Palmer Luckey

The Anduril Man

This dude has gotta be one of the greatest tinkerers since Edison. Basically he made Oculus VR as a teenager which Facebook then bought for $2B in 2014 with Palmer Luckey becoming a board member. Facebook paid $2B because, unlike Microsoft or Google they did not have their own Windows or Android operating system and The Zuck thought that this would give Facebook their platform of the future. Didn’t turn out that way. A few years later Palmer was punted from said board {?Oculus lost a big infringement lawsuit, Palmer supported Trump in a woke (at the time) company?}. VR never skyrocketed.

However. With a billion dollars in his pocket Palmer started Anduril, the defence product company. It, in a few years, has taken on and in some cases won, against the big defence contractors whose business model is …..hey government we have this new fantastic plane, or ship, or whatever IN OUR IMAGINATION and you give us billions and we will build it. Anduril says…..hey government we have this product ready to use and we’ll sell it to you. The Anduril motto is…..we’ll make billions and save the government hundreds of billions. Considering how atrocious the military is with waste, corruption, and grift Anduril’s approach does not seem unreasonable.

The Anduril Man has been on a few pods lately. He has not published any books but does have some personal sci Fi manuscripts and is totally behind the military outline given by Christian Brose in his book "The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare". Here are seven completely unwoke provocative Palmer Luckey ideas/thoughts/concerns:

1)China manufactures close to a third of the world’s stuff (ie-military components) while the USA lags by a lot.

2)China (and Russia) have many many centuries-old territorial claims so Chamberlain appeasement will not work.

3)Face recognition AI software is not that great but combined with skeletal discrepancy and movement recognition AI, it will be military magic (like the Arthur C. Clarke famous line).

4)China’s shipbuilding capacity is 350X that of the USA AND ships built in China for any purpose must meet military specifications (sure, build a ferry to carry cars but the floor has to be thick enough steele to carry tanks), SO with a stroke of Premier Xi’s pen these assets can be requisitioned immediately for an invasion.

5)Robotic humanoids are not at the level of a 20 year old navy seal. Rather they are at the level of a 90 year man which is very useful right now for manning armaments positions that have a high likelihood of being taken out.

6)Anduril’s AI backbone called Lattice has dozens of weapons systems that can be plugged into it to integrate military operations which is the future of warfare.

7)Apple’s billionaire CEO is a China sycophant as China manufactures its stuff which Apple then sells. Apple releases products to the Chinese market which allows the CCP to clandestinely monitor its individual citizens. Apple could be nationalized in a heartbeat by Mr. Xi. Mr. Cook cannot publicly say he hates Nazi concentration camps (but can yammer on endlessly about climate, gender, white privilege, colonialism, ESG, DEI, etc) even though the Uyghur story drips blood and pus like a non-healing wound.

But. However. You pick the conjugation.

All this conventional weapons (chemical bond energy) pontificating is moot compared to nuclear weapons (atomic nucleus energy) deployment. If you measure the former as ONE then later is ONE MILLION on an energy/blow up something/destruction scale. Furthermore, considering that the USA’s nuclear force is on sole presidential command and hair trigger alert (some call this launch on warning) with a six minute time fuse for a president (who might well be senile), then moot is hardly the right word. Meaningless is.