464: Palmer Luckey—The Department of War Has a Mullet
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
4.8 • 39.1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2026
⏱️ 123 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tech founder, defense disruptor, and founder of Anduril Industries Palmer Luckey chats with Mike about the strange haircut on America's military bureaucracy—all business in the front, chaos in the back. Luckey explains how Anduril is trying to bring speed, accountability, and modern technology to national defense, often in spite of layers of red tape. Along the way, they discuss why Palmer got into defense contracting, who was pivotal in the Department of Defense becoming the Department of War, and why he donated to AOC.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, friends, it's Mike Roe. |
| 0:05.0 | This is the way I heard it. |
| 0:06.0 | My guest today is a young man who I had the pleasure to meet serendipitously some months ago at an energy summit sponsored by our podcast's good friend Alex Epstein. |
| 0:20.0 | Chuck, you were there as well, as I recall. I was, yes. I was |
| 0:24.0 | quite fascinated by Palmer and I was so glad. I've been trying to get him on the podcast ever since, |
| 0:29.3 | and thankfully he was able to be here today. Palmer Lucky, if you're unfamiliar, is, I think he's 33 years old. |
| 0:36.3 | Yeah. He was just a boy, like many boys, obsessed with video games and computers, and his hobby got |
| 0:43.4 | out of hand, and he came up with this idea called Oculus, and Mark Zuckerberg bought it for |
| 0:48.6 | $2.2 billion. |
| 0:51.6 | And so young Palmer wound up with a lot of ready cash. A lot of Jack. |
| 0:56.1 | A lot of Doxan jingoa. Ooh, shekels raining down. And he was just a young man. I think it was |
| 1:01.6 | like he was 20 or 22 when that sale went out. And then they fired him. Yeah. You know, he |
| 1:08.1 | well, he was a young man and he heard some things he liked coming out of the mouth of one Donald Trump of all people and donated a modest amount, like $9,000, I think, to a, to a pack. |
| 1:24.1 | Anyway, yeah, Facebook hated that, fired him. Yeah. |
| 1:30.0 | And I believe he got even though. |
| 1:31.9 | Well, you know, it worked out for him. |
| 1:35.7 | And, you know, he and Mark are friends again, and he doesn't seem to hold a grudge with anything. |
| 1:40.0 | But what this guy has done is launch a company called Anderil. |
| 1:45.7 | And this company is a part of the industrial military complex. |
| 1:48.4 | They're worth billions of dollars. |
| 2:00.7 | And he makes drones and uses AI to create autonomous weapons that the Department of War is seriously enamored of. So obviously I wanted to talk to him about that, |
| 2:04.2 | but as you'll hear, it doesn't much matter what I want to do when Palmer Lucky is in the room. |
... |
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