Shawn Ryan Show - #245 Trae Stephens - Inside Anduril’s AI Superweapons: Eagle Eye Helmet and Autonomous Tech

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

Trae Stephens is Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, a defense technology company, and a General Partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, where he invests across sectors with a particular interest in startups operating in the government space. Previously, Trae was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on growth in the intelligence and defense sector as well as international expansion, helping large organizations solve their hardest data analysis problems. He was also an integral part of the product team, leading the design and strategy for new product offerings. While at Palantir, Trae also served as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University. Before joining Palantir, Trae worked as a computational linguist building enterprise solutions to Arabic/Persian name matching and data enrichment within the U.S. Intelligence Community. He began his career working in the office of then Congressman Rob Portman and in the Political Affairs Office at the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, D.C. immediately following the installation of Hamid Karzai’s transitional government. Trae graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Buy PSYOP Now - ⁠https://psyopshow.com⁠ ⁠https://tryarmra.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://aura.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://betterhelp.com/srs⁠ This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. ⁠https://bubsnaturals.com⁠ – USE CODE SHAWN ⁠https://bunkr.life⁠ – USE CODE SRS Go to ⁠https://bunkr.life/SRS⁠ and use code “SRS” to get 25% off your family plan. ⁠https://shawnlikesgold.com⁠ ⁠https://moinkbox.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://mypatriotsupply.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://patriotmobile.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://prizepicks.onelink.me/lmeo/srs⁠ ⁠https://rocketmoney.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://ROKA.com⁠ – USE CODE SRS ⁠https://shopify.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://USCCA.com/srs Trae Stephens Links: X - https://x.com/traestephens LI - https://www.linkedin.com/in/trae-stephens-485a811 IG - https://www.instagram.com/trae.stephens Founders Fund - https://foundersfund.com/team/trae-stephens Anduril Industries - https://www.anduril.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. S.ca. yamex. Arc Raiders, a multiplayer extraction adventure video game set in a lethal yet vibrant future earth.

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I've been pumped about this. I love everything that's going on with Anderol. The Palmer episode was fascinating. What a cool dude to be around. And so, yeah, we, We've been dying to get you in the studio, and it's been almost a year, I think, since Palmer's been on. So I'd love to get some updates. And what I really want to do is life story on you, get into everything that, you know, childhood, how you got into tech, all that stuff.

And then we'll end with everything that's going on in Anderrell. Sounds good. Let's do it. Perfect. All right. Everybody starts with an introduction here. Trace Stevens, co-founder and executive chairman of Andeural Industries, a defense tech powerhouse that's redefining national security with AI in autonomy. A partner at Founders Fund, you've backed game changers in government and defense tech since 2014, co-founder of Seoul and wearable e-reader, so you can read without distraction, intern at the Afghan embassy in D.C., an early Palantir employee who helped turn data in

into Intel, excuse me, Intel, a husband, a father, a devout Christian, you're unapologetic about your faith in Silicon Valley. In fact, you preach to tech entrepreneurs in 2024 on how Jesus would approve of building of righteous AI weapons. You are a sneakerhead and a prepper. All those things. Love the prepping. Love all of it.

But yeah, I wanted to do. talk about, you know, in 2024, you preach to tech entrepreneurs on how Jesus would approve of righteous AI weapons. There's not a whole lot of Christians out there from what I know, but there are not. It's a, it is a pretty godless city with, with a pocket of really strong believers in community. Do you get a lot of pushback for that or for being a Christian out there? You know, when I first moved to San Francisco, that was kind of my expectation that it would be sort of hostility. But I haven't experienced that at all. I feel like really smart people, they generally think of Christians as being simple-minded. And so when you come at them and you're

clearly not simple-minded, they're just curious. They're like, I don't get it. How could you be both smart and also have this kind of crazy faith that I don't take seriously? And so it's actually been a great opportunity to open doors for people just asking those questions and being able to go into apologetics. Explain to them why, you know, I think that their lack of faith is just as much of a faith as mine. Like, you have to be kind of crazy to believe that all of this came from from nothing over millions and millions of years. That requires as big, if not a bigger leap of faith than what I believe. That's what I think, man. Have you ever heard of Lee Strobel? Of course, yeah. Case for Christ? Yeah, man. I read that back in high school, man. I've had him on

three times. And when he talks about, you know, his time as an atheist, he's like, man, you have to have, It's like more work to gain faith that there is nothing out there than there is to actually believe. And I love that guy. Yeah, no, it's absolutely true. And I think that we're seeing a bit of a renaissance where people are coming back to this idea that, look, even if they have a hard time with the belief and 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, no. People are super interested, you know, even in the last just 18 to 24 months, the churches in San Francisco are seeing enormous growth, especially in Gen Z. I'm sure you've seen some of the stats that show that, you know, there's this resurgence of faith with Gen Z, particularly with men in Gen Z, which is really unusual, like, looking at historical trends over the last hundred years. So it's been really cool to see. Yeah, that's like, I mean,

I feel like that's worldwide, not just simply 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 it's kind of reawaken people to this idea that there's something in classics that are worth looking at. You know, I don't know if you're a fan of the HBO show, Silicon Valley, but the, you know, 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

Hulie, the big company and 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 and pretty much any institution is at an all-time low right now. I think people are just looking for anything that makes sense. Yep.

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

You know, my wife, Michelle, she has started this organization called Act 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 it all started with my 40th birthday party. So I don't really like parties very much, but my wife was adamant that we should gather together 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 years here on the show, Shamsankar. Nice. Did a roast at me. And then on Saturday, my favorite band, which is a 90s-era punk ska band called Goldfinger, they came and performed.

Turns out you can just hire 90s-era punk ska bands, 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. No kidding. 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 Act 17 has done incredible events with people like Peter, with Francis Collins, who was, you know, early in the genetics movement. He was the director of the National Institutes of Health. And, you know, starting to kind of expand. Over the last four weeks, Peter has done an Act 17 series on the Antichrist, actually, in San Francisco. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Did you go to that? Yeah, I was, 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, like, a small group Bible study, exploring the concepts around the Antichrist, read a bunch of books, did discussion

groups around it. And I think he's 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 waiting through a sea of protesters standing outside the building to come here, you know, a Silicon Valley billionaire talk about faith and why he believes in the gospel. Man, I think that's awesome. Did you, was that the, was at the times? I can't remember the interview where they asked him if he thought he was the antichrist. Yeah, there's a famous clip with the interview with Ross Duthat 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 Duthat. He did a lecture series at the University of Austin as well. So this is, it's on the top of his mind. Man, I would love to have seen that. That would have been awesome. They didn't record it, right? It was a private event. It was totally off the record. Yeah. So no shared notes, no video, nothing. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. How many people went? I mean, there were a few hundred people for four consecutive weeks with overflow, like people sitting in the lobby on, you know, watching a simulcast. So there were a

It was a pretty crazy. Also, the majority were not, we're not Christians either. It's, you know, just 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, you know, do a, you know, a Bible thumping presentation of the gospel. You want to get people in the marketplace that aren't known for being Christians and then put them in a context where they're talking to people who wouldn't expect them to talk about their faith. And I think there's a tremendous opportunity to leverage that, not only in tech, but in other leading industries, whether that's finance, media, entertainment, whatever. That's interesting, you know, that it was that good of a turnout and that it sparked that

much interest, especially from non-Christians. Yeah. That's very, very interesting. You know, back to 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. 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 Canaan Abel story. And then we figured out bow and arrows and swords, and eventually we got into catapults and trebishes and, you know, the advent of gumpowder, you know, we're just climbing the curve of the amount of destruction a single individual is able to inflict on another party or another set of parties. That kept going up that curve, up and up and up until the atom bomb. And that was kind of the moment where, you know, humanity, we looked at ourselves in the mirror,

and we said, this can't go on. Like, we can't just become ever more destructive. And the Cold War was really the story of humanity figuring out how to de-escalate that level of violence. And so during the Cold War, you see things like precision-guided munitions. Like, you know, we can shoot AIM-9s

through windows of buildings and take out combatants inside of buildings without destroying the building or, you know, harming innocents that are outside of that room. Everything is just about precision now. And so my view from the annual perspective is if I'm building technology, if I'm participating in the development of next generation munitions, next generation weapons, we should be doing that in a way that is more edifying to the principles of just war theory. Can we make things that are more 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.

enabling us to, you know, 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 they're 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 to do things that we believe are wrong that people just won't do them. And that's ultimately the goal of defense tech. It's not to make it more more violent, more terrible. The goal is to make it so lethal and so much of a disadvantage to our

adversaries that they would just never even think. Big is deterrentable. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, I think about this all the time. Right on, right on. I think about it too, but I love what you guys are doing and it protects our country and I also believe in peace through strength so yeah but a couple things to get through here before we get into the interview I got a couple gifts for you here so

everybody gets these vigilance league gummy bears made in the USA legal in all 50 states for now yeah for now until you know until RFK deems red dies to be illegal but 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 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 da-da-da-da. 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 I found this company called Glacier. Have you heard of it? I have not, no. Okay. So Glacier was started by a bunch of former Intel guys in the Intel service. And so that phone, it's a hardened iPhone.

And 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 they can't tell what, it is, but if Pegasus were to wind up on it or something, 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, 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 a consumer based

that's a little more application that has a lot of the same features but maybe not you know quite that high speed that people could actually afford so we're rolling that out towards the end of the year that's awesome thank you so much

I 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, well, I'll teach you how to use it. Yes, that sounds great. I think you guys will like that. And then, all right, last thing before we get into it.

So I got a Patreon account. It's a subscription account. And we've turned it into quite the community. And I offer them the opportunity to ask every guest to 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 they're constantly changing because obviously the administration's changed, the politically appointed officials change, and so you get this kind of like ebb and flow of how that interaction has been shaped. If you go back to the Obama administration, basically everyone in tech had supported Obama when he was elected president. But there was really no presence of tech people in the administration. It was kind of he ended up going with government insiders and academics and things like that. And so the connectivity was really, really low. Obviously going into the first Trump

administration, Peter and Palmer were the only, 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, you know, people like Michael Cratsios, who is Peters, Chief of Staff, who's running the Office of Science and Technology Policy. You have David Sacks working on AI and Crypto, who is one of the original PayPal Mafia. You have Emil Michael, who is the CEO 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. 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-administrative. 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. It's called Lebanon, Ohio. You know, we had kind of the quintessential. 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 Politico's out there watching the show, Rob Portman, the former congressman and later senator from the state of Ohio, owns the Golden Lamb. And so there's like this crazy connection there. Just one town over

from Middletown, which is where JD grew up. So some of the same stories that he talked about in Hillbilly Elegie, about kind of the rise of industrialization in Ohio and then the collapse as a result of globalization. And I was kind of in high school as we were going through that massive shift where the factories were closing. People's parents were out of jobs. You know, strip malls were vacated. It was an interesting childhood for sure. Check this story out. A new discovery found a massive trove of gold coins in the Czech Republic, minted by a long-lost civilization. It's from before the second century BC. They also found silver coins among artifacts. I mean, the proof is there. Not only have gold and silver been valued for thousands of years, but they can physically last that long, too. Just another reason why I'm partnered with the award-winning company Goldco. They sell gold and silver, and they do an amazing job with it. So if you're ready to learn how gold and silver can help you protect your savings, I want you to go to shonlikesgold.com.

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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 a she was you know a mom and very active in my brother and his 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 uh very recently in the last you know 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 in July, trying to spend more time hanging out with each other. Good, good. What are you guys fishing for up there? Well, that trip was a lot of salmon and trout, but Alaska is an incredible ecosystem.

I mean, they have everything. I think in the three days that we were fishing, we caught chum salmon, king salmon. Socky salmon, basically every species. And then nailed some huge rainbow trout as well, which is really fun. I love fly fishing, man. Oh, it's the best. For someone like me that lives and works every day in a city, there's something about going out and standing in rushing water and 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 with it, literally with his bare hands by himself. And so kind of grew up, you know, playing in the creek and hanging out in the woods, building 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, public school was an interesting experience.

You know, I didn't, as you said, I grew up in a blue collar family. It's not like I was going to a fancy private school with a bunch of hard charging aspirational people. And at times that was sort of frustrating because, you know, you can kind of get stuck in the rut of feeling like, you know, everyone's just goofing off and you're just trying to get through through school. But, yeah, I had a, you know, graduated atop of my class, got great test scores, and then got rejected everywhere that I applied to college. So this is the lesson, 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 Microsenter Mall and picked up, you know, the motherboard and the... Right on.

Yeah, we kind of built that. Always was really interested in it. But had no interest in going into tech. That was not a part of my plan. I actually thought I was going to be a journalist when I was in high school. Senior year comes around, September 11th happens, and I had this kind of watershed moment where I 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 went down the closest path I could find to working in intelligence. And, you know, saw a demo of Palantir in my first job in the intelligence community, got into kind of a battle internally about using Palantir, got denied, and then jump 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 computational linguistics around Arabic name matching. So in college, I studied, I was a Middle Eastern Studies major, so learned Arabic, studied abroad in Egypt.

And the intersection of people who could write code and could speak Arabic was, you know, very, very small. And so, you know, there's 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 know, you could imagine all the permutations of that. And when you're dealing with intelligence reporting, you know, the writer is effectively

choosing how to spell these names, just transliterated. And someone had to go out and figure out how to merge these records to identify the individuals that were crossing all of the reporting that was being collected. And that was my job. I was the guy that was going in and trying to make sure that this Muhammadata was the same as this Muhammadata was the same as this Muhammadata. So that when we pass those reports down to you guys in the field in Afghanistan or in Iraq, that you had reliable intelligence that you could act on when you're kicking down doors. interesting how long did you how long were you in the intelligence for i only lasted about two and a half years it was it was a short battle with bureaucracy and i was defeated got to you got to you got to you and how did you how did palantir pop under your radar so i'm not sure

are you familiar with incutel the cia's venture capital firm i am now yeah it's a it's a it's a It's kind of an under-the-radar thing, but under George Tenet, the CIA set up this essentially a venture fund called Incutale, 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 Department of Homeland Security, with the Pentagon. They're kind of all over the place. But at the time, they had funded a work program.

for Palantir in a few federal intelligence agencies. And they were doing a roadshow, and they gave a demo that I was at. And I'm like, oh crap, this would literally save me like 20% of the time that I spend every week doing searches in these databases. Because basically the way that I would do it is, there are 12 different databases.

You go into each one of them, you write a really complex query, and then it would just be running in the background. It's like, all right, well, I'm gonna go get a cup of coffee, go, you know, talk to a couple people and come back and hope that I have an exported CSV file, then I can merge into an Excel spreadsheet and run concatenate functions to try to, you know, 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, you know, there was no requirement, as you're familiar. There was no requirement. There was no funding to, you know, 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 is, 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? What do, I mean, what are they, 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 on the policies that we want to enact to protect our society in the national security context. But we don't want them to have the best tools to do it. We would rather them have crappy stuff that barely

works. You know, we have to hold together with duct tape. And so I think a lot of the concern about Palantir is really, you know, people expressing a concern around democracy. They're saying, I don't believe that the American people can make good decisions about policies, and therefore I don't want our federal, our civil servants to have the tools that they need to actually, you know, enable the policies that we as a democracy have decided that we want to go after. So it's kind of troubling. Yeah, you know, it's, 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 volunteer and talking about how. all, 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 in, that's using it in war. And, you know, then you have everybody else that's sitting there at home that all they do is complain about it.

I mean, 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 Anderil, there was 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. Like, that's not what we're doing any more than it was what Palantir is doing. You know, no one at Palantir is like, you know, sitting down at their desk

and like looking up text messages that their girlfriend sent or something like that. It's just like that's not what's happening at all. But I think we're like programmed for hysteria. And, you know, I do think that this philosophical challenge is very real, that it's really expressing a distrust in democratic institutions. And that's a cultural problem that exists way beyond the scope of what Palantier 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, Shamm 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 Shamm, 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? And at the end of that, you know, call it five and a half year period, I was feeling pretty burned out. But over the time that I had been there, I got to be friends with Peter Thiel, who is the founder of PayPal, the co-founder of Palantir. And Peter just out of the blue asked me if I would come join him at Founders Fund. So not having any interest in venture capital

or frankly knowing anything about finance, I kind of jumped ship and joined Peter in San Francisco. No kidding. You know, back to, you know, as Palantir's spine, Joe Lonsdale had a great quote yesterday. He was talking about, you know, if you saw how the government managed data, you have won 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. 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,

one 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 I would critique myself for in the role that I was in at Palantir as well. As like, maybe we didn't do a good enough job telling the story.

Maybe we tried to be a little bit too secretive. Maybe we could have been more out in 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 working there, you know, back when you were in intelligence. You spent six years there, and then you go into venture capital with Peter Thiel, knowing nothing about finance or VC. I mean, what was it Peter? Is that who you believed in? Why did you make that transition? Yeah, you know, when Peter first asked me to do it, he asked if I could go and meet up with the leadership of the fund. And I remember sitting down with Lauren Gross, who's the CEO 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 it. 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, he's the co-founder of the company I'm working at. It's like, I don't know, is this an opportunity or is it an order? Is it some combination of both? Am I being like, you know, fired from Palantir and being like rescued and brought over to Founders Fund?

Still to this day, 12 years later, I'm not sure what the real story is. But yeah, it was a weird transition for sure. Did you like venture capital? Yeah, I mean, I love what I do. I feel very blessed to, you know, have this really cool, you know, job where I get to learn about, like, everything. You know, this is like the beauty of VC as a job is that, you know, 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. Like you had Scott Nolan, my partner, who's building General Matter.

It's a nuclear fuels company. I don't know anything about nuclear fuels, but I get to learn from the founder of that company and get excited about the thing that they're excited about. And that's really what every day is. Every day is just like an experiment 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 Founders'Connor, 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, you know, it's a big part of what everyone in this industry does

is you're just meeting with really compelling people day in and day out. What is it, I mean, when you're looking for a founder that you want to invest in, what is it that does it for you? What is you're looking for? Well, you know, 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 in the meeting I've just got the table out and I'm like checking off like do they have this trait did 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're like you 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 0 to 1. In the book, he said that, you know, we're all drawn into memesis. 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. 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, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, like these are like sort of weird people. And, you know, there's maybe somewhere on the autism spectrum. And that kind of acts as their superpower because they're not absolutely. 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 in instantly, you're like, okay, this person is not just trying to be like a cool kid from their business school

class. There's something else to it. Interesting. Interesting. What are some of the most successful founders that you've invested in? Who are they? I mean, Founders Fund has an incredible track record. We were, you know, the first investor in Facebook and

SpaceX, in Airbnb, in Stripe, Anderol, 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. Oh, bad, 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 seating, 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.

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Then I met Palmer. Their founder's fund. Mm-hmm. How did that, how did you guys meet? We were the first institutional investor in Oculus. So he had started this virtual reality company, ended up getting acquired by meta for a couple billion dollars. And, you know, I think he was just on this.

path that he just thought, you know, I'm going to be the VR guy. Like, 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 Andrel, he was the first person I went to. And I just said, like, hear me out. What if we started a next generation defense prime? And he was like, oh, man, I'm doing this VR thing. Like, I'm super passionate about

this, but, you know, 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, was he always out there, board shorts, mismatch flip-flops, Hawaiian shirt? I would love to say that like he's changed or like matured by the standards of society, but he's exactly the same person that he was when, you know, he was a teenager starting Oculus. Money, success, fame has not changed him. Good. I love that. I love that. All right.

And real quick, I got to hear some quirky Palmer stories. Let's hear it. Yeah, no, I mean, he is such an interesting person. You know, I could spend all day talking about this. In the early days of Anderol, he and I would travel to D.C. a lot together. And, 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 in my cargo shorts. And you'd have 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 he's sitting in like the middle seat and 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 gear 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. So, yeah, 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 he's like this weird celebrity in the anime scene oh man that's hilarious super super fun uh could not be uh a quirkier and yet smarter person he's he's just the perfect combination what kind of stuff is that guy innovating it just in his free time.

Have you seen any of his crazy gizmos? I mean, right now he is so focused on soldier-born compute, like building the helmet, that I think it's consuming, like, all of his creative energy. It's, you know, it's the perfect thing for him. It's, you know, seven years into Andril, 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 in 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, you know, it was a crazy transition from believing that, you know, I was going to walk into this incredible tech forward environment. And it turns out that it, like, I would do these, you know, coffee break searches and stuff.

Like, it wasn't at all what I expected. Because that would inspire 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, like, 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 percent margin attached to the top of it. And then they, you know, they get their, you know, special badges. And they walk in every day and they sit at their desks. And, you know, they have no incentive to move fast because they get a margin on top of every hour that they work.

And it would be crazy to believe that we're employing our best and brightest in these roles, 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, you know, D.C. area, getting crapped on by bureaucrats and just like, you know, punch card checking in, checking out for work. And that just seemed like the whole incentive structure was broken. And so I didn't do it because I was like, man, I really want to be like a tech entrepreneur. I did it because I thought it was the right thing for the country.

That's cool to hear. That's cool to hear. What was the, I mean, what was the first product you guys wanted to develop? At Anderl. Well, I mean, we have this pitch deck, like a very bad Google Slides deck that we used to recruit our first to 12 hires, and one of the slides in that is, like, a list of things that we wanted to build. We didn't know which thing would be the first thing that we wanted to build, but we had this list, and it was kind of cool.

Like, earlier this year, I opened up the slide deck in my Google Drive, and it turns out that we've built, 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 we made is, like, you have to build something that is going to be pretty fast. Like, you have to be able to get it out into the field quickly. You don't want it to be a science project.

And you want there to be a significant amount of political urgency around the thing that you're going to build so that you can drive a different kind of decision-making rather than business-as-usual procurement policy. And so, for us, that meant that we landed on Century Tower, which is now deployed not only at military bases, but also on the southwest border in the United States with border with Mexico. Obviously, in the first Trump administration, this was a big concern. Whether or not you have a border wall, you need to know what's going on. And so we built this autonomous Century Tower that was, you know, completely off-grid, mobile. We could pick it up and move it around, had solid state, metamaterial, radar, an infrared camera, optical camera, communications network, and it would just persistently look around itself

and flagged for the Customs and Border Patrol whenever something was crossing the border that they needed to take a look at, and then it would enable them to make a decision. Like, yes, that's something that we care about that we're going to go and take a look at. Know that's something that we expect to see. And over time, you train that model, and that has now grown into a massive program. We cover an enormous swath of the Southwest border, and we're expanding constantly, delivering more towers to get more and more coverage on the border. But the important thing about that initial work is that all the lessons that we learned from

that, the AI computer vision system, the operating system. for surfacing tracks to the users of the platform, ended up being the exact same back end that we used for every subsequent product. And so it was kind of the AI brain was the real product. And then whether you made a Century Tower that flies, which was our next product, which is called Ghost, to interceptor missiles, to submarines, to autonomous fighter planes.

They all have that same. that same operating system on the back end that we call lattice. And so we're still getting amortized research and development out of the very first thing that we started building eight years ago. Damn. Where did you guys come up with the list? It was just, you know, sitting around with Palmer, me, Palmer, Matt, Brian, and Joe. Just, you know, riffing on what we think would make sense for us to build,

leveraging that combination of software and hardware. And, you know, I'm honestly kind of surprised that we ended up doing almost exactly what we said that we were going to do. That's crazy. Do you have that slide with you by chance? I'd love to put that up. Yeah, yeah. I can show you the slide, yeah.

Perfect. So what did come next? So the next product after the Century Tower was Ghost, which is just a flying version of the tower. It's a modular payload drone that could do autonomous identification, detection, and tracking of targets. And so you can kind of think about it as like a helicopter with a pilot, where you just tell it, hey, I want you to go and do this mission. Like, go and see if you can find things that look like this. And then it would just go and conduct a mission and then report back to you when it was seeing things that were interesting.

And these are now deployed all over the place that are deployed with U.S. forces abroad. They're also deployed in Ukraine. So it's become kind of a core product line for us. And then we went from there into counter drone. We started building interceptors for, you know, small drones. We have a product called Anvil that is the first version was not explosive. It would just fly like a bowling ball into a drone. And then we've continued to level that up into Roadrunner, which is kind of like a reusable interceptor.

Barracuda, which is, you know, like a missile, more like an interceptor cruise missile, and kind of expanding that out every time. But the goal is really like all domain. Like you want to do, you know, work in space, work in air, work on ground, work on the surface of the sea, subsea, and Palmer's new obsession is subterranean, which, you know, not a lot of details that are shareable on that front yet. Damn. What are you guys doing in space? Actually, all of our space stuff is classified, so that's, like, the one domain that I can't really say much about. All right. How about under the sea? Yeah, so we have a whole platform called Dive. So different sizes.

Dive LD, which is the large diameter dive, is like the size of a pickup truck, basically. Again, same software. You send it out on missions, and it can do everything from pipeline inspection to, you know, in theory, you could do kinetics. You could, you know, drive it into the side of an enemy warship. We started a joint venture with the Australian Navy to build an extra large version of Dive that's called Dive XL, really clever. her name. And we just completed the delivery on a program of record for Australia, where we'll build a bunch of these for them as they're kind of transitioning over to the Ocas Treaty where they're getting the delivery of nuclear submarines from the United States. So they obviously

have real concerns about the sea space around the continent. And we're spinning up a bunch of work there with them on that as well. We also have a product called Seabed Century that is kind of a platform that you can drop into onto the floor of the ocean floor and it does the same thing as the Century Tower would except undersea. And so we also have Copperhead, which is kind of like a modular payload delivery vehicle undersea, which is kind of a euphemism for a torpedo without saying torpedo. But yeah, we're, you know, we're always building new stuff. and all these domains. How, I mean, how fast, I mean, I'm sure it's different for every product, but I mean,

how fast are you guys manufacturing 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, you know, roughly on that same timeline, call it 18 months. The challenge, of course, and the thing that we're focused on primarily as a business right now is production scaling. Like, how do you go from building hundreds of things or single digit thousands of things to building tens of thousands of things. And I think the name of the game in this autonomous future for national security is what we would call attritable mass, which is like, you know, are we building $15 billion aircraft carriers, $300 million fighter planes in, you know, very small unit numbers, or are we building thousands or tens of thousands of much less expensive things that have comparable capabilities or better capabilities that if we lose them in combat, it's not

the end of the world. Like, you can resupply that stuff really quickly. But our production capacity in the United States has totally atrophied. We just don't even have the capacity to do this anymore. And this is really what our focus is right now. We're building a huge factory campus in Ohio to enable us to ramp production capacity. And it's a new muscle for the business, kind of in the same way that, you know, Tesla went from building the roadster to building, you know, the gigafactory and starting to sell hundreds of thousands and millions of cars. How big is the manufacturing facility in Ohio going to be? Yeah, I mean, long term, it will be around 5 million square feet.

The first building is going to be just under a million square feet, and that will be up and running in the late first quarter of 2026. Man. 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 got to 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 Frigdair, one of them worked at NCR, National Cash Register. I had an uncle who worked at Ford, another one of my grandfather's 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 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 we need to bring production back to america uh and it's it's very cool to be part of bringing that back to to my family story uh in addition to just doing it in a more macro level how are you guys i mean how is how is enderil finding the people that have the skills to do this because i mean it's been so long since we were you know in in in production and manufacturing

yeah it's been i mean how long has it been it's been at least 20 years Yeah, I mean, all this sort of started falling apart, I guess, when I was in high school, which was like 20 years ago. You know, all the steel production left Ohio. There were huge steel companies in Ohio, Armcoe was, I think, the biggest employer in Middletown where JD is from. And, you know, none of that is there anymore. My uncle worked at mound steel, which was another big steel producer in Southwest Ohio. It's no longer there. So, you know, I think there's definitely a 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 industrial blood in the water. But, you know, some of it will be, you know, re-skilling 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. element. 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. 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 barricudas. 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 it will be, so the production facility will be, it will do one product at a time. Well, I mean, the idea is that it will be modular and flexible. And so, you know, we can

reset things to, you know, rebuild these lines that enable us to scale. The Ukraine story is a great example here. So, you know, despite what most people think, the supply that the United States was giving to Ukraine was mostly Cold War era technology, javelins, stingers, things like that. These things are 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 The manufacturer of those weapons 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, you know, a few times less expensive than the alternative.

Would you say it's better than what we've been using? Well, I mean, part of this is like a question around how exquisite you're building it. Like, are you building something that's like a Frankenstein that has to do everything? well, I'm sure you've heard stories about the F-35, which is like when you're building a joint strike fighter that you're going out to every one of the services and you're saying, Marine Corps, what do you need? Air Force, what do you need? Navy, what do you need? And then you're building that aircraft that meets the needs of all those services. Well, you end up with a $300 million airplane. Norm Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin, sort of tongue in cheek said,

I think it was 2050 was his market. 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 capabilities of B-21. These are pretty awesome. The question is, could you build something that solves a problem for 10x lower cost that doesn't require a 30-year development program and, you know, thousands of man hours to build a single unit. I think the answer to that is clearly yes. So in some cases, it will be like, you know, 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 out with that. Great.

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Find out who's really pulling the strings. I'm Sean Ryan, and this is Target Intelligence Sciop, an ironclad original. In this eight-part audio experience, we uncover the ghosts in the machine. Buy it today at sciopshow.com. All right, Trey, we're back from the break. Dude, nice shooting. That was fun. You don't shoot often, do you?

I mean, I shoot a fair amount. I have a clay target range at my house in New Mexico, and I, you know, I grew up with a hunting dad, so we would shoot in our backyard all the time. Well, shooting clay pigeons doesn't have anything to do with a pistol. You did pretty damn good. I was impressed. Much appreciated.

Nice work, man. That's fun. But, yeah, so I know we were getting ready to talk about the helmet that you guys are making. Yep. But we had some, we went down some rabbit holes there on the break. So about getting into college was the first one. Yep. So you got rejected from, sounds like, just.

about everywhere you applied. I probably should have dug into that a little bit more and then and then you enlightened to be on the break. So why did you why did you get rejected? I mean, 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 in early april my senior year and uh i was kind of like caught off guard by this this reality

one school that i got into was unc chapel hill and my high school girlfriend uh was already committed to going to Elon which is just right down the street from uh 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. She broke up with me. Oh, 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 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 Emissions Department, demanded to see the Dean of Emissions. And as the story goes, like, I camped out. I didn't really camp out. I was only there for about an hour before they were like, okay, we'll hear your case. And I went in and dumped out a backpack full of recommendations. letters. And I remember specifically what the dean said. He said, you know, son, there are cracks in the meritocracy. And, you know, it's not as simple as, you know, you get good grades, you play varsity sports, you do whatever. It's like, there's more to it than that. And it turns out that

a lot of this started coming out in research years after I graduated. There was a Princeton study from 2009, that basically showed that the most underrepresented demographic in college admissions is poor white kids. And it's like completely under the radar. No one would expect that this would be the thing, obviously. But, you know, 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.

Like all these top-tier universities, they have this stat of how many valeditorians 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 of affirmative action programs at universities, you actually saw some of this come out in the data

where, you know, 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 J.D. talks about in Hillbilly Elogy as well. It's like, you know, the rural white communities were just decimated and they were left out of, the American project.

Is that getting better now, or? I actually don't think so. Like, I think that, like, lower, low socioeconomic status, white communities in America are just, like, it's not on the radar of most of the people that are, you know, thinking about trying to, you know, bring people out of poverty. And I think every other demographic, every other ethnic demographic in America has better emissions rates for low social, economic status except white communities. It's like the one that just gets no, there's no credit

that's given in the emissions process. Now, to Georgetown's credit, they let me in, which is crazy that I pulled this stunt and ended up going to Georgetown. But, 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 this is like a core problem.

I mean, what do you think that is 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, it was just gutted by globalization, by the de-industrialization of the Midwest. And, you know, these communities were totally left behind. And then they got caught up in the opioid epidemic and economic collapse.

And that's ultimately, like, the community that drove, the populism movement that led to Trump's election. And, you know, I think J.D., becoming the vice president is very much part of that story. It's like he's very aware of, you know, how this all happened. I mean, thank you for sharing that. What I kind of meant is, you know, 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 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, and tech innovators, but most of them, most of them, I think, did not go to school, you know, and started innovating right out of,

I mean, I think that doesn't, doesn't Founders Fund kind of encourage that? Well, Peter has the Teal Fellowship where he pays people to drop out of college. Yeah, yeah, that's what I meant. But, so, I mean, you know, what do you think this is done to, you know, the workforce, to schools, to, you know, to people's sentiment about going to college, I mean, by by starving poor white kids, the opportunity of education. Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of, you know, issues in society that are driven primarily around what was fundamentally a boomer problem. Like, the boomers basically convinced all of their children that that was the path, that, like,

they needed to go to college. That was how you became successful. But there's not like a bunch of white collar jobs that require, you know, liberal arts degrees. Yeah. From, you know, 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 like whatever they're doing, they didn't need a college degree to do it. They would have been much better off just not taking the debt. But more importantly than that, going back to the industrial 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. work anyway. It was like it was just kind of a racket. It's insanely expensive now. I mean, I was just talking to Eric, you know, our COO last night. His son's getting ready to go to school

and is looking at Vanderbilt, you know, up in Nashville. It's like $280,000 for a four-year degree. Yeah. I think that's pretty common. Yeah. Holy shit, man. Yeah. No, it's crazy. And, you know, the old American dream of go and get the college education, get a good-paying job, get married young, buy a house. It's just, it doesn't happen. Like, that isn't, that isn't the path. I think this is part of the reason why Gen Z has had this kind of weird political revival is that they've had this realization that, hey, like, I'm not even, I can't even be in the market to buy a house. Like, it just doesn't work. The debt loads are tremendous. There's not enough housing. It's hyper competitive. It's like, we've kind of robbed an entire generation

of what we used to think of as the American dream. I mean, do you think that's true? Do you think that's 100% true, or is that 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. Like, in cities, that is the problem. In large sections of America that are more rural or suburban.

I think the American dream is still somewhat alive, but the problem is that the jobs are not, they're not remaining in those communities. Now, there are some exceptions. There are high-growth, you know, suburban environments in America, you know, those surroundings of Nashville are, you know, probably some of the best in the country. But, you know, I don't think, I don't think that applies to everywhere.

Ohio did not have that story for a very long time. Yeah. Bentonville, Arkansas, that's another one that's going, on nuts. Yeah, I mean, you know, I love company towns. I think company towns are amazing. I wish we have 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 would 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,

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 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, you know, 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. Like I want my kids, you know, when they're graduating high school, I don't want them to feel like they have to go to like an Ivy League school. 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, we were kind of talking about a little bit about the attack on the family dynamic here and you had some pretty interesting stuff to say about that. I'd like you to dive into that a little bit. We're talking

about AI girlfriends, online dating, just all that kind of stuff. Yeah, you know, in the early days of AI companions, I started playing with all these apps just to get a sense for how they worked and, you know, how it felt as a user of the applications. And man, it was really dystopian. Like, you know, you go into these weird relationships and you can dress the avatars and 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, um, people have gotten into, uh, relationships historically, uh, 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. Um, and by and large, like people were able to pair off, uh, and build, build families. Um, but today, like the whole online dating trend has, 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 percent of men on dating apps get literally zero matches. No shit.

Zero. There's no, 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 in cells 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. 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 have a companion that's always there. They'll 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, trickle-down impacts of this. But, like, you know, from a societal political perspective, in 50 years that these trends continue, like, America is a totally different place. Yeah, you know, being a tech guy, you have two kids yourself. I mean, this is something that me and my wife go back and forth with all 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, where are we going to, are we going to homeschool our kids? Are we going to put them in a school somewhere? What are we going to do? And what do we do about technology? Because on one hand, 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 them 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 you know they're older than toddlers and so you know how do you handle that with your wife I mean... Yeah, I mean, we try to be really thoughtful about this. Our kids are 10 and 12.

You know, our sort of policy on smartphone access and social media is that we're going to hold out for as long as we possibly can. And, you know, there are great examples, like the babysitter that they have had for the last few years, she just left for college. And she literally just got social media, like, before she went to college. And she's 18 years old. It's like, it's possible to be cool. cool and, uh, you know, sociable and relational and, uh, smart and not subject yourself to that unnecessarily at too young of an age. Yeah. Um, and so I think that's kind of our policy with our kids is to try to keep them in that zone for as long as we can. So no smartphones. No

smartphones. I mean, we have, they don't even have an Apple watch yet, which I think is you're starting to see that kind of happen with kids in that range where their parents don't want them to have access to social media, but they want them, you know, to be reachable, textable, callable. We haven't even done that. Like, you know, they haven't demonstrated that they need it. And, 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, 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 a version

of this is when they turn 10, we go for a father-son road trip from San Francisco to Disneyland. And on the road trip, we listen to an audiobook about the birds and the bees. And we have a completely trapped environment where we're both looking forward in the road. He can't jump out of the car. And he has to sit through seven hours of content about peer pressure and social media and pornography and the sex education. We do the whole thing. And so I just did that two weekends ago with my youngest who just turned 10.

And, 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 than you learn it from your friends. And we start trying to teach them through open dialogue about, you know, these important topics that have the potential to literally ruin your life. Yeah. What book is that? What book do you?

We use a program called Passport to Purity That is really good I feel like it's out of print Because it was really hard to get the accompanying journal But there's probably something comparable out there today Passport to what? Purity I'm getting that

It's really good I mean it's kind of corny at times But it's really good I mean it's got to be right For kids Yeah I mean Maybe it's not for kids No no it's very much

for 10-year-old kids. That's like, that's the framing. So they don't have no, no tablet? They have an iPad, but the iPad is for travel. Okay. When we're on an airplane or something like that? They don't have like day-to-day privileges to screens. When do you think you'll give it to them?

Our oldest, the 12-year-old is using a laptop for school now. Yeah. But he's not playing games or anything on his laptop. He's just using it for school. I mean, I don't know the exact answer to the question, but the, like, kind of dodging answer is I'm 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 it's a good reminder. Like, yeah, if I'm going to have this rule that I believe that you shouldn't have it because it's bad. your brain, like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not immune to that same critique. It's probably back from my brain, too. Man, that's interesting, you know, I mean, 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 of the day. I mean, just knowing how to use it. Oh, no. I mean, they're, they're tech native. I mean, kids today, like, you know, hand them an iPad and they just intuitively know how to use it. It's like, I don't have to teach them how to do it. They're using laptops at school. They know how to type. They can navigate a, you know, macOS. They're fine. They're 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, 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 page? 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, just 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. And it was, you're talking about 20-year-olds. And where were you going with that? Yeah. Basically, every collapsed civilization in human history has been driven by underemployed, unhappy, single men in their 20s. That's like, that is the powder keg of civilization. And, you know, for centuries, we actually did a pretty good job with this in America. Like, you know, there was always work, and there was, you know, we were doing a pretty good job with pushing the family. But we're in this really weird window now where, you know, it is very common to see people disaffected, disengaged, unhappy in their 20s.

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 180. Man, I just, I think the messaging has to change.

You know what I mean? It's just, it's time and time again. It seems like, you know, we're teaching people just to become victims. You know, that's what I see. You know, it's, it's, I mean, 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 house. And remote working has become huge. You know, I know it's shrinking a little bit. I don't like remote work. I'm not clear that works, but yeah. But, but, you know what I mean?

And, and, but I think, 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 Anderl. And, you know, I think that, I think that's inspiring. I think that inspires a lot of people and it's a very different, you know, messaging than what most people see. It's, it's, it's be ashamed of who you are, you know, you were a slave owner. You're a victim of slavery. You're, you know what I mean? And it's like dude this like what the fuck are we doing here like you have to empower these people

you are people americans and in in 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 uh i'm a testament to that you're a testament to that a lot of the people at work here are a testament of that i mean a lot of 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 Founders Fund is called Founders Fund as 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 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 to Europe one? Or do you think we might get on the right path here?

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

Yeah. I've spent years on this show pulling back the curtain and trying to reveal what's really happening in this country. And the truth is, there's a double standard here in America. You see, time and time again, people defending themselves, defending their family, and then the judicial system goes after them. It's a double standard. And if you don't believe me, check out episode number three with Don Bradley. That is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. because it's not just about what you did, believe it or not, it's how the legal system interprets it.

And that's why I'm a USCA member. The USCA has over 860,000 members because they know the reality is, after you stop the threat, the real fight begins. Your membership gives you the education, elite training, and self-defense liability insurance you need for the second fight, the legal one. Plus, every member also gets access to a 24-7 critical response team and attorney network in the event of a self-defense incident. Violent crime happens too often in America. This isn't about living in fear. This is about being prepared when things go sideways.

You don't get to schedule danger, and with the world changing so fast, you have to do what you can to protect your family. Check out the USCA's risk-free membership at USCA.com slash SRS. That's USCA.com slash SRS. Protect more than just your life. Protect your future. Go right now to uscca.com slash SRS. My days don't slow down.

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Yeah. So, you know, the perfect project for Palmer is the intersection of defense and VR. And so for years, Palmer was telling the Pentagon, like, man, I just don't know that it's there, like, from a technology perspective. I don't know that I would trust the modern versions of augmented and virtual reality to put it on the heads of a soldier that's putting their lives at risk. But, 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 I-VS program. And so we're now working on this kind of with the team that has been iterating on versions for a while.

We've taken wildly different directions in a couple of places. We've partnered with Meta, which was kind of a coming home for Palmer, which was cool to see Zuck and Palmer kind of make up and be friends again. and also working with companies like Oakley. So it's been really cool to see that coming to fruition. Not a whole lot of publicly shareable stuff right now, but you're going to see some of this start coming out in the coming months. Cool. I mean, will we see it this year?

Actually, I don't know the specific timing, but it will be in the next few months. When do you think the product will be on soldiers' heads? It's a good question. I don't know the specific answer to that. from a timeline perspective is it still going to everybody in the military not the way palmer described it is this is going on everyone's head that's the idea 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 saying it we were talking about equipment you know what i mean and in my time in the seal teams and you know you know i did we i had everything i needed to be successful operator but then i would see these conventional guys running around in this i just felt so fucking bad totally it's 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 and so to see you know i know vortex optics is doing some cool stuff to with with with rifle scopes that actually went out to I think it was 80 second airborne first before special ops which I loved and then you know so the helmet you know the question is still

going to be military wider is it totally yeah that's the plan you know the program is about soldier born 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 war 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 and 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 Andral 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 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 in Ind Andoral? I think Fury, 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. Yeah, I guess all of the stuff that we're working on right now is really exciting. I think all the counter-air programs are incredibly important, and you can see in all of the things that have happened from a global conflict perspective over the last, you know, five years or something are very driven by shooting down autonomous assets as being, like, the most important thing that you can do. And we've been leaning in really heavily on that as well. So I think there are a lot of challenges, and, you know, the beauty of being Anderral is that our, our, our.

value at is speed. And so, you know, we, 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 yeah, 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 we are really excited to be partnering with them on delivering that. And that will be the first things that we build out of the Arsenal factory in Ohio as well, as we'll start rolling the Fury aircraft off the line. So the Fury aircraft will, it will be manned? No, it's unmanned. It's unmanned. Yep. But it'll have its own fleet of smaller.

It is an autonomous wingman to a manned aircraft. Okay, so that would be those, these are the autonomous aircraft around the manned aircraft. That's right. How many will, how many, like, how many aircraft are we talking? How big is the fleet? I mean, you could, you could control a bunch of them. You could control, you know, dozens if that was the con-op that they wanted to choose. I don't know if you've read the book or seen the movie Ender's Game, but it's basically

it's a science fiction novel, and the idea is that there's this guy, Ender Wiggins, who is effectively controlling an entire, like, alien battle from a bunker where he's just there and he's giving commands and the, you know, 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 is 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 surface vessels with submarines, with ground vehicles, like, we're moving in that direction with these detritable assets. I mean, what is, what does the future warfare look like for you, you know, in your mind? I mean, how, are we going all autonomous? Are humans becoming obsolete? I ask all of you guys this.

Yeah. Well, no, I don't think humans are obsolete. Like, there 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's all that hasn't been the case for decades already.

There's sea whiz, 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 shoot 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 are you, how far out do you think we are from seeing the battlefield being 100% autonomous? You know, maybe there's decision makers, you know, well, there will be decision makers somewhere else. But I mean, how long do you think it is before the entire battlefield is autonomous? Yeah, I mean, so much of this is probably driven by geopolitical realities rather than, 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. You know, the humanoid robotics, I think, are kind of. 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 by humans operating in theater in the field 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 most just way possible. But humans make this, they make bad decisions as well. Do I think that there's some imminent threat, like existential threat of, you know, AI destroying human civilization? No, I don't think that's really on the near-term horizon. What kind of lessons are you guys learning from Ukraine? Russia. Yeah. You know, the airspace is probably the most interesting kind of foreshadowing

of future conflict because the Russians are doing a really good job of denying GPS and messing with communications signals. So you've seen like crazy tactics, like the use of fiber optic cables to drones. I don't know if you've seen any of this. Yeah, I've heard of it. Yeah, they're literally drones towing like, you know, a mile. of fiber optic cable so that they're wired and they can't be interfered with by the electronic warfare stuff. So there's a lot of back and forth, you know, trying to keep ahead of your opponent 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 our aircraft to have the ability to operate

without comms connections. You can't rely on GPS. You can't rely on GPS. You can't rely on remote piloting, like you need to actually be able to dead reckon or navigate optically by, you know, landmarks on the ground and things like that. So that is, 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, 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?

I mean, this is why we started the company. You know, the purpose is to be relevant and to be active. And I think part of that is building the engine for the United States, which is, you know, the vast majority of our business is building that engine for them. But, you know, the U.S. government makes policy-level decisions about where we send our equipment to be helpful to our partners abroad. And we're really honored to be part of that. What's your biggest concern in the world right now? I mean, China is 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 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 serious 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 TSM, 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 pieces of strength thing came from. It's like, we're going to tell people what we have and why we're strong, and that will prevent them from doing crazy things. the, you know, the Assassin's Mace story, which is like a parable in China, is, you know, hide your strength by time and then strike when you have an unfair advantage. And so, you know, it's to their advantage to go into these international dialogues and say, like, oh, no, we're weak. We don't, we don't, we're not competing. We don't have the ability to do that.

Like, you know, we want to be part of these discussions. And we actually listen to them. And we're making decisions based on believing that. But their entire, like, you know, moral background in the way that they think about these things is very different than 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. You know, when we started Anderrol in 2017, we were telling the story to investors.

Like, we believe that the future of national security is near-peer conflict. Like, this is about great powers. Like, we're moving out of counterterrorism. That was eight years ago. And it was super weird to even be telling that story. And today, I feel like, you know, no one's confused about this anymore. You know, obviously we could talk about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and how terrible that was. But no one believes that nation building and counterterrorism is like the thing

that we should be focusing on anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely with you on that. I mean, you know, breakfast we were talking about, you know, it doesn't sound like, in your opinion, we are ahead of China on much of anything. I think we have, we're more innovative. Like, the entrepreneurial energy that we have is a tremendous advantage. We're really good at software as a country. We're the best in the world at building these software capabilities. There are a lot of things that are really important that they have massive advantages on. And like production.

You know, they have entire factories that do autonomous production of cruise missiles, for example. Like, I mean, they're just way ahead of us on that. Also, all the natural resources stuff, the Belt and Road strategy, you know, for better or worse, was a genius play by them to go and scoop up access to all of the raw materials. And we just watched them do it. I know, man. And 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 on kinetically? I mean, this is the question with Ji. 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 III. But, man, I mean, when she started talking about the cognitive warfare and, you know, the Psiops 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 going to have to take it kinetically. I mean, they're doing a phenomenal job at dividing and just, that other party takes over.

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. And I don't think there's a 0% probability that that's the way that it goes down. So. Yeah. Yeah.

What, I mean, anything, what else about China? Who's bothering you? How, how ahead are they on manufacturing and AI? I mean, they have like 250 times a 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 Foundersund, we often hear hardware builders talk about is that even if you had unlimited money and you were going to set up a factory in the United States to build something that is currently being built in China, you wouldn't even be able to operate the factory because the skill that's required to make these things with high yields and quality, it's all in China. Like, we don't even have people in the United States that, like, know how to run these machines. And so we have to figure out some way to reskill. And I think autonomy in factory 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 job's perspective. Because the alternative to leveraging modern software in order to reindustrialize is just continuing to outsource to foreign countries. And I don't think we have the time or the economic will to make a different decision on that fact. Like, we just need to push as hard as we can.

Are there any other countries that you're concerned about other than China? I mean, are you concerned about Russia, India, breaks? You know, I think that there's risks at some level with all of these other nations. You know, I think Iran has continued to be a thorn in the side of Western power. that's concerning. North Korea as like a rogue state is pretty terrifying. Like who knows what they're going to do if they feel truly desperate. You know, Russia continues to be a threat to, you know, all the countries 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 vehicle. had dry-rided tires, it was like, you know, we think our bureaucracy is bad. I'm sure their bureaucracies are all really bad, too. They're not 10-foot giants, but we need to be prepared as if they are. And so I think there's a lot of global threats that we need to take seriously. What kind of side ventures are you doing? Well, the one that I've been most interested in is this project called Soul. So one of the kind of of critiques of younger generations, my own generation, millennials included, is that because of short-form video content largely, we've lost the ability to consume long-form media.

Like we don't really read books anymore, and I feel like this is a huge problem. And so I got together with a few friends of mine, and we started a consumer hardware company that builds a wearable e-reader. And so it's like, you know, a Kindle that you wear in a pair of sunglasses. And kind of the thesis is that we don't need do-everything devices to do everything. Like sometimes you want a single-purpose device that actually removes you from the do-everything context that's highly distracting. More minutes are read on the Kindle app on Apple devices than are read on Kindles. No shit.

And so, you know, our perspective on this is like, what if we gave someone a better reading experience, a better technology than what? they previously had, would we see, you know, longer reading sessions, more frequent, more pages read, and it's been really cool to see that adoption take off over the last couple of years. So I'll send you an e-reader that you can check out. Right on, man. Yeah. I would love that. Let's see.

Other side quests, you know, I think that there are only so many things that a person can do before they stopped being effective at any of them. So I'm probably at just about capacity right now. Well, I mean, I thought here that you hosted Bible studies in Silicon Valley where Christianity was once borderline illegal. Yep. Are you still doing that? Yeah.

Let's see. The most recent one that I did was in the spring. My wife and I and another couple have been doing these. 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 you, you, 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, 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, you know, I think it looks more like a push for one world government than it does, you know, a destructive, you know, 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 complacency. Well, Tray, 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 or... Oh, no, it is. It is. Oh, man. Well, then I have to be careful to not throw stealth founders

out to the wolves here. Let's see. I think diving into the foundational model AI founders could be really interesting, like pulling in people who have perspectives on how AI is going to shape in the next 10 to 20 years. Okay. You have this, 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 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. Brod on. He'd be great to bring in. We're trying. Great.

We're trying. Love to hear it. We're trying. Well, Trey, I just really appreciate you coming here. I thought it was a fascinating interview. I hope to see again. Best luck and all your endeavors. Great.

Thanks, Sean. 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 SIOP, that search has never been more difficult. In September of 2022, the U.S. Army's 4th Sciop 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 Cy War 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 Kentucky Syop 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're 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. Sciops 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 SIOPs 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,

Mind Control Colts 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 Psiops 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 Sciop. Buy it today at Sciopshow.com.