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

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

Palmer Luckey argues that designing weapons for existing factories can help scale production in wartime.

- Show: Sourcery
- Hosts: [Molly O'Shea](https://realalpha.app/people/molly-oshea/)
- Guest: [Palmer Luckey](https://realalpha.app/builders/palmer-luckey/) is cofounder of Anduril.
- Published: Dec 22, 2025
- Length: 35 min

## The best minutes

- [4:28](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=268) [Anduril treats failed tests as part of product development](https://realalpha.app/s/anduril-treats-failed-tests-as-part-of-product-development/) (3 min)
- [14:18](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=858) [Visible-spectrum invisibility is easy but often not useful](https://realalpha.app/s/visible-spectrum-invisibility-is-easy-but-often-not-useful/) (4 min)
- [32:03](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1923) [Design weapons for factories the country already has](https://realalpha.app/s/design-weapons-for-factories-the-country-already-has/) (3 min)

## Also worth watching

- [2:00](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=120) [Anduril's product-first model rewards speed over billable work](https://realalpha.app/s/andurils-product-first-model-rewards-speed-over-billable/) (2 min)
- [11:41](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=701) [Spacecraft would be too fragile to armor in combat](https://realalpha.app/s/spacecraft-would-be-too-fragile-to-armor-in-combat/) (3 min)
- [17:53](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1073) [Luckey's UAP theory favors the distant past over the future](https://realalpha.app/s/luckeys-uap-theory-favors-the-distant-past-over-the-future/) (4 min)
- [22:06](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1326) [Seabed Sentry filters ocean detections into useful alerts](https://realalpha.app/s/seabed-sentry-filters-ocean-detections-into-useful-alerts/) (3 min)

Skip the sponsor reads, the rest of the press discussion, and the garage-project and fatherhood conversation.

## Full analysis: Palmer Luckey forecasts factory-line designs could scale to millions

- Luckey forecasts weapons designed for existing factory lines could scale to hundreds of thousands or even millions of units.
- The episode gives a design rationale and one example, but does not show those volumes.
- Buyers should separate manufacturability from qualified suppliers, delivery rates and demonstrated surge output.

Its 6 sections, what it means for you and what to watch are on [the page](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/#analysis), free with an account:

- [32:21](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1941) Luckey wants weapon designs to fit existing factories
- [33:27](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=2007) Fury's landing gear trades weight for wider production
- [2:23](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=143) Fury's 556 days show development speed, not output
- [6:11](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=371) Failed tests count when they produce usable changes
- [34:05](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=2045) Factory-ready designs still need proven production networks
- [17:03](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1023) Optical camouflage shows why requirements beat spectacle

## Summary

Palmer Luckey is a cofounder of Anduril, which he describes as a defense product company that develops systems with its own money and sells them to government customers. He previously started Oculus and began ModRetro as an online community for modifying vintage game consoles; the project later produced the Chromatic handheld and is preparing the M64.

Palmer Luckey argues that weapons should be designed for existing automotive, agricultural and machine-shop capacity so production can scale in wartime without a separate industrial base. He describes Anduril’s self-funded product approach and Fury, its autonomous fighter, and defends iterative testing after press criticism. He says warfare on the moon and in space would be fragile and catastrophic, while visible-spectrum camouflage has limited value against modern sensors; he treats UAPs as an unresolved, separate technological track and guesses they may be old. He also discusses ocean surveillance, shipbuilding, ModRetro, personal engineering projects and fatherhood.

### Minute by minute

- [2:00](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=120) **Fury pairs autonomy with existing fighter jets.** Luckey calls Fury the first autonomous fighter the U.S. Air Force has procured and says it reached first flight 556 days after Anduril signed a contract. He says it can fly alongside manned fighters, extending their sensors and weapons while taking risks unsuitable for human pilots. Anduril funds development itself and sells products rather than billing for contracted work.
- [4:28](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=268) **Luckey rejects criticism of Anduril's test failures.** Luckey says Reuters and The Wall Street Journal emphasized two aircraft that failed to detach during tests and a small fire at a range designed for fires. He says the fire affected 0.00002% of the range and injured nobody, and that Anduril has had hundreds of fires and hundreds, if not thousands, of failed tests over eight years. He argues the tests produce useful data and says the Air Force and Navy reported successful results.
- [11:41](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=701) **Moon warfare would be catastrophic.** Luckey says the moon could support large antenna fields for electronic warfare and radar tracking, but that combat there would be swift and catastrophic because failures in life support, vacuum containment or food supplies can be fatal. He says spacecraft are difficult to armor because of mass and volume constraints, making avoiding detection and attack crucial.
- [14:18](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=858) **Optical camouflage has narrow military value.** Luckey says Anduril demonstrated optical camouflage for its Ghost drone around 2019–2020 by projecting colors and luminance to match the background. He argues visible-spectrum concealment can fool the eye but not infrared, lidar or radar, so it has little value against technologically equipped adversaries.
- [18:45](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1125) **Luckey thinks UAPs may come from the past.** Luckey says UAP behavior may reflect what the objects are rather than active camouflage, but stresses that he does not know what they are. His current guess is that they were not recently manufactured and may have been around for a long time. He describes UAPs and current technological development as parallel tracks.
- [22:13](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1333) **Seabed Sentry filters ocean surveillance data.** Luckey presents Seabed Sentry as an extension of Anduril’s land-based Sentry Tower. He says it uses an extending fiber-optic microphone array and sophisticated processing to locate ocean activity, then filter detections such as whales, boats, submarines and divers to surface relevant threats.
- [24:37](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1477) **Ships remain necessary to carry weapons.** Asked whether ships matter when missiles exist, Luckey says they do because ships carry missiles, aircraft and submarines. He says small cruise missiles cannot easily travel from U.S.-controlled territory to the Taiwan Strait, so the United States still needs ships.
- [27:12](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1632) **A turbine motorcycle and retro consoles.** Luckey says his garage holds personal cars, motorcycles and projects, including a turbine-powered motorcycle that he says redlines at about 200,000 RPM. He describes ModRetro’s Chromatic as compatible with Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, with a sapphire screen lens and aluminum-magnesium shell, and says the M64 is an upcoming N64-compatible system.
- [30:35](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1835) **Fatherhood has not yet changed Luckey's outlook.** Luckey says fatherhood has not changed his outlook much so far. He says he already thought in long time horizons and wanted to leave the country better for his children before becoming a father, while expecting his perspective may shift as his child grows.
- [32:15](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1935) **Existing factories could scale weapons production.** Luckey says Anduril is designing weapons for factories the United States already has, drawing on the World War II model of making weapons with automotive and tractor capacity. He says Fury’s landing gear is a few percent heavier so any machine shop can make it, rather than only two U.S. sites. He argues existing production lines could support hundreds of thousands or even millions of units.

## Transcript

Sourcery, hosted by Molly O'Shea, with Palmer Luckey.

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=0) 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 going to change. 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. Aneril's a defense product company, not a defense contractor.

[0:35](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=35) Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Aneril beat all of them. The only difference between us and a lot of the other companies that are working in the defense space is that we are doing this on our own dime. We're spending our own money to move as quickly as we can. One of the things that I am most excited about right now is how we're designing a lot of our weapon systems to be manufactured by the types of industry that the United States already has. if you look back at world war ii there's this story about how we turned our automotive factories into missile factories bomber factories we designed bombers and missiles that can be manufactured by automotive factories by tractor factories and we're trying to move more towards that. What would war look like on the moon? What would war look like on the moon?

[1:26](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=86) Paul Ver, lucky. Welcome to Sorcery. Thank you for coming to Anderil HQ, former Los Angeles Times printing press, so finally doing some good. I just heard all about this from Matt. He told me It's actually all about the printing press lore. Yep, it's a lot of fun. I mean, you can see where we cut all of their machines out of the floor even. So we didn't actually rebuild the floor, we just went in with a grinder and cut out all of their machines. And you're building something similar, right? Oh yeah, very similar. All kinds of cool stuff. So I'd love for you to just maybe walk through one or two of your favorite things here.

[2:00](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=120) 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.

[2:37](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=157) So we were competing against Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and in the end, Andrel 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 to fly. So it's an AI-powered fighter jet that flies alongside manned fighters. So imagine if I had an F-35 pilot, he might fly with two or three or four or five of these alongside with him, extending his weapons webs forward, his sensors forward, and allowing them to engage in risks that you would never want a person to do.

[3:15](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=195) You know, 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, you know, just throwing away human lives. And what do you think this costs you compared to what the government would cost them? I think that we're, in general, much more efficient than the government. We've done a pretty good job. We like to think of our approach as being a defense product company, not a defense contractor. That is, we're not getting paid to engage in contracted work where they say, go and do this many hours of work to build exactly this thing.

[3:58](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=238) Instead, we're investing our own money. in building what we think the right products are, and then we sell them to the government.

[4:04](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=244) **Palmer Luckey:** 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.

[4:13](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=253) And that's gone really, really well for us. It leads to way better incentive structures. We make more money when we move faster rather than more money when we move more slowly. We make more money when things work the first time rather than more money when it takes 10 tries. And you can imagine which of those leads to better outcomes. 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? Yeah. I mean, there was a handful of stories. Reuters and Wall Street Journal were both basically trying to write the same story.

[4:42](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=282) 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. 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.

[5:40](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=340) 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. Nobody was injured. It's exactly what it was like. And the crazy thing is, Anduril has started hundreds of fires during our test procedures over the course of years.

[6:08](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=368) **Palmer Luckey:** This is how you actually make functional products. You test them to fail you. You push the limits.

[6:14](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=374) 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 in things on fire falling onto the ground? And they said Andrel runs into roadblocks and obstacles as tests fail. That's actually not the case. Those tests were extremely valuable. They're part of our usual test campaign. We've had hundreds, if not thousands of failed tests over the eight years that we've existed. We've started hundreds of fires.

[6:45](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=405) 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 Andrel and they met all of the criteria that we talked about. Nobody mentions those things. They just want to talk about what they see as problems because they have no idea what product development looks like. If I ran a product development cycle that was two years late and a billion dollars over budget, they'd have almost nothing to say about it.

[7:19](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=439) 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 they believe are exposés. The only difference between us and a lot of the other companies that are working in the defense space is that we are doing this on our own dime. We're spending our own money to move as quickly as we can. It's not like taxpayers are paying for that drone test that we were doing internally. Anyway, I've said this publicly, but we're not going to be changing our approach. I've had people say, oh, what are you going to be doing with your test procedures in the wake of these articles?

[7:53](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=473) 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 criticism of us, the journalists, is. You've been critiqued. How are you going to please us? Pleasure us. Tell us how. Bow down for us and tell us how you're going to change because we criticized you. And I'm just not going to do it. We're already doing the right thing. We're not going to change. And I don't really care if there's bad stories written from time to time by people who have never done anything that anyone will ever remember.

[8:24](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=504) Why do you think journalists have this sense of entitlement? Journalism attracts a certain type of person. They're people who want to be heard. They want their voice to be important. They derive importance from it. I say that as somebody who himself was pursuing journalism. So the only difference between me and a lot of other journalists is that I got out and started doing things that actually matter. What do you think? I don't know if you saw this. It's also a good way to make money. Oh, yeah. Well, like Anduril, defense, new defense startup valued at over $30 billion starts fire in Washington State is a really interesting story.

[9:00](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=540) 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. They have to convince people that they're experts, that they're providing access to information you wouldn't get otherwise, and that they are getting to learn about things that would otherwise be buried or hidden, but for these truth-seeking journalists.

[9:43](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=583) 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. Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the U.S.

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[11:44](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=704) That's Turing.com slash sorcery. I think we talk a lot about war and defense on Earth. I'm really curious to hear from you. What would war look like on the moon? What would war look like on the moon? I mean, I've... 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. But what would war on the moon look like? I mean, have you ever read Robert Heinlein's novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?

[12:35](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=755) No. What year was that? That was probably like late 40s, early 50s that he wrote that. That's a pretty good picture of what warfare on the moon would look like, which really, until we develop our space technology a long way, life on the moon or anywhere off Earth is very, very fragile, right? If your life support systems fail, you die. If your vacuum containment systems fail, you die. If your food resources go bad, you're probably a long way from help. The things that we take for granted on Earth, like, oh, equipment breaks down and I'm okay, the bar is just much higher on the moon. 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.

[13:34](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=814) But at that point, it's not even so much about, you know, moon warfare. You're just back to like, you know, normal subterranean bunker type stuff. I guess warfare on the moon is probably going to be decisive and swift and catastrophic for everybody involved until we get much, much, much better at building space technology. I asked this. By the way, same thing for spaceships. Like, people say, what is a space battle going to look like? It's like, man, it is so easy to rip apart a spaceship.

[14:05](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=845) **Palmer Luckey:** You know, the requirements are so severe on the weight side, on the mass and volume side, that you can't armor a spaceship currently.

[14:15](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=855) It just doesn't really work. So, yeah, space combat's going to be all about never being detected, never being targeted, never being fired upon, because the moment that you're hit, you're probably totally wrecked. How far do you think we are from invisibility cloaks and masking? And I don't mean by radar. Sure, you mean like visible spectrum. Yes, yeah. That's actually a lot easier. You think so? 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.

[14:55](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=895) too. Andrel has a project going way back building optical camouflage for the ghost helicopter drone that we make. And it's essentially a projection system that looks at the target, looks behind, it looks at where the target is, knows where you are, looks behind you, and it calculates the luminance and color values that you would need to match whatever is between your target you're surveilling and the background. 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 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 andrel did this in like 2019 2020 um you know Actually, let me see if I can find something for you.

[15:53](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=953) I might have a picture I can pull up of some of those tests. An invisible. Yeah, invisible drone. Yeah. We're looking for an invisible drone right now. you'll notice so this is a ghost drone just the body of it like you know not with uh without without without the the landing gear attached and we put up on this tripod and we're testing it against the drug of the truck and then also the sky because they're very very different systems so we're moving up and down to view you know to make it change color as the observer moved but this is with optical camouflage disabled so you can clearly see the body against the sky see how you can see this ever so slight disturbance yeah see how it's perfect and it lines up and we it can't the goal wasn't and by the way you'll see how the body is also copying the truck as well right in this case it was turned off then we turn it on so it has to have part of itself be the sky part of it be the truck it's a very very difficult high contrast problem to do both at the same time

[16:47](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1007) **Palmer Luckey:** 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, you know,

[16:56](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1016) an infrared camera, thermal camera, 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 base is 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. 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, if you've got the right technology.

[17:52](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1072) So you don't think UIPs use optical camouflage? I think that to the, there's a lot 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, like I've, I've talked about this with the people that 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 that you see them and they don't have any radar signature either.

[18:32](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1112) 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 interesting okay 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 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 you know 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

[19:34](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1174) 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 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.

[20:08](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1208) **Palmer Luckey:** So, that's my bet, is basically, given that there's been a lot more time before now than now, just probabilistically speaking, I think it's likely these things have been around for a very long time, and either spent a long time coming to us, or to themselves, subjectively, not much time at all.

[20:27](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1227) Wow. That's it. Look, I'm not saying I know what's up. That's just my... Not saying I know, but I'm using some ideas. I'm not saying I know what's up. I'm saying that is my current guess. Okay. Based on what I know. Interesting. You said this was your most underrated product. So why? Oh, sorry. And lastly, the real bet here is I don't think any of these UAPs, I think it's unlikely they were manufactured or created within the last few years. That seems very unlikely. I think they've either been around for a very long time, stored for a very long time, created a very long time ago, or traveled from the distant past into our present.

[21:07](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1267) That's impossible to say. This is the theory, of course, that there's these undersea alien bases, that these things are destroyed there. There's an out-of-print book called The UFOs and USOs of the Santa Catalina Channel, and it's all about how people have seen these things that have gone into and out of the ocean in extremely similar ways over the course of decades and so like it's it's believable but of course being stored on earth does not necessarily mean they came from here nor does it not but i i would bet that these things are not recently manufactured i suspect they've been around for either a long time or maybe a really really long time how does that make you feel about our technological superiority i think that 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 going to change and uh this this won't be relevant so we have to we have we have but until that happens you have to treat them as completely independent parallel tracks yeah so this is one of our products that i think doesn't get nearly enough attention. It's our seabed sentry. For context, Anduril's best-selling

[22:24](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1344) product has been our sentry tower. So we sell them to the military, like Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, a bunch of foreign customers. The Brits have a bunch of them. And Border Patrol has a bunch of them. We're covering about 35% of the U.S. southern border now. It's basically an autonomous tower that scans 360 degrees, detects all the people, vehicles, animals, drones, whatever, within a few miles. 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.

[23:01](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1381) **Palmer Luckey:** The hard part is not detecting. It's actually classifying and paring it down to what you actually care about and then pushing those targets to people.

[23:09](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1389) So giving you basically perfect situational awareness of what's going on in the area. The Seabed Sentry is an extension of what we've done with the land-based Anderall 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 fiber optic microphone array. It's an extraordinarily sensitive microphone that can allow you to hear things that are very, very, very far away. And then it runs it through processing that is more sophisticated than any human sonar operator could ever be.

[23:51](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1431) 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 them are. boats are. I know where all 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 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. I might want to know about submarines that I can't find for 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 see them. It's really just trying to make the world transparent to military. You know, we want to know where everything is. We don't want anyone to be able to hide from us. It's been like very popularly reported and even in the venture capital community that we are at a loss of shipbuilding and shipmaking. That's right. China is hundreds

[24:53](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1493) of times ahead of it hundreds of times more capacity but is it important if we have missiles it is important because well i mean for one uh so something has to carry those missiles so you need you you do need you do need ships um you need something that can deploy aircraft also that can deploy submarines you know like 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 u.s controlled territory so yeah we we unfortunately do need shifts unfortunately sorcery is proudly sponsored by carta carta is transforming the private marketplace connecting founders investors and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital Trusted by more than 65,000 companies in over 160 countries, Carta's platform of software and services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest, and scale with confidence. Carta's fund administration platform supports over 9,000 funds and SPVs, representing nearly $185 billion in assets under management, with tools designed to enhance the strategic impact of fund CFOs.

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[26:46](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1606) What really stands out is how clearly it explains why each stock is included. And before you invest, you can even backtest your idea against the S&P 500, so you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing. And beyond generated assets, Publix lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto, all in one place. They'll even give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com slash sorcery, paid for by public investing. Full disclosures in the description. I know you have some of your own toys and you're a bit of a mechanist yourself.

[27:22](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1642) I am. So how did this evolve and what is your current set? Like what is in your garage? Well, my garage at home is mostly full of 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 Anduril or weapons-related projects at home because I've got a way better workshop and a way better lab here at Anduril HQ. It wouldn't make sense for me to go home and do that stuff. If I'm going to work on those things, I'll just stay late at work. But that's been an evolution compared to the days, you know, in the very beginning of Anduril.

[28:01](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1681) Even before Anderleon, I was building jet engines at my house in my empty swimming pool. So it's come a long way. Now I have a better place to test everything. Anything like a jet engine? Here? No, personally. Oh, anything like a jet engine at my house? Yeah. I mean, I have some jet engine powered personal toys at home, but nothing military relevant. but I've been working on a turbine powered motorcycle for a while, which I think is, you can get really, really high power density with turbine engines. And so I've been working on a motorcycle that red lines at about 200,000 RPM. And that'll be a lot of fun when it's done someday.

[28:42](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1722) Wow. Wow. And you also have ModRetro. That's right. So ModRetro is a side project I've been doing for a long time. It was actually the first company I started even before Oculus. So back when I was about 14 or 15 years old, I started ModRetro as an online community for people who wanted to modify vintage game consoles, electronics, computers, kind of combining the best of modern technology with a lot of these retro systems, building portables out of home consoles, 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 I mean I mean like you know compatible with original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games but with no price limits no cost limits and so uh took a long time mostly because I've been so busy with Anduril that you know I can only put a tiny bit of time here and there you know get a little time over Christmas a little time over Easter finally got it out uh last last year so the ModRetro 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

[29:53](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1793) 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 display that bad in 2025 it's actually very very difficult everyone's used to making things that are an order of magnitude more dense um but yeah that's that that's that's been a fun our new project that we're about to put out there is a uh the mod retro m64 which is an air rumors about this oh yeah it's good it's 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. This is more of a personal question but what's it like being a father? How has this changed your perspective of the world? 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 the kid. I'm working for the dough and a lot of the usual things people say like oh you know the kid you know really made me appreciate the long-term

[31:10](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1870) perspective or short term i like to think i'm already a pretty long-term thinker i'm doing things like andrel 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 uh his only words he can say are our truck and car um which are pretty good words to start with those are hard words yep no and he can also mimic the sounds of cars the sounds of trains and the sounds of airplanes actually he now calls airplanes up uh because he he understands the word up a little bit but he thinks airplanes are also called up um so he points his up and on the ground up 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.

[32:04](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1924) 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. I know. It'll start challenging you. Oh, yeah. I look forward to it. It's great. So as we close out, what are you most looking forward to for Andrel? 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, 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.

[33:05](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1985) And I think that we've lost that as a country.

[33:07](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1987) **Palmer Luckey:** We've mostly, as a country, been building weapon systems that require highly specialized workforces, highly specialized factories.

[33:14](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=1994) 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.

[33:46](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=2026) We're going to need a whole of country effort to reconstitute what we've lost and keep fighting. 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, tractor style, agricultural style factory lines. Because those are the ones that we're actually going to 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.

[34:20](https://realalpha.app/v/WEGJh-4Iq30/?t=2060) 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 don't necessarily have to build so many weapons factories if your existing factories are capable of building weapons. And that's going to be a big change that I think people have not fully realized the importance of. It's a great place to end it. Thank you so much. Of course. Thank you so much for coming. 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.

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