Trae Stephens – Anduril’s AI Weapons, Palantir Myths, Antichrist and War with China | SRS #245

That's what I think, man. man. Have you ever heard of Lee Strobel? Of course. Yeah. Case for Christ. 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 work to gain faith that there is nothing out there than there is to actually believe. And I love that guy. Yeah. No, it's absolutely true. And I think that we're seeing a bit of a renaissance where people are coming back to this idea that, look, even if they have a hard time with the belief in the supernatural, they're starting to kind of grok this idea that a society unmoored from truth, foundational truth, is really dangerous and not a society that they want to live in.

And that's kind of opened the door to being able to have these conversations with people about, you know, 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, that's like, I mean, I feel like that's worldwide, not just San Francisco. definitely in the country. But I mean, why do you think that is? Why do you think so many people are tapping into the Bible and coming to Christ right now? Well, I think there's been such a push really since like the 70s, but especially in just like the last five years around this kind of completely godless approach to life. And some of those lies are being exposed. I think we're starting to see societal dysfunction, a breakdown in trust, and institutions you know you have all of these different factors and young people are in an interesting position to look at that and say Man, none of the things that I thought I was promised are real.

Like all of these ridiculous kind of wokey ideas around how the world is supposed to function, they don't actually work. Like society doesn't work like this. You can't just walk around not believing in anything. You have to believe in some sort of truth. And I think that's kind of reawakened people to this idea that there's something in the classics that are worth looking at. You know, I don't know if you're a fan of the HBO show Silicon Valley, but there was this narrative that was picked up for like 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 like a mystic, like a monk that was his mentor and advisor. And that was really like the moment. That was like Burning Man, Silicon Valley style. And it was kind of a joke. It became a meme where people are like, wow, this is really silly. Like all these things that we're being told are just really silly, you know, untruths. And you're starting to see people kind of turn from that kind of Eastern mysticism thing and look back at the Western classics, which, you know, Judeo-Christian ideas seem a lot more moored in some way. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think things just got so chaotic.

and the trust in pretty much any institution is at an all-time low right now. I think people are just looking for anything that makes sense. And obviously truth, but because so many lies have been exposed at this point and conspiracies have come true. And yeah, I think it's just 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. You know, my wife, Michelle, she has started this organization called Acts 17, which is the reference to the apostles 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. And, you know, it all started with my 40th birthday party. So I'm not really a—I don't really like parties very much, but my wife was adamant that we should gather together a group of— friends. And I thought, wow, the best way for me to avoid having a huge group of people hang around for my birthday is to do it at our house in New Mexico, because the gnome would come. Like, 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. And the roast was my best friends coming together and roasting me, including a former guest of yours here on the show, Shyam Sankar. He did a roast with me. And 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. And then Sunday, my partner at Founder's 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. People were like, man, I've never heard a presentation of Christianity that like

challenged me intellectually in this way. And so we just kind of ran with it. And Acts 17 has done incredible events with people like Peter, with Francis Collins, who was early in the genetics movement. He was the director of the National Institutes of Health. And starting to kind of expand. Over the last four weeks, Peter has done an Acts 17 series on the Antichrist, actually, in San Francisco. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Did you go to that? Yeah, I mean, my wife runs the organization. Dude, how was it? Really cool. I mean, Peter has been talking about these themes around the Antichrist for a long time. During COVID, he and I did a small group Bible study exploring the concepts around the Antichrist, like read a bunch of books, did discussion groups around it. And I think he's like really hammered into his thoughts around what that means to the world today and how that should affect the way that we behave. And it was cool to see that, you know, hundreds of people showed up for four consecutive weeks wading through a sea of protesters standing outside the building to come hear, you know, a Silicon Valley billionaire talk about faith and why he believes in the gospel man i think that's awesome did you what was that the was that the the was it

the times or i can't remember the the interview where they asked him if he thought he was the antichrist yeah there's a famous clip with uh the interview with Ross Douthat where Ross said something like, do you believe that humanity should continue to exist? And he paused for an uncomfortable amount of time and then eventually said yes. But yeah, I mean, he's been talking about this for a while. He did a series in Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson from the Hoover Institute talking about it. He did the interview with Ross Douthat. He did a lecture series at the University of Austin as well. So this is, it's on the top of his mind. Man, I would love to have seen that. That would have been, that would have been awesome. They didn't record it, right? It was totally off the record. Yeah.

So no, no shared notes, no video, nothing. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. How many people went? I mean, there were a few hundred people for four consecutive weeks with overflow, like people sitting in the lobby on, you know, watching a simulcast. So there were a lot. It was a pretty crazy. Also the majority were not, were not Christians either. It's, you know, people in tech showing up curious to hear what he had to say. I think that's kind of the lesson here from an 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. And I think there's a tremendous opportunity to leverage that not only in tech but in other leading industries whether that's finance media entertainment whatever that's interesting you know that that it was that good of a turnout and that has sparked that much interest especially from non-christians yeah that's very very interesting um you know that too you know your remarks that you know i can't remember exactly

what it was but jesus you know basically would have no problems with people in defense tech building weapons to annihilate evil. I mean, where did you come up with that? Well, I mean, there's a long thought process that gets to that point, but it actually all starts with just war theory, going back to St. Augustine. You know, 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, you know, the, you know, the fifth, sixth centuries. And the idea is basically that, you know, pacifism is a really convenient belief to hold inside of, you know, a hegemony with a monopoly.

on violence. It's like it's very easy to be a pacifist when you have a state that is going to protect your right to be pacifist. You can't really be a pacifist if you exist outside of a society like that, though. And so then the question is, how do you engage in a just way with protecting innocent life? And there are all sorts of principles around this. There's, you know, a principle of just cause, like, do we have the information that we need to make a decision, a righteous decision about whether or not we're going to go and engage in violent conflict. There's the principle of discrimination. If you're going to do it, are you going to do it in a way that is highly discriminant, that you're attacking the right players, the, you know, the combatants rather than innocent life? You have the principle of proportionality. Are you responding in turn to a conflict or are you going way overboard and, you know, increasing the stakes and the level of violence by your counter-response.

Anyway, there's all of these principles that St. Augustine laid out thousands of years ago. And the way that that kind of applies to modern day is really interesting. So if you think about the way that conflict, violence has emerged over the course of human society, you know, it started, you know, we're hitting each other with like rocks and things like that, you know, the Cain and Abel story. And then we figured out bow and arrows and swords. And eventually we got into catapults and trebuchets. and you know the advent of gunpowder you know we're just climbing the curve of the amount of destruction a single individual is able to inflict on an on another party or another set of parties that kept going up that curve up and up and up until the atom bomb and that was kind of the moment where you know humanity we looked at ourselves in the mirror and we said this is like this can't go on like we can't just be 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. And so my view from the annual perspective is if I'm building technology, if I'm participating in 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 discriminant, that are more proportional, that are more precise, so that we're putting the humans, the sacred nature of human life, that we're removing those people from dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs, and enabling us to engage in combat, engage in geopolitics, the real geopolitics, in a way that reduces the loss of innocent life.

Wow, you really went down the rabbit hole with this. Is this because you had, was this a tough decision for you to get into defense tech? I mean, was there an internal, you know, battle going on in your head on, all right, we're going to do this. These are weapons. These are, you know, we're going to be used in war. I mean, did you, was that a big decision for you? Yeah. I mean, as a Christian, obviously I think about this stuff a lot. Like, you know, I don't, at the end of my life, I believe I'm going to be judged for my actions on earth. And, you know, I don't want to be doing things that are acting in opposition to God's will.

And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I think, like, one of the misunderstandings that people outside of the industry have is they sort of believe that there are, like, this cadre of generals in the Pentagon that are sitting around, like, plotting how they can, like, enact violence on the world or something like that. and, you know, you served, you know, the reality is, is that no one wants to write letters home to the parents of children lost in combat. Nobody wants to do that. What we want to do is we want to deter combat. And, you know, Reagan talked about this all the time, peace through strength, peace through strength, peace through strength. That's what we 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 morally like more violent more terrible the goal is to make it so lethal and so like so much of a disadvantage to our adversaries that they would just never even think think it's determinable yeah yeah exactly um and so yeah i think about this all the time right on right on i think about it too but i love what you guys are doing and it protects our country and and i also believe in peace through strength so yeah but um

a couple things to get through here before we get into the interview i got a couple gifts for you here so everybody gets these vigilance league gummy bears made in the usa legal in all 50 states For now. Yeah, for now until, you know, until RFK deems red dyes to be illegal. But they taste pretty fucking good. You just have to put some of that blue drink inside of them, and then they'll be protected forever. Right on. Thank you so much. And then this is the first time I've given one of these out. So, you know, after interviewing so many tech innovators like yourself, it's it's uh it's made me want to get in the game really bad and so and then through a lot of the interviews i've done i've interviewed a lot of high profile people overseas and so i've always been like very concerned about phone security 100 so i went down a rabbit hole to find the real black phone and um i found this company called glacier have you heard of it i have not no okay 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 it has, I mean, they do an overwatch of the phone. You know, no data leaks out. They have all-American VPNs. They have burner numbers. So an endless amount of burner numbers. You can get any burner number, any area code you want. and so you know if you're doing a political donation booking a hotel ordering a pizza talking to somebody you never want to talk to again you know you can use one of those burner numbers and they will actually they can even tell if um they can't tell what it is but if pegasus were to wind up on it or something they'll they'll get 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 like 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, that's a little more application that has a lot of the same features, but maybe not quite that high speed that people could actually afford. So we're rolling that out towards the end of the year. That's awesome. Thank you so much. much i i uh 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 you guys will like that and uh and then all right last thing before we get into it so i got a patreon account it's a subscription account and um 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 U.S. government? Yeah, no, that's good. There are a lot of misconceptions. I think, you know, they're constantly changing because obviously the administration's changed, the politically appointed officials changed, and so you get this kind of like ebb and flow of how that interaction has been shaped. If you go back to the Obama administration, basically everyone in tech had supported Obama when he was elected president. But there was really no presence of tech people in the administration. It was kind of, he ended up going with government insiders and academics and things like that. And so the connectivity was really, really low. Obviously, going into the first Trump administration, Peter and Palmer were the only, you know, tech billionaires that were engaged in that administration from the very beginning. And then Biden came around and, you know, again, the whole tech community jumped out in support of him. But there's been a bit of a shift now where people are starting to realize that all of this time and effort and money that they put into courting the democratic establishment didn't really give them the connectivity to drive any of the change that they wanted to see. And so I think in this administration, you know, there's been a

real effort by the administration to understand what it is that is going on in tech, whether that's, you know, with AI regulation or with crypto or with defense and trying to figure out ways to pull them into that conversation. And so you get people like Michael Kratzios, who was Peter's chief of staff, who's running the Office of Science and Technology Policy. You have David Sacks, working on AI and crypto, who was one of the original PayPal mafia. You have Emil Michael, who... as the COO of Uber, that's now the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. And so that tie is much stronger than it has been in, you know, modern history.

Yeah, it definitely seems that way. Yeah. And so I think from a misconception perspective now, I think, you know, 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, you know, 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 like 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, they are like very pro-administration right now. Yeah, I think, I mean, 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. So where'd you grow up? I grew up in rural Ohio, north of Cincinnati, about 30 miles north of Cincinnati, kind of small town USA.

say. It's called Lebanon, Ohio. You know, we had kind of the quintessential, you know, downtown area with, you know, a vintage soda fountain and the public library. And our claim to fame in town was the oldest inn in Ohio. It's called the Golden Lamb. For those, like, politicos out there watching the show, Rob Portman, the former congressman and later senator from the state Ohio owns the Golden Lamb. And so there's like this crazy connection there. Just one town over from Middletown, which is where JD grew up. So some of the same stories that he talked about in Hillbilly Elegy about kind of the rise of industrialization in Ohio and then the collapse as a result of globalization. And I was kind of in high school as we were going through that massive shift where the factories were closing, people's parents were out of jobs, you know, malls were vacated uh it was it was an interesting childhood for sure when we first started building the sean ryan show storefront we didn't have everything figured out we had products merch, ideas, and a growing audience.

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That's shopify.com slash srs. What did your parents do? My dad was a mechanic, and he built roller coasters, actually. So there's a big amusement park in southwest Ohio called Kings Island. And from the day he graduated high school until the day he retired, he worked at Kings Island as an amusement park mechanic. Right on. My mom was all sorts of things. She worked in accounting. She was a substitute teacher. She worked at the public library in Lebanon. And she was, you know, a mom and very active in my brother and I's life, so. Yeah. So very blue collar family. Super blue collar family. Yeah.

Brothers and sisters. I have a brother. He's 18 months older than me. He's a farmer and a real estate agent in Vermont of all places. 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 kind of rekindled our sibling love and we do a bunch of stuff together. He and I just went on a fishing trip up in Alaska um in july um trying to spend more time hanging out with each other good good what are you guys fishing for up there uh well that that trip was a lot of salmon and trout um but you know 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 um sockeye salmon um basically every species um And then nailed some huge rainbow trout as well, which is really fun.

I love fly fishing, man. Oh, it's the best. You know, for someone like me that, like, lives and works every day in a city, there's something about going out and standing in rushing water and, you know, feeling the tension of the line in the current. It's just, it totally disarms you. Therapeutic. Yeah, it's super, super therapeutic for me. What were you into as a kid? I mean, I fished a lot. my dad was an avid fisherman and hunter and so kind of did all those outdoor stuff with my dad. We lived on, you know, a bunch of acreage in the middle of the woods in a log cabin that my dad built literally with his bare hands by himself. And so kind of grew up, you know, playing in the creek and hanging out in the woods, building tree houses with my brother. Also, I played basketball, ran cross country, played ultimate Frisbee in high school. That's the only thing that I carried over to my college experience from the athletics perspective. And we were super active in our church. My grandfather was the pastor of our church growing up. So we were really active in the community there as well. Right on, right on. I mean, so were you a good student?

Yeah, I mean, I was a bit of a nerd, no doubt about it. You know, it was—public school was an interesting experience. You know, I didn't—as you said, I grew up in a blue-collar family. It's not like I was going to a fancy private school with a bunch of hard-charging aspirational so people um and uh at times that was sort of frustrating because you know you can kind of get stuck in the rut of um feeling like you know everyone's just goofing off and you're just trying to get through uh through school but um yeah i had a you know graduated top of my class um got great test scores and then got rejected everywhere that i applied to college so This is the lesson of some of what J.D. talked about in Hillbilly Elegy.

How did you, I mean, how do you get into tech coming from, I mean, spending all your time outdoors, fishing, hunting, blue-collar home, public school? I mean, very, I mean, non-traditional tech path. I was always interested in tech. My mom's brothers were really into IT growing up. And so, you know, my uncles hung out with my brother and I and we built our first 486 computer together, like went to Micro Center Mall and picked up, you know, the motherboard and the right on. Yeah, we kind of built that always was really interested in it, but had no interest in going into tech. That was not a part of my plan.

I actually thought I was going to be a journalist when I was in high school. So senior year comes around, September 11th happens, and I had this kind of watershed moment where I was always patriotic, but I never thought of it as something that I wanted to do as a vocation. And everything just changed on that day. And I decided that I wanted to go into service for the country and, you know, went down the closest path I could find to working in intelligence. and saw a demo of Palantir in my first job in the intelligence community, got into kind of a battle internally about using Palantir, got denied, and then jumped ship really early on and joined Palantir before we had any revenue, 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 kind of stuff were you doing? I was working on counterterrorism, primarily on like 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 like write code and could speak Arabic was, you know. very, very small. 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. And when you're dealing with intelligence reporting, you know, the writer is effectively choosing how to spell these names, just transliterated. And someone had to go out and figure out how to merge these records to identify the individuals that were crossing all of the reporting that was being collected. And that was my job. I was the guy that was going in and trying to make sure that this Mohammed Atta was the same as this Mohammed Atta was the same

as this Mohammed Atta, so that when we pass those reports down to you guys in the field in Afghanistan or Iraq, that you had reliable intelligence that you could act on when you're kicking down doors. Interesting. How long 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 you. Got to you. And how did Palantir pop under your radar? So, I'm not sure. Are you familiar with In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital firm? I am now. Yeah, it's a really, it's kind of an under the radar thing. But under George Tenet, the CIA set up this, essentially a venture fund called In-Q-Tel.

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. You know, they work with the Department of Homeland Security, with the Pentagon. Like, they're kind of all over the place. But at the time, they had funded a work program for Palantir in a few federal intelligence agencies. And they were doing a roadshow. And they gave a demo that I was at. And I'm like, oh, crap, this would literally save me like 20% of the time that I spend every week doing searches in these databases. Because basically the way that I would do it is there are 12 different databases.

You go into each one of them, you write a really complex query, and then it would just be running. background. It's like, all right, well, I'm going to go get a cup of coffee, go talk to a couple 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 siloed intelligence infrastructure where you could just run the search once and it would just return everything instantly. And so in its simplest form, it would have saved me probably a day of work every week. But there was no requirement, as you're familiar, there was no requirement. There was no funding to build anything like this. And so it was really hard to get it brought into the door. So I switched over to the private sector and worked at Palantir instead. So what, I mean, what a lot of Palantir's, everybody's worried about it.

Everybody's worried about, you know, are they spying on us? Is this going to be the, you know, the newest Patriot Act? I mean, are they spying on us? What is it? Yeah, I mean, the misconceptions around Palantir are crazy. I mean, they're not bringing any data. The data belongs to the customer. It's just architecture for data management. Like you have to have some sort of software infrastructure that allows you to store data, search data, you know, explore data, analyze data, you know, structure investigations around that data that are shareable with other people. And these are things that in any normal world, you would be like, yes, we want our warfighters to have the best tools that they can to do the job that we're asking them to do.

And so I think a lot of the hysteria, like, philosophically is really troubling because basically what people are saying is that we, a democratic society, have elected representative government to make decisions about how we should, like, make decisions around the policies that we want to enact to protect our society in the national security context. But we don't want them to have the best tools to do it. We would rather them have crappy stuff that barely works that, you know, we have to hold together with duct tape. And so I think a lot of the concern about Palantir is really, you know, people expressing a concern around about democracy.

They're saying, I don't believe that the American people can make good decisions. 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 kind of troubling. Yeah, you know, it's, I mean, it's, every time I talk to any of my buddies that are still in special ops or in intelligence, I mean, they're all raving about Palantir and talking about how, you know, just everything from a javelin shot to a sniper shot to, I mean, targeting and everybody's raving about Palantir. it's it's it's that's in that's using it in more and you know then you have everybody else that's sitting there at home that that they all they do is complain about it i mean where does the where does the misconception come from that they are spying on everything and everyone no i mean the media has a lot to do with it you know in the early days of andrel there was a kind of a profile that was written about the company and the headline of the story was something like you know Anderil is enabling a surveillance panopticon or something like that.

It's like, this is just not helpful. That's not what we're doing any more than it was what Palantir is doing. No one at Palantir 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. And I do think that this philosophical challenge is very real, that it's really expressing a distrust in democratic institutions. And that's a cultural problem that exists way beyond the scope of what Palantir is being asked to solve. How long did you spend there? I was there for six years.

Six years? Yep. Why did you leave? Most of the time that I was there, I was working with Shamsankar, who you know, trying to figure out how to make the business development engine work. You know, the kind of unfortunate reality is that I showed up and I was the least talented person technically, but the least, you know, awkward socially. And so what do you do? Well, I got put in charge of sales. And so, you know, Sham and I were kind of tasked with figuring this out. Really everything I know about this space I learned from Dr. Karp, the CEO, and Sham as we were kind of trying to figure it out together.

it took us years to like break through the ceiling of you know how do you sell really complicated software to the u.s government um and at the end of that you know call it five and a half year period i was feeling pretty burned out um but over the time that i had been there i got to be friends with peter teal who is the you know the founder of paypal the co-founder of palantir um and peter just out of the blue asked me if i would come join him at founders fund um so not having any interest in venture capital or frankly knowing anything about finance um i kind of jumped ship and joined peter in san francisco no kidding you know back to back to you know as palantir spying joe lonsdale had a great quote yesterday he was talking about you know if you saw how the government managed data you want us in there and he said you know we're the ones watching the watchers i thought that was i thought that was pretty good because everybody's worried about the watchers but yeah I mean, the reality is, is like the idea behind Palantir was that there shouldn't be a tradeoff between doing your job well and like protecting privacy and civil liberties.

That's like the entire founding story of the company is that for anyone with a brain that has an engineering background, you don't believe you have to make that choice. That's a false choice. We can do both of these things. You know, there's all sorts of critiques that you can make that, you know, I would critique myself for in the role that I was in at Palantir as well, is like, maybe we didn't do a good enough job telling the story. Maybe we tried to be a little bit too secretive. Maybe we could have, like, been more out and, you know, showing people what it is that we were doing. Obviously, there's limitations to that working with the intelligence community.

But you know, if we hadn't done it, it's not like it wouldn't have happened. It would have just been done by Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics or Booz Allen Hamilton or Deloitte much less well and with less thought put into the protection of privacy and civil liberties. So, you know, a lot of this just comes down to storytelling, I think. So you're at Palantir. You believe in it before you're even before you even work in there. You know, back when you were in intelligence, you spent six years there. And then you go into venture capital with with Peter Thiel. knowing nothing about finance or VC.

I mean, what, was it Peter? Is that who you believed in? Why did you make that transition? Yeah, you know, when Peter first asked me to do it, he asked if I could go and... up with the leadership of the fund. And I remember sitting down with Lauren Gross, who's the COO of Founders Fund. And, you know, we're having breakfast together. And she kind of looks at me and she's like, why are you interested in venture capital? And I'm like, oh, no, you misunderstand. I'm not. I'm not interested in venture capital. I'm doing this because Peter asked me to. And I can't even imagine what the internal conversations were at Founders Fund coming out of this interview process where people were like, wait a second, this guy doesn't even want to work here. Why are we interviewing someone that doesn't want a job?

And so, you know, it was kind of a weird, like 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, you know, he's the co-founder of the company I'm working at. It's like, I don't know, is this an opportunity or is it an order? Is it some combination of both? Am I being like, fired from Palantir 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 yeah, it was a weird transition for sure. Did you like venture capital? Yeah. I mean, I love what I do. I feel very blessed to have this really cool job where I get to learn about everything. This is like the beauty of VC as a job is that we're just going and interacting with the most interesting, most passionate people in the world who 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 like an experiment and curiosity. So was that what you were doing? Were you looking for founders that you wanted to invest in? Yeah, it's still a big part of my day to day. You know, we just have pitch meetings. My first year at Founder Sun, I did 500, just over 500 pitch meetings, which is a lot. Wow. You know, I've ratcheted that down a bit. I have a better sense for the types of things that are 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? I mean, when you're looking for a founder that you want to invest in, what is it?

does it for you what is yeah looking for well you know this is this is probably like the most common question that vcs are asked because i think people really want to believe that there's a rubric that there's like some sort of table and i in the meeting i've just got the table out and i'm like checking off like do they have this trait do they have this trait in reality it doesn't really work like that um there's something like that's way more gut and intuition based um where you know 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. Like there's something really vibrant about this person.

There's something that's super differentiated about this person. Peter wrote a book called Zero to One. In the book, he said that, you know, we're all drawn into mimesis. And so like most normies are they're just aping what everyone else is doing and so they're you know they want to be like the uber for x or something like that um but the really generational transformative founders are the people who aren't tied into you know 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 you know uh steve jobs or mark zuckerberg or elon musk like these are like sort of weird people And, you know, they're maybe somewhere on the autism spectrum.

And that kind of acts as their superpower because they're not actually concerned about what other people think about them. And that ends up being a tremendous unlock. So we're really looking for people like that, where you meet them and instantly you're like, okay, this person is not just trying to be like a cool kid from their business school class. There's something else to it. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. What are some of the most successful founders that you've invested in? Who are they? I mean, Founders Fund has an incredible track record. We were the first investor in Facebook, in SpaceX, in Airbnb, in Stripe, Andurl, Palantir.

We've been kind of 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'll bet, man. There's been some awesome stuff that has come out of that. Yeah. This is – I mean, the history of the PayPal mafia is – Truly incredible. Like, if you think about this one company ended up kind of seeding, either as investor or founder, most of the companies that we think of today as being kind of definitional of the tech success story in America. And it just all started with, you know, one group of people starting one company. BetMGM has a new exclusive, Game of Thrones.

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Then I met Palmer. Their Founders Fund. Mm-hmm. How did you guys meet? We were the first institutional investor in Oculus. So he had started this virtual reality company, ended up getting acquired by Meta for a couple billion dollars. And 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, when he was, right after Meta was acquired, he moved or got a house in Woodside, which is really close to Facebook's headquarters.

And he drained his swimming pool and he was building a ramjet in his swimming pool in Woodside. And so he and I had talked about that a couple of times. And when I had this idea for Anderil, he was the first person I went to. And I just said, like, hear me out. What if we started a next generation defense prime? And he was like, oh, man, I'm doing this VR thing. I'm super passionate about this, but I don't know that I'm ever going to do anything other than VR. And that obviously only lasted until he got fired for his politics. And then he was right back on the Andrews story with me. Right on. Was he always out there?

Board shorts? Mismatched 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 you know he was a teenager starting oculus money success fame has not changed him good i love that i love that all right and real quick i gotta hear some quirky palmer stories let's hear it yeah no i mean he is he is such an interesting person um you know i could i could spend all day talking about this uh in the early days of andrel he and i would travel to dc a lot together and uh You know, 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? And he would just be like, oh, I've got it. It's my cargo shorts. And he'd have, like, his toothbrush and a stick of deodorant in one of his cargo pockets, and he'd have, like, two days' worth of clothes in his other cargo pocket. And, you know, he's sitting in, like, the middle seat in economy at the back of the plane. It has taken us years to get him to the point where he's just like happy to do things in a way that keep him safe. It's been a real struggle. One of the other fun, he's a huge gearhead. He loves cars. He has a ton of cars.

Most of them don't work, which is a constant thorn at his side. But, you know, I'm a huge Aston Martin fan. As I mentioned before, I love James Bond. And so, you know, 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. And, you know, I think 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 um so yeah he's he's always super super entertaining he's an animated character there's no doubt about that at his wedding there was like this entire contingent of like japanese anime people that like in the industry that were like palmer like zealots and they were they showed up with like custom vinyl figurines of him and his wife i mean it was like holy he's like this weird celebrity in the anime scene oh man that's super super fun Could not be a quirkier and yet smarter person.

He's just the perfect combination. What kind of 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 Soldier Born Compute, like building the helmet, that I think it's consuming all of his creative energy. It's the perfect thing for him. It's, you know, seven years into Andrel, he finally gets to return to his roots and work on the thing, you know, giving our soldiers superpowers. And it has to just be the most fun for him of anything that we've done. That is pretty cool, man. That is pretty cool. So I got a quote from you here that says, you said the tech at your government desk was worse than what you had in your college dorm.

What did you mean by that? Well, yeah, you know, the day I showed up, I think I had expected that there was going to be some, like, James Bond moment. Like, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to have this supercomputer and someone's going to, like, throw me the keys to an Aston Martin. That's what I thought. Like a laser watch and things like that. And I sat down and I had Windows 98 and a CRT monitor. And I was in a cube with two other people who, like, didn't actually work. They just, like, talked about, you know, 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 Palantir story. Like, you know, finding out that there was – it wasn't that there weren't people that cared about this. It was that they didn't have a seat at the table. You know, like, you know, the standard way for getting software tooling historically, or at least post-Cold War, has been, you know, you put out an RFP and all the defense primes, they all bid on it. They present white papers, they say how many heads it would take for them to write the code and then they get hired on a cost plus basis where they're reimbursed for the hourly labor with some 7% to 12% margin attached to the top of it and then they get their special back badges and they walk in every day and they sit at their desks and, you know, they have no incentive to move fast because they get a margin on top of every hour that they work. And it would be crazy to believe that we're employing our best and brightest in these roles, especially like going into the 2000s, you know, our best and brightest, they can make a lot more money working at Google,

bringing their dog to work, getting free food. Like, why are they going to go sit in the concrete basement in the D.C. area getting crapped on by bureaucrats and just like punch card checking in, checking out for work. And that just seemed like the whole incentive structure was broken. And so I didn't do it because I was like, man, I really want to be like a tech entrepreneur. I did it because I thought it was the right thing for the country. That's cool to hear. That's cool to to develop at andrel well i mean we have this uh this pitch deck like a very bad google slides deck that we use to recruit our first 12 uh hires and one of the slides in that is like a list of things that we wanted to build we didn't know which thing would be the first thing that we wanted to build but we had this list and it was kind of cool like earlier this year i opened up the slide deck in my Google Drive. And it turns out that we've built, like, almost all of them.

No kidding. Yeah. And it wasn't, like, intentional, like, okay, let's go back to the deck and do the next one. It was just kind of organically how it unfolded. So, really, the first approach that

I mean, how fast, I mean, 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, no, it's a good question. I mean, as far as like doing things at limited scale, like, you know, we can ramp pretty quickly into the limited rate production on all of these. I think, you know, the example of Century Tower, I mean, within a year of the company starting, we were rolling these things out in production. With Roadrunner, I think it was like 18 months from the beginning of that program until we were delivering units into the field. And this is for a reusable cruise missile. I mean, this is 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. Like, how do you go from building hundreds of things or single digit thousands of things to building tens of thousands of things? And I think the name of the game in this autonomous future for national security is what we would call a tritable mass, which is like, are we building $15 billion aircraft carriers, $300 million-dollar 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 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 um and uh it's a new muscle for the business kind of in the same way that you know tesla went from building the roadster to building you know the gigafactory and starting to to sell hundreds of thousands and millions of cars how big is the is the manufacturing facility in ohio going to be yeah i mean long term it will be around five million square feet um the the first building is going to be just under a million square feet, and that will be up and running.

in the first, late first quarter of 2026. So moving pretty fast. Congratulations. Thanks, yeah. That's awesome. It's sort of a weird homecoming for me. It's like, I left Ohio and now I'm going back and, you know, working on this crazy factory. Got to bring my mom to the ribbon cutting ceremony, which was pretty cool. Dude, I mean, she's gotta be just so proud, you know, to see how far you've come, you know, in life and with whatever thing you're doing now, what's that feel like for you to be able to bring your mom to that facility? Yeah, no, it's really cool. I mean, I was talking, I just spent some time with her this weekend back home and I was talking to her about like what our family, like our family story has been in Ohio.

And she was kind of going through the list of all of these factory jobs that my family had had. It was like my grandfather worked at, one of them worked at Frigidaire, one of them worked at NCR, National Cash Register. I had an uncle who worked at Ford. Another one of my grandfathers worked at General Motors. I have an aunt that works in eyeglass manufacturing. And I started kind of searching around when I was sitting there with my mom. And every single one of these factories is no longer there. Like our industrial capacity that was kind of the heart of, you know, Ohio's economy for so long completely collapsed.

And that was the story of my family. I mean, that was it. And so more than just, like, coming back and being like, hey, mom, look, I'm doing this cool thing and we're doing it in Ohio. It's really about, like, reinvigorating this family story. Like, we need to bring production back to America. And it's very cool to be part of bringing that back to my family story in addition to just doing it at a more macro level. How are you guys – I mean, how is Endural finding the people that have the skills to do this? Because, I mean, it's been so long since we were, you know, in production and manufacturing.

Yeah. I mean, how long has it been? It's been at least 20 years. Yeah. I mean, all this sort of started falling apart, I guess, when I was in high school, which was like 20 years ago. You know, all the steel production left Ohio. They're huge steel companies in Ohio. Armco is, I think, the biggest employer in Middletown, where JD is from. and you know none of that is there anymore. My uncle worked at Mound Steel which was another big steel producer in southwest Ohio. It's no longer there. So, you know, I think there's definitely still skilled labor around. There's a big Honda factory on the west side of Columbus, Intel 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 kind of the, you know, industrial blood in the water. But, you know, some of it will be, you know, reskilling people and, you know, bringing more of that back through education, through continuing education programs. You know, kind of the craziest thing to me about the way that we've been approaching this for the last decade is that, like, the government could not have gotten this more wrong. Like, if you go back to Obama and you look at the, like, upskilling programs that they were doing, it was all software development. They were, like, running, you know, coding boot camps, teaching people how to write code.

What's the first job that's going to be replaced by AI? Coding. That's, like, that is the thing that is going to be hit the hardest at, like, mid-tier, lower-tier, mid-tier software developers. Like, we should have been training people to build stuff. like we have to re-industrialize this is like absolutely critical for our country and we just totally you know 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 will that eventually become an ai manufacturing facility well i mean we're going to implement all sorts of technology in our production system like there will be autonomy there will be robotics all of that is absolutely true but we're also going to employ thousands of people that you need to be able to do that. If you're building up like a simple, you know, simple, I use very loosely, but if you're going to set up like an assembly line for something that's going to be produced over and over again, certainly you could like build in entire steps of that that can be purely automated. And, you know, this is what companies like Tesla have done significantly better than the traditional automakers. But you also have a bunch of people

involved and you're constantly moving things around you know like the government isn't just going to have an insatiable demand for any single one of our products we're going to have to make the factory modular enough that we can be responsive to the needs of the warfighter And so sometimes the factory might be pumping out Autonomous Fury fighter planes. At other times, it might be pumping out roadrunners. At other times, it might be pumping out barracudas. And so moving that around, reconfiguring the space so that we can meet those production demands. There's going to be a lot of people involved with that.

So the production facility will do one product at a time? Well, I mean, the idea is that it will be modular and flexible. And so, you know, we can reset things to, you know, rebuild these lines that enable us to scale. The Ukraine story is a great example here. So, you know, despite what most people think, the supply that the United States was giving to Ukraine was mostly Cold War era technology, javelins, stingers, things like that. These things were built in like the 60s and the 70s. And when we 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' 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 like are you building something that's like a frankenstein that has to do everything well i'm sure you've heard stories about the f-35 which is like when you're building a joint strike fighter that you're going out to every one of the services and you're saying marine corps what do you need air force what do you need navy what do you need and then you're building that aircraft that meets the needs of all those services well you end up with a $300 million airplane.

Norm Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin, sort of tongue in cheek said, I think it was 2050, was his market said, in 2050, the entire defense budget will buy exactly one airplane. Like, that's basically the track that we're on. We're on this track that we're building these overly complicated things. Yeah, they're actually. pretty awesome, like the capabilities of the F-35, pretty awesome, the 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 like over the horizon, totally new technology that changes, you know, 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. Gotcha. Gotcha. 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. BetMGM has a new exclusive, Game of Thrones. Download the app and unleash a new realm of thrills when you sign up for a BetMGM casino account.

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I'm super excited to announce a project that I've been working on. I partnered with Ironclad for their newest original series, Target Intelligence, Psy-Up. 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 prologue buy it today it's psyopshow.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 operations, psyops.

What if it's all designed for you? Find out who's really pulling the strings. I'm Sean Ryan, and this is Target Intelligence Psy-Op, an ironclad original. In this eight-part audio experience, we uncover the ghosts in the machine. buy it today at psyopshow.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 i have a clay target uh range at my house in new mexico and i you know i grew up with a hunting dad so we would we would shoot in our backyard all the time well shooting clay pigeons doesn't have anything to do with pistol you did pretty damn good i was impressed much appreciated nice work man that's fun but um yeah so i know we were getting ready to talk about the helmet that you guys are making yep but um but we had some we went down some rabbit holes there on the break so about getting into college was the first one yep so you you got rejected from sounds like just about everywhere you applied i probably I should have dug into that a little bit more, and then you enlightened me on the break.

So why did you get rejected? I mean, you're making good grades, obviously bored because you're ahead of your class, graduated top of the class. What is going on? Yeah, I mean, at the time, it was really mysterious. I genuinely had no idea what was going on. You know, I feel like growing up, everyone just kind of told me, you can do whatever you want. you can go to school wherever you want like you know sky's the limit go and do whatever it is and uh yeah i got a bunch of skinny envelopes back um in early april my senior year and I was kind of like 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. You know, 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. And she broke up with me the same day that I rejected all these colleges. And so 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.

And 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, you know, a week later, I hopped on a plane and flew out to D.C. And I, you know, posted up in front of the admissions department, demanded to see the dean of admissions. And as the story goes, it's like I camped out. I didn't really camp out. I was only there for about an hour before they were like, OK, we'll hear your case. And I went in and dumped out a backpack full of recommendation letters. And I remember specifically what the dean said. He said, you know, son, there are cracks in the meritocracy.

and you know it's not it's not as simple as you know you get good grades you play varsity sports you do whatever it's like there's there's more to it than that and it turns out that a lot of this started coming out in research years after I graduated there was a Princeton study from 2009 that basically showed that the most underrepresented demographic in college admissions is poor white kids and it's like completely under the radar no one would expect that this would be the thing obviously but you know there's it adds nothing to the demographic of the university the university has to there's no cost for them to pay in relationships with guidance counselors they get nothing from you know bringing on another man or bringing on another white kid and so it's the easiest possible rejection you know like all these top tier universities they have this stat of how many valedictorians they deny admissions to. It's just like a bunch of public school white kids that are getting denied. And with the kind of reframing 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 like a tiny increase in acceptance rate for white kids. It was actually the Asian American population that realized like 80% of the growth under that demographic shift. And so, you know, I think this is kind of what JD talks about in Hillbilly Elegy as well. It's like, you know, the rural white communities were just decimated and they were left out of the American project. Is that getting better now or? I actually don't think so. I think that like lower low socioeconomic status white communities in America are just like it's not on the radar of most of the people that are, you know, thinking about trying to, you know, bring people out of poverty.

Um, and every, 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, there's no credit that's given in the, in the emissions process. Um, now to Georgetown's credit, they let me in, which is crazy that I pulled this stunt and ended up going to Georgetown. But, you know, I think like looking back on that, that was 2002, 23 years ago. Like it was almost like you could predict the rise of the populist movement in America. It was like, you could have known in 2002 that something is, something's not going right. That, that this is like a core problem. I mean, what do you think that has done to the country? Well, I think it's led to these disenfranchised populations where I grew up in Ohio, as we've already talked about, it was just gutted by globalization, by the de-industrialization of the Midwest. And these communities were totally left behind. And then they got caught up in the opioid epidemic and economic collapse. And that's ultimately the community that drove the populism movement that led to Trump's election.

And, you know, I think J.D. becoming the vice president is very much part of that story. like he's he's very aware of you know how this how this all happened i mean thank you for sharing that what i kind of meant is you know with with with poor white kids getting denied university who deserve to be there i mean what i mean you know now there's a lot of people and you know that say that you know is college even necessary at this point if you're not going into you know some type of a specialized occupation, a lot of people don't think it's worth it. I've had a lot of, you know, your types on here, tech innovators, but most of them, most of them, I think, did not go to school, you know, and started innovating right out. I mean, I think that doesn't founders fund kind of encourage that? Well, Peter has the Teal Fellowship where he pays people to drop out of college yeah so yeah that's what i that's what i that's what i meant but um so i mean you know what what do you think this has done to you know the workforce to to schools to the you know to to people's sentiment about going to college i mean by by starving poor white kids the opportunity of education yeah i mean there there's a bunch of you know issues in society that are driven

primarily around what was fundamentally a boomer problem. Like the boomers basically convinced all of their children that that was the path, that like they needed to go to college. That was how you became successful. But there's not like a bunch of white collar jobs that require, you know, liberal arts degrees from, you know, four-year regional universities. And so I think that you had this, all these people taking on tremendous amount of student debt and then they graduate and they realize that 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 re-industrialize. And, you know, we as a country need to come together around this idea that there are multiple paths to career fulfillment. It doesn't all go through four-year universities. And the four-year university story didn't really even work anyway. It was like it was just kind of a racket.

It's insane. expensive now. I mean, 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. And 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. I mean, do you think that's true?

Do you think that's 100% true? Or is that in and around bigger cities? I mean, I bet if we go to where you grew up in Ohio or where I grew up in Missouri, there is plenty of affordable housing. 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 is that the jobs are not they're not remaining in those communities yeah now there are some exceptions there are high growth you know suburban environments in america uh you know the surroundings of nashville are you know probably some of the best in the country um but you know i don't think i don't think that applies to everywhere you know ohio did not have that story for a very long time Yeah. Bentonville, Arkansas, that's another one that's going nuts.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I love company towns. I think company towns are amazing. I wish we had more of them. What Walmart has done in Bentonville is incredible. I would love to see other major companies set up their headquarters in places that are not, you know, part of the current economic growth story in America and see if they can build old company towns as well. that'd be really cool well i mean what do you think you know back to the college stuff i mean where do you think this goes do you think is do you think that four-year universities are kind of becoming obsolete Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that they're, I wouldn't say they're obsolete, but they're highly specialized. And for some things that you might do, you kind of need to have the academic background to do it. Not everything, but for some things, that is a really important thing for people to do. The like traditional kind of liberal arts education, I think it's much harder to make the argument that, you know, people should be going into $300,000 of debt to do that. We just need to have an aspirational path for vocations that don't require that. And 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. I want my kids, when they're graduating high school, I don't want them to feel like they have to go to like an ivy league school like i'm okay if they don't do that i'm okay if they decide they want to be chefs or artists or whatever like there's society is larger than just you know desk jobs yeah white collar desk jobs you had some uh we were kind of talking about a little bit about the attack on the fine 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 kind of 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. And man, it was really dystopian. You go into these weird relationships and you can dress the avatars and, you know, lingerie 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 like kind of

the best use case for LLMs is that it can just keep a conversation going forever and ever and ever. And I think as a society, we've been moving away from kind of traditional pairing, the way that we've, people have gotten into relationships historically, which kind of worked in local communities. It was like, you know, 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, like people were able to pair off and build families. But today, like the whole online dating trend has shifted that massively, where you're no longer looking at local communities, it's more of like a local maxima.

Like within 30 minutes or 45 minutes of where I live, what are the options? And it's like paralysis by analysis. Like, you know, people are like, oh, there's always more fish in the sea. I can always go on more dates. There's always, you know, more people out there that I need to meet before I settle down. And what's ended up happening on these online dating apps is that, you know, a tiny percentage, I'll speak specifically about men, a tiny percentage of men get the majority, the vast majority even, 80 plus percent of matches go to like a tiny percentage of generally like over six foot two, you know, very physically attractive. It's hard to convey personality traits.

in a way that would have mattered in local communities. And the sadder part about this is that the bottom 50% of men on dating apps get literally zero matches. No shit. Zero. There's no matching that's happening. And I think like ultimately what that leads to is that you have all these people that are, you know, unsatisfied in their jobs, unsatisfied in their, you know, their relational life, and they become the powder keg of civilization. You kind of create a class of incels that feels like they don't fit in. And I think we, as a technology community, have to take some ownership for this reality that we've given a whole chunk of society tools to enable these behaviors that lead to them being unhappy.

And I think AI companions are like that in a supercharged way, where now it's like, oh, I don't need to go through the stresses and difficulties of relationship. I can just, you know, have a companion that's always there that will never say anything negative. It's just going to be my own little world, and they're going to validate what I say. And sometimes the things that they validate end up being violent, whether it's suicide in the worst cases or school shootings or, you know, whatever else. Man, how common is this? I think it's going to become more and more common. You know, I think we've seen in recent years that there is a big shift.

Towards singleness, that there's just not as many people that are getting married, or they're getting married much later. And obviously, when you get married much later, you have fewer kids, you know, there's like, struggle down impacts of this. But like, you know, from a societal political perspective, in 50 years, if these trends continue, like, America is a totally different place. Yeah, you know, being a tech guy and you have two kids yourself, I mean, this is something that me and my wife go back and forth with all the time is, you know, we're trying, I mean, porn, you know, so, I mean, it's so easy to access now social media, all the predators and all the, you know, shit trying to lure kids in sexually through social media platforms.

I mean, you know, my friend Brian Montgomery says it best when you give your kid a phone, you're not giving your kid access to the world, you're giving the world access to your kid. And so, you know, a discussion that happens at my house a lot is, you know, 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 it's i feel like you know me personally you need to you need to protect your kid you know from the world and the access that they're that they're going to get with some of the technology on the other hand it's like shit i mean you can't shelter him too much because then he's going to fall behind because the whole world is heading this way it's already here and so i'm curious you know and and you know i don't know if you want to say the ages of your kids or not, but they're older than toddlers. And so how do you handle that with your wife? Yeah, I mean, we try to be really thoughtful about this. Our kids are 10 and 12. Our sort of 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, like 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. And so I think that's kind of our policy with our kids is to try to keep them in that zone for as long as we can. So no smartphones. No smartphones. I mean, they don't even- have an apple watch yet which i think is you're starting to see that kind of happen with kids in that range where their parents don't want them to have access to social media but they want them you know to be reachable textable callable we haven't even done that um like you know they haven't demonstrated that they need it and um you know you can see all sorts of sort of questionable behaviors that happen with kids when they you know eight years old when they're the way that They use their iPads even.

It's like, wow, these things are super addictive. And you can see it in kids in a kind of a supercharged way. 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 audio book 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 hours of content about peer pressure and social media and pornography and, you know, the sex education. We do the whole thing. And so I just did that two weekends ago with my youngest who just turned 10. And, you know, 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'd much rather you learn it from me when you learn it from your friends. And we start trying to teach them through open dialogue about, you know, these important topics that have the potential to literally ruin your life.

Yeah. What book is that? What book do you? We use 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 it's i mean it's kind of corny at times but it's it's really good i mean it's got to be right for kids yeah i mean yeah maybe it's not for kids but no no it's very much for 10 year old kids that's like that's the framing yeah so they don't have no no tablet they have an ipad but the ipad is for travel okay when we're on an airplane or something like that they don't have like day-to-day privileges to screens when do you think you'll give it to them our oldest the 12 year old is using a laptop for school Now, um, but he's not playing games or anything on his laptop. He's just using it for school. Um, I mean, I don't know the exact answer to the question, but the like kind of dodging answer is I'm going to hold out as long as possible.

Yeah. Are you getting any pushback yet? A little bit, but I think they also understand and appreciate how it's not good. I mean, I'll even, you know, I'll hear my kids say things like, why are you using your phone? Like they want me to put my phone away too. And, uh, and I, it's a good reminder like yeah if i'm gonna have this rule that i believe that you shouldn't have it because it's bad for your brain like yeah i'm not i'm not immune to that same critique it's probably bad for my brain too man that's interesting you know i mean so you so you have like you have like no fear that your kids will miss out on you know on that they'll be behind by not having a smartphone what are they going to miss out on i don't know you know what i mean just Like iOS or, you know, Windows back in the day.

I mean, just knowing how to use it. Oh, no. I mean, they're tech native. I mean, kids today, like, you know, you hand them an iPad and they just intuitively know how to use it. It's like, I don't have to teach them how to do it. They're using laptops at school. They know how to type. They can navigate a, you know, Mac OS. They're fine. They're going to be fine. But like, I can't think of any positive things that they're missing out on by not having an iphone in their pocket yeah yeah i love hearing it i love hearing that but uh and then it's tough if you don't have like the other parents at the school aren't on the same page it can become highly problematic socially well see that's what i mean are you do you have that experience are most of the parents like on the same they're on the same page at the school that my kids go to like you know kids are not walking around with their smartphones at 12. that's like the first time i've heard that it seems like everybody just it's like here you go here's the babysitter here's a phone you know yeah we haven't had that problem yet but you know good for you man yeah i walked in in the middle of the conversation with you and jeremy you were talking about you know how

you know historically how society's collapsed it was you're talking about 20 year olds and where were you going with that yeah basically every collapsed civilization in human history has been driven by underemployed, unhappy, single men in their 20s. That's like, that is the powder keg of civilization. And, you know, for centuries, we actually did a pretty good job with this. America. Like, you know, there was, there was always work and there was, you know, we were doing a pretty good job with, with pushing the family, but we're in this really weird window now where, you know, it is very common to see people disaffected, disengaged, unhappy in their twenties. And I think any like 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. And we need to figure out ways to get them into productive, personal, human relationships with other people. How do you think we do that? I mean, you know, the really kind of cliche answer to this that sounds like a very me answer is go to church. Just got to go to church. Like, it's a great community. There are people that you have values alignment with. They're going to hold you accountable. Like, you know, the church as an institution has been, you know, a bulwark for this for thousands of years.

And I don't think it's any different today than it was in 100 AD. Man, I just, I think the messaging has to change. You know, I mean, it's just, it's time and time again. It seems like, you know, we're teaching people just to become victims. You know, that's what I see. You know, it's, I mean, I kind of disagree with, I think you can buy a house. early on you just you know you can't buy a house in nashville you know what i mean or san francisco yeah or san francisco but i think there are plenty of places to buy a house and remote working has become huge you know i know it's shrinking uh a little bit i don't like remote work but i'm not clear that works but yeah but uh but you know what i mean and and but i think i don't i think like the messaging has to change you have to empower people and tell them like 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 know you're the co-founder of andrew and and you know i think that i think that's inspiring i think that inspires a lot of people and it's it's a very different you know messaging than what most people see it's it's yeah i think

be ashamed of who you are you know totally you were a slave owner you're a victim of slavery year you know what i mean and it's like dude this like what the are we doing here like you have to empower these people our people, Americans, and ingrain it into their head that like, you know, this is the best country in the world. This is, you know, the American dream still is very achievable. And I'm a testament to that. You're a testament to that. A lot of the people that work here are a testament to that. I mean, a lot of the people on the show have been a testament to that. And, you know, but just like time and time again it's like these it's like they're being taught to lose right well there's a loss of personal agency where i feel like this isn't just true of america it's true of western civilization writ large is that no one believes in the great man theory of history anymore it's like almost cancelable to talk about it where like people matter like individuals are driving things for it and this is why founder's fund is called founder's fund is we invest in people I don't want to hear a bunch of disconnected business ideas from, you know, nameless, faceless groups.

I just I want to meet the people. And that's what we're investing in. And you can look at like Europe as the, you know, 10 year forward future of like wherever culture is going. And like you look at the the bills in the EU. They're just buildings. There's like there aren't even faces of people on the currency in the EU anymore. Like at least the American currency still has the faces of presidents on it. It's like we still believe that, like, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and, you know, whoever, like, we believe that there were great men in history that made a difference. But I think that we're slipping, you know, perilously into this trap of victimhood and just believing that, like, you know, 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? Or do you think we might get on the right path here? Europe is a fucking disaster. Europe is a disaster. I'm hopeful. Like, I feel like there is a bit of an awakening where people are realizing that these lies that they've been told are not productive. But, you know, I think time will tell and it's going to be a tough road to get back on track. But it is a project worth going down. Yeah, yeah. betmgm has a new exclusive game of thrones download the app and unleash a new realm of thrills when you sign up for a betmgm casino account betmgm and game sense remind you to play responsibly and offer resources to help you make a corporate choices. BetMDM.com for tees and seeds. 21 and over to wager. Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia only. Games may vary by market. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. Rewards issued as non-withdrawable site credit bonus bets unless otherwise provided in applicable terms. Rewards subject to expiry. Gambling problem?

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He was all excited about it. I think he used this to actually launch the announcement. 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, like, 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 and virtual reality to put it on the heads of a soldier that's putting their lives at risk. But, you know, he got to the point within the last 24 months where he thought, man, we could really do this. Now, there's a program that already existed inside of the Pentagon called IVAS, which was a contract owned by Microsoft, actually.

And we went out and we acquired the Microsoft division that was doing the iVest program. And so we're now working on this kind of with the team that has been iterating on versions for a while. We've taken wildly different directions in a couple of places. We've partnered with Meta, which was kind of a coming home for Palmer, which was cool to see Zuck and Palmer kind of make up and be friends again. and also working with companies like Oakley. 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. I mean, will we see it this year? I 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 kind of like left behind, which I hate seeing.

We were talking about equipment, you know what I mean, in my time in the SEAL teams. And, you know, I had everything I needed to be a successful operator. But then I would see these conventional guys running around in this. I just felt so fucking bad. Totally. It's funny, but it's not. I mean, these guys couldn't even fucking move. Right. And so I would take my kid, like, here, take this. I'll go get a new one. You know, and so to see, you know, 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 Ops, which I loved.

And then, you know, so the helmet, you know, the question is, is it still going to be military-wide? Totally, yeah, that's the plan. You know, the program is about soldier-borne compute. And so, you know, there might be variants of this that are relevant for different pockets, but, like, every soldier is going to, in modern warfare, every soldier is going to need compute. They're going to need some way of controlling assets that are autonomous. They're going to need some way of interacting with the battle space from a command and control perspective. They're going to want that heads-up display that gives them kind of superhuman vision into the environment they're operating in.

And the idea is like you can make this inexpensive enough that you can deploy it broadly across the entire service. So that is the idea. How are you guys coming up with these ideas? I mean, who are you using as advisors on stuff like this? I mean, it's always about the warfighter. Everything goes back to the guys at the end of the chain that are. doing the jobs. And so we have an enormous percentage of Anduril employees have military and intelligence service. And so we're going out and recruiting directly from the people that we're serving as customers. And we also are very tied in to the communities that we're serving, you know, as contractors. And so we spend a lot of time in D.C. We spend a lot of time downrange with the users. And that all feeds back into our innovation engine internally. Damn, that's awesome. What are you most excited about at Anduril? I think FURI, the collaborative combat aircraft program, kind of 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 counter error 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 Anduril is that our value add is speed. And so So, you know, we want to be able to iterate quickly as we see the threats changing in the field. Can you talk about the fighter plane a little bit or is that all? Yeah. So it's called the collaborative combat aircraft.

So the idea is that you have a manned aircraft like an F-22 or an F-35, and the pilot can basically command a bunch of smaller aircraft that fly around it to go and conduct different missions. So you extend sensor range, you extend shooter range, you basically can create a network around that manned aircraft to do the job at significantly lower cost and at no risk to human life. And this is a concept that has been batted around the Air Force for a long time. And, you know, we're really excited to be partnering with them on delivering that. and that will be the first things that we build out of the arsenal factory in ohio as well as we'll start rolling the the fury aircraft off the line so the fury aircraft will it will be manned no it's unmanned it's unmanned yep but it'll have its own fleet of smaller it is an autonomous wingman.

to a manned aircraft okay so that would be those these are the autonomous aircraft around the manned aircraft that's right how many will how many like how many aircraft are we talking how big is the fleet um i i mean you could you could control a bunch of them you could control you know dozens uh if 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 um but it's basically the it's a science fiction novel and the idea is there's this guy, Ender Wiggins, who is effectively controlling an entire alien battle from a bunker, where he's just there and he's giving commands. And the starfighters and stuff like that are all operating autonomously in the battle space. And he's like a conductor of an orchestra. You can kind of think about that as where we think that the next generation of autonomy is going is that you're going to have orchestra conductors and they'll be, you know, sending these things out on missions to go and do things rather than, you know, flying themselves directly into harm's way.

Man, that's interesting. And you can imagine this in every domain. It's not just air, but, you know, you can imagine this on service vessels with submarines, with ground vehicles, like we're moving in that direction with these charitable assets. I mean, what does the future of warfare look like for you in your mind? I mean, are we going all autonomous? Are humans becoming obsolete? I ask all of you guys this. Yeah. Well, no, I don't think humans are obsolete. Like there is a human in the loop that is accountable for the decisions that are being made. You know, one of the things that comes up frequently when you start talking about autonomy is this idea of like full autonomy versus human in the loop autonomy, which is like the idea that when you're about to make a, you know, a lethal decision, like there has to be a human that like hits the button that says do it.

But that hasn't been the case for decades already. There's CWIS, the close-in weapon system that is on naval vessels. It automatically engages with threats, aerial threats, to the naval service vessels. There's no human directing the cannon as it's shooting at things and shooting them out of the sky. In fact, there can't be because the entire challenge that it's facing is moving at superhuman speeds to eliminate threats. But there should be. A human that's accountable for these decisions, there's someone somewhere that you're going to be able to shake a stick at and say, this robot did something that it shouldn't have done.

And it's your responsibility to know what mission you've set the robot off to do. And so I think that we're really moving in the direction of more autonomy that is engaging with fewer of these manned exquisite platforms that are very expensive. But there will be people that are making the decisions about how those missions are conducted, 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 decision makers somewhere else. But I mean, how long do you think it is before the entire battlefield is autonomous?

us? Yeah, I mean, so much of this is probably driven by geopolitical realities rather than, you know, hard technical realities. If we were to enter into like a major global conflict with a near-peer foreign adversary, like we would probably try to accelerate to that much more quickly. But if we're kind of lulled into complacency by, you know, the false narrative of stability, global stability, then we're not going to feel much of an incentive to move in that direction anytime soon. So I think it just really depends. The humanoid robotics, I think, are kind of the thing that comes up most when people think about the autonomous battlefield.

It's like, are you going to have a bunch of Tesla optimist robots running around with firearms shooting at each other? Like, I don't know, maybe on some timeline there could be something like that that's happening. But in the near term, I think it's like assisted like by humans operating in theater, in the field. Gotcha. With robots and support. Gotcha. I mean, do you have any fears about AI in the battle space? I mean, look, humans make a lot of bad decisions. Yes, they do. Like, you know, a super immature, you know, 18 year old with, you know, six months of training is not necessarily going to make better decisions than a robot from an ethics perspective.

And so, of course, like, you know, I want. these things to be conducted in the the most just way possible um but humans make this they make bad decisions as well um do i think that there's some imminent threat like existential threat of you know ai destroying human civilization no i don't i don't think that's that's really on the near-term horizon what what kind of lessons are you guys learning from ukraine russia yeah Yeah, you know, the airspace is probably the most interesting kind of foreshadowing of future conflict because the Russians are doing a really good job of denying GPS and messing with communications signals.

So you've seen like crazy tactics like the use of fiber optic cables to drones. I don't know if you've seen any of this. Yeah, I've heard of it. Yeah, they're literally drones towing like, you know, a mile of fiber optic cable so that they're they're wired and they can't be interfered with by by the electronic warfare stuff. So there's a lot of back and forth, you know, trying to keep ahead of your opponent in in how you're approaching airspace. And I think that's like that will be a huge part of getting this right in the future is that we need we need our aircraft to have the ability to operate without comms connections.

You can't rely on GPS. You can't rely on remote piloting. You need to actually be able to dead reckon or 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 kind of place for us to learn. And we obviously believe it's really important to, you know, supply equipment via the allies and partners that are doing work there with the Ukrainians. I mean, what does it feel like to see the equipment that you're building out there?

um i mean this is why we started the company um you know the the purpose is to uh be relevant and to be active um and i i think part of that is building the engine for the united states uh which is you know the vast majority of our business is building that engine for them um but you know the u.s government makes policy level decisions about where we We send our equipment to be helpful to our partners abroad, and we're really honored to be part of that. What's your biggest concern in the world right now? I mean, China is a huge risk, not only militarily, but also economically. And I don't think we're taking that quite seriously enough.

I think there's a political understanding of that. But it's not clear to me that there's like a level of seriousness to actually do the things that are required to reduce that risk across both of those two dimensions. What do you think the things that are required to reduce that risk are? Well, I mean, there's like the kind of impacts of Belt and Road where you have, you know, natural resources, production, you know, all of the things that are kind of economic drivers for growth in China that have been stripped out of the United States that we have to figure out some way to bring back. Like, do we actually have the ability to, you know, 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, you know, Xi has been very explicit that, you know, he intends to reunify China. And Taiwan has, like, a ticking timeline of 2027. Now, is he going to move by 2027? Like, I don't know. It depends on how seriously you take him at his word. But there's, you know, a lot of risk, particularly if you think about, like, even just semiconductors as, you know, an important part of our technology ecosystem. Like, if, you know, China takes Taiwan and shuts down our access to TSMC, like, that's a huge problem for the U.S. economy. So we really need to, like, think through all of that.

But, you know, the Chinese have they have a different they have a different cultural history than we do. And when you try to frame their actions through like a Western understanding of the world, you reach very different conclusions than they reach. Like, you know, Western history is, you know, be open about your strength. And, you know, this is where the piece of strength came thing came from. It's like we're going to tell people what we have and why we're strong and that will prevent them from doing crazy things. the you know the assassin's mace story and which is like a parable in china is you know hide your strength by time and then strike you have an unfair advantage.

And so, you know, it's to their advantage to go into these international dialogues and say like, oh no, we're weak. We don't, we don't, we're not competing. We don't have the ability to do that. Like, you know, we want to be part of these discussions and we actually listen to them. And we like, we're making decisions based on believing that, but their entire like, you know, moral background in the way that they think about these things is very different than even like the, you know, nursery rhymes that have led to creating Western culture. And so I think we have to start looking at them through the right lens in order to make the right strategic decisions to prepare for the worst. Do you feel like that's starting to happen? I feel like people are definitely taking it more seriously than they did even five years ago. When we started Anderil 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're 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 um but no one believes that nation building and counterterrorism is like the thing that we should be focusing on anymore yeah yeah i'm definitely with you on that i mean you know breakfast you we were talking about you know it doesn't sound like in your opinion we are ahead on of china on much of anything i think i think we have we're more innovative like the entrepreneurial energy that we have is a tremendous advantage um we're really good at software um as a country we're the best in the world at at building these software capabilities there are a lot of things that are really important that they have massive advantages on and um like what like production um you know they have entire factories that do autonomous production of cruise missiles for example like i mean they're just way ahead of us on that also all the natural resources stuff the belt and road strategy you know for better or worse was a genius play by them to go and scoop up access to all of the raw

Materials and we just watch them do it. I know and and I think that we put ourselves in this situation where You know, 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 I mean Do you think 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, you know, there's a question about, like, 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, like, 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, you know, they've got a short timeline to get their stuff together to be able to credibly deter Chinese aggression. And so that's kind of the small window that we're in right now. Yeah, you know, I don't – I just – I don't know. I went over there, you know, and interviewed the vice president. Very enlightening interview.

I've been really worried about it too, you know. and i think that that is what could trigger you know world war three but man i mean when when she started talking about the cognitive warfare and you know the the psyops and the propaganda and stuff that's going on there and how divided it actually is and when i learned more about you know that the actual history of china taiwan i mean i don't know if they're gonna have to take it kinetically i mean they're doing a phenomenal job at dividing and just yeah that other party takes over it's it's done not a shot fired yep i mean that is the optimal case for china obviously is that they can use soft power means to just do it kind of in the way that they did hong kong um and i don't think there's a zero percent probability that that's the way that it goes down so yeah yeah what i mean anything what what else about china who's bothering you how how ahead are they on manufacturing and ai i mean they have like 250 times the shipbuilding capacity that we have.

I mean, that's like a huge problem for us being able to keep up militarily. We've gutted our entire industrial base in the United States in service of globalization for economic optimization. And China has been the primary beneficiary of that transition. I think that like, you know, they're just, they're so much better suited to addressing these, like, 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, like, the skill that's required to make these things with high yields and quality it's all in china like we don't even have people in the united states that like know how to run these machines and so um we have to figure out some way to rescale 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 re-industrialize

is just continuing to outsource to foreign countries. And I don't think we have the time or the economic will to make a different decision on that fact. We just 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? Yeah. 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 kind of tendency to make our enemies appear 10 feet tall and i think you saw in the early days of the war in ukraine that you know their military readiness was pathetic their vehicles had dry rotted tires it was like You know, we think our bureaucracy is bad. I'm sure their bureaucracies are all really bad, too. They're not they're not 10 foot giants, but we need to be prepared as if they are. And so I think there's there's a lot of a lot of global threats that we need to take seriously.

What kind of side ventures are you doing? Well, the one that I've been most interested in is this this project called Soul. So one of the kind of critiques of younger generations, my own generation, millennials included, is that because of short-form video content, largely, we've lost the ability to consume long-form media. Like, we don't really read books anymore. And I feel like this is a huge problem. And so I got together with a few friends of mine, and we started a consumer hardware company that builds a wearable e-reader. And so it's like, you know, a Kindle that you wear in a pair of sunglasses.

And kind of the thesis is that we don't need do everything devices to do everything. Like sometimes you want a single purpose device that actually removes you from the do everything context that's highly distracting. More minutes are read on the Kindle app on Apple devices than are read on Kindles. No shit. And so, you know, our perspective on this is like, what if we gave someone a better reading experience, a better technology than what they previously had? Would we see, you know, longer reading sessions, more frequent, more pages read? And it's been really cool to see that adoption take off over the last couple of years.

So I'll send you an e-reader that you can check out. Right on, man. Yeah. I would love that. Let's see. Other side quests. Um, you know, I, I think that there are only so many things that a person can do before they stop being effective at any of the, at any of them. So I'm probably at just about capacity right now. Well, I mean, I, I thought here, you know, that, you know, you hosted Bible studies in Silicon Valley where Christian Christianity was once borderline illegal. Yep. Are you still doing that? Yeah. Um, let's see the most recent one that, uh, that I did was in the spring. We've been, my wife and I and another couple have been doing these kind of faith and work oriented Bible studies where they're kind of like graduate classes.

We assign a bunch of reading, and then we get together and we do discussion. Originally, that started off as like, you know, 10 people, and then it was like 50 people. And this last session that we did in the spring was like over 100 people, like one weekend night every week. So it was, you know, 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, you know, as a Christian, we've had a lot of guys on talking about end of the world type stuff.

And a lot of people are kind of thinking that maybe we're possibly in end times. Where are you at on this? Yeah. I mean, Peter's been doing this Antichrist lecture series. He and I have been talking about this for a long time. You know, I think that the Bible says that we will know neither the day nor the hour. It doesn't say that we won't know the month or the year. It just says the day or the hour. I think that, you know, you should always be alert to these things. You know, there's also kind of one of the stories that Jesus, the parables that Jesus tells the disciples is the vineyard owner.

It's like your workers want – they want to be actively working when the vineyard owner returns. And so if you sit and you get complacent, you know, 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, you know, an increased push for a global rather than a national identity, kind of the push for one world order. You know, the motto of the Antichrist in the Bible is peace and safety. People think of it as like this satanic kind of thing, but actually it's a mirror of Christ.

The Antichrist is a deceiver, and so I think it looks more like a push for one world government than it does a destructive nation state or something like that. So I think we just need to be aware of anything that resembles these sort of fake unity movements that are driving people into. into complacency. Well, Trey, we're wrapping up the interview. I got one more question for you. Yep. 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. So 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 to not throw stealth founders out to the wolves here. Let's see. I think diving into the foundational model AI founders could be really interesting, like pulling in people who have perspectives on how AI is going to shape in the next 10 to 20 years. Okay. You have this, like, kind of bifurcation of some of them believe that we're going into, like, existential, you know, risk to humanity and other people that have a more optimistic version. I think playing on that tension could be really fun. Mike Gallagher, former congressman who ran Point on the TikTok ban, he's at Palantir now.

And he would be a really interesting person to chat with, probably. So a former politician, but now working in tech. JD I think would be an awesome one right on he'd be great to bring in we're trying great love to hear it we're trying well Trey I just really appreciate you coming here I thought it was a fascinating interview um hope to see you again and best of luck in all your endeavors thanks John I'm Sean Ryan, former Navy SEAL, CA contractor, and host of The Sean Ryan Show. Much of my life has been dedicated to seeking truth and getting answers, no matter how uncomfortable the questions are that we have to ask.

But in the age of the PSYOP, that search has never been more difficult. In September of 2022, the U.S. Army's 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 chess pieces and social unrest phrases begin to appear on screen they ask have you ever wondered who's pulling the strings These are the Psywar soldiers. The series you're about to listen to is an attempt to answer that question, and an even bigger one. The global power brokers that conduct psychological operations constantly evolve.

Technology like AI has evened the playing field, and now, in the era of social media, 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 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, 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 peek behind the curtain. Welcome to the PSYOP. Buy it today at PSYOPshow.com.