BREAKING: Palmer Luckey, Anduril
FULL INTERVIEW
PALMER LUCKEY
Palmer Luckey joins Sourcery for an unfiltered showroom tour at Anduril HQ, covering everything from autonomous fighter jets & invisible drones to UFOs, the physics of time travel, and what war would actually look like on the Moon.
→ Listen on X, YouTube, Spotify & Apple
Palmer breaks down why Anduril is a defense product company, not a traditional contractor—self-funding development, moving faster than legacy primes, & designing systems to be manufacturable at national scale. We go deep on testing culture, media backlash, why “failure” is essential to real weapons development, & how incentives differ when you’re spending your own money instead of relying on taxpayer dollars.
The conversation veers into Palmer’s most speculative & fascinating territory: UAPs as a parallel technological track, why time travel from the distant past is more plausible than from the future, why space warfare would be swift and catastrophic, & why visible-spectrum invisibility is already solved — but largely irrelevant against modern sensors.
We also cover ModRetro (from an heirloom-grade Game Boy® to the upcoming M64), & how becoming a father has (& hasn’t) changed Palmer’s long-term worldview.
This is Part 4 of 4 of our interview series with Anduril’s Founders, in addition to our compiled video, check them all out!
Part I: CEO Brian Schimpf
Part II: Full Anduril R&D Tour: Matt Grimm, Co-Founder & COO
ANDURIL IS HIRING
→ Check out open roles here.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Palmer Luckey, Founder Anduril
(01:26) Fury: The first autonomous fighter jet
(04:28) Anduril testing failures & Press heat
(11:47) What would war look like on the Moon?
(14:28) Invisible drones & Why camouflaging isn't useful
(18:47) UAPs are from the past?
(22:16) Seabed Sentry, Sentry Tower & Ocean surveillance
(24:44) Shipbuilding gap with China & Why ships matter
(27:18) Palmer's garage projects: Jet engine motorcycle
(30:43) Lessons from fatherhood?
(32:17) The next big step for Anduril
Products & Systems Discussed
Fury (YFQ-44A)
The first autonomous fighter jet ever procured by the U.S. Air Force. Developed from contract to first flight in just 556 days, designed to fly alongside manned fighters and take on high-risk missions without risking pilots.
Ghost Drone
Ghost is an expeditionary, quiet, and modular platform that delivers intuitive autonomy at the tactical edge, balancing extended range and multi-payload capacity with an expeditionary footprint.
Sentry Tower
Anduril’s best-selling autonomous surveillance tower, deployed across military installations, allied borders, and ~35% of the U.S. southern border. Detects, classifies, and filters activity in real time to deliver actionable situational awareness.
MOST UNDERRATED: Seabed Sentry
An underwater extension of Sentry, using fiber-optic acoustic arrays and advanced signal processing to detect and classify submarines, divers, vessels, and other underwater activity—while filtering out irrelevant noise like marine life.
EXPLAINED
Optical Camouflage Systems (R&D)
Projection-based visual masking technology that dynamically matches background luminance and color—effective against the human eye, but intentionally deprioritized due to vulnerability to IR, radar, & lidar.
MORE
ModRetro Chromatic
An heirloom-grade, no-compromises reimagining of the Game Boy®, built with sapphire glass, aerospace-grade alloys, and a custom low-resolution display faithful to the original pixel structure.
ModRetro M64 (upcoming)
A next-generation, premium Nintendo 64–compatible system designed as a modern tribute to classic hardware, continuing Palmer’s long-running passion project outside of defense.
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Great interview to end 2025.
Love or him or hate him, Palmer’s never boring.
Great interview. We are looking to connect with you when you get a chance. Mike@CoastalGatewayPort.com