Palmer Luckey on Threats, Autonomy, and the Future of American Power

**Shane Reeves** (0:01)
Welcome to Inside West Point Ideas That Impact. I'm Brigadier General Shane Reeves, the Dean at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Through a series of discussions, we will show you a different side of West Point, where we will make even our most complex initiatives accessible to broad audiences, and give you an inside view of our cross-disciplinary work, which is being applied throughout the world.
I'm excited to welcome our guest, renowned entrepreneur and technologist, best known for founding Oculus VR, the company that led the way in advancing virtual reality technology. While still a teenager, he began building VR headsets in his parents' garage, which led to the launch of Oculus, introduced the Oculus Rift through a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. Just two years later, he was hired by Facebook, now Metta, after they acquired Oculus for two billion, accelerating the development of consumer virtual reality worldwide. After Oculus, our guest founded Anduril Industries, a defense technology company focused on developing advanced autonomous systems and AI-enabled tools to support US and allied national security. Our guest, Mr. Palmer Luckey, has demonstrated bold experimentation, technical curiosity, and entrepreneurial risk-taking, and has reshaped entire industries. By the way, cadets, it's not every day, you get to hear from a billionaire who wears Hawaiian shirts, and who's closer in age to you than he is to me. So please join me in welcoming Mr. Palmer Luckey to the United States Military Academy.
We were meant to have dinner last night at the superintendent's quarters, and you skipped out on me. The excuse I heard was because you had to go to dinner with the president of the United States, and the vice president of the United States, and the prime minister of Japan. Now, people skip out on dinner with me all the time. Supe doesn't even tell me when he's not coming to dinner. He just doesn't even show up. But I have to say, that was one of the better excuses I've ever heard for skipping dinner with me. So how was the dinner?

**Palmer Luckey** (2:11)
It was really good.
So I was at the White House for other business. And then yesterday was the bilateral exchange between the Japanese delegation in the United States. And I'm a big fan of Japan and our relationship with Japan. I used to go to Japan four times a year when I was running Oculus VR because I worked all the game developers there. And I even speak just a little bit of Japanese. And so I was worried the whole thing was going to be blown up. And apparently it went fantastic. And because it went well, they said, Palmer, you should totally come. And I said, I'm supposed to go to West Point.

**Shane Reeves** (2:42)
Wait a minute, so did the president say, Palmer, you should totally come? Is that how he said it?

**Palmer Luckey** (2:46)
No, it was something like that. It was like the dinner, you're here for it, right? And I said, Mr. President, I'm actually here mostly on state business. I just met with Marco and there's some stuff that we're doing. And he said, oh, that's a huge mistake.
Don't worry about it. You'll be going tonight. And I said, oh, I'm actually doing something at West Point. He said, I'm sure you can do it tomorrow. And anyway, they put me right next to Takichi and I'm a huge fan of her from a distance. So I was very starstruck.

**Shane Reeves** (3:21)
Sounds great. But what really, in my opinion, put you and elevated you in the list of our all-time visitors at the United States Military Academy is that, this morning you went over to Arvin and you did this right here. Show that picture, please. That's right.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:38)
Thanks for picking a good one.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:42)
That's right.

**Shane Reeves** (3:46)
A little bit of combat swim. You might be too exhausted for this talk.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:50)
Are you okay?

**Palmer Luckey** (3:50)
I'm okay.
I was feeling optimistic going in because I said, well, these guys, they've got to go to do a whole bunch of other athletics today. They got to pace themselves. I can go in as long as I don't die. I'll be okay. I made it to like two minutes and three seconds. Then I turned to Jeff and I said, I have a problem. Can he halt? He all called me out.

**Shane Reeves** (4:09)
No, you get big street cred for that. You're also a collector.
I read that you own a US Navy Mark V special operations craft.

**Palmer Luckey** (4:17)
I do.

**Shane Reeves** (4:17)
Two submarines.

**Palmer Luckey** (4:18)
I do.

**Shane Reeves** (4:21)