Well good afternoon Pepperdine. We are so grateful you're here. Welcome to the first installment of this academic year's President's Speaker Series. Stay tuned at the end for the announcement as to what the next one is going to be.
One of our core values as you know at Pepperdine is that truth has nothing to fear from investigation. Part of the very purpose that this university exists is to be a place that pursues intellectual freedom. A place where we relentlessly seek truth together with humility and without fear.
This idea, this relentless pursuit of truth, is at the very heart of Pepperdine and is fundamental to a free society. At Pepperdine, we talk about things that matter. We talk about big ideas. We talk about big questions.
And there is no conversation that's better to kick off the speaker series than the one we have here today with someone who's contributed to protecting freedom, not just for the United States, but for her allies as well. Today we're joined by Palmer Luckey, a visionary entrepreneur and inventor. As you know, he burst onto the scene in October in 2012 by founding Oculus VR, the company that revolutionized virtual reality. He later then founded Andreal Industries, a company that's focusing on the cutting-edge national security solutions. As a tech pioneer, as a market disruptor, As an industry reshaper, he is one of the most influential minds of our time.
Not only does he value freedom, but he invests his talents and resources into defending it. He is someone who boldly thinks, asks, and innovates. Please join me in giving a Pepperdine welcome to Palmer Luckey.
So the way this is going to go, Palmer and I are going to have a conversation for about 25 to 30 minutes, and then you are going to be sending in along the way your audience questions through the QR code on your brochure. Toward the end, we'll be having those questions asked. So welcome back to campus, Palmer. Third time on campus or more?
Oh, it depends on how you count. I guess formally coming and doing stuff, yeah, probably about three times. But, you know, my sister Roxanne went here, so I dropped her off and picked her off a lot more than three times.
Excellent, excellent. Well, we had a chance to have dinner together about a year ago and visit to my house. And then, of course, at your sister's graduation, we got a chance to catch up as well. So let's unpack your story a little bit.
Founded multiple companies. Change the face of multiple industries. Pretty impressive for what feels like some pretty humble beginnings in terms of starting off at a community college at 14 or 15, a semester or two of university when you were 17 at Long Beach State, then living in a trailer in your parents'driveway at 19. Not exactly the traditional route for a world changer 13 years later.
Tell us a little bit about your upbringing. Well, look, I think on the one hand, I think there's this common idea these days you really have to go to school for the thing that you're passionate about. And I think that that's actually less and less the case. And I've had this maybe spicy thing to say. Speak truth here.
We're good with truth. But I think that it can be very, very true when you're working on things that are inside of an established system. I think it's very hard, for example, if someone is going to try to make a difference in a highly regulated industry or in one where credentialism is everything, like let's say law. In that case, you have to be part of the system. You have to play by the rules.
But the more removed you are from the existing system, and in the case of virtual reality, there's never been a successful virtual reality company in history. And so when people say, oh, wow, that's so crazy that you would have done it outside of your university or outside of an existing company, and I point to them and say, well, what university could I have gone to to work on this? What company could I have been working on this at? In fact, it's something that only could have come from a virtual reality company.
from outside of the system. Yeah, so K through 12. Well, I was homeschooled. Homeschooled, okay. I very much kind of represent the outside the system guy. Okay, so Julie, homeschool, how was he as a student?
Two thumbs up, there we go, KFAS Learner. Obviously finished early enough to start going to community college at 14. Tell me, why journalism was the place you first put your toe in at Long Beach State? You know, it was just, it was a mistake. Okay.
It's important. I could tell you some kind of interesting story, like, you know, I thought I already knew everything I needed. to know about engineering and that going to school wasn't going to teach me the type of engineering that I was interested in, which is true to a degree, and that journalism is a broadly applicable skill, you know, and learning how to effectively communicate with others and, let's be real, persuade others to believe in your version of the truth.
It's a valuable skill. We've seen it shape the world in a way that I think is sometimes good, sometimes bad. Anyway, I recently gave an interview where they were asking me, Paul, do you still think like a journalist?
I said, oh, absolutely not. I'm a propagandist. I'll twist the truth. I'll put forward only my version of it if I think that that's going to propagandize people to be what.
You know what I need them to believe but very different for journalists where you're supposed to be objective You're supposed to be neutral. You're supposed to convey the facts I think that's I think that's what's supposed to be the case I actually would be fine with journalists who just admit their propagandists I think that would be it imagine if you went to a football game and the players Insisted that they were not football players, right? You know, they're like no no no, man Like we're just we're just here to like have some fun It's like but you're you're professional you're trying to make a particular team when you're paid millions always the measure like no no we're just here to play football. I don't even think about any of that. Like it would be bizarre, but that's actually how the press is today.
They're like, I'm just here to tell the facts. It is, it is like, I mean, come on, man, we, we, we know what's going on. No, no, no, no. It's really how it is. I don't know why anybody would want to not be a football player though.
I mean, right. Right. Wouldn't you want to be a football player? So let's, let's take you back.
Has anyone, has anyone seen interview going around on TikTok or YouTube with, I forget who's the musician where she says, I'm not a musician. And you know what I'm talking about? You guys have seen this.
And she says, I think you think I'm calling, she says, I don't do magic tricks and shit. I produce music. She says, that's why I called you a musician.
She says, I'm not no magician. Anyway, I feel like there's a lot of press out there who are actually the equivalent of saying, I'm not a musician. They're like, I'm not, I'm, I have no point of view.
Anyway, I'm still angry about this. So let's get to some facts. But I used to be on the online editor of the Daily 49er, one of the oldest student papers in the country.
So I'm allowed to be angry. It's great. Excellent. As a journalist. So let's get to some facts, not propaganda here.
So you're in your trailer with your tech bros, munching Taco Bell, fiddling with some lenses. What was the aha moment? It was like, you know what?
I think we can solve the challenge that has been troubling the VR industry that was trying and that you figured out. How did that happen? So there were kind of two things that happened. And one of them I know we've talked about before. And I think it's a valuable mentality for people to think about in whatever career they're pursuing or whatever non-career they're pursuing.
For years, I had been thinking about what the next step in display technology was and gaming technology. And... in data visualization. And so a time came where I had this pretty crazy home computer setup with six monitors all rigged into a dual graphics card AMD iFinity rig. And, oh, look at that.
I haven't thought about that one in a while. And I started to ask myself, okay, so what's next? I've got this crazy multi-monitor setup.
Is it more graphics cards? Is it more displays? And I realized, wait a sec.
This is the wrong question entirely. I shouldn't be asking what the next step is, because the next step isn't going to be that interesting, and it's, you know, just another tiny little incremental bump. What I should be asking is what the last step is. So let's think about it.
What's the last step? Well, obviously, it was apparent to me that it was going to be virtual reality. The ability to actually feel like you are inside of a totally simulated environment. To feel like you're inside of a game, rather than just observing it on a screen.
No matter how large, no matter how many... you know, how realistic it might seem, no matter how many displays you were stitching together with your iFinity rig. And that was a really, really big moment for me because that changed my thinking. I said, okay, I'm not going to work on the thing that's here, and now I'm going to work on where I think it's actually going. I'm going to try to, you know, skate to the puck instead of going after where it is now.
There's a million sports analogies that the sports fans have known for years about this, but it's not common in the tech space. Anyway, so I started doing research, not about what. the next step in VR, but what you would need to do to solve some of these fundamental problems that had plagued the industry up to that point.
Things like the headsets being very heavy, the headsets having very low field of view, having lots of latency, delay between your motion your head makes and when that's reflected on your retina. And I came up with a series of technical innovations that reduced latency, increased field of view, reduced weight, and hugely reduced the cost. I was handily outperforming $30,000, $40,000.
military-grade headsets that are used for dismounted infantry training with a device that costs less than $300. to sell. And that's because I had some, I can get into the clever ideas if you want, but probably the number one philosophy was only solve in hardware what must be solved in hardware.
Everything else solved for free in software. So for example, it doesn't make any sense to make a VR headset the traditional way where you make a wide field of view optic with many, many, many glass stages in it to achieve a wide field of view, low chromatic aberration and low geometric distortion. Instead you say, okay, field of view that I have to do in hardware.
But I'm just gonna optimize a design that has tons of chromatic aberration tons of geometric distortion a totally unacceptable amount and then run a real-time shader on my graphics card to pre distort my rendered image as the inverse function of that distortion basically Pre-distorting it so that when it goes through the second layer of distortion in the lens it then comes back to looking correct That's where I would done it right. I mean, it's it's it is pretty obvious, right? I gotta admit that was one of my one of my best ideas. Yeah.
It sounds like, and obviously someone liked it. We kept applying it across the board and what it ended up with was a headset that yes, it needed probably an extra 10 or 15% more render horsepower. But I saw that computer hardware was advancing so rapidly that 15% drain on your compute power, doing all this software correction that you just wait two or three months and you're already there.
The hardware that never changes. It's always expensive. It's always heavy.
It's always limited. And so that was, that was really the key insight. that made Oculus what it was. And that, of course, served you well later, as we'll get into with Anduril. But you had this, you solved this, you figured out how to demonstrate it, you got people interested in buying it.
And so Facebook ultimately meta was the winner. Were there others that were vying to buy this from you? There were a lot of companies that were interested in...
Oculus because we were years ahead of the competition. And it wasn't just a matter of our technology. We had really great tech, but we also had hundreds of video game developers that were developing content for our platform. We had a really great SDK that made it easy for anybody to make a virtual reality game, something that had never been done before. And it was integrated in all the major game engines to the point where all the universities were, anyone doing VR, they were doing it on Oculus.
And we had also sold hundreds of thousands of development kits to game developers. Studios around the world so it was it was a it was something that Facebook was interested in but a lot of other companies were Interested I won't put their names out there, but okay. I'll say it's It's look it's everybody you'd think but I get that the difference between The two trains Facebook now meta and the other companies was that the other companies were looking that at this They were looking at this as kind of a short-term win. All of these companies have a 10 or 15-year roadmap. Virtual reality was not on any of their roadmaps as the thing that is going to dominate their business.
And Facebook had a different pitch. It was, look, if you go to like hypothetically, if you were to get purchased by Microsoft or Google, you're going to be working in service of their existing 15-year roadmap, one that is primarily focused on web, mobile, and maintaining their current kind of duopoly dominance in the tech industry. They don't actually want to shake things up and cause a AR VR revolution to happen because they might do okay, but they're not likely to be right at the very pinnacle like they are right now.
Facebook, on the other hand, didn't have a hardware platform. They didn't have an operating system they controlled. They were in a position where, you know, shaking up the box of dice was actually likely to...
cause good things to happen for them. They might, put it another way. Let's say that Facebook didn't end up, let's say the VR revolution happens. Everyone's using VR all the time. Everyone's wearing augmented reality glasses.
If Facebook could cause that to happen, they might not be the top tech company in the world or even the second top company in the world, but they're gonna be in a much better position than their position at the time, which is. controlling none of the hardware, none of the software, totally serving at the whims of the people who did control those things. And so their bet was, if we can make this revolution happen, we're going to be better positioned, which means, therefore, that they're highly incentivized to actually make it happen. Rather, like, put it in a conspiracy way, does Microsoft really want us to shift from desktop computing to immersive computing? Is that actually good for their established many-billion-dollar business? Hard to say.
It's hard to say. So Microsoft was interested. I think we just got that.
So let me ask you this. It's worth noting, it's not even that out of the blue. We were closely partnered with Microsoft at the time. You could stream Xbox games to your Oculus at launch. We did a bunch of content partnerships as well.
So it's not like one day they knock on our door and say, hey, we're this company called Microsoft and we'd like to talk about what you're doing. People understood what we were doing. So Facebook shakes things up, they win the lottery, Is it fair to say that you thought this was the last step? You thought you were going to do VR, kind of that was your career.
Oh, I've said many times I would still be doing VR if I wouldn't have been knocked out the door a few years after getting hired. Okay, so you get knocked out the door. This pops up on Facebook yesterday, wearing some goggles that maybe somebody invented up there at Meta.
People are wondering... Is there a story behind this? Look, all the people who orchestrated my... my, my ouster aren't, they're not, they're not at Meta anymore. You know, it's, it's one of, it's one of those things where, uh, you know, I'm, I'm still extremely, I'm still extremely bitter about it, but, but no, oh man, no, you've noticed anyone who's ever, ever talked to me even once has noticed.
Um, but, but, but you have to recognize at some point, you know, Meta is a very different company. It's, we're talking about something that happened eight years ago. Um, you know, they, they, they've, they've changed a lot of their own policies.
They've changed the, they've changed a lot of the composition of the workforce. And so at some point, you have to deal with things as they are, not as they were. Amen.
So you're out of the door at Facebook, and now you've done well enough. Google it if you want to know how well he did. But you've done well enough to not only could you move to an island, you could buy an island and just kind of do nothing for the rest of your life. But you decided, you know what? It's not what's, I'm not content.
What are some of the things that you considered prior to deciding to go into defense tech? What were the things that were on your mind as possibilities? Well, I got to say, first of all, that the common thing about people who dream about making it big and then doing, you know, the Island retirement thing and never doing anything again. Very, very rare for those people to get the Island.
Um, it's, it's one of those like horrible twists of fate that the, the, the, the mentality that you need to get that amount of money and to, and to grind through what it takes to build a business that'll get you there, uh, doesn't allow you to stop working and it doesn't allow you to relax. I don't know anybody outside. There's people will point to like Hollywood because it's highly visible.
You got to remember, like you. you got to look at those people sort of like lottery winners. I'm not saying that they're not talented, but it's very different from the reality of 99% of people who managed to make enough money to buy an Island.
I think we're, we're all cursed, you know, like, like the crew of the black Pearl and pirates, the Caribbean, like we're, we're cursed to walk this planet for eternity ever in search of more gold. It's just, it's just, it's just, it's just the way that it's just, it's just, it's just the way that I see it. Sorry. What was the second part of the question?
I got this. Well, what were things you considered? Well, what are the areas? right, right. Well, Well, you know what?
I mean, look, I, I didn't, I didn't even consider retiring because I, well, for, for two reasons. One, uh, a lot of people who start a unicorn company worth over a billion dollars and then, and then leave, they leave because they want to spend more time with their families for a little bit, or, you know, they, they, they get bored very quickly. They get more bored in retirement.
They start something new. I was cut down in my prime. I was running, I was running, you know, I was running a major VR division at a major company doing exactly what I loved.
And then I was and then I was tossed out the door. And so I wanted to do something that mattered for a few reasons. One, because I didn't want to spend my time on something meaningless.
Two, because I was really out to prove that I was somebody, that I was not a one-hit wonder, and that all the people who thought that I was were going to look like idiots. And that last one was really important to me. And so there were a few things that I was looking at.
I was looking at trying to start a chain of nonprofit private prisons. That would compete with existing private prisons using a totally different business model, basically offering to house prisoners for free and then only getting paid after they were released and stayed out of prison for five years. The idea being that I could win a bunch of contracts and get rid of a lot of the incentives to have people just returning over and over again, which is what the private prison companies want. They don't actually want real criminals. They want people who know how the system works, who will just sit quietly in the cell and go through their time and get their bed paid for.
Um... Which is not what I think incarceration should be for. So kick around some various ideas.
I wanted to start, I also looked at solving obesity with petroleum-derived synthetic food products. This left-handed sugar we talked about last time. Left-handed sugar is, it was a big part of that. Google it, left-handed sugar.
I had never heard of it. It's fascinating. If anyone can execute on large-scale manufacturing of left-handed sugars, whether it's dextrose, sucrose, fructose, any of them, you're going to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
It is an ex- extraordinary opening for someone in biotech to figure out. Now, the problem is you're going to have to build the first biological organism on the entire planet to consume left-handed sugar structures. Nothing's ever done it on the planet.
There's no reason it couldn't. It's just that we don't have any biological examples to pull from. Anyway, look, you can effectively make something that is the molecular twin. the mirror copy of sugar where mechanically it is sugar and it crusts like sugar and it cooks like sugar and it bakes like sugar and it even binds to your taste receptors like sugar. It is for all intents and purposes sugar, except you cannot metabolize it.
Nothing can metabolize it, but that also means nothing can make it. And so all the synthesis is very, very expensive and purely artificial right now. If you could make sugar cane that was left-handed, you'd be worth it. A lot of money. It'd be a total game changer.
Zero calorie, zero health impact, sugar, frosting, soda, all of it. There we go. Well, it sounds good to me. Sign me up. I'll be the first consumer for anybody who figures that out.
Someone's going to figure it out within our lifespan. The technologies are coming together on that, but it's not what I'm going to do. I'm going to do... And then, you know, finally, what I decided to do was work on national security.
That was what I thought was... So on the balance, the best use of my talent. So now now you decided national security and you're coming up with a company kind of defense tech and you're looking for a name.
And so I'm going to read a passage that may give a little bit of insight into to how this came about. This is a a box set of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Page 277. So the background is we've had a sword that was destroyed when it killed the bad guy. The bad guy's back.
The sword's being reforged. And here we go. Very bright was that sword when it was made whole again.
The light of the sun shone redly on it. And the light of the moon shone cold. And its edge was hard and keen.
And Aragorn gave it a new name. And he called it... Anduril.
Anduril, Flame of the West. So that's, I assume that's how the name came about. Tell us a little bit more. Why that name?
Well, there's a whole bunch of angles to this. I mean, you know, it's, and Anduril is reformed. from the shards of Narsil, the sword that was broken.
And I think that a lot of what we're trying to do was not just build a new company, but rebuild what we used to have in this country in terms of a national security capability that took our best and brightest and put them to work on some of the most important national security challenges. The reason I started Anduril is because I perceived that we were running a very dangerous experiment in this country. We were, for the first time, completely divorcing our most innovative technology companies. from the Department of Defense.
That's never happened in history. And that was because they were, well, there were cultural reasons, ideological reasons, but mostly it came down to money and a desire to cater to the Chinese market. You can imagine how the Cold War would have gone if our most innovative tech companies had hedged their bets because they thought that Soviet Russia was going to be a really big part of their...
of their revenue profile. You can imagine how World War II would have gone if our most innovative technology companies had said, well, we don't really want to get involved with national security. I think Imperial Japan is going to be a massive revenue opportunity for our investors in the next two quarters. I mean, but this is how it was going with China.
And so I wanted to be clear, you know, we're not just starting a company. We're trying to return to that tradition. We're taking the sword that was broken, this thing that used to work in this company or in this country, and we're going to do it here.
The other reason that I think it really spoke to me and a lot of the other co-founders, we're all nerdy dudes, and we all love Lord of the Rings, but also this idea of the flame of the West, this sword that is inherently good, that fights for good, is wielded only by the kingdom of man against the horde, the hordes of Mordor. And specifically a sword that is inherently... inherently created and wielded to fight evil, specifically. I wanted to be clear, we're not just a neutral company. We're not here to say, oh, we're just here to make money.
We're just here to make something for everyone. We are taking sides. We are going to fight for the things that our country values, that our allies around the world have in common. Ignore the things that maybe we don't. But for the most part, there's enough commonality between Western allies of the United States that we can agree.
yeah, okay, we're going to be building things for good, for the kingdom of man, to fight against the hordes of Mordor. And there's actually one other bit, which was a quote from the book. Someone said, they love the blade not for the brightness of the blade or the keenness of the edge, only for that which it protects. And I think that there's a lesson there, an aspirational lesson, you know, kind of like it's one of those ones where you know it's true, but you You're told to turn the other cheek, but actually you don't. That's kind of how I see it.
It's an aspirational idea that when you're building a defense company, you're not building weapons because the weapons are cool, because the blade is bright, or for the keenness of the edge. You're doing it really for that which it protects. And I remind my employees of that all the time. We're not just trying to build cool stuff. The stuff is cool, but we're doing it for a greater purpose.
And we need to always remember that. Now, at the same time, the reality is that it is, you know, the... the blades are bright and the edges are keen. And that's how you get people to want to work on stuff.
You can't get people to work on things if you run your office like a funeral home every day. And so when people are like, oh, but isn't it terrible to celebrate the power of weapons? And I say, you know what?
Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims. And I think that it's reasonable for the philosophers to degrade those people and whine about how they're sick in the head. But society needs them.
And even if I'm sick in the head, we need people who are willing to fight for our country, and I'm not doing that directly. My life's not on the line. But you need people like me who are sick in that way and who don't lose any sleep making tools of violence. In order to preserve freedom. That's right.
And I think that there's a lot of people who cannot handle that. And I think that's totally fine. I have no...
beef with people who say, oh, I could never, I could never do that. I would just be, I'd be so guilty every night knowing that even bad people are facing the ultimate punishment for their crimes. I say, well, you know, it's, it's, it's a good thing that we've got to mix in society. Specialization of labor is what built America. We don't, we don't all need to do the same things.
We don't need to all think the same way. And, uh, you know, the, the, the pacifists exist on the sacrifices of the people who actually put their lives on the line. And I think that we should respect that, even if we're not willing to do it ourselves. One of the things that you said in a prior interview struck me that war only happens when there's a disagreement as to what the outcome would be. That's right.
So unpack that more, and I think that's an important point to make. With rare exception, and I'll say the modern times have seen some of the greatest exceptions to this. So typically, warfare between nation states only starts when one or both sides Misunderstand who is going to win the conflict.
If both sides understand who's going to win, it's very rare for things to proceed to violence because the weaker nation, knowing full well that they are going to lose, typically says, okay, I'm going to capitulate. I'm going to give you what you want. And that's why, by the way, it's important to have peace through strength. But ignoring that whole side of it, it's typically when both sides think that they are going to be able to come out on top that a war starts.
That is the most dangerous situation, and that's why it's so important to not be evenly matched with your enemy. Evenly matching your enemy is what leads to the most dangerous form of conflict. It would be better for us to be completely at our enemy's mercy, or to be vastly stronger to them, in an overwhelming way where they are fully aware that they cannot win. Now, where this falls apart is where you have enemies who have irrational aims.
You have jihadists who know full well they are going to die, Everyone that they're fighting with is going to die, but they think that on the other side It's all going to be worth it And it's very very hard to engage in in in game theory with people who pursue the non game theory optimal strategy But it is possible to Diminish the effect it's like playing Monopoly with the person who's going to drop out and give all their money to somebody else like that's That's what it's like to fight some of these irrational Actors, I think this especially you've seen in the Middle East over the last few decades. They're not gonna win They're just gonna screw it up for everybody else, right? So so you're creating these systems and let's go a little bit deeper into what you've created this lattice system that allows for just An AI, and by the way, Anduril Industries AI, not an accident.
And so you've got this VR, this Lattice AI thing that you can control a lot of things that will stop attacks. Yep. And will deter attacks to preserve peace and freedom.
Tell us a little bit more about how Lattice works. So Lattice is the AI engine that powers every single Anduril product. It is the common piece of software where every dollar I put into making Lattice AI better. I'm making all of my products better. And every dollar that I put into it gets multiplied, the effects across my dozens of products, rather than being tied into one piece of hardware.
I'm a hardware guy at heart. But getting back to the Oculus philosophy, you should only do things in hardware that need be done in hardware. Software can be manufactured infinitely for free.
The replication cost is zero. And so upfront investment makes a lot of sense. When we started Andral in 2017, AI was not cool.
It was not hip and it was not easy to raise money for. It was hard to raise money for a weapons company in general, but AI in particular, there was a lot of this sense that it was this fool's errand that was not actually going to pan out. But I was once again saying, what's the last step? I don't care what the next step in building new missiles or attack helicopters or ships is. Where's this all going in the end?
And the answer was obviously huge numbers of systems, massive numbers of low cost, attritable systems. And the only way to make that work Is autonomy. We don't have an infinite supply of people to put in these things, nor should we want to put that many lives on the line.
And so it was kind of a foregone conclusion. It wasn't that I wanted to start an AI company, it was that I had no choice. In order to work on the last step, now, I had to start working on AI then. And of course now it's the Palmer Lucky I Told You So Tour. Everyone agrees that AI is important.
Everyone agrees that it's going to work. And I say, yeah, I know, I know, I know, I know. But I have some good dinners with my... Original investors, and I say, hey, remember when you said that maybe AI was a dumb idea, even though you believed in the weapons stuff? Like, yeah, yeah, Palmer, we've heard this a lot of times now.
Yeah, yeah. So original investors had to, first of all, invest in you, but they also had to invest in your ability to overcome what was otherwise a fairly closed system of defense contract. Hugely insular.
The free enterprise was just not alive and well. Tell us a little bit about what that was and how you've been able to get through it, the cost plus manufacturing. Well, if you want to read my full bit on this, you can go to rebootingthearsenal.com. I've written a huge manifesto about this, and in fact, there's an audiobook version narrated by me. And so you could listen to that on your way home if you want, but here's the very short version.
We've seen massive consolidation and massive distortion in the defense industry since the end of the Cold War. You have about 80% of the major weapons contracts going to just five companies. 30% of major weapons contracts have a single... Meaning only one company even shows up to even try to deliver.
And that has led to gross inefficiencies, massive centralization, duplicating work that's been done a thousand times before, and almost no examples of proactive investment on the part of the industry in order to try and do the right things. Most of these people are working on cost plus contracts where they get paid for time, materials, and then a fixed percentage of profit on top. That means that they make more money.
when things take longer. They make more money when the schedule slips. They make more money when the parts are more expensive. And so what can you expect in a system with those kinds of incentives? You can only expect what you incentivize.
Longer schedules, more expensive systems that are more complicated and break more often, and zero investment of your own dollars into fixing the problems or building products from scratch. So I like to say that Anduril is a defense product company, not a defense contractor. Because we work a lot like a lot of other technology companies do.
We use our own money to decide what to build, how to build it, when it's done, and then we sell the product to our customer. And that's what we've done in many cases, building things that the government didn't believe were possible, never would have even been willing to try funding anyone else to build, and now we're defending bases all over the world, U.S. bases, allied bases, building a lot of offensive and defensive weapon systems that are of critical importance. So you went to Ukraine when the war broke out. Tell us why you decided to go in person. What you saw and how it affected you?
So I was a little bit of a late, I didn't go until a few months after the war started, so I missed the main offensive on Kiev. But we've had people and weapons in Ukraine since the second week of the war. we move pretty fast there.
Look, there's a lot of angles that I could take with this. I've actually met Zelensky before the war started. Back in 2019, he read an article about us in Wired magazine and wanted to know if we could get him a lot. lot of our border security technology to use on their eastern border and unfortunately the state department wasn't really wasn't really keen on ukraine at that at that point in time um i think i think it could have made a material difference in the in the first few hours of the war uh but well let me just interrupt for just a second if zelinsky had lattice if he had and it was known what he had and had these could that have prevented russia from even going in no i don't think i think we could have made a material difference in the outcome.
And I think that you might have seen this war. Look, if we were able to provide real-time intelligence with targeting grade tracks of all of Russia's most critical weapons systems to Ukraine in those early days before their air force was eliminated, before their long-range precision fires were exhausted, I think that could have made a really big difference. But the war would have started for a lot of reasons. Remember, first of all, Putin hugely Misestimated the outcome of this war whether you whether you think he's smart or dumb for doing it It isn't going the way that he thought they really believed that this was going to be a three to seven day special operation They were gonna go in they were gonna kick Ukraine's ass They were gonna take Kiev and it was all gonna be over and one of the reasons he was actually wrong is even just graft Within his own system They had lots of like missing night vision Missing tires missing fuel reserves because it all been sold out from under him and then the paperwork falsified He didn't even understand his own strength. And he also misunderstood where Ukraine was.
But look, when I was, I've heard people say, oh, that's just what Putin says. He never really thought this was a seven-day war. That's just what he said to, you know, get the populace on board.
I think he truly believed it. One of the things that I saw when I was in Ukraine was some of these burned out vehicles and actually a crashed Ka-52 attack helicopter sitting on a runway that was shot down by the equivalent of a National Guardsman. they showed me the picture. He's wearing a polo shirt and slacks, firing a missile at this helicopter landing on his company's property, and they blew it out of the sky.
But one of the interesting things is whether they're talking about the armed crews in these armored vehicles or the attack helicopter pilots, most of them only had about three or four days of clothing and enough food for three or four days. They really thought they were going to go in, get this done, and they were going to get resupplied because they were going to have all the airports within a few days. In the Ka-52 helicopter, you know what the guy had in his bag?
He had a couple days of clothes, a few days of food, and 50 condoms. Because that's what he thought he was going to need in the wake of winning this conflict. He's not around anymore, but I mean, it's... He... He's an optimistic guy there.
Look, but if you... But you got to remember that this is a pretty smart guy for the Russian armed forces. You know, like a Kha-52 helicopter, this is a post-Soviet system. So this is a stealth, all-composite attack helicopter, very, very advanced, developed after the fall of the Soviet Union. The people who fly it are actually pretty intelligent.
But he had fallen for the propaganda that was so pervasive in Russian culture and in their state media. They had pushed this idea that the Ukrainians wanted the invasion, that they were controlled by... the Jewish cabal, the West that actually secretly ruled through Zelensky, and that if only they would go in and decapitate the head of the Zionist beast, that all of the people of Ukraine would thank them. They thought there'd be parade. Like this guy, he brought a few days of normal clothes and then his really nice dress uniform.
They thought they were going to be having parades. They thought the women were going to be all over them. They were going to say, thank you so much, Ka-52 pilot.
You saved us from the Jews. Well, this goes back to your point earlier about the effectiveness of propaganda and the willingness of the public to believe. And so you've got all of these additional products, but there's...
Well, it's the most valuable weapon that Russia had. I've always said it's not any one weapon system. It's the ability to control what even their intelligent populace believes, because that's how you get people who are otherwise intelligent to do things they would otherwise never do.
It's actually, I think, China's most... powerful weapon as well. When they invade Taiwan, they are not going to convince millions of people to die for that cause by telling them the truth. They're going to tell them some crazy version of, you know, Taiwan is effectively ruled by the United States. It's a total proxy state.
Your brothers and sisters want to be reunified with China. We want to achieve the heavenly mandate. It'll be the first time China's been reunified as a whole in 3,000 years. And you're going to...
fight to fight for the freedom of your brothers and sisters trapped under Western imperialist rule and of course they don't mention that Taiwan has much higher standard of living than China that they have higher literacy much higher earnings much higher productivity much better relations with the rest of the world an extremely strong and flourishing democracy they did they they're gonna lie to people to get them to do what they want not tell them the truth and then they're gonna make a nice monument to the two or three million people who die in that amphibious assault and call them heroes So it's unfortunately these are things you can see coming from from now you don't have to wait for it to happen So so we've seen on the screen these these weapons that you've made these these freedom protection devices There's something that you're making now that maybe some of us could afford for Christmas and so Tell us what this mod. Oh this mod Retrochromatic is, and after this I'm going to get to an audience question or two, but tell us about what this is. And when's it going to be available for the consumer?
This is a side project I've been working on for 17 years. It's a clone of the Nintendo Game Boy Color. It's kind of the ultimate Game Boy.
So it has a magnesium aluminum alloy shell, a lab-grown sapphire crystal screen lens, a custom-made display that perfectly mimics the color balance and reproduction of the Game Boy Color. And so those are actually shipping in December. Our exclusive retail partner is GameStop, so you can order them through our website or GameStop.com, or you can try to walk into a GameStop, but I think you're going to have a hard time finding one. It's worth noting that it is not made in China.
It's manufactured in North America. which is good because Anduril and I are now sanctioned by China and Russia. And so they...
As one is. And so that was a really smart decision that I made on that front. Anyway.
Fantastic. We look forward to getting our own version or our own device. It's bundled with a new version of Tetris that we've developed with the Tetris company.
It was actually used at the Tetris World Championships just a few months ago. You guys might have seen that Logan Paul participated in the championships and did not do particularly well. Not well at all. He made a little mini documentary video about how he was preparing for months, practicing every day. And he fought hard, but you don't understand the power of these, frankly, all Asian children who are so good at Tetris.
It is... is impossible to believe until you see it live. Okay. Okay.
A couple of questions from the audience. Uh, as, as we begin the process of wrapping up, do you fear the power of AI? Why or why not? Do I fear the power of AI? I fear, I fear people using AI for bad purposes.
I think that people jump to this idea of, you know, like Terminator, Skynet, the AI is the problem. I think we are so far from that. I'm not worried about more advanced AI.
being the problem. I'm worried about dumb AI being used by evil people. There are plenty of evil things you can do.
So it's really a battle of good and evil. You need the good people to have the AI and not the bad people to have the AI. And unfortunately, it's going to be both.
We cannot opt out. Right. If we opt out, then the good people don't have it, the bad people do, and then we've got problems. Well, there's a shadow campaign being waged in the United Nations right now by many of our adversaries.
to trick Western countries that fancy themselves morally aligned into not applying AI to weapons or defense. And they use phrases that sound really good in a sound bite. Well, can't you agree that a robot should never be able to decide who lives and dies? And my point to them is, where's the moral high ground in a landmine that can't tell the difference between a school bus full of kids and a Russian tank? Is that really the point?
What's the moral victory in being forced to use larger bombs with more collateral damage because we're not allowed to use systems that can penetrate past Russian or Chinese jamming systems and strike precisely the part of the target or the system or the vehicle that needs to be hit? There's no actual moral advantage there. These ideas are being pushed not by people who want the West to succeed. It's being laundered through mostly European nations that are useful idiots.
They are so stupid that they don't understand that they're being used by people who just want to cripple all of us. Because Iran is going to have great AI. China does have great AI.
And I mean, wouldn't it be so typically, typically, I don't want to say the phrase. Wouldn't it be so typically European though? To say, oh, well, you know, I think the right thing for us to do is just be completely helpless. Because I'm sure that if we just prostate ourselves before the world, nobody will do anything to us.
I mean, it's this crazy idea. So you need the good people to have AI. You don't want the bad people to have AI, but they are going to have it.
And you asked if I'm worried about it. I'll be totally candid. AI is actually very low on my list of things I'm worried about when it comes to the world's evil.
The world's evil. I think biological weapons, chemical weapons, particularly new advancements in biotech that allow for tailored biological weapons that go after or purport to go after particular races, particular genetic lines. They don't have to be right. It doesn't have to work.
They just have to believe that that's what they've accomplished. Aren't you just full of good news? These are the things that actually terrify me. And AI is just not part of it.
Okay. One last question from the audience. And then one last question I have for you.
So we'll try and hit these in... Palmer's got an appointment. He's got to leave driving out of here in nine minutes. And so we're going to wrap up pretty quickly. But I'll try to, I'm going to get through a few questions for sure.
Okay. Okay. Who is your greatest influence and why?
Oh, that's really interesting. Let's say Howard Hughes and Walt Disney. Those guys were great. They were huge supporters of the nation. They built things on their own dime that the government didn't believe were possible.
And Walt Disney in particular did a lot of military work that people are not familiar. If you want to look it up, you should really dig into that. The Walt Disney Company. Was it the Walt Disney Corporation?
No, it's the Walt Disney Company, right? Yeah. They've really buried a lot of that, but you should look into it. He probably did more for World War II, and particularly on the victory through superior air power.
He probably did more for the war effort than any individual American. You should really look up what he... what he did for this country.
There we go. There we go. Just a follow-up. You've mentioned on prior occasions. Victory through air superiority.
Okay. You've mentioned on a few occasions that faith is an important part of you and what matters to you. Do you want to unpack that a little bit? Not in nine minutes. Not in nine minutes.
Okay. So here's the final question then about freedom. So, if you've looked around campus and you probably didn't have time when you came in, there's banners all over campus that have the word freedom on there. And that's the theme for the year. We've got an academic year theme every year.
And this year the theme is freedom. And we always have coins made. And so my first gift to you is a coin that says freedom on it.
I love it. What my question to you is, what does freedom mean to you? And how does the pursuit of freedom and the protection of freedom, how has that driven you over the course of your life?
And where do you expect it to drive you the rest of your life? Freedom is self-determination organized at whatever... Level is relevant to the conversation. You know freedom is not just your right to decide what to do for yourself It's also the right of your town to decide how to manage its affairs of your nation how to manage its affairs relative to other countries, it's the values that enable that to to go on indefinitely. I think that, obviously, people disagree on what freedom is.
I mean, this is probably too political. You probably can't get as political as I can, but I've seen people say, people have the right to be free of gun violence. They have the right to be free of lack of healthcare.
I'm like, that's not freedom. That's not self-determination. That's specifically about imposing your will on others so that you can get the outcome that you want for yourself. It's the opposite.
It's the opposite of freedom. Freedom should run downstream to have the maximum level of self-determination that is possible. So I think it is important that we define freedom in a way that doesn't just end up being one of these buzzwords like democracy, where democracy actually means not democracy for the things that I like.
It is too important of a word to allow it to become diluted in that way. And I think, unfortunately, in this country where... We're quite down.
I'll get even more political. You see Mike Waltz saying, I'm all about freedom. You should have the right to do whatever you want.
And if someone's trying to get in your business, you know what I say? What the hell business of yours is it? It's like, okay, that sounds really good, except you sent the police to go shoot paintballs at people who were sitting on their patios during COVID.
I mean, it's as easy. I'm all about freedom. You have to say it in America, right? Every politician has to say they're about freedom, even if they're the one.
that wants to put you in prison for smoking mango flavored vapes. They have to be like, I'm all for freedom. You're going to prison.
I'm all for freedom. Hey, hey, you can't use that much water. And you know what?
Mind your own damn business. I mean, it's just, oh my God, it boggles my mind. We can't. Stay away from the mango vapes, man.
Those will get you in prison. To be clear, I'm straight edge and I don't smoke or drink. I don't use alcohol or tobacco or anything else. But I very much fall into the actual mind your own damn business. side of things.
And I can't imagine actually being, you know, kind of anti-freedom statist and then saying, oh yeah, I'm a big believer in freedom. And I think we need to push back on people and say, hey, like freedom doesn't always mean getting your way, but freedom is not getting your way at the expense of other people's right to self-determine. Amen.
Amen. Well, Palmer, you are... You are and have been a great defender of American values and of freedom, specifically, not only with your words, but with your actions. G.K. Chesterton said profoundly that the true soldier fights not because he hates what's in front of him, but because he loves what's behind him.
I think that accurately describes the work that you're doing in Andrew Hill, fighting against tyranny and terrorism for the world to be free. And so that work has played a major role in defending free societies. around the world, and no doubt will continue to do so in the future. President Reagan, who has been an influential figure at Pepperdine, has said, freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. And we would all like to thank you for your immense efforts in ensuring, through unmatched innovation and defense technology, that ours is not the generation that sees freedom go extinct.
So thank you, Palmer. So I've got a few gifts for you before we go, but I saw you eyeing this box set of leather-bound Tolkien. It's very beautiful. Yes, and it is now yours.
That is great. But I'm not sure you can carry it on the motorcycle on the way back. I cannot fit that on my motorcycle, unfortunately.
But we will make sure that it gets sent to you or one of your friends carries it with you. Thank you so much. The other thing I wanted to give you is the very first ever, and let's stand up so we can have the photo here.
Very first ever. Presidential Award for Excellence in Freedom. And so what this is, is the theme tower from Pepperdine, that you can see on the front lawn of Pepperdine, that's inscribed with Palmer Luckey Presidential Award in Freedom.
So we're grateful to you for this. Thank you for spending your time with us. Thank you so much.
We're still going to go through a few questions. I went too long. This is my cross to bear. So you want to go through your questions? Yeah, we're going to do this.
How about that? Well, no, we'll clean. Okay. Love that.
I'm not, I'm not, we told... It's good to be boss. We told people that we told people we were going to do questions and I can't tell a lie.
I'm not a journalist. Okay, fantastic. Well, perhaps I went, wow, perhaps I went, I'm not either.
Perhaps I went a little bit long on my questions. Okay, so here's one. Would you ever consider an IPO for Anduril? Yes, that is our current plan. So, and...
Yeah, no, we're going to do it. There's a lot of reasons for this. Without getting into the specifics of it, there's a lot of ways that you can drive a company like Anderle.
I think in the long run, being publicly traded does lead you to be aligned with the American public in a lot of ways. And the reality for political reasons, practical reasons, financial reasons, a privately traded company is never going to win something like the... trillion dollar joint strike fighter effort.
It's just not going to happen. Congress won't allow it to happen. And then people say, well, couldn't you be acquired? And I think I just point to how that went for me last time. Not well.
As someone who has disrupted both the VR and defense industries, what do you see as the next frontier for technological innovation? And how can entrepreneurs identify opportunities in these high stake fields? Besides left-handed sugar. Look, biotech in general is a really interesting field, particularly the application of new technologies like artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing to biotechnology. I think energy is a really fascinating space.
I think that unfortunately a lot of the money to be made is on government welfare, but there's a lot of government welfare to be had. And so I think that a lot of money is going to be made and there's going to be some good stuff that comes out of it. So there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in energy, particularly the fact that nuclear energy appears to be legal to pursue and has a regulatory pathway to success for new companies is pretty extraordinary. We haven't had that for decades. And so there's a lot of ideas from the 50s and 60s that you can just go bring back to today and they actually make a ton of sense.
And then, of course, I know this is biased, but I think defense. I think that there is a strong need for companies to tackle. Problems in the national security space and and roll is not going to do all of it We're not going to do this alone There's there there are there are plenty of problems to be solved but you are you are launching things into space now We just that was in the papers today.
We know we told you we just signed a new major contract with the US Space Force You know, we're doing things in every domain air space So those are loons. Is that you? The balloons that are floating across the U.S.? Oh, no, no, that's not me.
That's not me. No, we help find the balloons and destroy them. Would you be able to tell us if it was you?
Yeah, I'd be able to tell you. Okay, okay. I'd be able to tell you.
I would tell you if they were my balloons. Okay. What advice would you have for a Pepperdine new graduate trying to break into the defense industry?
P.S., I'd love to work for Anduril. One of you. If you're trying to break into the defense industry, I'd say probably I can give you better advice as to what not to do. There's a lot of paths into the defense industry.
I probably would not go to work for a prime. A lot of people think that they'll get experience. The reality is these existing companies are so stratified and so siloed that anything you learn about how to operate in a company like that is going to be so hyper-specific, rather than the more generalized knowledge you need to operate, not just in a startup, but just in a generally regular sort of business. I would say if you end up, for example, on a proposals and captures team, learning specifically how to best write the intro paragraphs of a certain type of proposal for a particular branch of the military, you could do a whole career just doing that. And the government's going to pay you because cost plus contracts often actually pay you.
for the time you spend making the proposal. I'm not kidding. The money you spend-So you make that paragraph really good.
Oh, and you better have a whole team of people. And of course that's what we have to do for the country. I mean, it's just like, the point is I would encourage you if you wanna work in the defense space whether you start your career in defense or start out somewhere else, work in a place where you will learn a variety of generally applicable skills that are applicable to- kind of the real world outside of the currently highly distorted defense industrial base. Excellent. Okay, well, we'll do one more question and then we'll close for the day.
Can you use classic Game Boy cartridges for the chromatic? If not, will you create a color adapter? I have no idea what this means. It is fully compatible with all Game Boy Color games. And all of the, actually, original Game Boy titles as well.
It's backwards compatible, but also in addition so all of the games that we are making so we're doing some new games We're re-releasing games from the 90s and early 2000s and we're even launching some games that were developed back then But then never released for various reasons So there's some brand new never-before-released stuff from major major game developers that they never actually put out there and all of the Every every game on chromatic is inherently at its core a Game Boy architecture title. So you can even take those games and put them into an original Game Boy and play them on the original hardware as well. It is a perfect clone in that sense.
It is a full hardware reproduction, gate for gate, logic for logic. Oh, fantastic. Well, let's thank Palmer one more time. Well, if you've enjoyed today's experience, mark your calendar, October 31st, yes, Halloween, starting at four, we'll be done by five. Our next presidential speaker series is a conversation, debate, dialogue between Governor Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma and our own Rick Caruso, who LA Times is calling a strong candidate for governor in 2026. Right before the election happens.
discussing the difficult issues with people on different sides of the aisle. Come back for us and join us together. God bless you all. Thank you. Have a good evening.