Palmer Luckey talks AI, war and Anduril on The Axios Show | Full Interview

Anduril's culture and effectiveness

00:00- Palmer Luckey, good to see you again, and welcome to the "Axios Show." - Thank you for having us on. - Thank you for having us on. - You are the founder and figurehead of Anduril Industries, among the splashiest, fastest growing, most pro-autonomy and polarizing defense contractors on the planet, I would hazard? - Wow, seven descriptors. - Yes, I'm big on adjectives. You have your haters and you have your hot takes, so I would like to lean into both if you're game. - I am always game to lean into the things that make me polarizing. - Fantastic. Describe for me Anduril in one sentence, one quick sentence. Anduril is a defense product company that spends its own money designing, developing, and shipping tools

00:39that will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year as we make tens of billions of dollars a year, someday. - Someday. - We're not there yet. - Describe to me the culture in one word.

00:54- Effective. - Why? - Almost everything that we have here is oriented around what type of competence will lead to actually delivering things that actually work with the customer on a timeline that is relevant. So you're balancing, I could say, "Oh yeah, we're focused on affordability, or we're focused or we're focused on timelines." But the the reality is all of these things interplay with each other. They're often opposed with each other. And it really just comes down to, we need to build tools that are effective. And sometimes something needs to come now rather than later to be effective. Sometimes it needs to be higher capability to be effective or not. Sometimes, if it's not cheap enough to buy in scale that matters,

01:30then it's not effective. So I would say we have a pretty strong culture here. We're about 20% veterans here. People are very close to the customers. They're very close to the deployments, and they understand, I think, a lot better than a lot of other companies, how the military is truly using our tools. We have people who are forward deployed. We have people who are overseas in the Middle East right now. We've had people who are in Ukraine since the second week of the war. And so I think we have a very good understanding of what it takes to be effective with our customers. And if we don't, we develop it. If we go and we learn that we are screwing it up, we put our own resources into fixing it.

02:05Look, you gave me one word. - Yeah. So if I'm gonna pick this one word, I'd say the culture is around being effective, even when sometimes it is not, for example, fiscally disciplined or when it is not responsible or it's a different question. - To zoom out on effective, where in the world have you been effective? Is that Ukraine with drones? Is that Australia with Ghost Shark? Is that the Middle East? - So we've been effective in, we've been effective in a lot of places. And, of course, we've had bouts where it was ineffective. You know, like I'd say we've been very effective in the Middle East right now. We've also had challenges in the past, and then we've surged resources to get that fixed,

Competing with defense primes

02:49which is one of the reasons that things are working now. But I think we've been effective in Ukraine. Australia, we're really just beginning to deliver there, right? We've built a factory there. We've hired a large team there. We've developed this Ghost Shark program with them building robotic submarines at a very large scale, very quickly. We delivered the first submarine a year ahead of schedule. I don't know if I would say that's like effective yet, because Australia's not fighting anybody right now. And I think they hope to keep it that way. So it's hard to prove, but I think Ukraine, Taiwan, certainly the United States, we've proven that we are effective a number of times. - What do you have in operation

03:25in the Middle East right now? - That is like the one question I probably can't answer in detail. I can say, of course, we are involved. Of course, we work with a lot of the customers that are on footprints all over the Middle East.

03:41Let's do a recap after things settle down. And I think that would be a fun time to go through, you know, and then say, "Hey, here's what we did. Here's what worked. Here's what didn't. Here's new stuff that came up we didn't expect. Here's things that we were perfectly prepared for.' I'm happy to sit down and do that. - Fantastic. - But I think right now is not the time. - I'll hold you to that. Your competition in the defense contracting world includes the entrenched primes, the Lockheeds, - Sure. - The Northrops, the Boeings. If I'm a Pentagon buyer, why do I buy Anduril versus those guys? - So it depends on what you're doing. But, in general, the sense that a lot of people have in the Pentagon

04:16is that Anduril is a company that is going to move very, very quickly. We're gonna bring a lot of our own resources to bear on the project, and that even when programs have run into political problems, because we're willing to spend our own money as a product company continuing to keep things going, there's a number of programs that have survived political breaks that would've killed a lot of traditional cost-plus programs. And so I think a lot of the people in the program offices in the Pentagon that are making decisions, whether they're selecting Anduril or, let's say, keeping Anduril in the mix. You know, it's not always, "We're gonna award to Anduril," it's we're gonna select two or three companies

04:48to work on this. I think the reason we stay in that basket is they know that we'll move quickly. They know we'll put our own money in. They know that even when we run into political challenges, we're not gonna do a stop-work order. We're not gonna just shut down our lines. We're gonna keep moving and hope that we come out the other side. You know, remember the scene at the end of, you know, "Return of the Jedi," where you have the Millennium Falcon, you know, it's coming out of the exploding Death Star, and it barely comes out at the very end with fire following it the whole way. We've had a number of programs that the Department understands went just like that. And we are the company that comes out of the fire,

05:22like the Millennium Falcon. And a lot of the other companies are the ones that are consumed by the fire. And I think that's the difference between us. - Who is emerging as influential at the Pentagon? When they call you, you pick up. Is that Pete Hegseth? Is that Steve Feinberg? Is that someone else? If Steve wants to talk to me, I talk with him. If Emil wants to talk with me, I talk with him. If Hegseth calls me, I talk to him. I have actually myself- - Have they all called you? - Let me think about that. I mean, maybe this is too much to talk about publicly, but I don't think they'll mind. I've, of course, met and had meetings with all of them. In terms of an actual phone call from them, I've had calls from Pete.

Relationships with Pentagon leaders

06:03I've had calls from Emil. I have not yet had a call out of the blue from Steve, but, look, these guys, I don't know if I would say they're, like, emerging as influential so much as they were appointed into these extremely influential roles. And so, of course, of course they're influential. They're the ones who are tasked with making these decisions. From what I understand, they're running this whole organization a little differently than people have run in the past. It's not just me getting the call, I guess would be my point. - Yeah. - I think that they're calling up lots of other people. And by the way, the calls are not necessarily, "Hey, I've got good news for you." There's also a lot of, "Hey, you need

06:40to fix your shit on X, Y, and Z. - Like the RTX tweet we saw from the President. I think that that is exactly how this whole department is being run right now. Like that's the president doing it in public. - By Twitter or by? - That's the president doing it in public. But I think that you have a lot of this pressure from the department as well. They're learning that the best way to fix these problems is to be very, very honest and open about it and not filter it through, you know, let's say, a program review that comes out months later that concludes with like, "Performance unsatisfactory." You want to put pressure on people early enough that they can actually course correct and adapt. And so I very much appreciate all of this.

07:18To be honest, even talking with my, I wanna say competitors, but remember we also collaborate with companies like Raytheon and Northrop and Lockheed. In fact, we're teamed up on certain programs. So I guess my colleagues. In my conversations with my colleagues there, they actually appreciate this as well. They probably don't like being slammed in the press, you know, or on Truth Social, but they do appreciate the early feedback from senior leaders on what they're getting wrong and what they're getting right, because they have the ability to course correct. - You, Alex Karp at Palantir, Elon Musk, you all have a distinct style, a distinct tact. And you have said, you've described it in the past as a bit of a caricature.

Style, marketing and recruiting

07:58Do you need to be a bit of a caricature to run a successful defense company these days? - No. No. Some of the most successful defense companies I know are run by very competent operators. They're the most straight-laced guys you've ever seen. If you set us side by side, we'd look like a Japanese comedy duo, the straight man and the funny man playing off of each other. I don't think you need to be a larger-than-life character. I think that what you see is the larger-than-life characters are the ones that get the retweets or the Re-Truths. (chuckles) And the straight players typically don't. But that's also not what makes a company successful. I know a lot of people who are, they don't maybe get as many likes as I get

08:39on Twitter, now X, but they are still running very effective defense companies. - Is that also a measure of public affairs and messaging and kind of marketing? - I would say marketing to our customers is mostly in terms of the quality of our products. A lot of it is G to G, government-to-government interactions. Like the best thing I have for sales and marketing is someone telling somebody else, this is how this Anduril system worked. They were able to move super fast, and they got this problem, or China came outta nowhere with this crazy new capability that we saw that Russia now has and they were able to fix it, push an update in the field, 'cause that's really good. To be honest, the marketing that you get, that you see like on Twitter,

09:18it's primarily a recruiting engine. Like I'm not marketing to necessarily the guy who's buying my system. Like he's not the one who's, you know, checking out the hot takes. But for recruiting, it's helpful. Like Anduril being out there and having a position, for example, on who should have the final call on how to use autonomous weapons or being out there and having an opinion on what good manufacturing looks like, we are attracting the right people, and, I think, repelling the wrong people. Our company probably wouldn't have gotten a lot of our best talent if we weren't out there in that way. - Do you think your bluntness comes across as rude or off-putting? - I think to certain people it definitely does.

09:58- Who are those people? What are they like? - Ordinary people who, you know, there's people that you'll just like vibe with and you'll get along with really well. And maybe with certain friends you're very, very blunt. And then people who like that bluntness are more likely to become your friends. I think that that's kind of how it works. Like, I wouldn't say that people who don't like bluntness are bad people. Like I'll just give you a straight answer. The Japanese. The Japanese do not value the same cultural things that the United States does. And so I have to admit,

10:39I normally am myself. - Yeah. - And I normally do not like to try to be somebody else. But if you're in Japan, you do need to realize that there are different cultural norms and you need to interact in a different cultural context. I learned that not at Anduril, but at Oculus, where we worked with lots of Japanese video game developers, lots of video game publishers. You cannot go in and be, like, if you think I'm a caricature of an American technology entrepreneur, Imagine how that looks on their end. It's not just like a caricature, it's like a surrealist comedy. - Do you have to tone it down when you're trying to sell to the Japanese military, for example? - Yes, yes. You know, like, here, shake by hand.

11:19No, no, no. Too strong. - Oh. - There we go. (host chuckling) That's like a good Japanese handshake. It's just a different cultural context. And so you have to adjust to meet them where they are. And interestingly enough, they try to meet us in the middle too, you know? They think they're coming in and they'll have the meeting that, for them, is, you know, the craziest meeting ever. And for a typical American company, it's a lot less. - What's the most badass thing Anduril has built? - I'm supposed to love all my children equally. - Everyone has a favorite child. - Everyone, everyone. It's true. The science bears it out. I think the coolest thing, you know, there's a bit of recency bias here,

Fury and the Air Force decision

11:59but I think that the coolest thing that we've built in my mind right now is Fury, which is the FQ-44. It's an autonomous fighter jet for the United States Air Force. You know, we were competing with a lot of the big guys. And to go toe to toe with them and then get selected by the Air Force to deliver these prototypes to them was just the coolest thing ever. Because I don't wanna put down the other things that we built, like I have a lot of other favorites that I really like. I love Roadrunner and I love EagleEye, our heads-up display systems. And I love our robotic submarines, and I love Ghost, and I love some other things I can't talk about. Only about half of our products are public, which is another thing that makes this difficult.

12:36But Fury was one where we went toe-to-toe with the big guys for their bread and butter, not like a side thing that they're not interested in, and we won. And that, to me, was very gratifying, for me, for the team working on the product, for all the other teams building mission systems and support stuff that went on the product, the people building the buildings that are being used to build the product. I think that that is one that everyone's still riding a bit of an emotional high on. - What if the Air Force picks General Atomics, what happens to Anduril? - What happens? I mean, we'll be fine. When you run a company like this, the way to think of it is like flipping coins. If you have one coin flip that your whole company rides on,

13:19it's very high stress environment. Like if it goes tails and we self-destruct, that's really bad. In the early days, when Anduril had two products, that was how we felt. And by the way, of our first two hardware products, one came up ahead, the Anduril Sentry Tower, and the other came down a tails, the Anduril Sentry Tank, which was a firefighting vehicle, both powered by Lattice, both powered by the same AI brain. And if we would've had two tails there, I mean, that, that would've been it, right? Maybe not. Maybe I would've been able to raise more money and try again. But it's not- - You have been raising a lot of money. - We have, but this was eight and a half years ago. Defense wasn't hot.

13:52In fact, it was very unpopular. I had to twist arms and pull favors to get a lot of my Oculus investors to invest in me, some of them because they believed in what we were doing, others, honestly, as a favor to me, or maybe even a little bit of what people would consider extortion, you know, a little bit of, "Hey, if you don't invest in me and we are successful, I'm gonna tell everybody that you're the only Oculus investor who didn't come back to invest in my company. I thought you guys believed in people, not companies. How many billions of dollars did we make you again? How many billions?" And the point is, in the early days we were flipping a couple coins. We now have a lot of coins. If Fury goes on tails,

14:32the FQ-44, we will be okay. We've got a lot of other things we're working on. We've got a lot of other capacity. If you had to ask me and if I'm a betting man, and I guess I am, I would say that I think the Air Force is going to probably want to have more than one company making autonomous fighter jets for them. I think, again, you know, again, I can't speak for the Air Force. It's just me, the guy, you know, from the peanut gallery. I think that it's very likely that they would carry General Atomics and Anduril, if not more, into production, so that they can continuously compete us against each other. Why give a monopoly to somebody on something if you're able to have them continuously at each other's throats

15:09for margins, for performance, for upgrades. If I were president of the United States, I'd wanna have parallel source and dual source minimum on everything that I'm doing, because now you get the power of the American free markets, of the capital markets basically just running at each other continuously across every problem that DoD is doing. I would love to have multiple vendors of nuclear submarines, multiple vendors of aircraft carriers. And I want to leverage private capital so that eventually you might have as much private capital going into these problems as public capital taxpayer dollars. - What won't you build? What's your red line? - What wouldn't I build? That's an interesting one. Well, you know, I've been pretty public

Red lines: what Anduril won't build

15:48that how our weapons are used are, you know, that's a matter for the DoD. But you're right, I have control over what I can build. There's things that I could say, for example, you know, that's a power too great for any man. - Nuclear weapons. - I would definitely build nuclear weapons. I would build fission weapons. I would build fusion weapons. I think that nuclear weapons have been one of the most stabilizing forces in history ever. Now, granted, we're only about half a century into that experiment, so there's time for me to be wrong. But we've seen, I think, really large-scale, true, like total war seems off the table between superpowers. That's incredible. It's never been like that in history

16:24where total war is off the table. So fission weapons, fusion weapons, absolutely I would build them. I would probably not build, I would not build biological weapons. - Chemical weapons? - Chemical weapons I would build, but in a very specific vertical. And this is a very controversial thing, and please don't clip, "Yes, I would build chemical weapons," and put it on the Axios- - In future defense. (chuckling) - So I wanna be very, very specific about this. And so if you guys post it, you know, please include this as well. I'll give you an example. Pepper spray is illegal for most non-military police units to use in the military. So like certain MPs can use pepper spray. We are not able to use pepper spray, tear gas

17:01as part of our conventional offensive military tactics. I think that's a huge mistake. It falls under a lot of these chemical weapon prohibitions. And I understand the worries about fear of escalation or a slippery slope. I think we understand chemical weapons enough to know there's no real slippery slope from literally hot pepper juice to, you know, nerve, nerve agents that are going to kill you. There is no slope. And so I'll give you an example. You have a bunch of soldiers. They're at a checkpoint. You have a guy who's approaching towards the checkpoint. He comes up to the checkpoint. Something occurs that makes you think that this person is a threat and you need to be able to subdue him,

17:34that you need to be able to get them outta the car. Right now, you have one option, you shoot the guy and you kill him. There is no escalation of force between like waving a flashlight at a guy and yelling him and shooting at him. You could take warning shots at him, but like now you're creating problems with shrapnel, with ricochets, with civilian damage. I think it is unarguably a moral win for us to be able to have a continuum of force that does not have a gap between shouting at people and shooting them. And I think pepper spray is right in that continuum. So like I absolutely would love to build certain types of chemical weapons that give you something in that continuum. I think if you go beyond shooting people continuum,

18:12that's where I wouldn't. I would never build large scale, large scale, you know, I'll call it like strategic-level chemical weapons versus very, very focused tactical. Like biological weapons, I would not build. Facial recognition is actually another one. - Interesting. - I'm not saying facial recognition has no uses. However, we've had a kind of internal policy, me and Brian Schimpf, our CEO, that facial recognition is probably the wrong tool to use as part of the kind of final-stage targeting of kinetic weapons. It's just still a very fraught technology. There's a lot of ways to spoof it. There's a lot of ways that it can be wrong. There's a lot of ways that people can go out of their way to affirmatively trick a system

18:53that is built on facial recognition. And so, to me, it's a great tool for, let's say, law enforcement to perform investigative activity. It is not a good tool to use when you're deciding who lives and who dies in a split-second decision. So we've never integrated facial recognition in any of our systems, because we don't think the gains are even close to the negatives. - So you mentioned chief technology officer Emil Michael earlier, so I'd like to ask you about Anthropic. - Sure. - Do you think the Pentagon overstepped labeling the company a supply-chain risk? - So correct me if I'm wrong, and maybe I'm behind the times, there's been a lot going on. I think they have not yet formally designated them

The Anthropic-Pentagon feud

19:32as a supply-chain risk, using that. - Even threatened, do you think it was a, - Correct. - Do you think they overstepped even threatening it? - I am of the mind that no. If anything, I think I may have been even more forceful in this rejection. And let me tell you why. The only reason you have not seen, I think, a larger defection from other companies that are worried about, you know, similar problems is because of the forceful reaction of the Department. The Department is saying, "We are not gonna let you slippery slope this. We're not gonna let one company get their special provisions, and then we're gonna have a different debate with a different company, a different debate with a different entity."

20:11Because these companies do have different values, right? They're not gonna all simultaneously agree, you know, "Anthropic's version of their limits is our version." What you end up with very quickly is a patchwork of different regulations across all these different companies. And the Department now has to ask, is this operation, is this planning element, is this tool compliant with these five different companies versions of what their limit is? And by the way, that version changes over time. They now have to weigh these things. Let's set aside the, you know, Anthropic was saying it's about offensive autonomous weapons with no human in the loop or about mass surveillance. There's a lot of questions there.

20:48Like, okay, what defines offensive? What defines no human in the loop? What defines weapon? What defines use, right? And I know this sounds a little bit like, you know, Bill Clinton, you know, depends on what the definition of is is thing, but these things really do matter. Imagine if it was something even more simple. A tech company said, "Department of War, I'll do anything that you want. We will not turn it off unless you target innocent civilians. We want it in paper that we can turn it off if you target innocent civilians." Well, what is targeting? Like, is it inadvertent versus explicit? What is innocence? Is it determined by the courts? Is it determined by the Hague? Is it determined by people in Brussels?

21:31Is it determined by Dario? What is a civilian? And who decides? What if there's civilian mixed in with other things? You run into these problems where, if you agree to this, you are giving more power to private companies, executives making billions off taxpayers than the president of the United States. They could just unilaterally, you know, pull the keys on stuff in a way that not even the commander-in-chief can do. I don't think that that's correct. I think that our military has to be accountable to our civilian elected leadership, not to corporations. So I guess your question, did they respond too strongly? No, I think they have to show, we will not allow this to progress. And I'll end this with one last bit.

22:13If the military truly was using these things in a way that is truly objectionable, let's say, they are targeting innocent civilians. These are the worst case scenarios they bring up. What if they kill everyone who didn't vote for the president? What if they're using drones to do that? I'd say, you know what, at that point, they should take an illegal action and they should turn it off. They shouldn't have it in their contract that they can do so. It shouldn't be up to them to judge it. If it becomes so bad, they should do the same thing that many soldiers have done throughout history, which is do something that is illegal because it's the right thing. And I think that, probably, society comes out on the right side of that.

22:49But it is not okay to give them that say. - Do you think this is more a battle of policies or personalities? - Hmm. It's all, I mean, it's both, right? I mean, that's what politics is. I think that there are people who know how to, like, I bet there is somebody in the tech world, I don't know if it's me, somebody probably could have gotten something equivalent to those policies through by talking about it in exactly the right way, writing exactly the same thing, and making sure to not rub the wrong people the wrong way. Like there, there's a way where you could talk people through these things. Maybe you could say, "Oh, you know, we're gonna do this in a way that it's not taking authority away from you."

23:27Maybe it would be something like, instead of in our contract it says you can't do these things, it would say, you know, "We're handing this language over to Congress and should they ratify it, this is how it would go. But of course we want your input on what these things would be." So look, personalities always enter into it. I'd be naive to say otherwise. - Last question on this. - And I think probably the personalities in this case did not approach this in the most collaborative way that they could, but in the end, I give the win to the Department, because they're the one that has to make sure that use of force and responsibility for force lies in the chain of command that is accountable to the people that we elect.

24:06- Elon Musk tweeted that Anthropic hates Western Civilization. Secretary Pete Hegseth retweeted it on his personal account. Do you agree with that take? - I probably would not agree with it enough to- - Would you retweet it? - Would I retweet it? Let me give you the steel man for it before I answer. It depends on how much you know about somebody. So I know people in Anthropic who are patriotic Americans, and they do absolutely support the United States having a stronger military than our adversaries. They support, you know, ideas like freedom of expression, freedom to self-determine, freedom of association. And so it's hard for me to say Anthropic hates Western Civilization. What is Anthropic?

24:53Is it the people? Is it the policy at the top? But here's the steel man for why somebody might believe that they would. Remember that Anthropic had in their constitution for Claude, you may have seen the, do you know what I'm talking about? - Yes. Yeah. - Where it says something like, you know, generate the response that is least offensive to non-Western cultural sensibilities. Generate a response that does not conflict with positions contrary to typical Western-supremacy ideals of cultural imperialism. You've seen what, it's like a 10 prompts in that. I think it's really easy to look at that and say, okay, they built a tool that inherently takes the counter-Western position, the anti-Western position.

25:36You can say anything that offends Western sensibilities, nothing that would offend people who are outside of that cultural system. And so you say, "Well, wait, what are Western sensibilities?" I mean, you're talking about, again, freedom of speech, freedom to self-govern, freedom of association. And I think it's actually pretty reasonable to say, okay, a company that had their internal constitution for their core product is clearly anti-Western. I'm not taking moral judgment on that, but it was clearly anti-Western. Is it reasonable to say that that company is not aligned with the West? Absolutely. Does it mean they hate the West? Maybe not. For example, you could say, "Well, it's actually that they were afraid of bad press.

26:15They're afraid of social justice warriors. They're all in San Francisco they were all just kind of lost sight of reality for a little while." So I probably wouldn't retweet it, but I think it's- - You didn't either. - I didn't retweet it, but I think like if me and Pete were debating it right here, I think that he would probably say, "Palmer, their core product literally is anti-Western." And then another person would say, "But Pete, they removed that from their constitution months ago." And someone can reasonably say, "Okay, but did they remove it because they don't believe it or did they remove it because they realize this is an extremely bad position for basically any American looking in this.

26:54This isn't a DoD thing. Like I bet most Americans, you're like, "Hey, what do you think about this AI constitution that says to, you know, make sure it never says anything that might offend anybody who doesn't believe in Western principles and does not value these Western principles at all? - Do you think most Americans are worried about this Anthropic/Pentagon feud? Or is that in our little defense bubble? - No, I think we are. I think it's a defense and politics bubble. I think if you were to go, I think if you were to go to the beach, you know, in South Carolina and ask a bunch of people, "What do you think about this Anthropic deal?" They'd be like, "What?" (host chuckling) You'd be like, "You know, Anthropic, the AI company?"

27:29They'd say, "What?" This is very much a little bit of a tempest in a teacup. It just happens to be of great importance for the future of our nation. - Another hot topic, Iran. - Sure. - If you look back at Iran 2026 right now, Epic Fury. - Yeah. - As you've looked back at previous Middle East interventions, what would you say is going wrong now, could go wrong now? - Is going wrong or could go wrong? Well, one thing I've been talking about is we're starting to see, I think, one of the artifacts of the United States having had such a liberal and permissive refugee policy vis-a-vis Iran. And I'm not saying that we should not have had that policy. I'm not making a judgment and saying we should not have accepted Iranian refugees

Iran and US strategy

28:11who were persecuted by the government, probably would've been killed years ago if they didn't come here. But I can still recognize that allowing many of their smartest people who are most against the regime to come to America and other Western countries has kind of hollowed out their country of the reservoir of kind of patriotic Iranian individuals who nonetheless don't like the theocratic regime that is currently in power. I think one of the reasons, Trump has said, "I'm giving you your moment. Now is the time to rise up." The combination of sending people like that to countries like America and the Ayatollah killing 35,000 protestors in a single weekend, those things combined have left them

28:50where you don't have many people left who could rise up, take control of the machinery, and lead us in a good direction. I think that's one of the reasons you're not seeing that happen. And so that's something that I think will continue to go wrong. - Does does that then require boots on the ground from the US to solve this? - Geez, I hope not. I mean, I don't think the United States has the political will to do it, whether it's good or bad. I've been saying this for years. I think after our adventures in the Middle East of the last couple decades have robbed America of its ability to sustain a boots-on-the-ground campaign. I think that what Trump's doing, like, you know, whether it's in Venezuela or Iran,

29:26it's a totally new type of warfare, but I think it's born of strategic realities, right? Like we do not have it in us to do this, for good reasons or bad. I don't think that we're ready to go fight, let's say World War II for the right reasons, much less reasons that not everyone agrees with. I think that we don't have another D-Day in us right now, and I think that's actually a bit of a problem. I think that it means that even in a very important fight, we might not show up, but it's one of the reasons I've been saying the United States probably needs to transition from being the world police to being the world gun store. We need to give the people that work with us, who have a stronger stake in these interests

30:03than even we do, the tools that they need to defend themselves and hopefully align with US interests. I don't think it's gonna go to boots on the ground. Maybe I'll be eating my words in a week, but I don't think that we have it in us. - So Trump ran as a bit of an anti-war president, some in MAGA- - And he and he did that even in the first one. You know, remember when Hillary Clinton was running and saying she would enforce a no-fly zone in Syria. And you had Trump saying, they'd say, "Well, well what would you do, you know, if you were president?" He said, "Well, I wouldn't start World War III." And, I have to admit, that resonated with me. I was like, you know what, that's probably the right attitude

30:37in terms of not starting wars needlessly, not expending munitions and arms and industrial capacity that we need to fight more important wars than that particular issue. - Is the Iran war an important one? - Here's the thing, I'm not in the Gang of Eight. I haven't seen the briefing that people saw. So far you've had people saying, and you know, whether it's Secretary Rubio or other people in Congress who were briefed that there was an imminent threat to the United States to, not just servicemen, but also civilians. It seems to be, this is not necessarily based on the briefing, but things have leaked out is we now know that Israel was planning a preemptive strike because they believed that if they did not,

31:17there was going to be a large-scale attack on Israel. And so it becomes one of those things where I don't have enough information to say. I think that probably we'll find out in the long run if this is as justified as it seems to the administration. And this aligns with what I've also been saying is like, this is why decisions like this cannot be up to corporate executives. Like we cannot allow military policy to be controlled by a corporatocracy, because we won't necessarily have all that information. And can you imagine a world where like the president and his secretaries have to brief like 20 CEOs, "Okay, okay, okay, corporate overlords, here's why we're going to be attacking Iran. Here's what we're gonna be doing.

31:58If we don't do it, there's this many people are gonna die. Are you guys willing to make some money on this or not? Let us know and we'll get to it or not." Like that would be a crazy situation. But based on what I know, if it is true that there was going to be an imminent attack on the United States, not just military members, but also civilians, I think that it seems very reasonable. And the steel man I've heard is Iran's ballistic missile capacity had taken a huge turn up, right? They had built these new facilities. - But couldn't reach America. - So not necessarily America, but still lots of US interests in the region still, lots of US allies, and, of course, we have dozens of bases in the region.

32:38I think the steel man for this is China had provided Iran with manufacturing equipment and manufacturing expertise that had caused a steep curve upwards in their ballistic missile production capacity and that they were only a few months into that production capacity. If you allowed them to continue that for even two years, they would build an arsenal that is so vast that we could never afford to take action. They could build nuclear weapons with impunity. They could strike US or allied bases with impunity, and we just wouldn't be able to do anything. This is like the North Korea scenario. North Korea has so much artillery built up in the hills that we really can't even dream of doing anything against them, right?

33:15They build nukes. We can't do anything about it, 'cause they're going to pound Seoul into pieces with weapons from 50 years ago. And so I think the steel man is, we could not let the Iran situation turn into North Korea on steroids. - What needs to happen before Anduril goes public? Word on the street is that you're raising 4 billion at 60 billion. We reported that the other day. - I can tell you that that's not quite right. But I will tell you also that we are basically continuously raising, talking to investors. As long as there are things that we think we could private capital to work on, building better tools, building better capacity, we're gonna do it. Like our last round, we raised, how much did we raise?

Fundraising and Arsenal-1

33:58It was quite a bit of money. I forget. - It was, yeah, billions. - It was billions of dollars. We put most of that money into building Arsenal-1, which is this 5-million-square-foot production facility to build missiles, fighter jets, air defense systems, all kinds of things at this huge facility. And if we were raising right now, we'd be putting into basically exactly the same thing. So we need to massively scale up our capability. There's a huge number of things that we're making that are extremely relevant. And I cannot wait for the government to come, give me an order, give me money, then start building the factory, then train the people to build it and then start building. If we do that, we are gonna miss a lot of windows.

34:36Like think how stupid I would feel if I won a bunch of contracts to build the things that would deter China from invading Taiwan. And then because it takes three years to get them out the door, the war happens. I mean, I would feel like the, I'd feel like the biggest idiot in history. And luckily we've got a lot of investors who feel the same way. Last thing I'll say on this is we have investors who are investing in us because they believe in Anduril and they believe that we will become the type of company that can go public. We're gonna get our financials in the right shape that we can be a publicly-traded company. There's a number of them that, to them, that is secondary to wanting us to promote stability,

35:15stop a great power conflict with China. And I think they feel that actually investing in Anduril protects other investments that they have, not just in the United States, but around the world. - On Arsenal-1, y'all said the production lines could go hot as soon as this July, a few months from now. - Actually, they're going live in a matter of weeks. We're ahead of schedule. So I just came back from Ohio, we were doing our final site survey. We have our first main building. We have our first main building done, about a million square feet, and we have the exterior work done on the second building. So that first line is actually gonna be coming online in a matter of weeks. - What's rolling off that line?

35:54- We are making a variety of aircraft and missiles and other stuff. - So like Barracuda and Fury? - Barracuda is there, Fury is there. There's another aircraft that we're making there as well for a different. Look, this facility is making things for SOCOM, for the Army, for the Marine Corps, for the Air Force, and one other customer. I mean, like we already have the space all allocated to make all of these things. You know, it's more slanted towards one customer than another in terms of square footage right now. But yeah, that's coming online in a matter of weeks. And we should be at full scale with that by,

36:37it'll probably be Q2 next year. - Real quick, before a lightning round, who's ahead in the AI race? US, China? - The United States is ahead in the AI race. - How big is the gap? - It's extremely small, because China's been doing a very good job of distilling our models, copying a lot of our technology, leveraging open-source AI advancements and getting those advancements into fielding, not just with the military, but also their police state, their surveillance apparatus much, much faster than the United States has. I'm not saying we need to build a, you know, police state, a surveillance apparatus. I'm just recognizing that China has the will at the top to push these things out much faster than the United States.

US-China AI race

37:21And you can criticize authoritarian regimes while still recognizing that certain structural advantages exist, and China is maximizing those structural advantages to push AI into their entire government and its fingers, I think, faster than the United States. Like I would say the Department of War is the furthest along in pushing AI into a lot of these. I mean, like they're using AI right now in this Iran operation to great effect. Try to name another part of government that is leveraging AI that effectively. Yeah, like the Department of War, and I think probably because you have personalities like Emil, you know, in the lead, that's why they're leveraging it so quickly. You know, I'm not putting down Trump's other appointees

38:02of the other departments, but you, in the bureaucracies particularly, you are not seeing Department of Agriculture using AI as effectively as the Department of War. You're certainly not seeing the Department of Education using it as effectively as they could. It's probably like Department of War then maybe Department of Energy are probably the two that I would say are in the lead. - Lightning round? - Let's do it. - Okay. How long does it take to do your hair?

Lightning round: subterranean, EagleEye, Newsom, Evangelion

38:26You and me both. (chuckling) - That's it. - You had subterranean on your website. - That's right. - You went a bit viral the other week or month for talking about subterranean capabilities. What are you guys planning? What are up to? - Anduril has working prototypes of subterranean systems that can deliver a variety of kinetic, electronic, and other effects. I've been talking about it louder and louder and louder, because, first, when I started talking about it before we had built anything years ago, everyone thought that I was crazy. And to be clear, the thing people thought was crazy is I said, "I think the next war-fighting domain, is I said, "I think the next war-fighting domain, before it's the moon, is the subterranean domain."

38:59- Is it subterranean, then the moon? - Yeah, subterranean, then the moon. The moon's just gonna take longer to become an actual war-fighting domain. And I'd say it's not a domain when it's like a special weirdo little place where a few people might live. Like it needs to be larger than that. Look, the United States and the Soviet Union both believed during the Cold War that the crust of the earth would turn into a battle space, and that you would move people and machines and effects through fire and logistics chains using the crust of the earth the same way that a submarine moves through the ocean. And I think that the thing that killed that dream isn't that we decided that it was impossible,

39:34it was that we won the Cold War and we turned the spigot off on a lot of very, very interesting things. The difference now is that with the power of autonomy, you can now build these things much more cheaply, much, much, much lower risk. You don't need to build manned, crude things. You've seen the movie "The Core," of course. We don't need- - Is that what you guys are up to? - No, like the thing from "The Core" is what the US and the Soviets were trying to build back then. The Soviets built a working subterrene. It worked so well, they lost it in the earth, a nuclear powered subterrene, a submarine that moves through terra firma. Anyway, I've been talking louder and louder about this, Anyway, I've been talking louder and louder about this,

40:09because when I talk about these things, it acts as a lighthouse that attracts all of the people. They say, "Wait, what's that over there? There's a guy who's doing this." And so I'm talking about it loudly to attract all the right people, the people who wanna work on these problems, the people in government who need to solve these problems. And it's moving along slower than I would like, because it seems so crazy. It isn't. - You unveiled EagleEye at AUSA in October. Does it have cat ears? - Oh, the EarPods. - Yeah. - So it has modular sensor mounts that allow you to put sensors in it. - Have you seen the rumors that those are cat ears? - I have seen the rumors, and I have to admit, there may have definitely been some consideration.

40:51Internally, we actually call them wolf ears. - Okay. But the wolf ear modules, if you think about it rationally, here, you have all of your hearing protection. You have already a lot of stuff going on. Then you have a rail that's going on here. So you basically have like this span, you wanna put these weights on top of your head going back into your spine. You don't want them floating out here or you're floating way off the side where they're gonna get stuck on stuff, where they're gonna tilt you to one side or the other. You want them to be basically as central as possible and as far back in your head as possible. But you also need this central vein for things like IR beacons, things that are visible from all different directions.

41:25And so when you run the math, there's actually, like the ears could be like here or here. There's actually very little flexibility. And so what, for people who don't know what we're talking about, our helmet has these pods where I can put different modular sensors on. So I've got my main thermal and night vision and vision enhancement up here. And then up here I can have, let's say, a long-range thermal sensor or a hyperspectral camera that allows me to see explosive residue on something. But I can have that be modular where I don't have to carry it around on my head all the time. I can carry my hyperspectral camera on my pouch, only use it when I'm actually, let's say, you know, inspecting something for residue.

41:58Or maybe one guy in the squad has long-range thermal, another guy has hyperspectral, another guy has a SWIR thing, because he's the guy who's marking fires for air support, and he needs that in his HUD. It makes these things easier to replace, easier to upgrade, easier to have different roles in the squad with different technological capabilities. But yes, there are people who say that they look like anime girl cat ears. And I will admit that the comparison was made immediately upon converging on that engineering solution. - Last two questions. You mentioned before we started, Gavin Newsom saved Anduril. - Oh, yes, that's right. And I said, "I think he did it without even knowing." This is not to say that Gavin did this,

42:41because he wasn't even thinking of Anduril. I suspect he was not at all. But the California state legislature passed a bill that was regulating AI. So it made it through the house and it made it through the Senate, not with a super majority. So it was not a bill that could not be vetoed. And one of the provisions in the bill said that it was illegal for companies to build products with AI that cause harm to humans, in fact, that could cause physical harm to humans. This would've been a total prohibition on using artificial intelligence on weapons for the United States military. And I think that this is a terrible thing. That bill, I'm a states'-rights guy, I lean libertarian. But that bill is the reason

43:21that I think we need federal preemption on these issues. You cannot afford to have states pass legislation that unilaterally cripples the entire, like, what if I literally can't push software updates to a system that the department has that are desperately needed to protect a military base, because California legislators passed a law saying it is illegal for me to do so. That's crazy. Gavin vetoed the bill, and I'm very, very glad that he did. I think, look- - Have you told him this? 0 I have not told him this. If I have the chance, I probably will mention it to him. Look, me and Gavin, we disagree on a lot of things. There's plenty of things that I could criticize Gavin Newsom on. But I will say, on the balance,

44:01he is not one of the crazy people, right? You can disagree with him very easily, but he is not someone who wants to tear down capital markets. He does not want our military to be the weakest military in the world. Like he's generally a sane guy and apparently more sane than most of our legislators who voted for that bill. I mean, to say nothing of what it would've done to like the California economy. You basically would've had to have everybody who's doing anything with the Department move out. Because it's not just weapons companies like Anduril, it's anyone who works with the federal government on these systems would've been hit by this, so. But you know, like, I mean, you remember when there were a lot of state legislators

44:45who were telling Elon that he should get out of California and celebrating when he brought all those jobs with him. So there's certain people who they look at their responsibility to the state very differently than I think most Californians or Americans would. - Last question, might be your favorite, is Yoko Taro the right person to reboot Evangelion? - I have a lot of trust in Hideaki Anno and his judgment when it comes to the franchise. And if he believes it is the right choice, and he is, you know, notoriously protective of that intellectual property. All the licenses of Evangelion have to be personally approved by him. I think that if he is okay with it, then so too must I. - You a NieR fan?

45:29- No, not really. - Palmer, thanks for the time. - Thank you so much.