Trae Stephens – Anduril’s AI Weapons, Palantir Myths, Antichrist and War with China | SRS #245
In this long‑form interview, Sean Ryan talks with Trae Stephens, co‑founder and executive chairman of Anduril and partner at Founders Fund, about a wide range of topics that intersect technology, society, and personal belief. Stephens critiques the American higher‑education model, arguing that the boom‑generation’s push for four‑year degrees has created massive student‑debt and ignored the demand for skilled‑trade jobs needed for re‑industrialization. He advocates for vocational pathways and company towns, citing examples like Bentonville, Arkansas. The conversation shifts to the social impact of AI‑driven companionship and online dating, where Stephens warns that AI girlfriends and algorithmic matching exacerbate loneliness, create echo chambers, and may foster a class of disaffected men. He shares his parenting philosophy, keeping his 10‑ and 12‑year‑old children off smartphones and using a road‑trip audiobook to discuss sexuality and media literacy. Stephens then details Anduril’s defense‑technology roadmap: the development of a soldier‑borne AR helmet (derived from the Pentagon’s IVAS program), the Collaborative Combat Aircraft “FURY” – an autonomous wing‑man system that augments manned fighters, and broader autonomous combat concepts that keep a human‑in‑the‑loop for lethal decisions. He reflects on lessons from the Ukraine war, such as GPS denial and fiber‑optic‑tethered drones, and stresses the need for communications‑independent navigation. Geopolitically, Stephens identifies China as the primary strategic risk, highlighting supply‑chain dependence on Chinese raw materials, the Belt‑and‑Road strategy, and China’s superior manufacturing capacity, especially in autonomous missile production. He argues the U.S. must rebuild its industrial base and reskill workers, leveraging AI and autonomy. He also mentions concerns about Russia, Iran, North Korea, and the broader BRICS threat. On the personal side, Stephens talks about his side venture “Soul,” a wearable e‑reader designed to combat short‑form media consumption, and his ongoing Christian Bible‑study groups in Silicon Valley. He discusses eschatological views, the Antichrist narrative, and warns against a global one‑world‑government push. The interview concludes with suggestions for future guests and a brief plug for the host’s psy‑ops audio series. Overall, the episode blends critique of education and culture, insights into emerging defense technologies, geopolitical analysis, and personal faith, illustrating Stephens’ worldview that combines entrepreneurial innovation, strategic foresight, and moral responsibility.
Chapters
Trae Stephens, welcome to the show, man.
Man, it's great to be here. Thanks for bringing me out.
I've been pumped about this. I love everything that's going on with Anduril. The Palmer episode was fascinating. What a, what a, like, cool dude to be around. And, uh, so yeah, we've been dying to get you in the studio, and, and, uh, it's been almost a year, I think, since Palmer been on, so I'd love to get some updates. And what I really want to do is life story on you, get into everything that childhood, how you got into tech, all that stuff. And then we'll end with everything that's going on at Anduril.
Sounds good. Let's do it.
Perfect. All right, everybody starts with an introduction here. Trae Stephens, co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril Industries, a defense tech powerhouse that's redefining national security with AI and autonomy. Partner at Founders Fund, you've backed game changers in government and defense tech since 2014. Co-founder of Soul, a wearable e-reader so you can read without distraction. Intern at the Afghan Embassy in D.C., an early Palantir employee who helped turn data into intel. Excuse me, intel. A husband, a father, a devout Christian. You're unapologetic about your faith in Silicon Valley. In fact, you preached to tech entrepreneurs in 2024 on How Jesus Would Approve of Building of Righteous AI Weapons. You are a sneakerhead and a prepper.
All those things.
Love the prepping. Love all of it. But, but yeah, I wanted to talk about, you know, in 2024, you preached to tech entrepreneurs on how Jesus would approve of righteous AI weapons. There's not a whole lot of Christians out there From what I know, but—
They're not. It is a pretty godless city with a pocket of really strong believers and community.
Do you get a lot of pushback for that or for being a Christian out there?
You know, when I first moved to San Francisco, that was kind of my expectation that there would be sort of hostility, but I haven't experienced that at all. I feel like really smart people, they generally think of Christians as being simple-minded. And so when you come at them and you're clearly not simple-minded, they're just curious. They're like, I don't get it. How could you be both smart and also have this kind of crazy faith that I don't take seriously? And so it's actually been a great opportunity to open doors for people just asking those questions and being able to go into apologetics, explain to them why, you know, I think that their lack of faith is just as much of a faith as mine. Like, you have to be kind of crazy to believe that all of this came from nothing over millions and millions of years. That requires as big, if not a bigger leap of faith than what I believe.
That's what I think, man. Have you ever heard of Lee Strobel?
Of course. Yeah. Case for Christ. Yeah, man. I read that back in high school, man.
I've had him on 3 times. And when he talks about, you know, his time as an atheist, he's like, man, you have to have— it's like more work to gain faith that there is nothing out there than there is to actually believe. And I love that guy.
Yeah, no, it's absolutely true. And I think that we're seeing a bit of a renaissance where people are coming back to this idea that, look, even if they have a hard time with the belief in the supernatural, they're starting to kind of grok this idea that a society unmoored from truth, foundational truth, is really dangerous and not a society that they want to live in. And that's kind of opened the door to being able to have these conversations with people about why We believe what we believe and why we believe that that is not only good for our souls, but also good for humanity.
So people are interested. They're asking questions out there.
Yeah, no, people are super interested. You know, even in the last just 18 to 24 months, the churches in San Francisco are seeing enormous growth, especially in Gen Z. I'm sure you've seen some of the stats that show that, you know, there's this resurgence of faith with Gen Z, particularly with men in Gen Z, which is really unusual, like looking at historical trends over the last 100 years. So it's been really cool.
Yeah, that's like, I mean, I feel like that's worldwide, not just San Francisco, definitely in the country. But I mean, why do you think that is? Why do you think so many people are tapping into the Bible and coming to Christ right now?
Well, I think there's been such a push really since like the '70s, but especially in just like the last 5 years around this kind of completely godless approach to life. And Some of those lies are being exposed. I think we're starting to see societal dysfunction, a breakdown in trust in institutions. You know, you have all of these different factors, and young people are in an interesting position to look at that and say, man, none of the things that I thought I was promised are real. Yeah. Like all of these ridiculous kind of wokey ideas around how the world is supposed to function, they don't actually work. Like society doesn't work like this. You can't just walk around not believing in anything. You have to believe in some sort of truth. And I think that's kind of reawakened people to this idea that there's something in the classics that are worth looking at. I don't know if you're a fan of the HBO show Silicon Valley, but there was this narrative that was picked up for the first 20 years of the 21st century around weird Eastern mysticism and Buddhism and stuff like that. And the CEO of Hooli, the big company in the HBO show, had a mystic, like a monk, that was his mentor and advisor. And that was really like the moment. That was like Burning Man, Silicon Valley style. And it was kind of a joke. It became a meme where people are like, wow, this is really silly. Like, all these things that we're being told are just really silly untruths. And you're starting to see people kind of turn from that kind of Eastern mysticism thing and look back at the Western classics, which Judeo-Christian ideas seem a lot more moored In some way.
Yeah, I think things just got so chaotic and the trust in pretty much any institution is at an all-time low right now. I think people are just looking for anything that makes sense and obviously truth, but because so many lies have been exposed at this point and conspiracies have come true and yeah, I think it's just crossed mass caused mass hysteria and confusion, and people are just looking for something to settle into that's solid, that's, you know, that is, that's, that's, that's, you know, truth. Yeah, it's cool to see, man. It's really cool to see.
Yeah, it's been great. You know, my wife Michelle, she, uh, has started this organization called Acts 17, um, which is the reference to, uh, the apostles speaking at, in Athens, um, to the intellectuals, to the philosophers, and arguing with them about apologetics for why the message that Jesus brought was the message. It was the truth. And it all started with my 40th birthday party. So I don't really like parties very much, but my wife was adamant that we should gather together a group of friends. And I thought, wow, the best way for me to avoid having a huge group of people hang around for my birthday is to do it at our house in New Mexico, because then no one will come. Obviously, if I just do it away from where anyone is. But we We planned this weekend where Friday we called the roast, Saturday was the toast, and Sunday was the Holy Ghost. And the roast was my best friends coming together and roasting me, including a former guest of yours here on the show, Sham Sankar. Nice. Did a roast of me. And then on Saturday, my favorite band, which is a '90s-era punk ska band called Goldfinger, they came and performed. Turns out you can just hire '90s-era punk ska bands. Nice. Which is pretty cool. And then Sunday, my partner at Founders Sun, Peter Thiel, gave a sermon. 250 people ended up coming to this crazy birthday party, most of them not believers. But the feedback that we got after Peter gave this sermon was incredible. No kidding. Where people were like, man, I've never heard a presentation of Christianity that challenged me intellectually in this way. And so we just kind of ran with it. And Acts 17 has done incredible events with people like Peter, with Francis Collins, who was early in the genetics movement. He was the director of the National Institutes of Health and starting to kind of expand. Over the last 4 weeks, Peter has done an Acts 17 series on the Antichrist, actually, in San Francisco.
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Did you go to that?
Yeah, I mean, my wife runs the organization.
Dude, how was it?
Really cool. I mean, Peter has been talking about these themes around the Antichrist for a long time. During COVID he and I did a small group Bible study exploring the concepts around the Antichrist, read a bunch of books, did discussion groups around it. And I think he's really hammered into his thoughts around what that means to the world today and how that should affect the way that we behave. And it was cool to see that hundreds of people showed up for 4 consecutive weeks, wading through a sea of protesters standing outside the building to come hear a Silicon Valley billionaire talk about faith and why he believes in the gospel.
Man, I think that's awesome. Did you— was that the Times? Or I can't remember the interview where they asked him if he thought he was the Antichrist.
Yeah, there's a famous clip with the interview with Ross Douthat where Ross said something like, do you believe that humanity should continue to exist? And he paused. for an uncomfortable amount of time and then eventually said yes. But yeah, I mean, he's been talking about this for a while. He did a series in Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson from the Hoover Institute talking about it. He did the interview with Ross Douthat. He did a lecture series at the University of Austin as well. So this is— it's on the top of his mind.
Man, I would love to have seen that. That would have been awesome. They didn't record it, right? It was private.
It was totally off the record. Yeah. So no shared notes, no video, nothing. That's pretty cool.
That's pretty cool. How many people went?
I mean, there were a few hundred people for 4 consecutive weeks with overflow, like people sitting in the lobby on, you know, watching a simulcast. So, wow, there were a lot. It was pretty crazy. Also, the majority were not Christians either. It's, you know, people in tech showing up curious to hear what he had to say. I think that's kind of the lesson here from an Acts 17 perspective is that you don't want to get ordained ministers to come in and You know, do a, you know, a Bible-thumping presentation of the gospel. You want to get people in the marketplace that aren't known for being Christians and then put them in a context where they're talking to people who wouldn't expect them to talk about their faith.
Yeah.
And I think there's a tremendous opportunity to leverage that, not only in tech, but in other leading industries, whether that's finance, media, entertainment, whatever.
That's interesting, you know, that it was that good of a turnout and that it sparked that much interest, especially from non-Christians.
Yeah.
That's very, very interesting. You know, back to, you know, your remarks that, you know, I can't remember exactly what it was, but Jesus, you know, basically would have no problems with people in defense tech building weapons to annihilate evil. I mean, where did you come up with that?
Well, I mean, there's a long thought process that gets to that point, but it actually all starts with just war theory going back to St. Augustine. I think it's really easy to forget in a 21st century context that the laws of engagement in warfare and the way that the West approaches combat are all rooted in just war tradition from the 5th, 6th centuries. And the idea is basically that pacifism is a really convenient belief to hold inside of you know, a hegemony with a monopoly on violence. It's like, it's very easy to be a pacifist when you have a state that is going to protect your right to be pacifist. Yep, yep. You can't really be a pacifist if you exist outside of a society like that, though. And so then the question is, how do you engage in a just way with protecting innocent life? And there are all sorts of principles around this. There's, you know, a principle of just cause, like, do we have the information that we need to make a decision, a righteous decision about whether or not we're going to go and engage in violent conflict. There's the principle of discrimination. If you're going to do it, are you going to do it in a way that is highly discriminate, that you're attacking the right players, the, you know, the combatants rather than innocent life? You have the principle of proportionality. Are you responding in turn to a conflict or are you going way overboard and increasing the stakes and the level of violence by your counter-response. Anyway, there's all of these principles that St. Augustine laid out thousands of years ago. And the way that that kind of applies to modern day is really interesting. So if you think about the way that conflict, violence has emerged over the course of human society, it started, we're hitting each other with rocks and things like that, the Cain and Abel story. And then we figured out bow and arrows and swords, and eventually we got into catapults and trebuchets. and, you know, the advent of gunpowder, you know, we're just climbing the curve of the amount of destruction a single individual is able to inflict on another party or another set of parties. That kept going up that curve, up and up and up until the atom bomb. And that was kind of the moment where, you know, humanity, we looked at ourselves in the mirror and we said, this is like, this can't go on. Like, we can't just become ever more destructive. And the Cold War was really the story of humanity figuring out how to de-escalate that level of violence. Mm-hmm. And so during the Cold War, you see things like precision-guided munitions. Like, you know, we can shoot AIM-9s through windows of buildings and take out combatants inside of buildings without destroying the building or, you know, harming innocents that are outside of that room. Everything is just about precision now. And so my view from the Anduril perspective is if I'm building technology, if I'm participating in the development of next-generation munitions, next-generation weapons, we should be doing that in a way that is more more edifying to the principles of just war theory? Can we make things that are more discriminate, that are more proportional, that are more precise, so that we're putting the humans, the sacred nature of human life, that we're removing those people from dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs and enabling us to engage in combat, engage in geopolitics, the real geopolitics, in a way that reduces the loss of innocent life?
Wow, you really went down the rabbit hole with this. Is this because you had— was this a tough decision for you to get into defense tech? I mean, was there an internal battle going on in your head on, all right, we're going to do this. These are weapons. These are, you know, we're going to be used in war. I mean, did you— was that a big decision for you?
Yeah. I mean, as a Christian, obviously I think about this stuff a lot. Like, you know, I don't, at the end of my life, I believe I'm going to be judged for my actions on earth. Uh-huh. And, you know, I don't want to be doing things that are acting in opposition to God's will. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I think like one of the misunderstandings that people outside of the industry have is they sort of believe that there are like this cadre of generals in the Pentagon that are sitting around like plotting how they can like enact violence on the world or something like that. Yeah. And, you know, you served, you know, the reality is, is that no one wants to write letters home to the parents of children lost in combat. Nobody wants to do that. What we want to do is we want to deter combat. And, you know, Reagan talked about this all the time, peace through strength, peace through strength, peace through strength. That's what we wanna do. We wanna make it so unthinkable to do things that we believe are wrong that people just won't do them. And, and that's ultimately the goal of defense tech. It's not to make it more like more violent, more terrible. The goal is to make it so lethal and so like so much of a disadvantage to our adversaries that they would just never even think.
Biggest deterrent of all.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, I think about this all the time.
Right on. Right on. I think about it too, but I love what you guys are doing and it protects our country. And I also believe in peace through strength. So yeah, but a couple things to get through here before we get into the interview. I got a couple gifts for you here. So everybody gets these Vigilance Elite gummy bears made in the USA, legal in all 50 states.
For now.
Yeah, for now, until RFK deems Bread dyes to be illegal, but they taste pretty fucking good.
You just have to put some of that blue drink inside of them and then they'll be protected forever.
Right on.
Thank you so much.
And then, this is the first time I've given one of these out. So, after interviewing so many tech innovators like yourself, it's made me want to get in the game really bad. And then, through a lot of the interviews I've done, I've interviewed a lot of high-profile people overseas, And da da da da da. So I've always been like very concerned about phone security.
One hundred percent.
So I went down a rabbit hole to find the real black phone, and I found this company called Glacier. Have you heard of it?
I have not. No.
Okay. So Glacier was started by a bunch of former Intel guys in the Intel service, and so that phone they it's a hardened iPhone. And it has— I mean, they do an overwatch of the phone. You know, no data leaks out. They have all-American VPNs. They have burner numbers. So you get an endless amount of burner numbers. You can get any burner number, any area code you want. And so, you know, if you're doing a political donation, booking a hotel, ordering a pizza, talking to somebody you never want to talk to again, you know, you can use one of those burner numbers and they will actually— they can even tell If they can't tell what it is, but if Pegasus were to wind up on it or something, they'll be able to know, hey, something's acting phony on your phone. So it's like the ultimate black phone. And it has a secure messenger service that actually tunnels your entire organization. And so you can't have a Signal debacle like we saw at the beginning of the administration. It would be impossible to accidentally text Sean the reporter and not Sean the podcaster. But yeah, I thought so. Anyways, we're starting a company with them and those are extremely expensive to get. So I said, why don't we do a consumer, a consumer-based— that's a little more application that has a lot of the same features, but maybe not, you know, quite that high speed that people could actually afford. So we're rolling that out towards the end of the year.
That's awesome. Thank you so much. I, I go through A lot of effort every time I travel internationally to have burner devices and things like that. So, this is something I think about a lot.
Dude. Thank you so much. Well, I'll teach you how to use it. Yes, thank you. I think those guys will like that. And then, all right, last thing before we get into it. So, I got a Patreon account. It's a subscription account and we've turned it into quite the community and I offer them the opportunity to ask every guest a question. So, this is from Tyler Wilson. Given your past work in the intelligence community and your time advising the Trump administration, what are the most significant misconceptions the public has about the relationship between Silicon Valley and the US government?
Yeah, no, that's good. There are a lot of misconceptions. I think You know, they're constantly changing because obviously the administrations change, the politically appointed officials change, and so you get this kind of like ebb and flow of how that interaction has been shaped. If you go back to the Obama administration, basically everyone in tech had supported Obama when he was elected president, but there was really no presence of tech people in the administration. It was kind of, he ended up going with government insiders and academics and things like that. And so the connectivity was really, really low. Obviously, going into the first Trump administration, Peter and Palmer were the only tech billionaires that were engaged in that administration from the very beginning. And then Biden came around, and again, the whole tech community jumped out in support of him. But there's been a bit of a shift now where people are starting to realize that all of this time and effort and money that they put into courting the Democratic establishment didn't really give them the connectivity to drive any of the change that they wanted to see. And so I think in this administration, you know, there's been a real effort by the administration to understand what it is that is going on in tech, whether that's, you know, with AI regulation or with crypto or with defense, and trying to figure out ways to pull them into that conversation. And so you get, you know, people like Michael Kratsios, who was Peter's chief of staff, who's running the Office of Science and Technology Policy. You have David Sacks working on AI and crypto, who is one of the original PayPal Mafia. You have Emil Michael, who is the COO of Uber, that's now the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. And so that tie is much stronger than it has been in, you know, modern history.
Yeah, it definitely seems that way.
Yeah. And so I think from a misconception perspective now, I think I'm always reminding defense tech founders that the government, they're not buying the best thing to solve the job. They're buying relationships and decades of service and things like that. And so you really have to understand how to talk with the government and how to sell to the government in order to actually get any of the technologies on the defense side that the warfighter needs to win. That's just a very different problem set than like engineering a good product. Yeah, there's more to it than that.
Yeah, it definitely seems like the pulse has changed in Silicon Valley, that's for damn sure. Especially, especially with these younger guys, these younger innovators. I mean,
yeah,
they are like very pro-administration right now.
Yeah, I think— I mean, there's, there's always time for that to shift, but there's a lot more optimism about that engagement than there has been historically.
It's good to see. It's good to see. But all right, let's move into your life story. Let's do it. So where'd you grow up?
I grew up in rural Ohio, north of Cincinnati, about 30 miles north of Cincinnati, kind of small town USA. It's called Lebanon, Ohio. You know, we had kind of the quintessential, you know, downtown area with, you know, a vintage soda fountain and the public library. And our claim to fame in town was the oldest inn in Ohio. It's called the Golden Lamb. For those like politicos out there watching the show, Rob Portman, the former congressman and later senator from the state of Ohio, owns the Golden Lamb. And so there's like this crazy connection there, just one town over from Middletown, which is where J.D. grew up. So some of the same stories that he talked about in Hillbilly Elegy about kind of the rise of industrialization in Ohio and then the collapse as a result of globalization. And I was kind of in high school as we were going through that massive shift where the factories were closing, people's parents were out of jobs, you know, strip malls were vacated. It was, it was an interesting childhood for sure.
What'd your parents do?
My dad was a mechanic and he built roller coasters, actually. So there's a big amusement park in Southwest Ohio called Kings Island. And from the day he graduated high school until the day he retired, he worked at Kings Island as an amusement park mechanic.
Right on. Yeah.
Right on. My mom was all sorts of things. She worked in accounting. She was a substitute teacher. She worked at the public library in Lebanon. And she was, you know, a mom and very active in my brother and I's life. So, yeah.
So very blue-collar family.
Super blue-collar family. Yeah.
Brothers and sisters?
I have a brother. He's 18 months older than me. He's a farmer and a real estate agent in Vermont, of all places. No kidding. So he and I are about as different as they can be.
Are you guys close?
Very recently, in the last, you know, 5 years or so, we've kind of rekindled our sibling love and we do a bunch of stuff together. He and I just went on a fishing trip up in Alaska in July, trying to spend more time hanging out with each other.
Good, good. What are you guys fishing for up there?
Well, that trip was a lot of salmon and trout. But Alaska is an incredible ecosystem. I mean, they have everything. I think in the 3 days that we were fishing, we caught chum salmon, king salmon, sockeye salmon, basically every species, and then nailed some huge rainbow trout as well, which is really fun. Nice.
I love fly fishing, man.
Oh, it's the best. For someone like me that lives and works every day in a city, there's something about going out And standing in rushing water and, you know, feeling the tension of the line in the, in the current, it's just— it totally disarms you and just—
Therapeutic.
Yeah, it's super, super therapeutic for me.
What were you into as a kid?
I mean, I fished a lot. My dad was an avid fisherman and hunter, and so kind of did all those outdoor stuff with my dad. We lived on, you know, a bunch of acreage in the middle of the woods in a log cabin that my dad built with it, literally with his bare hands by himself. And so kind of grew up, you know, playing in the creek and hanging out in the woods, building treehouses with my brother. Also, I played basketball, ran cross-country, played Ultimate Frisbee in high school. That's the only thing that I carried over to my college experience from the athletics perspective. And we were super active in our church. My grandfather was the pastor of our church growing up. So we were really active in the community there as well.
Right on. Right on. I mean, so were you a good student?
Yeah. I mean, I was a bit of a nerd, no doubt about it. You know, it was— public school was an interesting experience. You know, I didn't— as you said, I grew up in a blue-collar family. It's not like I was going to a fancy private school with a bunch of hard-charging aspirational people. At times that was sort of frustrating, 'cause you can kind of get stuck in the rut of feeling like everyone's just goofing off and you're just trying to get through school. Yeah. But yeah, I had a— graduated top of my class, got great test scores, and then got rejected everywhere that I applied to college. So this is the lesson of, Some of what JD talked about in Hillbilly Elegy.
How did you— I mean, how do you get into tech coming from, I mean, spending all your time outdoors, fishing, hunting, blue-collar home, public school? I mean, very— I mean, non-traditional tech path.
I was always interested in tech. My mom's brothers were really into IT growing up. And so, You know, my uncles hung out with my brother and I, and we built our first 486 computer together, like went to Micro Center Mall and picked up, you know, the motherboard and the—
Right on.
Yeah, we kind of built that. Always was really interested in it, but had no interest in going into tech. That was not a part of my plan. I actually thought I was going to be a journalist when I was in high school. Senior year comes around, September 11th happens, and I had this kind of watershed moment Where I, I was always patriotic, but I never thought of it as something that I wanted to do as a vocation. And everything just changed on that day. And I decided that I wanted to go into service for the country and, you know, went down the closest path I could find to working in intelligence. And, you know, saw a demo of Palantir in my first job in the intelligence community. Got into kind of a battle internally about using Palantir, got denied, and then jumped ship really early on and joined Palantir before we had any revenue or really any users. And the rest is history. And I've been in tech since.
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Absolutely. Yeah.
What kind of stuff were you doing?
I was working on counterterrorism, primarily on computational linguistics around Arabic name matching. So in college, I studied— I was a Middle Eastern studies major, so learned Arabic, studied abroad in Egypt. And the intersection of people who could write code and could speak Arabic was is, you know, very, very small.
I'll bet.
And so, um, you know, there's the, the most common name in the English language is John. Um, it's like 3% of English-speaking men are named John, first or middle name. Obviously, in Arabic, over 30% of men are Muhammad. Um, and it's spelled a million different ways. I mean, you could, in a transliterated sense, M-O-H-A-M-E-D, M-U-H-A-M-M-A-D. You know, you could imagine all the permutations of that. And when you're dealing with intelligence reporting, you know, the writer is effectively choosing how to spell these names, just transliterated. And someone had to go out and figure out how to merge these records to identify the individuals that were crossing all of the reporting that was being collected. And that was, that was my job. I was the guy that was going in and trying to make sure that this Mohammed Atta was the same as this Mohammed Atta was the same as this Mohammed Atta, so that when we pass those reports down to you guys in the field, in Afghanistan or Iraq, that you had reliable intelligence that you could act on when you're kicking down doors.
Interesting. How long did you— how long were you in the intelligence for?
I only lasted about 2 and a half years. It was, it was a short battle with bureaucracy and I was defeated.
Got to hell. Got to hell. And how did you How did Palantir pop onto your radar?
So I'm not sure, are you familiar with In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital firm?
I am now.
Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a really— it's kind of an under-the-radar thing, but, um, uh, under George Tenet, the CIA set up, um, this, this essentially a venture fund, um, called In-Q-Tel, and their job was to scout for technology that would be useful to the to the mission of the intelligence community. And now they serve a bunch of different customers. You know, they work with Department of Homeland Security, with the Pentagon. Like, they're kind of all over the place. But at the time, they had funded a work program for Palantir in a few federal intelligence agencies, and they were doing a roadshow, and they gave a demo that I was at. And I'm like, oh crap, this would literally save me like 20% of the time that I spend every week doing searches in these databases. Because basically the way that I would do it is there are 12 different databases. You go into each one of them, you write a really complex query, and then it would just be running in the background. It's like, all right, well, I'm going to go get a cup of coffee, go talk to a couple of people, and come back and hope that I have an exported CSV file that then I can merge into an Excel spreadsheet and run concatenate functions to try to narrow it down. But in Palantir, it was like bringing Google to that siloed intelligence infrastructure where you could just run the search once and it would just return everything instantly. And so in its simplest form, it would have saved me probably a day of work every week. But there was no requirement, as you're familiar. There was no requirement. There was no funding to build anything like this. And so it was really hard to get it brought into the door. So I switched over to the private sector and worked at Palantir instead.
So what— I mean, what— a lot of Palantirs, everybody's worried about it. Everybody's worried about, are they spying on us? Is this going to be the newest Patriot Act? Are they spying on us? What is it? Yeah,
I mean, the misconceptions around Palantir are crazy. I mean, they're not bringing any data. The data belongs to the customer. It's just architecture for data management. Like, you have to have some sort of software infrastructure that allows you to store data, search data, explore data. Data, analyze data, you know, structure investigations around that data that are shareable with other people. And these are things that in any normal world you would be like, yes, we want our warfighters to have the best tools that they can to do the job that we're asking them to do. And so I think a lot of the hysteria, like philosophically, is really troubling because basically what people are saying is that we, a democratic society, have elected representative government to make decisions about how we should, like, make decisions around the policies that we want to enact to protect our society in the national security context, but we don't want them to have the best tools to do it. We would rather them have crappy stuff that barely works. Yeah. That, you know, we have to hold together with duct tape. And so I think a lot of the concern about Palantir is really, you know, people expressing a concern around democracy. They're saying, I don't believe that the American people can make good decisions about policies, and therefore I don't want our federal, our civil servants to have the tools that they need to actually, you know, enable the policies that we as a democracy have decided that we want to go after. So it's kind of troubling.
Yeah. You know, it's, it's, I mean, it's every time I talk to any of my buddies that are still in special ops or in intelligence, I mean, They're all raving about Palantir and talking about how, you know, every— just everything from a javelin shot to a sniper shot to, I mean, targeting. And everybody's raving about Palantir. It's, it's, it's— that's in, that's using it in war. And, you know, then you have everybody else that's sitting there at home that, that they— all they do is complain about it. I mean, where does the— where does the misconception come from that they are spying on everything and everyone.
No, I mean, the media has a lot to do with it. You know, in the early days of Anduril, there was a kind of a profile that was written about the company, and the headline of the story was something like, you know, Anduril is enabling a surveillance panopticon or something like that. It's like, this is just not helpful. Like, that's not— yeah, it's not what we're doing any more than it was what Palantir is doing. You know, no one at Palantir is like, you know, sitting down at their desk and like looking up text messages that their girlfriend sent or something like that. It's just like, that's not what's happening at all. But I think we're like programmed for hysteria.
Yeah.
And, you know, I do think that this philosophical challenge is very real, that it's really expressing a distrust in democratic institutions. And that's a cultural problem that exists way beyond the scope of what Palantir is being asked to solve.
How long did you spend there?
I was there for six years.
Six years?
Yep.
Why did you why did you leave?
You know, most of the time that I was there, I was working with Sham Sankar, who you know, trying to figure out how to make the business development engine work. You know, the the kind of unfortunate reality is that I showed up and I was the the least talented person technically, but the least you know, awkward socially. And so what do you do? Well, I got put in charge of sales. And so, you know, Sham and I were kind of tasked with figuring this out. Really everything I know about this space, I learned from Dr. Karp, the CEO, and Sham as we were kind of trying to figure it out together. It took us years to like break through the ceiling of, you know, how do you sell really complicated software? to the US government. And at the end of that, call it 5.5-year period, I was feeling pretty burned out. But over the time that I had been there, I got to be friends with Peter Thiel, who is the founder of PayPal, the co-founder of Palantir. And Peter, just out of the blue, asked me if I would come join him at Founders Fund. So not having any interest in venture capital or frankly knowing anything about finance, I kind of jumped ship and joined Peter in San Francisco.
No kidding. You know, back to, back to, you know, is Palantir spying? Joe Lonsdale had a great quote yesterday. He was talking about, you know, if you saw how the government managed data, you would want us in there. And he said, you know, we're the ones watching the watchers. I thought that was, I thought that was pretty good because everybody's worried about the watchers. But
yeah, I mean, the reality is, is like the, the The idea behind Palantir was that there shouldn't be a trade-off between doing your job well and, like, protecting privacy and civil liberties. That's, like, the entire founding story of the company, is that for anyone with a brain that has an engineering background, you don't believe you have to make that choice. Yeah. That's a false choice. We can do both of these things. You know, there's all sorts of critiques that you can make that, you know, I would critique myself for. In that, in the role that I was in at Palantir as well, is like, maybe we didn't do a good enough job telling the story. Maybe we tried to be a little bit too secretive. Maybe we could have, like, been more out in, you know, showing people what it is that we were doing. Obviously, there's limitations to that working with the intelligence community. But, you know, if we, if we hadn't done it, it's not like it wouldn't have happened. It would have just been done by Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics or Booz Allen Hamilton or Deloitte. much less well and with less thought put into the protection of privacy and civil liberties. So, you know, a lot of this just comes down to storytelling, I think.
So you're at Palantir, you believe in it before you're even— before even working there. You know, back when you were in intelligence, you spent 6 years there and then you go into venture capital with Peter Thiel knowing nothing about finance or VC. I mean, what Was it Peter? Is that who you believed in? Why did you make that transition?
Yeah, you know, when Peter first asked me to do it, he asked if I could go and meet up with the leadership of the fund. And I remember sitting down with Lauren Gross, who's the COO of Founders Fund, and, you know, we're having breakfast together and she kind of looks at me and she's like, why are you interested in venture capital? And I'm like, oh no, you misunderstand. I'm not. I'm not interested in venture capital. I'm doing this because Peter asked me to. And I can't even imagine what the internal conversations were at Founders Fund coming out of this interview process, where people were like, wait a second, this guy doesn't even want to work here. Why are we interviewing someone that doesn't want a job? And so, you know, it was, it was kind of a weird, like, 9 months that I was talking to Founders Fund before 9 months? 9 months. And finally Peter was just like, no, we're doing this. And it's like, you know, he's the co-founder of the company I'm working at. It's like, I don't know, is this an opportunity or is it an order? Is it some combination of both? Am I being like, you know, fired from Palantir and being like rescued and brought over to Founders Fund? Still to this day, 12 years later, I'm not sure what the real story is. But yeah, it was a weird transition for sure.
Did you like venture capital?
Yeah, I mean, I love what I do. I feel very blessed to have this really cool job where I get to learn about everything. This is like the beauty of VC as a job is that we're just going and interacting with the most interesting, most passionate people in the world who wanna solve these really meaty problems. And the expectation isn't that I'm going to know everything there is to know about nuclear. Like you had Scott Nolan, my partner who's building General Matter. It's a nuclear fuels company. I don't know anything about nuclear fuels, but I get to learn from the founder of that company and get excited about the thing that they're excited about. And that's really what every day is. Every day is just like an experiment in curiosity.
So was that what you were doing? Were you looking for founders that you wanted to invest in?
Yeah, it's still a big part of my day-to-day. You know, we just have pitch meetings. My first year at Founders Fund, I did 500, just over 500 pitch meetings, which is a lot.
Wow.
You know, I've ratcheted that down a bit. I have a better sense for the types of things that are gonna be a good fit. But, you know, it's a big part of what everyone in this industry does is you're just meeting with really compelling people day in and day out.
What is it, I mean, when you're looking for a founder that you wanna invest in, What is it that does it for you? What is it you're looking for?
Well, you know, this is probably like the most common question that VCs are asked because I think people really wanna believe that there's a rubric, that there's like some sort of table and in the meeting I've just got the table out and I'm like checking off, like, do they have this trait? Do they have this trait? In reality, it doesn't really work like that. There's something like that's way more gut and intuition-based where, you know, within about 5 minutes of a pitch meeting, you're like, you can get pretty dialed to know, okay, this is one that we might take a shot at. Like, there's something really vibrant about this person. There's something that's super differentiated about this person. Peter wrote a book called Zero to One. In the book, he said that, you know, we're all drawn into mimesis. And so like, most normies are, they're just aping what everyone else is doing. And so they're, you know, they wanna be like the Uber for X or something like that. But the really generational transformative founders are the people who aren't tied into, you know, peer group validation, and they're gonna do weird stuff. And so if you think about the most successful founders of our generation, people like, you know, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, Like, these are like sort of weird people. Mm-hmm. And, you know, they're maybe somewhere on the autism spectrum, and that kind of acts as their superpower because they're not actually concerned about what other people think about them. And that ends up being a tremendous unlock. So we're really looking for people like that where you meet them and instantly you're like, okay, this person is not just trying to be like a cool kid from their business school class. There's something else to it.
Interesting. Interesting. What are some of the most successful founders that you've invested in? Who are they?
I mean, Founders Fund has an incredible track record. We were, you know, the first investor in Facebook, in SpaceX, in Airbnb, in Stripe, Anduril, Palantir. We've been kind of at the very beginning of most of the last 20 years of technology. Yeah. Which has been really cool to be along for the ride for.
I'll bet, man. There's been some awesome stuff that has come out of that.
Yeah. This is, I mean, the history of the PayPal Mafia is truly incredible. Like, if you think about this one company ended up kind of seeding either as investor or founder, most of the companies that we think of today as being kind of definitional of the tech success story in America. And it just all started with, you know, one group of people starting one company.
Yeah. So then you met Palmer.
Then I met Palmer.
At Founders Fund. Mm-hmm. How did that— how did you guys meet?
We were the first institutional investor in Oculus. So he had started this virtual reality company, ended up getting acquired by Meta for a couple billion dollars. And, you know, I think he was just on this path. that he just thought, you know, I'm gonna be the VR guy. Like, that's what I'm gonna do for the rest of my life. But I also knew just from hanging out with him that he was really interested in national security. In fact, when he was— right after Meta was acquired, he moved or got a house in Woodside, which is really close to Facebook's headquarters. And he drained his swimming pool, and he was building a ramjet in his swimming pool. in Woodside. And so he and I had talked about that a couple of times. And when I had this idea for Anduril, he was the first person I went to. And I just said, like, hear me out. What if we started a next-generation Defense Prime? And he was like, oh, man, I'm doing this VR thing. Like, I'm super passionate about this, but I don't know that I'm ever going to do anything other than VR. And that obviously only lasted until he got fired for his politics. And then he was, he was right back on the Andoril story with me.
Right on. Was he always, was he always out there? Board shorts, mismatched flip-flops?
Yeah.
Hawaiian shirt?
I would love to say that, like, he's, he's changed or, like, matured by the standards of society, but he's exactly the same person that he was. when, you know, he was a teenager starting Oculus. Money, success, fame has not changed him.
Good. I love that. I love that. All right, and real quick, I gotta hear some quirky Palmer stories. Let's hear it.
Yeah, no, I mean, he is, he is such an interesting person. Um, you know, I could, I could spend all day talking about this. Uh, in the early days of Anduril, he and I would travel to DC a lot together and You know, I would show up for a 2-day trip and I'd have my rolling suitcase and a backpack, and he would just be at the airport just standing there with no bags. Like, Palmer, we're gonna be there for 2 days, man. What's your plan? And he would just be like, oh, I've got it. It's in my cargo shorts. And he would have like his toothbrush and a stick of deodorant in one of his cargo pockets, and he'd have like 2 days worth of clothes in his other cargo pocket. And, you know, he's sitting in like the middle seat in economy at the back of the plane. It has taken us years to get him to the point where he's just like happy to do things in a way that keep him safe. It's been a real struggle. One of the other fun— he's a huge gearhead. He loves cars. He has a ton of cars. Most of them don't work, which is a constant thorn in his side. But, you know, I'm a huge Aston Martin fan. As I mentioned before, I love James Bond. So, you know, when I told him that I really wanted to get an Aston Martin, he's like, Trae, there are only 2 cars that you should buy: cars that run really well and American cars. And, you know, I think when he, when he first— when Oculus was first acquired, the first thing that he did is he went out and he bought a Honda Odyssey Elite minivan, which is like Who does that? He, he wasn't even married. He didn't have kids, but he went out and he bought a minivan. Um, so yeah, he's, he's always super, super entertaining.
He's an animated character. There's no doubt about that.
At his wedding, there was like this entire contingent of like Japanese anime people that like in the industry that were like Palmer like zealots. And they were, they showed up with like custom vinyl figurines of him and his wife. I mean, it was like, Holy shit. He's like this weird celebrity in the anime scene.
Oh man, that's hilarious.
Super, super fun. Uh, could not be, uh, a quirkier and yet smarter person. He's, he's just the perfect combination.
What kind of stuff is that guy innovating at just in his free time? Have you seen any of his crazy gizmos?
I mean, right now he is so focused on Soldier-Born Compute, like building the helmet, uh, I think it's consuming, like, all of his creative energy. It's, you know, it's the perfect thing for him. It's, you know, 7 years into Andoril, he finally gets to return to his roots and work on the thing, you know, giving our soldiers superpowers. And it has to just be the most fun for him of anything that we've done.
That is pretty cool, man. That is pretty cool. So I got a quote from you here that says— you said it— you said the— You said one day tech at your government desk was worse than what you had in your college dorm. What did you mean by that?
Well, yeah, you know, the day I showed up, I think I had expected that there was going to be some like James Bond moment. Like, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to have this supercomputer and someone's going to like throw me the keys to an Aston Martin. That's what I thought. Like a laser watch and things like that. And I sat down and I had Windows 98 and a CRT monitor. And I was in a cube with 2 other people who like didn't actually work. They just like talked about, you know, local sports teams most of the day. And so, you know, it was a crazy transition from believing that, you know, I was gonna walk into this incredible tech-forward environment. And it turns out that it, like, I would do these, you know, coffee break searches and stuff. Like, that wasn't at all what I expected.
Is that what inspired you to get into defense tech eventually?
Yeah, it's really the Palantir story. Like, you know, finding out that there was— it wasn't that there weren't people that cared about this, it was that they didn't have a seat at the table. You know, like, you know, the, the standard way for getting software tooling, um, historically, or at least post-Cold War, has been, you know, you put out An RFP, and all the defense primes, they all bid on it. They present white papers. They say how many heads it would take for them to write the code, and then they get hired on a cost-plus basis where they're reimbursed for the hourly labor with some 7% to 12% margin attached to the top of it. And then they get their special badges, and they walk in every day, and they sit at their desks, And, you know, they have no incentive to move fast because they get a margin on top of every hour that they work. And it would be crazy to believe that we're employing our best and brightest in these roles. Yeah. Especially like going into the 2000s, you know, our best and brightest, they can make a lot more money working at Google, bringing their dog to work, getting free food. Like, why are they gonna go sit in the concrete basement in the, you know, DC area? getting crapped on by bureaucrats and just like, you know, punch card checking in, checking out for work. And that just seemed like the whole incentive structure was broken. And so I didn't do it because I was like, man, I really want to be like a tech entrepreneur. I did it because I thought it was the right thing for the country.
That's cool to hear. That's cool to hear. What was the— I mean, what was the first product you guys wanted to develop?
At Anduril? Well, I mean, we have this pitch deck, like a very bad Google Slides deck that we used to recruit our first 12 hires. And one of the slides in that is like a list of things that we wanted to build. We didn't know which thing would be the first thing that we wanted to build, but we had this list. And it was kind of cool, like earlier this year, I opened up the slide deck in my Google Drive, and it turns out that we've built
No kidding?
Yeah, and it wasn't like intentional, like, okay, let's go back to the deck and do the next one. It was just kind of organically how it unfolded. So really the first approach that we made is like, you have to build something that is going to be pretty fast. Like, you have to be able to get it out into the field quickly. You don't want it to be a science project, and you want there to be a significant amount of political urgency. Around the thing that you're going to build so that you can drive a different kind of decision-making rather than business-as-usual procurement policy. And so for us, that meant that we landed on Sentry Tower, which is now deployed not only at military bases, but also on the southwest border in the United States with a border with Mexico. Obviously, in the first Trump administration, this was a big concern. Whether or not you have a border wall You need to know what's going on. Mm-hmm. And so we built this autonomous sentry tower that was, you know, completely off-grid, mobile, so you could pick it up and move it around. Had, you know, a solid-state metamaterial radar, an infrared camera, optical camera, communications network, and it would just persistently look around itself. and flag for the Customs and Border Patrol whenever something was crossing the border that they needed to take a look at. And then it would enable them to make a decision like, yes, that's something that we care about that we're going to go and take a look at. No, that's something that we expect to see. And over time, you train that model, and that has now grown into a massive program. We, we cover an enormous swath of the southwest border, and we're expanding constantly, delivering more towers. to get more and more coverage on the border. But the important thing about that initial work is that all the lessons that we learned from that, the AI computer vision system, the operating system for surfacing tracks to the users of the platform, ended up being the exact same backend that we used for every subsequent product. And so it was kind of the AI brain was the real product, and then And whether you made a sentry tower that flies, which was our next product, which was called Ghost, to, you know, interceptor missiles, to submarines, to autonomous fighter planes, they all have that same operating system on the backend that we call Lattice. And so we're still getting amortized research and development out of the very first thing that we started building 8 years ago.
Damn. Where did you guys come up with the list?
It was just, you know, sitting around with Palmer, me, Palmer, Matt, Brian, and Joe, just, you know, riffing on what we think would make sense for us to build, leveraging that combination of software and hardware. And, you know, I'm honestly kind of surprised that we ended up doing almost exactly what we said that we were going to do. That's
crazy. Do you, do you have that slide with you by chance? I'd love to put that up.
Yeah, yeah, I can, I can show you the
Perfect.
The slide. Yeah.
Perfect. So what did come next?
So we went— the next product after the Sentry Tower was Ghost, which is just a flying version of the tower. It's a modular payload drone that could do autonomous identification, detection, and tracking of targets. And so you can kind of think about it as like a helicopter with a pilot where you just tell it, hey, I want you to go and do this mission. Like, go and see if you can find things that look like this. And then it would just go and conduct a mission and then report back to you when it was seeing things that were interesting. And these are now deployed all over the place. They're deployed with US forces abroad. They're also deployed in Ukraine. So it's become, it's become kind of a core product line for us. And then we went from there into counter-drone and we started building interceptors for, you know, small drones. We have a product called Anvil. that is— the first version was not explosive. It would just fly like a bowling ball into a drone. And then we've continued to level that up into Roadrunner, which is kind of like a reusable interceptor, Barracuda, which is, you know, like a missile, more like an interceptor cruise missile, and kind of expanding that out over time. But the goal is really like all domain. Like you want to do, you know, work in space, work in air, work on ground, work on the surface of the sea. Subsea, and Palmer's new obsession is subterranean, which, you know, not a lot of details that are shareable on that front yet.
Damn. What are you guys doing in space?
Uh, actually, all of our space stuff is classified, so that's like the one domain that I can't really say much about.
All right, how about under the sea?
Yeah, so we, uh, we have a whole platform called Dive, um, so different sizes. Dive LD, which is the large diameter dive, is like the size of a pickup truck, basically. Again, same software, you send it out on missions, and it can do everything from pipeline inspection to, you know, in theory, you could do kinetics, you could, you know, drive it into the side of an enemy warship. We started a joint venture with the Australian Navy to build an extra large version of Dive that's called Dive XL, really clever name. And we just completed the delivery on a program of record for Australia where we'll build a bunch of these for them as they're kind of transitioning over to the AUKUS treaty where they're getting the delivery of nuclear submarines from the United States. So they obviously have real concerns about their— the sea space around the continent, and, and we're spinning up a bunch of work there with them on that as well. We also have a product called Seabed Sentry that is kind of a platform that you can drop into onto the floor of the ocean floor, and it does the same thing as a sentry tower would except undersea. And so we also have Copperhead, which is kind of like a modular payload delivery vehicle undersea, which is kind of a euphemism for a torpedo without saying torpedo. But yeah, we're, you know, we're always building new stuff in all these domains.
How— I mean, how fast— I mean, I'm sure it's different for every product, but I mean, how fast are you guys manufacturing and getting these to the end user?
Yeah, no, it's a good question. I mean, the— as far as like doing things at limited scale, like, you know, we can, we can ramp pretty quickly into the limited-rate production on all of these. I think, you know, the example of Sentry Tower, I mean, within a year of the company starting, we were rolling these things out in production. With Roadrunner, I think it was like 18 months from the beginning of that program until we were delivering units into the field. And this is for a reusable cruise missile. I mean, this is— Wow. A really complicated product. With Dive, it was, you know, roughly on that same timeline, call it 18 months. The challenge, of course, and the thing that we're focused on primarily as a business right now is production scaling. Like, how do you go from building hundreds of things or single-digit thousands of things to building tens of thousands of things? And I think the name of the game in this autonomous future for national security is what we would call attritable mass, which is like, you know, are we building $15 billion aircraft carriers, $300 million fighter planes in, you know, very small unit numbers, or are we building thousands or tens of thousands of much less expensive things that have comparable capabilities or better capabilities that if we lose them in combat, it's not the end of the world. Mm-hmm. Like, you can resupply that stuff really quickly. But our production capacity in the United States has totally atrophied. We just don't even have the capacity to do this anymore. And this is really what our focus is right now. We're building a huge factory campus in Ohio to enable us to ramp production capacity. And it's a new muscle for the business, kind of in the same way that, you know, Tesla went from building the Roadster to building, you know, the Gigafactory and starting to sell hundreds of thousands and millions of cars. Mm-hmm.
How big is the, is the manufacturing facility in Ohio going to be?
Yeah, I mean, long term, it will be around 5 million square feet. The first building is going to be just under 1 million square feet, and that will be up and running in the first, late first quarter of 2026. Man. So moving pretty fast.
Congratulations.
Thanks. Yeah. That's awesome. It's a sort of a weird homecoming for me. It's like I left Ohio and now I'm going back and, you know, working on this crazy factory. Got to bring my mom to the ribbon-cutting ceremony, which was pretty cool.
Dude, how— I mean, she's gotta be just so proud, you know, to see how far you've come, you know, in life and with whatever thing you're doing now. What's that feel like for you to be able to bring your mom to that facility?
Yeah, no, it's really cool. I mean, I was talking— I just spent some time with her this weekend back home, and I was talking to her about like what our family, like our family story has been in Ohio. And she was kind of going through the list of all of these factory jobs that my family had had. It was like my grandfather worked at— one of them worked at Frigidaire, one of them worked at NCR, National Cash Register. I had an uncle who worked at Ford. Another one of my grandfathers worked at General Motors. I have an aunt that works in eyeglass manufacturing. And I started kind of searching around when I was sitting there with my mom, and every single one of these factories is no longer there. Like, our industrial capacity that was kind of the heart of, you know, Ohio's economy for so long completely collapsed.
Yeah.
And that was the story of my family. I mean, that was it. And so more than just like coming back and being like, hey, Mom, look, I'm doing this cool thing and we're doing it in Ohio, it's really about like reinvigorating this family story. Like, we need to bring production back to America. And it's very cool to be part of bringing that back to, to my family story, uh, in addition to just doing it at a more macro level.
How are you guys— I mean, how is, how is Anduril finding the people that have the skills to do this? Because I mean, it's been so long since we were, you know, in, in, in production and manufacturing.
Yeah.
It's been— I mean, how long has it been? It's been at least 20 years.
Yeah. I mean, all this sort of started falling apart I guess when I was in high school, which was like 20 years ago, you know, all the steel production left Ohio. There were huge steel companies in Ohio. Armco was, I think, the biggest employer in Middletown where JD is from. And, you know, none of that is there anymore. My uncle worked at Mound Steel, which was another big steel producer in southwest Ohio. It's no longer there. So, you know, I think there's definitely still skilled labor around. There's a big Honda factory on the west side of Columbus. Intel was, you know, has been trying to open a chip fab on the east side of Columbus. You know, automotive OEMs, there's a lot of production that left Dayton that's coming back, glass manufacturing, things like that. And so there is still kind of the, you know, industrial blood in the water. But, you know, some of it will be, you know, reskilling people and bringing more of that back through education, through continuing education programs. You know, kind of the craziest thing to me about the way that we've been approaching this for the last decade is that like the government could not have gotten this more wrong. Like if you go back to Obama and you look at the like upskilling programs that they were doing, it was all software development. They were like running, you know, coding boot camps, teaching people how to write code. What's the first job that's gonna be replaced by AI? Coding. That's like, that is the thing that is going to be hit the hardest at like mid-tier, lower-tier, mid-tier software developers. Like, we should have been training people to build stuff. Yeah. Like, we have to reindustrialize. This is like absolutely critical for our country. And we just totally, you know, swing and a miss on that. Will
you guys be using a lot of humans for manufacturing, or will that eventually become an AI manufacturing facility?
Well, I mean, we're going to implement all sorts of technology in our production system. Like, there will be autonomy, there will be robotics. All of that is absolutely true. But we're also going to employ thousands of people that you need to be able to do that. If you're building up like a simple, you know, simple, I I use very loosely, but if you're going to set up like an assembly line for something that's going to be produced over and over again, certainly you could like build in entire steps of that that can be purely automated. And, you know, this is what companies like Tesla have done significantly better than the traditional automakers. Mm-hmm. But you also have a bunch of people involved, and you're constantly moving things around. You know, like the government isn't just going to have an insatiable demand for any single one of our products. We're going to have make the factory modular enough that we can be responsive to the needs of the warfighter. So sometimes the factory might be pumping out autonomous Fury fighter planes. At other times, it might be pumping out Roadrunners. At other times, it might be pumping out Barracudas. And so moving that around, reconfiguring the space so that we can meet those production demands— No kidding. There's gonna be a lot of people involved with that.
So it will be— so, so the production facility will be— it will do one product at a time.
Well, I mean, the idea is that it will be modular and flexible. And so, you know, we can reset things to, you know, rebuild these lines that enable us to scale. The Ukraine story is a great example here. So, you know, despite what most people think, the supply that the United States was giving to Ukraine was mostly Cold War-era technology— Javelins, Stingers, things like that. These things were built in like the '60s and the '70s. And when we when we realized that we were burning all of our inventory in that supply mission to Ukraine, it's not like the manufacturer of those weapon systems had active production facilities. Like they didn't exist. Like these companies were pulling people out of retirement to rebuild assembly lines to make these these weapon systems. And so this is what we're trying to avoid. We want to build the institutional knowledge to be able to. turn quickly to produce the things that have demand and to do it in a single space so that we're not overspecializing those spaces for single systems.
And a lot of you— so a lot of your guys' products are significantly cheaper than the stuff that we're using today, correct?
That's the goal. I mean, everything we build should at least be, you know, a few times less expensive than the alternative.
Would you say it's better than what we've been using?
Well, I mean, part of this is like a question around how exquisite you're building it. Like, are you building something that's like a Frankenstein that has to do everything well? I'm sure you've heard stories about the F-35, which is like when you're building a joint strike fighter that you're going out to every one of the services and you're saying, Marine Corps, what do you need? Air Force, what do you need? Navy, what do you need? And then you're building that aircraft that meets the needs of all those services? Well, you end up with a $300 million airplane. Norm Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin, sort of tongue-in-cheek said, I think it was 2050 was his marker, said in 2050, the entire defense budget will buy exactly one airplane. Like, that's basically the track that we're on. We're on this track that we're building these overly complicated things. Yeah, they're actually pretty awesome. Like, the capabilities of the F-35, Pretty, pretty awesome capabilities. The B-21, these are pretty awesome. The question is, could you build something that solves a problem for 10x lower cost that doesn't require a 30-year development program and, you know, thousands of man-hours to build a single unit? I think the answer to that is clearly yes. So in some cases, it'll be like, you know, over the horizon, totally new technology that changes In other cases, it's just a much lower-cost version of something that is a great capability that we just don't have the ability to even buy if we wanted to at scale.
Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, Trae, let's take a quick break. When we come back, I want to talk about the helmet and where you guys are at with that.
Great.
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16.22. Oh man. All right. That is really
good. Here we go. The key is going to be to not rush, because if I try to beat your time, it's not going to work. I have to go slow.
It's very beatable. All right, shooter ready?
Ready. All right, Trae, we're back from the break. Dude, nice shooting.
That was fun. It was good.
You don't shoot often, do you?
I mean, I shoot a fair amount. I have, I have a clay target, uh, range at my house in New Mexico. And I, you know, I grew up with a hunting dad, so we would, we would shoot in our backyard all the time.
Well, shooting clay pigeons doesn't have anything to do with pistol. You did pretty damn good. I was impressed.
Much appreciated. Nice work, man. That's fun.
But, um, yeah, so I know we were getting ready to talk about the helmet that you guys are making.
Yep.
But, um, but we had some— we went down some rabbit holes there on the break, so About getting into college was the first one.
Yep.
So you got rejected from, sounds like, just about everywhere you applied. I probably should have dug into that a little bit more. And then, and then you enlightened me on the break. So why did you, why did you get rejected? I mean, you're making good grades, obviously bored because you're ahead of your class, graduated top of the class. What is going on?
Yeah, I mean, at the time it was really mysterious. I genuinely had no idea what was going on. You know, I feel like growing up everyone just kind of told me, you can do whatever you want. You can go to school wherever you want. Like, you know, sky's the limit. Go and do whatever it is. And yeah, I got a bunch of skinny envelopes back in early April my senior year. And I was kind of like caught off guard by this reality. Now, the one school that I got into was UNC Chapel Hill, and my high school girlfriend was already committed to going to Elon, which is just right down the street from North Carolina. So I went over to her house that same day, and I'm like, man, I don't know what happened, but I got rejected everywhere. You know, I guess the upside of this is that we're gonna be going to school close to each other. with me being at UNC. And she was like, yeah, about that. And she broke up with me. Oh, man. The same day that I got rejected to all these colleges. And so I went home and I was just weeping on the couch. And my mom was like, well, where do you really want to go to school? I really want to go to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. She was like, all right, you're going to get on a plane, you're going to fly to Georgetown, and you're going to tell them that they're going to take you. And I was like, I don't think that's the way it works, Mom. But she was like, no, no, this is what you're going to do. And so, you know, a week later, I hopped on a plane and flew out to DC. And I, you know, posted up in front of the admissions department, demanded to see the dean of admissions. And as the story goes, it's like I camped out. I didn't really camp out. I was only there for about an hour before they were like, okay, we'll hear your case. And I went in and dumped out a backpack full of recommendation letters. And I remember specifically what the dean said. He said, you know, son, there are cracks in the meritocracy. And, you know, it's not as simple as, you know, you get good grades, you play varsity sports, you do whatever. It's like, there's more to it than that. And it turns out that a lot of this started coming out in research years after I graduated. There was a Princeton study from 2009 that basically showed that the most underrepresented demographic in college admissions is poor white kids. And it's like completely under the radar. No one would expect that this would be the thing, obviously. But, you know, there's an— it adds nothing to the demographic of the university. The university has to— there's no cost for them to pay in relationships with guidance counselors. They get nothing from, you know, bringing on another man or bringing on another white kid. And so it's the easiest possible rejection. All these top-tier universities, they have this stat of how many valedictorians they deny admissions to. It's just like a bunch of public school white kids that are getting denied. With the reframing of affirmative action programs at universities, you actually saw some of this come out in the data where for every Black and Hispanic kid that didn't get a spot in a class by pulling away the affirmative action programs, it wasn't the white community that was benefiting from that at all. I think it was like a tiny increase in acceptance rate for white kids. It was actually the Asian American population that realized like 80% of the growth under that demographic shift. Wow. And so, you know, I think this is kind of what J.D. talks about in Hillbilly Elegy as well. It's like, you know, the rural white communities were just decimated and they were left out of the American project.
Is that getting better now, or?
I actually don't think so. Like, I think that like lower, low socioeconomic status white communities in America are just like, it's not on the radar of most of the people that are, you know, thinking about trying to, you know, bring people out of poverty. And I think every other demographic, every other ethnic demographic in America has better admissions rates, for low socioeconomic status except white communities. It's like the one that just gets no, there's no credit that's given in the admissions process. Yeah. Now, to Georgetown's credit, they let me in, which is crazy that I pulled this stunt and ended up going to Georgetown. But, you know, I think like looking back on that, that was 2002, 23 years ago. It was almost like you could predict the rise of the populist movement in America. It was like you could have known in 2002 that something's not going right, that this is a core problem.
I mean, what do you think that has done to the country?
Well, I think it's led to these disenfranchised populations where I grew up in Ohio, as we've already talked about, it was just gutted. by globalization, by the deindustrialization of the Midwest. And, you know, these communities were totally left behind. And then they got caught up in the opioid epidemic and economic collapse. And that's ultimately like the community that drove the populism movement that led to Trump's election. And, you know, I think J.D. becoming the vice president is very much part of that story. It's like he's very aware of how this all happened.
I mean, thank you for sharing that. What I kind of meant is with poor white kids getting denied university who deserve to be there, I mean, now there's a lot of people that say that, is college even necessary at this point if you're not going into some type of a specialized occupation? A lot of people don't think it's worth it. I've had a lot of your types on here, tech innovators. Most of them, I think, did not go to school and started innovating right out of— I mean, I think that doesn't Founders Fund kind of encourage that?
Well, Peter has the Thiel Fellowship where he pays people to drop out of college.
Yeah, that's what I meant. So, I mean, you know, what do you think this has done to, you know, the workforce, to schools, to, you know, to people's sentiment about going to college? I mean, by starving poor white kids the opportunity of education.
Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of, you know, issues in society that are driven primarily around what was fundamentally a boomer problem. Like, the boomers basically convinced all of their children that that was the path. that like they needed to go to college. That was how you became successful. But there's not like a bunch of white-collar jobs that require, you know, liberal arts degrees.
Yeah.
From, you know, 4-year regional universities. And so I think that you had this— all these people taking on tremendous amount of student debt, and then they graduate and they realize that like whatever they're doing, they didn't need a college degree to do it. They would have been much better off just not taking the debt. But more importantly than that, going back to the industrialization challenge is that there are all of these skilled labor jobs that don't require college education, maybe vocational education, that are significantly better paying. They're more in need in our economy. It's a tremendous gap that we now have as we're trying to reindustrialize. And, you know, we as a country need to come together around this idea that there are multiple paths to career fulfillment. It doesn't all go through a 4-year university. And the 4-year university story didn't really even work anyway. It was just kind of a racket.
It's insanely expensive now. I mean, I was just talking to Eric, our COO, last night. His son's getting ready to go to school and he's looking at Vanderbilt up in Nashville. It's like $280,000 for a 4-year degree.
Yeah. I think that's pretty common.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it's crazy. And, you know, the old American dream of go and get the college education, get a good-paying job, get married young, buy a house, like, it's just, it doesn't happen. Like, that isn't the path. I think this is part of the reason why Gen Z has had this kind of weird political revival is that they've had this realization that, hey, like, I'm not even, I can't even be in the market to buy a house. Yeah. Like, it just doesn't work. The debt loads are tremendous. There's not enough housing. It's hypercompetitive. It's like we've kind of robbed an entire generation of what we used to think of as the American dream.
I mean, do you think that's true? Do you think that's 100% true? Or is that— or is that in and around bigger cities? You know, I mean, I bet if we go to where you grew up in Ohio or where I grew up in Missouri, there is plenty of affordable housing.
Oh, no, that's absolutely, absolutely true. Like in cities, that is, that is the problem. In large sections of America that are more rural or suburban, I think the American dream is still somewhat alive. But the problem is, is that the jobs are not— they're not remaining in those communities. Yeah. Now, there are some exceptions. There are high-growth, you know, suburban environments in America, you know, the surroundings of Nashville, are, you know, probably some of the best in the country. But, you know, I don't think, I don't think that applies to everywhere. You know, Ohio did not have that story for a very long time.
Yeah. Bentonville, Arkansas. That's another one that's going nuts.
Yeah. I mean, you know, I love company towns. I think company towns are amazing. I wish we had more of them. What Walmart has done in Bentonville is incredible. Yeah, I would love to see other major companies set up their headquarters in places that are not part of the current economic growth story in America and see if they can build old company towns as well. That'd be really cool.
Well, I mean, what do you think, back to the college stuff, I mean, where do you think this goes? Do you think that 4-year universities are kind of becoming obsolete?
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that they're— I wouldn't say they're obsolete, but they're highly specialized. And for some things that you might do, you kind of need to have the academic background to do it. Mm-hmm. Not everything, but for some things, that is a really important thing for people to do. The, like, traditional kind of liberal arts education, I think it's much harder to make the argument that, you know, people should be going into $300,000 of debt Yeah. To do that. We just need to have an aspirational path for vocations that don't require that. And, you know, I think it's really on millennials at this point as they're raising their own children to give— make sure they understand that those paths are cool. They're okay. Like, I want my kids, you know, when they're graduating high school, I don't want them to feel like they have to go to like an Ivy League school. I'm okay if they don't do that. I'm okay if they decide they want to be chefs or artists or whatever. Society is larger than just desk jobs, white-collar desk jobs.
We were kind of talking a little bit about the attack on the family dynamic here, and you had some pretty interesting stuff to say about that. I'd like you to To dive into that a little bit. We're talking about AI girlfriends, online dating, just all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, you know, in the early days of AI Companions, I started playing with all these apps just to get a sense for how they worked and, you know, what— how it felt as a user of the applications. And man, it was really dystopian. You go into these weird relationships and you can dress the avatars in lingerie and they'll never disagree with you. Pretty much anything you say, they're just going to echo back to you whatever it is that you want to hear. And they're very good at conversation. I mean, that's kind of the best use case for LLMs is that it can just keep a conversation going forever and ever and ever. And I think as a society, we've been moving away from kind of traditional pairing. The way that people have gotten into relationships historically, which kind of worked in local communities. It was like you met people at school or you met people at church or at the Elks Lodge or whatever it might have been. And by and large, people were able to pair off and build families. But today, the whole online dating trend has shifted that Massively, where you're no longer looking at local communities. It's more of like a local maxima, like within 30 minutes or 45 minutes of where I live, what are the options? And it's like paralysis by analysis. Like you know, people are like, oh, there's always more fish in the sea. I can always go on more dates. There's always you know more people out there that I need to meet before I settle down. And what what's ended up happening on these online dating apps is that. that a tiny percentage, I'll speak specifically about men, a tiny percentage of men get the majority, the vast majority even. 80-plus percent of matches go to a tiny percentage of generally over 6'2, very physically attractive. It's hard to convey personality traits in a way that would've mattered in local communities. And the sadder part about this is that the bottom 50% of men on dating apps get literally zero matches. No shit. Zero. There's no matching that's happening. And I think like ultimately what that leads to is that you have all these people that are, you know, unsatisfied in their jobs, unsatisfied in their, you know, their relational life, and they become the powder keg of civilization. You kind of create a class of incels that feels like they don't fit in. And I think we, as a technology community, have to take some ownership for this reality that we've given a whole chunk of society tools to enable these behaviors that lead to them being unhappy.
Yeah.
And I think AI companions are like that in a supercharged way, where now it's like, oh, I don't need to go through the stresses and difficulties of relationship. I can just, you know, have a companion that's always there that'll never say anything negative. It's just gonna be my own little world and they're gonna validate what I say. And sometimes the things that they validate end up being violent, whether it's suicide in the worst cases or school shootings or, you know, whatever else.
Man, how common is this?
I think it's going to become more and more common. You know, I think we've seen in recent years that there is a big shift towards singleness, that there's just not as many people that are getting married or they're getting married much later. And obviously when you get married much later, you have fewer kids. You know, there's like trickle-down impacts of this. But like, you know, from a societal political perspective, in 50 years, if these trends continue, like America is a totally different place.
Yeah. You know, it's— I mean, being a tech guy, And you have 2 kids yourself. Yeah. I mean, this is something that me and my wife go back and forth with all the time is, you know, we're trying— I mean, porn, you know, so, I mean, it's so easy to access now. Social media, all the predators and all the, you know, shit trying to lure kids in sexually through social media platforms. I mean, you know, my friend Brian Montgomery says it best. When you give your kid a phone, You're not giving your kid access to the world, you're giving the world access to your kid. And so, a discussion that happens at my house a lot is, are we going to homeschool our kids? Are we going to put them in a school somewhere? What are we going to do? And, what do we do about technology? Because, on one hand, I feel like me personally, you need to protect your kid from the world. And, the access that they're going to get with some of the technology. On the other hand, it's like, shit, I mean, you can't shelter them too much because then he's going to fall behind because the whole world is heading this way. It's already here. Right. And so, I'm curious, I don't know if you want to say the ages of your kids or not, but they're older than toddlers. And so, how do you handle that with your wife? I mean,
Yeah, I mean, we try to be really thoughtful about this. Our kids are 10 and 12. You know, our sort of policy on smartphone access and social media is that we're gonna hold out for as long as we possibly can. And, you know, there are great examples, like the babysitter that they have had for the last few years, she just left for college, and she literally just got social media, like, before she went to college, and she's 18 years old. It's like, it's possible to be cool and, you know, sociable and relational and smart and not subject yourself to that unnecessarily at too young of an age. Yeah. And so I think that's kind of our policy with our kids is to try to keep them in that zone for as long as we can.
So no smartphones?
No smartphones. I mean, we have— they don't even have an Apple Watch yet, which I think is— you're starting to see that kind of happen with kids in that range where their parents don't want them to have access to social media, but they want them to be reachable, textable, callable. We haven't even done that. Like, they haven't demonstrated that they need it. And you can see all sorts of sort of questionable behaviors that happen with kids when they, 8 years old, the way that they use their iPads even. It's like, wow, these things are super addictive. And you can see it in kids in a kind of a supercharged way. Yeah. Now, one of the things that we do that I love, I just did the second version of this, is when they turn 10, we go for a father-son road trip from San Francisco to Disneyland. And on the road trip, we listen to an audiobook about the birds and the bees. And we have a completely trapped environment where we're both looking forward at the road. He can't jump out of the car. And he has to sit through 7 hours of content. about peer pressure and social media and pornography and, you know, the sex education. We do the whole thing. And so I just did that 2 weekends ago with my youngest who just turned 10. And, you know, it starts the conversation and it's like, look, we're not gonna hide this. We wanna catch it early enough that you're not gonna learn all this stuff from your friends. I'd much rather you learn it from me. Yeah. Than you learn it from your friends. And we start trying to teach them through open dialogue about, You know, these important topics that have the potential to literally ruin your life.
Yeah. What book is that? What book do you—
We use, we use a program called Passport to Purity that is really good. I feel like it's out of print because it was really hard to get the accompanying journal, but there's probably something comparable out there today.
Passport to what?
Purity.
I'm getting that.
It's really good. It's— I mean, it's kind of corny at times, but it's, it's really good. I
mean, it's got to be, right? For kids.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, maybe it's not for kids, but—
No, no, it's very much for 10-year-old kids. That's like, that's the framing.
Yeah. So they don't have no, no tablet?
They have an iPad, but the iPad is for travel.
Okay.
When we're on an airplane or something like that, they don't have like day-to-day privileges to screens.
When do you think you'll give it to them?
Our oldest, the 12-year-old, is using a laptop for school now.
Yeah,
but he's not playing games or anything on his laptop. He's just using it for school. I mean, I don't know the exact answer to the question, but the, like, kind of dodging answer is I'm gonna hold out as long as possible.
Yeah. Are you getting any pushback yet?
A little bit, but I think they also understand and appreciate how it's not good. I mean, I'll even, you know, I'll hear my kids say things like, why are you using your phone? Like, they want me to put my phone away too. And, uh, and I— it's a good reminder, like, yeah, if I'm gonna have this rule that I believe that you shouldn't have it because it's bad for your brain, like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not immune to that same critique. It's probably bad for my brain too.
Man, that's interesting. You know, I mean, so So, you have like no fear that your kids will miss out on— that they'll be behind by not having a smartphone?
What are they going to miss out on? I can't think of anything good that comes out of this. I don't know.
You know what I mean? Just like iOS or Windows back in the day. I mean, just knowing how to use it.
Oh, no. I mean, they're tech native. I mean, the kids today, like, you hand them an iPad and they just intuitively know how to use it. It's like I don't have to teach them how to do it. They're using laptops at school. They know how to type. They can navigate a, you know, macOS. They're fine. They're gonna be fine. But like, I can't think of any positive things that they're missing out on by not having an iPhone in their pocket.
Yeah, yeah. I love hearing it. I love hearing that. But, and then—
It's tough if you don't have like the other parents at the school aren't on the same page. It can become Highly problematic social media.
Well, see, that's what I mean. Are you— do you have that experience? Are most of the parents like on the same—
They're on the same page at the school that my kids go to. Oh shit. Like, you know, kids are not walking around with their smartphones at 12.
That's like the first time I've heard that. It seems like everybody just is like, here you go, here's the babysitter, here's a phone, you know?
Yeah, we haven't had that problem yet, but you know, who knows. Good for you, man. Yeah.
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I'm super excited to announce a project that I've been working on. I partnered with Ironclad for their newest original series, Target Intelligence Psyop. It's an 8-part audio experience where we find out who is Enjoy this trailer and stay tuned to the end of the show to listen to the prologue. Buy it today at psyopshow.com. Link is in the show notes.
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influence. They're called psychological operations, psyops. What if it's all designed for you? Find out next on out who's really pulling the strings. I'm Sean Ryan, and this is Target Intelligence Psyop, an Ironclad original. In this 8-part audio experience, we uncover the ghosts in the machine.
Buy it today at psyopshow.com. I, I walked in in the middle of the conversation with you and Jeremy. You were talking about, you know, how, you know, historically how society's collapse. And it was— you're talking about 20-year-olds, and where were you going with that?
Yeah, basically every collapsed civilization in human history has been driven by underemployed, unhappy single men in their 20s. That's like— that is the powder keg of civilization. Um, and, you know, for centuries we actually did a pretty good job with this in America. Like, you know, there was, there was always work and there was you know, we were doing a pretty good job with pushing the family. But we're in this really weird window now where, you know, it is very common to see people disaffected, disengaged, unhappy in their 20s. Mm-hmm. And I think any, like, rise in political violence, activism, it's gonna be outta that community by and large. And so that doesn't mean that we need to police that community better. It means we need to find ways We need to engage them in things that they want to do, like employment-wise. And we need to figure out ways to get them into productive, personal human relationships with other people.
How do you think we do that?
I mean, you know, the really kind of cliché answer to this that sounds like a very me answer is go to church. Just got to go to church. Like, it's a great community. There are people that you have values alignment with. They're going to hold you accountable. I think the church as an institution has been a bulwark for this for thousands of years. And I don't think it's any different today than it was in 100 AD.
Man, I just, I think the messaging has to change. You know what I mean? It's just, it's time and time again, it seems like we're teaching people just to become victims. That's what I see. I mean, I kind of disagree with— I think you can buy a house early on. You just, you know, you can't buy a house in Nashville, you know what I mean?
Or San Francisco.
Yeah, or San Francisco. But I think there are plenty of places to buy a house, and remote working has become huge. You know, I know it's shrinking, uh, a little bit. I don't like remote work, but, uh, I'm not
clear that works. But yeah,
but, uh, but you know what I mean? And, and, and, but I think, I don't— I think like the messaging has to change. You have to empower people and tell them I mean, that's one of the reasons I do this show and bring people like you on here. It's like you grew up blue-collar family, very small town in Ohio, and now you're the co-founder of Anduril. And I think that's inspiring. I think that inspires a lot of people. And it's a very different messaging than what most people see. It's— Yeah, I think— Don't be ashamed of who you are. Totally. You were a slave owner, you're a victim of slavery. You know what I mean? And it's like, dude, what the fuck are we doing here? You have to empower these people, our people, Americans, and ingrain it into their head that this is the best country in the world. The American dream still is very achievable. And I'm a testament to that. You're a testament to that. A lot of the People that work here are a testament to that. I mean, a lot of the people on the show have been a testament to that. And, you know, but just like time and time again, it's like these— it's like they're being taught to lose.
Right. Well, there's a loss of personal agency where I feel like this isn't just true of America, it's true of Western civilization writ large, is that no one believes in the great man theory of history anymore. It's like almost cancelable to talk about it where like people matter, like individuals are driving things forward. And this is why Founders Fund is called Founders Fund, is we invest in people. I don't wanna hear a bunch of disconnected business ideas from, you know, nameless, faceless groups. I just, I want to meet the people. Yeah. And that's what we're investing in. And you can look at like Europe as the, you know, 10-year forward future of like wherever culture is going. And like you look at the bills in the EU, they're just buildings. There aren't even faces of people on the currency in the EU anymore. At least the American currency still has the faces of presidents on it. It's like we still believe that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and whoever— we believe that there were great men in history that made a difference. But I think that we're slipping perilously into this trap of victimhood and just believing that Like, you know, people can't actually make a difference, which, which is a lie.
Do you think we're destined to just go down the same path Europe went? Or do you— I mean, do you, do you think we might, uh, get on the right path here? I mean, Europe is a fucking disaster.
Europe is a disaster. I'm, I'm hopeful. Like, I feel like there's— there is a bit of an awakening where people are realizing that these lies that they've been told are not productive. But, you know, I think time will tell and it's going to be— it will be a tough road to get back on track. But it is a project worth, worth going down.
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's move back to— let's move back to enduro. I want to— I want to hear about the helmet. I talked to Palmer about it. He was all excited about it. I think he used this to actually launch the, the announcement. But where are you guys on the helmet?
Yeah, so, you know, the perfect project for Palmer is the intersection of defense and VR. And so for years, Palmer was telling the Pentagon, like, man, I just don't— I don't know that it's there, like, from a technology perspective. I don't know that I would trust the modern versions of augmented and virtual reality to put it on the heads of a soldier that's putting their lives at risk. But he got to the point within the last 24 months where he thought, man, we could really do this. Now, there's a program that already existed inside of the Pentagon called IVAS, which was a contract owned by Microsoft, actually. And we went out and we acquired the Microsoft division that was doing the IVAS program. And so we're now working on this kind of with the team that has been iterating on versions for a while. We've taken wildly different directions in a couple of places. We've partnered with Meta, which was kind of a coming home for Palmer, which was cool to see Zuck and Palmer kind of make up and be friends again. And also working with companies like Oakley. So it's been really cool to see that coming to fruition. Not a whole lot of publicly shareable stuff right now, but you're gonna see some of this start coming out in the coming months.
Cool. I mean, will we see it this year?
Um, I actually— I don't know the specific timing, but it will be in the next, the next few months. So
when do you think the product will be in soldiers'— on soldiers' heads?
Hmm, it's a good question. I don't know the specific answer to that from a timeline perspective.
Is it still going to everybody in the military? Not the way Palmer described it, is this is going on everyone's head.
That's the idea.
Not just special operations, which I fucking love because, I mean, special ops always gets all the cool toys and gear and stuff, and then everybody else is kind of like left behind, which I hate seeing. We were talking about equipment, you know what I mean, in, in my time in the SEAL Teams. And, you know, we— I had everything I needed to be a successful operator, but then I would see these conventional guys running around and they're I just felt so fucking bad.
Totally.
It's, it, it's funny, but it's not. I mean, these guys couldn't even fucking move, right? You know, and so I would take my kit, be like, here, take this, I'll go get a new one, you know. And, and so to see, you know, I know Vortex Optics is doing some cool stuff too, uh, with, with, with, um, with rifle scopes that actually went out to I think it was 82nd Airborne first before special ops, which I loved. And then, you know, so the helmet, you know, the question is, is it still going to be military-wide or is it—
Totally. Yeah, that's the plan. You know, the program is about soldier-borne compute. And so, you know, there might be variants of this that are relevant for different pockets, but like every soldier is going to, in modern warfare, every soldier is going to need compute. They're going to need some way of controlling assets that are autonomous. They're going to need some way of interacting with the battle space from a command and control perspective. They're going to want that heads-up display that gives them kind of superhuman vision into the environment they're operating in. And the idea is like, you can make this inexpensive enough that you can deploy it broadly across the entire service. So that is the idea.
How are you guys coming up with these ideas? I mean, who are you using as advisors on stuff like this?
I mean, it's always about the warfighter. Everything goes back to the guys at the end of the chain. Yeah. That are, that are doing, doing the jobs. And so we have an enormous percentage of, of Anduril employees have military intelligence service. And so we're going out and recruiting directly from the people that we're serving as customers. And we also are very tied into the communities that we're serving, you know, as, as contractors. And so we spend a lot of time in D.C., we spend a lot of time downrange with the users. And that all feeds back into our innovation engine internally.
Damn, that's awesome. What are you most excited about at Anduril?
I think FURY, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, kind of autonomous fighter planes, is a huge, you know, force multiplier for the military. So really excited about what we're doing there. Yeah, I guess all of the stuff that we're working on right now is really exciting. I think all the counter-air programs are incredibly important, and you can see in all of the things that have happened from a global conflict perspective over the last, you know, 5 years or something are very driven by shooting down autonomous assets as being like the most important thing that you can do. And we've been leaning in really heavily on that as well. So I think there are a lot of challenges. And, you know, the beauty of being Anduril is that our value add is speed. And so, you know, we want to be able to iterate quickly as we see the threats changing in the field.
Can you talk about the fighter plane a little bit, or is that all?
Yeah. So it's called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. So the idea is that you have a manned aircraft like an F-22 or an F-35, and the pilot can Basically command a bunch of smaller aircraft that fly around it to go and conduct different missions. So you extend sensor range, you extend shooter range, you basically can create a network around that manned aircraft to do the job at significantly lower cost and at no, no risk to human life. And this is a concept that has been batted around the Air Force for a long time. And, you know, we are— we're really excited to be partnering with them on delivering that. And that will be the first things that we build out of the Arsenal factory in Ohio as well as we'll start rolling the Fury aircraft off the line.
So the Fury aircraft will— it will be manned?
No, it's unmanned.
It's unmanned. Yep. But it'll have its own fleet of smaller—
It is an autonomous wingman to a manned aircraft.
Okay. So that would be those— these are the autonomous aircraft around the manned aircraft.
That's right.
How many will— how many— Like, how many aircraft are we talking? How big is the fleet?
I mean, you could, you could control a bunch of them. You could control, you know, dozens if that was the CONOP that they wanted to choose. I don't know if you've read the book or seen the movie Ender's Game, but it's basically the— it's a science fiction novel. And the idea is that there's this guy, Ender Wiggins, who is effectively controlling an entire, like, Alien battle from a bunker where he's just there and he's giving commands and the starfighters and stuff like that are all operating autonomously in the battle space. He's like a conductor of an orchestra. You can kind of think about that as where we think that the next generation of autonomy is going, is that you're going to have orchestra conductors and they'll be sending these things out on missions to go and do things rather than flying themselves directly into harm's way.
Man, that's interesting.
And you can imagine this in every domain. It's not just air, but you can imagine this on surface vessels, with submarines, with ground vehicles. We're moving in that direction with these detritable assets.
I mean, what does the future of warfare look like for you in your mind? I mean, how Are we going all autonomous? Are humans becoming obsolete? I ask all of you guys this.
Yeah. Well, no, I don't think humans are obsolete. Like, there's a human in the loop that is accountable for the decisions that are being made. You know, one of the things that comes up frequently when you start talking about autonomy is this idea of, like, full autonomy versus human-in-the-loop autonomy, which is, like, the idea that when you're about to make you know, a lethal decision. Like, there has to be a human that, like, hits the button that says do it. But that's all— that hasn't been the case for decades already. There's CIWS, the Close-In Weapon System, that is on naval vessels. It automatically engages with threats, aerial threats, to the naval surface vessels. There's no human directing the cannon as it's shooting at things and shooting them out of the sky. In fact, there can't be. Because the entire challenge that it's facing is moving at superhuman speeds to eliminate threats. But there should be a human that's accountable for these decisions. There's someone somewhere that you're going to be able to shake a stick at and say, this robot did something that it shouldn't have done. And it's your responsibility to know what mission you've set the robot off to do. And so I think that we're really moving in the direction of more autonomy that is engaging with fewer of these manned exquisite platforms that are very expensive. But there will be people that are making the decisions about how those missions are conducted, what strategies are utilized, and things like that.
How far out are you— how far out do you think we are from seeing the battlefield being 100% autonomous? Maybe there's decision makers, well, there will be decision makers somewhere else, but I mean, how long do you think it is before the entire battlefield is autonomous?
Yeah, I mean, so much of this is probably driven by geopolitical realities rather than hard technical realities. If we were to enter into a major global conflict with a near-peer foreign adversary, we would probably try to accelerate to that that much more quickly. Mm-hmm. But if we're kind of lulled into complacency by, you know, the false narrative of stability, global stability, then we're not going to feel much of an incentive to move in that direction anytime soon. So I think it just really depends. You know, the humanoid robotics, I think, are kind of the thing that comes up most when people think about the autonomous battlefield. It's like, are you going to have a bunch of Tesla Optimus robots running around with firearms shooting at each other? Like, I don't know, maybe on some timeline there could be something like that that's happening. But in the near term, I think it's like assisted like by humans operating in theater, in the field with robots in support.
Gotcha. I mean, do you have any fears about AI in the battle space?
Um, I mean, look, humans make a lot of bad decisions.
Yes, they do.
Like, you know, a super immature, you know, 18-year-old with, you know, 6 months of training is not necessarily going to make better decisions than a robot from an ethics perspective. And so, of course, like, you know, I want these things to be conducted in the most just way possible. But humans make this— they make bad decisions as well. Do I think that there's some imminent threat, like existential threat of, you know, AI destroying human civilization? No, I don't, I don't think that's, that's really on the near-term horizon.
What, what kind of lessons are you guys learning from Ukraine, Russia?
Yeah, you know, The airspace is probably the most interesting kind of foreshadowing of future conflict because the Russians are doing a really good job of denying GPS and messing with communications signals. So you've seen like crazy tactics like the use of fiber optic cables to drones. I don't know if you've seen any of this.
Yeah, I've heard of it.
Yeah, they're literally drones towing Like you know, a mile of fiber optic cable so that they're they're wired and they can't be interfered with by by the electronic warfare stuff. So there's a lot of back and forth, you know, trying to keep ahead of your opponent in in how you're approaching airspace. And I think that's like that will be a huge part of getting this right in the future is that we need we need our aircraft to have the ability to operate without. without comms connections. You can't rely on GPS. You can't rely on remote piloting. Like, you need to actually be able to dead reckon or navigate optically by, you know, landmarks on the ground and things like that. So that is a big challenge that everyone's working to figure out with high fidelity.
Do you guys have a lot of equipment going over there?
Yeah, I mean, we have stuff in country. kind of place for us to learn. And we obviously believe it's really important to supply equipment via the allies and partners that are doing work there with the Ukrainians.
Well, I mean, what does it feel like to see the equipment that you're building out there?
I mean, this is why we started the company. The purpose is to be relevant and to be active. And I think part of that is building the engine for the United States, which is, you know, the vast majority of our business is building that engine for them. But, you know, the U.S. government makes policy-level decisions about where we send our equipment to be helpful to our partners abroad. And we're really honored to be part of that.
What's your biggest concern in the world right now?
I mean, China is, is a huge risk, not only militarily but also economically. And I don't think we're taking that quite seriously enough. I think there's political— a political understanding of that, but it's not clear to me that there's like a level of seriousness to actually do the things that are required to reduce that risk across both of those two dimensions.
What do you think the things that are required to reduce that risk are?
Well, I mean, there's like the kind of impacts of Belt and Road where you have natural resources production, all of the things that are kind of economic drivers for growth in China that have been stripped out of the United States that we have to figure out some way to bring back. Do we actually have the ability to acquire the raw materials that are needed even for the things that we want to build without going through China-controlled assets? Right now, the answer is no. That's a real problem. Militarily, I think Xi has been very explicit that he intends to reunify China, and Taiwan has a ticking timeline of 2027. Now, is he going to move by 2027? I don't know. That depends on how seriously you take him at his word, but there's a lot of risk, particularly if you think about even just semiconductors. as, as, you know, an important part of our technology ecosystem. Like, if, you know, China takes Taiwan and shuts down our access to TSMC, like, that's, that's a huge problem for the, the U.S. economy. Yeah. Um, so we, we really need to, like, think through all of that. But, you know, the Chinese have— they have a different, uh, they have a different cultural history than we do. Uh, and when you try to frame their actions Through like a Western understanding of the world, you reach very different conclusions than they reach. Like you know, Western history is you know be open about your strength, and you know this is where the peace through strength came thing came from. It's like we're going to tell people what we have and why we're strong, and that will prevent them from doing crazy things. The you know the assassin's mace story in which is like a parable in China is you know hide your strength. strength, bide time, and then strike when you have an unfair advantage. And so, you know, it's to their advantage to go into these international dialogues and say like, oh no, we're weak. We don't— we're not competing. We don't have the ability to do that. Like, you know, we want to be part of these discussions. And we actually listen to them. And we're making decisions based on believing that. But their entire, like, you know, moral background in the way that they think about these things is very different than And even like the nursery rhymes that have led to creating Western culture. And so I think we have to start looking at them through the right lens in order to make the right strategic decisions to prepare for the worst.
Do you feel like that's starting to happen?
I feel like people are definitely taking it more seriously than they did even 5 years ago. You know, when we started Anduril in 2017, we were telling the story to investors, like, we believe that the future of national security is near-peer conflict. Like, this is about great powers. Like, we're moving out of counterterrorism. That was 8 years ago. Wow. And it was super weird to even be telling that story. And today I feel like, you know, no one's confused about this anymore. You know, obviously we could talk about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and how terrible that was. Um, but no one believes that nation-building and counterterrorism is like the thing that we should be focusing on anymore.
Yeah, yeah, definitely with you on that. I mean, you know, breakfast, we were talking about, you know, it doesn't sound like in your opinion we are ahead of China on much of anything.
I think we have, we're more innovative. Like the entrepreneurial energy that we have is a tremendous advantage. We're really good at software as a country. We're the best in the world at building these software capabilities. There are a lot of things that are really important that they have massive advantages on.
And— Like what?
Like production. You know, they have entire factories that do autonomous production of cruise missiles, for example. Like, I mean, they're just way ahead of us on that. Also, all the natural resources stuff, the Belt and Road strategy, you know, for better or worse, was a genius play by them to go and scoop up access to all of the raw materials. And we just watched them do it.
I know, man.
And, and I think that we put ourselves in this situation where Um, you know, we have to start making these crazy bets in order to figure out our way around the supply chain, uh, that, that has been created over the last 30 years by a very effective Chinese strategy.
Do you think that they will— I mean, do you think they will take Taiwan kinetically?
I mean, this is, this is the question with, with Xi. It's like he, he has said that he's going to reunify and, uh, There's a question about how important that is to his ability to continue ruling if he doesn't stick to his word, but I think we should take him seriously. He says he's going to do it. Of course, there's some edge case that Taiwan doesn't object and just lets it happen. That means that they won't go into a military conflict, but I would rate that as a pretty low probability. They've got a short timeline to get their stuff together to be able to credibly deter Chinese aggression. And so that's kind of the small window that we're in right now.
Yeah, I don't know. I went over there and interviewed the vice president. Very enlightening interview. I've been really worried about it too. And I think that that is what could trigger World War III. But man, I mean, when, when she started talking about the cognitive warfare and, you know, the, the, the psyops and the propaganda and stuff that's going on there and, and how divided it actually is, and when I learned more about, you know, the, the actual history of China-Taiwan, I mean, I don't know if they're going to have to take it kinetically. I mean, they're doing a phenomenal job. it dividing and just—
yeah,
that other party takes over, it's, it's done. Not a shot fired.
Yep. I mean, that is the optimal case for China, obviously, is that they can use soft power means to just do it kind of in the way that they did Hong Kong. Um, and I don't think there's a 0% probability that that's the way that it goes down. So,
yeah. Yeah, what— I mean, anything— what, what else about China is bothering you? How, how ahead are they on manufacturing and AI?
I mean, they have like 250 times the shipbuilding capacity that we have. I mean, that's like a huge problem, um, for, for us being able to keep up militarily. Um, we've gutted our entire industrial base in the United States in service of globalization for economic optimization, and China has been the primary beneficiary of that transition. I think that they're just so much better suited to addressing these long-running problems with making things in the real world than we are. One of the things that we often hear at Founders Fund, we often hear hardware builders talk about is that even if you had unlimited money and you were going to set up a factory in the United States to build something that is currently being built in China, you wouldn't even be able to operate the factory because, like, the skill that's required to make these things with high yields and quality, it's all in China. Like, we don't even have people in the United States that, like, know how to run these machines. And so we have to figure out some way to reskill. And I think autonomy in factory workers are gonna be a big part of this as well. And it's actually a great argument for why we should be leaning more into AI rather than less from a jobs perspective, because the alternative to leveraging modern software in order to reindustrialize is just continuing to outsource to foreign countries. And I don't think we have the time or the economic will to make a different decision on that fact. Like, we just need to push as hard as we can.
Are there any other countries that you're Are you concerned about other than China? I mean, are you concerned about Russia, India, BRICS?
You know, I think that there's, there's risks at some level with all of these other nations. Um, you know, I think Iran has continued to be a thorn in the side of, of Western powers. That, that's concerning. Uh, North Korea is like a rogue state, is, is pretty terrifying. Like, who knows what they're going to do if they feel truly desperate. You know, Russia continues to be a threat to, you know, all the countries on the east in Eastern Europe. That, that is a real concern. But we also have this kind of tendency to make our enemies appear 10 feet tall. And I think you saw in the early days of the war in Ukraine that, you know, their military readiness was pathetic. Their vehicles had dry rotted tires. It was like, you know, we think our bureaucracy is bad. I'm sure their bureaucracies are all really bad, too. They're not 10-foot giants, but we need to be prepared as if they are. And so I think there's a lot of global threats that we need to take seriously.
What kind of side ventures are you doing?
Well, the one that I've been most interested in is this project called Soul. So one of the kind of critiques of younger generations, my own generation, millennials included, is that because of short-form video content largely, we've lost the ability to consume long-form media. Like, we don't really read books anymore. And I feel like this is a huge problem. And so I got together with a few friends of mine and we started a consumer hardware company that builds a wearable e-reader. And so it's like, you know, a Kindle that you wear in a pair of sunglasses. And kind of the thesis is that we don't need do-everything devices to do everything. Like sometimes you want a single-purpose device that actually removes you from the do-everything context that's highly distracting. More minutes are read on the Kindle app on Apple devices than are read on Kindles.
No shit.
And so, you know, our perspective on this is like, what if we gave someone a better reading experience, a better technology, than what they previously had, would we see, you know, longer reading sessions, more frequent, more pages read? And it's been really cool to see that adoption take off over the last couple of years. So I'll send you an e-reader that you can check out.
Right on, man.
Yeah.
I would love that.
Let's see, other side quests. You know, I think that there are only so many things that a person can do before they stop being effective at any of them. them. So, I'm probably at just about capacity right now.
Well, I mean, I thought here that you hosted Bible studies in Silicon Valley where Christianity was once borderline illegal.
Yep.
Are you still doing that?
Yeah. Let's see, the most recent one that I did was in the spring. My wife and I and another couple have been doing these these kind of faith and work-oriented Bible studies where they're kind of like graduate classes. We assign a bunch of reading and then we get together and we do discussion. Originally that started off as like 10 people and then it was like 50 people. And this last session that we did in the spring was like over 100 people, like one weekend night every week. So it was a pretty wild experience. It's cool to see so many people, not all of them again, Christian, just showing up because they want to dive into theology. So yeah, that's been happening. Not doing one in the fall. I think I'm a little underwater at the moment.
Right on. I mean, you know, as a Christian, we've had a lot of guys on talking about end of the world type stuff. And a lot of people are kind of thinking that maybe we're possibly in end times.
Where are you on this?
Yeah, I mean, Peter's been doing this Antichrist lecture series. He and I have been talking about this for a long time. You know, I think that the Bible says that we will know neither the day nor the hour. It doesn't say that we won't know the month or the year. It just says the day or the hour. I think that, you know, you should always be alert. to these things. There's also kind of one of the stories that Jesus— the parables that Jesus tells the disciples is the vineyard owner. It's like your workers want to be actively working when the vineyard owner returns. And so if you sit and you get complacent, and you're not ready, then that's a tremendous cost to your own soul. And so I believe that we should We should be ready, and we should prepare as if those times are coming. I think a lot of the things that we're seeing happening globally are are really concerning with you know an increased push for a global rather than a national identity. Kind of the the push for one world order. You know the motto of the Antichrist in the Bible is peace and safety. People think of it as like this satanic kind of thing, but actually. It's a mirror of Christ. The Antichrist is a deceiver. And so, I think it looks more like a push for one world government than it does a destructive nation state or something like that. So, I think we just need to beware of anything that resembles these sort of fake unity movements that are driving people into complacency.
Well, Trae, we're wrapping up the interview. I got one more question for you.
Yep.
If you could see 3 people on the show, who would they be?
Oh man, um, I, I, I think that there's like very mission-driven companies that are out there that are still somewhat stealth. So, uh, I'm assuming that this is not part of the recorded portion, or—
Oh no, it is.
It is. Oh man. Well, then I have to be careful to not throw stealth founders out to the wolves here. Let's see. I think diving into the foundational model AI founders could be really interesting, like pulling in people who have perspectives on how AI is going to shape in the next 10 to 20 years.
Okay.
You have this kind of bifurcation of some of them believe that we're going into existential risks to humanity and other people that have a more optimistic version. I think playing on that tension could be really fun. Mike Gallagher, former congressman who ran point on the TikTok ban, he's at Palantir now, and he would be a really interesting person to chat with probably. So a former politician, but now Working in in tech, JD I think would be an awesome one.
Right on.
He'd be great to bring in.
We're trying.
Great.
We're trying.
Love to hear it.
We're trying. Well, Trey, I just really appreciate you coming here. I thought it was a fascinating interview. Hope to see you again, and best of luck in all your endeavors. Great.
Thanks, John.
I'm Sean Ryan, former Navy SEAL, CIA contractor, and host of The Sean Ryan Show. Much of my life has been dedicated to seeking truth and getting answers, no matter how uncomfortable the questions are that we have to ask. But in the age of the psyop, that search has never been more difficult. In September of 2022, the U.S. Army's 4th Psyop Group released a cryptic video on YouTube.
There is another very important phase of warfare. It has a Its target not the body but the mind of the enemy.
Between clips of troops assembling chess pieces and social unrest, phrases begin to appear on screen. They ask, have you ever wondered who's pulling the strings? These are the PsiWar soldiers. The series you're about to listen to is an attempt to answer that question and an even bigger one. The global power brokers that conduct psychological operations constantly evolve. Technology like AI has evened the playing field, and now in the era of social media and the democratization of information, all it takes to conduct a psyop is a smartphone.
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In each episode, We look at a different method of psychological operations, how they've evolved, and how they are being deployed. There's a quote that is attributed to a scientist named E.O.
Wilson that says, we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. This is a life raft in that sea of both information And misinformation. Psyops are all around us. They're conducted by corporations, governments, activist groups, intelligence agencies, foreign adversaries, and anyone who knows how to shape perception to get what they want. Tonight between 1 and 2. The series provides an in-depth look at how these psyops work, from conversations with whistleblowers, experts, historians, tech innovators, and more. We look at world events that are being shaped by highly constructed psychological operations specialists and look at the terrifying possibilities of where this could all be headed. Along the way, you'll You'll learn about everything from Russian troll farms, fake ghosts in the jungles of Vietnam, and mind control cults to the CIA's involvement in Hollywood.
Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?
The early history of psyops and psychological These experiments laid the foundation for what we see today in modern campaigns that seek to divide culture over polarizing issues. We look at where we are and how we got here, but ultimately, this series is a toolkit to help you understand how you're being manipulated and how to spot the signs of a psyop. Before the Army's viral psyop recruitment video ends, The words on screen inform viewers that war is evolving and all the world's a stage. This series is a peek behind the curtain. Welcome to The Psyop. Buy it today at psyopshow.com.
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