The Ledger, every show

“And the result of this is that today, in almost every war game that the United States simulates against China or their proxies, the United States, ah, if we don't lose, certainly end up in a very, very bad situation.”

“Apple's got 95% of their manufacturing in China. They agreed to invest. They've invested hundreds of billions of dollars in manufacturing capacity there. They've agreed to invest a further two hundred and seventy five billion dollars in Chinese manufacturing i…”

“The US military is well behind the Chinese People's Liberation Army in the implementation of artificial intelligence.”

“Back in the Oculus days, when we sold the company to Meta, one of the first things that happened was New York Stock Exchange emailed our contact info, email, and they asked if I would come and ring the bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Sounds pretty cool, r…”

“Who would have bet that eight years later, that Microsoft contract, that twenty-two billion dollar contract vehicle for the architecture of the Army's AR future would move over to Anduril, that we would be launching something like Eagle Eye”

“There's more AI in a John Deere tractor than there is in any system that the U.S. DOD is fielding.”

“I could give a whole talk on how the executives of Silicon Valley used the vocal minority of their rank and file as a smoke screen for their dependence on China, but that's a different talk for a different day.”

“The New York times posted a quote for me that I literally never said. And I told them like, Hey, you said that I said this, I never said that. They said, well, it's more or less what you said. We don't think the meeting is different.”

“And so for that reason, I think this is a little contrarian and not everyone agrees, but I think that the odds of a tactical nuclear weapon are very high. It will not be used on the United States. It will not be used on a NATO ally. It'll probably be a tactica…”

“And Jason, like many influential people, some of them even in this room, who have treated me like shit for years, suddenly changed their tune as soon as Andrew was on the upswing.”

“Jason and the people like him are the reason I was fired from my, from Oculus, my own company.”

“As you know, these things are very complex, but more or less, yes. I mean, there's a direct causal line from that to me being put on leave to me not being allowed to come back and then pushed out.”

“I would bet that upwards of 90% of Silicon Valley is very supportive of the military, and the perception that it's not is a symptom of another problem, which is that a very small group of radicals have managed to hijack the narrative and convince everyone that…”

“Probably, but I think most of the forward looking companies that would value that network effect, that one in particular see, see, see that in the next few years, probably all banks are going to be forced to adopt this to be competitive.”

“The biggest beneficiaries of vibe coding are going to be the hardware nerds like me. It's going to be the shape rotators not the word cells. Everyone's focused on, on, on, on how the word cells are going to be wiped out by AI, but for the shape rotators, it's …”

“So we were competing against Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and in the end, Andrel beat all of them.”

“China's hundreds of times ahead of it. Hundreds of times more capacity than us.”

“I think that that is a model that is going to be a big deal here in the United States, and I think it's also going to be a big deal in allied nations that similarly have a lot of their own existing industrial capacity. You know, you don't necessarily have to b…”

“We were competing against Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and in the end, Andrew beat all of them, which was really really gratifying to, you know, go from starting this company to going toe to toe with the guys who are legends of the fighter commun…”

“Building drones that are invisible to the human eye at the ranges that you're using them, it's not just like a hypothetical. Andrew did this in like, 2019, 20 20.”

“The technological path to VR displays being better than 99% of people's home viewing environments is a single digit year problem. It's not decades. It's within 10 years, certainly.”

“Honestly, my bet is that a smaller player will Figure it out first, just because there's so many different approaches and it's very hard as a large company to pick one approach that will out-compete every one of the myriad of other approaches that are all comi…”

“None of those things are going to be ready for quite some time, and the hardware that we have today, it's good for enthusiasts, but the hardware we have today is not going to be something that the majority of people want to use, certainly not as part of their …”

“I think Apple's gonna have a really big impact on that, because in addition to the hardware advancements that they've been making, I think they're going to make VR headsets cool simply by making sure that all the rich and famous people are wearing one.”

“There's actually a pretty clear path to VR that is visually indistinguishable from reality in the next five to seven years, certainly not more than 10.”

“People, people often seem to think that there's got to be this big breakthrough, like that we're going to be scanning lasers. I'm like, no, I think actually things are going to look pretty similar. You're going to have micro LED displays that are very high bri…”

“The Apple one, it, because so few people have them, it, I think it's going to take a year or two before people feel like the software side is really there. But the hardware is gonna impress people.”

“I think the big change you're going to see going forward, and this has really been because of Ukraine, the, I think the United States within our lifetimes is not going to get boots on the ground in a big way in major conflicts.”

“And I think actually our submarines are the longest range electric vehicles of any kind anywhere in the world.”

“We have a strong, actually, system for accountability, where it's always a person, as they say, on the loop. A person is always making that decision to kill. I don't think that we're going to get away from that anytime soon.”

“Now, I think it's believable that in the next 20 years, you could have the smallest nations in the world doing something like that, or trying.”

“For the most part, what you saw was what you got, and of course, there's a lot of interesting classified programs and a lot of interesting black programs, but there was nothing that was going to fundamentally alter the nature of the types of conflicts that wer…”

“Nearly two-thirds of major weapons system contracts in the United States have just one bidder.”

“China and Russia and our adversarial nations are not waiting and have, in many ways, been much more successful at adopting commercial technology into their military process.”

“My prediction in 2013 was that Bitcoin will go to about a 100,000 dollars and then stabilize. I'm sticking with it. I think it'll get there. I'm not sure that it in particular has the appropriate utility to reach a higher store of value.”

“There's more, better AI in John Deere tractors than there is in any US military vehicle.”

“There's better computer vision in the Snapchat app on your phone than any system that the US Department of Defense has deployed.”

“Taiwan does not have the tools today that they need to deter Chinese aggression.”

“They are extremely vulnerable to the point where we feel like we can't use them. The problem is aircraft carriers were not designed to be a peer-to-peer a peer-to-peer great powers tool for us to go toe-to-toe with the Soviets or the Chinese.”

“The final media platform, not just the next one, but the final one. I wasn't sure if it'd be the next one or if it was ready, but I knew that in the end, virtual reality was going to be the dominant media platform.”

“I think the most powerful uses of these types of Human and computer interfaces are going to be ones that do require many hours of training. You know, imagine if I could, let's say, wear a band that is detecting a lot of the, Electrical activity in my median ne…”

“Because for the first time in history, most innovative technology companies in America are largely not working with the United States military. That's truly unprecedented. There's never been a point in US history where that was the case.”

“The Chinese in particular have a variety of companies that are building Weaponized drones with, you know, really lethal systems on them. And those are being sold to other countries right now.”

“And when I looked at national security, it was a very interesting space where the only two unicorns in the last 30 years in defense, Palantir and SpaceX, were both founded by people who had just sold their company for billions of dollars.”

“That is the end goal. Like in the end, I want to build products that make all of my other products more valuable.”

“Like a typical defense contractor will spend between one and three percent of their revenue on IRAD. Whereas a modern tech company is going to be spending 20 to 50 to even 80% of their revenue on IRAD.”

“The reality is that most of our leadership and honestly, most of the company actually leans more to the left.”

“There's a guy running around now who says that he's a co-founder of Oculus, who was very much so not a co-founder.”