Palmer Luckey Talks Tech

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Well, Cesday two is well underway, and with that in mind, let's go to Bloomberg Tech co hosts Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow, who are on the ground in Las Vegas with Palmer Lucky he is the founder of and Duryll over to you guys.

Thank Katie, thank you very much. Indeed, and we are on the floor of CS. But we got some serious conversations to have, not just about retro technology that has been brought back by Palme Lucky in one of his startups, but we also want to talk about ANDREIL because very much defense SEC is in the IVS storm.

Right now.

We have two truth social posts coming out from the President talking about the publicly traded defense companies shouldn't be doing stop buybacks, shouldn't be paying dividends, and need to focus on investing in America.

Where do you think that.

Is being pointed at and why do you think it's being announced now?

Well, you can probably guess I fall on this issue.

President Trump is saying that he wants to see defence companies building new plants, building new factories, delivering on time, and then maintaining systems cost effectively, and that's I mean, trying to do more. That is why I started in early years ago, because I looked at the United States and defense industrial base and realized we weren't moving fast enough, weren't building new plants, we weren't building the new technologies.

That we needed.

And so I'd say I'm I'm broadly aligned. Personally speaking, I think dividends and buybacks are actually very very different in their tenor, and I think probably I'm much more on the sides of not allowing these companies to do dividends, certainly not when they're years behind on critical programs where they are failing.

To invest in new things.

Stock buybacks are a little different because you're investing in yourself. You're racing I believe that my future is better than my past. That's different than a dividend, which effectively ends up just being a tax on tax payers to pay for defense, straight into the pockets of public market investors.

So I look at these those things a little differently.

Big picture, if these companies were doing really well, and if they were living up to their end of the bargain, I don't think you would see any action from Trump or others on this. It's really a reflection of how many problems we have with our defense industrial bases.

These are you'll compare to this, right, Parma, You compete against them for contracts.

That's the same pot of money. That's right, and you know, to be fair.

In the time that you and I have been doing interviews, you are typically transparent. One of the provisions that the president proposes is a salary cap of five million dollars. In the Bloomberg story outline some of the comp of those CEOs. Would you be willing to say what you pay yourself to Anderill and if you would abide by I.

Pay myself one hundred thousand dollars a year.

So significantly less than a five million dollar cap.

True, But I also own a lot of my company, and so so you know this this measure is not really written in a way where it's intended to hit new companies starting new things.

You know.

Act like if Kelly Johnson were alive today and he owned a bunch of you know, Lockheed Martin or north from Grummer or Raytheon, I don't think that anyone would have nearly much of a problem with him. Yeah, I pay myself a hund one thousand dollars a year. That's my compensation package. I own a bunch of ander all because I started the company. That's so my motivation is to try and build in the biggest thing possible. I will say people are fairly critigue and said, but Palmer,

Right. It's actually the same thing with like mod Retro in the gaming.

Space, like, oh, of course Palmer would criticize these other game companies, after all, he's in the gaming space. It's like, yeah, but I'm in the gaming space because I want to solve these problems. It's kind of this like catch twenty two, like like if you're outside it, they'll say, well, why don't you do something about it then and you do something like who cares what you're doing, You're just part of the problem. It's always been emotionally difficult for me.

We also have posts that President Trump is thinking more than a trillion should be invested in the area of defense budget budget not an.

Anti defense or anti defense company. That's not for sure. That's for sure.

What's interesting is your company is Dare I say it considering going public?

Yes? Would your CEO?

Do you think the CEO that needs the business when it's com public should be under these sorts of restrictions from an executive order? Do you think that that's going to be an ish?

I think that when you are on the doll and when you're effectively run on the public's wallet, that the public should be able to impose whatever restrictions they want on you. I like, you're not asked whether it should be like, if I am getting paid by taxpayers, they should have the ability to elect people, elect representatives, elect who will then nominate people who can hold me to

If they say that I'm not allowed to pay myself one.

Dollar until I get caught up, I think they should be allowed to do that. When you are working on the PU, when you are working on taxpayer NIME, there is no level of oversight or intervention that I am against. Conceptually, now, I think some of these might be bad moves, they might not necessarily help the defense spase, But in concept I think everything should be on the table, and I think it's even good.

Maybe there scarce of people.

Sometimes you don't necessarily go to people and say this is the way it's going to be forever. You say this is how it's going to be until you get your act together. You remember being a teenager and your parents say you're grounded until X, Y and Z bring up your grades, solve your problems.

And then we will talk about altering the deal. You say, but this deal has so many problems. If it's life, this my whole life.

If I'm grounded for the rest of my life, that means I'll have no social life. And your parents are not necessarily looking at ground you for life. They're saying, right now, you're grounded. And I think that that's what you're seeing right now. It's not necessarily a lifetime.

Let me jump in here.

I want to bring the Bloomberg television audience the reporting because these are two truth social posts by the president.

That's right, their proposals.

But what Bloomberg's reporting in their last hour is that he is considering an EO according to sources, to make this happen. Answer this derail on track with the pledges and commitments it's made in Ohio, the projects that it is contractually obliged to the military on, not just in this country but around the world.

There are a handful of things where we are not, but in most cases we are. So like you brought up Ohio, we're building this is a huge plant arsenal one in Columbus, Ohio, where we're building autonomous spider jets and a bunch of other things, building about six million square feet there. We're actually ahead of schedule on that. We had a bunch of people from Ohio that we hired the first round of factory workers.

We've brought them out to.

California on our dime, so we were housing them, we're paying them, and we brought them so that we can put them into our existing factory, teach them how ANDRO works, you know in doctrinate them into our way of manufacturing, our way of thinking.

And we've actually already finished that training.

Process and we've already sent them back to Ohio where they're helping stand up the factory. We're going into production this summer and we have a new batch of people that have already been sent back. So on Arsenal one, we are ahead of schedule. We are hitting our commitments. I think we're building a new plant to build new things, and we're doing it on our own dime. We're spending nine hundred million dollars of our own money to build this plan.

Where aren't you are very transparent? In some places you're not? Are the weapons working is you want them to? Are they performing in the field?

So some of these things I can talk about, some that I can't talk about. But like, for example, I have a project that is a man portable counter UAS system and oh Androl sorry I am Androl in my perspective, Yeah, sorry about that. Androl has a project building a man portable counter UAS system. We really wanted to have that actually fielded right about now, and instead, because of a

It's turned out to be a more technically challenging problem than we thought.

Now in that case, it's not a failure of you know, like we're not building a factory or we don't want to invest. It's just it's a harder technical problem than we thought. I suspect that we're going to continue to run too those if you if you only build things with no technical risk, you're not trying hard enough. I think, androle will continue to do things that from time to time will turn out to be harder than we thought. But you know, I just need to flip more heads than tails.

When we're thinking about where you stand, where US stands versus China, yep, where does it intens of drone technology? We're in this context of a geopolitical strain that started this year off with Venezuela. We look now to Russia. How do you see China and the Taiwan question.

China has an incredibly strong drone industry. It is largely a result of state intervention. It's largely a result of industrial policy, of supply chain investments that the government has made, and even trade deals that China has made around the world to allow for these drones to freely flow out in other marketplaces. Yeah, China has the best rone industry in the world. It's not even close. It's definitely a weakness that the United States has. Now you saw recently

So I'm hoping that this band on Dji.

Drones results in a strong US drone market popping up to take its place over the next one two three years. Androl actually as a drone that we were showing off in Japan recently that's made with one hundred percent Japanese parts. Japan is another nation that can build their own drones. They don't need Dji, but it's hard for that to make economic sense when China's allowed to flow the market.

Let's pivot and talk about modern retro sure for the lay person, No, I got to do it. That's why you're here right. Your background's in virtual rally and you've basically rebirthed the game Boy. I don't know if there's some IP we'll issue on that.

So mod Retro is actually a company I started when I was about fourteen years old, combining retro technology and modern technology to build these kind of tributes that bring the best of both worlds. So like we make, for example, something called the mod Retrochromatic. Think of it as like the ultimate tribute to the Nintendo game Boy. It's a game Boy cartridge compatible.

Console that has an illumin magnesium shell.

Instead of a plastic window over the screen, it has a lab grown sapphire crystal window. It's the largest sapphire crystal window of any product ever, way bigger than you would typically see on like a rolex or something, because I've got to cover an entire screen. We're also building a new console called the mod Retro M sixty four, which plays Nintendo sixty four games. I think of it

So I just had a fake.

Business card and a fake ID, and I pretended to be from a different company. Now I'm coming with a real ID and with a real company, and I'm seeing all my friends from the VR days, all my friends from the Retro days, and of course a lot of defense presence here too.

Can mod Retro be?

Mod Retro is never going to be as big as It's never going to be as big as it pardly currently. Look, you've got a couple dozen people building things for people who really really care about this stuff. I think that there's some things we have coming down the line that are going to be more broadly interesting. For example, we're working on something I won't get into the details because

I guess he was complaining about is TV today.

Yeah, I was.

Look, there's a lot of things that we're working on that are kind of learning from the lessons of the past and trying.

To just bring them into the future.

Like what would you rather have a smart TV or a TV that shows what you plug into it? I think I know what most people would want, but that's a pretty retro idea.

Unfortunately, now to a television that works.

Pa Ma Lucky, founder of Anderrail, founder of mod Retro, also cto andeil I would say, frankly, could not have had a more timely conversation given the headlines of the day,