Joe Lonsdale

And then it turned out the Xi Jinping guy is clearly a commie who's going to try to confront us. He's going to be a serious adversary. And that got scary. And then a bunch of my friends, three of the best guys from Palantir with Palmer Lucky, started the Android. And so we backed that early.

And it basically convinced me at the time, looking at all these things and looking at Android, we better get back involved in defense. So we said, okay, we're back involved in defense. What are we going to do? We need to get more of our best and brightest from the tech world, which I'm lucky to come from and have access to, to work on these problems. And we mapped out about 20 different areas.

And we decided to start EPRIS first and decided to build that because exactly the future of warfare seemed very clearly to be heading towards drone warfare. And it's just not sustainable to fire missiles at drones, right? You're spending a million dollars or $100,000 to shoot down something that costs a lot less than that. So you need a one-to-many effect.

You need to be able to shoot cones of energy. And the thing we realized...

really with the help of some really smart people like Beau and Nathan, is that it turns out that the chips in Silicon Valley had gotten to be so powerful and so fast that they can help you control power on very small time scales and get the power to hit the emitter and then fire way farther than anything anyone else was doing. And so the emitter was called gallium nitride.

It's just a super efficient way of shooting. Gallium nitride. Gallium nitride. It's a GAN, they call them. G-A-N is the element, you know, code. The gallium nitride, these are super efficient emitters and these exist in other places too. It's a big breakthrough that was really started to be used in the last kind of like 10, 15 years in a bunch of different contexts.

But it turns out if you use the AI chips, get the power to hit the gallium nitride, you're taking a bunch of power and you're kind of condensing it into like a 10,000th of a second or even less of a thing. And so you have this burst, it's a super fast burst and the burst is intense enough because it's so condensed that when it hits the drone, when it hits the electronics, it fries them.

you know, destroys them. And then there's all sorts of things you do to kind of tune the burst and figure out how to actually do it most efficiently and effectively to fry these things as well. And, you know, we're now, I'm not supposed to say quite how far away, but you're shooting things down from miles away. You're shooting miles away.

And it's not just, it's not just the, it's not just like the little tiny, like, you know, you know, DGI drones or whatever they're called. It's like, you know, these are the big things that Iran's making for Russia as well. They could take down quite a far distance away.

And what's really cool is you're not just doing it, so you're doing it for bases, you're doing it for forward attacks, but you can like put these things, you put smaller versions in the cones. So for example, you know, Anduril's Roadrunner, you've seen that, right? The thing that takes off and lands again.

You can put it in one of those missiles, and that one's not going to work as far because it's a smaller form factor, but that missile can get up and get pretty close to the bad guy drones, fire a bunch of them, and then come back and land. And so there's things like this that you do now, too.

Leonidas is the first version of the product that's being forward deployed with CENTCOM, and it's just going out actually in the next month, which is great. The tests have shown you could do about 100 drones at a time in certain contexts. 100 drones at a time? If they're together and flying together, and then the thing moves, so you fire, fire, fire. You know why it's called Epirus?

Epirus was the bow of Theseus. Theseus was a guy who started Athens in legend, right? And in legend, his bow had infinite arrows. And so that's the point here, is you're firing electronic power, so you effectively have infinite arrows. See, this thing can fire thousands of times. And each shot costs almost nothing.

And if they want to, they could shoot it down right now with any number of different types of missiles, I'm sure. But this, exactly. I mean, I think there's probably rules from the FAA about, there's always regulators about what you could do on shore and where you could do it and how you could do it. But eventually, you'll probably have things like Leonidas protecting stadiums, protecting airports.

That was another reason we started it, by the way. When we were building Palantir, One of the big focuses was stopping terror attacks and working and partnering to stop terror attacks with the United States intelligence community, which I think we're very helpful in doing. And so I have it on my mind, maybe it's kind of a sick thing, but what's a bad guy going to do?

You kind of have to put yourself in the bad guy's shoes. and figure it out. And one of the things a bad guy could do, which would be horrible, maybe I shouldn't talk about it too much, is you can attack a stadium. You can get lots of little drones. You can put little explosives and cameras on them. It'd be really scary. So I think our stadiums are going to need to be defended by things like this.

Yeah, it pisses me off. That's crazy. There's some really amazing judges I know who are, one of them actually was just involved in this, well, it doesn't matter, really great decision against the SEC last week. But they would go down to the border and they assign them to help because they're overloaded with the cases.

And some of the Biden administration judges were letting in people on the watch lists. And they're like, what are you doing? You can't let them in. He said, no, we're instructed to let in everyone. I'm still saying that, I don't even believe it, but this is what I'm told by multiple people. I think Chip Roy, the congressman, wrote about it as well. Isn't that crazy?

They're letting in these people into our country. What are they doing? What do you think they're doing? I think it's this weird ideology where they just, A, they're probably trying to spend a lot of money while bringing down inflation by bringing in more people, and B, it's just some weird open border ideology. I don't understand it. But the fact that you'd let people in, even on watch lists,

I guess they think it's not actually dangerous. I don't know. These people don't think in terms of like you and I, in terms of there's bad guys and there's good guys and we got to keep people safe and we have this like adversarial relationship with some other countries. It's almost like they're just like extremely naive people who live in a different type of world than we do.