#AIS: Palmer Luckey on Anduril

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. We have an exciting show for you today. This is the 15th and the final episode from the All-In Summit 2022 I wanted to take a quick moment to thank my team. They worked tirelessly over 100 days to make the event magical for everybody who was able to make it. Thanks to the audience for coming. Next year, we'll try to have twice as many of you there. Just a quick thank you to Amber, Ashley, Jackie, Nick, Fresh, Maureen, Molly, Big Mike, Andre times two, Rachel reporting producer, Justin, Jamie, Jimmy D, my brother, Josh, everybody who came and supported the event. We had an incredible crew. We had an incredible time. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't thank the amazing speakers who joined us from all around the world. So candid, so insightful. My pal, Bill Gurley, Brad Gerstner, Adina, Mar, Tandis, Tim, Elon, Antonio, Nate, Ryan, Claire, my boy, Roboi, Antonio Garcia Martinez, Jo Wansdale, James, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald. And of course, today's guest, the one and the only Mr. Palmer Luckey.
And most of all, I'd like to thank my besties, Chamath, Sacks and Friedberg, who did an amazing job of hosting the event. Now, a little preamble here before we start this episode. Many of you have heard that this is a controversial episode. It is a little controversial. There may be a little twist in it. So I will be coming back after Palmer Luckey's talk to give you a little context because it might get a little confusing. I don't want to spoil the surprise for you. So enjoy this episode.
But before we go to this episode, a lot of you have questions. You have questions about the future of the All-In Podcast. And those questions are important and they're never going to be answered.
They're never going to be answered. But just so you know, I'm not leaving.
I'm not leaving.
I'm not leaving. The show goes on. This is my home. They're going to need a wrecking ball to take me out of here. They're going to need to send in the National Guard because I am going nowhere.

**Palmer Luckey** (2:32)
So my name is Palmer Luckey. I founded two companies. My first was a company called Oculus VR that I founded when I was 19 years old and living in a camper trailer. Thank you, thank you.
Sold that for a few billion dollars to Facebook and then got fired a few years later and then started Anduril because I wanted to work in the national security space for a variety of reasons. And I'll get into some of those reasons today. So the technology industry for many years has prided itself on being the first to understand where things are heading so that they can build the things that are going to be relevant for the future. On national security though, and on the rise of our strategic adversaries, it was one of the last industries to realize where things were going due to a variety of ideological reasons, but also business reasons. Silicon Valley didn't just predict the importance of defense in the 2020s. It largely took the exact wrong position, the opposite position.
First of all, you have obvious examples like big technology companies explicitly refusing to do work with the Department of Defense. Google is one big example, but the worst examples are really in the startups that don't exist because people didn't want to even get into such a controversial space lest it ruin their careers.
You know, when I started Anduril, I had already sold the company for billions of dollars, and investors still didn't want to invest. I still had a tough time in a lot of meetings with venture capitalists, and none of the conversations with VCs that I had were about my ability to hire or execute or build products. Everyone believed that I could do those things, even the ones who didn't like me much. The vast majority of conversations that we had were about whether or not it was even ethically okay to ever build a company that would build weapons. And the people who turned us down, the ones who decided not to invest in Anduril, actually believed that we had a good team and good people and good product market fit. The issue is that they thought that it was inherently wrong to build tools capable of being used for violence because they believed that the idea of deterring violence through having a strong arsenal was fundamentally obsolete and itself wrong.
Imagine how hard it would have been to raise money if I hadn't founded Oculus. It would have been impossible. Even after we raised money and got traction, the negativity continued. There was a really interesting cover story in Bloomberg in 2019 that called us tech's most controversial startup. This was a year where TikTok was banning users for calling attention to the weaker genocide in China and banning users for posting homosexual content. This is a year in which Adam Newman paid himself tens of millions of dollars for the right to use the word we. It's a year that Uber was under a federal investigation for its workplace culture immediately after a board coup that ejected much of the leadership. It's a time where Facebook was getting hauled in front of Congress to testify. But of course, as a tiny defense company making a handful of purely defensive base security systems that committed the crime of building technology for the military, Anduril was the one that claimed the belt for the world's most controversial technology company. I'd say that the war in Europe has totally shattered the idea that we live at the end of history. Every few decades, we start to believe that economic ties have ended all prospect of war, and every few decades, we're reminded that this isn't true. That's a very popular idea, especially in DC, that we live at what they call the end of history. It's this idea that economic ties and interconnections make the prospect of conflict fundamentally unthinkable, ignoring the fact that many people see this as a matter of destiny in economics. In 1909, English economist and politician Norman Angel published an entire book called The Great Illusion, and it was entirely about how war in Europe was impossible and that spending money on building militaries that could deter conflict was a waste of time that could be better spent building utopia. He specifically argued that any European country annexing another would be as absurd as London annexing Hertford, and the book was actually the number one bestseller in 1909 Now we've had some version of this argument for a few decades now, ever since the Cold War started, and luckily a lot of people are waking up. But unfortunately it's not because they've come to a reasoned decision based on the fundamental principles at play. It's because right now supporting the military, supporting defense, and supporting Ukraine in particular has become the current thing. And in current year, current thing is the thing that you have to support regardless of what you think of the underpinnings. Unfortunately for issues like defense and national security, the stakes are too high and the relevant timeline is far too long for people to start caring about things at the moment that they need to start caring about them. So today I want to talk a little bit about why I started Anduril and why you should all think exactly the same way that I do.