Palmer Luckey
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Same thing with our missiles. Our missiles have 90% fewer parts than our competition. We've very aggressively designed them to have very few parts, to have those parts consolidated as much as possible into individual pressings or panels. We might have one part that is 10 times as big as the parts that you would have in a competing system, and it does all of these different things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And the reason that's important is because right now in U.S. war games, we're predicting that we'll run out... U.S. war games against a hypothetical Chinese invasion scenario in Taiwan, we run out of missiles in less than eight days. We have eight days, and then we're completely out. So eight days of pain for China doesn't mean very much to a country that thinks in 100-year timelines.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They're like, that's it? There will be eight days of pain, and then it will take the United States literally years to rebuild that arsenal? Oh, shit. Well, we could just go win. Let's just go do it. Just put the cannon fodder out there, soak up the missiles, and then we win. Because we have years to operate with impunity until they get their shit together. We have to fix this as a country.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We have to get back to where things are actually manufacturable. As a country, we've slipped into this problem where we build so few arms that we build really expensive, really exquisite things that take years to complete. We need to get back into more of a World War II mentality where we can build weapons faster than we can use them. Because now China has to think about day eight.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
day 80, day 800, day 8,000, that's how you're going to deter them. They need to look and see that you are a continuously present adversary, that there is a credible threat of violence that extends beyond the weekend. That's the only way we're going to keep them from running roughshod over everybody. And this may be more political, but I'll say it anyway. Taiwan is not the end state for China.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And all the people who think that this fight over Taiwan is the real fight are missing the point. They believe that the Philippines is their territory. They believe that Korea is their territory. They also believe that North Korea is their territory, but they like them as a buffer state with South Korea. But that would change the moment they could actually capture South Korea.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And they even think that most of Japan belongs to them. They think that it's theirs. They've tried over and over for thousands of years. And even today, like, Even publicly, they won't say they own all of Japan, but they do maintain they own part of Japan. Like, no, no, maybe we don't own all of it, but like that part, that's definitely ours.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It is really dangerous to let people with millennia-long ambitions of ruling those areas, go unchecked. Because even if you don't give a shit about Taiwan, which you should because our whole modern economy runs on chips from them, and until we figure out how to make them better or as good ourselves, we have to keep them around.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Even if you don't give a shit about Taiwan, there's a lot of reasons to make sure we're spooking China on day 80, day 800. Wow. People like talking about the AI part of the missiles, but honestly, if our missiles had no AI, and we're just able to make them 10 times faster, that's pretty good all on its own, even if we're doing nothing else.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
China definitely has the technology in terms of manufacturing prowess. They know how to make stuff fast. They know how to make it cheap. They have automated cruise missile production facilities that are capable of turning out more cruise missiles in a week than the entire United States turns out in a year. It is incredible. Do you know the multiple for Chinese shipbuilding capacity?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
China has more shipbuilding capacity than us. They can build ships a lot faster than us. If we start blowing up boats in the Pacific, they're going to be able to build more. How much more shipbuilding capacity do you think they have? How much more? You think it's five times more? You think it's 100 times more? What do you think it is?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Make a crazy guess. 20 times. It's 350 times. They have 350 times more shipbuilding capacity than the United States. An equivalent ship? No, so it's worse. People will try to argue with me, and sometimes they'll say, but Palmer, all of that is commercial shipbuilding capacity.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So it's unfair to compare all of China with all of the United States because you're counting all of China's commercial shipping. But you know why it's fair? Because in China, the law says that all commercial vessels have to meet military standards. If you are building a roll-on, roll-off passenger ferry,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
for transporting people in cars, you have to have deck plate supports that are strong enough to transport tanks and armored vehicles on. They are requiring even their civilian vessels to all be military standards compliant because they foresee a world where they're going to nationalize their entire domestic fleet and use it in a whole of China fight against the West.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And it's funny because people are like, oh, they're just doing that just in case, just in case. It's not just in case. China understands how much more it costs for every single ferry to support military operations. They are taking that cost on because they expect to do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They're not going to basically spend billions of dollars for absolutely no reason in an economy that knows how to cut corners like no other. They are doing this because they believe it's a core part of their strategy. So yes, they're not quite equivalent. Like I would say US ship, like ship for ship, our ships are better. But quantity has a quality all on its own.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And when you're talking about a 350X difference, people will say, oh, well, the Chinese Navy is only twice the size of our Navy. Well, yeah, today, but on day 10, they're going to be probably a lot bigger. And then every day we're going to crank, like we're going to crank out a ship a month and they're going to put out 350 ships a month.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Like you could see where this just becomes an impossible problem for the United States. And so what really happens is we become an ally that is unreliable, that says we're there for our allies, but only in the way that people say they stand for things, right? Like it's very easy for us to say, oh, of course we stand with Japan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Okay, well, what's that going to mean when every single one of our ships is at the bottom of the ocean and we have one new ship coming off the line a month? It's a meaningless promise. And so our adversaries see that, and a lot of them are going to our allies, and China's saying, hey, you know the math. You can do the math. You need to end up in the Sinosphere. And the U.S.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
can say they love you all they want. Reality is they can't back up. They can't cash those checks. And so my belief is that the United States should stop being the world police. We need to stop sending our people all over the world to fight everyone's wars for them. And we need to become the world's gun store. We need to just sell them the guns that they need to defend themselves.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And we need to make sure that we actually keep those shelves stocked. Because if like, look what's happened in Ukraine. We're not sending them more stuff, partly for, you know, various partisan political reasons and strategic reasons, but we're also out of stuff to send to them. Like, we're out of artillery shells that we can spare to Ukraine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We're out of a lot of, like, we don't have any Javelins to send to Ukraine. We're all out. And so how can our allies stay allied with us if they think that they're going to get into a conflict and we're just saying, oh, sorry, actually, we forgot how to bake things. We forgot like a hundred years ago. Sorry. Jeez. Do they have any of the technology?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Manufacturing-wise, which I just talked about, they're ahead of us. You're talking about AI, the sensors, do they have that? Luckily, we're ahead on that. The United States is ahead of China on a lot of advanced sensing technology and a lot of advanced AI. Now, China, don't underestimate them. We've seen with DeepSeek and stuff, they're doing very interesting things in the AI realm.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I don't think that we're a decade ahead of them in technology. We have... What I'm doing at Andoril is ahead of what China's doing in most ways by a few years. But that's it. I'm a few years ahead of them. I hate to admit this, but I was part of the problem for a long time. I made millions of virtual reality headsets in China. That's where we made Oculus Rift. That's where we made Gear VR.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
That's where we made Oculus Quest. Millions and millions of those things. And I know how good they are, not just at manufacturing, but at the actual technology development side. They understood exactly what we were doing. They knew how we were doing it. They were able to rip it off. They were able to do it with their own domestic companies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
when we were developing cutting edge technology, we were never more than a few months ahead of China. Anything that we figured out, they would be able to copy it and figure it out very quickly. Now, I think they don't have a culture that's particularly good at leaping beyond what we're doing, but you don't have to leap beyond what we're doing to be a threat to us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If they're really good at manufacturing and they have way more people and they have tech that is about as good as ours, that's all you need to win.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So you're talking about a particular provision of a policy, a legal policy that they call civil-military fusion. Anything that is civilian is inherently civilized. military as well. And if the military wants to use it, they have all rights to it. You cannot deny it to them. You cannot tell them no. You cannot refuse to sell it to them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They are basically saying the military apparatus and the civilian apparatus are one and the same. And you cannot operate within the Chinese social contract unless you equally support both. I'm actually glad that the United States has given companies the freedom. I'm a libertarian leaning guy. I think it is good when you have the right to self-determination.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If I decide that I want to be a pacifist and never sell a single thing to the United States military, I should absolutely have that right. I think that people should berate me for it. I think that's the wrong opinion, but isn't it good that you're allowed to make that decision that the state can't come and say, You have to work for me if I want you to. I'm glad about that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But we have to recognize that there are disadvantages to that. One disadvantage has been the way that the United States technology industry has treated the United States of America for the last 20 years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I mean, I know it sounds crazy today when you have Mark Zuckerberg begging Congress to ban TikTok and you have all of these tech companies saying that China is a huge threat to them, but let's get in the time machine for a second. Let's travel back 10 years to 2015. What was going on in 2015? Google was trying to get into China. Facebook was trying to get into China.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Microsoft was trying to get into China. China had convinced all of these companies and more, Apple too, that they were ascending to be the world's dominant economic superpower, that they were going to surpass the US in short order. And these companies could make trillions of dollars by working with China the way China wanted them to work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So making, for example, have you heard about Project Dragonfly? That was Google's project to make a censored version of Google search engine for the Chinese market that would appease the Chinese authorities. It was used to censor search results and also collect and report on information on any dissidents to pipeline that to the Chinese government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Anyone who would be using it to try and search for things they shouldn't, it was going to alert the Chinese authorities and tell them how to find them. You basically had... for a period of about a decade, a total abdication of responsibility on the part of our tech companies to do anything for the United States. They were all refusing to work with our military, protesting our military.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Google famously pulled out of the Project Maven contract because their employees were angry about it. That was a project to use Google's AI to do better targeting that would better avoid civilian casualties. And their employees protested and they gave in. The executive says, okay, we won't do it. We're going to pull out of working with the military. Actually,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
YouTube banned the Anduril YouTube account. About two years into our company, they banned it. They said that our company promoted harm of people. And we said, guys, that's what war is. It's either threatening you're going to harm somebody or actually doing it. That's the whole game. And they said, sorry, this is not allowed under our threat of harm policy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And they didn't actually unban us until years later when they... in the midst of this new re-alignment of tech with our military and our government, when they launched the new Google Federal team doing government work and they realized they needed to integrate with something that we made. And I told them, guys, I'm not integrating with Google Federal until you unban our YouTube account.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Like, I'm not that cucked, right? Could you imagine what a cuck I'd be to like let them integrate with our weapons systems, even though they literally banned me from the largest video platform and de-platformed me from the largest video platform in the world? because some shitty pencil-pushing blue-haired person in San Francisco doesn't like my politics or my company.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
To their credit, they did unban us. We've been unbanned for years, so good for Google. The point I'm trying to make is people are coming back around and they're starting to say they're going to work with the military. Google is saying that. Meta is saying that. Microsoft is saying that. Apple is not saying that. Pay attention to that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But there was this period of time where we ran a very dangerous experiment, which was decoupling our most innovative, most valuable companies from the military entirely. And that's an experiment we've never run as a country. Has there ever been a time where our most innovative companies didn't work with the US military? Could you imagine how World War II would have gone?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Could you imagine if General Motors and IBM and General Electric had said, well, we're not going to work with you. We think that's wrong. In fact- We're going to work with Imperial Japan because we think that's a huge revenue growth opportunity for us in the future. And we think manufacturing is going to be cheaper there. That's what our big tech corporations were doing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Imagine if during the Cold War, if all, imagine if Zenith and RCA and Westinghouse had said, you know, we love America in an abstract way. hypothetical way, but actually we're going to team up with the Soviet Union and we're going to manufacture all of our chips there. Like, could you imagine what would have happened to America?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so I was, when I was in Silicon Valley, this was one of the things that was rolling through my head was, oh my God, I'm sitting amongst the best technologists in the world and none of them care about our military. None of them care about America and they're thrilled to work with China. I'm so glad that China, I think China's actually made a misstep And I'll end this rant with this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
China has made a misstep that we should take advantage of. They tricked all of our tech companies and our media companies into believing that China was this revenue opportunity. And so they basically caused our technology innovation economy to decouple from our government and our country and our national responsibilities. What they should have done is actually given them a slice of the Chinese pie.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They should have let Google in. They should have let Facebook in. They should have given them some money and a little more and a little more and a little more to keep them on the line. You know, like basically just to string them along, keep them in the communist bucket. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
will cause catastrophic consequences for their home country if they leave. Here's a fun one. Think about the guys who are running the... What would it be like if China plucked you? Yes, like that's a great example. Imagine if I had no national allegiance and they made an offer over there and I really wanted to live in China. And they just, yeah, they got rid of me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
That would cause so much downstream damage. And the best, like, I don't want to go to China. In fact, my company is sanctioned by China on account of our sales to Taiwan. And so if I go to China or Hong Kong, I'll be arrested. It's fantastic. Also Russia or Belarus. If I go to Belarus, I'll be arrested. I would imagine. But how do you know that? Oh, they put it out publicly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Russia has the so-called poison list where they say, here are the individuals that are under extreme sanctions personally, individually as individuals. And Belarus also recognizes the... I think Belarus and maybe one other... one other weirdo Baltic break off. I can't remember what it was, but there's a handful of countries in the world where I literally can't go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But think about not even just China. Is that public? Oh yeah, it's public. I even tweeted about it. I actually have the notice framed in my office.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I will definitely send one to you. I have one in my office. Perfect. My dream is to get it signed by Vladimir Putin somehow. I just want to get it on his desk somehow or at a signing or something. By the way, he deserves a bit of credit on this AI stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
He was saying before I even started Anduril, the country that wins in the sphere of artificial intelligence will become the ruler of the entire world. Like, I know that today that sounds not that interesting, but this was nine years ago when everyone thought AI was crazy. Xi Jinping said that too. Right. You have all these world leaders who are saying things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Could you imagine Hillary Clinton having an opinion on something like that eight or nine years ago? Absolutely not. Could you imagine Joe Biden putting a stake in the ground? Of course not. Anyway, even in growing China, look at Venezuela. Let's take whoever's running their oil and gas machinery over there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
That was when they were taking fire and then they responded and there ended up being civilian casualties.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Imagine what would happen if we identified their top 10 most competent people who are running their oil and gas organizations and we gave them all defector visas and said, come to America and you can work at ExxonMobil on industrial refinement systems and we're going to pay you twice as much as you make in Venezuela.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You would destroy the whole Venezuelan economy overnight and you just have to take 10 people. So yeah, immigration is a sword. We need to be doing way more of this because an American passport is worth its weight in diamonds, right? It is so valuable to these people. They desperately want it. Culturally, we've dominated the world, right? Everyone loves America.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Even the people who hate America love America. Even the people who hate America love our movies, love our music. They all want to date American women. Like, what? Let's take advantage of that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
When is this coming out? I don't know yet. Roughly? Probably in a couple weeks. IVAS is a program that is the modern instantiation of a very old idea. This idea that you are going to augment the vision of soldiers and give them superhuman perception abilities. The idea is you can see at night, you can see thermal signatures, you can see hyperspectral signatures,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Well, they made it sound like they just rolled into an intersection and just like did like a drive-by shooting or something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You have extraordinary superhuman hearing. You're able to mark targets in the environment without projecting anything in the environment. You can seamlessly see in your heads-up display where all of your friends are, where all of your foes are, where all of the innocents and noncombatants are, and have that all just seamlessly presented to you as if you're Superman. You can see through walls.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You can see through night. You can see through fog. You are Superman. This idea has been around for a very long time of putting a heads-up display, a computer, and a radio on every soldier. You can even go back to Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel, Starship Troopers, and that was really the concept behind the mobile infantry.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They're wearing these kind of mech suits with fighter jet-style heads-up displays that show them where all their targets are, that show them where all of the good guys are, that help them do ballistics calculations showing where bullet impact is going to be in a much more intelligent way than just, you know,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
putting a red dot that's coaxially aligned, but actually saying like, here is the impact point, factoring in the wind, factoring in your motion, factoring in what the other guy is doing. People have tried this over and over again through history and the tech's just never quite been ready. And they've also not maybe worked on it in quite the right way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Yeah, there was actually a... Somehow that hadn't even made it into my long-term memory.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But most importantly, nobody's ever built a software backend that could make it work. Even if the helmets were okay, they didn't have this kind of system, whether it's AI or something else, that could understand the whole battle space, taking in sensors from everybody. So my helmet, his helmet, his helmet, and that airplane, and that airplane, and that satellite, and that ship.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You get what I'm saying. Building one common fused view of the world in real time has never really been properly accomplished. And so you have programs like Future Warrior and Net Warrior and Connected Soldier and Land Warrior. You have all these different programs where the Army has tried over and over.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
IVAS is sort of the latest attempt at this kind of individual infantry vision augmentation system. When the IVAS contract was first awarded years ago, it was a really big deal, and I was really excited about it. I knew I couldn't compete with it because, unfortunately, it was being awarded right around the time that I was starting Anduril.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
When the IVAS program was running through the wickets, Anduril was 12 people. Obviously, I was not going to be able to win this contract. But as an ARVR guy, I was really excited that the Army was moving in that direction. And they were putting a lot of resources behind it. IDAS is a $22 billion contract. It's enormous. The plan is not to put this on the heads of one person or one top tier unit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's to put it on the heads of every single person in the army who's bearing a rifle. Anyone who's making contact with the enemy is going to have superhuman augmented vision that allows them to never miss anything. anything, never miss their shot, never hit the wrong thing. You probably more than almost anybody can probably understand what an incredible tool that would be.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The problem is that even IVAS has been plagued by many of the problems that have have hit a lot of these other systems. You didn't have the backend that could provide all of that data to make it a useful thing rather than just a heads-up display. You didn't have the hardware working as well as it could have.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
There were a lot of soldier reports that it was making people sick, that it was making people dizzy, that it was causing signature problems. There were quotes from soldiers in evaluations who said, this is going to get me killed. It was running you a lot of issues. Anyway, the punchline is,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
over the last year, I've been working on an angle to try and get the iVAS program into a better place, to try and make it everything that it should be. A few months ago, we teamed up with Microsoft, which was the company that had won the iVas contract and that was using something based on their HoloLens system, which is now discontinued, to build the iVas product.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We partnered with them to integrate Lattice, our AI system, with their heads-up display. We integrated that. We did it very quickly. It was actually a less than three-week process. In three weeks, we went from teaming up to having Lattice feeding all of our three-dimensional tracking information into their existing IVAS heads of display. We did a soldier touchpoint with it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They used it in some exercises and some trials. They said, oh my God, this is incredible. I can see drones that are coming to attack me. I can see what their attack vectors are. I can see where the people controlling them are. I can see where I need to go to be safe in an amount of time that is reasonable before that drone actually gets to me. Really, really powerful stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But here's the really big deal. As of just about now, Anduril is taking over the IaaS program as the prime. Microsoft is transferring all of the employees, hardware, IP, facilities, everything to Anduril. We are now going to be the prime on the IaaS program. We are going to continue to integrate Lattice into it, and we are building
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
a totally new system on the hardware side that is going to be better than anything that anyone has ever seen. It is going to be by far the best AR, VR, MR vision augmentation system that has ever been built in terms of resolution, in terms of field of view, in terms of graphical fidelity, in terms of sensor quality and what you can do with those sensors. It is...
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
a bigger jump from what exists today than the jump that I made when I started Oculus. It is a jump that I think cannot be overstated. I am very aligned with the Army's vision in terms of this being something that should be on everybody, but I think my vision goes maybe even a little further. I don't just want this on every person who's carrying a rifle.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I want it on every logistician, every loadmaster, every rotary wing pilot, every fixed wing pilot. I want it deployed with everybody across every service, every branch, so that every person is eyes for everyone else. What about police? I think that police is going to be a very interesting, it's going to be an interesting but adjacent challenge.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So, for example, police, you're trying to make something that they can wear all day, every day, and they're also interacting face-to-face with people. Let me put it this way. You can't put a RoboCop helmet on most police officers. It's too heavy, it's too much protection for what they're doing day-to-day. But the software backend is, is certainly going to integrate. I'll give an example.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So short enough that this clearly wasn't just like lost data. They didn't want that data.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I think that probably what you're going to see on law enforcement officers is going to look more like a pair of Oakleys that is still running Lattice. It's still showing them where threats are, but it probably doesn't need the ability to pick up an attack helicopter 15 clicks out and then flag them where they need to go. I probably don't need that type of expensive sensing on there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I probably need things that are much more of a local web, but that's definitely going to happen. And it's something I'm very excited about. Also, you look at things like body cameras. You could make body cameras that are way better, that do a 360-degree capture, And right now, a body camera for a law enforcement officer is really just a tool that gets his ass in hot water.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
That's basically its job. Not enough people look at footage from these body cams and say, oh, wow, this guy was totally in the right in what he did. If the footage exonerates their actions, then everyone ignores it and the media says nothing. And if it shows that he made any mistake, then they're going to hoist him by his own petard.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
What I want to see is body cameras that are a tool that law enforcement officers are excited to use. I want something that's watching my six. I want something that's watching for threats that I'm not seeing. I want basically a guardian angel on my shoulder that is able to do what backup would normally do for me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And at a superhuman level, like imagine if you could have not just eyes in the back of your head, but what if you could have a hundred eyes all throughout your head, all looking out into the world and at the slightest disturbance be like, holy shit, I think someone's opening that window and firing, like they're aiming a gun from that window.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It should be telling me not like, hey, be aware that someone might be shooting you. It should be giving you even more direct commands than that. It should throw a red threat alert and show you a direction you need to throw yourself immediately to not get shot, to get behind cover. You're going to see very tight integration between man and machine on these things. Anyway, IVAS is...
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
very much a war fighter oriented system. And it's oriented towards the things that people at the tip of the spear are doing. I think you're going to see similar ideas, but oriented around maybe a different form factor for law enforcement.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
What does it look like? It looks like a, so one of my beliefs with the previous IVAS system, it was not very tightly integrated into the helmet. So you wear your ballistic helmet and it basically straps on top of it. You like clip it on the brim here. You run a strap to the back. There's a big battery pack and compute module back here. There's a big sensor brim you clip onto the helmet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The problem when you're trying to clip onto an existing system is it ends up not very tightly integrated, lots of snag points, lots of snag hazard. It ends up being very heavy and misbalanced where it's really, really torquing your neck.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The thing that I'm building is an all-up integrated ballistic shell that integrates hearing protection, hearing augmentation, vision protection, vision augmentation, all into one seamless ballistic shell that protects you from airbursts, direct fire rounds, blast and concussion, the whole thing in one integrated seamless product.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I'm not quite ready to show the actual thing, but true to Anduril product company fashion, we've been investing a ton of resources in this for years at this point. So I knew that I wanted this to happen years ago.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I wasn't sure if I was able to make it happen, but we started putting millions of dollars into this years ago so that if it happened, we would be ready to go and not trying to catch up from the start. Damn. Anyway. This shit is going to be crazy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The first fully integrated system, meaning it has all of the different sensors, all of the different compute and vision augmentation systems all integrated into one thing, is going to be done at the end of March. Right now, we're basically in systems test where we have individual systems that we are doing
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
doing development and testing of, but the first fully integrated helmet with all of this stuff actually working, actually working tied together with Lattice, feeding tracks, that's all going to be done in March. Just to give you an example of how useful this might be, if you want to mark a target for somebody else, you'd have to use a laser, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
What if you could market digitally and you don't emit any signature for anyone else with nods to see? And what if anyone else can see it? Here's an even crazier, and when I say crazy, I don't mean like a hypothetical, like you could just do this with this tech.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Imagine that you're doing some kind of pincer and you have some guys over here, some guys over here, and I can't see a guy behind that building, but you can. if you're seeing him, it's taking that track. It's taking that enemy mark and it's now putting it into my vision. I can now see through the building, through the wall, and I can see the guy coming around the corner before he's there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's all continuing and it's not just the helmets, you're also, anything that's seamed into lattice is talking to you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So if there's a drone overhead that sees a guy five clicks out that way, coming up a hill and he thinks he's going to set up on top of that hill and pop you, imagine if it sees him, it notifies you, you look at him coming over that hill and you bring your rifle on target, literally the moment he clears, you're taking out that threat.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
That's the type of combined sensing and combined arms tactics that this enables. It's going to make robots and people work together so seamlessly, like they're just one cohesive, effective unit. This is also the way that I think you're going to have robot dogs, robot soldiers integrated with human force. Imagine if you see a guy who's running around a building, you lose sight of him.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You can't deal with him because you've got something else. What if I can now task another robot and say, hey, just stay on that. Don't let that guy get into a position where he can fire at me. And if it looks like he's going to, let me know and we'll make him a priority.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Now I don't have to spend my very limited vision processing and engagement capability just tracking that potential threat who might be running away or might be just repositioning. Isn't it great if I can just tell the drone overhead, hey, watch that guy. If he's really just running away in his sandals, I don't care about that right now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Maybe we're going to go track him down later, but I don't really care about him right now. Today, it's really hard to make that work. You end up with people getting basically pulled onto all these different tasks and they have to make split-second decisions because they don't have unlimited bandwidth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
When you have computers watching all these sensors and you have an unlimited amount of attention that a computer can give, you can have that computer doing everything for you. You can say, watch every single one of those windows and watch every single one of those doors and just let me know if I need to worry about it. I got a question. Fire away. That's...
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's going to be so good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I think... I'll be honest. I'm not a huge fan of facial recognition. Mostly because the situations where it works, I believe, are pretty limited. If you're wrong, it's such a spooky thing. What if it tells you the wrong thing? What if it is... wrong, how do you delegate responsibility for that? But I will tell you this. Here's how I would handle that problem.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I probably wouldn't use facial recognition. I'm just making this up on the fly. I haven't thought this through very well, so you'll have to forgive me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
First of all, going into something like the Bin Laden raid, I probably would have set up drones around that whole site with things like wall-penetrating radar systems that are flooding that whole area with RF energy so that I can actually see people moving around inside the buildings behind the walls.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If I can do that, then I can, like, if I'm a hostage, I can probably guess, like, a guy up against the wall, you know, who's staying there even when shit's going down, probably not someone I need to worry about as much as the guys who all of a sudden start scrambling around like flies the moment that we land in the yard. So you're going to have a pretty good idea even just from shit like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The actual guys in the square, not the people that deleted the drone footage.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But if it were me, my understanding is during the Bin Laden raid, there was a live video feed from the team back all the way to the Situation Room. Is that correct? Yeah. That's what I hear. That's what I hear. Well, that's what I hear. That's what I hear.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I would love to see a situation where you basically have the feed from everyone's cameras being fed back to a talk and you've got a bunch of analysts in there who have seen this guy 100,000 times on every bit of one, on all their intel. They've built a pattern of life on this guy. They know what he's wearing every day when he goes to take a piss in the yard.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Did they ever figure out who deleted the drone footage?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I would want a guy where instead of facial recognition trying to make a guess, I can look at somebody and there's like 10 angels over my shoulder in the form of human intel analysts who will say, that's him. That's the guy that you want.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And like, you think about like, I think for that CIA asset, he's probably not going to be wearing the system that we're building is called Eagle Eye. Mm-hmm. He's not going to be wearing a full eagle eye, integrated ballistic visor probably.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
He's probably going to be wearing something more like Oakley's that just look like he's just a normal dude, but it's presenting him with, hey, that's the target. We're tracking him.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I might just be misunderstanding.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
That's super easy. I mean, like... Like with Eagle Eye, you actually have that inherently. All the helmets, and I can't talk about how they do it because it's not great information to be out there. There are multiple ways for the helmets to know who is who, even in really tough environments without the bad guys being able to pick up on how that works. But basically, if I'm wearing this helmet,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
See, these are the things that undermine confidence of just America, for Americans. People wonder why we lose confidence in our institutions. It is shit like that. That's almost worse than those guys going to prison is the fact that everyone watched people in the state do that, get away with it, and probably do it again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If I look over into those bushes and my guys are over there, it's popping up their names above their heads.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
What I'm saying is it would be trivially easy to make something where if you know what the guy looks like and you know what he's wearing, you could have it just scanning for that. It's like doctor in white lab coat. It's like it's Dr. Farij in the white lab coat and he's going to be wearing his tortoiseshell glasses. that is something you could definitely do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Or you enter the room and it says, you know, it outlines him in blue and it says, Dr. Farij, probably. The thing is- Wow. That just makes the decision-making process- Well, the situation you're talking about, that's even a little different than facial recognition specifically. Like I'm actually a huge fan of height recognition. So one of the things, and when I say height, it's not even height.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's actually like skeletal recognition. Face recognition is hard because you need a good capture, it needs to be relatively dead on, it needs to be lighting that is good enough. I'm a huge fan of being able to differentiate between different people on their skeletal pose.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If I have a drone that's way overhead and it sees some guy walking through a doorway, especially if I know how big that doorway is, I can take that video, run it back, and I can basically build a model of how long his wrist to arm joint to shoulder distances are. And we're all different. Like we're all uneven too. Like my arms are slightly uneven.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Palmer Luckey, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm so incredibly stoked to be here. I'm pumped to have you here. It's so different when it's not on a screen. Yeah. Do you watch it? Do you watch the show? So I don't watch podcasts regularly in general, but I've seen yours from time to time. Of course, I had to tune in for Trump. Yeah. And it's just, it's a...
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If I can basically say, oh, look, it's a six foot one guy with an arm that's two inches shorter on this side. And he leans a little bit to this side. Like you can be pretty freaking sure that's the same guy that you saw get into the car. Stuff like that is... paired with facial recognition, a lot more powerful. And what you're describing, it's like almost like clothing recognition.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You know, it's like, yeah, he's got a white lab coat, he's got the glasses, and he's got the face, and he's got the hair. And like, if you have all of that, but the guy is only like four feet tall, then it would say, oh, that's not Dr. Farage. I don't care what his face looks like.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Now, are you imagining, and you're imagining that this is happening on the fly, like we can't give him a beacon or something ahead of time? Because if he has a beacon, it's really easy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Honestly, there's so many ways. I mentioned hyperspectral vision. Using hyperspectral cameras, you can look at things and they can tell you what it is made out of based on its spectral response across multiple frequencies. You can say, that is stone, that is glass. Have you ever seen hyperspectral cameras that are used for detecting drugs? They can just look at something and like, that's cocaine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's really wild. There have been attempts in the past to use hyperspectral cameras for doing covert marking of vehicles. So like you'll have an operative walk by a car and they basically take a piece of invisible paint that you can't see with your human eye and they just like smear a line along the hood as they walk by. And it looks just like a smear of, you know, dirt to a normal person.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But on a hyperspectral camera, it shows up as a bright orange streak on it. You could just say like, hey, I'm going to give you a pen made out of hyperspectral stuff. I mean, like out of a weirdo material, like basically a chemical you would not normally see in a pen. You could say, I'm going to give you these eyeglasses. Or honestly, you could give them some makeup.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You could have them smear some of the right compound on their head. And you could have a system just see that and say, oh, it's like that guy. We're going to outline anyone who has this shit on their forehead. We're going to outline their whole body in blue as a hostage. Wow. There's a lot of interesting things you could do there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I haven't thought that much about these applications, I got to admit. I've mostly been thinking about it from a more big army versus special tactics.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We'll have to bring you out once we have the functioning system.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The cool thing is, I talked earlier about Lattice. Maybe you can see where my grand scheme is all coming together here. When I started Anduril, we said we're going to save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. We're going to make our warfighters into unstoppable technomancers. We literally said we're going to build augmented reality heads-up displays, fighter jets, smart cruise missiles.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The things we're building today are literally what we said we were going to build eight years ago. But I remember I talked earlier about how Lattice were basically taking all this expertise of the world's best operators and boiling it down into an AI model that can help you. Imagine if you're an operator who's wearing something like Eagle Eye, iVAS.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And imagine if I not only have a system that is watching my six and telling me what's going on, imagine if it can look at an aircraft that's coming to engage us And then on board, the AI has the expertise of the world's best fighter pilots. Or best rotary wing pilots.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
By building all this expertise in, you're potentially building a guardian angel that is like the superhuman, super intelligent thing. Imagine if you look at it and it says, oh shit, That's a Russian pilot based on the tactics that it's observing or the way that it's working. Imagine it says, oh, he's going to come back around to do a low attack run.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
This stuff is way beyond just, oh, there's a dot and there's the enemy. If you have the world's best expertise of the world's best warfighters distilled into one super AI, it's like you're rolling around with a whole team of experts sitting on your shoulder telling you what might happen next. And that's just...
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I'm so excited to live in that world because I imagine that's not the world you live in. I bet there were plenty of things you did where you said, man, I wish that we had the world's leading expert on X, Y, or Z here with me to tell me what was going on. You've probably played with the AI stuff where you're like, hey, who won the 1960 World Series? That's fine. But what if you could say, hey,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
how do I defuse this bomb? Or imagine seeing a vehicle and be like, how do I hotwire this car? And if it can just have all of that on tap for you and say, oh, well, either here's how to do it or just say, you're shit out of luck. You can't hotwire this car in the five minutes that you have. You need to move on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
really excited about living in a world where everyone's working with access to the best information. I need one of these helmets. So it's interesting. This is a little bit of an off-topic bit, but people have internally been discussing this. Are we going to sell this to civilians? And it's one of those really shitty situations. I'm a gun owner. I own about 400 guns.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I own a bunch of other gun-related type systems as well. So I'm really down the rabbit hole. And I'm a big fan of weapons companies, especially gun companies, that sell the same things to the military that they sell to civilians. That's great. I hate it when they say, oh, we're not going to sell this to you. We're only going to support the government.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The problem, when I was not in the defense space, I was always pissed about this. I'm like, how dare they not sell me the cool shit? How dare they not do that? But then I'm realizing, anything that I sell to civilians, I'm effectively also selling to Chinese special forces, to Russian commandos. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Now, I'm not saying that they'll be able to get enough to outfit their whole force, but anything you sell to civilians is eventually going to get sold to a traitorous American. It happens way too often. I hate that it happens, but you've read these stories, right? You know, some guy sells on eBay night vision that is top of the line night vision to like literal Russian cutouts.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so I would hate to build this incredible capability and then all of a sudden it's in the hands of the top tier units that we're potentially going to be fighting against. And also I don't want them reverse engineering it. I don't want them using it and learning how it works, learning whatever my problems, because there will be problems. I am going to do my very best to minimize.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
the impact of those problems. Like, I know I'm, something is going to be wrong with our system. I would prefer that I don't have a bunch of, you know, Russian cues walking around and trying it every day and realizing that there's a way to, for example, you know, trick the Dr. Farij facial recognition so that it swaps the two things. Like,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Not that I'm going to let it do that anyway, but you get what I'm saying. I've been struggling with this. I want to sell to civilians, but I also know that the national security impact is actually material and real. I haven't figured out how to reconcile that yet. One would be to sell a more limited version to civilians. maybe it doesn't do everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You probably don't want the civilian version to include the model that includes the weapons tactics advice of the best master chiefs and the best pilots and the best admirals of history. That's probably a dangerous thing for our adversaries to have.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I had not even run through my mind now, but that's another thing. We do a lot of work with CBP. We actually have our AI, our lattice sentry towers are along about 30% of the border now. We're covering hundreds of miles. We are responsible for hundreds of thousands of apprehensions that would not have happened otherwise. I am so proud of the work that we do with Border Patrol.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And could you imagine if they start going up against cartels who have helmets telling them how to evade our systems? how best to bypass them, sharing tactics on when to send decoys across to distract them and saying, okay, based on the average transit speed of a Humvee in this terrain, we think you have 16 minutes before they are able to get line of sight on you. That's what I want to be doing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I don't want to just tell soldiers what's happening now. I want to tell them what's probably going to happen. I want to do predictive analysis and use data processing to say, hey, based on what we've seen in the past, tactics we've seen from this enemy in the past, This is what they're going to be doing 10 minutes from now. I do not want the cartels having that shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
What do you mean there?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's an interesting thing to ponder. But you know, Mark's come around. Mark's based now. It's pretty interesting to watch. You've seen this going on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's a... I think it's a reflection of a lot of things. The world's changing. It's clear China's not our friend. It's clear they're not the friend of our corporations. It's clear that there's crazy people running our media, crazy people running our politics. And eventually, people who are smart, and Zuck is smart, right? He's not an idiot. At some point,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I mean, I don't want to complain too much here, but one of my biggest beefs with the US defensive system is I could not have started Anduril before Oculus. I've only been successful with Anduril because I'd already made billions of dollars in another company. That's kind of an indictment of our system.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If you look at history, we have a long history as a country of finding the best technology wherever it is and then building those people and those technology up into incredible parts of our warfighting apparatus. Are you familiar with the Samuel Colt story? No. Or Smith and Wesson? No.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Sam Colt was about to go bankrupt for the second time when he was hand-making revolvers out of the back of a covered wagon. And then he got a order from the Texas Rangers for like two dozen of his pistols. That paid his bills for the year. And then after that, the United States Army adopted his...
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
revolver as the standard service weapon because it was so obviously superior to anything else that had come before. So the six-shooter of the time was an extraordinary sidearm. And he went in his life from almost being bankrupt working out of a covered wagon to arming the entire Western world with his weapons. The designs that he made
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
went from out of the back of a wagon to literally tens of millions of units spread across America and Europe defending America against Nazis and the Japanese. Isn't that just insane? Isn't that amazing that our country used to be able to have those stories of... finding the right guy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so my question to people is always, could the United States military effectively buy something, even if it was a game changer, from Palmer Luckey of 2011? Back when I was a teenager building Oculus. If I had gone to the military and said, I've changed everything. I've built a VR headset that is better, faster, cheaper by an order of magnitude.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I don't know where you fall on this. I need to look more into that one. I don't know where you fall on this, but generally, we should be allowing these guys to use performance-enhancing drugs, and it should be on the level where we know about it, and it's monitored, and like...
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's $300 and it's better than your best $300,000 headset and a 10th of the way. Do you think they would have been able to buy it or use it? No, it's this muscle we used to have that we've lost as a country. We're only willing to bet on people who have already made it, companies that are already big. Nobody wants to take any risk. In doing so, they take more risk than they ever should.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
A bureaucrat doesn't want to risk his job, so instead he just risks our national security. The point I always make to people is we need to fix our procurement system so that the Palmer Lucky of 2011, can successfully sell into the military. We should not pat ourselves on the back because, and people are, they're saying, oh, well, I'm so glad things are changing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The success of Anduril shows that we're really getting our shit together. I'm like, guys, that's a good first step, but let's not pat ourselves on the back for a billionaire successfully starting a new company, right? that is not the problem America has, is that billionaires aren't good at starting companies. If you have a billion dollars, you can do whatever you want.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You can start an ice cream company, you can start a defense company, but we need to open it up to a lot more innovation that doesn't come from people like me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I hope that people who are listening are considering working on national security problems. Because even if you think that you are not relevant or not helpful, you're probably wrong. If you are good with computers, there are places that desperately need you. If you are good at metallurgy, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, there are places that desperately need you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Because the reality is people are going to be using these things and there's ways to use them that are pretty safe and probably increase their probability of living in general. But we've treated that whole category, like the whole category of making your body you know, better is just like, it's just, it's just not allowed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Well, the key is it has to, like we should be doing it and we should be doing it right. We shouldn't, we shouldn't be driving it into the shadows so that people are hiding it from their doctor, hiding it from their unit, hiding it from everybody. And now nobody has it. I don't want to be too mean here, but do you think Marines are the right guys to be measuring out dosages of this stuff?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I'm being unfair, but you can play to the stereotype really easily here. Is that the guy you trust to get it right every single time, to get the math just so, with people's lives on the line? No, you should have a doctor who's responsible for that, and they should say, hey, your job is not to is not to have this stuff hidden from you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's to make sure that it's being done in a safe way that's increasing their combat effectiveness, increasing their probability of living to see their families.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Good news for him, I'm not much of a coder either. I'm more of a hardware guy, more of an electro, optical, mechanical guy. I think he's in a fine place to not necessarily be a great coder, especially with how things are going with AI. The actual act of coding is going to become less and less important to being able to build things. I'm not saying that you're not going to still have programmers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I'm not saying that you're going to have everything done by AI. But when you're talking about the types of coding that I had to learn to do, like gluing together bits of firmware, making my Arduino, well, the Arduino wasn't big when I was his age. Wait, what did you just say? Arduino, it's the thing that all the kids are using these days.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's a quasi-open source microcontroller kit that allows you to interface different types of sensors with compute.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If you wanted to build an automated bird feeder, in my day, you would have gone out and been like, okay, I'm going to build a 555 microcontroller circuit with a timer and an interrupt, and I'm going to build a thing where the bird flies in and put dispenses feed, or dispenses feed every 12 hours if no birds come by. We would have done that all by scratch.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
These days, a kid would go and buy an Arduino, and they would probably plug in the motor, and they'd plug in the sensor, and then they would write a little bit of code that says, if the resistance level coming off of this sensor, if the resistance drops to this, that means something's blocking it, that means that it's probably a bird, then trigger this motor, fire this relay, give it the voltage for this long, this many seconds.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
That's the kind of way you would do it these days. And so I'm saying, That type of coding, you don't need to be very good. You need to know enough to get by. Think about, you might not know enough to design a car engine, but you know enough to clean a carburetor. That's the type of coder I was. I think his son is in a perfectly fine place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The most important advice that I can give people is to work on projects that you care about. don't look to school, whether it's college or the state-mandated younger educational system. Don't look to them to tell you, here's what electronics projects you should be working on. Here's what you should be doing to learn how to do these things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Because one, they're often years or even decades behind what industry and hobbyists are actually doing. So you're going to be learning how to do things that are ancient. Two, when you're working on something that you're only doing for yourself, you're going to make way better decisions, I generally find, in what you teach yourself, in how you do things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The only difference between me and all the other tech guys is they were mostly going to school for tech degrees. I was, if you can believe it, a journalism major. I was the online editor of the Daily 49er, which was the Cal State Long Beach... You've got to be shitting me. You were going to do journalism? I was going to do journalism.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
When I hire people at Anduril, I look for people who have done projects that were outside of what their work paid them to do or what their school made them do, because that means that the type of person who is willing to work on things with their own money and their own time because they want to bring something into this world that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
To me, those are the projects that people, that's what drives you to learn the most. It's what drives you to have the right attitude around all this stuff. I would say, don't do what I did. I started going to college when I was 14 or 15. And I took some robotics courses, which in hindsight, I don't regret taking them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But I think the time that I spent taking those robotics courses would have been better put into self-guided, self-directed efforts. And that's especially true in the modern day of the internet. All these things that in my era were not as widely available and you kind of had to go talk to a professor about it. There's a YouTuber who can teach you even better. There's an instructables guy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Heck, there's probably a lot of people on Patreon. I'll bet there's a ton. There's a lot of creators on Patreon who are putting out really interesting guides, really interesting education.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I would tell your son, encourage him to work on the things that he's interested in and don't rely on other people telling him what he should be working on and don't sweat the fact that he's not doing much or any coding. There is lots of stuff you can create in the technology world when you're a bad coder.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It just means he's going to have to go find a really good programmer as his co-founder, that's all.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Taste them. All right, I'm going to taste them. Open them up. I've been a big fan of European gummy bears in the past because they don't use all the stuff that they use in the United States.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I was, even as a teenager, frustrated with the state of journalism in America, particularly technology journalism. I think the thing that radicalized me was this CNN piece about a... I think this was back when you had the iCloud hacks, and they were reporting on how 4chan was affiliated with it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And you're not using a... I can tell you don't have a bunch of mineral oil on these as an anti-caking or anti-sticking agent, do you?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I ask because I'm interested in food science. Before starting Andral, one of the things I was considering doing was starting a company to make synthetic food out of petroleum. They would have zero calories and therefore allow you to eat as much as you want without getting fat. I had to learn a lot about
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
you know, food science, but in particular, the science of foods that you're not really supposed to eat like mineral oil. And a lot of these gummy bears, they put anti-stick, anti-cake agents in them. And if you have too many of them, they give you diarrhea. Yeah. Yeah. And I can tell you, I can tell, I don't see it on the ingredients list and I can feel it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Like they're, they don't have like that slimy sheen. Yeah. So you can, you can eat as many of these as you want, I bet without having a bad day at the toilet. No. Something to think about. You got a gift, right? I do. So this is something that I put a lot of time into, not for yours specifically, just generally.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
This is a mod retrochromatic for about the last 15 years as a side project that I put a little bit of time into here and there. I've been building a clone of the Nintendo Game Boy Color. This is a hardware clone that is basically what Nintendo would have made if money was no object. It's got a custom one-to-one LCD that's the exact same resolution as the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's a modern, totally custom LCD. Sapphire screen lens, so not glass or plastic. It's the same stuff you'd see on a high-end Rolex. and the shell is made of an aluminum-magnesium alloy. Compatible with any Game Boy game. I gave you a couple games, too, that are sitting over in the studio. It's a pretty fun bit of hardware, and this one's signed by me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So it comes bundled with... Tetris. It's a new edition of Tetris. This was actually played at the Tetris Classic World Championships last year. We had a tournament for it. And in my opinion, it is the best version of Tetris that's ever been made. Oh, well, if you want the batteries, it runs on not rechargeables. Runs on AA's. Nice. So you'll have to twist those out of the packaging.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I'll do that later.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And you have another one in the studio so that you can actually play. So I'm not going to let it be trapped. You got to get back into Tetris.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You're very welcome.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Well, I've got a lot of my heart and soul in that. And the name for it, the ModRetro Chromatic, ModRetro is actually the first business I ever started. So when I was a teenager, like 13 or 14, I started an internet forum called ModRetro for game console modification enthusiasts. And it's pretty fun to come back to it today. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And they had this technology analyst who's paid six figures, which was a lot of money at the time, you know, when I was going to school. He paid six figures to live in New York City and analyze technology. And the anchor says, so who is this 4chan? And I'm like, oh my God, this is nuts. And then what does he say? He says, well...
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Right now, I'm 99% focused on just Anduril. I sold Oculus to Facebook for a few billion dollars, and I was up in Silicon Valley for a few years before they fired me. So I don't have that one anymore. And ModRetro I've had since I was 14 years old, and I'm very lucky where I found a few other people who are putting their full time into it because I just couldn't put time into it anymore.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But I'd say Anduril's my baby. That's the thing that I'm putting all my time into. That company is awesome. Thank you. It's awesome. For people who don't know, we're not a defense contractor. We're a defense product company.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We use our own money to design and build products for the United States military and allies around the world that leverage autonomy and artificial intelligence to do things that nobody's been ever able to do with weapon systems before. Our
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
business model is that we build these things using our own money, not taxpayer money, and then we show up to the government, not with a PowerPoint saying, hey, here's this thing I want you to give me money to build. I have this working tech, this working product, buy it from me. That's awesome. All right, so... Where'd you grow up? I grew up in Long Beach, California. My dad was a car salesman.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
My mom was a stay-at-home mom who homeschooled me and my three younger sisters. I ended up moving down to Orange County to start my first company, Oculus, but I spent my whole childhood in Long Beach.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Yeah, there's lots of reasons. Wait, how old are you right now? How old? I'm 32 years old. You're only 32? I'm only 32. Holy shit. Yeah, I've had a pretty intense run. But I was homeschooled probably because I was not the type of kid who fit into the public education system. I was... Probably these days they'd say that I have ADHD, but back then it was just called being a boy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I think my parents identified that me in particular out of my sisters was probably going to do better in a homeschooling environment than in public school. And my sisters, they were homeschooled for various periods of their childhood, but all of them at some point actually ended up going back to traditional schooling.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But you didn't. Yeah, and different things work differently for different kids. Some people really like the formal structure and the formal education process and being told exactly what you're going to do and how you're going to do it and when you're going to do it. And I was not one of those people. And I think it turned out pretty well for me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You don't mind if I eat these the whole time, right? If you need more than two bags, we got more. My wife's going to love them. She loves jelly beans. Do you have kids? I do. I have one kid. He's six months old. Congratulations. I'm a big pronatalist. I definitely believe you need to have kids
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We don't know the details yet, but he's some kind of system administrator. Someone who knows his way around computers and how to hack things. I was like, oh my God, like, technology journalism is going down the shitter. And I wanted to be part of the solution. So I'm glad I decided to build technology rather than report on it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If you don't have 2.1 kids minimum, you're a traitor to the nation and our ideals because you're basically outsourcing responsibility for the continued existence of our nation to other peoples, which seems like a super elitist attitude. You're like, oh, I think I just want one kid. Like, you fucking elitist.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I think being the man in the arena is a lot more fun and a lot more rewarding. But yeah, it's interesting to imagine a world where I'd be in your chair. Yeah, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Maybe one day. When I'm old and used up, I can get my own studio and I'll have you on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I've been very blessed to have an interesting life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
out dough dough a I didn't like it because when you're on a team boat, it's possible to succeed or fail on the basis of other people's work. Like you can fail and the boat still wins or somebody else can fail or you think they fail, then you blame your loss on them. And I found it was healthier for me to be a solo sailor because then if I win, it's all me. And if I lose... That's all me too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We did.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Like you, you can't, you can't make excuses for yourself and say, well, only reason I lost is because of, you know, you know, Alex on the other side of the boat, you know, that's why we really lost. Cause that guy wasn't pulling his weight. When it's just you in the boat, you're like, I lost. I lost. I didn't try hard enough. I didn't practice hard enough. And so that was a, I really like sailing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's a physical and mental sport, which is still sailing. I have not sailed in years. I've thought often about getting back into it. but I'm just so busy with Andoril. And sailing to me is not a fun, relaxing activity. It is an intense, competitive sport. And I am so out of practice and so physically inept compared to what I was that I know I would be totally non-competitive.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We'll jump right into the crazy shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so it's hard for me to go and do it. I think I'm going to get back into sailing once I'm, Once I'm all old and used up. Once I've made my contribution to society, the candle has burned down to just the puddle of wax, I'll get back in a sailing. Nice, nice. I like powerboats too. That's the other problem. Yeah, I heard you got a Mark V. I do. You've probably been on Mark Vs before.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I've been on a lot of Mark Vs. So I bought a Mark V special operations craft from the Naval Special Warfare guys. And I bought it. It was like as is, no warranty, just like getting rid of it. And there was no use certificate because they were basically selling it as scrap metal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So, I mean, look, I'll put my biases right out there. I think Justin Trudeau is Castro's son. But... you can almost set that aside. Because that's not the issue I really care about. Like, is it really Castro's fault? Or sorry, is it really Trudeau's fault if he's Castro's son? Like, I don't believe in the sins of the father, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And the nice thing about that is I was able to get it and then put a ton of money into reactivating everything, getting it going again. As far as I know, I'm the only civilian owner and operator of a working Mark V. Damn. There's a guy who has one with no engines in it that's sitting on the side of the freeway in a boatyard in San Diego.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I think I'm the only guy who's actually spent all the money to make one go again outside of the government. And I'll tell you, that boat was made for people with government wallets, not civilian wallets. I mean, it's such a cool boat, right? I mean, it's the fastest boat that the Navy ever built. So, you know, it was built explicitly for Navy SEAL insertion and extraction.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So really, really fast, tons of storage, really, really durable, really, you know, incredibly bulletproof drivetrain and engines. Did you put any weapons on it? So that was one of, that was part of my saga is they cut off all the weapons mounts even.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They took off the weapons and then cut off all the weapons mounts and hard points because that would have been like, you know, ITAR restricted arms type stuff. But we were able to find the contract number for the people who made the original mounting brackets. And so we just contacted that machine shop and said, hey, we need part number four, six, two, five, seven, one.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Do you still have the CAD for that? They said, it's not even in CAD. This is, you know, this is like, this is all drawn paper drawings, but yeah, we got the drawings. And we said, we, we want you to make us four of that part. And so we got a brand new weapons mounts made.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I've had, and I have a, I have replica M twos that were made by a company that makes Hollywood props that I keep on it when it's just parked in front of my house. But I keep the real M twos nearby so that if we go out into, uh, Out of California state waters, we could put the real M2s on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It is really awesome. It's one of those things where it's just, when you're out there on that thing and you're blasting along at 50 knots and you're just eating up waves like it's nothing. We've gone on a few really cool trips on it. There was one trip where when the hurricane was passing by California recently, there were these huge waves and swell offshore. We said, you know what?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We're just going to take it out. Supposedly, this thing could do 40 knots in sea state four. We're going to go do it. That was the craziest shit I've ever done on a boat. It was insane. I mean, think like coming off of waves, diving bound into the next wave and the whole thing goes over the entire boat and you shoot out the other side and you're still going 30 knots.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We also went to go see the USS Kitty Hawk, the last of the United States conventionally powered supercarriers, so not nuclear powered. They were towing it from Bremerton, Washington, down around the bottom of South America, then back up to Galveston, Texas for scrapping. And they didn't have any transponders on the boat or the tow because they didn't want looky-loos to come do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And they were doing it offshore. They didn't want people coming out to get in the way. And we got a hot tip from a buddy of mine as to when it was leaving and how fast they were going. And so we charted out where it was going to be and we guessed pretty well. So we just went out when it was passing by Southern California and we eventually found it way offshore.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I mean, I don't think he really should necessarily have to live his life burdened by that if it was true. Like, I can understand why someone would want to hide that. And like... That's one issue, I'll set that aside. The real question has always been for me, why is this conspiracy theory reported on it the way that it was? And we were talking about this. Let's say it's not true. Okay, fine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And it was so funny because we were approaching the towboat And before they could make visual contact with us, they must've seen us on radar. And they radioed us and said that this was a military tow operation and to stay clear. But I knew for a fact from talking to my buddies that it had already been cleared from DoD possession. And this was just the tow company talking shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
and like they were like arguably illegal what they were saying and so we just didn't respond and then about you know one minute later we make visual contact with them and they see you know big you know gray navy boat blasting towards them at 50 knots and they shut up and they didn't say another word i think they were like oh like damn they were like we shouldn't we shouldn't we shouldn't have uh shouldn't have you know puffed ourselves up that like like that and uh so we
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It was really cool. We got to, you know, we were ripped right by the boat. We got some really good pictures. And then we launched a fixed-wing drone off the back of the Mark V, and we did a touch-and-go on the runway at the Kitty Hawk.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Well, the thing is, you'll never get another, like, the military is not really in the business of letting you fly your, you know, remote-control airplanes off of aircraft carriers. It was so cool. And because we're out in the middle of the ocean too, so it's not like we're doing it like off like, you know, a docked ship or something, which they have done that with like the USS Midway in San Diego.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They've let people take off little RC planes from the deck, but it's just sitting at the pier. It's so cool to be flying an RC plane, FPV, and you know. going down, approaching the carrier, touch and go. And unfortunately, we tried to land the plane back on the Mark V, but we messed up and the plane went into the water.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So I had to come back around and I had to jump into the water and get the plane and keep it, I had to hold it above my head to keep the memory card out of the water so that it wouldn't get destroyed. But we got the video, we got the video.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I was really lucky in that there were certain things that I had to have beat into my head. There's other things where I was just interested for my own reasons and very, very good at self-directed learning. I mean, I read thousands of books before I was 13. Wow. Literally thousands of books.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Everything. The classics, science fiction. the art of the deal. The entire gamut of everything that you'd want. I was checking out lots of books from the library. Also lots of people giving me books, everyone knew that Palmer liked to read. And so people would sometimes buy me new books, but more often you'd have, especially like adult friends, just like, dumping massive quantities of books.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I'm a virtual reality guy, and so I understand the difference between things that's on a flat screen versus 3D, but it's just so cool to be here in person.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
My mom also, she managed to get on whatever registry Barnes & Noble uses for teachers. And so she had the educator's discount for buying stuff in Barnes & Noble. And so I forget what the discount was, but it was some extraordinary discount. Barnes & Noble did a lot for teachers, especially back then. And so- Yeah, I just read and read and read and read. So certain topics I was okay with.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I loved science. I love engineering. I love chemistry. Math, like real math, never really a fan. There was handwriting, which at the time, that was actually still a thing that they were insisting that kids needed to learn in school, and doing cursive. And they're like, oh, you're definitely gonna use cursive. Now they don't even teach it anymore. What a waste of time that was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But yeah, I would say my mom didn't keep up with me on the things that I was interested in, but she didn't need to try. She knew that I was going to be fine on those. And on the other stuff, my mom was able to beat me into submission.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But if you go and you look at any of the press coverage of this conspiracy theory, they make you believe through their reporting that anyone who believes it must be truly nuts. They're like digging deep on this conspiracy theory. And then what follows is the most surface level thing that takes
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
My mom was no dummy. She has a master's degree. She's a sharp one on her own.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Yeah, so my dad was a car salesman. Sometimes new, sometimes used. It depended on the time. The 2008 financial crisis was really, really tough for the car industry. So there were some times where it was really tough because dealers were laying people. You can't keep all your... salespeople employed when people aren't buying cars. It's just the way that it is.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But he sold mostly domestic cars, so Buick, Pontiac, GMC, Hummer. And then later, he kind of had to shift into selling import vehicles because that was the only thing that was actually moving volume. So he had to get into selling Korean and Japanese cars. And it wasn't really what he wanted to do, but it was the only way to make it work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And my parents decided, you know, my mom would stay at home and he would work. So we were a single income household. I don't want to say like we were poor or anything, but like when you got one person working and their one job they're working is a car salesman, you know, you got to sharpen your pencil sometimes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And sometime, like one of the things my dad would do is in his spare time, he'd buy used cars. I know it's funny. You sell used cars all day. Then you go home. You buy used cars, and you fix them up, drive them around for a few months, and then you sell them for more than you bought them for, and that gets you a little more cash.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
That was one of the ways that I ended up becoming mechanically inclined, was helping my dad work on motorhomes and vans and old, crusty BMWs. You learn a lot when you actually interact with the world and machines with your own two hands.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You know, I honestly am not sure. It was when I was 14 or 15. It was around, it was that summer. But I don't remember exactly. It would have been right around when I was either turning 15 or almost 15.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
No, no, I went. Because I was a commuter student. I wasn't like, I wasn't on campus. I was still living at home. But no, I was actually going to school and it was, the funny thing is when you're, so here's the way it works in California. High school students are allowed to attend community college courses and state college courses by law. The law says you have to allow them to take those courses.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
every official communication at state value and doesn't even look at the evidence that conspiracy theorists are actually analyzing. You know, they'll say, well, you know, it's very clear. The records are clear. Trudeau's mother didn't even visit Cuba until four years after he was born. It's like, But that's not the conspiracy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But there's two requirements. One, it has to have sign off from the principal of your school. This is why most kids don't do it. And by the way, taking college courses when you're a high school kid, it's amazing because you get college credit and high school credit at the same time. It's like AP courses, except a lot of these college courses are actually easier than AP courses in my estimation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's just true. Look, like AP kids are all motivated. Community college, you get everybody. So the good news is my mom had, we were registered with a homeschool group that basically just signed off on all the paperwork. They're like, so I just got everything signed off on. And normally schools don't want to sign off on this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Principals won't sign off because they lose out on revenue proportional to the classes you're not taking at school. What principal is basically going to sign off on a bunch of kids going to all the local community colleges when his school's going to lose the money?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's a totally fucked up system that incentivizes keeping kids trapped in the high schools rather than allowing them to specialize and take community college courses. The second thing you have to do is you have to you basically have last priority for enrolling in classes. When you were enrolling in classes, there's popular class where you had to be on your game and actually enroll in it quickly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You couldn't wait two weeks and then get around to it because the class would be full. The problem is that when you are a high schooler taking college classes, the enrollment window doesn't open until it's been open for four weeks for all of the proper students. And what that means is that every course you want to go into generally is already full.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so the only way to make it into the course is you have to go and petition into the course. You have to show up on the first day of class with your petition form. And then usually you're there with maybe some other people petitioning, sometimes not. And then at the end of the class, you talk to the professor and try to convince him to let him into your class.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so I had to get really good at that. Every single course I did, I had to, as like a 15 year old kid, talk to the professor and I would make sure to do research on them. I would make sure to do research on what work they might've done in academia. And I'd have to play the game like, oh, Professor Kraz, I'm such a huge fan of your work on the local geologics of the estuaries in Long Beach.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I've been reading your papers lately, and I really think you make the argument better than your colleagues at UCLA. They say, oh, well, thank you. I say, Mr. Kraz, I would really love to take your geology course. In fact, I have to take it for my general education requirements. I know your class is full, but is there any way that I could... that we could add an extra seat.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Is there any way that I could stay for a week or two while we wait for students to inevitably drop out and I can take their seats? And actually nine times out of 10, I was able to make it work. And there were times where I was just sitting in the back of the class or standing in the back of the classroom for the first week or two.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And then someone would drop, bam, I got my seat and I wouldn't have to stand anymore, which was good because I was fat at the time. I became an indoor kid. I stopped exercising.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The conspiracy theory is that in the flight logs, that one trip that was logged as Caribbean Island and doesn't have a country name, unlike every single other thing in the log, that that was Cuba. The conspiracy theory is that maybe it was when she went to his house in France. Like, that's the conspiracy. And they literally don't mention it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
yeah that's how I know that was a long ramble but when you're a kid going to college it is as weird as you'd think it is like a situational comedy every single day because you're like a 15 year old kid and it's obvious too I wasn't one of those kids where I'm like a towering brute and who knows if he's 30 it's like what's that 15 year old kid doing here this guy's still going through puberty over here that was exactly the situation and
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It was especially funny in things like when I was going to Long Beach City College and taking robotics courses. And you basically have a whole bunch of people who are older guys, mostly getting post-graduate master's degree type work. And you have a 15-year-old kid. And the way the class works is you're all on teams building robots. And so you have to pull your weight.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And nobody really wants you on your team when you're a 15-year-old kid when you're kind of going in blind. You're like, why do I want to be gimped by this teenager when we're all professional-level people often already working jobs and taking this night class? And so I really had to work hard to stand out and prove that I could keep up with the adults. Did you have a problem keeping up?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
No, I had no problem. Did they have a problem keeping up with you? I think that as soon as it was... I did a good job of making it clear that I could keep up pretty quickly. And as soon as that was clear, then I was like the most hilarious novelty ever. Like everyone thought it was just the funniest thing ever.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
As I got older and then I'm like 15 and 16 and 17 and 18, now I'm just the age of all the freshmen and it's not interesting anymore. But at the beginning, it was definitely pretty interesting. But you're not in freshman classes at that age. Not at that point. Well, it depends.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So the way that I did this, and the way I would actually recommend basically everybody do it if you can scam your principal into signing your paperwork, is the moment you are eligible, when you're 14 years old, start taking community college courses. And what you should do is take all the general education courses first, because they're generally easier.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You have to do them no matter what you're going to do as an adult, right? Like if I become a journalist or a mechanical engineer or a pilot, I'm still going to have to take history. So just start with all that crap and just do a few years of the crappy, all general ed courses. And then you can decide at the end what you're actually going to do. And you can then transfer all those
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
units to whatever school you're actually going to. And that's what I did. I transferred all those units from community college to Cal State Long Beach and went into the journalism program.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You're doing things that you can't do. I was lucky. I had a lot of local friends. I'll admit it. I wasn't making my friends at college. People are fine with the weird 15-year-old kid on their robotics team, but they're not going to go hang out with them after school. Nobody in their 20s is like, oh, I just love hanging out with 15-year-old kids. And if they are, something's wrong. Ha ha.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And it makes me wonder, why are they going to such great lengths to make this seem not just that, like, because you can analyze those and say, well, actually, here's why. And, you know, it was probably filled out by the... by the FBO and they just didn't know where it had been.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I was lucky. I wasn't running into any of those guys. But I was lucky. I had a lot of friends I grew up with. Had a lot of friends from doing homeschool stuff. But honestly, most of my friends were internet friends. I was running an internet forum called ModRetro. I think all my best friends were internet friends. And it actually worked out pretty well for me. It's like when I started Oculus...
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
and I started Oculus when I was 19 years old, almost everyone who worked there, Oculus is my virtual reality headset company. Almost everyone I hired was friends and moderators and administrators staff from ModRetro. We were all teenagers. Like we're all a bunch of teenage dudes who have known each other for like five or six years on the internet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And we basically decided to start a VR company together. I'll never forget when I called up my friend, Chris, who was one of the early administrators and moderators on ModRetro and a good online friend. I'd literally never met him in person. And I called him up and said, Chris, what are you doing this fall? He said, oh, I'm probably gonna work all summer at the local pizza place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And then I'm starting school this fall. I'm going off to college. I said, no, you're not. You're gonna come with me and we're gonna start this VR company that I've been working on, Oculus. And that was on a Friday. And that Monday, I rolled up in my crappy minivan to his house, which was two and a half hours away from mine. He piled all of his stuff into it and we drove away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And his mom couldn't believe it. Oh my God. He told her, mom, I'm dropping, I'm not going to school. I'm going to start a company with Palmer from the internet instead. And she's just like, Okay, sure. And she didn't understand that he was imminently doing it that Monday. And so we moved into a motel that is now condemned and has been torn down. It was later condemned and torn down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And like, there are reasonable ways to go after it, but the way they've gone after it is to pretend that you're insane if you believe this conspiracy theory. And I think that really gets back to- Isn't that just about every conspiracy theory? I mean, it's certainly the, I mean, you know where the phrase comes from, right? Conspiracy theory.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But we moved into the Seaport Marina Inn. And we lived there for the first few months of... Oculus, like literally me and my internet buddies living in a crappy motel room starting this company. And so I believe I didn't have a problem with making friends. We just had problems seeing each other in real life. How old were you? I was 19. 19 years old. Yep.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
No, I dropped out. I went through, I had basically one semester and summer school left to get my degree. And I had a series of technological breakthroughs in my virtual reality hobby, which I'd been working on. Like I said, I started building VR headsets when I was 14 or 15 as a hobby. And I would become obsessed with virtual reality technology and trying to make it better.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I believed that the existing systems, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and were very heavy, I believed they had missed something. I knew this had to be a crackable nut. And there weren't very many people working on VR tech. It was kind of a laughing stock at the time. Everyone thought, oh, that's this dead technology that'll never happen. It was just a ridiculous fad of the 90s.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I still believed in it. And over the course of years, I got better and better and better. And then I had a series of technological breakthroughs that made my headsets much cheaper, much lighter, much smaller than anything that anyone had ever made.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And for the first time, when I showed it to my friends, instead of them seeing my prototypes and saying that I was wasting my time, they said, oh shit, I actually get it now. This is cool. And so I had a choice. I could either stay in school and get my journalism degree, or I could drop out of school and start this company. Actually, it was kind of two options.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I could either drop out and start this company, or I could stay in school, get this degree, probably have to make use of that degree, and I was terrified that in the process of delaying me working on my real passion, that somebody else was going to figure out what I had, and they were going to do it before I did. I said, I don't have the time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I need to get this out of the world right now, because anyone... There were literally thousands of people in the technology industry who could have had the insights I had. The insights I had were not Einstein-level insights. They were the natural conclusion that any smart person who was looking at the VR industry in 2011 and 2012 would have made.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
components becoming available, computer power was increasing in a certain way where I could compensate for optical distortion in real time on a graphics card shader and not have it take up very much of my graphics rendering load. And I realized that if anyone smart happened to glance in my direction, that they were going to have all the same conclusions I did.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Well, I mean, the term conspiracy theory itself and conspiracy theorist was invented by the CIA and used and pushed through their media plants to discredit anybody who questioned the results of the original JFK investigation. And again, it gets to this thing, okay, set aside whether or not there was a second shooter, whether there was anyone on the grassy knoll.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I knew I needed to take advantage of that. Good thing I did. And actually, even better, I was right. So, Sony ended up launching PlayStation VR a couple years later, and it was more or less built on exactly the same principles that I had. Now, I think they copied a little bit from what I made public, but they also had internally been working on VR for years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so it turns out there were people in major companies who literally had come to the same conclusion I had. In fact, Sony made me a job offer before I launched Oculus. I was open sourcing all of my work, publishing it on the internet, And when Sony found out- Why were you doing that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
First, remember, VR was just kind of like a joke at the time. And I was working on it not as a job. I was working on it as a hobby, right? I got into VR like I just wanted to work on VR and make it good. And it's about, it's not about, it's- I guess there's two ways to look at this. One is that if I put stuff out there, other people put stuff out there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And then we all move faster together as a collective than me hoarding all my information to myself. But to be honest, it was just purely cultural and I never thought it through. Remember, I started the ModRetroForums because I was interested in modifying game consoles, vintage computers. The social currency of an internet forum is knowledge. How do you show off on an internet forum that is
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
built around engineering and product. You're like building projects. You show your projects and you don't just show them. You say, and here's why my project is better than anyone else's. Let me tell you in detail how I built my power management system.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Notice how I modified this LCD to not use a compact fluorescent illuminator, but instead uses the latest white LEDs from Nichia to achieve much lower power consumption. And then all the other nerds say, oh my God, this guy is a God. Like that is the The social currency of nerd forums in the 2000s was prowess. If you didn't prove your prowess, you're nobody.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Honestly, that was the culture I grew up in on the internet. That's how the internet was back then. It's very different than today. Today, it's about flash and style. You make a cool video. It's not really necessarily about going deep into the technology that you did or the design decisions. Also, you know what was common in the 2000s?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We'll do the next one in VR.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You wouldn't do it today where you go on and you post your final completed thing and hope it goes viral on TikTok. You would post updates in a forum thread every week. You'd say, here's my project update thread, guys. Here's how's it going. Here's what I'm doing. People would say, you're a fucking idiot. Why are you doing it that way?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And sometimes you'd say, you're wrong, and I'm going to prove it. Other times you'd say, he's right. I was doing it a stupid way. And you would adapt. And so it was just a totally different culture. And that was the approach that I, when I started working on VR, I'm like, well, that's what you do. You share your work and people are impressed by it. And so how did Sony get...
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
How did you get on Sony? I got really lucky in a series of chains. I don't want to say that it was all luck because I think people make a lot of their own luck. You might not be able to make a coin more likely to land on heads or tails, but you could increase the number of coins you get to flip in life. You could do things that increase the number of interactions you're likely to have with people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Let's say that the official story really is accurate. It's pretty extraordinary that conspiracy theorists are themselves literally terms born of a government conspiracy. It makes you wonder. People say, well, sure, the CIA had 30 media assets back then, including national news anchors. But I mean, that's not how it is today. Yeah, right. Is it? Is it? Right. That's why I like the Trudeau theory.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I think publishing in the open, for example, did that. It means that I didn't have to personally meet every person who would be helpful to me, they could just see my work out in the open and then come to me. And in this case, it was a guy named John Carmack, who you should have on the show, honestly. Probably the smartest engineer in the world that I know. Can you connect me with him? Absolutely.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
John is more or less the creator of first-person shooters, the modern 3D game engine. If you've played Call of Duty, if you've played Battlefield, if you've played anything, it all goes back to Doom. He was the original creator and lead programmer for Doom. Oh, dude, I love Doom. He is a wizard, and he was so far ahead of his time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I mean, not just building 3D games, but also one of the first people to conceive of networking those games over the internet to allow people around the world to be in a single virtual space and play games together. John was bringing that out. People had online games, but they typically were not real-time. They were things like online chess and
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
He figured out how to build netcode that would allow you to have people in a fast-paced action game where milliseconds matter and allow that to function over the internet. And so John was an extraordinarily brilliant guy. Everyone in the games industry, the tech industry writ large, knows who he is.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And he would give these, actually he would also publish all his personal notes and technical notes in a lot, like he would literally publish them online and just let anybody see them because he also believed in sharing information, everybody goes together. And he wasn't worried about people running faster than him because he was already running twice as fast as anybody in the world could ever run.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
John Carmack had been looking at virtual reality for years, but he had always concluded it was too expensive, too low field of view, too much latency, it made people sick. And every few years he would do another new look at VR and see where it was. And I got lucky where he came onto this internet forum and he was researching VR and he saw my project threads.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And he contacted me and said, hey, Palmer. Actually, no, our first interaction was he posted asking, hey, I want to modify this Sony head-mounted display that I have to be lower latency because you can't play games with it or you'll throw up. Does anyone have any tips on modifying this thing?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I gave him a detailed response where I said, John, I've already tried to do exactly what you're talking about. Here's all the technical challenges. The way Sony has implemented the display pipeline makes it impossible to get rid of the latency unless you drive the displays directly with your own brand new controller. Here's why you're not going to be able to do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so I laid all that out. He looked into all my other posts. He saw my Oculus Rift work logs and he contacted me and said, hey, you seem to really know your stuff. I see you have this Oculus Rift prototype. Can I buy one from you? I said, I'll do better than that, John. I'm a huge fan of yours. I'll just send you one for free. So I sent him one of my Oculus Rift prototypes for free.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
he adapted that into Doom 3 BFG edition. He basically made his game run on my headset, and he showed that at E3, which is a major gaming trade show in Los Angeles. It takes place every year. That was where Sony saw it. Sony saw that prototype, and there was so much attention being given to this at this point, because it was the best VR demo the world had ever seen. Like,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
John even explicitly said, this is the best VR demo the world has ever been created. Sony saw that, and they said, oh my God, John, who the hell made this? What company did you buy this from? He said, I bought it from a teenager on the internet who I've never met, and he just gave it to me for free. And so he put me in touch with Sony.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I met with them, showed them my technology, and they offered me a job running a VR research lab in their Santa Monica PlayStation studio. And... I ended up turning them down to start my own company. What I didn't know at the time is that they were already running a VR project. What I didn't know is that I was already in a race against the clock. When I turned them down, I didn't understand.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I thought turning them down, it's like, oh, I need to do this on my own before Sony gets into VR. I didn't know that they were literally already in a race with me. It was a really wild time. When did you find out? I kind of knew that there were... So all the VR work back then was being done by a group called Sony Liverpool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So over in the UK, they had an office that was doing most of their 3D work. They were doing all their 3D ports of various PlayStation games. Those were kind of the guys leading the charge on VR as well. And I found out that they were working on VR right before... right after I turned them down. But then Sony Liverpool was shut down just a few months later.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so all of a sudden the people who had been working on it weren't working on it anymore. But what I didn't know is like, and so I basically found out they were working on VR, then thought they weren't working on VR. Then I found out maybe a year later that there was an entirely separate VR project going on inside of Sony out of Japan. And I found out about it about a year later.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
There's other ones. We talked about the Kamala Harris DNC pipe bomb. I haven't followed that much. You've got to look into this one. I'm really stoked that we got Trump in office and that we have people coming to the FBI who are going to be able to dig into this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And then you won't believe this. The day that we announced the acquisition by Facebook of Oculus, literally the same day was the day that Sony announced their PlayStation VR headset. Literally the same day. Wow. Yep. Which gets back to, it was clearly an idea whose time had come, right? I was very lucky that I had the insight that I did as just a random guy in his garage.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
How wild is it that there's me, a 15-year-old sitting in his garage, has more or less the exact same insights on this dead technology that a huge team of advanced display researchers in Tokyo have at exactly the same time? Like, man. That's how you know that it's the right time to do something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And who's your friend that you... And by the way, John Carmack, just to tell you a little more about him, he also, at the same time he did in software, ran a rocket company that competed in the XPRIZE. And they built one of the first vertical takeoff and landing rockets. Years before SpaceX did.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They were more or less the inventors of modern control theory around doing vertical takeoff and landing rocks. So he did that as his hobby. He also built twin-turboed Ferraris as his hobby. And then I hired him as the CTO of Oculus. So I convinced him to leave his own game studio to come and be the CTO of Oculus.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And then eventually, after I was fired, he left, and now he's working on trying to build super intelligent general artificial intelligence. And he did this before the AI boom. So I know that seems like, oh, well, of course he's doing AI, like all these other hot people just following the trends. John was doing it when everyone thought he was crazy. So he's way ahead of the curve.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Damn, I would love to talk to him. I'll connect you guys. John is brilliant.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So that's my friend, Christopher Dykus, who was, I said earlier that I had never met him in person. That's actually not true. I just remembered I had met him one time in person at San Diego Comic-Con. We both met up while we were at Comic-Con.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But yeah. So was he a co-founder? He was literally the first person that I called before I called anybody else. He was a guy with a lot of the same hobbies as me, same interests as me. He was employee number one at Oculus. I don't even count myself as employee number one because you can't employ yourself. Or maybe you can. Anyway, we've always said that he's employee number one, because he was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The official story, according to the government, which is that there was a live, active, and dangerous pipe bomb planted by extremists outside of DNC headquarters on January 6th, that Kamala Harris passed within just several feet of that bomb, and that they managed to save her, defuse it, and destroy it. but there's so many problems with this story.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And the crazy thing is, Chris was also employee number one at Anduril, my new weapons company. No shit. So when, it is a whole long story all on its own, but when I was fired by Facebook, Chris was the guy who took a stand and said publicly, hey, you firing Palmer is totally wrong. It is absolutely insane. He has done nothing wrong. And I can't be at a company that is like this. And so he quit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
his extremely highly paid job at Facebook to come and join my next company, even though that company didn't exist yet, had nothing to its name. And he's one of those friends who is probably more loyal than he should be, which is what people should do. Wow. So you developed Oculus.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Well, it started with just me and my garage. When we were shipping our first product, the Oculus Rift DK1, we were up to about 25 people. When we shipped our second product, the Oculus Rift DK2, we were up to about 75 people. That was when we were acquired by Facebook. During my years in Silicon Valley working on VR at Facebook, we were run as an independent operation owned by Facebook.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We grew it to a couple thousand people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So there were a few things. We were not trying to sell the company. We were planning on staying independent. But then a few things happened. First, it became apparent to us that we weren't running a race on our own. We started to hear what was going on at Sony. Like when Sony announced PlayStation VR, we knew it was coming.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We knew there were other companies that were going to be entering the space with way more resources than we had as a startup. Look, we're a group of like 75 guys who managed to raise a little bit of venture capital. How do you compete with multi-billion dollar companies like Sony or Microsoft or Google or Apple? It's really, really hard.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
That was one thing we were just really concerned about and having a lot of discussions internally. How do we survive in the long run? We have the jump on these guys, but how do we turn that lead into something that persists rather than just being the people who are first and blazing a trail for everyone who then comes in and outspends us? It's pretty easy to outspend people in the games industry.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Here's a very real concern. What if they came in and all the video game developers who are making games for our platform What if they just came in and gave them piles of money to not support our headset and be exclusive to their headset? Sony did just that. By the way, I have no ill will towards them. It's all business. It's strictly business. They were trying to compete with us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
There were titles that had announced for the Oculus Rift as our launch titles. Sony came in, gave them money, and they said, we're not going to be on your platform, we're going to be on Sony's now. We were very, very vulnerable because nobody wants to buy a game console that has no games. You really need to Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
For example, you'll remember that originally Kamala Harris through her counsel testified that she wasn't even at DNC headquarters on January 6th. You'll also see in the video footage that's captured of the pipe bomb,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
that after it was called in and after Secret Service was on site, you have Secret Service and Capitol Police just standing around the bomb with their thumbs in their pockets, talking to each other. At one point, the Capitol Police walk to their car and eat their lunch. A group of children walks by. They don't block off the street. They don't be like, hey, don't walk by that pipe bomb right there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The whole thing is, it reeks. It couldn't possibly be what they say happened. And then this gets to kind of the second layer. Okay, again, ignore whether it was planted by the feds or planted by somebody else or planted by extremists, or maybe they found out it was planted by some foreign government agent that's a government. Like, it's hard to pick exactly which conspiracy you want to believe in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
,,,,,, in P P P P P P P P ac ac ac ac ac ac ac ac ac ac ac ac ac ac ac ac ac P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener gener g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g in P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But there's a simple question. Why has Kamala Harris never talked about it even one time? She has so much to say about January 6th, so much to say about people who were just protesting at the Capitol, nothing to say about the feds who were planted in that whole op. But why focus on things like the people who were protesting in front of the Capitol building when you could just say,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Ars Technica, Wired Magazine, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, The Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz reported on it. I mean, it was everywhere. And they all just had this lockstep narrative. Palmer Luckey is a racist, misogynist, anti, which is so funny. I'm actually a radical Zionist. It was even in the moment, it was funny.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I strongly believe in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. People are like, that's so problematic though. It's so ethno-state adjacent. I say, I don't care. After what happened to them in World War II, they deserve a place where they can do their own thing and protect their own people without getting wrecked by everybody else who hates them. And you know what?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Maybe someday everyone who hates Jews are going to be gone. We are not living in that world today. And people, it's a slippery slope though. If they can have it, why can't the KKK have their own state? I say, that's not going to happen. It's absurd for us to even have a discussion. it is very reasonable for the Jews to have a place that is theirs. And they say, oh, but what about the Palestinians?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You know what? That's a separate political issue. Like the existence of a Jewish state which is what Zionism is, like the belief that they have the right to a Jewish state, the existence of a Jewish state, is separate from the issue of what do you do with refugees from some political, you know, from some physical area.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So it was so funny to me when like Palmer's this anti-Semitic guy, because it was literally made up. Like, it's not even like there was like screenshots or made up screenshots. journalists just said it was true with zero evidence and they just repeated what each other said.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I know people are going to hear this and say, this, I must be missing, Palmer's ignoring, like he's glossing over something. He must have like said something about Jews on Twitter and they were like- Are you Jewish? No, I'm not Jewish. I just believe in the existence of a Jewish state. And I bet even some of your listeners probably won't agree with me on that. And that's fine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We don't have to all agree on everything. But I will say it was pretty ridiculous in the moment where like Palmer's an anti-Semite. I'm like, no, I love the Jews more than like anybody. Like you Democrats would probably hate me for how much I like the Jews. You know, like that you... Anyway, it was...
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
oh yeah, they literally tried to kill me. It's like right-wing extremists planted bombs outside of my party headquarters and got within five feet of killing me. Like, wouldn't you say that? Like, imagine if that happened to Trump. Trump would be milking it for all it's worth. And I love the guy, but I mean, he'd say, and they almost got me. You know, maybe it wasn't five feet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But what happened was as a result of this reporting, like looking back, I should have pushed back. What happened is I wrote a statement saying, hey, this is all false. None of this is true. Here's what actually happened. I gave $9,000 to this pro-Trump group. They ran a single billboard. Everyone is lying. This is literally fake news. And that was when fake news was like a new phrase.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Facebook told me I couldn't publish it. They said, we won't let you make this statement. You cannot make this statement because it frames the media as the bad guy. And in a world where Donald Trump is attacking the fourth estate, we can't appear to be aligned with him. I said, well, you guys don't have to appear to be aligned, but I will be.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Like I'm fine if people think that I'm being unfair because this is literally, Character assassination. Like they are trying to destroy, they kept reporting as of Thursday at 3.58 PM when read for comment, Palmer Luckey is still employed by Facebook. Like that's how they ended the articles. It was explicitly a scalp taking operation from the very beginning. All the articles were ending with,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Palmer's still employed, Palmer's still employed. According to Facebook, Palmer is currently still employed. And they just couldn't wait for the followup where they could take my scalp. So Facebook tried to get me to resign and I refused. They tried to get me to not say anything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Eventually they wrote their own statement for me that basically just said, I'm sorry for the negative impact this is having on Facebook's of reputation and I want to, I'm going to be taking a voluntary leave of absence. In reality, they told me I couldn't come into the office until after the election. It was that explicit. You can't come in until after the election.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Their thinking was, okay, Palmer is like the leader of our virtual reality organization. They knew they actually needed me. Getting rid of me is not a thing that they could easily do. And their thought was, okay, we know that Palmer didn't post these racist memes. Facebook knew none of this was true, right? So they knew that this was just a media invention, but they didn't want to push back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Amazing human. People should just know my bias. Joe was one of the first investors in my first company, Oculus. Back when I was a teenager, he put millions of dollars into my company at a time where very few people did. This was his last VC firm, Formation 8, which has now evolved into 8VC. I love Joe. I like to think Joe loves me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They didn't want to say anything. Kind of like where you see Mark now coming out and finally saying, okay, the Hunter Biden laptop thing, maybe that wasn't good. But this was 2016. It was a different universe. So they were hoping that I would take this leave of absence, disappear until after the election. They believed Hillary would win.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And then if Hillary won, they thought all their employees and the press would kind of forget about this whole thing. Because it would just be this crazy time that Palmer supported that fringe candidate who lost in a landslide to Hillary Clinton. Remember, she had a 95% chance of winning. So now I told them this was a bad strategy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I said, guys, what you don't understand is Donald Trump is going to win. And they thought that I was just like insane. They like, literally when I said that, they said, wow, I thought you were a smart person. I'm like, no guys, I am a smart person. Donald Trump is going to win. Like I will accept that there's a possibility he won't, but all of the signs are that he is going to win.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Like the problem is that the media is reporting on Donald Trump the same way that they're reporting on me. an absurd, totally baseless way that is out of touch with reality. Don't fall for that. And they said, no, no, you have to stay out of the office until after the election. So the day after the election, Trump had won. They said, actually, you can't come back to the office. Are you serious?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
People say it's five feet. I think it was two feet. You know, maybe I looked at it. Maybe I looked at it and said, I think that's a bomb. And maybe I'm the one who caught it. He would be talking about this. And the fact that it's not talking about it, like someone has realized that it's not a good idea to talk about whatever happened because it's probably not what they told the public.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I'm serious. They said, you can't come back into the office. And that was when the machinery went into motion to get rid of me. They realized that with Trump in office, and there were Facebook executives publicly saying, I will not work with Trump supporters. I will not have them on my team, which is, by the way, illegal in California, but you have to bring a case about it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And especially back then, Republicans weren't really I think we weren't punching square. I think that most of them were like, I just want to get shit done. I just want to get paid. I'm not, I'm not trying to be a professional victim, right? Like what, what, what red blooded Republican man wants to basically go into a courtroom and be like, they're so mean to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They said, they said that they don't like me because I voted for Trump. Like, doesn't that just sound like this is like the, the dumbest little bitch fest ever? Like, wouldn't everyone laugh at you even if you won? And so people wanted to get work done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They didn't want to be a professional victim and put themselves out there as the whiny little boy who's sad his coworkers don't like him in a hostile workplace environment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
No, because the lawyers were very, they very quickly isolate things like this. The moment they realized that this was turning into a problem, they're like, you cannot come to the office. You cannot send any messages. You cannot send any emails. You may only communicate through attorneys. There is a lockdown protocol to minimize accountability on these things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so it wasn't until, and so they told me though, even after the election, they said, you can come back. We really need you. We all recognize that you're the guy and that you're, critical part of the team. We just need to stay out of the office for a little longer and we're going to figure this all out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And then January rolled around and their attorneys called my attorneys and said, you're being fired. You're being terminated without cause. Oh, that was the other thing I forgot. They launched an internal investigation into me. They wanted to try and dig up some kind of policy violation. They wanted to find a reason to fire me that they could say had nothing to do with politics.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so that went for months and they dug through all my emails and all my communications and they interviewed dozens of Facebook employees, just like full Gestapo style. you know, what have you ever heard about Palmer Luckey doing something bad? Like, what do you know? What have you ever heard? And I was like, I literally have never heard Palmer even mentioned politics. He's just like a VR guy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
He gave $9,000 to this Trump group, I think on a whim because he has billions of dollars. Like, this doesn't see, and so they tried to find something on me. And they found literally nothing. So their investigation concluded. And I remember being in the room with, because it's a formal process and they let you know when you're being investigated.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And in the end, they said, we found no violations of Facebook policy at any point in your tenure. And like, so that was when they realized they were going to have to fire me without cause. They just said, well, we were paying you tens of millions of dollars a year, and we've just decided for no reason we don't need you employed anymore. And it was, look, it was totally ridiculous.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It was totally trumped up. they didn't ever ask me about people who were discriminating against me for my politics, right? They were saying, oh, we did this investigation and Palmer was not fired for his politics. Like, well, you never asked me about it. If you would have told me, Palmer, are you aware of any instances of people being discriminated against their politics?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Like, yeah, I can give you like two dozen. If they asked me, Palmer, were you fired for politics? Like, yeah, I can literally give you the emails and messages where people explicitly state that they will not work with me. Because of how I, and so like, it was insanity. Like they, and they were, the worst part is they were even telling the media this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so to me, this is like one of the most interesting conspiracy theories because it's very rare for them to touch people at... Kamala's level, right? There's lots of conspiracies about what an ATF unit does or what some group of State Department goons did. It's very, very rare that the Vice President of the United States has their proximity and seal of approval on the actions of the day.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They were saying, oh no, it was Palmer's decision to leave. Literally untrue. I was terminated. They said, they told one journalist off the record, but you know, off the record doesn't mean anything. They told one journalist off the record that it was something like, They said, look, Palmer leaving was his decisions.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's not like this is Soviet Russia where you say something, you say the wrong thing about the wrong politician and then get disappeared. It was literally just like that. Anyway, I'm sorry I seem worked up about this, but just like, I hate getting back into this headspace because it was just- I'd be pissed if I was you too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I mean, you got to remember this was, this was, sorry, I need to do some water. Oculus was everything to me. all my friends worked at Oculus. Remember, it was started by me and all my friends worked there. All the friends that I made working over the course of half a decade on that particular product were there. My reputation was there, my work was there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
All of the technology that I've been developing since I was 13 years old for VR was owned by that company. Everything, like I was Oculus. And then they said, no, we're taking it all away from you. and you can't even talk to anybody, or we're going to come after you. And if you say a word of this to anyone, we're going to come after you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so for me, it was just, it was a catastrophically destructive event. And I wish that I would have acted differently in the moment, but the mistake I made was trusting that people could have different politics from me, but still treat me fairly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I didn't realize that when they told me, oh, you're still an important part of the team, I didn't realize that was a pure manipulation tactic to prevent me from leverage. Like I had leverage. There were things that they needed from me. There were things I was doing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They basically were just manipulating me to try and squeeze the last little bit of juice for me for a few months before just getting rid of me. Wow. Yep. Anyway, that was how that all went down. What would you have done different? So first of all, I would have put out my own statement, which I had already written. I should have just put it out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And the thing is, I realized later, I didn't know at the time, that political activity outside of your employer, like outside of your job is protected, at least in California. They cannot do anything about politics. They cannot tell you to not endorse a candidate, for example. They can tell you you can't do it wearing a Facebook shirt. You can't do it while you're on the clock at Facebook.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Of course, lots of Facebook employees do that. Hillary Clinton was everywhere. They were literally using the campus print shop to print, I'm with her posters that they were plastering all over San Francisco. If you were for Hillary, it was absolutely no problem. But I should have said, you know what, that aside, I should have just gone out and said, hey, the media is lying.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They are lying to all of you. This is completely false. This is fake news to the ultimate degree. The press is lying about me to try and take my scalp. And I think that would have probably caused a lot of... It would have pissed them off because I wouldn't have been allowing them to run the PR strategy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But the way that it's supposed to work, just if you've never worked at a big company, the trade you're making when you allow the company to run your PR strategy is implicitly that they're not going to fire you, right? Basically, it's okay. The trade is... do things our way and you get to stay safe because otherwise there's no incentive to do things their way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Otherwise you do just go off on your own. You say, fuck you. I'm going to do whatever I want. I shouldn't have made that trade. I should have gone out, gotten the truth out there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I think people would have been pissed that I didn't let Facebook, you know, do their preferred option, which was to say nothing bad about the, they literally told me I couldn't, I said, I'm, I'm against Hillary Clinton because I think she's going to drag us into world war three.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Yeah, that's a damn good point. Yeah, you've got to look into this and watch the video. I think your watchers would probably love to see it. You could just ask yourself, wait a sec, if they know it's a live pipe bomb, you're watching, why are they doing what I'm watching them doing? This only makes sense. If it's a bizarre conspiracy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
She said that she's going to enforce the no-fly zone in Syria, which is like, that is saying I'm going to shoot down. People think I will enforce a no-fly zone means you just like say words and it's like mean to pretend you have the authority. No, enforcing a no-fly zone means that a Russian aircraft is going to enter Syrian airspace and the United States is going to shoot it down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I was looking, I was like, holy shit. I'm one of the people who want us to get out of the Middle East, especially at the tail end of things. I'm like, that will drag us back. Can you imagine doing this shit all over again with the Russians in the Middle East? And they said, you can't say any of this. You cannot say anything negative about Hillary Clinton.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You cannot say anything positive about Donald Trump. And I should have just realized, wait a sec, this is literally illegal. I should just put it out there. They would have been upset with me temporarily that I didn't follow their strategy, but it would have been much harder for them to fire me in the end.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The masterstroke of their strategy was that in refusing to deny the allegations against me, they became true. Right? Perception is reality. My refusal to address them and Facebook's refusal to point out that it was all made up, in the minds of everybody, they said, well, it must be true. He is funding white supremacist troll campaigns. He is funding people to attack other people on the internet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
He is funding a tidal wave of anti-Semitic memes all over the internet because why wouldn't they believe it? I never even said that it wasn't true. And I think if I had made clear that it wasn't true, I probably would have gotten through it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's a... What a crazy place to work. Well, and you know what was even crazier was that they maintained for years and years and years that I was not fired from my politics. Zuck got asked about it when he was in front of Congress. Yeah. Yeah, it was Ted Cruz who asked him, Senator Cruz, why did you fire Palmer Luckey? And he said, oh, I don't think this is an appropriate forum.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
He said, you have to answer the question. And Zuck said something like, I can only commit that it was not a political matter or something like that. Which was, to be fair to Mark, I don't think he was lying. I think that his team had correctly, properly insulated him from it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
When you're illegally firing employees for their politics, you don't bring that to the most important people in the company and basically poison them. That's poisoning the king. To show him, if you're like, hey, King, here's this thing. We're performing illegal activity. You've just screwed them over now because now they do know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Am I to say that there was no suspicion or a kind of understanding as to what would happen? I wouldn't go that far, but It was crazy how they maintained for years and years and years that politics, their CTO, Andrew Bosworth, publicly on multiple occasions said, Palmer's termination had nothing to do with politics. It was not a factor in any way whatsoever.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And they were telling people, they started telling me that I was fired for cause. They're like, oh, we can't tell you why he was fired, but believe me, we had no choice. He did something that was just beyond the pale. We had to fire him. We had no choice. I did, by the way, sort of get victory on this. So I will give credit to him. Andrew Bosworth, about a month ago, did post on Twitter.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
He said something like... You can pull up the exact one if you want and put it up on the screen. He said something like... I want to apologize to Palmer Luckey. I've been saying things about him in the past that weren't true. I just want people to know that I was misled by others and that we are sorry and it shouldn't have gone down that way and I was wrong.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I'm so concerned that it's going to be like the JFK files.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So they are actually finally acknowledging that the story they were putting out there, that politics was not a factor and that I was fired for any reason at all is nonsense. But, you know, It's sparse comfort a decade on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We've got some big news coming soon. Big news on the Anduril side. I know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You ever been involved in litigation? No. So one of the things that's interesting, particularly with criminal, so I've been through, whenever you make money, people come after you. They come out of the woodwork and they sue you for, you know, oh, you copied my idea. Oh, you're infringing on my patent in Germany.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Boop, boop.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's like, okay, Meta, when was Palmer Luckey fired? He goes, boop, boop. Palmer Luckey was fired on March 29th, 2017 after being found guilty of stealing intellectual property in a trade secret lawsuit. And then it links to a story on ZDNet where the guy says, I was found guilty of this crime, but he's literally wrong. It literally didn't happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Because first of all, being found guilty is for criminal cases, not civil cases. Two, I literally won on all of the charges around trade secrets. Like we literally won. And the judge threw out all the damages against me and said, yeah, he's not guilty of any of this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But what's crazy is, of course, the average person, you ask these questions and these things that journalists write are being brought up years in the future as the basis for AI knowledge. If you ask these AI systems, as far as they know, it's all true. It's all true. According to these AIs, I was fired after I funded a tidal wave of anti-Semitic memes. How do you undo that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's this persistent harm that just lasts forever. Let's say that I could get them by sending my lawyers after them now to remove these stories. Well, there's still these huge AI models that have been trained on a decade now of reporting and re-reporting. How do you undo that? It's a big problem when you've got so much bullshit that's been put out there, a tidal wave of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I've won all of the cases that mattered in the end or got them thrown out by the judge. But one of the things that I had to learn over the years, and by the way, I've been to a verdict in federal court twice. So, unfortunately, I'm pretty well acquainted with the rules. If you destroy evidence, the way that the court interprets it is in the least favorable light.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I'd say maybe the majority of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You saw the bit where Elon was saying, he says, you are the media now. In the modern world, you have the tools to get your message out and people can amplify others based on who has the closest proximity to the real information, who actually has the actual media. We can... be primary sources. We don't need intermediaries. And then you have the National Press Club.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You see this speech where they have this guy up on stage. He says, it doesn't matter what Elon says. They are not the press. We are the press. I'm like, oh my God. He's so out of touch with just the American moment. Like, who's going to hear that and be like, yeah, he's right. How dare citizen journalists without credentials report on things?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Same day? I literally picked up the phone, and I had been talking with people. Well, I got to backtrack a little bit. Before I started Oculus, when I was a teenager, I had worked for almost a year on an army project called Brave Mind. Have you ever heard of this? No. It was at the ICT mixed reality lab.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
There was a project that was being worked on called Brave Mind that was using virtual reality exposure therapy to treat veterans with PTSD. The idea was that you could put them into virtual reality simulations of things that would trigger their PTSD. And you could teach them coping exercises, thinking exercises to mitigate their physiological responses under the guidance of a licensed therapist.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You could also expose them to things that they might be exposed to in the battlefield ahead of time to help them learn how to cope with that ahead of time. And I was not doing any important work on the program. I don't want to make it sound like I was one of the key researchers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I was the cable monkey, I was the lab technician, I was making stuff go, making head-mounted displays work, designing stuff to support the program. But that was my first exposure to how the government uses technology, the good that it can do in our military, but also how broken a lot of the procurement systems are in terms of how they buy things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
how they procure things, the incentives that happen when you have cost plus contracts involved, cost plus contractors involved who make more money when the contract runs long, more money when they make the more expensive decisions rather than the faster, more efficient decisions. And that experience, small as it was, stuck with me through my whole career.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I had a lot of conversations with friends who did work in defense, whether working literally in the military or building tools for the military, who gave me these stories that you would just never believe about how broken things were, how much money was being wasted and grafted and misspent.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
When I made all my Oculus money, one of the first things I did was try to find small defense startups that I could invest in that had a shot at changing this. My thinking was, okay, I've made all this money.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They basically assume that whatever was destroyed is as bad as it could possibly be. Otherwise, there's an incentive to destroy. Like, if you assume, oh, it's not the worst possible thing. What was destroyed, maybe it was only halfway there, and that's how we're going to weight this. Yeah, unless it's the government destroying the evidence.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I don't have the time to work on this problem at all, but I want to find companies that have a shot at changing this structure, proving that you can apply technology from the tech industry and bring it into these defense spaces in a really meaningful way. And I ended up not really making any investments.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
There was a couple tiny things, but nothing material because I couldn't find anybody who was doing things the way that I want. I couldn't find anyone who was trying to build basically the next Lockheed Martin or the next Northrop Grumman. I mostly found companies that were building some little gizmo or gadget, but like a part of the bigger machine, but they weren't going to change anything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And they weren't out there trying to change things at a big scale. And so I made some friends who were doing a similar thing. So one of those was Trey Stevens, who's one of the co-founders at Anduril. He was, at the time, working full-time as a venture capitalist at Founders Fund, which is Peter Thiel's venture firm. or one of his venture firms, rather.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And he was full-time trying to find exactly the same thing I was. He was meeting with hundreds of small defense companies, trying to find ones that had a shot of really becoming something big and meaningful. And we ended up becoming friends.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I met Brian Schimpf, who was director of engineering at Palantir at the time, and a few other people, my friend Joe Chen, who was an early Oculus employee, former paratrooper, really interested in trying to figure out how to use technology to make DoD better. And so what happened was after these years of meeting all the time and just complaining, oh my God, isn't this all screwed up?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Aren't we wasting so much money on nonsense? Isn't it a shame there's no company that could come in and really go toe to toe with these big guys and give them a threat? And the day that I was fired, I picked up the phone, I called Joe and I called Brian and I called Trey. I said, hey, you know, guys, we've been trying to find a company that we could invest in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
that does this, I think we should start it ourselves. I think now's the moment. They said, Palmer, we're all so busy, like running engineering at Palantir or being a venture capitalist, or in your case, running Oculus. I said, you know, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. And so that was really... So they had no idea? I let them know, but it was... That's a sacrifice I'm willing to take.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. And so I'd say the early Andoril crew is like that... group of people that had been thinking about these problems, some people from Oculus who resigned when they fired me. There was a pretty large contingent of people who said, what you did to Palmer is fucked up and wrong, and I refuse to be part of it. I'm out of here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The funniest part is that of that contingent, the people who left because of the way Facebook treated me then, many of them came to work at Anduril and they said, Palmer, what are you doing next? Like, I want to be a part of whatever it is. And then some of them, when they found out I was starting a weapons company, never talked to me again. They were huge fans of me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And that's one of those, like, I wish that they would look at it that way and say, no, no, when a box of evidence is missing on something and it's the government, And they were committing these actions. And it just so happens to be the JFK. You should assume the worst. I'm not even saying that we should assume the worst as people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They believed I was treated unfairly. And then when they found out that the thing I thought was most important for me to work on, which is to build better tools for our national security, save taxpayers hundreds of billions by making tens of billions, they literally... concluded that I had become an evil person and never wanted to talk to me again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Some of them have then come back around as world events have shifted. Like, you know, this is 2017, so as it became more clear that China is an aggressor and not a benevolent fountain of money, as it became clear that Russia is still an expansionist dictatorship and not a reformed quasi-Western gas station, people have come back and said, okay, I was wrong. what you're doing is not evil.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But at the time it was very controversial. A lot of people believed that anything you did with the military was either useless or evil or warmongering. The fact that you were saving them money was actually to the detriment. Like I was like, guys, we're spending way too much money on these weapons systems. They said, oh, so you're going to make it so they can buy 10 times as many weapons?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Wow, as if that's better. Like, well, guys, if you hate the military, like if you hate NATO, for example, Should they be armed with water balloons? Should they be armed with slingshots? What level of force are you okay with them having?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If you believe that NATO has any reason to exist at a level beyond kids with water balloons, then you should probably want them to be armed with things that can actually beat our adversaries. And the problem is that at that point, people just, they stop talking to you and say, fuck you, fascist.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And they move, like, you can't reason someone out of an opinion that they didn't reason themselves into. And when people, when you start to try to pull them out of the matrix, they are often unable to, unable to make the jump.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So Andrew started. We wanted to build not a defense contractor, but a defense product company. Use our own money to decide what to build, how to build it, decide when it's done, and then sell products based on those technologies to the United States government. I was a strong believer and I get to look like a visionary today, but back then I looked like a crazy person.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I was a strong believer that the entire future of warfare would be defined by artificial intelligence and autonomy. This fundamental decoupling of the one-to-one ratio from shooter to weapon, from pilot to plane, to allow smaller numbers of people to wield many swords was kind of the thinking there. I knew that would change everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I'm saying the criminal justice system should assume the worst because otherwise they're going to keep doing this. You need to say, no, the box of missing papers does not get you out of hot shit. The box of missing papers is the indictment. It is the thing that you go to prison for life for. When you lose the files on the JFK investigation, that is...
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Not just with small, cheap drones, but even with large-scale systems. If you can get people out of harm's way, and if you can allow them to leverage their own intellect beyond what they can hold and steer with their own two hands, if you can basically become a person who manages weapons at a higher level while they micromanage the second-to-second
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
execution of your commands, you can fundamentally change warfare in a way that I think is very accretive to US interests and very, very against the world that, let's say, China or Russia wants to exist. Largely because I think these advantages accrue mostly to the defender.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If you're trying to build a military that is designed to turn your allies into prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on, like you have in NATO or most US operations, that's really useful. If you're trying to build a military where you need to, let's say, go into Taiwan with landing craft and get millions of soldiers there and invade and then occupy their territory,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
all of the stuff I just talked about is a nightmare for you. It doesn't actually help you. The ability to wield many swords per arm is not that useful for occupying a resistant, hostile land. It's a lot better for slug it out, large scale, great power fights. And that's what the United States needs to focus on winning for the most part, at least right now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Like I said, I had exposure from the Brave Mind stuff and I'd become interested in the problem, but I'd done a lot of research and I'd kind of been building a theory of how someone might be able to fix this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
there were a lot of assumptions I made that were wrong some were right I don't want to make it sound like I came in day one and I understood the whole landscape but you know I had my beautiful mind charred up on the wall with all the strings and all the pins connecting where I thought where I thought the bad shit was and where we could be going after um
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I was right about enough of the problems that we were able to actually get some traction. Basically, our bet was simple.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We decided we were going to put all of our money into building this AI called Lattice, which is a military-focused AI that is built to the standards you need for military, the reliability you need for military, that could act as a tool that would be the brains of dozens of products. Basically, a Lattice being something you can build other things on top of. They always build this Lattice AI
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
as a sort of core software product. And then you can build on top of it autonomous fighter jets, autonomous tanks, cruise missiles, small arms, surveillance systems, security systems, drone defense systems, and they all kind of share this common brain.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And so we started by building Lattice, and we started building products on top of it, some of them for the military, some of them for Customs and Border Protection. Actually, our first major program of record was with CBP. And Against all odds, we've actually managed to make it work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Today, Andro is still making Lattice, and we have over two dozen different hardware products that are all using that same AI brand. Wow. One of our big wins recently.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
That is way more important to the national fabric and unity of America and people's trust in government than any simple crime ever could be. That cover-up is so much worse than anything that people go to prison for life for every day. You think they're going to do it? Or I guess it would be already gone now that they said that. You mean, are they going to hide it? Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Yes. I mentioned earlier that I read a lot of books, and I read a lot of science fiction. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We've had a really productive and profitable relationship over the years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I think it's what you said. I think the Shredders are working overtime, and I think they're looking at what's happening with USAID, and they're probably saying, oh, shit, the Doge boys are coming here next. We've got to do something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Oh, very familiar. I've had the pleasure of meeting Eric Prince a few times. Actually, even before I started Andral, I asked him, what should Andral build? What did he say? Should I say? I think I can say it. We talked about a few different things, but one of the things that he thought would be a good technological innovation would be
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
artillery that is actively cooled in such a way that you don't have any cooldown intervals? What if you could have an artillery piece that works at maximum mechanical interval? It has a very high cyclic rate artillery that never needs to cool down and never goes down for maintenance. Something that could auto-swap a lot of the consumables.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
,,,,, in P P P P P P P Pத ac la ac la ac ac ac ac ac ac ac ac ac P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P gi wh wh wh laст gener pu gener laст gener gi cad wh gi cad wh ag ident gi cad gener g aut g aut gener in a 100 in in P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P I . . . .
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
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Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I know technically they're not allowed to charge government more, but they have the government version, right? It's like a special government paint. Like, oh yeah, the special government paint version of this optic that's going on this rifle, it's going to be $4,500. Meanwhile, as a civilian, you can go buy something for $500 that is just as good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I mean, we have to stop doing that as a country. Very familiar with that. Eisenhower was right when he said that in a very real sense, every rifle made, every bomb dropped represents a child deprived of an education, a library never built, a hospital never constructed. Like, I feel like a lot of people forget those two things are tied together.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It doesn't mean we need to be hippies about it and pretend that war's never going to happen, but we need to be spending the right amount on these things. We cannot treat it as... Right now, it's almost like you can't question it because you can't question... If you question defense spending, you're questioning the existence of the military. That's... That's just crazy to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And his point was that artillery is limited a lot in that respect, and that you can only get off so many rounds at a time from a single piece, and that it would be a huge game changer on the battlefield. At the time, I was looking at how I could apply mostly artificial intelligence and autonomy to AI.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
There's no other part of our society where you can get away with that, where you're like, oh, no, that's not true, education. You can't question education either. You can't say, aren't we spending too much on education for how bad it is? And be like, how dare you attack our brave teachers who are educating all of our children? It's like, no, no, I'm not attacking the teachers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's just, you know, it seems like we spend a lot of money for kids to get grades this bad. Like the kids can't read good or do other stuff good too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Oh man, this is an interesting one. I don't think so on a quite long timeline for a few reasons. First of all, it's the nature of the job. I'll tell you, here's someone who will be replaced. That hilltop surface-to-air missile operator, right? That is a crazy dangerous job. You're the first thing that everyone wants to take out before they can get through to everything else. You're going to die.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We have to get rid of that guy. But then you look at what a lot of Navy SEALs do, or look at what Green Berets do. It's so much about interacting extremely closely with people, around people, among people, in infrastructure that was designed for people. I think it's going to be really, really hard to make robots that do that set of things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Remember I said robots can do the jobs that a 90-year-old man can do? Okay, they're going to eventually do the job that a 70-year-old man can do. And then eventually they'll be able to do what like an average in shape 50-year-old man can do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
To build humanoid robots that can do what a Navy SEAL in the prime of his life, you know, probably secretly roided out, like that's a really high bar for a robot to hit, especially when it comes to his ability to break the rules or make a decision that wasn't programmed or decide that he's going to do something that a robot's just never going to do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
My intuition here is like, that's going to be the last job to be figured out. It's a little bit like... It's not a perfect example, but it's like, is AI going to replace like the jobs of our politicians? It's like, you know, that's probably like the last thing to go. Like in a very real sense, there's certain parts of our society that are almost like envoys of America.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
They represent what we're doing. And I think that we're not going to outsource that to robots.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
What is a long way out? 30, 40, 50 years minimum. There's some things that move fast and others that don't, but I mean, because here's the other thing you have to remember. And I think we talked about this a little bit earlier, but you're also able to augment people. So the right comparison is not Navy SEAL of today versus robot 10 years from now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's what could a Navy SEAL look like in 10 years in terms of their... biological modifications or conditioning in terms of their mental modifications or conditioning, things like exoskeletons, things like more advanced mobility, things like more advanced small arms. All of those are going to make the Navy SEAL a moving target as well.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The name of my company, Andral Industries, you'll note the acronym is AI, but we had to hide it because back then, AI was kind of a dirty word in tech. Everyone thought it was never coming, never going to work. So we couldn't talk about it. I ended up not building it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So the robots would have to get not just as good as a SEAL of today, they're going to have to be as good of a SEAL of that era. And I think we're going to keep investing in I think we're going to keep investing in the guys around, hopefully a lot more than we have been. You're involved with exoskeletons, correct? I don't know how I just ran a sub eight minute mile for the first time in my life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I'm usually the guy who's wheezing to do a sub 10 minute mile. And last night I ran a sub eight mile in an exoskeleton that ran... Basically, it ran out of thermal capacity two-thirds of the way through the run. So the last third of the run, I was actually going slower than I normally would run. But the first two-thirds were so fast.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Actually, when I go home tonight, I'm going to be making some mods to the cooling system that the company designed. I don't want to badmouth the company. I think that they made a mistake on the cooling system. And so I'm going to be doing some mods tonight that I already have the parts sitting in the garage for. And I'm going to run, I think I'm going to run a sub seven mile.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Anyway, I'm like an out of shape fatty. And if I'm able to just like put on a exoskeleton and run a seven minute mile, imagine what that could do on a Navy SEAL. The same thing for augmenting vision. You know, right now, the night vision capabilities that we give our warfighters are not that far removed from what we had in the 90s, right? It's still Gen 3 night vision.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Sure, it's white phosphor instead of green, and it's a little higher res and a little higher game, but generationally, it's the same. Imagine what happens when you can take that Navy SEAL and you can put on a visor that gives him full peripheral vision at night in the thermal spectrum, the visible spectrum, the ultraviolet spectrum, the hyperspectral spectrum.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
He's able to identify individual materials, components, vehicles. see all of his buddies, see all of the bad guys, and have information seamlessly shared between him and every other weapon and robot and vehicle on the battlefield. That is where the Navy SEAL is going to be in just a few years. I think it's going to be hard for robots to compete with that guy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But I look back now and say, shit, you know, that probably would have been a really useful thing to have in Ukraine, especially in the early days of the war. Yeah. But yeah, then that, of course, read his read his book, Civilian Warriors.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So different exoskeletons work in different ways. This particular one basically is sensing your motion based on your actual motion. And then it tries to predict, it actually has an onboard AI algorithm that is trying to predict what you're doing. And then it applies force that matches. Like you use power steering, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You make a motion, it feels that torque, and then it adds more power to it to zero it out. It's actually not that different than that. Imagine if you had power steering, but instead of just for turning a wheel and grinding your tires, imagine it was every joint on your body. So you say, okay, I'm lifting, I'm doing this, and it says, oh, he's trying to do that. I'm going to add more power in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
there's more advanced techniques that start to actually read your muscles before they even move. Because when you tell your muscles to move, it takes time for them to respond. That's going to be the future of exoskeletons.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's going to be measuring your body so that instead of there being a delay where I move, it feels it, and then it helps me, it's going to be seamlessly integrated with you, maybe even starting to move your arm before your natural muscles are doing it. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
That's what, and the crazy thing is eventually, someday, and I think this is way out just for a variety of basically invasive surgical reasons, eventually you'll be able to read those signals right from the brain directly. So right now, you have a lot of latency in your motion. You don't perceive it. You think there's no latency in your body.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
There's actually a couple hundred milliseconds of latency in your movements that your brain just ignores and tells you is fine. Imagine a world where you're wearing an exoskeleton. where the moment your brain is telling your arm to move, the exoskeleton starts moving your arm. You could potentially make someone who's literally 10 times faster at moving or reacting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And again, do you see where I'm getting? That's going to be the Navy SEAL of the future. And that guy is going to be a beast.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I've actually got a very small-scale version of this. I built a system that measures when you are trying... Are there security guys running around with this stuff? We have a great security team, but I probably shouldn't talk about methods and tactics on that. I built a device many years ago, and I've screwed around with it a lot of times.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It basically is a small sensor that you can mount that is able to tell when you are flexing muscles on your face. And I hooked that up to another electrical actuator. Have you ever used like a TENS unit for like therapy? So I hooked up something that's a lot like a TENS unit, but it's just rigged a little differently.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So instead of making your muscles vibrate, it is made to just trigger individual muscle groups. You know, like it can just basically make you, you know, pull this finger or pull that finger.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And I made it so that whenever I even barely start to flex a muscle up here in my face, it sends a signal wirelessly to a patch I have on my arm that fully fires this tendon and makes me pull my trigger finger. Now, the thing is,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If I do this normally, like if I normally am telling my trigger finger to go, that signal has to go from my brain, down my spinal cord, out through all these nervous cords, out into my arm. That actually takes a really, really long time. There's something called nervous transit velocity or nervous conduction velocity. It's how fast you can send signals down your peripheral nervous system.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
By building a bypass for it, I can make it where I can actually if I want to pull the trigger on my gun, I can flex that muscle on my head, which is much closer to my brain, therefore a much, much shorter pathway. And I can actually shave a ton of latency off the delay between when I see something when I pull my trigger.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
All of a sudden, I've now reduced effectively, because you're familiar with like lock time in a firearm. It's like lock time is the time between when you pull a trigger and when the round is actually going. If you have like a really heavy hammer, you can have a higher lock time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's if you're looking at a target, you're pulling that trigger, you have some inaccuracy that is caused purely by the lock time, when you told it to fire and when it actually fires. And you can learn it out to some degree by kind of predicting all this together. I can not only be faster, I can even be more accurate by just removing that latency. Lock time, we pretend it's actually just the gun.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Your real lock time is signal from your brain to when you pull the trigger to when the trigger reacts. There's a lot of things we can do. So when I talked about biological modifications and mechanical modifications, there's things that we're going to be able to do that are going to eventually have your brain telling you to fire some weapon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
And the weapon will be fired and out the barrel and hitting the target before you would have, a traditional guy would have been able to even pull the trigger. So it's an exciting future. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I do have to admit that I have said in the past that exoskeletons, the time has probably come and gone. This is a public prediction that I've made. My belief was that exoskeletons were probably something that made sense in the 80s and the 90s if we would have invested in them. But that at this point,
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
we probably should just move to humanoid robotics and just have them remotely controlled by people. I will say, by the way, we're going to have remotely controlled Navy SEAL robots long before you have the AI-controlled robot. But I've recently seen some technology that has me questioning that. I think that we're going to start seeing this tech in tier one groups
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
like just about now, like less than a year would be my estimation. When does it get out? A controlled robot. Sorry, no, exoskeletons. Exoskeletons. Now, they're going to be a little less cool than people expect. It's not going to be like an Iron Man suit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's more like a suit that maybe helps one or two of your joints, like that helps you run better, maybe to run faster, or maybe just to use less... so that you can run longer. I'm sure you were in situations where when you've liked it to have been able to go take a jog carrying a whole bunch of stuff to a place a kilometer away and then get there and not be tired, that'd be a huge deal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I think those are going to be the types of exoskeletons we see. It's not going to be like, I put on my Iron Man suit and I'm carrying 300 pounds of vibranium armor and the bullets are blasting off me. I think it's going to be more like, hey, you can run up
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
a whole flight of stairs to the top of a 10-story building because all the power's cut and there's no elevators, and you're going to step out on that last landing, and you'll be like, oh, yeah, that was a little tough, as opposed to feeling like you want to collapse. And that's a huge deal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Eventually, I do think we will see the thing that everybody wants, which is you put on the suit and you're Superman and you punch through walls and the bullets are coming at you and nothing happens. It's going to be a decade plus before that happens. One of the problems being any suit that can do that can also kill you. Just think about it this way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
A suit that basically helps out your legs, it's only as powerful as your legs are on average climbing up some stairs. If it malfunctions, you might hurt yourself, but you'll be okay.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If you are building a suit that is capable of doing Iron Man style, like I'm going to punch through this building and walk through the brick wall opening, that's a suit where if it malfunctions, it could rip your arms out of their joints. You really need to be You really need to be careful when you're building something like that. It's not the type of thing that you build over a weekend.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I mentioned earlier, I'm modifying this exoskeleton tonight so that I can run faster. That's not the type of thing you do with an exoskeleton that is able to rip your limbs off. It's a very different development process. It's more like a medical device and less like a toy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
I guess before you had asked about AI Navy SEALs or robot Navy SEALs, I missed in my mind, there's going to be an intermediary step, which is you'll have robot bodies that are piloted by people. They're still using human judgment. That's going to happen a lot sooner than the AI robot Navy SEAL.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You're going to put on a VR headset. You're going to strap on a suit that does full motion capture of your entire body. It's probably going to handle the leg locomotion because that's something you can't really remotely do very well. It's going to have to use local sensors to scan the terrain and do a better job than you'd be able to see anyway.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Imagine downward shooting LIDARs, building a 3D model of all the terrain that's within 10 feet of you so you know what to step over, what you could trip on, what you need to avoid. Um, and then everything on the top, you've got a guy who's just tele-operating the whole thing, and, you know... Oh, shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Yeah. I mean, like, and... So casualties will be essentially zero. Human casualties. If it's a... If... I will admit, there are problems with this. The reason you want to move to an AI brain eventually is largely because of communications links problems. If I have a command center that has to talk to a robot, that means that all they have to do to make this robot stop working is jam that link.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
Tony Stark, except Tony Stark got out of building weapons. I moved into it. So we're a little bit in reverse, but I like the comparison.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If they jam the link, the robot is like all of those battle droids in Star Wars Episode I. They just fall over and they're useless. But for missions where that's okay, maybe we have links that can't be jammed by that enemy. Maybe it's short range enough that we can just power through. Yeah, that's going to be a thing soon. Actually, have you seen the Tesla humanoid robot demo with Optimus?
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So most of those demos, I'm not trying to piss off Elon. Sorry, Elon, I'm going to let people know. All those demos with the robots pouring drinks for people and being robot bartenders, those are all actually teleoperated. It's not an AI brain that's doing all of that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
There's a guy who's doing what I just described, wearing a VR headset, wearing a motion capture suit, and he's pouring drinks for people, walking around, doing all kinds of stuff. That is definitely going to be a thing that our military is doing a lot of in just the next few years. If not at the level of a Navy SEAL. Wow. If not at the level of the ACL.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But if you need to serve drinks, that's going to be happening soon. Wow. Damn, dude. Let's talk about... I got to throw out one more thing, which is I write a little bit of speculative sci-fi from time to time. I don't publish it just for my own note-keeping and entertainment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
But I did write a bit years and years ago about a tier one operator who basically uses robotics to continue operating even into his 70s and 80s. He's got a broken body, but he's still the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to his instincts and his knowledge and his ability to get stuff done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
It's really interesting to imagine how that might actually work in the future because if you've got a guy who's really good at remote controlling robots, it doesn't really matter if he's getting older and breaking down, at least not as much. As long as your brain's there, I think people will still be useful.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
So there's a few things that we're doing. You're probably thinking of Roadrunner, which is a reusable missile of sorts. Vertical takeoff and landing. It can go out, attack targets, and come back. And we have some versions that are suicide attack aircraft. We have others where they're carrying a bomb.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
We have others where they have payloads where they can go out, do a mission, and then come back and be reused again. We're doing a lot of interesting stuff on that front, I think, because in the past, we're also building long-range cruise missiles. We have a line of missiles called Barracuda. We have a Barracuda 100, 250, and 500 different ranges, different payloads.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
One of the cool things you can do with AI-powered missiles is... send them into an area, and then have them do precision targeting, collaborating with each other, even if you don't have a person there who's, let's say, steering a coded laser target designator.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
In the past, you would need somebody to say, get out there, shine a laser at the thing you want it to go after, and then it goes after that laser dot. Well, what if instead you get a missile show up somewhere and say, oh, that's a Li-Yang destroyer. I know that the engine room is right there. And I know that the thinnest part of the deck is right there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
If I approach it this angle and this speed from this direction, I can punch through the engine room and destroy engine one. And if that's successful, another one's going to come in behind me from the other side and destroy engine two. If I miss or I don't make it through, I'm going to have it instead go for engine one. And then the next one's going to go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
That's the type of intelligent targeting that has been the stuff of science fiction until now, and now we just do it. We're doing this type of stuff in Russia right now where we're hitting targets where they have jammed communications links that would make it impossible to remote control systems, and where it's at ranges where you can't get a person into these areas.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
You can't get a JTAC forward to laze these Russian targets. They'd mow you down with machine guns or landmines before you get even close. The other side of what we're doing with missiles, and it's less interesting than the AI stuff, I know, but it's just manufacturing. We are making our missiles and our submarines and really everything we do in a much more reasonable way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#171 Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones
The way we make our submarines looks a lot like you make a car. We're basically using processes, robots, assembly lines that you could use to build a Tesla. You can use it to build our submarine. Versus more traditional techniques that require huge teams of specialized human welders and a huge piece of infrastructure that allow you to really, really slowly build pressure vessels.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
I'm actually not too worried on the small quadcopter side. I think the United States is actually doing fine there. Where we really get screwed is on munitions that are a bit harder to build, things like cruise missiles, things like surface-to-air interceptors. In that case, I mean, you've probably read all the stories. U.S. wargaming results.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Yeah, it depends on who you ask. There's people who say a day, there's people who say eight days, people say two weeks. But you can see the tenor of it is all the same. And let's say that it is two weeks. Two weeks of pain doesn't mean much to a dictator who thinks in terms of centuries. right?
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
If China believes that we can put up a good fight for a week or two, and then it's going to take us years to rebuild our industrial capacity on the weapons side, I mean, that's an easy trade for someone like him to make. Just get through the pain and come out the other side with the world's largest military by far standing unopposed and a US arsenal that is empty.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
So... To be honest, it's not that hard. We spend so much on so little. We spend so much money on capabilities that are of very little consequence to deterring a conflict with China. Legacy things that made sense when we were investing very heavily in counterterrorism, made a lot of sense when we were imagining that we were going to get into a large scale land war in Europe.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
You know, I actually think that in a lot of ways, Andrew will do better in a world where defense budgets are going down because that's when you have to tighten your belt. When your budget is stable or going up, it's easier for people to just keep spending on everything they're already spending on because nobody will complain and then add even more on top of that.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
When you're forced to tighten your belt, that's when you start to make tradeoffs and say, you know, do I really need to keep For like, one example is the Marine Corps getting rid of their tanks. And they said, you know what, that's not the future of the Marine Corps island hopping in the Pacific. Tanks are not going to be part of that. So you know what, we're going to get rid of them.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
That sent a shockwave through the DOD to have the commandant make that decision. We probably need to make 100 decisions that are just like that. fundamentally recomposing the force, their mission, how we think about deterrence. My ideological view is that the United States should not be the world police. We should be the world gun store.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
We need to stop sending our people overseas to die for other people's sovereignty. And we need to be willing to sell them the weapons they need to make themselves into prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on. Nobody wants to bite. Nobody wants to take a bite of them.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
That's how I think we're going to help our allies, not just like Ukraine or Israel, but looking at other places that China has on their roadmap, like the Philippines, like South Korea, like Japan. We need to sell them the tools that they need to defend themselves.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
When you rethink things that way, you say, well, wait, maybe we don't need to budget to have hundreds of thousands of troops that are ready to go fight for this particular country. Maybe we can actually put that money into advanced munitions production of things that are 90% fewer parts, much easier to make, where we can make large quantities of them sufficient to deter a conflict.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Maybe we actually can cut defense spending and also get more capability. I'll finish this rant by saying this, which is, I'm actually probably a little bit at odds with some of my Republican colleagues where they're saying, hey, we're at 2.9% of GDP on defense spending. If we're telling the rest of the world that they need to be at 5%, shouldn't we be at 5% too?
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
I lean more towards, I think we can do it with what we're already spending or less.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Or what are you hearing? Well, I'll start by saying it's really easy to say that my vision comes at a convenient time and then point to Trump. Eight years after I started the company, back when everyone said that AI was bunk, that I was evil for starting a weapons company. You were not the coolest kid in Silicon Valley at the time as you are perhaps now.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Well, you know, and, you know, like our CEO, Brian Schimpf, is a Democrat. I'm a Republican. The good news is I think defense is pretty nonpartisan or at least bipartisan.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Look, you know, I've I've been to Mar-a-Lago, but who hasn't? I will say the last Mims hasn't. It feels like the I've been calling it the Palmer Lucky. I told you so tour all these people who said that we lived at the end of history, that new weapons were either evil at worst and irrelevant at best have realized, no, actually, you do need to have a backstop to to the threats that you make.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
You cannot ensure peace if there's no credible threat of violence underpinning it. And that's been the United States strategy for a very, very long time. I think that this new administration is very aligned with my vision, not so much because I have convinced them. I think, and I know everyone says this, I think it's where common sense leads.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
And I think everyone understands that you have to look everywhere. You can't say, oh, defense is off limits. We don't need to be more efficient there. I got into this because I wanted to make the defense industry more efficient. And I think we got a lot of other people who are finally in office who agree.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
I think the DoD is going to be a lot more cooperative.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Put it another way, there's a very different flavor to a bunch of office goons refusing to open the door on foreign aid to Mozambique versus a bunch of Pentagon officials and troops barricading the door to the designees of the president. Like that's actually like, that's like military revolution coup type of stuff. So I just don't see it. I don't think you're gonna see a standoff.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
I think they're gonna say, Can I see your badge? Can I see your papers? Okay, yep, right this way. I think that you're gonna see less of this irrational, I can resist by just not opening the door mentality.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
The United States should not be the world police. We should be the world gun store. We need to stop sending our people overseas to die for other people's sovereignty. And we need to be willing to sell them the weapons they need to make themselves into prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on. Nobody wants to bite. Nobody wants to take a bite of them.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Oh, you know, fairly regularly. I mean, we're also in a bunch of group chats together.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
I would say we are I'd say we're associates or colleagues. I don't know if I deserve the title type title of of a of a friend. If Elon says that I'm his friend, then I will I will gladly I'll gladly accept so. But, you know, like we we definitely get along. Let's see. No. Oh, no. Here's what it was.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
The last thing we were talking about was the fact that the Black Eyed Peas Grammy winning song, Let's Get Retarded, has been taken off every single music platform and replaced with the child safe version that was for children's sports games, Let's Get It Started.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
So that was the last thing that we were talking about and how it's an example of memory holing that nobody even really talks about, despite everyone agreeing that it has happened.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
I think that there's a lot of There's a lot of fair criticism that people make in Silicon Valley. There's also a lot of interpersonal dynamics. And there are people that I work with that Elon doesn't like. There's people that Elon works with that I don't like. There's people that Elon works with who fired me and who ripped away my company from me. And guess what? My president does the same thing.
WSJ What’s News
Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
And yet I still vote for him and support him.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Well, I think the tent is legitimately getting bigger and that everyone wants it to be. The people outside the tent wanted it to be bigger and the people inside it want to be. I mean, you see a lot of, you know, and I For people who aren't familiar, I was a Trump supporter even before 2016.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Absolutely. And it's one of those things where it doesn't really matter whether it's fair or not. It's definitely good for the right to become a bigger tent and to bring more people into it. I think it's just a good thing. And so you have a lot of people, it's like Patti LaBelle said, I've tidied up my point of view. I've got a new attitude.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
All these people have tidied up all of their inconvenient beliefs, all of their things that maybe don't align with the current zeitgeist, and they've decided that they're going to follow a different path. I'm not going to throw it back in their face and say, oh, yeah, but what about this thing that you did? What about this thing you did eight years ago? It's just not productive.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
I've been calling it the Palmer Lucky I Told You So Tour. All these people who said that we lived at the end of history, that new weapons were either evil at worst and irrelevant at best, have realized, no, actually, you do need to have a backstop to the threats that you make.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Well, I think that the point that I'm trying to get across is that a lot of people have been watching the IVAS program, which the idea of the IVAS program, for people who aren't familiar, is to augment the vision of soldiers, to give them superhuman vision that allows them to see heat vision, night vision, day vision, hyperspectral vision, and to also be able to
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
seamlessly share a view of the battlefield with a lot of advanced sensors, robots, drones, so that you can kind of see in your view highlighted where all the good guys are, where all the bad guys are, what the incoming threats are, where you're safe, where you're not, and then also seamlessly command and control large numbers of autonomous weapons.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
The programs had a lot of challenges over the last eight years. It was it was kicked off during it was it was kind of conceived before Trump, but it was actually awarded during the early days of the of the first Trump administration. It's had a variety of different problems. And there's a lot of people who are seeing.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Anderle and me come in and take over this contract saying, oh, good, they're going to fix the problems. You know, they're going to make it where it doesn't make people dizzy. They're going to make it where it's lighter. They're going to make it where it's cheaper. And what I'm trying to get across to people is, look, that is not where my ambition ends.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
I truly believe that IVAS is just the beginning of a long path towards better human augmentation, augmenting our senses, augmenting our cognition, tighter, more seamless integration between robotic and biologic teammates.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Andrew, I think has a lot of, a lot of weight to bring in areas like mass scale manufacturing. Like we know how to make things at scale for the United States military. We've done that in a way that Microsoft has never really had to do. Um,
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
i'd also say purely egotistically that i am the world's best head-mounted display designer and so having me on the problem is going to make a really big difference and it's not just me i shift millions of virtual reality headsets to millions of people and i worked at facebook for a few years before they fired me but for me this is a little bit of a return to form and i got to admit
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
I have spent the last decade since getting fired thinking very carefully about what I would build if I was building again and how I would do it and how I could achieve kind of a similar gain in performance.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
But for a different customer, in this case, the customer I've been focused on for the last eight years with Anduril, which is the United States military and our allies and partners around the world.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Well, I've been looking at the military side of things for a very long time. On the Apple Vision Pro side, I've been pretty consistent about this. Even before it was announced, I was telling people, listen, you have to realize that what Apple's doing here is not trying to, with their first release, try to make something that is for everybody. They are trying to set a very high standard.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
They are trying to drag something out of the future that really shouldn't exist till 2026, 2027, and drag it into the present by making it ludicrously expensive. It's a $3,500 product. They never thought that that was actually going to be the thing that everybody buy, that everybody used.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
You're going to see major players launching productivity applications, gaming applications, entertainment applications. Are we on the precipice of the metaverse? I don't know. I never really bought into that particular buzzword turn of phrase. Although the day that Meta changed their name from Facebook to Meta, I did take literally all of my liquid cash and use it to buy MetaShares.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Currently the CTO of Meta, but there was a time where he was leading all of their mixed reality VR, AR efforts.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
I think that... They are a publicly traded company, and it would be crazy if they did not publicize their AI efforts to the same extent that their competition is. Remember that Meta is in a competition not just for hiring the best people or building the best technology, but for keeping investors aligned with their vision.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
There's been a lot more talk of AI, but that's what you have to do when you're a publicly traded company and investors are comparing you with your peers and they see that their peers are heavily investing in AI. It would be kind of crazy if Meta were to just keep it in the background, not really talk about it and instead focus on Metaverse. I'd say basically public communications
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
are very rarely an indicator of where strategic priorities truly are in someone's brain. I mean, I'll give you another example. The priorities that I'm most focused on for the next year, I've literally never talked about publicly. Actually, that's- Now's the time.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Well, I've asked as one of them. And I actually said when we teamed up with Microsoft just a couple months ago and that became public, I said, this is my top priority. It has been for a long time. And you could have very easily said a year ago with me, Well, sure seems like Palmer's given up on the metaverse. Seems like he's not really working on AR and VR anymore. He's all about AI now.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
And that comes back to what I publicly say. And you're right. I'm one of those crazy AR, VR people. I truly believe that we are someday going to spend most of our lives viewing the world in some kind of augmented way, whether it's AR, VR.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
You can't say, oh, defense is off limits. We don't need to be more efficient there. I got into this because I wanted to make the defense industry more efficient. And I think we got a lot of other people who are finally in office who agree. Stay with us.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
So the last round that we raised- We were pretty clear about what we were doing with it. We were raising money so that we could build this new manufacturing facility in Ohio, in Ohio. Yep.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
So we're building a lot of different things, but I'd say the thing that is going to dominate capacity is going to be autonomous fighter jets. We are building an autonomous fighter jet for the United States Air Force called Fury for the CCA program, Collaborative Combat Aircraft program.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
This is a really big win that Anduril had last year where we were competing against a number of different companies, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
We beat the big guys and managed to convince the Air Force that we were the ones who were going to be able to build the best autonomous fighter jet and that we were going to be able to build them at a scale of thousands of units on a timeline that is relevant to a potential disaster. fight in the Pacific with China.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
I do think that over the last few years, that actually is where people have come around to what we're building, like the The name of CCA, Collaborative Combat Aircraft, used to be Loyal Wingman. The idea being you're building these robotic systems that fight alongside manned aircraft.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
I think everyone agrees that at some point, someday, we're going to have few to no manned fighters, just in terms of the risk that you're taking, the cost that you have to carry when you're keeping a person alive, the fact that you have to always return from your mission versus having the ability to just send things on one-way trips.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
uh it's really just a question of when you know is it this year is it 10 years is it 50 years i think it's going to be somewhere in between the f-35 we probably need to keep that program going if only because we've made our allies so dependent on it we've sold a lot of f-35s there's a lot of people who've built their entire air defense strategy around f-35 and so we probably can't just shut down that program
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
um where are we at why can't we maintain any market share there in the us you know i i actually think we we're doing pretty good on that front in terms of the technology and the companies it's not an area that andrel is in we're not building kind of these small low-cost tactical quadcopters part of that is because company philosophy wise i believe that andrel should be building things that would not exist if we were not building them i'm not really in the headspace to use my mega billions that i raised from venture capitalists to crush
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
other competent American companies who are already doing a great job in their given area. So there's about a half dozen small drone makers in the US that are building really powerful tools in that category. I think that the problem is that the United States has not really made it part of our procurement strategy to actually use tools like that yet.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
Like the reason you see Ukraine using small quadcopters is because they're in a war. They're using whatever they can get their hands on, whatever they can build in country, whatever they can buy from China. And they're strapping grenades to... to drones and flying them around and blowing them up. The United States, we don't have a program of record for armed quadcopters.
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Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
There's earlier research and development going on. There are early prototypes of things going on. We're building a larger attack quadcopter that is fitting into a Marine Corps program for organic precision fires. But again, that's early stages. They're basically at the stage where they're buying hundreds of them to try out with the intent of getting into it later. So
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Goods From Canada, Mexico Still Exposed to U.S. Tariffs, Despite Pause
The United States should not be the world police. We should be the world gun store. We need to stop sending our people overseas to die for other people's sovereignty. And we need to be willing to sell them the weapons they need to make themselves into prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on. Nobody wants to bite. Nobody wants to take a bite of them.