As a teenager, Palmer Luckey designed the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset and then founded Oculus VR and sold it to Facebook for $2.3 billion.
Now he is bringing the ingenuity of Silicon Valley to defence technology.
Founder of Anduril Industries Palmer is on a mission to reshape our defence forces.
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In this episode of Defending Democracy with Malcolm Turnbull, Malcolm Turnbull and Palmer discuss how his technologies are helping Ukrainians fight against Vladimir Putin.
Palmer says Anduril has been involved with Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s invasion.
“We’ve had hardware and software in Ukraine since about two weeks into the war, and that support has continued to today,” Palmer explains.
“Recently, there was a large procurement that was publicly announced by the US government of some of our smart loitering munitions… so that particular case, that’s one of the things that we’re providing. But a variety of different systems, not just one component.”
Palmer goes on to explain there have been crucial learnings from Ukraine about the importance of modernising technology and ensuring countries are able to use it should they ever face attack.
“The first is reinforcing inside of the US military, and I think militaries around the world, the idea that you really want to build tools that make countries like Ukraine too prickly of a porcupine for nations like Russia and China to step on in the first place,” he says.
“The right time to arm them with cutting edge technology was not now. It’s not a panic response where we’re trying to flood all of these new systems into their country as they’re fighting for their lives.”
You can hear more about Anduril’s technology and Palmer’s thoughts on killer robots and the importance of such defence on this week’s episode of Defending Democracy with Malcolm Turnbull.
Defending Democracy with Malcom Turnbull provides a trusted and insightful guide through one of the most consequential questions of our time: Are we witnessing the decline of western/liberal democracy? Listen to the podcast now on the Listnr app.