Palmer Luckey: Every country needs a ‘warrior class’ excited to use ‘violence against others in pursuit of good ends’

After a three-minute promotional video, complete with HD footage of drone collisions and military vehicle explosions, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey took the stage at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, on Tuesday afternoon. In an hour-long conversation with Pepperdine University President Jim Gash, the billionaire raged against America’s opponents, supported fully autonomous weapons and suggested an Anduril IPO.

In 2017, Luckey co-founded defense technology company Anduril with Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, Joe Chen and Brian Schimpf, most recently valued at $14 billion. He made it clear that he had no hesitation when it got here to Anduril constructing weapons.

“Societies have always needed a warrior class, full of enthusiasm and excitement about using violence against others in pursuit of good goals,” he told Gash. “You need people like me who are sick with this and don’t lose sleep creating tools of violence to maintain freedom.”

Luckey, dressed in his usual uniform of a Hawaiian shirt and mullet, walked Gasha through the primary hours of the war in Ukraine and explained why he thought Anduril could have made a big impact. Luckey said he first met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019, after Zelensky examine Anduril in a Wired article. He asked Luckey whether Ukraine could acquire some of Anduril’s border control technology. “Unfortunately, the State Department was not very interested in Ukraine at that time,” Luckey said.

“Look if we were able to provide Ukraine with real-time intelligence containing traces of all major Russian weapons systems days before their air forces were eliminated and their long-range precision fires were exhausted,” he said. “I think it could have made a really big difference.”

According to Luckey, Anduril actually delivered weapons to Ukraine throughout the second week of the war.

He then aligned himself with many of Silicon Valley’s founders and called for unlimited AI development (Anduril products are powered by the Lattice AI platform). He insisted that “many of our adversaries are currently waging a ‘dark campaign’ inside the United Nations to deceive Western countries into stopping their aggressive pursuit of artificial intelligence.

“(Our opponents) use phrases that, in short, sound really good: ‘Well, wouldn’t you agree that a robot should never be able to decide who lives and who dies?'” Luckey said. “I want to tell them where is the moral high ground in a land mine that doesn’t know the difference between a school bus full of children and a Russian tank?”

The development of fully autonomous weapons – weapons that don’t require human involvement in the choice about who lives and who dies – is very controversial. The U.S. government is not buying them, and even Anduril co-founder Stephens has said he would not want to construct them. “Human judgment is extremely important.” said Kara Swisher last yr. “We don’t want to remove it.”

Luckey ended his speech by making it clear that Anduril wanted to finally reveal his information to the general public. “The reality is that for political, practical and financial reasons, a private company will never win something like a trillion-dollar joint fighter (jet) effort,” he said. “It just won’t happen. Congress will not allow this.”

People have created the chance of being conquered. “I’m just pointing out what it looked like on my end last time,” Luckey said, referring to how he was forced out of Facebook in 2016 after selling his previous startup, virtual reality company Oculus.

As he got up to leave, Gash tried to give him a leather-bound collection of “The Lord of the Rings”, which gave Luckey the name “Anduril”. But Luckey politely declined. “I can’t fit it on my bike,” he said.