YouSaid · the spoken record

Palmer Luckey

lines on the record: 87
first: 2026-02-03
most recent: 2026-02-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Scale, some of those things are getting to scale. Like our towers are very much at scale. We're on 35 bases around the world. We're covering about 30% of the U.S. southern border now. A bunch of the northern border as well. It's like our towers have scaled really well. Same thing with our counter drone systems. Like we're the program of record for all of SOCOM's drone defense. We're the program of record for all of the Marine Corps' drone defense. So some of these things are scaling. It's these newer things. I guess if I have a critic who says, Palmer, but you have all these things that haven't scaled, I say, guess what? Every single Android product that is more than five years old has scaled. It takes time to get the government to scale these things, but we don't have any examples of a product that we did that didn't scale once it had enough time. Every product in our, we've been around for almost nine years. Every product that was started more than five years ago is in major scaling mode. It's just we have a lot of other things that are newer and I'm sure there'll be some failures. But, you know, flipping coins. You don't need to get ahead.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to invade Ukraine. Zelensky is basically just angling for welfare. He's trying to be a sabre rattler. And so the people who made those decisions, they're still in the State Department. They're still making these things. So to a certain extent, I've got my hands tied behind my back. I'll say I want to make a $2,000 attack drone. And they say, well, you have to use this approved thing. You can only use this approved warhead. You have to make an anti-tamper so the Ukrainians can't make it do things that we don't want them to do. And the net of that is what you're talking about. People in Ukraine saying Andrew's stuff is expensive and it's locked down and it doesn't and you can't modify it. And I say, yeah, that sucks. Look, I've been to Kyiv. I've been to Lviv and I've trained people on how to use our systems. And I've heard this feedback face to face. And it's really hard to tell a guy who's telling you that people are dying because of it. Like, oh, well, sorry, I wish I could do better, but that's the short. One more thing. You're right that we have a lot of these different things and that is good for figuring out what works.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expensive. But for example, I'm required to use a certain navigation system that the government has approved for munitions of this category. And they also requires to use it because they want us to sell anti-tamper stuff using approved parts where Ukraine can't go in and say, ah, this was able to go 400 kilometers. But if I just strap on on a bigger battery and I can tweak it, I'm going to go to Moscow. Another example is like I wanted, I actually wanted to sell surveillance towers to Ukraine before this war even started and that wasn't something that I came up with. It was something Zelensky came up with it. He read a wired article about Andorl talking about how we were securing the US southern border. And when he was in the US for his first UN meeting after winning his election, he wanted to meet with Androil to talk about what it would look like to have our towers on his border so they could know how Russia was building things up, how they would cross. And then we ran into this problem where the US State Department basically put the Kabash on the whole thing. They said, no, Russia's not good.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be clear, I want to build small attack drones for Ukraine, and I want to be cost competitive there. But I'm competing with Ukraine using largely Chinese components, right? Most of these internally assembled drones, they're built using Chinese flight controllers, Chinese sensors, Chinese stuff. I'm prohibited from using those. So Andrew is sanctioned by China. Our entire C-suite is sanctioned by China. The government in the US prohibits us from making weapons using these Chinese components. And so I can come in and say, hey, I have this thing that is cheap, but instead of it being a $900 drone, it is a $2,000 drone. And people in Ukraine say, well, that's fucking expensive. And how am I ever going to do that? And I say, you're right. If you're willing to use Chinese stuff, I literally can't compete. And this has been a smart move by China, by the way. This is why China keeps they do this because it actually cripples my ability to compete. There's other stuff that I do that's just too expensive for Ukraine, and I'm trying to make it cheaper. I want our learning munitions to be more or less.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we've already made our investment in these facilities. So, I want to solve these problems, but in general, Andrews looked at these things kind of quasi-realistically. I'm waging this war of hearts and minds to explain why that is the dumbest thing ever. They need to open it up for competition. I think what they should do is say, we're not going to give you welfare to make your artillery line. We're going to say that the first company to build something using private capital and get to sufficiency, oh, we're going to award them a contract for this much. And they have to hit a certain price point and a certain scale. And only then are we committed to buying. And they just don't want to do that because they have their own centrally planned scheme. There's a lot of secret communism going on in the United States, a lot of secret Soviet thinking that is just hidden behind a veneer of the flag. So that's kind of like the artillery issue. When you get to the small drones, it actually gets to, I'm competing. Like my biggest competitor for building small drones.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just can't do that in the US. No matter how smart I think about it. I make solid rocket motors. I've wanted to make energetics get into the artillery shell business. The problem is I just cannot compete with what is a quite powerful arms industry that exists in a lot of the Baltics and Eastern European countries that are supporting Ukraine. The problem is that you automate everything. You have to get to a sufficient scale. And so one thing I've done is I've approached multiple administrations, said, hey, we need to commit to, for example, supplying 155 artillery shells to not just Ukraine, but all of these allies. We need to build the alien dreadnought where the metal goes in and the shells come out. So are you familiar with how artillery shell manufacturing happens in the United States? Here's the actual problem. The facilities are literally owned by the government. And then they actually lease them out to operators who then use them to develop stuff. And so if you try to compete with them, the government explicitly says, but this will, it'll be like it's a waste of investment.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they've definitely kind of won by any rational definition. And so we're probably not going to approach Chinese cost. Luckily, the U.S. has more money and we're more, you know, we make more money per person. And so we can probably afford a little bit of inefficiency. On the Ukraine side, that one's really interesting because we've had hardware and people in Ukraine since the second week of the war. I've been to Ukraine during the war myself, and we've been a part of USAID packages, European aid packages. We've even sold some things directly to Ukraine. But to your point, mostly higher-end stuff, long-range loitering munitions that can get through jamming bubbles. And what they really need is large amounts of industrial levels of firepower. I mean, like they need a lot of really small cheap drones. They also just need a bunch of artillery shells. They need a bunch of mortar shells. The biggest problem for a company like Androil, and it's a fair criticism that people have made. The thing is, I can't compete with, for example, Eastern European manufactured artillery or mortar rounds.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think that this is what I mean when I say we don't need technological breakthrough so much, we just need to just do things and like the tech to do this is gonna catch up. Like, you know why manufactured housing isn't big in the US? It's just anti-manufactured housing laws, literally prohibiting housing that is manufactured not on site. It's one of the most anti-American sets of laws that there's ever been. I confidently believe that the founding fathers, if they were around, would make this a federal issue. And they would say, we are not going to allow local governments to decide like if you want to say a house of a certain appearance is one thing, that's fine. But you cannot”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cost of extracting and transforming it will go to near zero, and we're going to compete the margins way down. It's just not that crazy. And so if you can do, and I bet you'll be able to recycle it with 90% efficiency at the end of the season. You'll say, what's my summer car going to be? Let's go down to the mall and buy one, and we'll try it out. Same thing, I think, for housing. Housing is going to come extremely cheap. The components are not expensive. It's the transformation and the regulation that have made it really hard.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how many would have you have owned as a rich guy, even 50 years ago? How about 100 years ago? How about 200 years ago? We've just made clothes so cheap. People buy clothes and they throw them away after wearing them one time. And you don't even have to be rich to do that. There are people who are in college working part-time who do this. I think that what you're going to see is that the same level of automation that is dominated textiles and agriculture start to apply to everything. I think AI is going to make it easier for the resource extraction processing and manufacturing. I really do believe that in our lifetimes you'll be able to go buy something that's like a Ford F-150 for $1,000 or the equivalent of”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I'll look, I'll give you my thesis for optimism. People know that I'm a pretty happy guy. It seems like I'm having a good time. It's because I remind myself that oats are like a dollar for some large number of pounds of oats. You can work for one hour of minimum wage at a federal level and earn enough calories to survive an entire week. It's the best it's ever been. Nobody's been able to do that. And it's not just oats. It's egg culture in general. Modern pesticides controls roundup machinery. We've figured out how to make food really, really well. We throw away most of it. That's how good we are at making it. And the same has been true, I think, for clothing. How many outfits do you own?”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He got so lucky. What a crazy coincidence. You basically had all these GPUs for gaming. By the way, Oculus, when we were acquired by Facebook, almost bought Nvidia back when they were worth about $7 billion. And we were looking at doing a 51% takeover. No, but here's the people say, oh, man, imagine if we would have gone through with that project. Never would have done what they did, right? It was gaming, and then the gaming stuff happened to be useful for all the proof of work and staking stuff in crypto, and then that ended up also being very similar to what we needed for AI. Like, man, what an incredible coincidence we live in that world. There's an interesting argument where Oculus would have gone and got NVIDIA and AMD and centralized them and then only focused on gaming and then we wouldn't have any of this stuff. It's a crazy world”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fuck you love your baby now. It's incredible. And there's people who are talking about using it in totally novel ways. For example, doing divorce counseling. And we've understood the mechanism of it for 50 years now. And it's literally just a willingness to just do things. And so I'm excited about the new science. I'm excited about new fusion. There's a lot of just do things that's going on right now”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of this bioscience. There's a lot of things that have been proposed for decades that are only just now actually being tested. I mean, here's another example. We've understood oxytocin, which is one of the primary mammalian pair bonding chemicals. We've understood how it works for decades. We've been actively using it to help postpartum depressed mothers bond with their kids. Oh, you hate your baby? Look at your baby and we're going to give you this shot.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's huge. And it feels very real. Our understanding of the world is progressing so fast, and there's a lot of things that don't require even technological breakthroughs. The most exciting thing about what's going on right now, in my opinion, is that it's mostly not actually technological progress. It's psychological, or you could even call it quasi-religious progress, catching up with the science that was figured out decades ago. That's this whole nuclear thing. All this nuclear energy stuff, it is just everyone's willingness to do nuclear catching up with the technology.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's just a great sci fi author. It's so funny when people try to blow it down. He must be a fascist because the government has some fascistic tendencies in starships.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just read It's so funny. I love Starship Trooper. It's so funny when people call him a fascist because of Starship troopers. And they've clearly never read Other Heinleen. Heinland also wrote basically like pro-worker, pro-communist. There's works.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And luckily, this administration is willing to sign off on it. In the past, they've not been a fan of these things. Yeah.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why I said it's not really right or about But like in the case of Erebor, the most, the riskiest asset, like the riskiest product we're offering is lending with a 50% loan-to-deposit ratio, which would make it one of like that's the riskiest product is one of the most conservative ratios in the entire country.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Billionaires, the millionaires were, you know, if Bernie has his way, if Bernie got in the White House and he's not that far away, you know, he's at one point, he was a few super delegates away from winning a general election. It's something to ponder. Bernie can still have an”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the midst of this huge populist shift, right or left. And the fact that they did it for rational reasons, but like, I'm surprised they didn't do the thing that would have been popular with their base. And it's not hard to imagine a world where a different White House would do something different. And this is not a right or a left thing. It's a popularism argument. Will we live in a world where politicians can make rational risk management, systemic financial collapse risk management if it's going to make them look like they're in the pockets of the billionaires? I think maybe not. I think you could end up a world of the world where there's massive economic pain because it's not politically viable to do the right thing for the country. And so that's the world that I'm trying to prepare for.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't look at how it all works. And I probably cannot build a bank that survives a total financial collapse. But are you guys familiar with the theory of the bear? The bear is chasing you. He's chasing people around you. You don't have to outrun the bear. You have to outrun everyone else. And so I think you might not be able to make it where every bank fails and you survive. But you can make it where you're one of the survivors in a world where something really bad happens, something that is beyond what the government could feasibly bail. And by the way, when I say feasibly bailout, I don't just mean financially. I mean politically. I am actually astounded that the Biden administration bailed out a bunch of billionaires like me.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was like, yeah, that was the negotiated. Now they're trying to get undo the deal. The way that I look at it is this. There is a lot more risk in the banking system than anyone is willing to admit. It only works if everyone stays in the matrix.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not available to rule or a lot of these tech companies, including smaller tech companies. So that was the question how do we make a bank that would give people the things they need from a bank without the parts that are going to destroy their entire business? I mean, if let's be real, if the federal government would not have bailed out SVB customers far beyond what the law required And if the Biden administration would not have more or less spuriously declared that the signature bank deal was actually signs of a systemic collapse, which is nonsense. Like if they wouldn't have done that, it would have wiped out a lot of tech companies. And so what we're trying to do with Erebor is actually a lot more boring than many people think, but there is a market for it.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the government doesn't want anyone to do this as part of the crazy scheme. No, like this, there's a reason the banks aren't doing this, and it's not just that nobody's smart, it's that the government doesn't really want it to.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there needs to be one to one banking in the United States. Not all banking. I'm not saying every bank should be like this, but the product should be available. I started going around talking to banks. I said, all right, I've got this thing. I want you to take my money and then you have it when I come to get it. It's the only thing you're going to do.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In many ways, it's the most boring bank there could be. We originally were thinking of calling it the real bank, but it turns out that the slogan, I think, of Citibank is the real something bank. I can't remember what it was. It's not a good slogan. Anyway, we're going to call it the real bank, but it was a very simple thought, okay? SVB's collapsing. Turns out that there's more risk in the system than people thought. It's potentially more widespread. And like, yes, SVB did some things that someone could avoid, but there's a lot of things that are inherent to the way that current banking is done. So our idea was, what would a bank look like if its job was to serve companies who more than every half percent of interest on their deposits actually just really needs their money to be there and not disappear?”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little more boring than that. Everyone's calling it Palmer Lucky's crypto bank. It's not so much a crypto bank as a bank that does support stablecoin deposits and transfers because, of course, any bank is going to need to support these things. If you want 24-7 liquidity and you want 24-7 settlement and you want it every day of the year with every country around the world, you're going to have to do it via stablecoins. It's just obvious how that's going to happen. So everyone's seized on Palmer Lucky is doing all this crypto stuff. It's actually way more boring.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one issue with reindustrialization is that China has already done a really good job there. I'm not saying we shouldn't. We should. But we need advantages that take advantage of our better financial apparatus, arguably that take better advantage of our cultural apparatus, certainly that take advantage of a unique fact, which is the U.S. has friends or at least partners all over the world. China doesn't have that. China has not convinced the world to host the Chinese military, to host Chinese culture. The United States needs to lean into the remaining advantages we do have. We should re-industrialize. I'm not saying we can win all we can't win without doing that, but it's not enough on its own.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, see, that's true today. Putin didn't say that thinking he wasn't saying, I think AI is going to accrue to the winner. And I bet the US is going to beat me. They were investing a lot. They didn't take the winning path, right? Like they didn't do some of these kind of attention-based models focus-based. The killer drone stuff way ahead of everybody else, and he would have put it to work before anyone else even knew how to respond. Imagine if Putin had made ChatGPT as kind of the simplified version I use for members of Congress.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expansionist actions. And what we're seeing playing out is kind of the more cynical version of we're seeing the cynics. The cynics were right. The cynics who said, no, war is still a thing of the present, hopefully not the future. And it's a good thing that companies like Andorol, I think, were getting started early on this. Because imagine if Androil was started right as. Conflict kicked off in Europe. Or worse, being started right as conflict kicks off over Taiwan with China. It's too late. You can't start working on bombs after the war has started and expect to have any deterrent impact. You're just going to be part of fighting wars instead of preventing them.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were talking about literally, I mean, our deck laid out exactly what was going to happen. And it said that warfare is going to be about a lot of these proliferated systems. It's going to move away from exquisite things that you build up capacity over decades. Instead, lower end systems that you can actually manufacture at a rate that is relevant to an ongoing conflict. And of course, that's exactly what's exactly what's happened in Russia. But the very big picture here is we were living in a world in 2017 where a lot of people believed we lived at the end of history that there was no more geopolitical movement of significance to happen and that United Nations could write. Mean letters to dissuade people from”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could you imagine if that was like from his own mind and not something that somebody wrote? That is Putin. He's a competent adversary in these ways. And so that was very much part of the rivalry. The problem is, of course, that now that rivalry has kind of reached its terminal stage, right? He's made his move on Ukraine. Everyone's seen that it's happening. And so the remaining one that we can influence is China.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, remember, we were quoting it in an Andrew pitch deck in early 2017 before AI was cool at all. Man, I would kill for a US leader to be that far ahead. Could you imagine if you had somebody come out? I won't even name who, but if you had somebody come out in the White House, he says. Have to hold the Lagrange points. Someone has to have the high ground in orbit. The cyst lunar insertion and transfer pads must be protected if we're going to extract resources from the belt, asteroids. So you know what I'm talking about. And imagine if that was all.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But let's be honest, that's some really good bond villain level. Yes, they will become the ruler of the entire world. You got to respect that.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the rivalry with China is a big one. It was a little broader than that. I mean, when we started Anderol, if you look back at the first pitch deck, you remember there was a page with a bear and a pair with a page with a dragon. And we lay out what the Chinese roadmap looks like. And we laid out what the Russian roadmap looked like. And we literally lay out that Russia is going to invade Ukraine. They intend to take it by force. There's a great quote by Putin where he says the country that wins in the sphere of AI will become the ruler of the entire world. I have a huge amount of respect for that quote. First of all, like what an incredible amount of style there. I'm saying that I like Putin. I super don't. I arguably started a company to fight Putin. I'm personally sanctioned in Russia and Belarus. I literally cannot go there without being arrested by Russia's security forces. So don't take this in like the, I'm in a nail palmer to the wall. He said something good about Putin.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're spending way too much. We're getting way too little. And we're not progressing at the rate that our geopolitical adversaries are. And if it were peacetime and there was no inkling of conflict for us or our allies, that maybe wouldn't be a problem. But that's not the world that we live in”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The name of my company is literally Androil Industries. The acronym is literally AI. It is so frightened. We didn't talk about it in the early days because AI wasn't cool. Almost nine years ago. It was like cold fusion or VR Nonsense for the future, never in the present. But yeah, it's so funny to be painted by the media as an AI coattail writer. When in fact I've been there before LLMs were a glimmer in most people's eye.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so funny when people look at Android and say, Oh, look at Androil trying to jump onto the AI grift, trying to pretend that all their stuff's about AI.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not the daily 49er anymore. It's now the daily breeze because 49er is a reference to the gold rush and the gold rush is racist now. I'm not kidding. That's why they did it, which is crazy because this team is still a 49ers. So how could that be? Anyway, the paper decided its name was racist, and so they would rename it after 100 plus years. But what I realized as a journalist is you can only really follow so many things yourself directly from first sources. Like if you could choose a beat and you can stay on top of it, but you have to outsource at some point the research to other people to consolidate and bring these things together. I'm very bullish on using AI at my direction to do this. I want to be able to sit in AI and say, scraped literally everything, the press releases, the social media chatter, the academic stuff, and then give me a summary that is not contaminated by some profit interest or ideological interest.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tells you what to look at, and like, I don't have enough time to become a real expert on this stuff. Just people didn't know. I used to be a journalism major until I dropped out. I was an online editor of the Daily 49er at Cal State Long Beach, which was the fourth largest student-run paper in the country at the time.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can trust the academics somewhat more than the press. The press just hates everything And also, they're lazy. They're not digging deep. They're basically. The press used to regurgitate what was given to them in press releases positively. Now they just regurgitate it and the tenor has changed. But it's the same activity. It's just repeating what's in the press release and the commentary around it is what's changed. So yeah, actually, I stay up to date a lot by reading academic academic papers and journals that are focused on the things that I'm interested in.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think of it this way. Like, suppose that you are going to try to, like, you want to keep up to date with new curved polarizer materials that are used for making pancake optics, where you're folding optical paths on top of themselves. You're like, oh, I want to stay on top of this. What are you going to do? Are you going to read press releases of all the companies that are touting this stuff? The manufacturers don't tout this stuff. How are you going to stay on top of the fact that there even are new advancements? And it turns out a pretty good way is to just follow the academic literature where you have people that are doing research on these things. And then they'll, their jobs say, you know, oh, and such and such group in China is doing this. And there's other company that has this approach. What we propose is a novel approach to X, Y, and Z. Now, they probably can actually do it, and they're never going to pull off anything of interest, but they've still done the other work. I am basically using them as my outsourced research team on anything. If I need to find out what the state of the art on something is.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In any space that I'm interested in. So, like, I am reading all the journals that mention synthetic long-chain hydrocarbons. I'm a huge believer in that. It's going to change everything and it's going to make this whole battery electric nonsense look like the multi-trillion dollar farce that it is, especially in aviation. This is a long topic, but I'm not saying, and by the way, the best performers in that area are not necessarily academic, but by staying on top of the academic side, you'll never be too far behind. People in academia don't have to create or produce or sell necessarily. Their job is just to be on the front lines of what's new. And so they'll never be too far behind that most of the time. Same thing with VR, same thing with optics, same thing.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do I keep up with weird stuff? I would never admit so in public, but I do actually keep up with the academic literature.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to come up with everything. I now come up with about half of our products. The other half come through a combination of customer demand and people in the teams coming up with solutions to problems. And that's good. In the terminal stage, every idea I have should be worse than the ones my employees are generating. I mean, that could even be the case today. But I'm the guy in charge. I'm the one guy that can't be fired. So half the ideas are still mine. Hopefully that shrinks over time. Sorry, what was the other bit of that question?”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when you're growing quickly, it's a lot easier. This is a harder strategy for a stable company, and I can't recommend it, but when you're introducing products at a sufficiently high rate, there's always a place for you to take these people, to pluck them out and say, you're going to be in charge of this new product and you're going to make it work, using your experience of how to work inside of our organization and the fact that people know you and trust you. Static organizations struggled with this because there just aren't enough roles. It's the how many senior VPs are there problem. It's nice to be growing fast.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Project and team leads that are typically engineers who came up out of other programs. Like one of our program leads is a guy, we call him the King Intern because he started, he was Andrew's first intern. So he started when he was 19 years old at Anderol. We were his summer internship. And then he quit school, came to Anderall. And within 12 months was leading a product. And now he's leading an entire business division. And we've done a pretty good job of making a meritocracy where people see the people in leadership roles are themselves engineers who have cut their teeth and proven themselves inside of Anderol.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a very brief period, very early in Androil's history, where we had more lawyers and lobbyists than engineers. It was very, very brief, but we had to overinvest in that when you're starting a company in such a compliance heavy regulatory, heavy government interface heavy side. We have never, ever had that problem since. I'd say we're about 85% engineering. So, yeah, we have quite little overhead. We don't have a ton of middle management. We have, we basically have”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Truly doing things for the right reason where you understand what everyone is doing around you, it's not that much bigger than the size of a home construction crew or a small game development team. Or you kind of see these natural themes emerge over and over again across societies and across history where it's these groups of a certain size. I mean the founding fathers. And I'm trying to keep every business unit as close to that size as I can.”
2026-02-03 · a16z Podcast · Palmer Luckey on Hardware, Building, and the Next Frontiers of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source