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

Palmer Luckey, Co-Founder of Anduril, joins Sourcery for an unfiltered walk through some of the most controversial & speculative questions in modern defense technology, from UAPs and UFOs to invisibility tech, moon warfare, and why all of it may be running on parallel tracks to today’s human military development. Luckey breaks down what war would actually look like in space and on the moon, why spacecraft are nearly impossible to armor, and why survival off-Earth is so fragile that conflict would be “decisive and catastrophic.” He also explains Anduril’s real work on optical camouflage, why visible-spectrum invisibility is easier than people think, and why it’s largely irrelevant against modern adversaries armed with infrared, radar, and lidar. The conversation moves from the serious to the personal: Palmer’s blunt take on media coverage and testing failures, his belief that UAPs are likely not recently manufactured, his side project ModRetro (from an heirloom-grade Game Boy to the upcoming M64), and how becoming a father has—and hasn’t—changed his long-term worldview. Equal parts speculative, technical, and philosophical, this episode captures the mind of a founder who’s comfortable operating at the edge of science, industry, and culture. Palmer Luckey: https://x.com/PalmerLuckey https://www.google.com/url?q=https://x.com/PalmerLuckey&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1766412760848364&usg=AOvVaw2FuPDZnHAroFFEtYv4-Rpd Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 YouTube : https://youtu.be/WEGJh-4Iq30 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://www.google.com/url?q=https://brex.com/sourcery&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1766412760848950&usg=AOvVaw0J1gJjdh4A83b-8M75aqVK—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery https://www.google.com/url?q=https://brex.com/sourcery&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1766412760849139&usg=AOvVaw2RuWWnNQBcMGxUMBi7Fc19 • Turing https://www.google.com/url?q=https://turing.com/sourcery&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1766412760849239&usg=AOvVaw39YgLIPgWyjLooI86PPFXH—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 https://www.google.com/url?q=https://turing.com/sourcery&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1766412760849462&usg=AOvVaw2yY--or2NCUIEdlie_2xAs • Carta https://www.google.com/url?q=https://carta.com/sourcery&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1766412760849561&usg=AOvVaw0il8xWQHQj-44W59DFwwxs—Carta connects founders, investors, and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital. 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See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga https://www.google.com/url?q=http://public.com/disclosures/ga&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1766412760851172&usg=AOvVaw0UJD_gkX0EgR3-rjF9o1Lw. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time. _ 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Palmer Luckey, Co-Founder Anduril (01:26) Fury: The first autonomous fighter jet (04:28) Anduril testing failures & Press heat (11:47) What would war look like on the Moon? (14:28) Invisible drones & Why camouflaging isn't useful (18:47) UAPs are from the past? (22:16) Seabed Sentry, Sentry Tower & Ocean surveillance (24:44) Shipbuilding gap with China & Why ships matter (27:18) Palmer's garage projects: Jet engine motorcycle (30:43) Lessons from fatherhood? (32:17) The next big step for Anduril

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The 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 gonna change.

• 0:11Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  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. And they're a defense product company, not a defense contractor. Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Anduril 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,

• 0:57Speaker 00

  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. And we're trying to move more towards that.

• 1:11Molly O'Shea?

  What would war look like on the moon?

• 1:14Speaker 00

  What would war look like on the moon?

• 1:26Molly O'Shea?

  Paul Verlucky, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Thank you for coming to Anduril HQ, former Los Angeles Times printing press. So finally doing some good.

• 1:34Molly O'Shea?

  I just heard all about this from Matt. He told me all about the printing press lore.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:49Molly O'Shea?

  And you're building something similar, right?

• 1:51Speaker 00

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

• 1:54Molly O'Shea?

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

• 2:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:11Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  Also known as the FQ44. 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 against Boeing, North Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and in the end, Andrew 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

• 2:54Speaker 00

  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. There'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.

• 3:33Molly O'Shea?

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

• 3:38Speaker 00

  I think that we're, in general, much more efficient than the government. We've done a pretty good job. You know, Andrew's up, 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." 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.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 4:28Molly O'Shea?

  Recently, Anduril got some heat in the press about testing. Can you just go through the history of testing and why failure is part of it?

• 4:37Speaker 00

  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 Anduril. 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. Remember, 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.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  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're 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. It 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, there was, nobody was injured. It's exactly what you expect.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  And the crazy thing is Anduril has started hundreds of fires during our test procedures over the course of years. This is, this is how you actually make functional products. You test them to failure. You push the limits. You find out where things are going wrong. Also, in this case, it was a counter drone system. What 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 and things on fire falling onto the ground? It's just, but you know, they, they, they, and they said Andor runs into roadblocks and obstacles as tests fail. But 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

• 6:44Speaker 00

  hundreds of fires. Because usually by the time we're doing a release, it actually works. It's actually quite rare for that not to work. And 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 Andor 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. But then if I have a successful failed test as part of moving quickly, then they're going to write a whole bunch of what

• 7:27Speaker 00

  they believe our exposés. The only difference between us and a lot of the other companies that are working in 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, you know, that, for, for, for that drone test that we were doing internally. Um, anyway, I, I've, I've said this publicly, but we're not going to be changing our approach. But I've had people say, oh, you know, what are you going to be doing, you know, with test procedures in, in the wake of these articles? And 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, 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

• 8:12Speaker 00

  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.

• 8:25Molly O'Shea?

  Why do you think journalists have this sense of entitlement?

• 8:27Speaker 00

  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.

• 8:44Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think, I don't know if you saw this.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  It's also a good way to make money.

• 8:47Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  Well, like Anduril, defense, new defense startup valued at over $30 billion, starts fire in Washington State is a really interesting story. As 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.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  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. And 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 that they actually passed 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.

• 10:09Molly O'Shea?

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• 10:54Molly O'Shea?

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• 11:11Speaker 03

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• 11:47Molly O'Shea?

  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?

• 11:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  But what would war on the moon look like?

• 12:30Speaker 00

  I mean, have you ever read Robert Heinlein's novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?

• 12:35Molly O'Shea?

  No.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  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... 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.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  The things that we take for granted on Earth, like, oh, equipment breaks down and I'm OK. The bar is just much higher on the Moon. And 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 bunker type stuff. I guess warfare on the Moon is probably going to be decisive and swift and catastrophic for everybody involved.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  Until we get much, much, much better at building, building space technology.

• 13:57Molly O'Shea?

  I asked this.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  By the way, same thing for spaceships. Like, people say, what is a space battle gonna look like? It's like, man, it is so easy to rip apart a spaceship. You know, the requirements are so severe on the weight side, on the mass, like, the mass and volume side. That you can't armor a spaceship currently. It just doesn't, it doesn't really work. So yeah, space combat is gonna be, 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.

• 14:28Molly O'Shea?

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

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Sure. You mean like visible spectrum?

• 14:37Molly O'Shea?

  Yes, yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  That's actually a lot easier.

• 14:39Molly O'Shea?

  I think so.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, way easier. 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.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  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, uh, 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. Anduril did this in like 2019, 2020. You know, actually, let me see if I can find, let me see if I can find something for you. I might, I might have a picture I can pull up of some of those tests.

• 15:55Molly O'Shea?

  Invisible.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, invisible drones.

• 15:57Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, we're looking for an invisible drone right now.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  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 it up on this tripod, and we're testing it against the dr- uh, the truck, and then also the sky, because those are 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 this is with optical camouflage disabled. See how you can clearly see the body against the sky?

• 16:24Molly O'Shea?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  See how you can see this ever so slight disturbance?

• 16:29Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  See how it's perfect, and it lines up, and we, we, it can't, the goal wasn't, and by the way, you'll see how the body is also copying the truck as well.

• 16:38Molly O'Shea?

  Right.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  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, li- you know, lidar, radar. Um, 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 bases, it's not actually that useful. 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.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  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 you easier to spot. Easier to spot, or if you've got the right technology.

• 17:52Molly O'Shea?

  So you don't think UIPs use optical camouflage?

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Um, I think that to the, you know, there's a lot that we don't understand about these vehicles and what they are, where or when they come from.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  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, uh, you know, how come like sometimes they're invisible in certain spectrums? 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. So.

• 18:52Molly O'Shea?

  Interesting. Okay.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  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, wherever, wherever they come from, you know, spatially.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  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 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, 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 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,

• 19:55Speaker 00

  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. 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,

• 20:16Speaker 00

  just probabilistically speaking, I think it's likely these things have been around for a very long time, and either spent a long time coming to us, or to themselves, subjectively, not much time at all.

• 20:27Molly O'Shea?

  Oh.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  That's it. Look, I'm not saying I know what's up. That's just my...

• 20:33Molly O'Shea?

  Not saying I know, but I'm...

• 20:34Speaker 00

  I'm not saying that...

• 20:35Molly O'Shea?

  Some ideas.

• 20:36Speaker 00

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

• 20:39Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  Based on what I know.

• 20:41Molly O'Shea?

  Interesting. You said this was your most underrated product. So, why?

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Oh, sorry. The last thing is, like, the real bet here is, I don't think any of these UAPs, I think it's unlikely they were manufactured or created, like, within the last few years. That seems, 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. Well, let's see, this, that's impossible to say. You know, this is the theory, of course, like, you know, that there's these undersea alien bases, that these things are destroyed there. There's an out-of-print book called The UFOs and UFOs 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. And so, like, it's believable.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 21:45Molly O'Shea?

  How does that make you feel about our technological superiority?

• 21:50Speaker 00

  I think that, uh, I think the 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, uh, every, everything's gonna change. And, uh, this, this won't be relevant. So, we have to, we have, we, we, but until that happens, you have to treat them as completely independent, parallel tracks.

• 22:15Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  So this is one of our products that I think doesn't get nearly enough attention. It's our Seabed Sentry.

• 22:21Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  For, for context, Anduril's, uh, best-selling product has been our Sentry Tower. So, uh, we sell them to the, uh, military, like Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, a bunch of foreign customers. Uh, the Brits have a bunch of them. Uh, and Border Patrol has a bunch of them. We're covering about 35% of the US southern border now. It's basically autonomous tower that scans 360 degrees, detects all the people, vehicles, animals, drones, whatever, within a few miles. And 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.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  It's actually classifying and, and, 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 Anduril Sentry Tower products. It's something that allows you to know where everything is under and on the surface of the ocean. We use a few different ways of doing this, but the primary way is this extending, uh, fiber optic microphone array. It's an extraordinarily sensitive microphone that...

• 23:38Speaker 00

  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. I 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 not want, I might want to know if there's divers in a harbor where there shouldn't be any people. I might want to know about ships that are not showing up on radar, but I can find their acoustic signature.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  I might want to know about submarines that I can't find from my space-based sensors or my air-based sensors or my ground-based or my, you know, sea-based sensors. But with this, I can, I can see them. It's really just trying to make the world transparent to military. You know, we want, we want to know where everything is. We don't want anyone to be able to hide from us.

• 24:44Molly O'Shea?

  It's been like very popularly reported and even in venture capital community that we are at a loss of ship building and ship making.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  That's right. China is hundreds of times ahead of it, hundreds of times more capacity.

• 24:56Molly O'Shea?

  But is it important if we have missiles?

• 24:59Speaker 00

  It is important because, well, I mean, for one, uh, see if something has to carry those missiles. So you need, you do need, you do need ships. You need something that can deploy aircraft, also that can deploy submarines. You know, like you, you, you need, you need big stuff to carry the little stuff. To just have lots of little stuff go all the way on its own, the physics generally don't work out. Like very hard to build a, you know, a small cruise missile that can fly all the way to the Taiwan Strait from US-controlled territory.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  So yeah, we unfortunately do need shifts, unfortunately.

• 25:33Speaker 03

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• 26:18Molly O'Shea?

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• 27:01Molly O'Shea?

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• 27:18Molly O'Shea?

  I know you have some of your own toys and you're a bit of a mechanist yourself.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  I am.

• 27:23Molly O'Shea?

  So how did this evolve? And what is your current set? Like, what is in your garage?

• 27:29Speaker 00

  Well, my garage at home is mostly full of my, uh, my personal stuff. So I have a bunch of motorcycles, I have a bunch of cars, I have a lot of personal projects. I don't really have a lot of Androl or weapons-related projects at home because I've got a way better workshop and a way better lab here at Androl HQ. It wouldn't make, it wouldn't make sense for me to go home and, and do that stuff. If I'm gonna work on those things, I'll just, I'll just stay late at work. But that, that, that, that's been an evolution, you know, compared to the days, you know, in the very beginning of Androl. You know, I, I, I, even before Anduril, I was building jet engines at my house in my empty swimming pool. So, uh, it's, it's, it's come a long way. Now I have a better place to test everything.

• 28:12Molly O'Shea?

  Anything like a jet engine?

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Here, or?

• 28:15Molly O'Shea?

  No, personally.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  Oh, anything like a jet engine at my house?

• 28:19Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  Um, I mean, I have some jet engine-powered, powered personal toys at home, but, uh, nothing, nothing, nothing military relevant. Uh, I've been working on a turbine-powered motorcycle for a while, uh, which I think is, you, you can get really, really high power density with turbine engines. And so I've been working on a motorcycle that redlines at about 200,000 RPM. And, uh, that'll be, that'll be a lot of fun when it's done someday.

• 28:43Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Someday.

• 28:44Molly O'Shea?

  Wow. And you also have Mod Retro?

• 28:46Speaker 00

  That's right. So Mod Retro is a side project I've been doing for a long time. Uh, it was actually the first company I started even before Oculus. So back when I was about 14 or 15 years old, I started Mod Retro as an online community for people who wanted to, uh, modify vintage game consoles, electronics, computers, come, kind of combining the best of modern technology with a lot of these retro systems, building portables, out-of-home consoles, uh, you know, doing really cool, cool modifications of existing handhelds like the Nintendo Game Boy. And so I've had this project I've been working on for over a decade to make a, the world's ultimate game boy. So, and I mean, I'd be like, you know, compatible with original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, but with no price limits, no cost limits.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  And so, uh, took a long time, mostly because I've been so busy with Anduril that, you know, I could only put a tiny bit of time here and there, you know, get a little time over Christmas, a little time over... Finally got it out last year. So the mod Retro Chromatic is the world's ultimate game boy. It's an heirloom grade tribute to the most important handheld console of all time. Instead of a plastic screen lens, it has a lab grown sapphire crystal screen lens. Instead of a plastic shell, it's made with the same aluminum magnesium alloy that we use in a bunch of our attack drones. It has a perfect one to one replica of the pixel structure of a game boy color. So we actually made a modern display, 160 by 144. It's harder than you would think to build a

• 30:14Speaker 00

  display that bad in 2025. It's actually very, very difficult. Everyone's used to making things that are in order of magnitude more dense. But yeah, that's been a fun. Our new project that we're about to put out there is a the mod Retro M64, which is an

• 30:31Molly O'Shea?

  Rumors about this.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, it's good. It's an heirloom grade tribute to the Nintendo 64. Compatible with all your Nintendo 64 games, but with a lot of really cool new features as well.

• 30:42Molly O'Shea?

  This is more of a personal question, but what's it like being a father? How has this changed your perspective of the world?

• 30:49Speaker 00

  I don't think it has changed it all that much yet. I know, I think it will happen over time. You know, I, me and my wife are, me and my wife are very traditional. She's raising a kid. I'm working for the dough.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  And a lot of the usual things, people say like, oh, you know, the kid, you know, really made me appreciate the long term perspective versus short term. I like to think I'm already a pretty long term thinker. I'm doing things like Andro because I care about the long term future of our country. I, I feel like, oh, I want our country to be better. I want to leave a better place for my kids. I actually cared about that even before I had kids. So I was already pretty amped up on a lot of the things that I think people say change over time. And then also he's just so little right now, you know, he, he, his, the only words he can say are, are truck and car. Which are pretty good words to start with.

• 31:37Molly O'Shea?

  Those are hard words.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Yep. And he can also mimic the sounds of cars, the sounds of trains and the sounds of airplanes. Actually, he now calls airplanes up.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Because he, he understands the word up a little bit, but he thinks airplanes are also called up. So he points his up and on the ground, up.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Anyway, we'll see how my perspective shifts over time. But thus far, maybe it's because I've been planning on always having kids. I feel like I was already doing a bunch of the same stuff and had a lot of the mindset that I have. But we'll see as he grows up and becomes more of a challenge.

• 32:12Molly O'Shea?

  I know, I'll start challenging you.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, I look forward to it. It's great.

• 32:16Molly O'Shea?

  So as we close out, what are you most looking forward to for Anduril?

• 32:21Speaker 00

  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 and into bomber factories. But it went the other direction, too. We designed bombers and missiles that could be manufactured by automotive factories, by tractor factories, by industrial equipment factories. Things like the thickness of the metal that we used is, the level of heat treat that we could do, even the way that we fastened or welded those pieces together. They were based on what we already knew how to do at scale in American industry. And I think that we've lost that as a country.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  We've mostly, as a country, been building weapon systems that require highly specialized workforces, highly specialized factories. I want to get back to the basics. How do we design cruise missiles and fighter jets that you can make in a Ford plant? How do I get back to making high-end weapon systems that you can make in any automotive factory? Heck, any machine shop in the country. One example is like Fury's landing gear is a few percent heavier than it could have been because we could have either made it manufacturable by only two places in the entire United States or any machine shop in the entire country. And we're trying to move more towards that because in wartime, Anduril's probably not going to be building all of our systems directly. We're going to need a whole of-country effort to reconstitute what we've lost and keep fighting.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  And so one of the things I'm most excited about is a lot of the weapon systems that we've already made and that we're going to be announcing in the future that are designed to be made on existing automotive-style, you know, tractor-style, agricultural-style factory lines. Because those are the ones that we're actually going to be... Be able to scale up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of units without having to build an entirely new industrial base, without having to find, hire and train an entirely new workforce just for building weapons. I think that that is a model that is going to be a big deal here in the United States. And I think it's also going to be a big deal in allied nations that similarly have a lot of their own existing industrial capacity. You know, you don't necessarily have to build so many weapons factories if your existing factories are capable of building weapons.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  And that's going to be a, that's going to be a big, a big change that I think people have not fully realized the importance of.

• 34:43Molly O'Shea?

  It's a great place to end it. Thank you so much.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  Of course. Thank you so much for coming.

• 34:47Molly 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.