Palmer Luckey's 'I Told You So' Tour: AI Weapons and Vindication
31:07 Share

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment.

Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Out of the Silicon Valley tech leaders now supporting President Trump, one you may not have heard of is Palmer Luckey, an eccentric entrepreneur who made his billions by selling his virtual reality company Oculus VR to Facebook, now MetaPay.

Oculus laid the foundations of the tech behind Meta's popular Quest headsets. But it's Lucky's current venture in the world of weapons that gives him influence in the U.S. defense industry. Lucky isn't your typical defense contractor.

He's got a mullet and a goatee, he sports Hawaiian shirts and set of business suits, and while his company, Andral, is named after a sword in the Lord of the Rings, its business, designing and manufacturing high-tech weapons, is deadly serious. Drones, artificial intelligence, cutting-edge operating systems, the stuff of sci-fi armories coming to life. 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. Anduril's latest deal is taking over a massive contract Microsoft had with the army to create what's called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS. It's a virtual reality headset designed for the battlefield that could give soldiers direct information from sensors and control of unmanned weaponry

This brings Lucky full circle to how he got his start years earlier with Oculus VR. His relationship with Facebook didn't last long. His support of Trump's first presidential run in 2016 didn't go over well in Silicon Valley. He was ousted after a donation he made to an anti-Hillary Clinton group sparked backlash among his colleagues, though his boss at the time, Mark Zuckerberg, would later tell Congress his departure didn't have anything to do with politics.

Now, Zuckerberg is among the tech moguls hanging around President Trump, and Luckey feels vindicated. I've been calling it the Palmer-Luckey-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.

From The Wall Street Journal, I'm Tim Higgins. And I'm Christopher Mims. This is Bold Names, where you'll hear from the leaders of the bold-named companies featured in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Today we ask, how does Palmer Luckey want to remake the U.S. government's approach to national security and go from being the world's top cop to its gun store? Palmer Luckey, welcome.

Lots to get into today. What you think about Trump 2.0. You've got great insight, I bet, from your time hanging around Mar-a-Lago. To your thoughts on Elon Musk's government efficiency efforts with Doge. As a guy who himself has spent a lot of time trying to navigate the bureaucracy of government. But first, let's talk about your company, Andrel. Recently announcing that you're taking over the VR headset development for the Army, a $22 billion contract.

previously held by Microsoft. And on that, you posted on social media platform X the following, and I quote, we don't have time for business as usual. Whatever you are imagining, however crazy you imagine I am, multiply it by 10, then do it again. I am back. I'm only getting started. Dang, man, that sounds crazy. What does it actually mean? Yeah.

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 see

And then also seamlessly command and control large numbers of autonomous weapons.

The programs had a lot of challenges over the last eight years. It was kicked off during... It was kind of conceived before Trump, but it was actually awarded during the early days of the first Trump administration. It's had a variety of different problems. And there's a lot of people who are seeing...

Anderle and me come in and take over this contract saying, oh, good, they're going to fix the problems. 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. I truly believe that IVAS is just the beginning of a long process

path towards better human augmentation, augmenting our senses, augmenting our cognition, tighter, more seamless integration between robotic and biologic teammates.

So Microsoft's been, hi, by the way, Palmer, it's been a minute, it's been like five years. How's it going? But yeah, hey, so they've been leading this effort for a while, right? And I think they're gonna stay on as a cloud providing partner. That's right. But why you and not them? Andrel, 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. 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 shipped 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, 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.

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.

I think, you know, there's it's you are clearly a true believer in augmented reality. You've been doing it for a lot of years. Last time we talked a few years ago, Apple was coming out with its own augmented reality goggles and you were you were a fan. Huge fan. And I wonder if I wonder if that's still the case. And I ask because there's been some disappointment among kind of the general observer that the new this new device hasn't taken over the world yet, just like the iPhone is.

and perhaps this kind of feeling that the metaverse isn't on the precipice that we all kind of thought a few years ago. Where are you on this? It's almost as if you're looking at a different use case than a few years ago that the general public was talking about. 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 technology,

release, try to make something that is for everybody. They are trying to set a very high standard. 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. 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. So you're clearly very...

bullish on Meta? Are you still bullish on their

potential in terms of the metaverse. I mean, just to put this in context, I was saying something jokey on threads and Andrew Bosworth got mad at me for saying like, Oh, like they've pivoted to AI. It seems like they're no longer the metaverse company for my mother. My mother's listening. Who's Andrew currently the CTO of meta, but there was a time where he was, uh, where he was, uh, leading, you know, all of their mixed reality VR, AR efforts. Right. So, so, uh,

They're clearly still invested. I mean, do you kind of... Are you still bullish on their vision? Because now they're really emphasizing AI. It does seem like a shift. 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

but for keeping investors aligned with their vision. 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 are

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. Now's the time. 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. 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,

So we've heard how Lucky sees the worlds of VR and war coming together. But next, we explore how his views match up with the current efforts by Doge. 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. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

Forget the frustration of picking commerce platforms when you switch your business to Shopify, the global commerce platform that supercharges your selling wherever you sell. With Shopify, you'll harness the same intuitive features, trusted apps, and powerful analytics used by the world's leading brands. Sign up today for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash tech, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash tech.

Well, let's talk about, I mean, maybe something you don't want to talk about, but you're out there raising more money, something like $2.5 billion, according to reports, which I think would value you at. Allegedly. $28 billion. But okay, so you don't want to talk about if that's true, but what do you need this kind of capital for? 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

In Ohio. Yep. Arsenal won a billion dollars, almost a billion dollars. I mean, this is a massive the plans for this. It's a massive facility. We've already talked about 4000 jobs. Yep. You're a wildly ambitious timeline. You want to start production mid 2026. That's right. What are you building there?

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 a autonomous fighter jet for the united states air force called fury for the cca program collaborative combat aircraft program this is a really big win that andrew had last year where we were competing against a number of different companies including lockheed martin northrop grumman boeing

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 war.

fight in the Pacific with China. Is that what... Is that going to replace or the F-35, for example? Replace the Top Gun? I mean, the movie is going to go away? I do think that over the last few years, that actually is where people have come around to. What we're building, like 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. 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.

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 have built their entire air defense strategy around F-35. And so we probably can't just shut down that program. So while we're talking about these autonomous aircraft,

you know, flying drones, essentially. Obviously those have been hugely important in Ukraine. I mean, a lot of these still are built in China. The U.S. has had trouble, you know, maintaining market share there. You know, the Pentagon's trying to encourage U.S. manufacturing of these really low cost autonomous munitions in a way. Where are we at? Why can't we

any market share there in the US? You know, I actually think we're doing pretty good on that front in terms of the technology and the companies. It's not an area that Anduril 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 Anduril should be building things that would not exist if we were not building them. I'm not really in the headspace to use my mastermind

mega billions that I raised from venture capitalists to crush 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. 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 drones and flying them around and blowing them up.

The United States, like we don't have a program of record for armed quadcopters. There's earlier research and development going on. There are early prototypes of things going on. We're building a small, sorry, a larger attack quadcopter that is fitting into a Marine Corps program for organic precision fires. But again, like 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

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... We run out in two weeks.

In a fight with China. 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? 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 ready

a U S arsenal that is empty. Okay. But, and we have a new secretary of defense and Pete Hegseth. He recently said, I'm quoting here. We have some really fast moving newer contractors that are willing to work that have already put a lot of money into R and D that want to help us rapidly feel these new systems that we're going to need for fights in the future. Defense spending is, you know, at this point, given the push toward efficiency is zero sum game.

It feels like he's talking about you, some of these other drone makers you just mentioned. I mean, do you see this as a good sign for Anduril, number one? And number two, how can we realize the dream that you just articulated in a world where we're trying to shrink budgets, even the defense budget, it sounds like, or they're looking for efficiencies? So to be honest, it's not that hard. We spend so much on...

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. You know, I actually think that in a lot of ways, Andrel 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. When you're forced to tighten your belt, that's when you start to make trade-offs and say, you know, do I really need to keep for,

For like, you know, 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. You know, that set a shockwave through the DOD to have the commandant make that decision. We probably need to make a hundred 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. 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. 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

like South Korea, like Japan. We need to sell them the tools that they need to defend themselves. 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. 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 we need to, they need to be at 5%, shouldn't we be at 5% too? I lean more towards, I think we can do it with what we're already spending or less.

I mean, this vision that you put forward comes at a good time, right? I mean, a period of time when President Trump is trying to reimagine how the federal government works. It has his team of Elon Musk and Doge out there talking about government efficiency. You spent time at the President's Club in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, California.

What are they thinking about? What are you hearing about what they want to do with the Pentagon? Is it this vision? Do you see this potential 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. 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.

But I didn't, you know, during inauguration day, I didn't see you on stage behind the president. How much voice are you going to have in this new administration? Look, you know, I've, I've been to Mar-a-Lago, but who hasn't? I, yeah, I will say the last year. Mims hasn't. I,

I, 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 the threats that you make. You, you, you cannot ensure peace if there's no credible threat of violence underpinning it. And, uh, that that's been the United States strategy for a very, very long time. Uh,

I think that this new administration is very aligned with my vision, not so much because I have convinced them. I think like and I know everyone says this. I think it's where common sense leads. 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.

you like 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 who are finally in office who agree. Do you think that means that Doge is going to go into the DOD like they have with other agencies? And oh, I don't think they'll have to. I think the DOD is going to be a lot more cooperative. I don't know. So you think they'll let them in and just kind of immediately give them root?

Put it, 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, uh,

Pentagon officials and troops barricading the door to the designees of the president. That's actually like military revolution coup type of stuff. So I just don't see it. I don't think you're gonna see a standoff. 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 going to see less of this irrational, I can resist by just not opening the door mentality. Lucky sounds like he's on the same page as Elon Musk when it comes to cutting government spending and doing things differently. But how close are they? What's your last text message? Let me see. Let me check. What did I last say?

Just ahead, more about that chat. And what Lucky says his Silicon Valley colleagues changing their views on Trump has in common with songstress Patti LaBelle. Stay with us. Let's go back to Musk. And I'm just curious, how much are you in contact with him? You know, what are you telling him? Anything specific? What am I telling him? What's your last text message? Let me see. Let me check. What did I last say? Sorry. Pull it out. Yeah, no, let me see. What is my last message?

I mean, how often do you text with him? Oh, you know, fairly regularly. I mean, we're also in a bunch of group chats together. Video game group chats, perhaps. Let's see.

You consider him a friend, though, a mentor? 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 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 definitely get along. Let's see. No. Oh, no. Here's what it was.

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. 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.

I guess I was wondering, I mean, you've partnered with OpenAI to use their AI tech and drone defense systems. Their CEO, Sam Altman, is almost Musk's nemesis at this point. Did you get any grief from him for that? 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. And yet I still vote for him and support him. Let me ask you a question about the so-called tech right.

Because, you know, mentioning Musk, I feel like, you know, y'all are sort of all members or honorary members. It does feel, especially in light of what you just said, like that is maybe a bigger tent in some ways than kind of other political subgroups in Silicon Valley have been in the past.

I mean, do you agree with that? Do you think that there's kind of a loose camaraderie there that keeps it together? 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 that want to be. I mean, you see a lot of, you know, and I, you know, for people who aren't familiar, I, you know, I was a Trump supporter even before 2016. So you're OK seeing Mark Zuckerberg?

uh hang out at mar-a-lago absolutely and 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 rights to become a bigger tent and to bring more people into it like i i think it's just is just a good thing and so you have a lot of people you know it's uh it's like it's like patty labelle said i've tidied up my point of view i've got a new attitude

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. Well, I think that's probably a good place for us to tie it off at. Homer Lucky, thank you for coming on. Always fun.

Before we go, we reached out to Apple to get its response to Lucky's thoughts on its Vision Pro headset, and the company didn't respond. We also reached out to the U.S. Department of Defense, and the State Department asked what those agencies thought of his comments about the country's national security policy. The State Department referred us to a fact sheet on U.S. arms sales and defense policy, and the DOD did not respond. And that's bold names for this week.

Michael LaValle and Jessica Fenton are our sound designers. Jessica also wrote our theme music. Our producer is Danny Lewis. We got help this week from Catherine Millsop, Scott Salloway, and Falana Patterson. For even more, check out our columns on WSJ.com. I'm Tim Higgins. And I'm Christopher Mims. Thanks for listening.