Transcript of #245 Trae Stephens - Inside Anduril’s AI Superweapons: Eagle Eye Helmet and Autonomous Tech

Trey Stevens. 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 Andural. The Palmer episode was fascinating. What a cool dude to be around. We've been dying to get you in the studio, and it's been almost a year, I think, since Palmer has been on, so I'd love to get some updates. What I really want to do is a life story on you, get into everything, childhood, how you got into tech, all that stuff, and then we'll end with everything that's going on in Andural.

Sounds good. Let's do it. Perfect.

All right. Everybody starts with an introduction here. Trey Stevens, co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril Industries, a defense tech powerhouse that's redefining national security with AI and autonomy. A partner at Founders Fund, you've backed game changers in government and defense tech since 2014, co-founder of Soul and wearable e-reader, so you can read without distraction, intern at the Afghan Embassy DC, 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 preach to tech entrepreneurs in 2024 on how Jesus would approve a building of righteous AI weapons. You are a sneakerhead and a prepper.

All those things.

Love the prepping. Love all of it. But yeah, I wanted to talk about in 2024, you preach 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.

There are not. It is a pretty godless city with a pocket of really strong believers in community.

Do you get a lot of pushback for that or for being a Christian out there?

When I first moved to San Francisco, that was my expectation that it would be hostility. But I haven't experienced that at all. I feel like really smart people, they generally think of Christians as being simple-minded. 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 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 I think that their lack of faith is just as much of a faith as mine. You have to be 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 three times, and when he talks about his time as an atheist, he's like, Man, you have to have... It's like more more work to gain faith that there is nothing out there than there is to actually believe. I love that guy.

Yeah, no, it's absolutely true. 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 grock this idea that a society unmoored from foundational truth is really dangerous and not a society that they want to live in. And that's 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, I know. People are super interested. 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 there's this resurgence of faith with Gen Z, particularly with men in Gen Z, which is really unusual, looking at historical trends over the last 100 years. So it's been really cool to see.

Yeah, I feel like that's worldwide, not just San Francisco, definitely in the country. But 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 the '70s, but especially in just the last five years, around this 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 have all of these different factors. And young people 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. All of these ridiculous, wokey ideas around how the world is supposed to function, they don't actually work. Society doesn't work like this. You can't just walk around not believing in anything. You have to believe in some truth. And I think that's 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 The HBO show Silicon Valley, but there's 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, a monk that was his mentor and advisor.

And that was really the moment. That was like Burning Man Silicon Valley style. And it was a joke. It became a meme where people were like, wow, this is really silly. All these things that we're being told are just really silly untruths. And you're starting to see people turn from that Eastern mysticism thing and look back at the Western classics, which Judeo-Christian ideas seem a lot more moored in some way.

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. Obviously, truth, but because so many lies have been exposed at this point and conspiracies have come true. I think it's just caused mass hysteria and confusion, and people are just looking for something to settle into that's solid, that's truth. It's cool to see, man. It's really cool to see.

Yeah, it's been great. My wife, Michelle, has started this organization called Acts 17, which is the reference to the apostle speaking in Athens 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. It all started with my 40th birthday party. I don't really like parties very much, but my wife was adamant that we should gather together a group of friends. 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 the gnome would come. Obviously, if I just do it away from where anyone is. But we planned this weekend where Friday we called the roast, Saturday was the toast, and Sunday was the Holy Ghost. 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 with me. Then on Saturday, my favorite band, which is a '90s era punk ska band called Goldfinger, they came and performed. It turns out you can just hire '90s era punk ska bands, which is pretty cool.

Then Sunday, my partner at Founder Son, 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. People were like, Man, I've never heard a presentation of Christianity that challenged me intellectually in this way. And so we just ran with it. And Act 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 expand. Over the last four weeks, Peter has done an Act 17 series on the Antichrist, actually, in San Francisco.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Did you go to that?

Yeah. My wife runs the organization. How was it? Really cool. 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. 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. It was cool to see that hundreds of people showed up for four consecutive weeks, waiting 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. Was that the Times? 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 Duhat, 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 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 Duthat. He did a lecture series at the University of Austin as well. So 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 a private event.

It was totally off the record. Yeah. So no shared notes, no video, nothing. That's pretty cool.

How many people went?

There were a few hundred people for four consecutive weeks with overflow, like people sitting in the lobby watching a simulcast. There were a lot. It was pretty crazy. Also, the majority were not Christians either. No shit. It was people in tech showing up curious to hear what he had to say. I think That's the lesson here from an Act 17 perspective is that you don't want to get ordained ministers to come in and do 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. 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. That it was that good of a turnout, and that it sparked that much interest, especially from non-Christians. Yeah. That's very interesting. Back to your remarks that, I I remember exactly what it was, but Jesus basically would have no problems with people in defense tech, building weapons to to to violate evil. I mean, where did you come up with that?

Well, there's a long thought process that gets to It's a good 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 fifth, sixth centuries. The idea is basically that pacifism is a really convenient belief to hold inside of a hegemony with a monopoly on violence. It's very easy to be a pacifist when you have a state that is going to protect your right to be pacifist. You can't really be a pacifist if you exist outside of a society like that, though. Then the question is, how do you engage in a just way with protecting innocent life? There are all sorts of principles around this. There's a principle of just cause. 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 discriminant, that you're attacking the right players, 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. The way that that applies to modern day is really interesting. 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 like, rocks and things like that, the Cain and Abel story. Then we figured out bow and arrows and swords. Eventually, we got into catapults and trebuchets and the advent of gum powder. We're just climbing 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 the moment where humanity, we looked at ourselves in the mirror and we said, This can't go on. 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.

And so during the Cold War, you see things like precision guided munitions. We can shoot AIM-9s through windows of buildings and take out combatants inside of buildings without destroying the building or harming innocents that are outside of that room. Everything is just about precision now. My view from the Anne-Rol 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 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 Ed, was this a tough decision for you to get into defense tech? Was there an internal battle going on in your head on, All right, we're going to do this. These are weapons. We're going to be used in war. Was that a big decision for you?

Yeah. I mean, as a Christian, obviously, I think about this stuff a lot. At the end of my life, I believe I'm going to be judged for my actions on Earth. I don't want to be doing things that are acting in opposition to God's will. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I think one of the misunderstandings that people outside of the industry have is they believe that there are this cadre of generals in the Pentagon that are sitting around plotting how they can enact violence on the world or something like that. You served. The reality 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 our combat. Reagan talked about this all the time, peace through strength, peace through strength, peace through strength. That's what we want to do. We want to make it so unthinkable to do things that we believe are wrong, that people just won't do them. And that's ultimately the goal of defense tech. It's not to make it more violent, more terrible. The goal is to make it so lethal and so much of a disadvantage to our adversaries that just never even think.

Biggest deterrable.

Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, I think about this all the time.

Right on. I think about it, too, but I love what you guys are doing, and it protects our country. And I I also believe in peace through strength. But a couple of things to get through here before we get into the interview. I got a couple of gifts for you here. Everybody gets these Vigilance League gummy bears made in the USA. Legal in all 50 states. For now.

Yeah, for now until RFK deems red dye to be illegal.

But they taste pretty fucking good.

You just have to put some of that blue drink inside of them. It'll be protected forever.

Right on.

Thank you so much.

And then, this is the first time I've given one of these out. After interviewing so many tech innovators like yourself, it's It's made me want to get in the game really bad. Then through a lot of the interviews I've done, I've interviewed a lot of high-profile people overseas. I've always been very concerned about phone security.

One100 %.

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, it's a hardened iPhone, and they do an overwatch of the phone. No data leaks out. They have all-American VPNs. They have burner numbers, an endless amount of burner numbers. You can get any burner number, any area code you want. And so if you're doing a political donation, booking a hotel, ordering a pizza, So talking to somebody you never want to talk to again, you can use one of those burner numbers, and 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-based, it's a little more application that has a lot of the same features, but maybe not quite that high speed that people can actually afford. So we're rolling that out towards the end of the year.

That's awesome. Thank you so much. 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.

I'll teach you how to use it. Yes, that sounds great. I think you guys will like that. All right, last thing before we get into it. So I got a Patreon account. It's a subscription account. 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 they're constantly changing because Obviously, the administration's changed, the politically appointed official's changed, and so you get this ebb and flow of how that interaction has been shaped. If you go back to the Obama administration, basically every 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 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, there's been a real effort by the administration to understand what it is that is going on in tech, whether that's 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 people like Michael Kratzios, who is 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 Emile 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 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. And that's just a very different problem set than engineering a good product. 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 with these younger guys, these younger innovators. I mean, Yeah. They are like very pro-administration right now.

Yeah, I think 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. Where did you grow up?

I grew up in rural Ohio, north of Cincinnati, about 30 miles north of Cincinnati. Small town USA. It's called Lebanon, Ohio. We had the quintessential downtown area with a vintage soda fountain and the public library. 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 this crazy connection there. Just one over from Middletown, which is where JD grew up. So some of the same stories that he talked about in Hillbilly Elegy about the rise of industrialization in Ohio and then the collapse as a result of globalization. I was in high school as we were going through that massive shift where the factories were closing, people's parents were out of jobs, strip malls were vacated. It was an interesting childhood for sure.

I've spent years on this show pulling back the curtain and trying reveal what's really happening in this country. The truth is, there's a double standard here in America. You see, time and time again, people defending themselves, defending their family, and then the judicial system goes after them. It's a double standard. If you don't believe me, check out episode number 3 with Don Bradley. That is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Because it's not just about what you did, believe it or not, it's how the legal system interprets it. That's I am a USCCA member. The USCCA has over 860,000 members because they know the reality is after you stop the threat, the real fight begins. Your membership gives you the education, elite training, and self-defense liability insurance you need for the second fight, the legal one. Plus, every member also gets access to a 24/7 critical response team and attorney network in the of a self-defense incident. Violent crime happens too often in America. This isn't about living in fear. This is about being prepared when things go sideways. You don't get to schedule danger, and with the world changing so fast, you have to do what you can to protect your family.

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My dad was a mechanic, and he built roller coasters, actually. There's a big amusement park in Southwest Ohio called Kings Island. 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. 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 a mom and very active in my brother and I's life.

So very blue collar family.

Super blue collar family.

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. So he and I are about as different as they can be.

Are you guys close?

Very recently, in the last five years or so, we've 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. What are you guys fishing for up there?

Well, that trip was a lot of salmon and drought. But Alaska is an incredible ecosystem. I mean, they have everything. I think in the three days that we were fishing, we caught chum salmon, king salmon, sockeye salmon, basically every species, and then nailed some huge rainbow drought as well, which is really fun.

I love fly fishing, man.

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 feeling the tension of the line in the current. It totally disarms you. Therapeutic. Yeah, it's 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 did all those outdoor stuff with my dad. We lived on 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 grew up playing in the creek and hanging out in the woods, building tree houses with my brother. Also, I played basketball, ran cross country, played ultimate frisby 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. I mean, so were you a good student?

Yeah, I mean, I was a bit of a nerd, no doubt about it. It was public school was an interesting experience. 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. And at times that was frustrating because you can get stuck in the rut of feeling like everyone's just goofing off and you're just trying to get through school. But yeah, I 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 do you get into tech coming from spending all your time outdoors, fishing, hunting, blue collar home, public school? I mean, very bound traditional tech path.

I was always interested in tech. My mom's brothers were really into IT growing up. My uncles hung out with my brother and I, and we built our first 486 computer together, went to MicroCenter Mall and picked up the motherboard. Right on. Yeah, we 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 watershed moment where I was always patriotic, but I never thought of it as something that I wanted to do as a vocation. Everything just changed on that day. And I decided that I wanted to go going to service for the country and went down the closest path I could find to working in intelligence. And saw a demo of Palantier in my first job in the intelligence community. Got into a battle internally about using Palantir, got denied, and then jumped ship really early on and joined Palantir before we had any revenue, really any users. And the rest is history, and I've been in tech since.

Can we go back to your time in intelligence? Absolutely, yeah. What 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 very small. I bet. And so the most common name in the English language is John. It's like 3% of English-speaking men are named John, first or middle name. Obviously, in Arabic, over 30% of men are Muhammad. 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 could imagine all the permutations of that. When you're dealing with intelligence reporting, the writer is effectively choosing how to spell these names, just transliterated. 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. That was my job. I was the guy that was going in and trying to make sure that this Muhammadada was the same as this Muhammadada was the same as this Muhammadada, so that when we pass those reports down to you guys in the field in Afghanistan or in Iraq, that you had reliable intelligence that you could act on when you're kicking down doors.

Interesting. How long were you in the intelligence for?

I only lasted about two and a half years. It was a short battle with bureaucracy, and I was defeated. Got to.

Got to. And how did Palantir pop onto your radar?

So I'm not sure. Are you familiar with Incutile, the CIA's venture capital firm?

I am now.

Yeah. It's an under-the-radar It's not a thing. But under George Tenet, the CIA set up this essentially a venture fund called Incutel. And their job was to scout for technology that would be useful to the mission of the intelligence community. And now they serve a bunch of different customers. They work with Department of Homeland Security, with the Pentagon. They're 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 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 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 site 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.

Palanteer, 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?

The misconceptions around Palantir are crazy. They're not bringing any data. The data belongs to the customer. It's just architecture for data management. You have to have some software infrastructure that allows you to store data, search data, explore data, analyze data, structure investigations around that data that are shareable with other people. 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, 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 make decisions on 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, that we have to hold together with duct tape. And so I think a lot of the concern about Palantier is really 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 civil servants to have the tools that they need to actually enable the policies that we, as a democracy, have decided that we want to go after.

So it's troubling. Yeah.

Every time I talk to any of my buddies that are still in special ops or in intelligence, they're all raving about Palantier and talking about how... Just everything, from a javelin shot to a sniper shot to targeting. Everybody's raving about Palantier that's in, that's using it in war. Then you have everybody else that's sitting there at home that all they do is complain about it. 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. In the early days of Andrew, there was a profile that was written about the company, and the headline of the story was something like, Andril is enabling a surveillance panopticon or something like that. It's just not helpful. That's not what we're doing any more than it was what Palantier is doing. No one at Palantier is sitting down at their desk and 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 programmed for hysteria. 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? Yeah. Why did you leave?

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. The unfortunate reality is that I showed up and I was the least talented person technically, but the least awkward socially. And so what did you do? Well, I got put in charge of sales. And so Sham and I were tasked with figuring Sourcing this out. Really everything I know about this space, I learned from Dr. Karp, the CEO, and Sham, as we were trying to figure it out together. It took us years to break through the ceiling of How do you sell really complicated software to the US government? At the end of that, call it five and a half 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 Founder's Fund. So not having any interest in venture capital or frankly, knowing anything about finance, I jumped ship and joined Peter in San Francisco.

No kidding. Back to his Palantier spying. Joe Lonsdale had a great quote yesterday. He was talking about, If you saw how the government managed data, you want us in there. And he said, We're the ones watching the Watchers. I thought that was pretty good because everybody's worried about the Watchers.

Yeah, I mean, the reality is the idea behind Palantier was that there shouldn't be a trade-off between doing your job well and protecting privacy and Civil Liberties. That's 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. That's a false choice. We can do both of these things. There's all sorts of critiques that you can make that I would critique myself for in the role that I was in at Palantier as well. It's 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 been more out and showing people what it is that we were doing. Obviously, there's limitations to that working with the intelligence community. But 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. A lot of this just comes down to storytelling, I think.

You're a Palantier. You believe in it before you're even working there. Back when you were in intelligence, you spent six years there, and then you go into venture capital with Peter Thiel, knowing nothing about finance or VC. I Was it Peter? Is that who you believed in? Why did you make that transition?

When Peter first asked me to do it, he asked if I could go and meet up with the leadership of the fund. I remember sitting down with Lauren Gross, who's the COO of Founder's Fund. We're having breakfast together, and she looks at me and she's like, Why are you interested in venture capital? 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. I can't even imagine what the internal conversations were at Founder's 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 it was a weird nine months that I was talking to Founders Fund before- Nine months? Nine months. And finally, Peter was just like, No, we're doing this. And it's like, he's the co founder of the company I'm working at. It's like, I don't know, is this an Is it an opportunity or is it an order? Is it some combination of both? Am I being fired from Palantier and being rescued and brought over to Founders Fund?

Still, to this day, 12 years later, I'm not sure what the real story is, but it was a weird transition for sure.

Did you like venture capital?

Yeah. I love what I do. I feel very blessed to have this really cool job where I get to learn about everything. This is the 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 want to solve these really meaty problems. And the expectation isn't that I'm going to know everything there is to know about nuclear. 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 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. We just have pitch meetings. My first year at Founder Son, I did 500 We've got us over 500 pitch meetings, which is a lot. Wow. I've ratcheted that down a bit. I have a better sense for the types of things that are going to be a good fit. But 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... When you're looking for a founder that you want to invest in, what is it that does it for you?

What is it that you're looking for? This is probably the most common question that VCs are asked, because I think people really want to believe that there's a rubric, that there's some table in the meeting. I've just got the table out, and I'm checking off, do they have this trait? Do they have this trait? In reality, it It doesn't really work like that. There's something that's way more gut and intuition-based, where within about five minutes of a pitch meeting, you can get pretty dialed to know, Okay, this is one that we might take a shot at. 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 we're all drawn into mimesis. And so most normies, they're just aping what everyone else is doing. And so they want to be the Uber for X or something like that. But the really generational transformative founders are the people who aren't tied into peer group validation, and they're going to do weird stuff. And so if you think about the most successful founders of our generation, people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, these are weird people.

And they're maybe somewhere on the autism spectrum, and that 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 a cool kid from their business school class. There's something else to Interesting.

What are some of the most successful founders that you've invested in? Who are they?

Founders Fund has an incredible track record. We were the first investor in Facebook, in SpaceX, in In Airbnb, in Stripe, Andrel, Palantir. We've been at the very beginning of most of the last 20 years of technology, which has been really cool to be along for the ride for.

I bet, man. There's been some awesome stuff that has come out of that. Yeah.

The history of the PayPal Mafia is truly incredible. If you think about this one company ended up seeding, either as investor or founder, most of the companies that we think of today as being definitional of the tech success story in America. And it just all started with one group of people starting one company.

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Then I met Palmer.

Their Founder's Fund. 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 Metta for a couple of billion dollars. And I think he was just on this path that he just thought, I'm going to be the VR guy. That's what I'm going to 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, right after Metta 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 Andrew, he was the first person I went to, and I just said, Hear me out. What if we started a next generation defense prime? And he was like, Oh, man, I'm doing this VR thing. I'm super passionate about this, but I don't know that I'm ever going to do anything other than VR. That obviously only lasted until he got fired for his politics.

Then he was right back on the Andrew story with me.

Right on. Was he always Was he always out there? Board shorts, mismatch flip flops, Hawaiian shirt?

I would love to say that he's changed or matured by the standards of society, but he's exactly the same person that he was when he was a teenager starting Oculus. Money, success, Fame has not changed him.

Good. I love that. All right, real quick, I got to Those are some quirky Palmer stories. Let's hear it.

Yeah, no. I mean, he is such an interesting person. I could spend all day talking about this. In the early days of Andrew, he and I would travel to DC a lot together, and I would show up for a two-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 going to be there for two days, man. What's your plan? He would just be like, Oh, I've got it. It's in my cargo shorts. You'd have his toothbrush and a stick of deodorant in one of his cargo pockets. He'd have two days worth of clothes in his other cargo pocket. He's sitting in the middle seating the economy at the back of the plane. It has taken us years to get him to the point where he's just 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 I'm a huge Aston Martin fan.

As I mentioned before, I love James Bond. When I told him that I really wanted to get an Aston Martin, he's like, Trey, there are only two cars that you should buy, cars that run really well and American cars. 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 wasn't even married. He didn't have kids, but he went out and he bought a minivan. So, yeah, he's always super, super entertaining.

He's an animated character. There's no doubt about that.

At his wedding, there was this entire contingent of Japanese anime people in the industry that were like Palmer zealots. They showed up with 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. Could not be a quirkier and yet smarter person. He's just the perfect combination.

What stuff is that guy innovating in his free time? Have you seen any of his crazy gizmos?

I mean, right now, he is so focused on Soulja Boy and Compute, building the helmet, that I think it's consuming all of his creative energy. It's the perfect thing for him. It's seven years to Andrew. He finally gets to return to his roots and work on the thing, giving our soldiers superpowers. 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. I got a I have a quote from you here that says, You said the tech at your government desk was worse than what you had in your college dorm. What did you mean by that?

Well, yeah, the day I showed up, I think I had expected that there was going to be some James Bond moment. I'm going to sit down and I'm going to have this supercomputer and someone's going to throw me the keys to an Aston Martin. That's what I thought. Like a laser watch and things like that. I sat down and I had Windows 98 and a CRT a team monitor, and I was in a cube with two other people who didn't actually work. They just talked about local sports teams most of the day. And so it was a crazy transition from believing that I was going to walk into this incredible tech-forward environment. And it turns out that I would do these coffee break searches and stuff. It wasn't at all what I expected.

Is that what inspired you to get into defense tech, eventually?

Yeah, it's really the Palantier story, 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. The standard way for getting software tooling, historically, or at least post-Cold War, has been 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. 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. Then they get their special badges, and they walk in every day, and they sit at their desks, and 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, especially going into the 2000s. Our best and brightest, they can make a lot more money working at Google, bringing their dog to work, getting free food. Why are they going to go sit in the concrete basement in the DC area, getting crapped on by bureaucrats and just 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 a tech entrepreneur. I did it because I thought it was the right thing for the country.

That's cool to hear. What was the first product you guys wanted to develop?

At Andrel? Well, we have this pitch deck, a very bad Google Slides deck that we use to recruit our first 12 hires. And one of the slides in that is 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 cool. Like earlier this year, I opened up the slide deck in my Google Drive, and it turns out that we built almost all of them. No kidding? Yeah. And it wasn't intentional. Okay, let's go back to the deck and do the next one. It was just organically how it unfolded. Really, the first approach that we made is you have to build something that is going to be pretty fast. 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 decision making rather than businesses as usual procurement policy. And so for us, that meant that we landed on Century Tower, which is now deployed not only at military bases, but also on the Southwest border in the United States, 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. And so we built this autonomous Century Tower that was completely off-grid, mobile, so you could pick it up and move it around, had a solid state, metamaterial, radar, a 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. 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. Over time, you train that model, and that has now grown into a massive program. We cover an enormous swath of the Southwest border, and we're expanding constantly, delivering more towers to get We did 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 back-end that we used for every subsequent product.

And so it was the AI brain was the real product. And then whether you made a sensory tower that flies, which was our next product, which is called Ghost, to interceptor missiles, to submarines, to autonomous fighter planes. They all have that same operating system on the back end that we call Lattice. And so we're Still getting amortized research and development out of the very first thing that we started building eight years ago. Damn.

Where did you guys come up with the list?

It was just sitting around with Palmer, me, Palmer, Matt, Brian, and Joe, just ripping on what we I think would make sense for us to build, leveraging that combination of software and hardware. I'm honestly surprised that we ended up doing almost exactly what we said that we were going to do at the very beginning. That's crazy.

Do you have that slide with you by chance? I'd love to put that up.

Yeah, I can show you the slide.

Perfect. What did come next?

The next product after the Century 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. You can think about it as a helicopter with a pilot where you just tell it, Hey, I want you to go and do this mission. 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 a core product line for us. And then we went from there into counter drone. We started building interceptors for 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 Road Runner, which is like a reusable interceptor. Barracuda, which is like a missile, more like an interceptor, a cruise missile, and expanding that out every time.

But the goal is really all domain. You want to work in space, work in air, work on ground, work on the surface of the sea, subsea. And Palmer's new obsession is subterráne, which not a lot of details that are shareable on that front yet.

What are you guys doing in space?

Actually, all of our space stuff is classified. So that's the one domain that I can't really say much about.

All right. How about under the sea?

Yeah. So we have a whole platform called Dive, so different sizes. Dive LD, which is a large diameter dive, is 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... In theory, you could do kinetics. You could 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 DiveXL, a 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 transitioning over to the AUCUS Treaty, where they're getting the delivery of nuclear submarines from the United States. So they obviously have real concerns about the sea space around the continent, and we're spinning up a bunch of work there with them on that as well. We also have a product called Seabed Century that is a platform that you can drop onto the floor of the ocean floor, and it does the same thing as a Century Tower would except undersea. And so we also have Copperhead, which is a modular payload delivery vehicle undersea, which is a euphemism for a torpedo without saying torpedo.

But, yeah, we're always building new stuff in all these domains.

I'm sure it's different for every product, but I mean, how fast are you guys manufacturing getting these to the end user?

Yeah, it's a good question. As far as doing things at limited scale, we can ramp pretty quickly into the limited rate production on all of these. I think The example of Century Tower, within a year of the company starting, we were rolling these things out in production with Road Runner. I think it was 18 months from the beginning of that program until we were delivering units into the field. And this is for a reusable cruise I mean, this is a really complicated product. With Dive, it was 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. 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 a treatable mass, which is like, are we building $15 billion aircraft carriers, $300 million fighter planes in 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 If we lose them in combat, it's not the end of the world.

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 in the same way that Tesla went from building the roadster to building the gigafactory and starting to sell hundreds of thousands of millions of cars.

How big 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 a million square feet, and that will be up and running in the late first quarter of 2026. Moving pretty fast.

Congratulations.

Thanks. Yeah. It's a weird homecoming for me. It's like I left Ohio and now I'm going back and working on this crazy factory. Got to bring my mom to the ribbon cutting ceremony, which was pretty cool.

Dude, she's got to be just so proud to see how far you've come in life and with everything you're doing now. What does that feel like for you to be able to bring your mom to that facility?

Yeah, it's really cool. I just spent some time with her this weekend back home, and I was talking her about what our family... Our family story has been in Ohio, and she was 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. I started searching around when I was sitting there with my mom, and every Every single one of these factories is no longer there. Our industrial capacity that was the heart of Ohio's economy for so long completely collapsed. And that was the story of my family. I mean, that was it. And so more than just 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 reinvigorating this family story. We need to bring production back to America. And it's very cool to be part of bringing that back to my family's story in addition to just doing it at a more macro level.

How are you guys... How is Andural finding the people that have the skills to do this? Because it's been so long since we were in production and manufacturing? Yeah. How long has it been? It's been at least 20 years.

Yeah. I mean, all this started falling apart, I guess, when I was in high school, which was 20 years ago. All the steel production left Ohio. There are huge steel companies in Ohio. Armco was, I think, the biggest employer in Middletown, where JD is from, and 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 I think there's definitely still labor around. There's a big Honda factory on the west side of Columbus. Intel was has been trying to open a chip fab on the east side of Columbus. 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 the industrial blood in the water. But some of it will be reskilling people and bringing more of that back through education, through continuing education programs. The craziest thing to me about the way that we've been approaching this for the last decade is that the government could not have gotten this more wrong. If you go back to Obama and you look at the upskilling programs that they were doing, it was all software development.

They were running coding boot camps, teaching people how to write code. What's the first job that's going to be replaced by AI? Coding. That. That is the thing. That is going to be hit the hardest at mid-tier, lower-tier, mid-tier software developers. We should have been training people to build stuff. We have to reindustrialize. This is absolutely critical for our country, and we just totally We're going to swing in a mist on that for the last 10 years.

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. 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 a simple, I use very loosely, but if you're going to set up an assembly line for something that's going to be produced over and over again, certainly you could build in entire steps of that that can be purely automated. And this is what companies like Tesla have done significantly better than the traditional automakers. But you also have a bunch of people involved, and you're constantly moving things around. The government isn't just going to have an insatiable demand for any single one of our products. We're going to have to make the factory modular enough that we can be responsive to the needs of the warfighter. So So sometimes the factory might be pumping out autonomous Furi fighter planes. At other times, it might be pumping out road runners. 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 going to be a lot of people involved with that.

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 we can reset things to rebuild these lines that enable us to scale. The Ukraine story is a great example here. So 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 the '60s and the '70s. And 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. They didn't exist. These companies were pulling people out of retirement to rebuild assembly lines to make 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 over specializing those spaces for single systems.

So a lot of your guys's 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 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. 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 a stripe 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. Will you end up with a $300 million airplane? Norm Augustine And the former CEO of Lockheed Martin, tongue in cheek said, I think it was 2050, was his market. In 2050, the entire defense budget will buy exactly one airplane. 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 awesome. Capabilities of 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 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 over the horizon, totally new technology that changes a con-op. 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.

Got you. Well, Trey, 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. Perfect. I know there are a lot of choices out there when it comes to cell phone service, and it feels like new providers pop up every week. But Patriot Mobile stands out for a reason. They're a company built by people who actually share your values, and they've been doing this for over 12 years. No gimmicks, no agendas, just honest service and a commitment to doing right by their customers. They offer reliable nationwide coverage using all three major networks, so you're not sacrificing quality. When you switch, you're supporting a company that believes in faith, family, and freedom. Values that matter. Don't just take my word for it. Ask the hundreds of thousands of Americans who've already made the switch to Patriot Mobile. Switching is easier than ever. Activate in minutes from the comfort of your own home. Keep your number, keep your phone, or upgrade. Patriot Mobile's all US-based support team is standing by to take care of you. Call 972 Patriot today or go to patriotmobile.

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I partnered with Ironclad for their newest original series, Target Intelligence, PSYOP. It's an eight-part audio experience where we find out who is really pulling the strings. Enjoy this trailer and stay tuned to the end of the show to listen to the prolog. Buy it today at sciopshow. Com. Link is in the show notes. The stakes have never been higher. Do you feel it? That something's off? What if none of this is real? For decades, wars have been fought in silence. No bullets, no bombs, just influence. They're called psychological generations, PSYOPs. What if it's all designed for you? Find out who's really pulling the strings. I'm Shawn Ryan, and this is Target Intelligence, PSYOP, an ironclad original. In this eight-part audio experience, we uncover the ghosts in the machine. Buy it today at psysopshow. Com. All right, Trey, we're back from the break. Dude, nice shooting.

It was fun. It was good.

You don't shoot often, do you?

I mean, I shoot a fair amount. I have a clay target range at my house in New Mexico, and I grew up with a hunting dad, so we would shoot in our backyard all the time.

Well, shooting clay pigeons doesn't have anything to do with a pistol. You did pretty damn good. I was impressed.

Much appreciated.

Nice work, man. That's fun. But Yeah. I know we were getting ready to talk about the helmet that you guys are making, but we went down some rabbit holes there on the break, so about getting into college was the first one. You got rejected from, it sounds like just about everywhere you applied. I probably should have dug into that a little bit more, and then you were enlightened to be on the break. 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?

At the time, it was really mysterious. I genuinely had no idea what was going on. I feel like growing up, Everyone just told me, You can do whatever you want. You can go to school wherever you want. Sky's the limit. Go and do whatever it is. I got a bunch of skinny envelopes back in early April, my senior year. And I was caught off guard by this reality. 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. I guess the upside of this is that we're going to be going to school close to each other with me being at UNC. And she was like, Yeah, about that. She broke up with me the same day that I rejected all these colleges. I went home and I was just weeping on the couch. And my mom was like, 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. I was like, I don't think that's the way it works, mom. But she was like, No, this is what you're going to do. And so a week later, I hopped on a plane and flew to DC, and I posted up in front of the admissions Department, demanded to see the dean of admissions. And as the story goes, 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. I went in and dumped out a backpack full of recommendation letters. I remember specifically what the dean said. He said, Son, there are cracks in the meritocracy. And it's not as simple as you get good grades, you 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 had graduated. There was a Princeton study from 2009 that basically showed that the most underrepresented demographic in college admissions is poor white kids.

It's completely under the radar. No one would expect that this would be the thing, obviously. But it adds nothing to the traffic of the university. The university has to... There's no cost for them to pay in relationships with guidance counselors. They get nothing from bringing on another man or bringing on another white kid. And so it's the easiest possible rejection. Like all these top-tier universities, they have this stat of how many validatorians they deny admissions to. It's just like a bunch of public school white kids that are getting denied. And 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 on 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 a tiny increase in acceptance rate for white kids. It was actually the Asian-American population that realized 80% of the growth under that demographic shift. Wow. And so I think this is what JD talks about in Hillbillyology as well. It's like the rural white communities were just decimated, and they were left out of the American project.

Is that getting better now?

I actually don't think so. I think that low socioeconomic status white communities in America are just like, it's not on the radar of most of the people that are thinking about trying to bring people out of poverty. And I think every other demographic, every other ethnic demographic in America has better emissions rates for low socioeconomic status except white communities. It's like the one that just gets no credit that's given in the emissions process. Now, to Georgetown's credit, they let me in, which is crazy that I pulled this stunt and ended up going to Georgetown. But I I think looking back on that, that was 2002, 23 years ago. It was almost like you could predict the rise of the populace movement in America. It was like you could have known in 2002 that something is not going right, that this is a core problem.

What do you think that has done to the country?

Well, I think it's led to these disenfranchized populations where I grew up in Ohio as as we've already talked about, it was just gutded by globalization, by the deindustrialization of the Midwest. And these communities were totally left behind, and then they got caught up in the opioid epidemic and economic collapse. That's ultimately the community that drove the populism movement that led to Trump's election. I think JD becoming the vice President is very much part of story. He's very aware of how this all happened.

I mean, thank you for sharing that. What I 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 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 think that doesn't Founders Fund I've encouraged that.

Well, Peter has the Teal Fellowship where he pays people to drop out of college.

Yeah, that's what I meant. What do you think this has done to the workforce, to schools 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 issues in society that are driven primarily around what was fundamentally a boomer problem. The boomers basically convinced all of their children that that was the path, that they needed to go to college. That was how you became successful. But there's not a bunch of white collar jobs that require liberal arts degrees from four year regional universities. And so I think that you had all these people taking on tremendous amount of student debt And then they graduate and they realize that 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 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 four-year universities. And the four-year university story didn't really even work anyway.

It was just a racket.

It's insanely expensive now. I was just talking to Eric, our COO, last night. His son's getting ready to go to school and is looking at Vanderbilt up in Nashville. It's like $280,000 for a four-year degree.

Yeah, I think that's pretty common.

Holy shit, man.

Yeah. No, it's crazy. The old American dream of go and get the college education, get a good paying job, get married young, buy a house, it doesn't happen. That isn't the path. I think this is part of the reason why Gen Z has had this weird political revival is that they've had this realization that, Hey, I can't even be in the market to buy a house. It just doesn't work. The debt loads are tremendous. There's not enough housing. It's hyper competitive. We've robbed an entire generation of what we used to think of as the American dream.

Do you think that's true? Do you think that's 100% That wasn't true, or is that in and around bigger cities? 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.

No, that's absolutely true. In cities, 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 that the jobs, they're not remaining in those communities. Now, there are some exceptions. There are high-growth suburban environments in America. The surroundings of Nashville are probably some of the best in the country. But I don't think that applies to everywhere. Ohio did not have that story for a very long time. Yeah.

Bentonville, Arkansas, that's another one that's going nuts.

Yeah. 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. 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.

Back to the college stuff, where do you think this goes? Do you think that four-year universities are 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 need to have the academic background to do It's hard to get it. Not everything, but for some things, that is a really important thing for people to do. The traditional liberal arts education, I think it's much harder to make the argument that people should be going into $300,000 of debt to to do that. We just need to have an aspirational path for vocations that don't require that. I think it's really on millennials at this point as they're raising their own children to make sure they understand that those paths are cool. They're okay. When they're graduating high school, I don't want them to feel like they have to go to 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 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 dive into that a little bit. We're talking about AI girlfriends, online dating, just all that stuff.

Yeah. In the early days of AI companions, I started playing with all these apps just to get a sense for how they worked and how it felt as a user of the applications. Man, it was really dystopian. You go into these weird relationships and you can dress the avatars and linger, and they'll never disagree with you. Like, 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 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 traditional pairing, the way that people have gotten into relationships historically, which 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 In the school community, it's more of a local maxima.

Within 30 minutes or 45 minutes of where I live, what are the options? And it's like a paralysis by analysis. People are like, Oh, there's always more fish in the sea. I can always go on more dates. There's always more people out there that I need to meet before I settle down. What's ended up happening on these online dating apps is that a tiny percentage, I'll speak specifically about men, a tiny percentage of men get the majority, the vast majority, even, 80 plus % of matches go to a tiny percentage of generally over 6 foot 2, very physically attractive. It's hard to convey personality traits in a way that would have mattered in local communities. 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. I think ultimately, what that leads to is that you have all these people that are unsatisfied in their jobs, unsatisfied in their relational life, and they become the powder keg of civilization. You create a class of incels that feels like they don't fit in. 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.

I think AI companions are like that in a supercharged way, where now it's like, I don't need to go through the stresses and difficulties of relationship. I can just have a companion that's always there that will never say anything negative. It's just going to be my own little world, and they're going to validate what I say. Sometimes the things that they validate end up being violent, whether it's suicide in the worst cases or school shootings or whatever else.

How common is this?

I think it's going to become more and more common. 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. There's like, trickle down impacts of this. But from a societal, political perspective, in 50 years, if these trends continue, America is a totally different place.

Yeah. Being a tech guy, you have two kids yourself. I mean, this is something that me and my wife go back and forth with all time. We're trying, I mean, it's so easy to access now social media, all the predators and all the shit trying to lure kids in sexually through social media platforms. 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 Where are we going to... 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, 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. So I'm curious in I don't know if you want to say the ages of your kids are not, but they're older than toddlers.

How do you handle that with your wife?

We try to be really thoughtful about this. Our kids are 10 and 12. Our policy on smartphone access and social media is that we're going to hold out for as long as we possibly can. And there are great examples. The babysitter that they have had for the last few years, she just left for college, and she literally just got social media before she went to college, and she's 18 years old. It's possible to be cool and sociable and relational and smart and not subject yourself to that unnecessarily at too young of an age. I think that's 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, they don't even have an Apple Watch yet, which I think is you're starting to see that 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. They haven't demonstrated that they need it. And you can see all sorts of questionable behaviors that happen with kids when they're eight 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 supercharged way. 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 in the road. He can't jump out of the car, and he has to sit through seven 10 hours of content about peer pressure and social media and pornography and the sex education.

We do the whole thing. And so I just did that two weekends ago with my youngest who just turned 10. And it starts the conversation. And it's like, look, we're not going to hide this. We want to catch it early enough that you're not going to learn all this stuff from your friends. I much rather you learn it from me than you learn it from your friends. And we start trying to teach them through open dialog about these important topics that have the potential to literally ruin your life. Yeah.

What book is that?

What book do you- 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 it.

It's really good. I mean, it's corny at times, but it's really good.

I mean, it's got to be, right? For kids.

Yeah.

Or maybe it's not for kids, but-No, it's very much for 10-year-old kids.

That's the framing.

So they don't have no tablet?

They have an iPad, but the iPad is for travel. When we're on an airplane or something like that, they don't have 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 his laptop for school now, but he's not playing games or anything on his laptop. He's just using it for school. I don't know the exact answer to the question, but the dodging answer is I'm going to hold out as long as possible.

Are you getting any pushback yet?

A little bit, but I think they also understand and appreciate how it's not good. I'll hear my kids say things like, Why are you using your phone? They want me to put my phone away, too. It's a good reminder. If I'm going to have this rule that I believe that you shouldn't have it because it's bad for your brain, I'm not immune to that same critique. It's probably bad for my brain, too.

Man, that's interesting. So So you have 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 iOS or Windows back in the day. Just knowing how to use it.

Oh, no. I mean, they're tech native. I mean, kids today, 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 Mac OS. They're fine. They're going to be fine. But I can't think of any positive things that they're missing out on by not having an iPhone in their pocket. Yeah.

I love hearing it. I I love hearing that.

It's tough. If you don't have the other parents at the school aren't on the same page, it can become highly problematic.

Well, see, that's what... I mean, do you have that experience? Are most of the parents on the same page?

They're on the same page. At the school that my kids go to, kids are not walking around with their smartphones at 12: 00.

That's the first time I've heard that. It seems like everybody just, here you go. Here's the babysitter. Here's a phone.

We haven't had that problem yet, but Good for you, man.

I walked in in the middle of the conversation with you and Jeremy. You were talking about, historically, how societies collapsed. You're talking about 20-year-olds. Where were you going with that?

Basically, every collapsed civilization in human history has been driven by underemployed, unhappy, single men in their 20s. That is the powder keg of civilization. For centuries, we actually did a pretty good job this in America. There was always work, and we were doing a pretty good job with pushing the family. But we're in this really weird window now where it is very common to see people disaffected, disengaged, unhappy in their 20s. And I think any rise in political violence, activism, it's going to be out of 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 to engage them in things that they want to do, like employment-wise. We need to figure out ways to get them into productive personal human relationships with other people.

How do you think we do that?

The really cliché answer to this that sounds like a very me answer is go to church. Just got to go to church. It's a great community. They're people that you have values, alignment with. They're going to hold you accountable. 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 think the messaging has to change. I mean, it's time and time again. It seems like we're teaching people just to become victims. That's what I see. I disagree with it. I think you can buy a house early on. You just You can't buy a house in Nashville.

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. I know it's shrinking a little bit. I don't like remote work.

I'm not clear that works, but yeah.

But you know what I mean? But I think 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 Andrew. 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 be ashamed of who you are. Totally. You are 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, ingrain it into their head that this is the best country in the world. The American dream still is very achievable. 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. But just time and time again, it's like they're being taught to lose.

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 almost cancelable to talk about it where people matter. Individuals are driving things forward. And this is why Founders Fund is called Founders Fund, is we invest in people. I don't want to hear a bunch of disconnected business ideas from nameless faceless groups. I I want to meet the people, and that's what we're investing in. And you can look at Europe as the 10-year forward future of wherever culture is going. And 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 people can't actually make a difference, which is a lie.

Do you think we're destined to just go down the same path Europe went? Do you think we might get on the right path here? Europe is a fucking disaster.

Europe is a disaster. I'm hopeful. I feel like there's There is a bit of an waking where people are realizing that these lies that they've been told are not productive. But I think time will tell, and it will be a tough road to get back on track. But it is a project worthworth going down. Yeah.

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But where are you guys on the helmet?

Yeah. So the perfect project for Palmer is the intersection of defense and VR. And so for years, Palmer was telling the Pentagon, Man, I don't know that it's there. From a technology perspective, I don't know that I would trust the modern versions of augmented 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 top division that was doing the IVAS program. We're now working on this 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 a coming home for Palmer, which was cool to see Zack and Palmer make up and be friends again, and also working with companies like Oakley. It's been really cool to see that coming to fruition. Not a whole lot of publicly shareable stuff right now, but you're going to see some of this start coming out in the coming months.

Cool.

Will we see it this year?

Actually, I don't know the specific timing, but it will be in the next few months.

When do you think the product will be on soldiers heads?

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? 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 left behind, which I hate saying. We were talking about equipment, you know what I mean? In my time in the seal teams. I had everything I needed to be a successful operator. But then I would see these conventional guys running around in this. It just felt so fucking bad. Totally. It's funny, but it's not. I mean, these guys couldn't even fucking move. So I would take my kid, be like, Here, take this. I'll go get a new one. And so to see... I know Vortex Optics is doing some cool stuff, too, with rifle scopes that actually went out to, I think it was 82nd Airborne first before Special which I loved. And then so the helmet, the question is, is it still going to be military-wide?

Totally. Yeah, that's the plan. The program is about soldier-born compute. And so there might be variants of this that are relevant for different pockets. But 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 superhuman vision into the environment they're operating in. And the idea is 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? Who are you using as advisors on stuff like this?

It's always about the warfighter. Everything goes back to the guys at the end of the chain that are doing the jobs. And so we have an enormous percentage of Andril employees have military intelligence service. We're going out and recruiting directly from the people that we're serving as customers. And we also are very tied in to the communities that we're serving as contractors. And so we spend a lot of time in DC. 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 excited about at Andural?

I think Furi, the Collaborative Combate Aircraft program, autonomous fighter planes, is a huge force multiplier for the military. So really excited about what we're doing there. I guess all of the stuff that we're working on right now is really exciting. I think all the counterair programs are incredibly important, and you can see in all of the things that have happened from a global conflict perspective over the last five years or something are very driven by shooting down autonomous assets as being 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 The beauty of being Andril is that our value add is speed. And so we want to be able to iterate quickly as we see the threats changing in the field.

Can you talk about the fighter plan a little bit or is that all? Yeah.

Or is that all? Yes. 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 risk to human life. And this is a concept that has been batted around the Air Force for a long time, and 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, is start rolling the Furi aircraft off the line.

So the Furi aircraft, it will be manned?

No, it's unmanned.

It's unmanned, but it'll have its own fleet of smaller-It is an autonomous wingman to a manned aircraft. Okay, so that would be... These are the autonomous aircraft around the manned aircraft. That's right. How many aircraft are we talking? How big is the fleet?

I mean, you could control a bunch of them. You could control dozens if that was the con-op 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 a science fiction novel. The idea is that there's this guy, Ender Wiggens, who who is effectively controlling an entire alien battle from a bunker, where he's just there and he's giving commands. The starfighters and stuff like that are all operating autonomously in the battle space. He's like a conductor of an orchestra. You can 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 in the harm's way.

Man, that's interesting.

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 intritable assets.

What does the future of warfare look like for you in your mind? Are we going all autonomous? Is our human humans becoming obsolete? I ask all of you guys this.

Yeah. Well, no, I don't think humans are obsolete. There's a human in the loop that is accountable for the decisions that are being made. One of the things that comes up frequently when you start talking about autonomy is this idea of full autonomy versus human in the loop autonomy, which is the idea that when you're about to make a lethal decision, there has to be a human that hits the button that says do it. But that It hasn't been the case for decades already. There's SeaWiz, the close-end weapon system that is on naval vessels. It automatically engages with threats, aerial threats to the naval surface vessels. There's no human direction shooting 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 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, when strategies are utilized and things like that.

How far out do you think we are from seeing the battlefield being 100% autonomous? Maybe there's decision-makers. Well, there will be a decision-maker 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 If we were to enter into a major global conflict with a near peer or foreign adversary, we would probably try to accelerate to that much more quickly. But if we're lulled into complacency by the false narrative of global stability, then we're not going to feel much of an incentive to move in that direction anytime soon. I think it just really depends. The humanoid robotics, I think, are the thing that comes up most when people I'll 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? 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 by humans operating in theater in the field with robots in support.

Got you. Do you have any Fears about AI in the battle space?

Look, humans make a lot of bad decisions.

Yes, they do.

A super immature 18-year-old with six months of training is not necessarily going to make better decisions than a robot from an ethics perspective. And so, of course, I want these things to be conducted in the most just way possible. But humans make bad decisions as well. Do I think that there's some imminent threat, like existential threat of AI destroying human civilization? No, I don't think that's really on the near term horizon.

What lessons are you guys learning from Ukraine, Russia?

The airspace is This is probably the most interesting 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 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 a mile of fiber optic cable so that 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 trying to keep ahead of your opponent in how you're approaching airspace. I think that will be a huge part of getting this right in the future is that we need our aircraft to have the ability to operate without comms connections. You can't rely on GPS. You can't rely on remote piloting. You need to actually be able to dead recon or navigate navigate optically by 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. It's a great 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.

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 the vast majority of our business is building that engine for them. But the US 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?

China is a huge risk, not only militarily, but also economically. I don't think we're taking that quite seriously enough. I think there's a political understanding of that, but it's not clear to me that there's There's 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, there's the impacts of Belt and Road, where you have natural resources, production, all of the things that are 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. It 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 an important part of our technology ecosystem. If China takes Taiwan and shuts down our access to TSMC, that's a huge problem for the US economy. So we really need to think through all of that. But the Chinese, they have a different cultural history than we do. And when you try to frame their actions through through a Western understanding of the world, you reach very different conclusions than they reach.

Western history is be open about your strength. And this is where the piece of strength 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 Assassin's Mace story, which is like a parable in China, is hide your strength, buy time, and then strike when you have an unfair advantage. And so it's to their advantage to go into these international dialogs and say, oh, no, we're weak. We're not competing. We don't have the ability to do that. 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 moral background in the way that they think about these things is very different than even the nursery rimes that have led 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 five years ago. When we started Adderall in 2017, we were telling the story to investors. We believe that the future of national security is near peer conflict. This is about great powers. We were moving out of counterterrorism. That was eight years ago, and it was super weird to even be telling that story. And today, I feel like no one's confused about this anymore. Obviously, we could talk about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and how terrible that was, but no one believes that nation building and counterterrorism is the thing that we should be focusing on anymore.

Yeah, definitely with you on that. I mean, at breakfast, we were talking about, it doesn't sound like, in your opinion, we are ahead on China on much of anything.

I think we have We're more innovative. 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. What? Like production. They have entire factories that do autonomous production of cruise missiles, for example. They're just way ahead of us on that. Also, all the natural resources stuff, the Belt and Road strategy, for better or worse, was a genius play by them to go and scoop up access to all the raw materials. We just watched Let them do it. I know, man. And I think that we put ourselves in this situation where we have to start making these crazy bets in order to figure out our way around the supply chain that has been created over the last 30 years by a very effective Chinese strategy.

Do you think that they will take Taiwan kinetically?

I mean, this is the question with Xi. It's like, he has said that he's going to reunify. And 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. And so they've got a short timeline to get their stuff together to be able to credibly deter Chinese aggression. And so that's the small window that we're in right now.

Yeah. 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 she started talking about the cognitive warfare and the psyops and the propaganda and stuff that's going on there and how divided it actually is, and when I learned more about the actual history of China, Taiwan, I don't know if they're going to have to take it kinetic. I mean, they're doing a phenomenal job at dividing and just... That other party takes over. It's done. Not a shot fired.

Yeah. I mean, that is the optimal case for China, obviously, is that they can use soft power means to just do it in the way that they did Hong Kong. And I don't think there's a zero % probability that that's the way that it goes down.

What else about China? Who's bothering you? How ahead are they on manufacturing and AI?

I mean, they have like 250 times the shipbuilding capacity that we have. That's a huge problem for us being able to keep up militarily. We've gutded 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 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 Foundersun, 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 the skill that's required to make these things with high yields and quality, it's all in China. We don't even have people in the United States that know how run these machines. And so we have to figure out some way to reskill. And I think autonomy in factory work is going to 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 to make a different decision on that fact. We need to push as hard as we can.

Are there any other countries that you're concerned about other than China? I mean, are you concerned about Russia, India, BRICS?

I think that there's risks at some level with all of these other nations. I think Iran has continued to be a thorn in the side of Western powers. That's concerning. North Korea as a rogue state is pretty terrifying. Who knows what they're going to do if they feel truly desperate. Russia continues to be a threat to all the countries in Eastern Europe. That is a real concern. But we also have this tendency to make our enemies appear 10 feet tall. I think you saw in the early days of the war in Ukraine that their military readiness was pathetic. Their vehicles had dry-rided tires. It was like, 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 side venture What readers are you doing?

Well, the one that I've been most interested in is this project called Soul. So one of the critiques of younger generations, my own generation and millennials included, is that because of short form video content, largely, we've lost the ability to consume long form media. 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 a Kindle that you wear in a pair of sunglasses. And the thesis is that we We don't need do-everything devices to do everything. 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 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 longer reading 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.

It's pretty fun. Right on, man. I would love that.

Let's see, other sidequests. I think that there are only so many things that a person can do before they stop being effective at any of them. So I'm probably at just about capacity right now.

Well, I mean, I thought that you hosted Bible studies in Silicon Valley where Christianity was once borderline illegal. 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 faith and work oriented Bible studies, where they're like graduate classes. We assign a bunch of and then we get together and we do discussion. Originally, that started off as 10 people, and then it was 50 people. And this last session that we did in the spring was over 100 people, 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, Christians 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, as a Christian, we've had a lot of guys on talking about end of the world type stuff. A lot of people are thinking that maybe we're possibly in End Times. Where are you at on this?

Yeah. I mean, Peter has been doing this Antichrist lecture series. He and I have been talking about this for a long time. I think that the Bible says that we will know neither the day or 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 should always be alert to these things. There's also one of the stories that Jesus, the parables that Jesus tells the disciples is the vineyard owner. It's like your workers, they 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 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 really concerning with an increased push for a global rather than a national identity, the push for one world order. The motto of the Antichrist in the Bible is peace and safety. People think of it as this Satanic thing, but actually it's a mirror of Christ.

The Antichrist is a deceiver. I think it looks more like a push for one world government than it does a destructive nation state or something like that. I think we just need to beware of anything that resembles these fake unity movements that are driving people into complacency.

Well, Trey, we're wrapping up the interview. I got one more question for you. If you could see three people on the show, who would they be?

Oh, man. I think that there's very mission-driven companies that are out there that are still somewhat stealth. I'm assuming that this is not part of the recorded portion. Oh, no, it is. It is. Oh, man. Well, then I have to be careful I'm able 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, pulling in people who have perspectives on how AI is going to shape in the next 10 to 20 years. You have this bifurcation of some of them believe that we're going into existential risks to humanity and other people that have 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 tech. Jd, I think would be an awesome one. He'd be great to bring in. We're trying. Great. Love to hear 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, Sean. 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 US Army's fourth PSYOP Group released a cryptic video on YouTube. There is another very important phase of warfare. It has as its target not the body, but the mind of the enemy. Between clips of troops assembling chest pieces, and social unrest. Phrases begin to appear on screen. They ask, Have you ever wondered who's pulling the strings? These are the Sidewar soldiers. The series What 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, in the democratization of information, all it takes to conduct a PSYOP is a smartphone.

Like and subscribe.

In each episode, we look at a different method of psychological operation. 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. 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 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 IA, who are working for television networks? The early history of psyops and psychological 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 peak behind the curtain. Welcome to the PSYOP. Buy it today at psysopshow. Com.