Inside Anduril: Exclusive HQ Tour w/ Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm & Trae Stephens

This is a rare, behind-the-scenes walking tour & sit-down interview inside Anduril Industries, a $30.5B defense technology company that develops and sells autonomous systems, AI-powered software, and advanced hardware for military and security applications to protect US and allied forces.. one of the most consequential defense companies of this era. In this Sourcery exclusive, we go inside Anduril’s headquarters and R&D facilities with the founding team: Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm, & Trae Stephens, to understand how modern defense technology is actually built. We walk through: Anduril’s R&D labs, machine shop, and test environments Autonomous fighter aircraft (Fury) and manned-unmanned teaming Fully autonomous submarines (Ghost Shark / Dive-XL) Distributed command-and-control systems (Menace, Titan, Eagle Eye) Arsenal-1, Anduril’s upcoming 5M sq ft hyperscale manufacturing campus in Ohio And discuss: Why manufacturing capacity is now deterrence Where the nearly $1T U. S. defense budget actually goes Why legacy procurement systems struggle with speed How Anduril beat Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop on next-gen fighter programs The ethics of AI, autonomy, and Just War Theory Why testing to failure is essential — and misunderstood How global instability is reshaping defense spending worldwide It’s a candid, technically deep, historically grounded conversation about war, factories, speed, ethics, and the future of deterrence, filmed inside one of the most closed, sensitive, and technologically advanced facilities in American industry. Brian Schimpf: https://x.com/SchimpfBrian Matt Grimm: https://x.com/mttgrmm Trae Stephens: https://x.com/traestephens Palmer Luckey: https://x.com/PalmerLuckey Molly O’Shea: ⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠⁠https://x.com/sourceryy⁠ https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 YouTube: https://youtu.be/RBXXYpjs9TE 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • Carta https://carta.com/sourcery—Carta connects founders, investors, and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital. Trusted by 65,000+ companies in 160+ countries, Carta’s platform of software & services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest, and scale with confidence. https://carta.com/sourcery/?utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=sourcery&utm_campaign=20250923-amer-carta_sourcery_data_insights https://carta.com/sourcery/?utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=sourcery&utm_campaign=20250923-amer-carta_sourcery_data_insights • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga http://public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  Welcome to Sorcery.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  We are here in what we call our Building A. This is our research and development building. It's a 200,000-square-foot building. 50-foot clear-high ceilings here. We have a machine shop. We have a composites lab. We have a development and test lab. All of these different environments where we can prototype things quickly, test them quickly, find the fractures, find where they break to get products built and shipped faster.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Thinking back to when we started Anduril in 2017 as kind of the pariah of Silicon Valley. It was not something people were doing. It was incredibly unpopular. And now, all of a sudden, it's a much cooler place than most places in Silicon Valley. When we started the company, the idea was, how do you build an apple for defense rather than the traditional model?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  With Anduril, we are constantly inventing new products. We're moving into totally gnarly, hard, political and geopolitical questions. And how do we thread these different strategies? And that just requires constant creativity.

• 1:12Molly O'Shea?

  Artistry and meritocracy.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Artistry and meritocracy.

• 1:16Molly O'Shea?

  I'm really curious to hear from you. What would war look like on the moon?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  What would war look like on the moon?

• 1:29Molly O'Shea?

  Ryan, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 1:32Molly O'Shea?

  Thanks for having me at Anduril.

• 1:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a pretty cool campus. It's tons of energy, old LA Times printing press. It's a very awesome space. When you look at the industrial base, the ability to produce and the ability to get new capabilities out quickly is one of the most determinative aspects you can have as a defense department. It's a war department. And that's not where we're at. We've had a strategy for generations, which has been... The decades-long technological edge is how we went, right? And the US invested more, had better engineers, and capitalized it more efficiently to like get to that massive technological edge.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  And there is still a dimension of that, for sure. But increasingly, the ability to produce at scale in a way you can afford, the ability to innovate fast on the software, to rapidly adapt these capabilities, that's going to be the determinative characteristic, right? We see this in Ukraine, we kind of see this across the board. So everything he's trying to align around is this idea of how do we get capabilities out faster to the force in a way that is affordable and effective, right? And companies that can work in that world, great. Companies that can't, you're going to die. And I think that's a healthy view. What he's not saying, and I think because the reality is, is there is a mix, is some of this stuff is going to look like autonomous systems, but it's not all going to be, right?

• 3:01Speaker 03

  There's still going to be a place for, you know, aircraft carriers and all these things, but the balance is going to shift. And there's these new class of capabilities that are really relevant, that can be more cost-effective, that you can produce at scale. And that's going to be a key aspect of what we do in the future. And so the focus is really on industry that can perform, setting up incentives for performance and setting up the whole acquisition system around speed. Where prior it was entirely set up around, we just need the most expensive capabilities at any time at any cost. And that's not the world we're in anymore.

• 3:33Molly O'Shea?

  Do you think the nearly trillion-dollar budget is reasonable or unreasonable, given the amount of efficiencies and technological advancements that we have? And maybe for people that don't understand how it's being allocated, could you also share that?

• 3:50Speaker 03

  So there's borderline trillion-dollar defense budget.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  And everyone thinks it's like we're buying a billion dollars of kit every year. Well, that's not true, right? Forget the actual percentages, but it's, you know, more than half goes to personnel costs, to facilities, to military construction. So you just have an outrageous percentage going to these fixed costs that you have that are not next generation technology. And then there's an outrageous cost as well then to sustaining the legacy technologies you have bought. So maintaining aircraft, maintaining ships. These are huge bills, right? That is significantly higher than the amount that's spent on procurement. And when you look at this in terms of historic terms, the procurement budget as a percentage of GDP, for example, is I think the lowest it's ever been.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  And so we're not spending money on the new technology. We're spending money on sustaining the old technology. We're spending money on all the infrastructure that we have to have a global military. And that is, that is very expensive. So now you're really talking about how do I get efficiency out of, you know, call it the 30% of the budget that I, you know, you're actually maneuvering around. And in that world, you know, there's a good argument, which is we could be spending that money a lot more efficiently. I think that is true. It's hard to argue we couldn't. How much more efficiently? I don't know, but, um, you know, I tend to think we can get a lot more bang for our buck on weapons, on aircraft, you know, probably 2X from where we are. By just looking at a different mix of these things.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  But the hard part is we got to transition to that world, right? So we're not, we can't just jump to that and say, all of a sudden, we're going to abandon all of our, you know, manned surface combatants and move to this autonomous future or something like that. Like that's, that's just not believable. So we're going to have to go through this transition, which is sort of always true of, how do we responsibly cycle out the old? Think about what's still fit for purpose or not, and then get the new systems in place. That will cost more for a period of time, right? And that is a hard world to live in. And so I don't see a world where like the defense budgets could magically shrink and we still have the military that we need to have. But I do think these things can be done wildly more efficiently than they ever have in the past.

• 6:07Molly O'Shea?

  I want to talk about Anduril's expansion. You have a global expansion, whether it's the facility in Australia or the new deal with Edge and the UAE.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 6:18Molly O'Shea?

  Let's maybe start with Australia and building out Ghost Shark there.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, Australia is a great example. So set in the context maybe a little broadly, we're in a period where things are just geopolitically more unstable. People like to talk about this, that we're in this time of peace, but it doesn't seem all that peaceful to me. We've got a land war in Europe. The Red Sea is still intermittently shut down. Israel and Iran going at it. You've got China doing constant aggression on the Philippines and the South China Sea. Cambodia and Thailand are sparring all the time right now. India, Pakistan doing air wars and doing air combat. I'm probably forgetting several of these going on right now. And so we're not in a time of peace, right? Like, this is not a stable time. And so something has changed, right?

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Like, there's a sense that a lot of historic grievances, the political opportunism to use violence to get to your ends, that has changed. And every nation's reflecting it, where they're increasing defense spending, they're ramping up their own defense. And I think the view of what the US is going to do or not do on everyone's behalf has shifted. The US reasonably is saying, "We're not going to go fight everyone else's wars. We're going to expect every nation to provide for their own defense." But that also does not imply the US is backing away as the sort of security guarantor for the world, right? Like, we still have the only blue water navy at scale that is able to project force anywhere and sort of multiple parts of the globe all the time,

• 7:47Speaker 03

  can guarantee international shipping and stability of the seas. There's all these things we're still going to do as America that are very aligned to our interests and aligned to the system that we have. So that's the whole backdrop that's going on. There's a whole lot of other pieces to this. And on top of it, the... Backlogs on like you want to order Patriot missiles. I'm hearing right now, the latest number, someone told me over the weekend was 15 years to get a new Patriot system. Like, what does that even mean? Like, I have no idea what that means, right? But it's like, call it even five to seven for a backlog. You're like, this is crazy. So the US isn't a dependable producer anymore. Can't get the weapons in time. This has resulted in basically every country looking a little bit differently in how they're

• 8:31Speaker 03

  going to think about, well, when they are ramping spending, what does that mean? And what do they want to be true? They're all going to look at a question of, if we're going to spend a lot of money, we should get some economic benefit. But probably more importantly, we need to have assured supply. We need to know that if we order this, this shows up. And that we want to shape our military for what we need it to be for our regional challenges. Australia is a great example of this. They shut down their French submarine program. They're going, you know, all in on the US nuclear submarine programs. That's not going to show up for till 2035. So this major gap of about a decade where their old technology was phasing out and

• 9:14Speaker 03

  they were waiting on this next generation capability to come in. We went and pitched them on this idea of you could build these extra large autonomous underwater vehicles. You can build them fast. And we did this model of splitting the development 50 50. They had skin of the game, we did too. And we ended up executing that program incredibly quickly. And to their credit, they saw the opportunity and said yes, basically immediately. They said yes in just a couple of months and we were signed in under contract. And we were able to deliver at pace. We built out a Australian engineering team. We built out an Australian production facility. We have our first production go shark already came off the production line. Then I think 30 days of signing the production contract. So just an incredibly fast pace that shows what you can actually do if you just hit

• 9:59Speaker 03

  go on this. And we want to replicate that model in a number of other countries. It's not going to look all the same, right? There's not that many places that will do, you know, fully ground up capabilities. But this idea of integrating into their military, helping them think about ways they can use technology to modernize, do warfare differently. And Understanding a more nuanced approach to how they're going to get local engineering and local production that fits while still being aligned with the US, which is still, again, the backstop of world security. Everyone needs that US alliance. And so this is just a very nuanced, complicated thing to actually solve for. But the numbers are pretty clear.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Europe is going to spend something like four times the amount of procurement that the US is over the next five years. Like, it's a massive buildup. Japan's going to substantially increase their budget. Taiwan's increasing their budget. Australia, like, everyone is ramping. So that problem I talked about with the US having so much in sustainment and keeping the legacy going, so the countries won't have that problem as much. They have an opportunity to build new and build efficiently. And something we very much want to help them with.

• 11:10Molly O'Shea?

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• 11:56Molly O'Shea?

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• 12:39Molly O'Shea?

  To learn more, visit Turing.com/sorcery, spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's Turing.com/sorcery. Trey Stevens.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Good to be here. How's it going?

• 12:50Molly O'Shea?

  Welcome to Sorcery.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 12:52Molly O'Shea?

  Thanks for having me at Anduril.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a much cooler place than most places in Silicon Valley.

• 12:58Molly O'Shea?

  You wrote, "The factory is really the weapon."

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, for decades and decades, the United States was the global manufacturing powerhouse. I mean, we had the ability during World War II to outproduce our adversaries. And, you know, your companies like Ford that turned over their production lines to build bombers for the Allied war effort. Fast forward to the last 30 years, the fall of the Soviet Union, we've atrophied massively in our manufacturing chops. We offshored a lot of manufacturing work to lower-cost labor locations like China. And not only did they soak up a lot of that manufacturing capacity, but they also developed advanced tooling and know-how to build the things that,

• 13:43Speaker 02

  you know, we use every day, whether it's, you know, the microphones that we're wearing today or the iPhones that are in our pockets. And so at this point, even if there was complete labor cost parity, we still don't have the ability to just magically reshore a lot of these critical components that are going to be important to the next 50 or 100 years. And so, you know, we're in this place where we really need to reindustrialize. It's incredibly important. It's incredibly important culturally, geopolitically, strategically. And, you know, this is what Anduril is really focused on right now, is bringing back our ability to not build hundreds of things or thousands of things, but tens of thousands of things or hundreds of thousands of things efficiently, scalably,

• 14:24Speaker 02

  and to do it in a way that enables us to retain that, like, magazine inventory advantage against our adversary. And so I think that's, that's really what I was saying with, "The factory is the weapon," because without the factory, you have no weapons.

• 14:37Molly O'Shea?

  Are you also outsourcing and finding?

• 14:38Speaker 02

  We have a lot of manufacturing partners. Obviously, we're not building every subcomponent of everything that we're building. So we're, you know, working with other vendors, we're working with other machine shops, we're working with other manufacturers. Uh, and then we're pulling it all together generally in our own facilities. Uh, but you know, we're, uh, in the first quarter of next year, we'll be opening our soon to be five million square foot factory campus called Arsenal One, just outside of Columbus, Ohio, uh, which is where we'll start ramping up our collaborative combat aircraft, the autonomous fighter plane production. Um, and we have other facilities around the country. We have, you know, shipyards, we have, uh, loitering munition is assembly that's happening, uh, in Atlanta, Georgia.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, we do some stuff right here in Costa Mesa at our headquarters. So, uh, I imagine that there will be multiple factories across, not just the United States, but across allied and partner nations as well, where we're ramping that manufacturing muscle at the same time.

• 15:33Molly O'Shea?

  What was it like to open up Arsenal One? I know it's under development, but choosing Ohio where you're from, what was that like?

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, at some point when we got down to like the final three states, uh, I realized that the, the bias was going to look really bad to the company. So I just kind of sat back and I'm like, you know what? I don't, I don't want to push this. Uh, I think Ohio is great. Obviously as a native Ohioan, uh, I thought it would be awesome to land there.

• 15:57Molly O'Shea?

  Opening something so large like that, does this feel real? I mean, primes have existed for a very long time, but you're known as the new prime. So how does that physicality feel?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Well, I'm, I'm certainly experiencing the realness of it with all the LinkedIn messages from my high school classmates that I haven't heard from in 20 years that are now looking for jobs.

• 16:16Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  So, uh, it, it feels pretty real. Now, I mean, one of the cool things to remember is that Ohio is the birthplace of aviation. Um, and so in some ways it's like you're starting with the Wright Flyer and then coming back with fully autonomous fighter planes, uh, to be built, you know, less than an hour drive away from where the Wright brothers, uh, were, were building the, the first airplane. Um, and so there's a tremendous history, uh, GE Aviation, GE Aircraft, where they build the jet engines is also right down the street, about an hour away from where we're setting up the factory. So, uh, It's a cool kind of cultural moment, I think, not only for us and what we're trying to deliver to the department, but also to the state of Ohio.

• 16:55Molly O'Shea?

  One thing that was kind of the central focus of our interview with Alex Carr was like moral and ethics around this. Christian Garrett, he's a big fan of you. We've done so many interviews with him at this point. He's great. But one of his questions he wanted me to ask you was about the just war theory and St. Augustine. So how does that play into all of this?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  I mean, since the very beginning, this was always a big part of the conversation that I was drawing the rest of the team into is just war theory, which was developed, you know, over a thousand years ago by St. Augustine, talks about like how you engage in lethal defense activity in the most ethical way possible. And if you look back at like the course of all human civilization, you had this massive ramp up in lethality. So we started with like hitting each other with rocks. And then it was like, you know, at some point, somebody is building and making a knife. And then someone makes bow and arrow, and then you have catapults that could do like one to many destruction, trebuchets. And then you have the advent of gunpowder. So you have guns and simple bombs.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  And that just kept going up and up and up until the atomic bomb in 1945. And at that moment, I think humanity looked around at each other and they said, I don't think we want to do this. Like global nuclear war is a pretty bad bet. And so from then until modern day, you see the climb back down the ladder. And so you had precision guided munitions. You know, you see like some of the counterterrorism work we were doing was literally shooting non-explosive AIM-9X missiles into windows to take out individual targets without blowing up buildings, no collateral damage. We've become really, really good at being accurate. And so people are constantly talking about kind of the freak out of

• 18:42Speaker 02

  the intersection of AI and defense and autonomy and what does that do from an ethics perspective? The goal is take humans out of dull, dirty, dangerous jobs. So we're not putting our, you know, men and women, brothers and sisters in horribly dangerous situations. And become as accurate and precise as possible. And that's really what just for theory is all about. Principles of discrimination, principles of, you know, just cause, like how much? How good is the information? Do we know for sure that this action that we're going to take is actually going to address the problem that needs to be solved? So this is very, it's a big part of and roll culture. We talk about these things internally a lot. And I think we would only do something that we fundamentally believed would be better,

• 19:27Speaker 02

  more just for humanity.

• 19:29Molly O'Shea?

  Where do you get pushback on that?

• 19:31Speaker 02

  I mean, there's a lot of pushback from, you know, people who don't necessarily understand why defense is important. You know, pacifism as an idea is only possible inside of a governing system with a monopoly on violence. Like you can't be a pacifist without a government monopoly on violence. That's just like not possible for humanity. And so I'm glad that people get to have these positions, these kind of anti-national security positions where they can sink down into their comfy couch with their hot chocolate and talk about pacifism because it means that someone out there is willing to risk their lives to protect their ability to be pacifists. So I'm all for it.

• 20:12Molly O'Shea?

  Do you have any cultural commentary on what's going on in America right now?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  I think culture is really hard to predict. I mean, we've seen big shifts even in the last 10 years that I don't think I would have expected. You know, there's a lot of surveys that show that for the first time in modern civilization, more men in the most recent generation in Gen Z going to church than women. It's like that has never happened before. 10 years ago, if you had asked me like, do you think Gen Z will have a rising church attendance and it will be more men than women? I would have, I would have gotten that answer totally wrong. So I'm not sure that I would be able to predict this stuff necessarily. But I think, you know, you've probably seen the meme like, you know, hard times create serious men, serious men create easy. I think that's kind of the moment we're in as people realize that, man, being serious is very important.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  And there's more important stuff out there than monkey JPEGs and, you know, AI slop.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  I think it's an opportunity for people to step into a good quest. And so I'm hopeful at least that we're in a moment of a transition from slop to good questing.

• 21:18Speaker 04

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• 23:03Molly O'Shea?

  Paul, we're lucky. Welcome to Sorcery.

• 23:06Speaker 05

  Thank you for coming to Andor HQ. Former Los Angeles Times Printing Press, so 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.

• 23:21Molly O'Shea?

  And you're building something similar, right?

• 23:23Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, very similar. All kinds of cool stuff.

• 23:25Molly O'Shea?

  So I'd love for you to just maybe walk through one or two of your favorite things here.

• 23:31Speaker 05

  Sure. 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. So we were competing with Boeing, North Grumman, Lockheed Martin.

• 24:11Speaker 05

  And in the end, Andor beat all of them, which was 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 that flies. 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. You know, there's a lot of ways to win a fight and live to see another day.

• 24:51Speaker 05

  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, you know, just throwing away human lives.

• 25:04Molly O'Shea?

  And what do you think this costs you compared to what the government would cost them?

• 25:08Speaker 05

  Uh, I think that we're, in general, much more efficient than the government. We've done a pretty good job. You know, Anduril's up. We like to think of our, 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, you know, this many hours of work to build exactly this thing." Instead, 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.

• 25:52Speaker 05

  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.

• 25:59Molly O'Shea?

  How far do you think we are from invisibility cloaks and masking? And I don't mean by radar.

• 26:05Speaker 05

  Sure. You mean like visi-?

• 26:06Molly O'Shea?

  Visi-?

• 26:06Speaker 05

  Visible spectrum.

• 26:08Molly O'Shea?

  Yes, yeah.

• 26:09Speaker 05

  That's actually a lot easier.

• 26:10Molly O'Shea?

  You think so?

• 26:11Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, way easier.

• 26:11Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 26:12Speaker 05

  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. Anduril 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. So 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.

• 26:56Speaker 05

  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.

• 27:11Speaker 05

  It's not just like a hypothetical. Andrew did this in like 2019, 2020. 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.

• 27:21Molly O'Shea?

  An invisible.

• 27:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, invisible drone.

• 27:23Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. Oh, my gosh. We're looking for an invisible drone right now.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  So what we did is down here at the end, we had our drone with the system turn on and off. So this is a ghost drone, just the body of it, like not with, without, without, without the landing gear attached. And we put it up on this tripod and we were testing it against the truck and then also the sky. Cause it's a very, very different system. So we're moving up and down to view, you know, to make it change color as the observer moved. But this is with optical camouflage disabled. See how you can clearly see the body as the sky?

• 27:57Molly O'Shea?

  That's crazy.

• 27:58Speaker 05

  See how you can see this ever so slight disturbance?

• 28:00Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Speaker 05

  See how it's perfect and it lines up and it can't. The goal wasn't, and by the way, you'll see how the body is also copying the truck as well. So in this case, it was turned off. Then we turned 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, uh, you know, an infrared camera, thermal camera, light, you know, 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 space is it's not actually that useful.

• 28:42Speaker 05

  It'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, you know, 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 and they're if anything the optical camouflage in some ways actually makes it easier to spot.

• 29:19Molly O'Shea?

  So you don't think UIPs use optical camouflage?

• 29:22Speaker 05

  To the there's a lot of that we don't understand about these vehicles and what they are where or when they come from but it is likely that whatever they are doing is a side effect or an artifact of what's going on so like like I've I've talked about this with the people they're like well you know how come how come you know how come like sometimes they're invisible in certain spectrums and 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

• 30:05Speaker 05

  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 so.

• 30:14Molly O'Shea?

  Interesting, okay.

• 30:15Speaker 05

  Coming from the future is too hard the physics just don't seem to work out but if you think about it um 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 um that could be true if they were just like waiting around and then came over you know at some point it 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

• 30:57Speaker 05

  and these are the remnants of that I'm not betting on any of these it's just that wherever they come from geographically uh there's a very very long tail 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 and so it's very believable that something from the distant past could come to our present not really believable that something can come from the future back into our present so that's my that's my bet is basically given that there's been a lot more time before now than now.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Just probabilistically speaking, I think it's likely these things have been around for a very long time. That's just my-

• 31:42Molly O'Shea?

  Not saying I know, but I have some ideas.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  I'm not saying I know what's up, I'm saying that is my current guess.

• 31:48Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Based on what I know.

• 31:50Molly O'Shea?

  Interesting. Matt Groome.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:52Molly O'Shea?

  Thanks for having me here. Where are we?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  We are here at Anduril's headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, in Orange County, just south of LA. So we're about eight and a half years old now, so we were founded in early 2017. And our first office was a 5,000 square foot, I think it was 4,900 something, just under 5,000 square foot garage that used to be American Airlines' storage facility for lost luggage. So if you flew to John Wayne Airport and you lost your bag, American Airlines would store it in this garage and just leave it there until someone claimed it or whatever. So it had mold on the walls, it had no bathroom, we had to put our own bathroom in. It had no air conditioning, it had no ventilation, it was just a like storage shed that was where we got started. So we started on our first day with 10 employees,

• 32:39Speaker 01

  just the five co-founders of us and our first five employees, and just had a couple ideas. There's a famous picture of us brainstorming ideas of what to work on with just a bunch of ideas on the whiteboard, and that's what led to originally the Sentry Tower for border security deployments and then kind of expanded from there. So from there, we then kind of expanded within Costa Mesa, we opened our DC office not that long after, and then have been kind of off to the races since then. So we're now just about 7,000 employees, got about 34, 35 offices around the world, depends how you count a little bit of different buildings on the same campus, but thereabouts, and are really off to the races scaling, especially on the production side as we land some of these larger contracts and ramping the full-scale production and getting out of just the like early R&D type of phase.

• 33:23Molly O'Shea?

  And what are we standing in front of right now?

• 33:24Speaker 01

  We are standing in front of, this is our XL UUV. In Australia, these are called Ghost Sharks. Here in America, they're just called the XL UUV. This is a fully robotic submarine, so- No humans onboard, no people remote controlling, fully autonomous. You give it a mission, you program some waypoints, you program a mission set of what it's supposed to look for, where it's supposed to drop payloads, when it's supposed to surface, and you send it out on its way and it goes and performs its mission completely autonomously. So these are designed at our office in Sydney, Australia, which I had the pleasure of setting up a couple of years ago when we first launched this program. And now they are currently being manufactured in our Sydney manufacturing facility that just opened.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  It's about 75,000 square feet and is capable of making dozens of these a year. And we'll be expanding production for them to our new facility in Kwanzaa, Rhode Island, where we'll be making both our dive LDs, our smaller submarines, and these big guys for the US market. The dev test area here is an area that is meant to break things. It's the blunt version of it. Fun, yeah. So these guys work on figuring out all sorts of ways to break our products. So whether that's spraying it with saltwater, as in the case of our little chamber over here. I don't know how much you've spent time on boats, but saltwater eats everything, everything. It eats water, it eats cables, it eats metal, it eats plastic, it eats leather, it eats rubber, eats everything.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  So when our products get deployed either on coastal environments or on boats, or in the water, in the case of submarines, you obviously need to work on a lot of that resiliency. So it's one of the test chambers they use for that.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Drop testing, over voltage, under voltage, like all sorts of different. Part of what we use the Anacoque Chamber for is different kind of

• 35:16Speaker 01

  resiliency to jamming techniques and all of that. In our lab in here, we've got test ovens, test chambers. So if you wanted to bake a product, freeze a product, low humidity, high humidity, run it through cycles like that, this is where you do that. We have our vibram over here. So if you wanted to take our product and then shake it. And see if connectors come out, see if the different motion kind of causes things to fracture over time. Vibe tables in here and then in our corner or back over there, you can kind of see, we take a couple of steps forward. Our battery chargers and dischargers. So if you want to cycle the battery over and over and over again, get up to high charge, low charge, high charge, low charge at different kind of power settings.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  And really kind of drive the batteries to failure, which is obviously important for testing. We would do all of that in here. So Menace is a distributed command and control platform. So think of it kind of like having smart compute. So if you want to have AI sensors in the field and you want to have the smartest possible sort of platforms for soldiers in the field to interact with, you need to have distributed compute along these lines. So we have very mobile versions of them here on these chassis. And then we have slightly less mobile versions of them in that sort of frame. That is what's called our Menace. We'll come around over this side. And then there's a variant of all of these that's on a larger platform that's called Titan.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  We're partnered with Palantir on the Titan program for bringing their software onto our kind of hardware for this joint program with the army. So so yep, so here on the on the Menace platform, got all sorts of antennas and communication protocols around built in. Big compute nodes in the back, you can kind of hear the hear the fans humming there. And then the whole idea is that our soldiers would be deployed out and then that gives you a lattice node and lattice compute wherever you are in the world. And then this also filters into the the broader landscape of having soldier born compute. So like the whole notion of the the IVAS program that we acquired from Microsoft spinout, now called

• 37:25Speaker 01

  I don't know what they called it now SBMC, soldier born, something, something, I don't know. They change the acronyms every year to keep us on our toes. But that program is basically like, could you put a lattice node on? Deployed soldiers, so whether that's a wrist-mounted, head-mounted, glasses-mounted, kind of AR-type system, and that's, of course, Eagle Eye.

• 37:45Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  So, all of this ties together into that distributed ecosystem where compute, comms, security, all forward-deployed with the soldiers, so.

• 37:53Molly O'Shea?

  It's, um...

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Fury's my favorite, but this one's pretty fun, too, so. You wanna drive off-road a little, you just wanna take, you know?

• 38:02Molly O'Shea?

  Is there an off-road track?

• 38:04Speaker 01

  There's now, unfortunately.

• 38:05Molly O'Shea?

  Should we just drive?

• 38:07Speaker 01

  You can drive right up here, right up through the lobby. Yeah, you can just bring it right around here. Park wherever you want.

• 38:14Molly O'Shea?

  In the middle of the road? You don't trust me?

• 38:18Speaker 01

  You just did the same drive that Sekwar Hegseth did a couple days ago.

• 38:21Molly O'Shea?

  Who did it better?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't wanna get into political hot water here, but he jumped the curb and drove it into the crowd for the speech, yeah.

• 38:30Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once-a-week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.