Anduril Founder Trae Stephens on Our Modern Defense System

I'm so glad you're here. Thank you so much for joining me.

Oh, so fun.

I've been trying to get you on this pod for a while now. I think because, um, well, when I— when we met, I was really impressed with who you are and when I learned about you and that we seemingly have different points of views on things. And I really have made a commitment this year to kind of index into other points of view. I mean, I think we're probably aligned on a lot of things, but I have a lot of questions for you. And, you know, I guess I'll start with, like, I, I'll go out on a limb and say maybe my— some of my Goop listeners haven't heard of you. So will you just kind of start with that? Who are you, Trae Stephens?

Yeah, um, I am I work in tech. I'm both a partner at Founders Fund, which is a venture capital firm, as well as—

The best one, right?

I mean, you said that.

It's the best one.

It is a very, very good venture capital firm. And also the co-founder of a defense technology company called Anduril. But maybe more centrally than that, I'm a Midwesterner who I've been married for 18 years. I have 2 2 small kids, grew up in a like lower middle-class household and have kind of been on a ride for the last now 42 years of my life. I could never have anticipated that I would've ended up where I've ended up today.

Amazing. So on your way to getting on this path, so you, will you tell me a little bit about when you were in high school, 9/11 happened, and from what I gather, that fundamentally opened something in you. Can you talk a little bit about what that was? I was in New York that day, um, and I actually— I walked out and at the end of the day and saw Building 7 come to the ground. And I think it fundamentally changed me as well, but I was already an adult with a job, so it didn't shift my, my path in terms of my profession. But As I understand, that was indelible for you.

Yeah, you know, growing up in rural Ohio, obviously I knew a lot of people that served in the military. It's kind of core to the culture of the town that I grew up in. My uncle was in the Air Force, some of my cousins had gone out of high school and gone into the Marine Corps. But there was really no point in my 18 years of life up until that day that I ever felt like there was anything resembling an existential threat to me or my safety or the safety of my family, safety of my loved ones. There was obviously the First Gulf War, but it never felt close to home. These things are happening so far away.

Yeah.

And I think on 9/11, there was this kind of moment where I realized all these things that we thought were guarantees in the American experiment don't feel super guaranteed anymore. And I decided at that time that I wanted to serve the country and go into national security. I wasn't sure if that meant like going into a military role or going into, you know, a political role, but I ended up deciding that I wanted to go the intelligence community route. And that's kind of what set me on my path to Washington, DC.

And how did you choose Georgetown?

Yeah.

Coming from Ohio? Like, was it because of the proximity to DC and you knew you wanted to somehow interact with government or be involved in government?

Well, I was mostly interested in finding, like, a university that was a good path to get into the intelligence community. Georgetown is the best of the schools for that specific thing.

So you go from Georgetown into the— into intelligence. Are you in the CIA?

I am not in the CIA. Yeah, I went into a counterterrorism office at one of the intelligence agencies.

Cool. That sounds cool.

It sounds much cooler than it actually is.

I was afraid you might say that.

Yeah, I mean—

Is it cumbersome? Is it inefficient? What is it about working in the government that makes it not Exciting.

It's not what I expected, and it's highly bureaucratic. So, you know, I grew up watching James Bond, watching, you know, The Bourne Identity, and you don't actually get James Bond when you show up. You get like Mr. Bean, right? Like, I had Windows 98 and a CRT monitor in 2006. I mean, no one threw me the keys to an Aston Martin. I didn't have Jarvis from Iron Man to talk to. Nice! I was just running what I called coffee break searches, where you open up a bunch of tabs in a very outdated version of Internet Explorer, and you run searches, and then you walk away. You go get coffee, and then when you come back 15 minutes later, hopefully, you have little downloaded CSV files, Excel spreadsheets, essentially. I think I just, I had expected that it was going to be a lot more advanced than it was. And the people are highly patriotic, they care about the mission, and that was really inspiring. But bureaucracy is brutal at that scale.

Is it still that way? Did you find that, do you find that now?

The bureaucracy is every bit the same as it used to be. You know, people matter a lot. Like individuals, individual people matter. They set culture. And I think, you know, there are ebbs and flows of how this goes. I'm hopeful that, you know, the people that are working in our national security apparatus feel supported by their leadership to take risks and do things that I certainly didn't feel empowered to do.

How does one do that? I mean, how do you bring— I ask this for myself too, like, how do you, How do you bring an intellectual cultural shift to an organization, like whether it's the government or, you know, I assume, or if it's like more of an incumbent company, like how does one make that shift culturally?

Well, I think there's like all sorts of micro things that you can do, but at the end of the day, like culture is set at the top. And as someone who's now in a leadership position, In multiple different places. I don't want to believe that's true because I want to believe that it's diffused throughout the organization, but people really do look to, how do our leaders behave? What characteristics are they bringing to bear? If the leadership is incredibly conservative and incentivizes risk reduction—

Risk-averse.

Yeah, risk-averse behaviors, that's what the whole organization is going to do. What I would have liked to have seen when I worked in the intelligence community was empowerment and promoting people on merit rather than tenure. I would have liked to have seen them say, I don't know if this is going to work, but I believe that we need to try. Right.

Like entrepreneurial spirit. Yeah.

If you think about the biggest moments of growth and change in the government over the course of our 250-year history as a nation, all of these moments had founders.

Right.

We had the Founding Fathers obviously who drafted the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. But even more recently, you look at getting through the Cold War without firing a shot with the Russians, building platforms that changed the course of humanity, like technologies. The internet was invented in DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, All of these things had individual people that were entrepreneurial, that were taking risky steps to do something that hadn't been done before. And the difference with that today is any major program, is there a single person that's responsible for it? Can you really shake a stick at an individual? Not really. We've kind of stripped the individual out of accountability.

Yeah, distributed the responsibility across.

That's right, yeah. One interesting way to think about this that's just aircraft-specific is that more time has passed between when the SR-71, the fastest airplane to ever fly, was initially flown to today than from the Wright Flyer to the SR-71.

Oh my God.

So we have this tendency to think of history as this like it's been It's been so long. It's actually like we made a lot of progress in not a lot of time. And then it wasn't our ability to build things that stagnated. It was bureaucracy that created that stagnation. And one of the former undersecretaries of the Army, this guy named Norm Augustine, who later was the CEO of Lockheed Martin, he said, in 2054, the entire United States defense budget will buy one airplane. Obviously, that's an extreme thing to say, but I think directionally what he was saying is like, look what we're doing. We've created this tremendous bureaucratic bloat that makes it really hard to get anything done, and we're not going to make that right-fire-to-SR-71 trajectory as quickly as we did if we continue down this path.

Yeah. Do you have hope that that is fundamentally fungible the way that we have set these things up? I think

it's possible. It just requires heroic leadership. I think a will to shake things up. And no matter how aggressive and entrepreneurial it seems like people are, large bureaucracies have a way of breaking the spirit. And so it will require kind of an all-of-culture effort And something that I've actually heard you talk about before that I agree with completely is I think some sort of mandatory civil service would be incredible for the American people. Yeah. And by that, I don't mean military service. I'm not saying everyone should go and serve in the Army or the Marine Corps or the Navy. What I'm saying is if you can go and work at City Hall for local government just for a couple years after graduation, I think it would be shaping for the lives and careers of the young people that are going into those roles, but it would also be revolutionary for the government because you would break these systems of entrenched bureaucracy and put young people in them that say, guys, this is crazy. Why are we doing things this way? This doesn't make any sense. I think that's politically very, very difficult to pull off in 2026.

Yeah, I do think that some kind of civil service where you're, you're, you're banding together, you're thinking about the, the country as a whole, especially because things are so divisive. I think if people, if people could engage in that way and, and contribute while also understanding that they're part of a greater thing, I think, I think it would be great. I mean, I was an exchange student in Spain, and at the time military service was required, and I thought that was insane. Like, I was 15 and I was like, what do you mean you have to? Like, my Spanish brother had to go to the army. My sisters had to go to the army. And they said that it was such an important part of their formation, right? Like, and that it gave them such a deep relationship with their country. I mean, I don't necessarily, I mean, having sons, like I would worry about, mandatory if we're going to be involved in wars and things like that.

But would you be concerned if your son was going and working at City Hall in LA?

No.

And I think ultimately that's what you're trying to do is you're trying to give that exposure to, look, we're all getting so tribal and so charged. If people had exposure to the way things worked, I think they would be able to take a step back and say, this isn't really about politics. It's about how ineffective our bureaucracies are, and we should be building these things to serve the American people.

Yeah, absolutely.

And not to serve our own tribal political interests because that actually doesn't solve any of the problems. It just makes it worse. I think this is the way you open this conversation by saying this is your year of trying to engage in more dialogue. And without that sort of open, respectful dialogue, I'm not sure we can fix any of these problems that we're seeing in the country. And that feels really important to me.

Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree with you more. It's like the— you know, I notice with my own husband too, who's the best person ever in the world, and he's so progressive. Like, he has such a sweet heart and he wants to like make sure everybody's looked after. And I think in this climate, you know, sometimes I'm like, can you— I'm like, can you just listen to this? Like, can you— what, you know, can you know, it is very triggering for people. Like, they've become— it's become so binary, I think. And so, and, and I, I am trying to, in my journey through being an American right now, I'm trying to, I don't know, I guess sort of Weave together lots of different points of view and also to get out of that place of righteousness and anger and fear. I mean, I'm pretty centrist and my husband thinks I'm a Republican. But I think it's— which I'm not a Republican. I mean, I don't feel anything right now, to be totally honest with you. I feel like I'm completely an independent. But I do think that, you know, we were just in Nashville over the weekend and we went to see bluegrass and there was this amazing girl playing on stage, young woman. And, you know, she was talking about, she obviously had like completely different points of view than my husband, you know? So I'm sitting there like, okay, like, is he gonna? And I just thought, no, but this is so beautiful to see somebody who clearly is such a good person. Coming from such a different place, isn't that more valuable to understand ultimately?

Yeah, we don't really gain anything from shutting people out and not hearing what they have to say. I think this is the greatest risk to a lot of what's happening in technology today. If you think about the centralization of AI, It's just self-reaffirming. It's like when you go and you ask questions to a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, it basically is just going to tell you whatever it sees you want to hear. Which one do you use? I switch between them based on strengths of what I'm specifically trying to do. But fundamentally, they're all just going to basically tell you what you want to hear. Right.

But can't you say, challenge me at every point, don't tell me what I want to hear?

Who does that?

My husband actually did that with his Claude.

Oh, well, that's impressive.

That's impressive for your husband to do that.

I think most people are just pretty happy with being told, you know what? You're right. That seems great. And

there goes the friction, and friction is where I think character is built.

100%. And I think that goes especially for things like relationships, where for millennia people were paired off intimately with others, in local communities. It's like people would meet at school or at church or at the Elks Club or whatever it is, and they would be matched based on, we have a longstanding friend relationship, or, I think they're funny, I think they're charming, we have mutual friends. Today, that's not really how it works, right? The online dating scene has created this sort of paralyzation around optionality.

Yeah.

They're meant to date in really high volumes, but not to actually connect in any way. And so if you look at the filters, like, I think it's like 10% of men get 90% of the right swipes, the positive matches.

Right.

And the bottom 50% of men get no matches at all. Well, what does that do for society where you've created this this kind of environment that's super self-selected in a mass optionality framework, you get loneliness, despair, and young men unemployed or underemployed in their parents' basement, never matching romantically with another person, going to LLMs, getting self-validation, having them tell them all the things they want to hear, becoming addicted to porn, gambling. And you can see these literal tech companies that are emerging around these exact ideas, and that's the powder keg for any civilization. I mean, assassination attempts against presidents— who are these people? They're young men under 40 that are unmarried, that don't have kids. I mean, we've created this as a society.

So what do we do about that in your view?

Well, I think this mandatory civil service is actually kind of a good idea. It's like you Guarantee employment, which is really important in this era of a reformation of what jobs look like with AI. I think being able to guarantee that. I think getting people back into local communities as a focus is really important. Reskilling, retraining people. The trades, I think, will be a big part of reskilling over the next 20 years. Yeah. We need people to be electricians, to be plumbers, to be all of those things, welders. This is the funniest thing to me about recent government policy is that under the Obama administration, they had this huge push around reskilling the workforce. And what did they do? Code academies. It's literally the first thing that gets replaced by AI.

What a bummer. Unbelievable. It was a good idea.

It was a good idea at the time. But man, they couldn't have chosen a worse profession to reskill people into.

Oh man. You said something earlier, you mentioned about the Cold War, and I was thinking about, you know, I was in 7th grade. I'll never forget moving to New York City to start 7th grade, like in the height of the Cold War, and being petrified at night that the Russians were gonna bomb us. So I grew up with a slightly different idea of safety, I think, because of that. And because I think it was also specific to being a New York City kid. And we are this huge country, we're protected by 2 oceans. So I understand, you know, and then I was there again, of course, as I said before, during 9/11. So I think I did always have a slightly, I wouldn't say, I didn't have that idea of American safety that a lot of people did just because of my specific New York City upbringing. But I think a lot of people still have that. sense, right, that we're safe because we're this big country between 2 oceans and wars historically haven't happened on this soil for a long time. Is that an erroneous— like, how do you feel about— I mean, especially because you're somebody who's helping to keep us safe, like, what are the things that keep us safe? And do we have the wrong idea, or, you know, are we lulled into a false sense of security? Yeah,

you know, these things end up being like super idiosyncratic based on what's happening at a time of maturity. Like even just the few years difference in age for us is like, you lived through the heart of Reagan rearmament, like the very tail end of the Cold War. I was 6 when the Berlin Wall fell.

Right.

And so like by the time I have active memories, you know, we're in like George H.W. Bush era, the like globalization push from H.W. into Clinton. So very, very different time, but not actually separated by very many years. I think what's happening today is there's this sort of speedrunning of geopolitics that has been happening over the last, call it, 6 or 7 years, where you had this transition out of counterinsurgency, non-state actor conflict. This is the War on Terror essentially, where we're not fighting governments really, we're really fighting— Terrorists. terrorist organizations that are decentralized. It's highly fragmented. They're doing insurgencies inside of urban environments. And transitioning from that into great power conflict where we're thinking about how do we deal with the threat from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, very, very different approach you have to take to build protections from great powers rather than— Right. counterinsurgency. And then along those lines, we had Ukraine, we had October 7th, we have the conflict with Iran, and the threat to Taiwan. Xi Jinping saying, we want to retake Taiwan, reunify by the end of 2027. So it's a very different geopolitical environment than the one that I was working in in the early 2000s in counterterrorism era. When we started Anduril, the defense tech company I started, in 2017, it was super unpopular. I think people were roughly just like, I don't know, we're sort of coming out of this whole war in the Middle East thing. It seems like everything is basically fine. There were employees at Google who were protesting Google working on a Department of Defense contract.

Right, I remember that.

And they ended up pulling out of that. So it was really an unpopular moment to be thinking about this. Just a few years later, it's like Ukraine flag and bio. Everyone has sort of changed over to this idea of, wow, the threat of authoritarianism globally and what that does to free democratic peoples is terrifying. And the whole momentum shifted almost overnight into a posture of we have to be prepared to draw hard lines around what we're willing to allow to happen.

So will you tell me a little bit about the founding story around Anduril in 2017?

Yeah. I had been thinking about this space obviously my whole career, and one of the realizations that I was coming to was we've relied on nuclear deterrence— and I'll explain what all this means— against great powers. for almost a century now, like 75 years, where you basically say, we don't believe that you're going to attack us because we have nuclear weapons and we will retaliate. And then you get into this idea of mutually assured destruction, that if we fire a nuclear weapon at a nuclear power, they're going to fire nuclear weapons at us.

War games.

Yeah. And before you know it, everything is kind of toast. And that basically worked, but you see a lot of this sort of fringe conflict where the belief is as long as it stays below a certain threshold, no one's going to launch a nuclear attack, and that's kind of the line that we're drawing. But we don't want any of these conflicts to happen. I mean, look at how many lives have been lost in Ukraine. I think it's over a million casualties now.

On the Russian side alone, I think.

Yeah, on the Russian side alone. I think it's really important to figure out how to use conventional deterrence rather than just nuclear deterrence. What I mean by conventional deterrence is, can you convince your adversary that the cost, both monetarily and in human lives, will be too high to even think about going into conflict? This is what Reagan did in the closing years of the Cold War, is he said, I'm going to build up And we're going to get to the point where the Russians are going to have to— the Soviets are going to have to look across the ocean and say, do we want to continue down this path?

Right.

Are we going to win? And ultimately they decided, no, we're not going to win. We can't keep up. And this sounds sort of uncomfortable. You know, it's like if you think about like the spectrum of possibilities on a quad chart where it's like, Feels good is good, feels bad is good, feels good is bad, feels bad is bad. This definitely is in the feels bad is good quadrant.

It's

like, I would prefer to not have to do this. It would be great if we could just say diplomacy works every time, we can convince people without any projection of power that they should do things the way we want them to do it, but it's just not how the world works.

No.

And we found this in the early days of World War II where Chamberlain in the United Kingdom was all about appeasement. Appeasement is not deterrence. You can't prevent people from doing bad things by really believing deep down inside that they shouldn't do bad things. And so the idea behind—

It's optimistic.

It's very optimistic. It's just not realistic.

Right.

And so the Anduril story from the beginning was, can we create a new era of conventional deterrence where we can build capabilities that are so inexpensive and so high capability that our adversaries will say, I don't want to get into this exchange.

We

don't have any advantages anymore.

Even though theoretically you profit from a conflict.

Sort of, although by the time you're in a conflict, All of the things that are going to be used in that conflict are in inventory. The way that Anduril is approaching this is we're not trying to build technology to solve problems today, we're trying to build inventories of capabilities that prevent the problems of tomorrow. Interesting. And so first off, I don't think wartime profiteering is ethical really in any way regardless, but I think The important thing is we need to build up a capability advantage over the next 100 years, regardless of what's happening right now.

How

are we going to prevent these things from happening?

Because I think deterrence is really the key.

Yeah, it's super important. We don't want conflict to happen. I have spent my entire career working in defense. I've never once met a general or an admiral that says, you know what I want to do today? I want to write letters to the parents of children who died in combat. Nobody wants to do that. This belief that we're hard charging, throwing people as meatbags into combat zones, it's just not true. Nobody wants to do that. And I think this is really kind of the motivation for building Anduril is let's make it really improbable that we'll do that.

And is Anduril, will you explain, are you making kind of next generation When you say they're less expensive, they're more efficient, hopefully they're never used and they stay in warehouses and nobody dies, but what do they do that's different than existing or earlier defense technology and weapons?

Yeah, there are probably 2 different categories that you can put them in. Oftentimes these things overlap. On the one hand, it's low cost, and this is what we would call attritable, which means if it is lost, it's not a huge deal.

I've never heard that word before.

It is a very defense-specific word. So imagine if you have an F-22 or an F-35, a multi-hundred-million-dollar fighter plane with human beings flying them. Are you going to send them into combat knowing that there's a high probability that they will be shot down? That's horrible from a loss of life perspective. It's also a tremendous financial Right. Burden that you're carrying by the loss of that asset. What if you sent in an asset that cost 1/100th of the cost and had no human operators? I'm not as concerned about what happens to that. That's what attritability is.

Okay.

And that's really what Anduril is focused on, is building low-cost systems that are a replacement for very high-cost human systems. And things that are autonomous that are more accurate and are able to execute their mission with a lot more precision than a human would be able to.

What would be an example of that? Like a drone?

Yeah, drones. Most people think of drones as aircraft, like small quadcopters or whatever. Drones are a lot of things. They're airplanes, they're ground vehicles, they're submarines. They're basically anything that is autonomously operated or remotely operated by a human. system robot. So yes, it includes that, but it also includes things like interceptors, for example. Oh yeah. Just in the Iran conflict alone, we fired thousands of interceptor missiles. The most common high-end interceptor is a Patriot missile, which was originally developed in the 1960s. These missiles cost millions of dollars, like variants between, call it $2.25 million up to about $8 million every time we fire one. In a conflict in which you're fighting MiG-29s, like a Russian fighter plane, shooting a couple—

I saw Top Gun.

Yeah, you saw Top Gun. You know what this is. Shooting a $3 million missile, that's okay. Yeah, that's what's required for that mission.

$3 million missile.

But right now what we're dealing with, with the conflict with Iran, are small drones that cost tens of thousands of dollars, not tens of millions of dollars. So every time one of those comes in, we're shooting at it with a multimillion-dollar missile. Currently? Currently.

Okay.

This is completely impractical. And so—

Are they efficacious, though?

They're amazing. They're truly amazing interceptor systems, highly accurate, but very expensive. And so part of the mission here is, can you build robots that use computer vision, machine intelligence to dramatically lower the cost of that intercept. So could you build an interceptor that could take out that category of threat for hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than millions of dollars?

And that's what you're building now?

That's like one of the kind of areas that we're building, yeah.

Does being a father, does this kind of like, I don't know, I think when we have children, we're so fundamentally changed. And How do you think about national security through that lens?

Well, I mean, going back to my own personal story, I want my kids to grow up without fearing for their personal safety. If you think about Maslow's triangle, let's take care of that basic human need. And I want to do it in the least aggressive and splashy way. You know, I have— my kids are 10 and 12, they're in 4th and 6th grade, and they're just getting to the age where their teachers and their peers are like sort of familiar with what it is that I'm doing. And, uh, that— the way that we present what we're doing is important to me because I want them to be able to be proud of what it is that we're doing without feeling like— Yeah. They're in this really weird kind of twilight zone where they're constantly having to defend with their peers what it is that their dad does for a living.

Of course.

Which is complicated, and I recognize that. Yes, of course, it's very complicated.

But I think we need to bring— that's the nature of everything. I mean, we as human beings are complicated. We have all kinds of gradations of light and dark and We're always sort of fighting with the good wolf and the bad wolf within us to a certain degree. And I think, again, that's this reductiveness in the culture around this is good, this is bad, I think is ultimately so not only harmful, but also I think against intelligence, that kind of lack of understanding that there are layers to things and complications to things. Yeah,

and the tension is important. You know, just a few weeks ago, the Pope was kind of pushing back against what was going on in Iran. And I think it was during his Easter homily where he said, God does not hear the prayers of those who are waging war. And as a Christian myself, I think hearing that, you know, there's a number of ways that you could respond, right? There's— you could respond by saying, wow, this guy is a kook. He's like rejecting millennia of just war theory, which is like the Augustinian tradition around engaging in war. You could look at it and say, wow, what am I doing? Like, the Pope himself is telling me that the thing that I'm doing is bad. Or you can approach it from a perspective of tension. It's like, what is the truth that the Pope is trying to get across?

Or you could approach it from a more mystical aspect of Christianity, like, as opposed to taking it literally. And this is just a random hypothesis that's occurring to me. You could think like, That, you know, if you were using it as a metaphor of like, you know, somebody who is like engaged in againstness all the time, you know, as opposed to like— but maybe he was referring to actual war, but it could have been something, you know, more mystical or metaphorical.

Totally. And I actually really like that framing. It's like if your approach is an approach of waging war where your heart is in a place where you're I want to go and conquer or destroy, there's probably not a great way to justify that morally.

Right.

If your heart is a heart at peace, you know, like there's a difference between peacemakers and peacekeepers, right? Like peacekeepers are saying, I'm just going to passively not create conflict, whereas peacemakers are saying sometimes you have to create conflict to to bring this to a long-standing peace. And so if you're approaching it with a heart of peace, I think it's very different at that mystical level than approaching it with a heart of war. But even the wisest beings in the universe, like Yoda himself, said, wars not make one great. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. And I think some of that is kind of what's coming out in the Pope's statements around saying, Look, if you're measuring your greatness in the size of your conquest, like, you're not going to be in a good place. But if you're measuring your success in the peace that you create in the long term, God is not sanctioning that conflict. It's not like he's saying, go and, you know, go and rip. I don't think that's what that's saying. I think what it is is like, are we creating the just conditions through which we are doing this in the most ethical way possible in order to create— Peace. Yeah.

Can I ask you about your faith? Because I was reading about it and I feel sort of, I don't know if envious is the right word, but I, and I feel like a spiritual person, but I don't have like necessarily a framework. I wasn't really raised with one. My dad is Jewish, my mom is very, you know, Episcopalian. And so there was a little, and they got married in the '60s and it was a little bit of a, it was very abnormal culturally for— A marriage like that to exist. And I felt like when I was growing up, everybody was sort of tiptoeing around the subject, if that makes sense. And so we were raised kind of with traditions, but not like a framework of religion. And my friends who have faith have this thing that I don't have, that I'm sort of like, I don't know, again, I don't think jealous is the right word, but I— I wanna understand it more. Is your faith, were you raised in that? Did you find it? I would just love to hear more about it and what it does for you.

Yeah, I was raised in it. So my grandfather was actually the pastor of my church growing up. So as he often joked, his family had a drug problem, which is that they were drugged to church every Sunday regardless of whether or not they wanted to be there. Um, but yeah, I, I kind of grew up going to church. Um, my mom and my dad, uh, are, you know, incredible, beautiful believers. Um, uh, really, I think, taught me to challenge and to, uh, press on areas where I had questions. So it didn't feel super simplistic. It felt a bit more robust, probably, given that.

Mm-hmm.

But then I went to Georgetown and—

Right, Jesuit.

You would think that the Jesuit Catholic thing would have been kind of an identifying characteristic of the academic experience, and it really wasn't. I think for the first time in my life, I was presented with a world that really said, you have to be able to explain why it is you believe what you believe. It's not enough to just say like, well, this is— I'm a Christian. That's just

Right.

There's nothing else to it.

Kind of a get-out-of-jail-free card in a way.

Totally. Yeah. And so really in college, I had to go through what's called apologetics, which is like defense of faith. Like, why is it that I believe this? Does it stand up to scrutiny, reason? And am I comfortable with the things that I thought that I believed my entire life? And there were some areas where I think I came through that experience and said, I don't know, maybe I would frame it differently than maybe the way that Sunday school would have framed it growing up.

Like what? What would be an example?

I think I'm a lot less convinced of literal interpretations of parts of the scripture. That's not to say that I don't believe in them, or I don't believe in the narrative that created the theological traditions and practices that we hold today. But it's not super important to me whether or not the Earth was created 10,000 years ago or 10 billion years ago. I just don't care. No part of that makes me feel more true to my faith. It just doesn't matter. So I think that was part of it. But then the other—

And also the metaphor, right? Doesn't the metaphor play into some of that? I mean, I would imagine When you read the Bible, there are parts that are inhumane and brutal and things that Jesus didn't say. And sometimes I think like even the Old Testament, when I studied that through a mystical lens, so much of that is about, is metaphor. And it's meant to be taken as like about ego or ego diminishment or like ways to become who you truly are as opposed to like what's literally in there.

Well, Well, I think that there are some parts that were kind of ambiguously metaphorical, and then there are other parts that were explicitly metaphorical.

Right.

You know, it's— I don't think it's, you know, random that Jesus approached almost all of his teachings in parable. Like, he wasn't telling historical stories. He was just saying, like, let me tell you a story about A man with 2 sons and a man that was sowing seed on pebbled ground. These are all metaphors, they're all parables. And I think that the human brain learns in this way from experience and story. And so I think just holding on to the need almost to be intellectually right about something— Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And just saying, look, the idea is my heart. That's the part that matters is like, where is my heart? What am I learning from this? How is it shaping my character? And I think that became really important to me. And my experience of that entering into the marketplace, going into government work, being in tech, working in venture capital, it's like there are so many people that are brilliant and super intellectual. Maybe they're trying desperately to get in touch emotionally with what's missing in their life.

Yeah.

And it's really common actually to find people that are like, I don't know what it is, but there's something missing. I've made it. I have all this monetary success. I have fame. I have influence and power. But something's missing. And there are all of these philosophers that have been talking about this for thousands of years— Pascal, C.S. Lewis said if we find that there's something missing, wouldn't that suggest that there's something more, there's something higher? Right. But then you have pop culture icons— mo money, mo problems. Kanye talks about this over and over. Eminem talks about this. It's like, I think as a rural kid from Ohio, I grew up looking to these exemplars in our society of what success looked like and thinking like, wow, they have their stuff together. They've really figured it out. And then you get to that level and it's like, man, there's so much emptiness. People that are just searching for meaning.

I mean, I imagine you must kind of rub shoulders with a lot of these guys, right, in your position. Who feel kind of, I don't know, like there's a vacancy or a lostness? Or like, do you, when you are with some of these guys who are super powerful and wealthy, do you feel like, you know, I don't know, imparting wisdom to them? Mm-hmm. Is it difficult to be in circles with people who, I don't know if I would, you know, are morally I would say maybe not aligned.

Well, I actually don't think there's that much moral misalignment. We can come back to that. But I think that coming into really Founders Fund in 2013, 2014, I had no expectation that I was going to show up and suddenly I'd be the Christian guy in tech. I think ultimately what happened is that people would ask questions and I would just actually answer them. I wasn't afraid to say, yeah, I'm a Christian and I actually believe this stuff and I've thought a lot about it and here's why I think that this is true. And over time, it just kind of snowballed where more— like, I would do a whole pitch meeting with a founder telling me about their company, and then afterwards they'd say, Can I— can we talk privately?

Oh, right.

And then they would say, I'm really struggling with this part of my life. I heard that you're a Christian. Can you pray for me? Can you, like, suggest what I might be able to read that could help with this? And ultimately, like, God is going to decide what he wants. And when the doors or the windows open, I'm just trying to walk through them and I've been really surprised at the response to that, the people that have reached out to ask for— I wouldn't say wisdom. I'm not sharing anything that's new. I'm just sharing my experience and the things that I've read or I've learned and— That resonate. That I think might resonate with them. And so it's been really cool to see. And I do think that there's like, sort of a new openness that didn't exist even 10 years ago. I don't know if you've watched the HBO show Silicon Valley, which is—

I haven't actually. Should I?

I mean, it's so cringey because it's so true. It's actually sort of painful to realize that the parody is just more or less reality. But there's an episode where they say, in Silicon Valley, you can do anything. You can microdose, you can be in a polycule. The only thing you can't do is be a Christian.

Oh my gosh.

Um, that was 10 years ago.

Yeah.

And I feel like today, you know, this experience of Eastern mysticism and all these things that the tech founders of the early 2000s went through, there's this, this really interesting resurgence in interest, interest for the classics, you know, people exploring traditional religion.

Right. Is that because we're like, it, it marries well with more right ideology, do you think? And that's kind of the prevailing ideology. Or do you think that it's like this— I don't know. I think that when I hear you talk about it, I feel like there's this very fundamental thing in being a human being that we don't have answers, that things can feel incredibly lonely, and that there are existential questions all the time. And We— I think that's why people used to love their kings and queens, because there's— if there's hierarchy or there's order that's endemic, we feel safe. So, I mean, do you think that from like a Christianity perspective, the reason that it's— that it's sort of more on the rise is because the whole country seems to be going more conservative?

I don't— I don't think it's political. I would say that it's probably a couple of things. The first is that I think people that have been seeking didn't find what they were looking for in whatever the prior paradigm was. And so I think that they're increasingly open to trying to explore things that maybe they hadn't considered. And I think that's aided in many ways by how imitative humans are.

Right.

We have a tendency to sort of parrot what people around us are doing. And once it became acceptable where there were enough people that were exploring it, it was now culturally okay to be out talking about it. And to your point about kings and queens, this is actually a great example from the Old Testament. I think it was the Book of Judges. There was a situation where the Jewish people did not have a king, but all of the neighboring kingdoms did. And they actually came back to the prophet And they said, give us a king. And he was like, why? Why do you want a king? And they said, well, all of the other civilizations around us, they all have kings. And he said, but this is what happens when you get a king. You get all these bad things. And they said, we don't care. We want a king.

Interesting.

And so he gave them a king, and then all of those bad things happened. And I think ultimately that's the memetic nature of our humanity. It's like we want what other people want, and that desire is imitated in both good ways— that's how we learn, by imitating our parents, by imitating our older siblings, our peers— but there's also a lot of negative parts to that as well, where we're imitating ego, we're imitating greed, we're imitating loneliness. Yeah. And, you know, social media, for example, is It's like the mass accelerator of imitation at societal scale, and we've seen the deleterious outcome of that sort of investment.

For sure. I think it's really important too to always question as you go, right? Like when you're— if you're engaging in a belief system, I mean, maybe I've just— this is like the person that I am. I've always pushed back and questioned things. Like, I think that's a really important part as well. Do you agree?

100%. Yeah, I think there's this kind of genius interview question that I always ask that's, what is something you believe to be true that you believe most of your peers disagree with you about?

That's a good dinner party question.

It is. And it's, it's actually really hard for most people to answer the question because if they really think about it, do you actually believe anything that you think would be upsetting to your peers?

Yeah, that is a really good question. I would have to think about that. What's your answer to that question?

I have so many. This is what I do for a living, right? This is what I think about all the time. Yeah, I think we want to constantly be fighting against this impulse to just be chasing whatever it is that's happening. I mean, Silicon Valley, People think of them as like— them, the tech industry— they think of the tech industry as this incredibly opinionated, sort of free-thinking group of people. It's really not. I mean, it's highly memetic. It's like they were super progressive and now there's this turn to traditional religion. And they went from being very against things like defense tech to being hyper for defense tech.

If they were early investors in Anduril.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, you get like these wild swings and it's just like—

What does that mean to you as somebody like a man of real faith when you see that pendulum swing around you?

I just, I just want to be true to my convictions.

Right.

And that means that I'm constantly wanting to ask myself, like, why is it that I believe this? Do I believe it because it's comfortable to believe it? Because the people that I care about their opinion of me believe that thing? Do I believe it because it's a desire for something that I want that's purely imitative of someone else's desire. I'll give you a great example. I'm going to criticize myself, but sort of in a way that I'm open to accepting that this is a valid criticism of myself. I love Aston Martins. Love them.

Why is that a criticism?

Why do I love Aston Martins?

Why?

I want to be James Bond. If I just saw a lineup of cars and the whole James Bond franchise never existed, I don't think I would've necessarily picked out It's only a

criticism depending on which James Bond you're talking

about. That's true, that's true. Some are better than others, and I'm very curious to see who the next one is going to be. But I think being able to be honest with yourself to say, I want that thing because someone that I admire, some model that I have, also wanted that thing. And like in the Aston Martin example, I'm comfortable with admitting that that's the case, even though it's sort of like, devalues my interest in some way because it's like I'm just borrowing someone else's desire. Um,

I don't think that— I don't think it devalues that. I mean, I think inspiration is such a beautiful quality. Like, if you see somebody and they inspire you, and if there's a way to personify that or make it tangible, like, I don't know, I do that all the time.

That's a good point. That's a good point. As long as you're choosing good models.

Yes.

You don't want to be inspired by bad models. But yeah, no, I think, I think that's right.

Um,

what inspires you?

You know, learning, curiosity. I'm so— I'm such a fundamentally curious person. I can go down rabbit holes for hours. I love, I love understanding other people and other points of view I love. And helping people inspires me a lot. Like I spend a lot of my time trying to understand what somebody needs. And I think it comes from a place of my own pain too, you know, like trying to— I think I'm very good at feeling people and seeing people and kind of helping. My inclination is always to like pour into that. it makes me feel very inspired and like that there are endless possibilities.

What is the source of that, would you say, for you? It's like, where, where does that interest in pouring into people come from?

I think it's a very fundamental part of me. And again, like, I think a lot, a lot of it comes from pain, certain things that I went through in my life. And I think being You know, there are sort of negative parts of that too. Like there's a hypervigilance that I have, you know, that comes from a life of a lot coming at me and certain traumas and things like that. And I think the bad side of that hypervigilance is that my nervous system is fucked up a lot of the time. And I think the upside is that I, I can feel people and I sort of love people. You know? What about you? Besides an Aston Martin, of course.

You know, I think you and I actually have this in common. I lost my dad when I was 30.

Wow.

He was 58.

Oh my gosh.

Which I think is the same as when you lost your dad. Yes.

I was 30 as well. Yeah. I'm sorry.

I lost him to Alzheimer's, which was pretty crazy to see someone you love kind of deteriorate and not become themselves.

And also someone you presumably had on a pedestal.

Yeah, yeah. And there were all these things that I feel like I would sort of make fun of him for, playfully, not Behind his back. And characteristics of him that I was like, man, I'm never gonna do that. I remember in high school, he would always make me change the oil in my car. And he was like, Trae, it's a life lesson. You have to learn how to do this because how else are you going to do it when you're an adult? And I was like, Dad, I'm gonna go to Jiffy Lube and pay someone else to change my oil. But then You know, the first year after he passed, I guess months after he passed, my wife was pregnant with our first son, and I was getting the nursery ready. And I was trying to hang a chandelier in the nursery, and I just couldn't do it. I couldn't figure out how to do it. I didn't know what I was doing. And I just remember laying on the floor and weeping, being like, man, I don't think I really appreciated him enough when he was around. Because right now, this is the time that I would call my dad and say, Dad, help me do this thing.

Mm-hmm.

And I just didn't. I realized, like, for the first time, like, I don't have my dad anymore. That's— I mean, it's crazy. As, like, a 30-year-old, I was supposed to have, like, decades more with him, to have grandchildren that I could bring to him. And, man, I think it just, like, it really changes your perspective on— the time that you do have with the— with your loved ones in particular.

Yeah,

like, I, I want to be around for my kids, for their kids, um, and I want to appreciate, like, the moments that come without just getting caught up in, like, uh, I'm on a wave and the wave is just, like, full speed ahead all the time. Um.

What do you think he would say now if he could see what you're up to?

Oh, he would just be all— he would be making fun of me constantly. He could not suffer—

Like making bomb jokes?

You know, he could not suffer a single moment of being happy for me in the most playful way. He'd be like, oh, wow, great job. You got straight A's. Get back to work, you loser. Yeah, I think he would have privately been very proud of me, and publicly he would have been very jokey about, about everything that's happened.

Wow. Okay, you made me cry.

Yeah, me too.

Um, I want to ask you one last question. This is, this is a question that my husband asks a lot because As I said, he's very progressive. And if you read the Gospels, it's very, I mean, Jesus is very unambiguous around like, you know, all the things, the meek shall inherit the earth and love thy neighbor as thyself. And in our climate right now, some of the rhetoric is— Very divisive. Not that, right? How, how do you hold those things at the same time genuinely? Like, as somebody who worked in a Trump administration, like, is that— how does that work?

Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. You read the Sermon on the Mount, it's very clear, um, about where we should be spending our time and effort and mindshare. And again, I kind of think about this on that quad chart that I was describing. There are a lot of things that feel good and are good. You think about things like healthcare or nonprofit work or working with at-risk communities, whatever. And there are a lot of things that we can all agree are in the is bad, feels bad category, like Child sex trafficking, murder, theft. And then you have the complicated diagonal, the is bad, feels good. And these things are sort of culturally in a moment where it could be things like gambling. I would argue that gambling is really— there are probably some demographics where it's not a huge issue, but really it's like robbing from the poor. And it's

also reinforcing what you were talking about earlier, this sort of basement culture.

Right, exactly. Pornography is another one of these where you could frame it as some sort of female empowerment thing, but the damage that it's doing to society is probably not even worth it if that were the argument you were making. Legalization of drugs you could probably put in that category. Obviously, you can make Right. Arguments around the edges of these things. I'm painting an overly broad picture intentionally. And then you have this other quadrant of is good, feels bad. And I am not in any way going to defend that national security, working in national security feels good. It doesn't. It doesn't feel good. Law enforcement doesn't feel good. I would call this quadrant duty and responsibility. On a personal level, the Gospels are checking the condition of our heart. Turn the other cheek. Absolutely. We should do those things. You know, how we respond to giving with our personal finances. You know, there are 3 different stories in the New Testament, in the Gospels, of Jesus telling people to give away some portion of their wealth. But he told all 3 of them— Tithing, right? But he told all 3 of them different amounts.

Oh, he did?

He told one, give away half. He told one, give away, I think, a third. He told another to give away all of their wealth. He was speaking to the condition of their heart. Where is your idol? And he was saying, look, your idol is your wealth. You need to turn from your idol. So I think these things are speaking to the condition of our hearts on a personal level. Societally, I think we have to respond to things differently, and I think those frameworks are governance. It's, you know, what is good governance? How do you care for society? How do you provide the conditions through which People have the freedom and the expression for those character, their heart condition. And unfortunately, due to the nature of the real world, there are bad actors, and we have to do what we can to keep those bad actors from taking whatever they want. And that's really where defense comes in. That's where law enforcement comes in.

Mm-hmm.

And there's an ethical way to do that. We don't need the accelerated intense rhetoric. That does not jive with me personally. But we do need to actually have laws and boundaries.

Yeah.

And as a resident of San Francisco, I can tell you the difference in a city that doesn't prosecute crime and a city that does prosecute crime. And people are going to reach a better place personally, fulfillment with abundance in a society that respects law. Um, and I'm simultaneously admitting that that doesn't always feel good.

Well, I'm afraid I've gone a bit over my time, so I thank you so much. This has been such an interesting conversation, very edifying, and I really appreciate you coming on.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.