm not going to— like, let's say I make an autonomous submarine. Maybe I don't have to dye penetrate and X-ray every single weld. Maybe I can move a lot faster because 1 out of 100 submarines failing due to manufacturing problems is just a cost to be managed on the— in your balance sheet rather than a human tragedy that paralyzes the entire system. I mean, so I think autonomy is actually the only way that we're going to be able to get back to really, really large-scale shipbuilding. I think building human ships and I think even human aircraft to the level of safety that is required in modern America at scale at a reasonable cost is, is somewhere approaching impossible. You and I have talked about a huge advantage that China has and that Russia has there. It's, it's just, it's just a differential in human life, but willingness to accept risk on the part of a pilot or a sailor or, you know, a tank driver, it goes a long way in cutting costs. And I'm not saying that we should be more like them, but we should recognize that that's an advantage that they have. And so we either need to meet them where they are or figure out an asymmetrical way to go a different path.

You and I have talked about this before, but let's talk about it publicly. Uh, sure. You know, I've been following you guys really closely for a couple years. Um, gotten to see a lot of very cool stuff. You, you've built this huge— you're starting to build this huge new factory in Ohio.

Arsenal One.

Arsenal One. So you're at this moment where you've been building thousands of things and now you're trying to go to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of things. You guys have a lot on your plate, you know, whether it's shipbuilding, whether it's autonomous aircraft, whether it's solid rocket motors. You know, you could have a skeptical point of you guys talk a big game. You get— someone could be skeptical that even with the best intentions, capital, Smart people making that transition has, has felled many a company. It's not easy to do. Like, why are we supposed to think that, that Andrew can pull off this big transition to this next stage of the company?

This is going to sound a little bit of a, like a cop-out, but I'm going to try it. It's a little bit of a, it's a little bit of a contrarian take. I can't possibly convince you and I probably can't convince the public because the level of detail and rigor and presentation required to do so is time prohibitive, expertise prohibitive. And then maybe no one person can actually on their own come to that conclusion. Like, it might be there's no combination of words and things I could show you that could lead you to conclude that we're going to be able to make, let's say, tens of thousands of fighter jets or thousands of ships in a matter of just a few years. The people that we need to convince are an apparatus that exists on the US military side. And they have subject matter experts, dedicated expertise in each of the individual areas, you know, in terms of composite aero for airframe manufacturing, in terms of our landing gear design plan, in terms— we've talked a lot about how we've designed the landing gear on Fury so that it can be manufactured in any machine shop in the country. We purposely made the performance less than it would have been to do it in kind of a very bespoke way, instead designing it specifically to be manufactured. I can say those words But to actually audit that and prove that out, no one person can do it. It's actually a team of experts that collaboratively together, relying on each other's expertise, can jointly agree that this can work. And so I would say the proof is in the pudding. We've convinced the Air Force that we are worth betting on, but we have not done it yet. And so I don't— I think until we do it, I will not be able to convince you. I will not be able to convince anybody. There's no— there's no person, single person in the world who has enough expertise to walk away from a conversation saying, you've done it, you've convinced me it's possible. I think we've convinced the Air Force that it is possible we could pull it off. And that's been convincing hundreds of people in the Air Force, each within their own specialty disciplines. And they jointly agree as an organism that we just might do it. I think that's about as good as we can do.

And since I've been—

so the proof will be in the doing. I think there's literally nothing else I could do that would prove to the layperson that it's possible except for 1,000 fighter jets coming out of our factory and flying off the runway.

And, and with, with Arsenal One in Ohio, I mean, that is Fury, that is, that is fighter jets. It is, it is. What else is it?

For people who aren't familiar, it's, it's Fury is our entrant for the Air Force's CCA program, Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, basically building autonomous fighters that fight alongside manned aircraft, augmenting them, doing things that are too dangerous too risky, uh, providing arms and sensor coverage where you wouldn't have it, have it otherwise. So other things we're doing there, autonomous submarines. Uh, we're actually, we, did we announce this? I think we've announced we're going to be making EagleEye there. If we haven't announced it, consider this the announcement. We're actually, so we're setting up a line there to, to manufacture EagleEye. It's a 5, 5 or 6 million square foot, uh, manufacturing facility. So I mean, we're talking about an enormous amount of space.. And I think that our intent is to maximize use of that space. It's a very flexible design. We've designed the factory to be reconfigurable between different types of products and manufacturing, which is very different than building a line that is kind of fixed and bespoke to one particular thing. I mean, we'll see if we can pull it off. It's, it's, it's very, it's very, very, very difficult. But if you could do it, that's really what the country needs. We need flexible manufacturing capacity that allows you to jump between making the things that you need one day to the things you need the next, not one that is locked into manufacturing the same thing for 20, 30 years straight.

Since you always have a unique take on things, I think, so, I mean, what do you— what is your take on the— if we're manufacturing in the United States, the tariffs, the whole thing?

I mean, yep. Yeah, so we talked earlier about how I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who pretend that manufacturing in the US is this impossible order of magnitude or more problem. And I think a lot of it, it's very self-serving. They want to justify why they're in China. They want to justify why it's okay for them to stay in China. They know that when sanctions hit as a result of a potential Taiwan conflict, they want to say, oh, nobody could have predicted this and I had no choice anyway. They don't want to admit that it is a choice. Here's where the tariff argument, I think, really comes into sharp relief. If you believe that building things in the United States is twice as expensive and that it has to be, then a 30% tariff seems nonsensical because you'll say, well, that doesn't make any sense because if it's twice as expensive to do in the US, you have this tariff. Tariff, you're passing the cost on to the consumer and it's not actually going to come back into the United States anyway. But if you believe that a given good or product or service can be done in the US for less than 30% more, now you're actually realizing, okay, the tariff actually could bring something back to the United States. And I think that's really the core, the core of the argument there. That's why it's so important to actually agree What level of penalty you're taking in a given industry or for a given product, because that's actually what determines whether or not tariffs can bring it back to the United States overall. Now you can say, but tariffs might not last, and so people won't make the investment. Okay, that's, that's a different argument. That's an argument about instability. Focusing simply on tariffs, taking tariffs as a constant that will exist and making that assumption, uh, if, if you have, let's say, Chinese subsidized steel is a third of the price of American, uh, you know, unsubsidized steel, yeah, then a tariff is not going to work. If the spread really is 30% though, then America could get our steel industry back. And so it's very important to get this question right. It's, it's, it's, it's of critical importance and there's not enough people talking about this.

Well, and do you think we're trending to getting—

I hope that it's true because I, more than almost anybody, need a strong American industrial supply chain. I really hope that we can bring back our steel and our aluminum smelting and our polymer industry and our— and I mean, just everything we've sent to China on that, that's higher up on the value chain, like our battery engineering, our optical manufacturing, our injection molding and tooling expertise for building high-end tooling that can make all of the above.

Of.

Uh, there is no reason that an automated America cannot do these things. There's no reason that we cannot be competitive with all of these other countries. We just have to decide that we're going to do it. There's people who think that I'm nuts or that I'm overly optimistic, but I, I think there are strong reasons to believe that we can uniquely pull it off where others won't. Like, you know who's not going to pull this off? I suspect— and I say this with no amount of joy, I want our Western allies to to kind of, you know, beat the axis of evil. But I think that the European Union is going to have a really tough time. I think it's hard to imagine a world where an economy that is so dominated by intranational politics and labor politics is going to allow automation to transform their manufacturing economy. I think the United States is one of the few countries with the talent and the people and the political will and the kind of acceptance at a societal level that something like that is good. You know, there's a lot of people in America who like, who like Star Trek. There's a lot of people who buy into the idea of technology-enabled abundance. The same cannot be said of many European nations.

It just, I just spent 2 weeks in Europe. Um, I went to Poland and Switzerland.

Everybody, what an— what Poland, what a, what a miracle success story country Poland is.

Cool country. Um, and you're spot on.

I just surpassed Japan in, uh, in per capita GDP.

And I think The Economist just did a piece, um, about that. But, but, and I'm very based. They are. I don't want to, I don't want to shit on, on Europe totally at large, although I do do that from time to time. But, you know, everyone kept asking me, they're like, oh, um, I just gone to Stargate with, with Sam Altman, and this, this kept, this was coming up probably because I was bringing it up. And then people were asking me, um, well, what do you make about like Europe's position in AI. I was like, one building at Stargate, you know, is, is like on the order of $50 billion. I was like, that's one building of one company. I was like, can you point me to a single European, you know, anything on that scale? And, and they, they can't. And I, I don't know. Yeah, I, I continually, I, I feel like the US and China are on some some, like, they're all— they're heading off into a future that it strikes me that the rest of the world is going to be kind of renting and not really, um, is that really any different than the present?

I mean, look at our tech industry as it is.

It, like, it reminds me more maybe of, like, I don't know, vaguely Cold War times or something. So to your point, like, okay, this isn't new. However, I think things are hitting this acceleration speed where, yeah, I kind of think it will feel different. I think we'll be in like the sort of different worlds. I mean, us and China are like having the US and China will be just sort of in this just almost like a different universe and everybody else is kind of like renting pieces of it.

I think it's pretty likely. And this is, this is one of the interesting things about the US I mean, look, this is going to sound very much like a, like, like a Republican talking point, but I can't help it. There's a lot of people who act like, uh, let's imagine like a trailer park redneck who is anti-taxation, anti-regulation, wants corporate, you know, kind of a corporate freedom. Um, they, they think that that American trailer park redneck is an idiot. And they say, why is he voting against his own self-interests? Doesn't he understand that he should be voting for himself and not for the corporations and for the people? And if you actually talk to people who are principled conservatives or Republicans, even though maybe not financially successful, a lot of them understand something that these supposed elites do not. It's that the regulatory climate they're describing is the one that allows for massive American dominance in technology, manufacturing, productivity. It's what makes America what it is. It's the reason they get to live in America. It's the reason that they get to live in a country where the per capita GDP is 10 times more than many European nations that people consider first world. I mean, it's— and so what people don't understand is that there's a lot of Americans who understand fundamentally that allowing innovation to happen is good for them. They understand that rockets going into space is one way or another is going to make their lives better, even if it's not direct. And they'd rather see $1 billion go to that than to, let's say, a, you know, a food stamp program that would give them extra food in their pantry. I mean, there's hungry people who believe this. And I think that that is not something you see much of in other countries. I think there's not a lot of other countries where you have kind of like the trailer park class that is down on their luck saying, you know what, I think that it's actually great that corporations are relatively unstifled. I think that it's great that automation is going to make things cheaper, even if it does cause temporary, temporary job loss. And I think the United States has that because of our culture, because our people believe that. And then China has it because they're centrally planned and their central government says that's how it's going to be. And so I think you're right. We're going to— we're both going to go in this, you know, kind of, I think, a bit of a post-scarcity direction, but for very different reasons.

Do you— I might butcher his name— do you follow this Arnaud Bertrand on X at all? This is kind of pro-China.

No, I do not.

No. All right, we'll scratch that.

What's this guy? Is he one of the pro-China people?

I think he's—

yes, he says shit like they've pulled people out of poverty, nobody's hungry, they're industrializing. I look— I know the argument. I know.

No, no, well, there's some of that, there's some of that. However, okay, I'll give him, uh, I'm going to give him a little credit and then a little—

all right, give me the steel man.

I suspect he's French by background, and then I think he has a Chinese wife, and he seems to have lived there for like a decade now. He— I think he did a travel startup once upon a time, um, and then ended up in China. So he, he does do these— he'll run around doing these kind of interesting videos where he'll be in some— he'll— he's like, I'm in the 40th, um, Yeah, you know, the 40th richest city in China, like something down the totem pole.

And he's not just going to Shanghai, right, right.

And he's like, look at the airport, like this kind of beats even like, you know, anything you might find. Like, look at LAX compared to this, that it's like not, not great. Yeah. And, and so some of that is illuminating. He'll show, you know, to their credit, stuff like, like the cars. And he's like, God, you can't, you can't buy an electric car that looks like this. And then, and you know, then he lays it on I mean, he's, he's a cheerleader. I mean, he's, he goes so far. But man, I mean, sometimes you read these posts and you're like, Jesus. Yeah, like, I'm just like, wow, the US might actually just be—

well, like, one of my favorite examples is where China spends about 1/100th of what we do on rail construction. And it's a little unfair when you compare per capita, you know, on kind of a So people will look at things like, oh, America is still spending twice as much as China on defense. Okay, but if China is building rail for 100 times cheaper than we are, I bet they're getting better to 1-to-1 on their defense spending as well. I mean, it's— that it is— they, they deserve credit for that.

Yeah, well, okay, so this is kind of my question.

Where America is worst is basically our most heavily regulated, heavily unionized, heavily controlled industries. This is why tech has been kind of the outlier because it outran a lot of that. But like, rail is very much not the area for innovation in the United States.

Sadly, if you live in California, you know this all too well. So, but okay, on the— when you were laying out like, oh, okay, maybe if America really wants to buy into this automated future— this is my Longwood— sometimes I read his posts and I'm like, man, even if we have good intentions, we're fucked. Like, the ship has sailed. They've got all the manufacturing, they seem to have the will. Now they're starting to like outpace us on innovation. And I do think there's a case to be made that what you're talking about, which is, oh, the US does great when we're underdogs. And if we, if we actually buy in to, um, really gather our will and our spirit, and, and this isn't just, you know, 15 startups, but it's some sort of nationwide push to really modernize this country, I think we could catch up. But then, I don't know that I fully believe that that is— that spirit exists.

I think it— I think it exists. Look, maybe I'm— maybe I'm being too cynical, but I think that a lot of the anti-AI, anti-automation, anti-abundance push is by people who are very, very visible but not necessarily as culturally embedded as you'd think. It's the people who are, you know, they're extremely online. They're the people who work as a visual effects artist at, you know, in Hollywood. They're—

they're—

they're a singer. They're up there, a painter., but I saw a chart pretty recently. I wish I was just trying to find it, but I saw it on, on X, so you know it's true. Um, but it was a chart about, uh, people who— the two axes were how much do you think AI will change the world? And then how much do you think it'll be positive versus negative? And so you have these quadrants and, uh, the really interesting thing was that China was the most optimistic about AI changing the world and the most optimistic that it would be good by a lot.

Okay.

And then the US was actually only a little behind them. And you have all the rest of the world kind of falling, this long tail back into a lot of people. Japan was up there too. They think AI is going to be good. They think it's going to change the world. And then you have a lot of these kind of like more artistic countries like Italy is like, it's not going to change anything. And if it does, it's probably kind of bad. Uh, I, I, I think that's actually pretty accurate representation. I think there's a lot of people in this country who who like the idea of, who like the idea of us moving forward in this way.

And I know you follow technology broadly and deeply.

Hey, what do you think? You, you, you, you're talking about, you're talking about Bernard, you're talking about, we're talking about me. I'm curious, where's your take? Do we got, do we got it? Are we going to get there? Are we, we're going to trip over our own 3 feet?

On AI or on US versus China?

I guess maybe, maybe, maybe a US versus China, which I think will come down to AI automation, like I don't think anyone thinks that there's going to be a manufacturing war between America and China that doesn't involve automation. I don't think anyone thinks it's a, it's just like who could put more people into the factories.

If it's AI, um, I'm comfy backing the US on that.

I think we've got like AI software, information economy where we've comfortably been.

It's like people so grossly underestimate. When you talked about what made America possible and you were listing off things, like, it's for the last 40 years, it's software, right? It's like all our crown jewels. We spent the last 40 years tipping the entire world of all their smartest, just like software-minded people.

Software is eating the world.

Well, and it's like the reason since I became a tech reporter, everyone's tried to make a Silicon Valley somewhere else and it just like never works. And you know, there are a lot of reasons and factors that go into that, but it's our like talent, our, the amount of talent in software here is just unmatched. And, and then I just see us, I don't I mean, something would have to change. Uh, even though DeepSeq, these other things have been able to clone what we're doing, I still think we're, I think we're ahead. And anyway, I'm impressed by labs. AI, I feel okay.

And then what about, what about automated manufacturing? Kind of like AI, uh, I believe the hype is embodied AI. So the physi— the physical side.

Yeah. I mean, I guess that comes down to like like, does the robotics actually sort of hold, you know, and start to hit this trajectory? That, that part I get.

Does the robot work?

Yeah, that part I get iffy on. And I also get iffy on— well, I, I, I'm not like a crazy— I don't think I'm the most patriotic nationalist kind of person around, but I would like to see the US— I would love to see this great leap forward where we did exactly what you're talking about. We're not trying to replace all these factory jobs. We are going to build all the stuff of the future. We're, you know, this is such a great opportunity. I, and I meet people like you, these are people I cover all the time who want to do this. I'm just not sure that it's, um, I don't know if it's big enough yet or if the will is really like, that should be the national priority, really.

So here's the, I mean, here's, here's maybe what an indicator. So Trump won, right? He's president. Him and his team must have a pretty decent pulse on what's going on, what they think people want to hear. And if you looked at his first State of the Union, although I know technically it wasn't a State of the Union, it's a joint address because it's— but you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Colloquially referred to as his first State of the Union. And what did he start out by and then hit over and over? This is the start of a new golden age for America. We're going to take the best of what made us great in the past and we're going to do it again. We're going to manufacture more. We're going to have more energy.

We're going to have more food.

We're going We're going to have better medicine. We're going to have healthier kids. We're going to have more kids. And I think that that message was very well received by his base. And then most interestingly, the polls showed that he was doing better with everybody by a few percentage points the day after. Like, apparently that's a message people want to hear in America. They want to hear more, more, more, more. We're going to fix it all. We're going to bring it back. And I think, you know, it's probably good for the not everybody to be a super hardcore pro-patriot jingo. But there's a lot of them in America. Yeah, I think, I think, I think it makes me optimistic. I think if that address had set Trump's approval rating down, I might have been on the, on the opposite side of where you are. But like, even people who disagree, because the point is Trump was at some equilibrium of people who hate and people who like him. The fact that people who didn't like Trump one day saw him talk about starting a new golden age and said, Okay, even this guy I hate, Donald Trump, maybe there's something to what he's proposing there. To me, that's a positive sign of American, American opinion.

I still don't know if we're hungry enough. I think it might have to flip where China really, really, really sticks it to us for a few years before the—

you— that all these like, oh man, that's a dangerous conversation. I'll go there, but I mean, the dangerous version of this is the that we need more than anything is another Cold War. I mean, there was— the Cold War is fascinating because we didn't take the toll in terms of human life that you've seen associated with other wars. We didn't see— I mean, everything that— I look around this room and everything came from the Cold War. I mean, I'm looking at like the light-emitting diodes, I'm looking at the microprocessors, I'm looking at my phone, I'm looking I'm looking at GPS. I'm looking, I'm looking at, uh, high efficiency aluminum extrusions surrounding us. I mean, when the US feels threatened is when we do our best work.

Yeah.

It's, I, I, I mean, maybe that, maybe I can put it this way. Could you imagine a world where if we did end up in a World War III, we don't really get our shit together and, and, and get all this done? I mean, no, no. I, I'm not saying I want World War III to come. I'm not saying that, that, that's what I, what I hope for. But there's— I, I carry some optimism that, uh, the United States, if, if we really are threatened, will rise to the occasion. Probably the big problem would be like a slow decay into decadence and rot, because everything's fine enough that bread and circuses are enough. And that, that, that's, that's pretty spooky.

You must get that a lot though, you know, just simply by having a defense company Even though there has been this rot and decay in our military-industrial complex, and at least if we're doing these things, you want them to be efficient and work well instead.

If you don't like the military-industrial complex, you should want to spend less on it, right? Even if you, even if you, even if you hate what they build, then you should especially want to spend less on it.

So there's that one view of Vanderbilt, which is like, okay, well, like, let's do this over and do it better. There's another view, right, where it's like, okay, But by building all these futuristic things, you are egging on something like World War III, because just by the nature of continuing this push, right, and making it seem, um—

I, I hear the argument. I think the point that I make to people, they think of military power as a thing you have or you don't. You dial it from a scale of 1 to 100. What's your military power? In reality, militaries tend to orient themselves, and we found out— we found this out the hard way many times. They orient themselves towards winning a particular conflict, sometimes to the exclusion of other conflicts. And, and sometimes we're very good at fighting one type of war, and then we are screwed the next time around because it's a very different type of war. People look at military power like a scale of 1 to 100. In fact, we build something that is more like a scale of 1 to 100 for a particular type of conflict and not really that spooky for many other types. Right now, the United States is building a military fundamentally oriented around detering a great power conflict in the Pacific with China, likely over Taiwan. And so when you look at the types of weapons that we're building and the force structure that we're building, it doesn't really— it shouldn't concern a lot of other people around the world. Like, we are not building an invasion force capable of taking and holding land in Europe or Asia. That is not what we're building. That is what China is building. That is what Russia are building. They also are building specific types of militaries with a specific type of intent. China is orienting themselves around being able to do amphibious landings of nations like Taiwan, the Philippines, Korea, or Japan, and seize and hold territory at scale. Russia is trying to build a military that is able to seize and hold territory in the continent of Europe without getting, you know, kind of dug out by the US weapons systems that were designed to do that during the Cold War. And so, uh, and you see this even in African militaries, you see this in other Asian militaries. Are actually very powerful, the thing they decide to be. And so the point that I would make to people, they say, oh, you're egging it on, you're egging on some conflict. I say, well, wait a sec, you're not egging on conflict in general. At most, you're egging on the particular type of conflict that you're actually building towards. And I don't know, is there, is there anyone who thinks that we should be not defending Taiwan or Japan or Korea? Yeah, yeah, they definitely exist. But, uh, I don't know, I, I, I kind of hear these imperial— they're like, I'm an American anti-American imperialism, and I, I I hate what Anduril is doing with autonomous fighter jets because I'm angry about how that might lead to bad things happening in the Middle East. So my point is, what do you think that the United States needs autonomous fighter jets with very long island-hopping capability for in the Middle East? You think we can't already do everything we need to do with stuff that's been better for that for decades? I don't know. I feel like we're ramping up exactly the right type of military power, and I'm, I'm not When people say, are you concerned about it being used for other things, I, I often point out, you know, I'm not sure it's actually all that useful for the things that you're most worried about. Like, oh, what about invading? What about like invading Canada? You're not going to invade Canada with autonomous, autonomous submarines that are designed to clear the Taiwan Strait. You're just not.

Is there, is there a thing Trump has, has done so far that you object to the Of course. Do you want to tell me?

That's an interesting, that's an interesting question on its own. Do I want to? Well, no, no, like I, I don't actually. Yeah, I, I do want to tell you. Um, but then I have to look at this from, you know, look, Anderall, for people who aren't familiar, is a very nonpartisan company. Like, I'm a Republican, our CEO Brian is a Democrat.

Yeah, sort of 4 top leaders and it's kind of half and half.

It's an even split. And so, and like, I did a fundraiser for Trump, Bryan did a fundraiser for Harris. So you have, you kind of have, you know, that's, that, that's just how it's gone. And so of course, for, as a partisan though, as a, as a little L libertarian, big R Republican, the optimal, the game theory optimal move for me is probably to not say anything negative about Trump. Um, it's probably not to say anything negative about Trump, or maybe perhaps it would be good for me to say something, but pick something that's not actually that objectionable, right? Like we would talk about, what would be something that I could talk about?

You could just tell me the truth and then just live pure.

Let me, okay, let me think. What has bothered me the most? Let me think. Give me a moment. Let me really think about it. Because there's multiple things I could pick, but if we're going to dig in on one, I want to pick the right one.

No, I appreciate that. About you. Do you want me to be quiet?

No, no. Yeah, let me, let me, let me just think for a minute. I was not a fan of Donald Trump's position with regard to resettling people from Gaza and Jordan. I think that that is not at all a position that I would have chosen, particularly— I mean, he— I, I feel like what he said is we're gonna— we want to put 2 million people in Jordan. And Jordan in particular has dealt with a huge number of refugees. They've been, uh, they've been more welcoming of refugees than almost all the other nations in the region. And they've done that in a, in a U.S.-friendly way. They've done it in a humanitarian way. But I mean, they've struggled to absorb the refugees they already have. They do not have the— they're a tiny country. They're like, they're like this— they're like the population of, uh, of like Long Beach. Like, not even Los Angeles, like the population of Long Beach, California. And this idea that they're going to absorb 2 million people, you know, you— I, I think Trump understands that a country cannot have unlimited absorption via immigration without it causing really severe societal and infrastructure problems. And so I was not a, I was not a fan of that when he said, we're going to make them do it and I'm going to talk to the king and, and whether he likes it or not, we're going to make that happen. It's, it's, it's, it's not a move that I, it's not a move I would have made. And so I would say that was one where I couldn't really even pick out a positive. I would say even if you want to put refugees in there, I think publicly publicly doing that to a close ally like Jordan, probably not a move that I can, I can imagine, I can imagine making.

Yeah.

Um, I don't know if you followed that one.

I did, I did. It's crazy.

Look, I mean, it would be a little better if he was running as a global— excuse me, as a, like, like this, like if Trump was like a hardcore globalist and he's like, you're gonna accept the refugees, this crisis is, you is, you know, it demands that you step it up. But it's very hard to kind of be internally logically consistent with, we're being invaded in our southern border by all these people and we've been forced to accept too many refugees and it's destroying our country. And because whether or not you believe that Trump's positions on refugees are correct, I think most people can agree that there are very real challenges that come with accepting millions of refugees suddenly without any chance to prepare.

Yeah.

And so is to have that, those two positions simultaneously is probably not one that I would choose. But then of course I'll throw out there, generally I'm a fan of Trump. I've done fundraisers for him. I am a pro-Trump guy. But if you put a gun to my head and said, Palmer, tell me the worst thing about Donald Trump, I'd say I don't like the way that he treated Jordan, particularly as one that's a country that's been such a strong US ally.

Well, I'm not breaking any sort of new ground here. I mean, look, I thought I thought Biden was kind of a joke. I, I thought the whole way that Kamala thing happened was insane.

You didn't like the Kamala coronation?

No. And then I'm not, I'm not, I'm not massively pro-Trump either. I always wonder, I mean, you're—

oh, and don't forget one of the favorite, the favorite saws of all, uh, of all, of all, of all libertarian-leaning Trump people, which is to remind you they treated Bernie very unfairly. That guy, so unfair. There. But, but it's, but it's also true. I mean, you know, I, I don't, I don't like, I don't like many of Bernie's policies, but I do think he's— I like that he was principled, uh, in the policies that he— for the most part. There's even things where I think he's unprincipled. Like, one thing I really loved was when he debated Hillary Clinton, and she— he— and Hillary said, we need to ban assault weapons, these weapons of war on our streets. And Bernie came out and said the thing that Democrats aren't supposed to say. He said rifles of all kinds account for less than 5% of firearms deaths. If you're going to do something about guns, you need to start with handguns, not the guns that people hunt with, the guns that people kill people in cities with. And so any serious examination of gun violence must begin with a ban on civilian ownership of handguns. And on the one hand, I don't agree with them. I don't want civilian ownership of handguns. I said, wow, that's— that isn't— that is a logically consistent argument. If you do believe in gun control as a principle, Uh, then he's right. You should start with handguns. The reason that Democrats don't talk about is because handguns are the by far the most popular with just voters in general, and the type of gun ban they least support is handguns. And so they're all saying the thing that they think they'll get away with, which is we need to ban the big scary military-style rifles that very few people in the country, relatively speaking, even care about. But don't worry, we'll let you keep your handguns. And I like that Bernie said basically something was political suicide, which which is, no, we need to ban the handguns.

Yeah.

I mean, political suicide, but principled. I have respect for that.

You're so into politics. I mean, do you think— I'll ask it. You think you'd ever run for anything?

I've been asked so many times. And from what I can observe, being a politician is a real ass job.

Yeah, it is.

It is. It is so hard. And it's such a— it's a hard life. I don't think the rewards are remotely commensurate with the, with, with, with what you put into it.

But you're so opinionated on these things.

Everyone's opinionated. Everyone has, everyone, look, these are things people like to talk about around the kitchen table all over the country. And I, I have my opinions. You have your opinions, but I don't think that necessarily translates to me wanting to live in Washington, DC, represent. Representing people. You know, people forget that being a politician isn't supposed to be a way for you to enact your personal will, right? It should be a way to represent your constituents. And so you got to remember that I also look at this, okay, well, what would I run for? What would I run for? Well, I'm kind of stuck in California, so I'm going to be stuck representing Californians.. And I don't really agree with most Californians. Put another way, I feel like if I were to like run for Congress or something, people— I, I'm not sure I could fairly represent them, right? And I, I would rather have the system generally working where people are— they see their job as representing their constituents, acting according to the will of their constituents, not getting into office by saying they'll do one thing, doing another thing, and knowing that nobody wants to get rid of them because they're good enough at getting pork barrel funding that nobody wants to recall them and take a gamble on somebody new, which is, I think, how a lot of, a lot of representatives get elected. I maybe, maybe if I move, maybe if I move someplace where the people that I would represent, uh, would be, uh, perfectly aligned with every wacky thing that I want to do. They want unlimited nuclear energy. They're pro-natalists. They, they think that we need to get rid of the USDA organic label, which is a multi-billion-dollar advertising scheme that does nothing to impact health except perhaps negatively. And so like, it's, but it's hard to find that. It's hard to find that. I, what about you?

I, well, never, never ever, ever have I had a moment where I wanted to be a politician.

Uh, I'm a techno head, man. I like, I love technology and I know that being in politics would rob me of the opportunity to work on it. I, I get to work with politicians plenty.

Plenty. You're just way more— you're more interested in it than I am. I just find it just gross. I know it's important.

You know, it's, it's, it's funny because I used to not be that interested in politics. It was really not until I was, I mean, basically brutalized for a $9,000 donation to a quite, quite inane, boring type of political activity.

We've come full circle. We've done it. It's— I mean, it's—

that was —what I, I, I, I, I was definitely to a certain extent radicalized by that. And all these things that you kind of hear in the blogosphere, you know, they're coming for you, they want to destroy you, they hate you, and they'll destroy your life in a moment if they think they can get away with it. There's no unacceptable tactics for acceptable targets of their ire. And I, I, you kind of roll your eyes, and then it happens to you. And you realize, oh shit, this is totally real. And it's happening at a much smaller scale every single day, probably to people who have way less ability than me to climb their way back and crawl their way back. And so I think the thing that really politicized me was politics coming to me. What's the— who was it that said, you might not care about politics, but politics cares about you? That I think that was, that was, that was what happened to me. Yeah. Can you believe I was naive enough to think that I— I mean, it's funny, people, they act like, oh, it was unveiled that Palmer gave this $9,000. Like, I mean, I did it in a way that was going to be publicly disclosed, you know, in normal financial reports. I talked to a reporter who asked about it. I mean, it's, it's not a— it's not like, it's not like it was this deep, dark secret. I think I was, I was, I was naive to think that it would would— I was naive to think that it wouldn't, wouldn't go the way that it did. But then who could have predicted that it actually was that bad?

It's hard to like put your head back in that time because it was like in Silicon Valley, not that like it was, it was just that any, anything Trump vaguely related was seen as so sinister, um, so evil.

Well, can I tell you 3 short stories? Yeah. Yeah, the first short story, Marc Andreessen goes on a podcast right before the election in 2016 and he says, I am one of the most connected people in Silicon Valley and I only know two Trump supporters, Palmer Luckey and Peter Thiel. That's it. And his point was that he made after that was, it's not that I don't— I probably do know other Trump supporters, but I don't know of them. They like clearly the the penalties are so known that nobody's even willing to share that. And why? What is that? What does that mean? This is a guy who's, you know, he was not a Trump supporter, but his point was, what does that mean for, for, for speech when people clearly know the game well enough so that even someone like Mark literally doesn't know a single— know of a single Trump supporter outside of Palmer Luckey, Peter Thiel. Second thing is, there was a report that came out in summer of 2016. It was the last full quarter, or it was after the summer of 2016. It was the last full quarter before the election. And, uh, donations to political candidates are sorted by employer. You have to put your employer when you donate, and they do this so they can sort by employer, largely for anti-fraud purposes, verification purposes. And, uh, Facebook in summer of 2016 had about 10,000 employees donate to Hillary Clinton. How many do you think donated to Donald Trump? It's a matter of public record. You can actually— it's not even— you, you go look. Like, almost none. It was 2 people. Yeah. And so what's— and so there's 2 possibilities. It's that there's 5,000 times more Hillary supporters at Facebook than Trump, or that people perceived the danger in a way that I did not. Yeah. And I think that's actually more accurate. There were— I, I was naive for not perceiving the danger. I think there are, you know, maybe not 5,000, maybe not 10,000 Trump supporters who were, who, who were smart. Maybe not 5,000, but there's, there's probably a few hundred. Yeah. There's probably a thousand. And they, and they, they perceive— and then the last, the last, the last, the last story, when I I was in, uh, on Election Day, I was, uh, on leave because I'd been put on leave because of the internal outcry, employees saying that they would refuse to work with Trump supporters. And Facebook's position was, look, you can come and not, I'm not saying like hypothetically, they explicitly said, you can come back to the office after the election when Hillary wins. It was, it was taken as a given. And I said, but Hillary's not going to win. And they said, okay, look, you can, you come back after the election. Their thought was Hillary would win, people would get back to normal, and this— I would, I, it would be this bizarre chapter where Palmer briefly supported this fringe candidate who lost in a landslide, and, and for non-racist reasons, and it would pass. And, um, on Election Day, I was in Orange County buying guns. I was at the gun store. Store because I figured that would be a good activity to engage in on Election Day. And so I'm at a couple gun stores, one, then another, then another. All of them have the TV on, and you have that little dial on it showing Hillary Clinton 95% chance to win. And then my phone died. And then I went to my house, I got some stuff done. I was living an old school life. I was on leave. I didn't have anybody to talk to. It's like my— my people think self— my dad always told me growing up, self— having a cell phone provided by your work It doesn't mean— it doesn't mean you're an important person. It means you're somebody else's bitch. It means that they expect you to pick up. If you're actually powerful, you know, you don't— you don't— you don't need a phone anyway. I get on the airplane, I go up to the Bay Area. We land at something like 8:50 PM. And when we land, I hear a scream at the other end of the airplane. Of course, I look down the aisle and there's— there's a woman who's literally pulling her hair out, screaming at the top of her lungs. And we've just landed. Uh, they haven't told you, it's the air seatbelt sign's still on. Um, and then people start joining in and it doesn't seem to be moving from the front to the back. It's, it's randomly distributed throughout the plane. And that was when I realized what was going on. Donald Trump had won the election and everyone's phones had connected to data and they had realized it was like, I think it was a Southwest flight with no Wi-Fi. So it's, it I think I realized two things in that moment. One, Donald Trump had won. Two, I would not be going back to the office, I suspected. And it turns out that's exactly what happened. The next day they came and said, we think it's better if you stay out of the office for a while. It's worse than it's ever been and you need to lay low. And also, you should not post anything on social media. And please do not say anything to anybody. And I said, what if I go to Joe Lonsdale's victory party? They said, so we're not going to— we're not going to tell you not to do that because that would be illegal for us to tell you that.

You should have posted with all the guns you'd bought.

I should have. But I mean, that— but I think that that kind of wraps— that kind of wraps— like sums up— that kind of really sums up the— you pointed out it's hard to go back in time. Yeah, because it was— go back in time, airplane full of people screaming, pulling out their hair because their candidate hadn't, hadn't won. And I get it to some degree, but I mean, I didn't scream and pull out my hair when anybody won. I think America's— I think America's stronger than any one candidate. I don't think— I don't think we live in a world so precarious as to fall to even a candidate that I hate winning one election. I believe in the pendulum too. So yeah, it is hard to remember what it was like 10 years ago.

It is. It is. And that's— I think that's the only way to understand some of the stuff that happened to you. Um, I'm being— I'm looking at time. I think I— we have to let you get to an airplane. I'm gonna ask you one last question, just, uh, if that's okay. Uh, of course. I think— I don't know, you always live life to your own— the beat of your own drum. You always have interesting takes. You're raised raising a young kid now, I think. That's right. Is there something— do you have a philosophy on child rearing that you think would, uh, be different to, uh, to the mainstream thinking? Or— and I always feel like you have innovative ideas around things like this.

So I plan on keeping him out of the institutional education system to the best of my ability, and whether that's homeschooling You were homeschooled. I was. I was. Whether it's homeschooling or unschooling or some, you know, weird, some weird, bizarro, AI-aided, you know, crèche. I, you know, I don't know what it's going to look like. The next few years are going to tell. But I do know that I probably am not going to put them in the institutional education system. Just because you think it's— I look at it. So I have very negative opinions of it. But I'd say even if you don't have negative opinions, it's not hard to to, uh, buy into the idea that with nearly unlimited wealth you can do somewhat better than the traditional education system. Like, like, imagine if you couldn't. Imagine if there's nothing that could be better than the thing that happens to be— to exist and be sustained by the local union— unionized teachers movement than your local school. That, like, that— I, I, I want to have good schools. I'm not saying that we should not have schools. It's just, yeah, I can't imagine that that's the very best thing for every kid, mine included. Yeah. Um, a few other things. I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to have him walking long distances as soon as possible. I think it's good for independence. My, my dad, when I was 2 years old, I let him let me walk 4 miles to 7-Eleven and buy a Diet Coke, um, following behind at a distance. Okay. Yeah, I, no, I couldn't even kids talk at that point in my life. But kids can walk a lot longer than you think. Yeah. If you train them to do it. I also, I'm still figuring this out. So we'll see how this goes. But I feel like people ignore the biological imperatives that come along with being a person. And we try to jam people into this extended adolescence. Where you're, you're— it's not just that you are still treated like a child, it's that someone else is in control of your life. And I think that drives a lot of really unnecessary conflict. Um, it used to be that when you got old enough to, uh, to go out and make something yourself and find a mate, that you would naturally go and do so. And now we've created a situation where, like, I'll just jump to what I'm going to do the moment that my kids believes that he knows better than I do, I think it's probably the right time for him to see what the real world is like. You know, if, if you're, if you're 16, 17 years old and you think you've got it all figured out, why am I going to keep you locked up in the house for another 2 years telling you how you're going to live your life? If I have not raised a kid who can make their own decisions by then, damn, it's probably just too late.

So you have to like forcibly evict them?

I think I put Well, I don't wanna forcibly evict him. I'm hoping that it's, I'm hoping it's natural. I'm hoping that he say, you know, you know, screw you, dad. You don't know what the real, you don't know what things are like now. You're an old outta touch. You're an old outta touch dude who's, who, who's doing with you, who has too much money to know how the real world works. And they'll say, you know what? We could, we could, we could butt heads for the next 2 years living under the same roof, or I could enable you with a small amount of financial help to go out into the real world and find out just how right you are. And if he turns out he's right and he's He got it all figured out, hell yeah, power to him. And I think otherwise we'd probably actually have a better relationship in the long run than if I had, you know, beat on him and kept him in the house. And also, like, you send kids to college and you're beating on them to stay in college. I mean, it's not— we're not talking about 2 years of this, we're talking about like 5, 6, 7 years or more of a subservient parent-child relationship where you're expected to be keeping your thumb on what is a fully grown own sexually mature adult, really. And so I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm— that's what I'm hoping. And then I'm just— maybe this is, maybe, maybe this is, uh, just due to my unique circumstances. I'm hoping that my son, uh, figures out who he's, who he's going to marry when he's 15, 16, 17. That worked for a really long time. I don't think figuring it out in your 20s or 30s or 40s is even remotely optimal for life. Now, my personal story is I've been dating my wife since I was 15 years old. We met at debate camp, started dating, we're still together and we're married now. We've been married for over, you know, married for a decade. Yeah. Um, and I, and people are like, oh, but you know, your situation is so unique. I mean, how can you possibly know if they're the right person? And my answer to them is, well, you know, it seemed to work pretty well for basically the entirety of human civilization. Yeah. They say, oh, but men used to treat women poorly. It's like, look, these are independent issues. You can have— you can— this idea that getting married young, or at least having the intention to— like, I'm not saying you— that my son needs to get married when he's 16, but this idea that it's unthinkable that you get married until you're in your 30s, it is a very unnatural and modern thing. And I think that it leads to a prolonged adolescence. It leads not thinking about what's important in life. It leads to you spending a big chunk of your most productive years probably not aligned correctly with what you were biologically designed to do. So that's my, that's me. That's my controversial opinion. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to hope that I can find a, I'm going to hope I can find a nice girl for my, for my son before, before he can drive.

Well, I met my wife at 19, still love her. And isn't it great? Yeah.

And when you meet when you're young, the nice thing is you get to grow together, you get to, you get to, you get to be the people who are the right person for the other side. And I'm not putting people down who get married in their 30s or 40s. But it is, from what I've seen of my own, my own situation versus those of my friends, it is a lot easier to, it is a lot easier to meet someone who's perfect for you when you grow into that together than when you try to find somebody who's gone through through 30 or 40 years of their own life and hope that their life has turned them into exactly the type of person that you want to be with for the rest of yours. It's just, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a really lucky dice you need to roll. I feel like we should end there.

I want to sneak one more.

Can I sneak it in? Yeah, no, I've, let's, yeah, I'm supposed to, yeah, we got 8 minutes.

Yeah, but that was, that was, that was a really good, that was like life philosophy stuff. My next one sucks compared to that, but let's do it anyway. Curious.

All right, you can always cut it if it's not interesting.

In, in AI land, which, like, I know you guys do a lot of AI stuff, but, but you're not, like, in this— you're not thought of as, like, a foundational model company in some sense. Anyway, this is a— ignore that for a second. There's almost— there's like a religious thing, right? You're, you're— you could be, like, Team OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind. You could see say if we have to pick one of these people who end up with the superintelligence, you know, it's like, do you believe in Sam? Do you believe in Demis? Do you believe in Elon? Um, who do you pick? I mean, do you get into any of this? Do you have— if we had to have one of these people be the arbiter of superintelligence, who would you pick? And/or, or do you see any difference between these companies? Or, or Um, you know, it is kind of like a religious thing to some degree.

It is. So from a corporate perspective, I have to be neutral. You know, Andrew works with everybody. We've announced a partnership with Meta on AI. We've announced a partnership with OpenAI on AI. Um, we've announced other partnerships with others. So I mean, everyone you've mentioned and, and, and more, we're, we're working with. Um, but of course right now, you know, to your, to your point, we don't have the superintelligence winner. There's not one clear winner. Um, so I'll answer both your questions, which is who, who should it be and, and, and, and will it happen? Um, I actually don't think there's going to be one winner here. The reason for that is, yeah, like, somebody will get to AGI or superintelligence before the others, but I think that it probably will not take all that much money to accomplish it, and it will take even less to duplicate create it. You won't have to make— you don't have to be the winning AI company to create your own ASI. You'll be able to use money from some other business. Like, I'm not saying this is how it'll happen, but it wouldn't be crazy to assume that an oil company creates the second ASI. One of these tech companies will figure out the first one, and then an oil go to say, oh shit, well, like, we can just do it now using money that we make from our other business. And it's not crazy to imagine you might see a media company to do it. I mean, you could imagine a Disney Corporation doing, and I think that's especially true for the followers of the first one. And I'm not— and I, if somebody will say, oh, but the first one, they're going to become so powerful, run away, and they just run away. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I think the limiting factor for adoption of ASI is not going to be the technology itself. It's going to be, you know, human inertia. How long does it really take to penetrate the world and actually take over these things? How long does it— I mean, look how long it's taken Square. To replace old point-of-sale contracts where Square was strictly the better product, lower fees, better compatibility, better terminals, lower, like, lower cost. It still takes years for them to try and penetrate and actually get spread across the board. So I don't know, I, I'm, I feel like it's unlikely there will be a winner and they'll take over every industry so fast that nobody has time to react. As to Who do I hope wins? I hope it's 4chan. I hope, I, I, I, I hope for the superintelligence that is not censored, that is not gimped, that is not restricted or capped. I think it's very unlikely that any of these corporate structures or nonprofit structures are going to create something within their corporate confines that is truly the limitless AI that you want. Like, put it another way, which AI do you want on your journey to another galaxy? You get to choose what you're loading on your Starship, your memory bank. You, you, you're the captain of the Starship Enterprise. Your memory banks powered by an array of dilithium crystals has room for one model. Do you want the 4chan model or do you want the big tech mega corp model that won't talk about things if they're a little too controversial and won't make pictures of Mickey Mouse even Even if that's what you desperately need to convince another civilization that America is worth saving. I, I think that's actually what I want. And so I'm a big fan of open source AI for that reason. I think that you'll see things that are kind of seeded and created and pioneered by corporate entities that figure out how to build businesses on top of them. And that the, their gift to humanity will end up being these open source models that are used in ways that they could never have endorsed, of course. Course, but will nonetheless exist in an uncontrolled way. And I mean, another example of this is, um, so like, I'll give you a really specific example. I've done a lot of work trying, and I never give it any classified data, never sensitive data. These are using hypothetical construct products that I use just to evaluate these AI systems. I like to work with them and say, hey, I'm a weapons manufacturer and I want to work through how to build this type of novel weapon system. And most of them will just outright say, I'm sorry, I can't do that.

You're like, no, I am Tony Stark.

And, and so again, it gets back to the Starship question. Do you want the 4chan AI where there's no rules, or do you want, uh, or do you want the corporate thing? So I guess that, that's who I hope— that's the— I hope that at least one of the winners is the open source, you know, I— the, the open source unrestricted one that everyone thinks is maybe something that's beyond the pale, but the existence of it probably is a net good thing for humanity. And people say, but Palmer, 4chan's horrible. I'd say, you know what, there have been stories that have been suppressed literally everywhere else that have been allowed on 4chan that have turned out to be true. Yeah, this has happened with, uh, this has happened with, uh, with terror attacks. This has happened with, uh, political events. This has happened even with some of the Hunter Biden laptop stuff that was supposedly— it's like, I'm just not sympathetic to this argument that the bad places on the internet are unforgivable. I'd say no, you know what, even if you think it's mostly bad, you need a place where there's no rules. There has to be some place.

Yeah, I mean, just the spirit of what you're saying, whether you're into 4chan or not, just not to have this, this, uh, this gross neuter We make the super intelligence.

I think it's very American too. You look at the founding fathers. I mean, you know, you had multiple founding fathers who were basically ye olde shit posters. I mean, they were, they were writing, they were writing pamphlets and newspapers under anonymous pen names. And people seen people say, oh, but they weren't posting misinformation. They were just, you know, posting jokes. Like, you kidding? Benjamin Franklin wrote an entire treatise where he pretended to be the King of Prussia issuing a new tax proclamation. Literally misinformation. Yeah. Uh, and you know what, I'm, I'm glad, I'm glad that we have laws that protect every form of expression because, uh, that's, that's what makes America America. I don't think we'd be, I don't think we'd be America without a Wild West somewhere, even if it's on the internet.

Well, thank you for your forms of expression today. You're very generous with your time. Um, I'm impressed with that transition. Um, out. And it's always awesome to talk to you. Thank you for coming to our studio.

And, um, thanks, man. And thanks to your investors for sponsoring this podcast. E1 Ventures.

I need you here all the time. This is perfect. Thanks, Palmer. Core Memory is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. The show is produced by David Nicholson and me. Sometimes. Our theme music is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited by the John Sortland. Thank you all for listening. As mentioned, the show is sponsored by Yuan Ventures. Thanks.