Now behind the Aloha vibe, a lot of people think of you as the guy who's building the virtual border wall, which either makes them love you or hate you. Let's talk about Endurall's main mission and the products that you're actually building to achieve that. because it's bigger than that. Well it's way bigger than that and I will say I actually don't think that many people think of us that way.
I mean people like to focus on the border work because it's politically controversial. The reality is that we've actually done way more on that in this administration than the past one. So people try to tie that to being a Trump thing.
The reality is everyone agrees that we need to know what's coming across the US border. There are people who disagree on immigration policy but immigration policy is separate from awareness of what's coming across the border and Anduril makes technology that we use to track drug trafficking, human trafficking, arms and cash smuggling in both directions going across the border. Even the people who want open immigration, unlimited immigration, you can walk into the United States and instantly become a citizen, there's nobody outside of a really radical fringe. that thinks that the right way to accomplish that is to allow the cartels to operate unimpeded.
And so if people say it's controversial, I would say the people who say it's controversial are people who have an interest in making it appear controversial. There's actually very few people who agree with them on that. But the main thing that we do is we're a defense product company.
So Anduril is trying to be the world's next major defense contractor. Our primary product is a piece of AI software called Lattice. It powers all of our hardware systems. It ties together hundreds of systems that are made by other companies, taking data from... every sensor so that it can be a sensor for every person and for every weapon and for every effector of every other kind.
And our goal is that you have the best information possible when you're in any type of situation where lives are on the line. You want to know where all the good guys are, you want to know where all the bad guys are, and you want to be extremely certain as to which is which. what the best way to respond is.
And we built a lot of hardware products on top of Lattice, but we have a lot more people working on software than hardware. So despite the appearance of a hardware company, and I'm a hardware guy, at the end of the day, most of what we do is driven by software. So let's talk about, you raised more money than almost any other startup.
Last year, there's been this flood of VC capital into defense tech. And I know you've said, we're making defense sexy again. Founders Fund was one of your earliest investors, Andreessen now.
We've seen Sequoia getting into defense tech. Why is this happening now? Did it take a war?
Because everyone is finally opening their eyes when we started and roll we struggled to raise any money And this is a guy who's just sold his last company for billions of dollars So it wasn't it wasn't that wasn't the issue But the responses we were met were met with from investors were somewhere kind of a mix between Indifference and scorn so on the different side people saying well we live at the end of history. There's not going to be any more conflict. Economic intertanglement precludes any kind of large-scale warfare in the future. And so what you're doing is just a waste of time.
And so I don't care about it. The other side is people saying, any use of force is wrong and what you're doing is evil and so I won't be involved. And I think the reason that you've seen things shift over the last few years has been a recognition that we don't live at the end of history.
There are still people in the world who want to use large-scale violence to achieve their aims. There are unfortunately countries that are not. that have a reasonable position, that that is the only way that they are going to be able to continue to expand and to grow per their aims.
There was a lot of belief years ago. that China was going to westernize, that they were going to adopt more of the principles of the West, and that they were going to be a good partner going into the future. And I think that was tied to so many tech companies making the bet that they would be allowed into China, that they would be able to make that into a market for them. Today, the equation has shifted. I think a lot of the attitude shift has been driven maybe by something a little more cynical than realizing that war is possible, as Russia has shown.
It's driven by the fact that VCs realize they're not going to be able to make money in China, and so they're getting out. You have a lot of tech companies that are realizing that China's never going to be a big market for them. They realize that they're locked out.
And not only are they locked out of China, China's going to come and eat their lunch. And so there's this newfound wave of patriotism, of dubious, dubious source. But I'll take what I can get. We're going to come back to China in a moment.
But first, I do want to talk about the politics, because so much has been made of, you know, Peter Thiel's investment in Anduril, Peter Thiel's connection to Trump. Is this a partisan effort? Or are you trying to cross the aisle with this technology?
I mean, the National Defense Authorization Act is the only bill that's passed every single year since it started being created. It's about as bipartisan as it gets. There's very few people who think... that it's better for China to have better weapons in the United States, that it's better for Russia to have better weapons than our European allies.
It is really a quite bipartisan issue. And I will note, you know, I don't want to be too mean, but one of the reasons that people have tried to turn me into a partisan figure is because it's really good for clicks. The reality is I spend maybe...
I don't know, 1% of my time on politics. I said 99% on tech. But that is not what people want to focus on. And a lot of it's also not true. I mean, heck, one of the moderators on your previous panels was on TV.
She's spreading all kinds of lies about me during the election year. She was saying that I was funding fake news and paying people to spread it. She was on TV saying that I was funding alt-right memes and teams of people to spread on the internet.
and said the real reason I was fired from Oculus is because I wasn't even involved in the day-to-day of my business anymore. I mean, just like an ideological hit squad on me, spreading, hang on, let me finish. We'll have to let her check that, but I will let you finish.
Nobody disagrees on these things. It's not a matter of opinion. It was just a fabricated story that outlets, including Bloomberg, picked up, ran with. and performed a character assassination on me, and have tried to turn me into a political figure because that's what they want to do to me.
People who spend far more on politics on the other side of the aisle would never even be asked the question you're asking me. Would you ever have Zuckerberg up here and say, hey, you donated a lot of money to politics. I mean, you're a pretty political figure. I mean, isn't your company actually really partisan?
You wouldn't even dream of doing it. The reality is it's because it's okay to attack one side for being political and not the other, that the question is even being asked. And I understand. I understand that you have to bring it up, because that's unfortunately the hell I live in, but it's something that I'm still gonna get frustrated with.
I might ask Zuckerberg that question. I might, but you made your point. So, There's a lot of controversy about tech companies working with the U.S. government.
You know, we've seen employees protesting at Google. Sure. For work with the Pentagon, protesting at Microsoft, for work with ICE.
You have really strong opinions about this. Yep. You think Silicon Valley should be working with the U.S. government.
Absolutely. I mean, I think that we live in a really dangerous time, and I have thought this for years. This is not a new opinion that I've developed in the wake of the Ukraine war. All of a sudden, I found a conscience.
I've been saying this consistently for a long time, since before I even started Andrel, you know. We live in the first period in U.S. history where our best, most innovative tech companies, with the largest pools of talent in our country, refuse to work with the military. We've never been in a situation like that before. And people don't understand how dangerous that is when you think about the global competition, not just militarily, but economically.
and what that means. Imagine if during the World War II build-up, if our biggest tech powerhouses like Westinghouse or RCA or General Electric had said, you know what, I'm not sure that we really should be taking sides, I don't want my tech to be used for military purposes, I think that Imperial Japan is a huge revenue opportunity for our shareholders, and I really think we need to not take sides in this. I mean, that is the situation we're in today, where tech investors and tech companies are refusing to work with the DoD, not because of any ethical qualms. I think that's a smokescreen. It's primarily been driven by a desire to work with our largest strategic adversary and make a lot of money doing it.
But these Google employees, for example, signing this open letter saying that they don't want Google to work with the DoD, they made a great... smoke screen. You know, they can't go out and say, we're going to refuse to work with the military because we are sellouts to China. But what they can say is, oh, we're just listening to our employees.
Well, I mean, let's look at the numbers. You had 3,000 people signing that open letter. That represents, I think, just under 2% of the Google workforce.
Now, does that mean that 98% of Google employees want their tech used for the military? No, not necessarily, but it means that 98% didn't care enough to click a one-click survey that we're already logged in with our employee credentials on. I think it's a tiny, radical minority that was very loud about this, and I think that if we are going to persist, and if we are going to protect our allies, we cannot afford to have our most innovative companies divorced from the organizations that are responsible for keeping those companies viable. Do you do work with other countries?
Oh, we do tons of work with other countries. We do a lot of work with the United Kingdom. We've done a lot of work with Australia. At the end of the day, and in case your follow-up question is, you know, which countries would you work with, work with, not work with, at the end of the day, that's determined by US policy. If the United States wants us to work with the UK, which is a strong strategic partner, then we're going to work with them.
If they tell us to work with an ally like Australia, then we're going to work with them. And I get people sometimes asking me, oh, but would you draw, what's your line in the sand? Would you sell to North Korea? Would you sell to China? And the answer is it doesn't matter.
I'd go to prison if I did that. I don't even have to think about it. And I do actually have opinions on it.
But the right thing for me to do as a guy who is working really at the behest of democratically elected leaders is not for me to say that I'm the guy who decides. who gets our technology or how it gets used. That should be decided not by corporate executives, but by elected officials who are actually beholden to power. We did do a poll about China from our audience, where they think the biggest tech threat in China is.
Looks like AI and chip making pretty tied up there. Companies like Apple, companies like Google, companies like Tesla have deep ties to China. Are these ties appropriate?
I don't know if I would say appropriate so much as existentially crippling. That's one another way to say it. Well, look, let's talk about a really big problem that's an elephant in the room that doesn't get talked about nearly enough.
The analysts, the financial weenies, they look at these companies and they try to come up with what the risks are. Oh, man, are rising interest rates going to hurt their sales? Could it be that they're not able to capitalize this plant that's over here?
But people don't like to talk about the real risk, the existential risk. The risk where Taiwan is taken by China and they either fully deprive us of advanced capabilities that we would certainly deprive them of in any kind of wartime scenario, or alternatively, that they unilaterally act to cripple our largest companies. Think how much trouble Apple would be in if China decided they wanted Apple to be in trouble.
Almost all their manufacturing is there. They cannot exist as a company without that. You have a nearly $3 trillion company, the biggest powerhouse. of economic value in the entire United States totally beholden to the whims of one person in China. That's crazy.
That's unprecedented. But people don't talk about it, including Apple, because if it happens, it's too unthinkable. It's a risk you can't even talk about.
You can't even discuss this risk rationally because it's so extraordinarily bad of an outcome. And so instead, what do people do? They say, well, I think that we do actually need to stay coupled to China.
Collaboration is really important. And shouldn't we all just get along? They don't have a choice. They made their choice years or decades ago, and now they have to pretend that they made the right one. Anyway, yes, I have strong opinions on this.
The problem fundamentally is, the right time for us to realize this danger and this risk was when we allowed China to join the World Trade Organization. We had this misguided idea that we were going to westernize them, and that they were working for us. It turns out that we're working for them. And the second best time to solve that is now. So let's talk about TikTok then for a second, because something else you have strong opinions on.
I know TikTok is banned from and oral employees'phones. Why do you think TikTok is such a threat? And what do you think that the U.S. government should do about it? Well, I mean, there's a few sides here.
So the United States government recently passed a piece of legislation that prohibits the installation or use of TikTok on government devices and also on the devices. of government contractors. Meaning if you build weapons systems, you're not allowed to have the Chinese spyware app on your phone.
Seems pretty reasonable, right? All right. And people say, oh, but they said really, really nicely that they're never going to send their information to China.
Well, guess what? Chinese law begs to differ. The Chinese Communist Party is literally on the board of directors of ByteDance. They literally have a financial stake in the company. The laws of China are extremely clear.
Them and their families are at risk if they dared to not do what the government said or to even if they were even to tell anybody about it. Now people can say, Palmer, that's unfair. In the United States, you can get a court order to get information too.
Yes, but you can't tell the company that they're not allowed to even talk about it and that they have to lie continuously about it. That nor are they going to imprison you and your family if you do do something about it. You're probably just going to get a book deal.
So, and that's the difference here, the book deal versus prison dichotomy between China and the United States. I actually think the United States should have gone slightly further on this. One of the reasons that we didn't ban TikTok from our employees'personal devices earlier as a security risk is because it's actually a legal minefield. You can't really quite get away with that in modern times for good reason. I think they should have gone further and said, you know what, we are going to formally declare that TikTok and ByteDance applications and really any application that is controlled directly by the Chinese Communist Party is a security risk.
We're not saying you have to not allow it. But you should be allowed to ban it if you want to. In other words, let's say that you're not a company that's directly covered like we are by this piece of legislation.
Imagine if we're something that's adjacent, like a company that does accounting for weapons companies. They're technically not covered. I wish our government would go and say, you know what, we're formally declaring that TikTok is a security risk, and that any company that believes it is in the national interest to ban it from devices that have access to their data is not at some kind of legal risk from...
TikTok or their employees saying hey, that's not fair. I really like funny videos on my lunch break You did sell your first company to Facebook. I did you did what do you think about what's going on over there?
Oh Man, well you look, you know, everybody can always speak Everyone who sells their company always likes to come back later and say if I were there things would be better and things would be different You know, I I think that there were I think that they're not they've not made the best moves that they could have made over the last few years. You're being remarkably diplomatic when you weren't so diplomatic earlier. Okay, no, no, but here's why. Because I'm not a journalist, so I'm not even...
By the way, I actually was. I was a journalism major at Cal State Long Beach. I was the online editor of the Daily 49er.
which is one of the largest student papers in the country. Good to know. Yeah, who knew?
That's why I'm so butt hurt about bad journalism. But the problem is that there are, what was I even saying? We were talking about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and what he's doing right and wrong.
What they're doing right now. I mean, the reason I'm so diplomatic is because at the end of the day, I'm still a VR guy. I want VR to succeed.
Me going out there and lighting everyone on fire for every mistake they make in trying to make VR happen is not going to make virtual reality more successful. That's what I'm saying. I'm not unbiased.
I'm allowed to be a VR partisan. I'm allowed to only say things that I think will cause virtual reality to become a mainstream technology faster. And in my estimation, going out and lighting the people who took my company, stabbed me in the back, and threw me out the back door, it's not going to be good for VR.
So I'm not going to do it. And look. Look.
For whatever differences I might have with them, they are one of the companies that has put more into VR than anybody in the world. And I don't want them to stop doing that. They are one of the few companies in the world that truly believes in VR still.
Apple, you seem to be a fan of the new thing. Is it going to be a thing if it's $3,500? I mean, I would say that that kind of isn't the point.
So for many years, I've said that virtual reality... Is it going to be a thing anyway? At some point, but not at $3,500. I mean, I've said for many years that the... Virtual reality has to become something that everybody wants before it can become something that everyone can afford.
You can't reverse those two steps and expect mainstream acceptance. I wrote a blog post on my blog, Parmalucky.com, the number one Parmalucky blog on the internet, called Free Isn't Cheap Enough. And in it, I argued that current VR technology, as it existed a couple years ago when I wrote it, was so limited that even if you gave it away for free to every American, most people would not continue to use it due to the technological limitations, ergonomic limitations, content limitations.
And if that's the case, if they wouldn't use it even if it was free, then clearly cost is not the problem. And reducing cost is not what gets you to mainstream acceptance. Apple is taking the other approach.
They are spending an enormous amount of money to drag what should exist a few years in the future and drag it into the present. And it's very expensive to do engineering that way. What they are doing is seeing if they can make it something everybody wants.
If they can make it something everybody wants, then it will certainly be something that everybody will buy once it's $1,000. And there's nothing that they're doing that is fundamentally expensive. Everything they're doing can easily be costed down using conventional manufacturing techniques in the future.
And I think that that's where that's going. All right. We have a question from the audience. All right.
Not a journalist. From the audience. So I'm going to let you take a swing at it.
How do you reconcile the idea of having a full-blown surveillance regime and individual liberty? Well, I am a libertarian, and I'm not a fan of full-blown surveillance regime. I would say that's also not what we're building.
I mean, you'll note we're not building tools that are used to surveil masses of American civilians. We're not hoovering up their personal data. We're not hoovering up stuff and marketing to them.
Like, I don't fall into that. People say, oh, but you're a surveillance company. You make these sensors that detect vehicles, animals, drones, etc. To which I say, you know what? There are certain places where you do need surveillance.
If you have a military base that is constantly under threat of attack, You need surveillance and I don't feel bad about that. If you have a border where there are people who are coming into the United States and selling us massive quantities of fentanyl contaminated marijuana, if they're coming in here and selling people into sex slavery, I don't really mind watching that one little strip and saying, you know what, people who go from that side to this side or this side to that side and they're doing it illegally, that's something that we should be aware of. Even as a libertarian, I think I'm fine with that.
There's no part of libertarian ideals that says that people are not allowed to voluntarily come together and protect themselves from true existential threat. And nobody's going to say, oh man, but you know, a real libertarian would just leave the gates open on their military base. I'm a compromised libertarian, as most practical libertarians are.
One more from our audience. Would you oppose withholding technology to an authoritarian regime? Um, I would oppose it. I think I kind of tried to cover this a little bit earlier. I mean, it isn't up to me and it shouldn't be up to me.
It should be up to the United States government. I'll give I'll give an example that is not me. Just to make this point. There were a lot of people who are really upset about the United States selling certain security systems to Turkey, which, remember, is a NATO ally on paper. Also an authoritarian regime and people were very upset about this and why are we selling these security systems?
Why would we do that? That doesn't make any sense and is does this mean the United States is supporting authoritarianism and What came out later is the reason that we were doing this is because the United States was temporarily Basing a bunch of nuclear armed aircraft at their airfield secretly now you could say that there's some moral high ground and not putting better security on the base where we're going to be having our own nuclear weapons. Or perhaps you could say we shouldn't even have aircraft there in the first place.
But that decision shouldn't be up to me. I shouldn't sit here unaware of those aircraft, unaware of those weapons, unaware of the bigger picture. And also divorced from all the politicians who have been elected to make those decisions. I should not sit here as a corporate executive and say, I will de facto...
Be the unilateral controller of US foreign policy. I, the corporate executive, get to decide who we are allowed to work with and who we are not, because that is a very dangerous path that puts power in the hands of people that should not have that power, that should be in the hands of people that you can elect a new leader to replace. All right, as much as I could sit here forever and listen to this, I'm getting the flashing. Please stop. It's time for a networking break.
Last question. From me, you sold a company once. What's your plan for Enduro? Would you sell it again? Do you want to go public?
Where do you want to take the business? The most likely outcome is that we become a publicly traded company. There's a lot of reasons for that. The government really likes to work with public companies where they don't have to worry if they're cooking their books.
You've got all of Wall Street breathing down your neck trying to find out if you're lying to them and if they should short sell you after, of course. going on TV and telling everybody that you're a terrible company. And I think that that's a reasonable thing. It's also not really likely that we would be a good fit for any of the other defense contracts.
I mean, we're a defense product company. We use our own money to decide what to build, how to build it, when it's done, and then we sell it to the government. We are building the tools that we think are maybe not the best way to make money, but they're the best way to equip partners like Ukraine, like Taiwan, with tools that they can use on day one, day 10, day 100, day 1,000 of a potential conflict. with the expansionist dictatorships that threaten them.
And we get to make that decision because we're our own company and we're not a cost plus contractor that has to go after certain structures of contracts because it's the only way that they can make money. And so I think it's really unlikely that I'm going to sell out to somebody again. I did it before. I've generally made a policy of trying to not make the same mistake twice.