Palmer Luckey on UFOs, Anduril, Invisibility Tech, & Moon Wars

0:00The UAP stuff and our technological development live in parallel development tracks right now. If and when we figure out what's going on with UAPs, UFOs, that whole universe, everything's going to change. Oh. I'm not saying I know what's up. One of the things we're most proud of lately is Fury, known as the FQ-44. This is the first autonomous fighter that the United States Air Force has ever procured. We went from signing a contract with the Air Force to first flight in 556 days, which is the fastest new fighter development program since the end of the Korean War. Andrel's a defense product company, not a defense contractor.

0:35Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Andrel beat all of them. The only difference between us and a lot of the other companies that are working in the defense space is that we are doing this on our own dime. We're spending our own money to move as quickly as we can. One of the things that I am most excited about right now is how we're designing a lot of our weapon systems to be manufactured by the types of industry that the United States already has. If you look back at World War II, there's this story about how we turned our automotive factories into missile factories. bomber factories. We designed bombers and missiles that can be manufactured by automotive factories, by tractor factories.

1:09And we're trying to move more towards that. What would war look like on the moon? What would war look like on the moon?

1:26Paul Ver, lucky. Welcome to Sorcery. Thank you for coming to Andrel HQ, former Los Angeles Times printing press, so finally doing some good. I just heard all about this from Matt. He told me all about the printing press lore. Yep, it's a lot of fun. I mean, you can see where we cut all of their machines out of the floor even, so we didn't actually rebuild the floor, we just went in with a grinder and cut out all of their machines. And you're building something similar, right? Oh yeah, very similar. All kinds of cool stuff. So I'd love for you to just maybe walk through one or two of your favorite things here.

2:00Sure. So this is our public showroom. We have another one that's full of stuff that I can't show to anybody without permission from the government. But of the things that are in this showroom, one of the things we're most proud of lately is Fury, also known as the FQ-44. This is the first autonomous fighter that the United States Air Force has ever procured. We recently just flew it for the first time. We went from signing a contract with the Air Force to first flight in 556 days, which is, as far as I know, the fastest new fighter development program since the end of the Korean War. The really exciting thing about this program is we were competing against a lot of the big guys.

2:37So we were competing against Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin. And in the end, Andrel beat all of them, which was really, really gratifying to go from starting this company to going toe to toe with the guys who are legends of the fighter community. and actually get selected to build something, build something to fly. So it's an AI-powered fighter jet that flies alongside manned fighters. So imagine if I had an F-35 pilot. He might fly with two or three or four or five of these alongside with him, extending his weapons webs forward, his sensors forward, and allowing them to engage in risks that you would never want a person to do.

3:15There's a lot of ways to win a fight and live to see another day. There's a lot of ways to win a fight and sacrifice pawns on the board. And autonomy means that you can do that without the ethical problems of just throwing away human lives. And what do you think this costs you compared to what the government would cost them? I think that we're, in general, much more efficient than the government. We've done a pretty good job. We like to think of our approach as being a defense product company, not a defense contractor. That is, we're not getting paid to engage in contracted work where they say, go and do this many hours of work to build exactly this thing.

3:58Instead, we're investing our own money in building what we think the right products are, and then we sell them to the government. So we want to be going to the government generally with a product rather than a PowerPoint, or at least a prototype instead of a presentation. And that's gone really, really well for us. It leads to way better incentive structures. We make more money when we move faster. rather than more money when we move more slowly. We make more money when things work the first time rather than more money when it takes 10 tries. And you can imagine which of those leads to better outcomes.

4:29Recently, Anderle got some heat in the press about testing. Can you just go through the history of testing and why failure is part of it? Yeah. I mean, there was a handful of stories. Reuters and Wall Street Journal were both basically trying to write the same story. So you may not know this. I was a journalism major before I started Oculus, my first company, and of course, before Anderle. And so I care about this on two levels. One is the kind of distraught tech founder who is upset when the press either doesn't understand or willfully misrepresents what his company is doing. And separately, you know, the single tear that I shed for the state of journalism in America.

5:06Remember, I wanted to be a journalist at one point. So people have said Palmer hates journalism. He doesn't want, you know, a free press. It's kind of nonsensical. if you look at me and you look at my career where I used to be the online editor of one of the largest college papers in the country. It just, the insult doesn't quite connect. In this case, they were making a huge deal out of the fact that we had had two aircraft that failed to release during a test. So they failed to detach from another aircraft. Also, they were making a huge deal out of a fire that we started during a test. And to be clear, this is a very, very small fire.

5:40It was about 0.00002 % of a weapons test range specifically designed to have fires on it. And the real, they said satellite imagery reveals the extent of the damage. There was a bunch of grass that caught on fire. And then it got put out and it was fine. Like nothing burnt down. Nobody was injured. It's exactly what it was like. And the crazy thing is Anderil has started hundreds of fires during our test procedures over the course of years. This is how you actually make functional products. You test them to fail you. You push the limits. You find out where things are going wrong. Also, in this case, it was a counter-drone system.

6:17What do you think is going to happen when a system designed to destroy drones full of flammable lithium-ion batteries is tested? Do you think that's never going to end in things on fire falling onto the ground? And they said Andrel runs into roadblocks and obstacles as tests fail. That's actually not the case. Those tests were extremely valuable. They're part of our usual test campaign. We've had hundreds, if not thousands, of failed tests over the eight years that we've existed. We've started hundreds of fires. Usually by the time we're doing a release, it actually works. It's actually quite rare for that not to work.

6:49And of course, they don't mention that the Air Force gave them a statement saying our stuff was awesome and passed the certification. They don't run the statement for the Navy saying, by the way, the exercise you're literally talking about was a success for Andrel, and they met all of the criteria that we talked about. Nobody mentions those things. They just want to talk about what they see as problems because they have no idea what product development looks like. If I ran a product development cycle that was two years late and a billion dollars over budget, they'd have almost nothing to say about it.

7:19But then if I have a successful failed test as part of moving quickly, then they're going to write a whole bunch of what they believe are exposés. The only difference between us and a lot of the other companies that are working in the defense space is that we are doing this on our own dime. We're spending our own money to move as quickly as we can. It's not like taxpayers are paying for that drone test that we were doing internally. Anyway, I've said this publicly, but we're not going to be changing our approach. I've had people say, oh, what are you going to be doing with the test procedures in the wake of these articles?

7:53And there's this incredible arrogance actually in that question. When journalists ask that question, they're saying, so what are you going to do to respond to what the criticism of us, the journalists, is? You've been critiqued. How are you going to please us, pleasure us, tell us how, bow down for us, and tell us how you're going to change because we criticized you? And I'm just not going to do it. We're already doing the right thing. We're not going to change. And I don't really care if there's bad stories written from time to time by people who have never done anything that anyone will ever remember.

8:24Why do you think journalists have this sense of entitlement? Journalism attracts a certain type of person. There are people who want to be heard. They want their voice to be important. They derive importance from it. I say that as somebody who himself was pursuing journalism. So the only difference between me and a lot of other journalists is that I got out and started doing things that actually matter. What do you think? I don't know if you saw this. It's also a good way to make money. Oh, yeah. Well, like Anderil, defense, new defense startup valued at over$30 billion starts fire in Washington state is a really interesting story.

9:00As long as you don't educate your readers into understanding that this is how normal weapons development works. You have to be careful, for example, to not quote any of their customers. You have to be careful to not mention that the Marine Corps itself started hundreds of fires on their weapons training range last year alone, just at Camp Pendleton. You have to carefully avoid all these things. And then your readers are like, wow, this is such an incredible expose. I'm so glad that I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal. It's a pretty bad incentive. They have to convince people that they're experts, that they're providing access to information you wouldn't get otherwise, and that they are getting to learn about things that would otherwise be buried or hidden, but for these truth-seeking journalists.

9:43And so there's this weird, they can't actually, imagine if they admitted the truth. They're like, here's our story. By the way, this is totally normal. And the military starts fires on their test ranges all of the time. And the customers said that this is normal and they love it. And then they actually pass the qualifications. It's like, well, wait, this isn't a story. Why did I pay for this? So unfortunately, there's a profit incentive and an ego incentive combined to twist the truth in these ways. Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30 ,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the U.S.

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11:34With Turing, discover how AI can accelerate your business growth. To learn more, visit turing.com slash sorcery, spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's turing.com slash sorcery. I think we talk a lot about war and defense on Earth. I'm really curious to hear from you, what would war look like on the moon? What would war look like on the moon? I mean, I've considered this on the moon. So usually I'm thinking about how do you use the moon as part of a warfighting strategy that is still very Earth-focused. So for example, the moon would be a great place for large phased arrays, large antenna fields that can do a variety of electronic warfare schemes, radar tracking schemes.

12:23but what would war on the moon look like?

12:29I mean, have you ever read Robert Heinlein's novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? No. What year was that? That was probably like late 40s, early 50s that he wrote that. That's a pretty good picture of what warfare on the moon would look like which really, until we develop our space technology a long way, life on the moon or anywhere off Earth is very, very fragile, right? If your life support systems fail, you die. If your vacuum containment systems fail, you die. If your food resources go bad, you're probably a long way from help. The things that we take for granted on Earth, like, oh, equipment breaks down and I'm okay, the bar is just much higher on the moon.

13:13And so I think he correctly predicted that almost any level of warfare is catastrophic. probably for both sides that are engaging in it. Unless you're able to do some really, really, really creative stuff, like put yourself inside of a lava tube or deep underground or in an asteroid. But at that point, it's not even so much about, you know, moon warfare. You're just back to like, you know, normal subterranean bunker type stuff. I guess warfare on the moon is probably going to be decisive and swift and catastrophic for everybody involved. until we get much, much, much better at building space technology.

13:56I asked this... By the way, same thing for spaceships. People say, what is a space battle going to look like? It's like, man, it is so easy to rip apart a spaceship. The requirements are so severe on the weight side, on the mass and volume side, that you can't armor a spaceship currently. It just doesn't really work. So yeah, space combat's gonna be all about never being detected, never being targeted, never being fired upon, because the moment that you're hit, you're probably totally wrecked. How far do you think we are from invisibility cloaks and masking? And I don't mean by radar. Sure, you mean like visible spectrum.

14:37Yes, yeah. That's actually a lot easier. You think so? Oh yeah, way easier. Really? It's a lot harder to hide from synthetic systems. So if you're talking about like radars or lidars or there's a large number of ways that you can see the world that are not just visible spectrum imaging. People are actually relatively easy to fix. Andrel has a project going way back, building optical camouflage for the ghost helicopter drone that we make. And it's essentially a projection system that looks at the target, looks behind. It looks at where the target is, knows where you are, looks behind you, and it calculates the luminance and color values that you would need to match whatever is between your target you're surveilling and the background.

15:20So that might be the sky. That might be a mountain. It might be a cloud. It's not that hard, and our eyes don't have very good resolution. You know, Ghost has a very narrow frontal cross section. And so it was actually designed partly to make itself very workable with optical camouflage. so building drones that are invisible to the human eye at the ranges that you're using them it's not just like a hypothetical andrel did this in like 2019 2020 um you know actually let me see if i can find let me see if i can find something for you i might have a picture i can pull up of some of those tests an invisible yeah invisible drone yeah we're looking for an invisible drone right now you'll notice so this is a ghost drone just the body of it like you know not with uh without without without the the landing gear attached and we put up on this tripod and we're testing it against the drug of the truck and then also the sky because they're very very different systems so we're moving up and down to view you know to make it change color as the observer moved but uh this is with optical camouflage disabled so you can clearly see the body against the sky see how you can see this ever so slight disturbance yeah see how it's perfect and it lines up and we The goal wasn't, and by the way, you'll see how the body is also copying the truck as well.

16:38In this case, it was turned off, and then we turn it on. So it has to have part of itself be the sky, part of it be the truck. It's a very, very difficult high contrast problem to do both at the same time. If you're all in the air, it's even easier. The point is, visible spectrum optical camouflage is actually quite easy. But something like this would be trivially easily seen by an infrared camera, a thermal camera, LiDAR, radar. So the biggest problem with optical camouflage, and the main reason you don't see a lot of money being put towards it in the modern defense base is it's not actually that useful.

17:11It's useful against human adversaries who do not have any other technology to aid them. And those are not really the enemies the United States is focused on stopping these days. So, like, for example, you might notice Ghost doesn't come with optical camouflage. All of our customers have been briefed on this. They've seen this. Their point is, Palmer, I'm not going up against a bunch of guys who are walking around with their naked eyes and nothing else. These are people who are, we are concerned about adversaries like Russia and China and Iran that are armed with very, very high levels of technology.

17:45And if anything, the optical camouflage in some ways actually makes you easier to spot. Easier to spot. Or if you've got the right technology. So you don't think UIPs use optical camouflage? um i think that to the you know look there's a lot of that we don't understand about these vehicles and what they are where or when they come from uh but it is likely that whatever they are doing is a side effect or an artifact of what's going on so like like like i've i've talked about this with the people they're like well you know how come how come uh you know how come like Like sometimes they're invisible in certain spectrums.

18:24And my point is, well, like what if they are not interacting with reality itself in a way you would expect? Like some of these things, you see them and they don't have any radar signature either. I don't know if that means they're cloaking themselves actively or if it means that just they do not exist even in the way that we think about physical matter. I don't know if it's an active countermeasure so much as the nature of the thing itself. But of course, there's so much that we don't know. My current working theory is that they come from the past. Interesting. Okay. Coming from the future is too hard.

18:55The physics just don't seem to work out. But if you think about it, think about it in a certain perspective, like there's a question of where they come from. Like, do they come from Earth? Do they come from nearby? Do they come from really, really far away? Wherever they come from, you know, spatially, the question then is, okay, temporally, what is more likely, that they happen to have come from this particular instant in time, or the hundreds of millions or billions of years that existed prior to our existence. That could be true if they were just waiting around and then came over at some point.

19:28It could be the case if they are regularly surveying and have just been around for a long time. You could imagine a world where maybe the Earth hosted advanced civilizations a billion years ago and we just don't even know about them and these are the remnants of that. I'm not betting on any of these. It's just that wherever they come from geographically, there's a very, very long tale of time. And also there's ways to travel forward through time very quickly. You know, if I create a very strong gravity distortion, I can have subjective time inside of that bubble passing very, very slowly relative to the time racing by outside of it.

20:00And so it's very believable that something from the distant past could come to our present. It's not really believable that something can come from the future back into our present. So that's my bet is basically given that there's been a lot more time before now than now, just probabilistically speaking i think it's likely these things have been around for a very long time uh and either spent a long time coming to us or to themselves subjectively not much time at all oh that's it look i'm not i'm not i'm not saying i i know what's up that's just my not saying i know but i'm not saying some ideas i'm not saying i know what's up i'm saying that is my current guess okay based on what i know interesting you said this was your most underrated product.

20:44So why? The real bet here is I don't think any of these UAPs, I think it's unlikely they were manufactured or created within the last few years. That seems very unlikely. I think they've either been around for a very long time, stored for a very long time, created a very long time ago, or traveled from the distant past into our present. That's impossible to say. This is the theory, of course, that there's these undersea alien bases, that these things are destroyed there. There's an out of print book called the UFOs and USOs of the Santa Catalina Channel. And it's all about how people have seen these things that have gone into and out of the ocean in extremely similar ways over the course of decades.

21:27And so like it's believable. But of course, being stored on earth does not necessarily mean they came from here, nor does it not. But I would bet that these things are not recently manufactured. I suspect they've been around for either a long time or maybe a really, really long time. How does that make you feel about our technological superiority? I think that UAP stuff and our technological development live in completely parallel development tracks right now. If and when we figure out what's going on with UAPs, UFOs, that whole universe, everything's going to change. And this won't be relevant.

22:08So we have to, we have, we have, but until that happens, you have to treat them as completely independent parallel tracks. Yeah. So this is one of our products that I think doesn't get nearly enough attention. It's our seabed sentry. Okay. For context, Anderil's best-selling product has been our sentry tower. So we sell them to the military, like Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, a bunch of foreign customers. The Brits have a bunch of them. and Border Patrol has a bunch of them. We're covering about 35 % of the U.S. southern border now. It's basically an autonomous tower that scans 360 degrees, detects all the people, vehicles, animals, drones, whatever, within a few miles.

22:52And then, most importantly, after detecting everything, reasons about what you might care about and what you would not, and then strips out all of the data you don't need. The hard part is not detecting. It's actually classifying and pairing it down to what you actually care about and then pushing those targets to people. So giving you basically perfect situational awareness of what's going on in an area. The Seabed Sentry is an extension of what we've done with the land-based Anderol Sentry Tower products. It's something that allows you to know where everything is under and on the surface of the ocean.

23:26We use a few different ways of doing this, but the primary way is this extending fiber optic microphone array. It's an extraordinarily sensitive microphone that can allow you to hear things that are very, very, very far away. And then it runs it through processing that is more sophisticated than any human sonar operator could ever be. And it is able to figure out by working with other systems where all these signatures are. So I can know where all the whales are. I can know where all the submarines are. I know where all of the boats are. I know where all of the divers are. And of course, the hard problem again becomes not just detecting things, but filtering out all the things you don't care about.

24:07I probably don't need to know where all the whales are. I probably don't need to know where all the fish are. Probably don't need to know where all the swimmers are. But I might wanna know if there's divers in a harbor where there shouldn't be any people. I might wanna know about ships that are not showing up on radar, but I can find their acoustic signature. I might wanna know about submarines that I can't find for my space-based sensors or my air-based sensors or my ground-based or my sea-based sensors, but with this, I can see them. It's really just trying to make the world transparent to military.