In the Ops Room with Palmer Luckey

Mark Pesce - The Next Billion Seconds
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Podcast Notes Key Takeaways The United States does not have a great history of exporting things to countries before conflicts happen “The big defense primes are not in the position to build the right things, partly because the government has created the wrong incentives for them to do so.” – Palmer Luckey“The point of high-end defense technology is not to win a war that has already started; it’s to deter that war from happening, to make the cost of engaging in that war so high that it never happens.” – Palmer Luckey “The real reason that these tech companies were not doing work with the United States military, or foreign allied militaries, was that they were afraid of upsetting China.” – Palmer Luckey Until Anduril became the third unicorn in 2019, there were only two unicorns in the defense industry since the Cold War: Palantir and SpaceXIt took billionaire-founders with previous success starting companies for venture capitalists to invest in the defense industry Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced many venture capitalists to reconsider their assumptions about investing in defense tech Some countries are willing to do irrational things that disrupt their economic relationships with other countries; irrational wars and conflicts are prevalent throughout history “I think the odds of a direct, hot war between the U.S and China are very very low. I think the odds of a proxy conflict over minerals in South America, South Africa, or Southeast Asia are quite high.” – Palmer Luckey Anduril is the answer to the question: “What would a next-generation Lockheed Martin look like?”Without giving away Anduril’s entire roadmap, the future of defense will have a lot of autonomous things across air, land, sea, subsea, and space all working togetherPalmer is more concerned about evil people using very basic AI than extremely advanced AI taking over the world in a Skynet scenario The U.S. must be involved in the technology (nuclear, autonomous weapons, etc.) if it wants to lead and potentially regulate how those technologies are used in the rest of the world “I want to save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year while we [Anduril] make tens of billions of dollars a year.” – Palmer Luckey 

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

In this live interview with Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey - joined by Anduril Chief Engineer Shane Arnott - we look at the future of defense, geopolitics, and Australia's future in a transformed Indo-Pacific region. Have we shifted toward a defense-driven future? For more information about this and all our other Next Billion Seconds content, please check out https://nextbillionseconds.com

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