makes it possible for working adults and parents to accomplish their dreams. we are thrilled to be celebrating our graduates. snhu, it's worth it in more ways than you can probably even imagine. as you start that momentum and get that first class going, the rest just really falls into place. for anyone that feels like college is impossible, i was right there with you, but i can say today that it is possible because of snhu. go to snhu.edu to get started. >> i'm driving a personal warship and we are all about to die.

sorry guys. >> this is a mark 5 special operations craft i purchased from the navy. emily are you sure i'm not going : to flip the boat? >> you are fine. it was designed for navy seal extraction missions. it is really fast and it is a lot of fun. emily while it may be part of : the old navy, lucky is trying to bring speed back to the pentagon. >> some of the united states technology is very bad and extremely expensive and not necessarily adapted to the types of conflicts we will see in the future. they have a lot of investment in legacy systems that o not -- that are not necessarily have china quaking in their boots. emily he is betting his new age : defense company can take a slice of the pentagon budget and reinvent how they do business from the outside in.

that is if they can beat the incumbents and convince the top brass about a billionaire founder sporting a hawaiian shirts is just as serious as rebooting america's arsenal as they are. you are not the typical silicon founder nor talking like they buttoned up defense contractor ceo, how does that play? palmer it is because i just : haven't changed. it was very easy at the end of world war ii to say conflict is over. we are living at the end of history. this idea of putting our best brains toward things that can kill people is a waste of talent , a waste of money and unethical , and that's not what anyone is saying any more. emily the war in ukraine and : china's rapid militarization have created fears that the u.s. is not modernizing fast enough. that has brought a controversial handshake between tech and defense back out into the open.

the military has a long history with the tech industry. post world war ii billions in defense funding transformed california into aerospace and technology boom towns. the first company to manufacture microchips that guided missiles, satellites, was funded by the pentagon. founders of that company pioneered modern day venture capital. and, helped cultivate a vibrant tech industry. today there's a new generation trying to bring back america's past proven by the unusual -- palmer lucky's collection of unusual vehicles. are you sure it still works? palmer it should.

:emily: yeah. palmer this is a 1967 disneyland : autopia designed by walt disney and it is the only complete one outside of the park. original gearboxes and wheels, the whole deal. when i got it -- uh-oh. emily technical difficulties. :palmer: got a flat head screwdriver? look at that. got to get moving. there we go. emily: back in business. are you sure this is street legal? palmer we are on a street, : aren't we? [laughter] emily you grew up in long beach,

: not far from here? palmer that's right, close to : the port. it was a place with a lot of car culture and aerospace culture and defense activity. i grew up watching the marine corps practice offshore, in their helicopters. watching navy ships do exercises. and it gets in your brain and does not leave. southern california, unlike a lot of places, is a place where almost everybody knows someone who served in the military or has a family that served in the military. -- a family member who served in the military. when that's the case, because of the density of the population, you don't have the crazy political ideology like in other areas. but when i started anduril it was different. defense was not cool and not the hottest thing.

emily before launching anduril : he worked on virtual reality head sets in his parents' garage. by 18 he caught the worlds's -- by 18 he had a prototype that kick started the dr move vince and caught the worlds's attention including mark zuckerberg. zuckerberg bought the company for $2 billion. luckey was later ousted. palmer i think people think you : got kicked out of silicon valley. palmer that is because i made a : $9,000 political donation. it is for the person to be -- for a person and put tech to support the person who supported the president does this year. emily he means this guy. : disputes he was fired for -- meta-disputes that he was fired for his political values but it was a rift so he turned attention to defense and set up shop in california.

how did you get interested in defense technology? palmer i was able to work as a : lab technician on an army project called brave mind teaching -- it was treating veterans of ptsd with virtual reality exposure therapy. that was before i started oculus. i heard over and over that it was broken and they were being punished for doing the right thing. they were rewarded for the wrong thing. they made more money when they were over budget, and that got me worried in a world where we were running a new experiment as a country where for the first time in american history, tech companies were not working with dod. emily: the relationship between silicon valley and washington splintered after the cold war. top talent caught the.com wave, ditching government jobs for positions at shiny tech firms. >> everybody used to work on

capitol hill and now everybody works for an internet startup. emily: the defense industry consolidated file -- power along five big primes. it is a complex oligopoly with a strict chain of demand which filters through layers of layers of bureaucracy. for tech startups looking to get a piece of the action, welcome to the valley of death. the government tries to nurture ideas at the time it takes to get to prototype two adoptions puts them in the defense market graveyard. it seemed impossible for outsiders to compete until spacex and palantir sued saying that the program favored the incumbents. >> it is no coincidence that the only companies to breakthrough since the winding down of the cold war were both founded by billionaires. it is unfortunate but it reflects the reality we have created where they smell so that

we used to have as a country of turning small and innovative defense companies into large-scale providers of weapons, we lost it. the only way to bypass that was to already have made billions of dollars somewhere else. as a country we need to do better. emily: so, this is the old l.a. times printing plan. palmer: it was the old printing press. i started oculus in orange county and i could hire people from all over the country. when i move to the bay it became higher -- harder to hire people who are not in the bay area. this is a place where you can build great companies that draw from all of america, not just from that one isolated bubble. emily: i was wondering -- wondering it is hard to poach people from big tech. palmer: the way that you poach people is to tell them that the career is meaningless and they

are wasting their lives on something that does not matter. when you can shock them out of the matrix like what are you doing with your life, there are problems in the world and you are not part of solving them. that has been behind a lot of people coming to work at anduril . ♪

emily: anduril has been clear from the get go. to come here is to wear it -- is to build weapons and surveillance systems. they started with this autonomous security tower that sits on the borders of the u.s. and abroad launched in the early days of the trump presidency. they have expanded to autonomous submarines, counter drones and other robots that are cheaper to build with menacing names. palmer: this is a half scale model of fury, which is an autonomous fighter jet that we are building. this is wisp, scanning infrared imager that is able to detect aircraft by building a 360 div gray is -- three and a degrees

fear. this is an electronic warfare system and can jam and hack and make sure that you are able to talk and the other guy isn't in a lot of really powerful ways. emily: you are trying to run a defense tech company like a start up. how does that compare to lockheed market -- lockheed martin, boeing, and how do you get washington to accept that. palmer: the contract is paid for time, materials and a fix percent of profit on top. that incentivizes you to come up with expensive solutions. and to drag it out as long as you can. at anduril, we are the opposite. because we make things at work and sell them rather than getting paid to do work, it means that when we do something faster it helps the profit margins. emily: you are building products that the government does not know it needs yet, right? palmer: very often.

it is rare that we work on something that is consensus or widespread belief that what we are doing is the right solution. often we build things as -- that they have written off as feasible or not viable. there was a lot of skepticism about applying artificial intelligence to defense and in general. chat deed -- chatgpt was so calm -- was so helpful because it convince people that ai could do things that they did not believe computers could do. emily: are we getting to a point where battles can be fought with ai and counter ai only? palmer: we will not have systems acting without human direction, but will we feet -- will we see dog fights without people in them? yes. in ukraine there have been engagements where you had unmanned systems destroying other unmanned systems. emily: it seems like what happened in ukraine marked a shift in warfare strategy. palmer: what is happening in ukraine is fascinating because they cannot afford to treat

warfare as the thing to be think tanked or to be debated in white papers. they have to actually win today. and that means a lot of barriers to trying new ideas have been lifted. that is use that as you've seen the small unmanned copters and interesting counter drone systems, things that were not nearly mature enough to be deployed by the united states, but they are willing to deploy them at an early stage because they know they cannot win doing things the old way. emily: the old way meant having the biggest and most expensive weapon on the battlefield. now, it is about having a swarm of commercial technology available quickly and cheaply. the pentagon recently announced the replicator program to fast-track thousands of low cost autonomous drones. startups and venture capitalists who historically shunned

military work claire clarity it is time to build to get in on the action. >> the old school way of developing technology does not work. you have to work with the private sector to bearing -- to bring new technology in. emily: big firms have offered ai, hardware and cloud service ends -- in exchange for billion-dollar deals but there has been friction from engineers who do not want anything to do with the military. emily: some have pushback on working with the u.s. government and military. do you see where they are coming from? palmer: they came to a company to work on consumer technology and they were not told that their work would be used for potentially violence. and they do not like that. i empathize with that because to them it feels like a bait and switch. emily: where it could be misused on american citizens for example and are they right to worry? palmer: yes. anything can be misused. emily: the heart of anduril's is

not its hardware but it software. engineers have developed a proprietary ai driven system that acts like an intelligent control center for the company's hardware. palmer: hardware is hard. the united states used be able to build things and it would slide wife's as fast as our adversaries and be twice as fast for a decade. those days are gone. hardware advantages are quickly copied so a lot of the most durable advantages for example using software to make decisions twice as fast is a capability that i do not think our adversaries are close to copying. emily: let us is just -- lattice is just one example of the military's increasing use of ai. the pentagon has been developing project maven, which analyzes images from military drones and help suggest targets. google initially won the project

but backed out after thousands of workers protested the deal. palantir, microsoft and anduril are among the main contributors. it is deployed there are still open questions about ai combat readiness. >> at the end of the day you just have to be correct and you are doing it from afar. so yes, i would submit that that is one of the toughest things that my organization has encountered. the idea of distinguishing enemy from not enemy or combatant from noncombatant. and the scale is impressive. emily: there are concerns that ai could deepen the fog of war. what do you think about that? palmer: i super disagree. it will be a tool to put all of the cards on the table for everyone. my hope is that you have dictators who make better decisions because even they have better information. let us use putin. i do not think he would've launched the invasion in ukraine if he would have understood what

was actually going to happen. they believed it was a three day special operation and they would roll in and it would be over quickly. if he had a better understanding of what he had and what they had he probably would not have made the play. emily: there are a lot of thorny ethical questions. we are talking about a future of self-guided bombs and killer robots. who is liable in a human is not in the loop. palmer: the key is a person is responsible for deployment. the existence of an algorithm cannot replace human responsibility for deploying the weapon system. it has to be a person who deeply understands the limitations of the system, and held to account when it goes wrong. war is hell and it will not be perfect. there will be people who is killed by ai who should not have been killed. that is a certainty if artificial intelligence becomes a core part of the way that we fight wars. we need to make sure that people remain accountable because that is the only thing that will

drive us to better solutions and fewer deaths and civilian casualties. i do not want ai to do these things but sometimes existing technologies are much worse. emily: china and taiwan, how does this play out? palmer: a lot of different ways. everything that anduril is working on on the r&d side is oriented towards up fight. right now china believes that they can take taiwan and that the united states is some combination of won't stop them, is not willing to stop them, will not win. they believe that taiwan is in a similar position and we have to change their minds. i will probably eat these words but if china ends up invading taiwan, i'm in a feel like we have failed in our mission. emily: you spent a lot of time in china working on oculus headsets. what do you know about chinese capabilities in ai and what don't you know?

palmer: i spent time in china because that is where we get our manufacturing because he did not have a choice. i deeply understand how dependent our country has become on chinese manufacturing, engineering, supply chain and materials. it is really extraordinary how they have pulled themselves up from nothing to being an economic superpower and we did this. we are the ones that gave them the blueprints and the tech and shipped all overseas and i am one of the guys who did it. what an [explict have] -- explictive] emily: do you think the u.s. military could lose its edge to china? palmer: depending on who you ask china has between 50 times and 300 times the military shipbuilding capacity of the united states. this is a problem if you are fighting a war where you lose all your ships and it takes you decades to rebuild. they lose their ships and they

rebuild the same year. this is an area where china has outpaced the united states. they have not outpaced us everywhere. and a lot of the areas that matter in a fight for the pacific they are kicking our ass. and the united states will not be able to win by following the same strategy. we will not build enough shipyards and train enough welders to build 300 times more ships, that is off the table. we have to win with our brains. emily: despite the innovation, anduril and all other tech startups are still bit players. venture capitalists plowed in 100 billion dollars between 2021 and 2023. only a handful of companies have won meaningful contracts. emily: right now -- palmer: right now anduril is at a high growth stage that i am aware of the fact that we are not a profitable business. we are living on borrowed time.

so, it is hard for me to feel like i have made it when i know if anyone can raise money from vc's, buy a really big office and fill it full of people but the question is are they building the right things and will it payoff? ♪

emily: so, what else do you have in your personal arsenal? palmer: i have a black hawk. a 1985 marine humvee. emily: how many helicopters?

palmer: seven. now i have six. emily: i do hear that you have a vault where you have every ne-yo game ever created. palmer: i purchased the world's largest videogame collection and i collect u.s. air force nuclear missile bases. i put that in one of my missile bases 200 feet underground. emily: where is that? palmer: i cannot tell you. emily: you started anduril in 2017 and you lived through silicon valley in the era of the area -- easy money, what you think about the frenzy? palmer: there are a lot of companies that never should have been funded. all of that money went to pay people to do things that were a waste of time. i know a lot of young founders who were working on crypto art nonsense and a fifth delivery or tense delivery app and now that money is harder to come by. you know what they are working

on now, energy and national security, transportation and like i see people working on real problems because the market forced them to and that is a good thing. emily: it is time to build? palmer: it is time to build. emily: the war in ukraine has been two years now, how are we going to look back on it? palmer: as one of the best examples of the hubris of the modern era, thinking that we land -- lived at the end of conflict and large-scale war is a thing of the past. sternly worded letters from the united nations mean anything at all to expansionist dictators. that is going to be a legacy of this fight. emily: is the u.s. government working fast enough to foster the object that we need to survive or win? palmer: it depends on the fights we fight.

hopefully we have enough time, we might not. emily: why not? palmer: let us say china makes moves on taiwan or other countries in the next 24 months. we are going to be in trouble. i think in 36 or 48 months we are still in trouble. if it takes long enough the united states military has recognized the problem. but like you are steering the boat when you turn how long did it take for the boat to respond. a wild. emily: a bit of a lag time. palmer: the u.s. military is a large machine and it takes a long time to move even once you have applied the control or input. that is the phase we are in. the government has realized the problem and has applied the input. we are waiting for the system to adjust. ♪

>> this is a geo cliff, more than 1000 have been discovered over the last three decades.