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

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Trey Stevens, welcome to the show, man.

Man, it's great to be here.

Thanks for bringing me out.

I've been pumped about this.

I love everything that's going on with Andural.

The Palmer episode was fascinating.

What a cool dude to be around.

And so, yeah, 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 and uh what i really want to do is uh life story on you get into everything that you know childhood how you got into tech all that stuff and then we'll we'll end with everything that's going on in andural sounds good let's do it perfect all right

everybody starts with an introduction here

trace stevens Co-founder and executive chairman of Andural Industries, a defense tech powerhouse that's redefining national security with AI and autonomy.

A partner at Founders Fund.

You've backed game changers in government and defense tech since 2014.

Co-founder of Soul and wearable e-reader, so you can read without distraction.

Intern at the Afghan Embassy in D.C., an early Palantir employee who helped turn data into

Intel.

A husband, a father, a devout Christian, you're unapologetic about your faith in Silicon Valley.

In fact, you preached to tech entrepreneurs in 2024 on how Jesus would approve of building of righteous AI weapons.

You are a sneakerhead

and

a prepper.

All those things.

Love the prepping.

Love all of it.

But yeah, I wanted to talk about, you know, in 2024, you preached to tech entrepreneurs on how Jesus would approve of righteous AI weapons.

There's not a whole lot of Christians out there from what I know, but there are not.

It is a pretty godless city

with a pocket of really strong believers and community.

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

You know, when I first moved to San Francisco, that was kind of my expectation that 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 nothing over millions and millions of years.

That requires as big, if not a bigger leap of 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, he's like, man, you have to have, it's like more work

to gain faith that there is nothing out there than there is to actually believe.

And

I love that guy.

Yeah, no, it's absolutely true.

And I think that we're seeing a bit of a renaissance where people are coming back to this idea that, look, even if they have a hard time with the belief in the supernatural,

they're starting to kind of grok this idea that a society unmoored from truth, foundational truth, is really dangerous and not a society that they want to live in.

And that's kind of opened the door to being able to have these conversations with people about, you know, why we believe what we believe and why we believe that that is not only good for our souls, but also good for humanity.

So people are interested.

They're asking questions out there.

Yeah, I know.

People are super interested.

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 San Francisco, definitely in the country.

But I mean, why do you think that is?

Why do you think so many people are tapping into the Bible and coming to Christ right now?

Well, I think there's been such a push

really since like the 70s, but especially in just like the last five years

around this kind of completely godless approach to life.

And some of those lies are being exposed.

I think we're starting to see

societal dysfunction, a breakdown in trust and institutions.

You know, you have all of these different factors.

And young people are in an interesting position to look at that and say, man, none of the things that I thought I was promised are real.

Like, all of these ridiculous, kind of wokey ideas around how the world is supposed to function,

they don't actually work.

Like, society doesn't work like this.

You can't just walk around not believing in anything.

You have to believe in some sort of truth.

And I think that's kind of reawakened people to this idea that there's something in the classics that are worth looking at.

You know, I don't know if you're a fan of the the HBO show Silicon Valley, but

there was this narrative that was picked up for like the first 20 years of the 21st century around weird Eastern mysticism and Buddhism and stuff like that.

And the CEO of Huli, 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 people are like, wow, this is really silly.

Like all these things that we're being told are just really silly, you know, untruths.

And you're starting to see people kind of turn from that kind of Eastern mysticism thing and look back at the Western classics, which, you know, Judeo-Christian ideas seem a lot more moored in some way.

Yeah, I think, I mean, I think things just got so chaotic and the trust in pretty much any institution is at an all-time low right now.

I think people are just looking for anything that makes sense.

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, caused mass hysteria and confusion.

And people are just looking for something to settle into that's solid, that's, you know, that is, that's, that's, that's, you know, truth.

But it's cool to see, man.

It's really cool to see.

Yeah, it's been great.

You know, my wife, Michelle, she has started this organization called Acts 17,

which is the reference to the apostles speaking in Athens to the intellectuals, to the philosophers, and arguing with them about apologetics for why the message that Jesus brought was

the message.

It was the truth.

And, you know, it all started with my 40th birthday party.

So I'm not really a, I don't really like parties very much, but my wife was was adamant that we should gather together a group of friends.

And I thought, wow, the best way for me to avoid having a huge group of people hang around for my birthday is to do it at our house in New Mexico because the gnome would come.

Like, obviously, if I just do it away from where anyone is.

But we planned this weekend where Friday we called the roast,

Saturday was the toast, and Sunday was the Holy Ghost.

And the roast was my best friends coming together and roasting me, including a former guest of yours here on the show, Sean Sean Sankar.

Nice.

Did a roast of me.

And then on Saturday, my favorite band, which is a 90s-era punk ska band called Goldfinger, they came and performed.

It turns out you can just hire 90s era punk ska bands, which is pretty cool.

And then Sunday, my partner at Founder's Son, Peter Thiel, gave a sermon.

250 people ended up coming to this crazy birthday party,

most of them not believers.

But the feedback that we got after Peter gave this sermon was incredible.

People were like, man, I have never heard a presentation of Christianity that like challenged me intellectually in this way.

And so we just kind of ran with it.

And Acts 17 has done incredible events with people like Peter, with Francis Collins, who was early in the genetics movement.

He was the director of the National Institutes of Health.

And, you know, starting to kind of expand.

Over the last four weeks, Peter has done an Acts 17 series on the Antichrist, actually, in San Francisco.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.

Did you go to that?

Yeah,

I mean, my wife runs the organization.

Dude, how was it?

Really cool.

I mean, Peter has been talking about these themes around the Antichrist for a long time.

During COVID, he and I did a small group Bible study exploring the concepts around the Antichrist,

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 hear, you know, a Silicon Valley billionaire talk about faith and why he believes in the gospel.

Man, I think that's awesome.

Did you, was that the, was that the,

was it the Times?

Or I can't remember the, the interview where they asked him if he thought he was the Antichrist.

Yeah, there's a famous clip with 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, that would have been awesome.

They didn't record it, right?

It was

totally off the record.

Yeah.

So no, no shared notes, no video, nothing.

That's pretty cool.

That's pretty cool.

How many people went?

I mean, there were a few hundred people for four consecutive weeks with overflow, like people sitting in the lobby on, you know, watching a simulcast.

So there were a lot.

It was pretty crazy.

Also, the majority were not.

were 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 Acts 17 perspective is that you don't want to get ordained ministers to come in and, you know, do a, you know, a Bible-thumping presentation of the gospel.

You want to get people in the marketplace that aren't known for being Christians and then put them in a context where they're talking to people who wouldn't expect them.

to talk about their faith.

And I think there's a tremendous opportunity to leverage that, not only in tech, but in other leading industries, whether that's finance, media, entertainment, whatever.

That's interesting, you know, that it was that good of a turnout and that it sparked that much interest, especially from non-Christians.

Yeah.

That's very, very interesting.

You know, back to, you know, your remarks that, you know,

I can't remember exactly what it was, but Jesus, you know, basically would have no problems with people in defense tech building weapons to

annihilate evil.

I mean,

where did you come up with that?

Well, I mean, there's a long thought process that gets to that point, but it actually all starts with just war theory, going back to St.

Augustine.

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 discriminate?

that you're attacking the right players, the combatants rather than innocent life.

You have the principle of proportionality.

Are you responding in turn to a conflict or are you going way overboard and

increasing the stakes and the level of violence by your counter response?

Anyway, there's all of these principles that St.

Augustine laid out thousands of years ago.

And the way that that kind of applies to modern day is really interesting.

So if you think about the way that conflict, violence has emerged over the course of

human society, you know, it started, you know, we're hitting each other with like rocks and things like that, you know, the Cain and Abel story.

And then we figured out bow and arrows and swords.

And eventually we got into catapults and trébiches and, you know, the advent of gunpowder.

You know, we're just climbing 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 humanity, we looked at ourselves in the mirror and we said, this is like this can't go on.

Like we can't just be, become ever more destructive.

And the Cold War was really the story of humanity figuring out how to de-escalate that level of violence.

And so during the Cold War, you see things like precision guided munitions.

Like, you know, we can shoot AIM9s 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 Andrew perspective is if I'm building technology, if I'm participating in the development of next generation munitions, next generation weapons, we should be doing that in a way that is more edifying to the principles of just war theory.

Can we make things that are more discriminate, that are more proportional, that are more precise,

so that we're putting the humans, the sacred nature of human life, that we're removing those people from dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs and enabling us to engage in combat, engage in geopolitics, the real geopolitics in a way that reduces the loss of innocent life.

Wow, you really went down the rabbit hole with this.

Is this because you had, was this a tough decision for you to get into defense tech?

I mean, was there an internal, you know, battle going on in your head on,

all right, we're going to do this.

These are weapons.

These are, you know, we're going to be used in war.

I mean, did you, was that a big decision for you?

Yeah.

I mean, as a Christian, obviously I think about this stuff a lot.

Like, you know, I don't,

at the end of my life, I believe I'm going to be judged for my actions on earth.

And, you know, I don't want to be doing things that are acting in opposition to God's will.

And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about this.

I think like one of the misunderstandings that people outside of the industry have is they sort of believe that there are like this cadre of generals in the Pentagon that are sitting around like plotting how they can like enact violence on the world or something like that.

And, you know, you served, you know, the reality is that no one wants to write letters home to the parents of children lost in combat.

Nobody wants to do that.

What we want to do is we want to deter combat.

And, you know, Reagan talked about this all the time.

Peace through strength, peace through strength, peace through strength.

That's what we want to do.

We want to make it so unthinkable to do things that we believe are wrong that people just won't do them.

And that's ultimately the goal of Defense Tech.

It's not to make it

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.

Biggest deterrent of all.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And so, yeah,

I think about this all the time.

Right on, right on.

I think about it too, but I love what you guys are doing, and it protects our country.

And I also believe in peace through strength.

So, yeah.

But

a couple things to get through here before we get into the interview.

I got a couple gifts for you here.

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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-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 intel guys uh in the intel service

and uh so that phone they it's a hardened iPhone and uh it has I mean they do an overwatch of the phone you know no data uh leaks out they have all-American VPNs they have burner numbers So you an endless amount of burner numbers.

You can get any burner number, any area code you want.

And so, you know, if you're doing a political donation, booking a hotel, ordering a pizza, talking to somebody you never want to talk to again, you know, you can use one of those burner numbers and they will actually, they can even tell if

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

they'll be able to know, hey, something's acting funny 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 can actually afford.

So we're rolling that out uh towards the end of the year that's awesome thank you so much i i uh go through a lot of effort every time i travel internationally to have burner devices and things like that so this is something i think about a lot dude thank you so much i'll teach you how to use it yes some 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 into quite the community.

And I offer them the opportunity to ask every guest a question.

So this is from Tyler Wilson.

Given your past work in the intelligence community and your time advising the Trump administration, what are the most significant misconceptions the public has about the relationship between Silicon Valley and the U.S.

government?

Yeah, no, that's good.

There are a lot of misconceptions.

I think, you know, they're constantly changing

because the obviously the administrations change, the politically appointed officials change.

And so you get this kind of like ebb and flow of how

that interaction has been shaped.

If you go back to the Obama administration,

basically everyone in tech had supported Obama when he was elected president.

But there was really no presence of tech people in the administration.

It was kind of he ended up going with government insiders and academics and things like that.

And so the connectivity was really, really low.

Obviously, going into the first Trump administration, Peter and Palmer were the only

tech billionaires that were engaged in that administration from the very beginning.

And then Biden came around and, again, the whole tech community jumped out in support of him.

But there's been a bit of a shift now where people are starting to realize that all of this time and effort and money that they put into courting the Democratic establishment didn't really give them the connectivity to drive any of the change that they wanted to see.

And so I think in this administration,

you know, there's been a real effort by the administration to understand what it is that is going on in tech, whether that's, you know, with AI regulation or with crypto or with defense, and trying to figure out ways to pull them into that conversation.

And so you get, you know, people like Michael Kratzios, who is Peter's chief of staff, who's running the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

You have David Sachs working on AI and crypto, who was one of the original PayPal mafia.

You have Emil Michael, who is the COO of Uber, that's now the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.

And so that tie is much stronger than it has been in

modern history.

Yeah, it definitely seems that way.

Yeah.

And so I think from a misconception perspective now, I think I'm always reminding defense tech founders that the government, they're not buying the best thing.

to solve the job.

They're buying relationships and

decades of service and things like that.

And so you really have to understand how to talk with the government and how to sell to the government in order to actually get any of the technologies on the defense side that the warfighter needs to win.

And that's just a very different problem set than 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, mean,

they are like

very pro administration right now.

Yeah, I think, I mean, there's, there's always time for that to shift, but there's a lot more optimism about that engagement than there has been historically.

It's good to see.

It's good to see.

But,

all right, let's move into your life story.

Let's do it.

Where'd you grow up?

I grew up in rural Ohio, north of Cincinnati, about 30 miles north of Cincinnati, kind of small town, USA.

It's called Lebanon, Ohio.

You know, we had kind of the quintessential, you know, downtown area with, you know, a vintage soda fountain and the public library.

And

our claim to fame in town was the oldest inn in Ohio.

It's called the Golden Lamb.

For those like politicos out there watching the show, Rob Portman, the former congressman and later senator from the state of Ohio, owns the Golden Lamb.

And so there's like this crazy connection there.

Just one town over from Middletown, which is where JD grew up.

So some of the same stories that he talked about in Hill Bibliology 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.

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What'd your parents do?

My dad was a a mechanic and he built roller coasters, actually.

So there's a big amusement park in Southwest Ohio called Kings Island.

And from the day he graduated high school until the day he retired, he worked at Kings Island as an amusement park mechanic.

Right on.

Yeah, right on.

My mom was all sorts of things.

She worked in accounting.

She was a substitute teacher.

She worked at the public library in Lebanon.

And

she was

a mom and very active in my brother and I's life.

So, yeah.

So very blue-collar family.

Super blue-collar family.

Yeah.

Brothers and sisters?

I have a brother.

He's 18 months older than me.

He's a farmer and a real estate agent in Vermont of all places.

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

Are you guys close?

Very recently, in the last

five years or so, we've kind of rekindled our sibling love and we do a bunch of stuff together.

He and I just went on a fishing trip up in Alaska 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, sockeye 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.

It's, you know, for someone like me that like lives and works every day in a city, there's something about going out and standing in rushing water and, you know, feeling the tension of the line in the, in the current, it's just, it totally disarms you.

Therapeutic.

Yeah, it's super, super therapeutic for me.

What were you into as a kid?

I mean, I fished a lot.

My dad was an avid fisherman and hunter.

And so kind of did all those outdoor stuff with my dad.

We lived on, you know, a bunch of acreage in the middle of the woods in a log cabin that my dad built literally with his bare hands by himself.

And so kind of grew up, you know, playing in the creek and hanging out in the woods, building tree houses with my brother.

Also, I played basketball, ran cross country.

played Ultimate Frisbee in high school.

That's the only thing that I carried over to my college experience from the athletics perspective.

And we were super active in our church.

My grandfather was the pastor of our church growing up.

So we were really active in the community there as well.

Right on, right on.

I mean, so

were you a good student?

Yeah, I mean,

I was a bit of a nerd, no doubt about it.

You know, it was

public school was an interesting experience.

You know, I didn't, as you said, I grew up in a blue-collar family.

It's not like I was going to a fancy private school with a bunch of hard-charging aspirational people.

um and uh at times that was sort of frustrating because you know you can kind of get stuck in the rut of um feeling like you know everyone's just goofing off and you're just trying to get through uh through school but um

yeah i had a you know graduated top of my class um

got great test scores and then got rejected everywhere that I applied to college.

So this is

the lesson of some of what JD talked about in Hillbilliology.

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 my mom's brothers um were really into it

growing up and so um you know my uncles hung out with my brother and i and we built our first 486 computer together, like went to Microcenter Mall and picked up, you know, the motherboard and the,

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, you know, went down the closest path I could find to working in intelligence.

And,

you know, saw a demo of Palantir in my first job in the intelligence community, got into kind of a battle internally about using Palantir, got denied, and then jumped ship really early on and joined Palantir before we had any revenue or really any users.

And the rest is history and I've been in tech since.

Can we go back to your time in intelligence?

Absolutely, yeah.

What kind of stuff were you doing?

I was working on counterterrorism, primarily on like computational linguistics around Arabic name matching.

So in college, I studied, I was a middle English studies major.

So learned Arabic, studied abroad in Egypt.

And the intersection of people who could like write code and could speak Arabic was, you know, very, very small.

And so, 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 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 Muhammad Ada was the same as this Muhammad Ada was the same as this Muhammad Ada, so that when we pass those reports down to you guys in the field in Afghanistan or Iraq, that you had reliable intelligence that you could act on when you're kicking down doors.

Interesting.

How long were you in the intelligence for?

I only lasted about two and a half years.

It was a short battle with bureaucracy, and I was defeated.

Got to you.

Got to you.

And how did you,

how did Palantir pop onto 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 really, it's kind of an under-the-radar thing.

But

under George Tenet, the CIA set up this, this, essentially a venture fund called Incutel.

And their job was to scout for technology that would be useful to the, to the mission of the intelligence community.

And now they serve a bunch of different customers.

You know, they work with the Department of Homeland Security, with the, you know, with the Pentagon.

Like they're kind of all over the place.

But at the time, they had funded a work program for Palantir in a few federal intelligence agencies.

And they were doing a roadshow and they gave a demo that I was at.

And I'm like, oh, crap, this would literally save me like 20% of the time that I spend every week doing searches in these databases.

Because basically the way that I would do it is there are, you know, 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 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 that then I can merge into an Excel spreadsheet and run concatenate functions to try to narrow it down.

But in Palantir, it was like bringing Google to that siloed intelligence infrastructure where you could just run the search once and it would just return everything instantly.

And so,

in its simplest form, it would have saved me probably a day of work every week.

But, you know, there was no requirement,

as you're familiar, there was no requirement.

There was no funding to

build anything like this.

And so it was really hard to get it brought into the door.

So I switched over to the private sector and worked at Palantir instead.

So what, I mean, what

a lot of.

Palantir's, everybody's worried about it.

Everybody's worried about, you know, are they spying on us?

Is this going to be

the newest Patriot Act?

I mean,

are they spying on us?

What is it?

Yeah, I mean, the misconceptions around Palantir are crazy.

I mean, they're not bringing any data.

The data belongs to the customer.

It's just architecture for data management.

Like you have to have some sort of software infrastructure that allows you to store data, search data,

explore data, analyze data,

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 decisions about how we should

like make decisions around the policies that we want to enact to protect our society in the national security context.

But we don't want them to have the best tools to do it.

We would rather them have crappy stuff that barely works that we have to hold together with duct tape.

And so I think a lot of the concern about Palantir is really

people expressing a concern around democracy.

They're saying, I don't believe that the American people can make good decisions about policies.

And therefore, I don't want our federal, our civil servants to have the tools that they need to actually, you know, enable the policies that we as a democracy have decided that we want to go after.

So it's kind of troubling.

Yeah, you know, it's, it's, I mean, it's every time I talk to

any of my buddies that are still in special ops or in intelligence, I mean, they're all raving about Valantir and talking about how, you know,

every, just everything from a javelin shot to a sniper shot to, I mean, targeting.

And everybody's raving about Palantir.

That'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.

In the early days of Andrew, there was kind of a profile that was written about the company and the headline of the story was something like, Andrel 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 Palantir is being asked to solve.

How long did you spend there?

I was there for six years.

Six years?

Yep.

Why did you leave?

You know, most of the time that I was there,

I was working with Shyam Sankar, 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

awkward socially.

And so what do you do?

Well, I got put in charge of sales.

And so Sham and I were kind of tasked with figuring this out.

Really everything I know about this space, I learned from Dr.

Karp, the CEO and Shyam, 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, you know, the founder of PayPal, the co-founder of Palantir.

And Peter just out of the blue asked me.

if I would come join him at Founders Fund.

So not having any interest in venture capital or frankly knowing anything about finance,

I kind of jumped ship and joined Peter in San Francisco.

No kidding.

You know, back to back to, you know, his Palantir spying.

Joe Lonsdale had a great quote yesterday.

He was talking about, you know, if you saw how the government managed data, you would want us in there.

And he said, you know, we're the ones watching the watchers.

I thought that was, I thought that was pretty good because everybody's worried about the watchers.

But yeah, I mean, the reality is, is like the

idea behind Palantir was that there shouldn't be a trade-off between doing your job well and like protecting privacy and civil liberties.

That's like the entire founding story of the company is that for anyone with a brain that has an engineering background, you don't believe you have to make that choice.

That's a false choice.

We can do both of these things.

You know, there's, there's all sorts of critiques that you can make that, you know, I would critique myself for in that, in the role that I was in at Palantir as well.

It's like, maybe we didn't do a good enough job telling the story.

Maybe we tried to be a little bit too secretive.

Maybe we could have like 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

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

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,

was it Peter?

Is that who you believed in?

Why did you make that transition?

Yeah, you know, when Peter first asked me to do it,

he asked if I could go and meet up with the leadership of the fund.

And I remember sitting down with Lauren Gross, who's the COO of Founders Fund.

And

we're having breakfast together.

And she kind of looks at me and she's like, why are you interested in venture capital?

And I'm like, oh, no, you misunderstand.

I'm not.

I'm not interested in venture capital.

I'm doing this because Peter asked me to.

And I can't even imagine what the internal conversations were at Founders Fund coming out of this interview process where people were like, wait a second, this guy doesn't even want to work here.

Why are we interviewing someone that doesn't want a job?

And so, you know, it was, it was kind of a weird, like nine months that I was talking to Founders Fund before Peter.

Nine months?

Nine months.

And finally, Peter was just like, no, we're doing this.

And it's like, you know, he's the co-founder of the company I'm working at.

It's like, I don't know, is this an opportunity or is it an order?

Is it some combination of both?

Am I being like, you know, fired from Palantir and being like rescued and brought over to FoundersFund 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 as a job is that

we're just going and interacting with the most interesting, most passionate people in the world who want to solve these really meaty problems.

And the expectation isn't that I'm going to know everything there is to know about nuclear.

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 Founder Sun, I did 500, just over 500 pitch meetings, which is a lot.

Wow.

You know, I've ratcheted that down a bit.

I have a better sense for the types of things that are going to be a good fit.

But, 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

it 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.

And in the meeting, I've just got the table out and I'm like checking off, like, do they have this trait?

Do they have this trait?

In reality, it doesn't really work like that.

There's something like that's way more gut and intuition-based

where, you know, within about five minutes of a pitch meeting, you're like, you can get pretty dialed to know, okay, this is one that we might take a shot at.

Like there's something really vibrant about this person.

There's something that's super differentiated about this person.

Peter wrote a book called Zero to One.

In the book, he said that,

you know, we're all drawn into mimesis.

And so like most normies, are they're just aping what everyone else is doing.

And so they're, you know, they want to be like the uber for 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, they're maybe somewhere on the autism spectrum.

And that kind of acts as their superpower because they're not actually concerned about what other people think about them.

And that ends up being a tremendous unlock.

So we're really looking for people like that, where you meet them and instantly you're like, okay, this, this person is not just trying to be like a cool kid from their business school class.

There's something else to it.

Interesting.

Interesting.

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

Who are they?

I mean, Founders Fund has an incredible track record.

We were, you know, the first investor in Facebook, in SpaceX,

in

Airbnb, in

Stripe, Andrew, Palantir.

We've been kind of at the very beginning of most of the last 20 years of technology, which has been really cool to be along for the ride for.

I'll bet, man.

There's been some awesome stuff that has come out of that.

Yeah.

This is, I mean, the history of the PayPal mafia is truly incredible.

Like, if you think about this one company ended up kind of seeding either as investor or founder, most of the companies that we think of today as being kind of definitional of the tech success story in America.

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Yeah.

So then you met Palmer.

Then I met Palmer.

Their founders fund.

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 Andrew, 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, you know, I'm doing this VR thing.

Like, I'm super passionate about this, but you know, I don't, I don't know that I'm ever going to do anything other than VR.

Um, and uh, that obviously only lasted until he got fired for his politics, and then he was he was right back on the Andrew story with me, right on.

Was he always was he always out there,

board shorts,

mixed-match flip-flops,

buying shirts.

I would love to say that like he's he's changed or like matured by the standards of society, but he's exactly the same person that he was when, you know, he was a teenager starting Oculus.

Money, success, fame has not changed him.

Good.

I love that.

I love that.

All right, and real quick.

I got to hear some Corky Palmer stories.

Let's hear it.

Yeah, no, I mean, he is, he is such an an interesting person.

You know, I could, I could spend all day talking about this.

In the early days of Andrew, 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, it's my cargo shorts.

And he would have like his toothbrush and a stick of deodorant in one of his cargo pockets.

And he'd have like two two days worth of clothes in his other cargo pocket.

And, you know, he's sitting in like the middle seat in economy at the back of the plane.

It has taken us years to get him to the point where he's just like happy to do things in a way that keep him safe.

It's been a real struggle.

One of the other fun, he's a huge gearhead.

He loves cars.

He has.

a ton of cars.

Most of them don't work, which is a constant thorn at his side.

But, you know, I'm a huge Aston Martin fan.

As I mentioned before, I love James Bond.

And so, you know, when I told him that I really wanted to get an Aston Martin, he's like, Trey, there are only two cars that you should buy.

Cars that run really well and American cars.

And, you know, I think when he, 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 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.

Could not be

a quirkier and yet smarter person.

He's just the perfect combination.

What kind of stuff is that guy innovating in his free time?

Have you seen any of his crazy gizmos?

I mean, right now he is so focused on Soldier Born Compute, like building the helmet, that I think it's consuming like all of his creative energy.

It's, you know, it's the perfect thing for him.

It's, you know, seven years into Andrel, he finally gets to return to his roots and work on the thing, you know, giving our soldiers superpowers.

And it's, it has to just be the most fun for him of anything that we've done.

That is pretty cool, man.

That is pretty cool.

So I got a quote from you here that says,

you said it, you said the 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 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 uh i sat down and i had windows 98 and a crt monitor and i was in a cube with two other people who like didn't actually work they just like talked about

local sports teams most of the day.

And so

it was a crazy transition from believing that

I was going to walk into this incredible tech forward environment.

And it turns out that

I would do these coffee break searches and stuff.

Like that wasn't at all what I expected.

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

Yeah, it's really the Palagier 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, they all bid on it.

They present white papers.

They say like what, how many heads it would take for them to write the code.

And then they get hired on a cost plus basis where they're reimbursed for the hourly labor with some 7% to 12% margin attached to the top of it.

And then they, 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, DC area getting crapped on by bureaucrats and just like, you know, punch guard, 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 first product you guys wanted to develop?

At Andoril?

Well, I mean, we have this

pitch deck, like a very bad Google Slides deck that we use to recruit our first 12 hires.

And one of the slides in that is like a list of things that we wanted to build.

We didn't know which thing would be the first thing that we wanted to build, but we had this list.

And it was kind of cool.

Like earlier this year, I opened up the slide deck in my Google Drive, and it turns out that we've built 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 Sentry Tower, which is now deployed not only at military bases, but also on the southwest border in the United States with a border with Mexico.

Obviously, in the first Trump administration, this was a big concern.

Whether or not you have a border wall, you need to know what's going on.

And so

we built this autonomous sentry tower that was, you know, completely off-grid, mobile, so you could pick it up and move it around,

had, you know, a solid state metamaterial radar, a infrared camera, optical camera, communications network, and it would just persistently look around itself and flag for the Customs and Border Patrol whenever something was crossing the border that they needed to take a look at.

And then it would enable them to make a decision.

Like, yes, that's something that we care about that we're going to go and take a look at.

No, that's something that we expect to see.

And over time, you train that model.

And that has now grown into a massive program.

We 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 you know, the AI computer vision system, the operating system for surfacing tracks to the users of the 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, you know, the AI brain was the real product.

And then whether you made a sentry tower that flies, which was our next product, which is called Ghost,

to, you know, interceptor missiles, to submarines to autonomous fighter planes.

They all have

that same operating system on the back end that we call Lattice.

And so we're still getting amortized research and development out of the very first thing that we started building eight years ago.

Damn.

Where did you guys come up with the list?

It was just sitting around with Palmer, me, Palmer, Matt, Brian, and Joe, just

riffing on what we think

would make sense for us to build, leveraging that combination of software and hardware um and uh you know

i'm honestly kind of surprised that we ended up doing almost exactly what we said that we were going to do at that very point

do you do you have that slide with you by chance i would love to put that up yeah yeah i can i can show you the perfect the slide yeah perfect so what did come next um so we went the next product after the sentry tower was ghost um which is just a flying version of the tower it's a a modular payload drone um that could do autonomous identification, detection, and tracking of targets.

And so you can kind of think about it as like a helicopter with a pilot

where you just tell it, hey, I want you to go and do this mission.

Like go and see if you can find things that look like this.

And then it would just go and conduct a mission and then report back to you.

when it was seeing things that were interesting.

And these are now deployed all over the place.

They're deployed with 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 CounterDrone.

We started building interceptors for small drones.

We have a product called Anvil that is,

the first version was not explosive.

It would just fly like a bowling ball into a drone.

And then we've continued to level that up into Roadrunner, which is kind of like a reusable interceptor.

Barracuda, which is

like a missile, more like an interceptor cruise missile, and kind of expanding that out over time.

But the goal is really like all domain.

Like you want to do, you know, work in space, work in air, work on ground, work on the surface of the sea, sub-sea.

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 a 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, a really clever name um and uh we just uh completed uh the delivery on a program of record for australia where we'll build a bunch of these for them um as they're kind of transitioning over to the aucus treaty where they're getting the delivery of nuclear submarines from the united states so uh they obviously have uh real concerns about their the the sea space around the continent um and uh and we're we're spinning up a bunch of work there with them on that as well.

We also have a product called Seabed Sentry that is kind of a platform that you can drop into onto the floor of the ocean floor.

And it does the same thing as a sentry tower would, except undersea.

And so

we also have Copperhead, which is kind of like a modular payload delivery vehicle undersea, which is kind of a euphemism for a torpedo without saying torpedo.

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

I mean,

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

Yeah, no, it's a good question.

I mean,

as far as like doing things at limited scale, like, you know, we can, we can ramp pretty quickly into limited rate production on all of these.

I think, you know,

the example of Sentry Tower, I mean, within a year of the company starting, we were rolling these things out in production.

With Roadrunner, I think it was like 18 months from the beginning of that program until we were delivering units into the field.

And this is for a reusable cruise missile.

I mean, this is like 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 of the game in this autonomous future for national security is what we would call a tritable 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 Tesla went from building the Roadster to building the Giga Factory and starting to sell hundreds of thousands and millions of cars.

How big

is 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 first late first quarter of 2026.

And moving pretty fast.

Congratulations.

Thanks.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

It's a sort of a weird homecoming for me.

It's like, I left Ohio and now I'm going back and, you know, working on this crazy factory.

Got to bring my mom to the ribbon cutting ceremony, which was pretty cool.

Dude, how, I mean,

she's 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 she was kind of going through the list of all of these factory jobs that my family had had.

It was like my grandfather worked at,

one of them worked at Frigidaire, one of them worked at NCR, National Cash Register.

I had an uncle who worked at Ford.

Another one of my grandfathers worked at General Motors.

I have an aunt that works in eyeglass manufacturing.

And I started kind of searching around when I was sitting there with my mom.

Every single one of these factories is no longer there.

Like our industrial capacity that was kind of the heart of, you know, Ohio's economy for so long completely collapsed.

And that was the story of my family.

I mean, that was, that was it.

And so more than just like coming back and being like, hey, mom, look, I'm doing this cool thing and we're doing it in Ohio.

It's really about like reinvigorating this family story.

Like we need to bring production.

back to America.

And it's, it's very cool to be part of bringing that back to my family story in addition to just doing it at a more macro level.

How are you you guys?

I mean, how is how is Anduro finding the people that have the skills to do this?

Because I mean, it's been so long since we were, you know,

in

production and manufacturing.

Yeah.

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.

They're huge steel companies in Ohio.

Armco is, I think, the biggest employer in Middletown where JD is from.

And, you know, none of that is there anymore.

My uncle worked at Mound Steel, which was another big steel producer in Southwest Ohio.

It's no longer there.

So, you know,

I think there's definitely still skilled labor around.

There's a big Honda factory on the west side of Columbus.

Intel was, you know, 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

some of it will be

reskilling people and

bringing more of that back through education, through continuing education programs.

You know, kind of the craziest thing to me about the way that we've been approaching this for the last decade is that like the government could not have gotten this more wrong.

Like if you go back to Obama and you look at the like upskilling programs that they were doing, it was all software development.

They were like running, you know, coding boot camps, teaching people how to write code.

What's the first job that's 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 can 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 barracudas.

And so, moving that around, reconfiguring the space so that we can meet those production demands.

There's going to be a lot of people involved with that.

So, it will be, so, so, the production facility will be, it will will do one product at a time.

Well, I mean, the idea is that it will be modular and flexible.

And so, you know, we can

reset things to,

you know, rebuild these lines that enable us to scale.

The Ukraine story is a great example here.

So, you know, despite what most people think, the supply that the United States was giving to Ukraine was mostly Cold War era technology, javelins, stingers, things like that.

These things were built in like the 60s and the 70s.

And

when we realized that we were burning all of our inventory in that supply mission to Ukraine, it's not like the manufacturer of those weapon systems had active production facilities.

Like they didn't exist.

Like these companies were pulling people out of retirement to rebuild assembly lines to make these weapon systems.

And so this is what we're trying to avoid.

We want to build the institutional knowledge to be able to turn quickly to produce the things that have demand and to do it in a single space so that we're not over specializing those spaces for single systems.

So a lot of your guys' products are significantly cheaper than the stuff that we're using today, correct?

That's the goal.

I mean, everything we build should

at least be

a few times less expensive than the alternative.

Would you say it's better than what we've been using?

Well, I mean, part of this is like a question around how exquisite you're building it.

Like, are you building something that's like a Frankenstein that has to do everything well?

I'm sure you've heard stories about the F-35, which is like when you're building a joint strike fighter that you're going out to every one of the services and you're saying, Marine Corps, what do you need?

Air Force, what do you need?

Navy, what do you need?

And then you're building that aircraft that meets the needs of all those services.

Well, you end up with a $300 million airplane.

Norm Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin, sort of tongue-in-cheek said, I think it was 2050, was his market saying, 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 the B-21, these are pretty awesome.

The question is: could you build something that solves a problem for 10x lower cost

that doesn't require a 30-year development program and

thousands of man hours to build a single unit.

I think the answer to that is clearly yes.

So in some cases, it'll be like over the horizon, totally new technology that changes a con op.

In other cases, it's just a much lower cost version of something that is a great capability that we just don't have the ability to even buy if we wanted to at scale.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

Well, Trey, let's take a quick break.

When we come back, I want to talk about the helmet and where you guys are at with that.

Great.

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All right, Trey, we're back from the break.

Dude, nice shooting.

It 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, we would shoot in our backyard all the time.

Well, shooting clay pigeons doesn't have anything to do with the pistol.

You did pretty damn good.

I was impressed.

Much appreciated.

Nice work, man.

That was 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, you had got rejected from sounds like just about everywhere you applied.

I probably should have dug into that a little bit more and then and then you enlightened me on the break.

So why did you why did you get rejected?

I mean you're making good grades obviously bored because you're ahead of your class graduated top of the class.

What is going on?

Yeah, I mean at the time it was really mysterious.

I genuinely had no idea what was going on.

You know, I feel like growing up, everyone just kind of told me you can do whatever you want.

You can go to school wherever you want.

Like, you know, sky's the limit.

Go and do whatever it is.

And yeah, I got a bunch of skinny envelopes back in early April, my senior year.

And

I was kind of like caught off guard by this reality.

Now, the one school that I got into was UNC Chapel Hill.

And my high school girlfriend

was already committed to going to Elon, which is just right down the street from North Carolina.

So I went went over to her house that same day and I'm like, man, I don't know what happened, but I got rejected everywhere.

You know, I guess the upside of this is that we're going to be going to school close to each other with me being at UNC.

And she was like, yeah, about that.

And she broke up with me

the same day that I got rejected all these colleges.

And so I, you know, I went home and I was just weeping on the couch.

And my mom was like, well, where do you really want to go to school?

I really want to go to the school of foreign service at Georgetown.

She was like, all right, you're going to get on a plane.

You're going to fly to Georgetown.

And you're going to tell them that they're going to take you.

And I was like, I don't think that's the way it works, mom.

But she was like, no, no, no, this is what you're going to do.

And so, you know, a week later, I hopped on a plane and flew out to DC.

And I, you know, posted up in front of the admissions department, demanded to see the dean of admissions.

And

as the story goes, it's like I camped out.

I didn't really camp out.

I was only there for about an hour before they were like, okay, we'll hear your case.

And I went in and I dumped out a backpack full of recommendation letters.

And I remember specifically what the dean said.

He said, you know, son, there are cracks in the meritocracy.

And, you know, it's not as simple as, you know, you get good grades, you play varsity sports, you do whatever.

It's like, there's more to it than that.

And it turns out that a lot of this started coming out in research years after I graduated.

There was a Princeton study from 2009 that basically showed that the most underrepresented demographic in college admissions is poor white kids.

And it's like completely under the radar.

No one would expect that this would be the thing, obviously.

But, you know, there's it adds nothing to the demographic of the university.

The university has to, there's no cost for them to pay and 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 tier universities, they have this stat of how many valedictorians they deny admissions to.

It's just like a bunch of public school white kids that are getting denied.

And with the kind of reframing of affirmative action programs at universities, you actually saw some of this come out in the data where, you know, for,

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 JD talks about in Hill Biliology 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 thinking about trying to

bring people out of poverty.

And I think every other demographic, every other ethnic demographic in America has better emissions rates.

for low socioeconomic status except white communities.

It's like the one that just gets no, there's no credit that's given in the, in the admissions 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 has done to the country?

Well, I think it's, it's led to these disenfranchised populations where, you know,

where I grew up in Ohio, as we've already talked about, it was just gutted by globalization, by the deindustrialization of the, 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 I think JD becoming the vice president is very much part of that story.

It's like he's very aware of

how this all happened.

I mean,

thank you for sharing that.

What I kind of meant is

with

poor white kids getting denied university who deserve to be there.

I mean, what, I mean, you you know, now there's a lot of people

that say that, you know, is college even necessary at this point if you're not going into, you know, some type of a specialized occupation.

A lot of people don't think it's worth it.

I've had a lot of, you know, your types on here, tech innovators, but most of them, most of them, I think, did not go to school, you know, and started innovating right out 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, what do you think this has done to, you know, the workforce, to

schools, to the, you know, to

people's sentiment about going to college?

I mean, by

starving poor white kids

the opportunity of education.

Yeah, I mean,

there's a bunch of, you know, issues in society that are driven primarily around what was fundamentally a boomer problem.

Like the boomers basically convinced all of their children that that was the path, that like they needed to go to college.

That was how you became successful.

But there's not like a bunch of white-collar jobs that require liberal arts degrees

from 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 industrialization challenge, is that there are all of these skilled labor jobs that don't require college education, maybe vocational education,

that are significantly better paying.

They're more in need in our economy.

It's a tremendous gap that we now have as we're trying to reindustrialize.

And, you know,

we as a country need to come together around this idea that there are multiple paths to career fulfillment.

It doesn't all go through four-year universities.

And the four-year university story didn't really even work anyway.

It was like, it was, 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 cult, go to school and is looking at Vanderbilt, you know, up at Nashville.

It's like $280,000 for a four-year degree.

Yeah, I think that's pretty common.

Yeah.

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.

Like, 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

or is that in and around bigger cities?

You know, I mean, I bet if we go to where you grew up in Ohio or where I grew up in Missouri, there is plenty of affordable housing.

No, that's absolutely, 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

remaining in those communities.

Now, there are some exceptions.

There are high-growth suburban environments in America.

The surroundings of Nashville are

probably some of the best in the country.

But

I don't think that applies to everywhere.

You know, Ohio did not have that story for a very long time.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

I mean,

you know, I love company towns.

I think company towns are amazing.

I wish we had more of them.

What Walmart has done in Bentonville is incredible.

I would love to see other major companies set up their headquarters in places.

uh that are not you know part of the the current economic growth story in america and and see if they can build old company towns as well that'd be really cool well i mean what do you think you know back to the college stuff i mean where do you think this goes do you think

is do you think that four-year universities are kind of becoming obsolete

yeah i mean i i definitely think that they're i wouldn't say they're obsolete but they're highly specialized And for some things that you might do, you kind of need to have the academic background to do it.

Not everything, but for some things, that is a really important thing for people to do.

The like traditional kind of liberal arts education, I think it's much harder to make the argument that, you know, people should be going into $300,000 of debt to do that.

We just need to have an aspirational path for vocations that don't require that.

And,

you know, I think it's really on millennials at this point as they're raising their own children

to give, make sure they understand that those paths are

cool.

They're okay.

Like I want my kids, you know, when they're graduating high school, I don't want them to feel like they have to go to like an Ivy League school.

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 desk jobs, white collar desk jobs.

You had some, we were kind of talking about, a little bit about the attack on the fine, on the family dynamic here and you had some pretty interesting stuff to say about that.

I'd like you to dive into that a little bit.

We're talking about AI girlfriends, online dating, just

all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, 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, you know, lingerie and they'll never disagree with you.

Like pretty much anything you say, they're just going to echo back to you whatever it is that you want to hear.

And they're very good at conversation.

I mean, that's like kind of

the best use case for LLMs is that it can just keep a conversation going forever and ever and ever.

And I think as a society, we've been moving away from kind of traditional pairing, the the way that we've people have gotten into

relationships historically, which kind of worked in local communities.

It was like, you know, you met people at school or you met people at church or at the Elks Lodge or whatever it might have been.

And by and large, like people were able to pair off and

build families.

But today, like the whole online dating trend has shifted that massively, where you're no longer looking at local communities.

It's more of like a local maxima, like within 30 minutes or 45 minutes of where I live, what are the options?

And it's like paralysis by analysis.

Like, you know, people are like, oh, there's always more efficiency.

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, physic, very physically attractive.

Um, it's hard to convey personality traits in a way that would have mattered in local communities.

And the sadder part about this is that the bottom 50% of men on dating apps get literally zero matches.

No shit.

Zero.

There's no matching that's happening.

And I think like ultimately what that leads to is that you have all these people that are, you know, unsatisfied in their jobs, unsatisfied in their, you know, their relational life,

and they become the powder keg of civilization.

You kind of create a class of incels that feels like they don't fit in.

And I think we as a technology community have to take some ownership for this reality that we've given a whole chunk of society tools to enable these behaviors that lead to them being unhappy.

And I think AI companions are like that in a supercharged way, where now it's like, oh,

I don't need to go through the stresses and difficulties of relationship.

I can just, you know, have a companion that's always there.

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 the worst cases or school shootings or, you know, whatever else.

Man, how common is this?

I think it's going to become more and more common.

You know, I think we've seen in recent years that there is a big shift towards singleness, that there's just not as many people that are getting married or they're getting married much later.

And obviously, when you get married much later, you have fewer kids.

You know, there's like...

trickle-down impacts of this.

But like, you know, from a societal political perspective, in 50 years, if these trends continue, like America is a totally different place.

Yeah, you know,

it's, I mean, being a tech guy and you have two kids yourself, I mean,

this is something that me and my wife go back and forth with all the time is, is, you know, we're, 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 Ryan 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 going to get with some of the technology.

On the other hand, it's like, shit, I mean, you can't shelter him too much because then he's going to fall behind because the whole world is heading this way.

It's already here.

And so I'm curious, you know, and

I don't know if you want to say the ages of your kids or not, but

they're older than toddlers.

And so I'm, 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.

Um,

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 there, the babysitter that they had have had for the last few years.

She just left for college and she literally just got social media like before she went to college and she's 18 years old.

It's like it's possible to be cool and,

you know, sociable and relational and

smart and not subject yourself to that unnecessarily at too young of an age.

And so I think that's kind of our policy with our kids is to try to keep them in that zone for as long as we can.

So no smartphones.

No smartphones.

I mean, we have, they don't even have an Apple Watch yet, which I think is, you're starting to see that kind of happen with kids in that range where their parents don't want them to have access to social media, but they want them to be reachable, textable, callable.

We haven't even done that.

Like, 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 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 beasts.

And we have a completely trapped environment where we're both looking forward to the road.

He can't jump out of the car, and he has to sit through seven hours of content about peer pressure and social media and pornography and,

you know, the sex education.

We do the whole thing.

And so I just did that two weekends ago with my youngest, who just turned 10.

And, you know, it starts the conversation.

It's like, look, we're not going to hide this.

We want to 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

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.

Fast forward 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, but.

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,

and I, 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 for your brain, like, yeah, I'm not.

I'm not immune to that same critique.

It's probably bad for my brain too.

Man, that's interesting.

You know, I mean, so you, so you have like, you have like no fear that your kids will miss out on you know on that they'll be behind by not having a smartphone what are they going to miss out on i can't think of anything you know what i mean

like ios or you know windows back in the day i mean just knowing how to use it oh no i mean they're they're tech native i mean the kids today like you know you hand them an ipad and they just intuitively know how to use it it's like i don't have to teach them how to do it um they're using laptops at school they know how to type they can navigate a you know mac 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

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 is just like, here you go.

Here's the babysitter.

Here's a phone.

Yeah, we haven't had that problem yet, but, you know,

for you, man.

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 has collapsed.

And it was, you're talking about 20-year-olds.

And where were you going with that?

Yeah.

Basically, every collapse 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, 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.

They're people that you have values alignment with.

They're going to hold you accountable.

Like, you know, the church as an institution has been, you know, a bulwark for this for thousands of years.

And I don't think it's any different today than it was in 100 AD.

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

You know, I mean, it's just, it's time and time again.

it seems like you know we're teaching people just to become victims you know that's what i see you know it's it's 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 a house and remote working has become huge you know i know it's shrinking uh a little bit i don't like remote work but i'm not clear that works but yeah

But

you know what I mean?

And

but

I think 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 Andural.

And, and, you know, I think that, I think that's inspiring.

I think that inspires a lot of people.

And it's, it's a very different, you know, messaging than what most people see.

It's, it's yeah i think you could be ashamed of who you are you know totally 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 are we doing here like you have to empower these people

our people americans and in and and ingrain it into their head that like you know this is the best country in the world this is you know the american dream still is very achievable and uh i'm a testament to that you're a testament to that a lot of the people that work here are a testament to that.

I mean, a lot of the people on the show have been a testament to that.

And, you know, but it's like time and time again, it's like these, it's like they're being taught to lose.

Right.

Well, there's a loss of personal agency where I feel like this isn't just true of America.

It's true of Western civilization writ large is that no one believes in the great man theory of history anymore.

It's like almost cancelable to talk about it where like people matter, like individuals are driving things forward.

And this is why Founders Fund is called Founders Fund is we invest in people.

I don't 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, 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, 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 which is a lie.

Do you think we're destined to just go down the same path Europe went?

Or do you mean

do you think we might

get on the right path here?

I mean, if Europe is a fucking disaster, Europe is a disaster.

I'm hopeful.

Like, I feel like

there is a bit of an awakening where people are realizing that these lies that they've been told are not productive.

But, you know, I think time will tell, and it's going to be a tough road to get back on track.

But it is a project worth going down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've spent years on this show pulling back the curtain and trying to reveal what's really happening in this country.

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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.

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All right, let's move back to, let's move back to Andural.

I want to hear about the helmet.

I talked to Palmer about it.

He was all excited about it.

I think he used this to actually launch the announcement, but where are you guys on the helmet?

Yeah, so,

you know,

the perfect project for Palmer is the intersection of defense and

VR.

And so for years, Palmer was telling the Pentagon, like, man, I just don't, I don't know that it's there, like from a technology perspective.

I don't know that I would trust the modern versions of augmented and virtual reality to put it on the heads of a soldier that's putting their lives at risk.

But, 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 IBAS, which was a contract owned by Microsoft, actually.

And we went out and we acquired the Microsoft division that was doing the IVAS program.

And so we're now working on this kind of with the team that has been iterating on versions for a while.

We've taken...

wildly different directions in a couple of places.

We've partnered with

Meta, which was kind of a coming home for Palmer, which was cool to see Zuck and Palmer kind of make up and be 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?

Hmm.

It's a good question.

I don't know the specific specific answer to that from a timeline perspective.

Is it still going to everybody in the military?

The way Palmer described it is this is going on everyone's head.

That's just special operations, which I fucking love because, I mean, special ops always gets all the cool toys and gear and stuff, and then everybody else is kind of like left behind, which I hate seeing.

We were talking about equipment, you know what I mean?

In

my time in the SEAL teams.

And, you know,

I had everything I needed to be a successful operator.

But then I would see these conventional guys running around in this.

I just felt so fucking bad for them.

Totally.

It's funny, but it's not.

I mean, these guys couldn't even fucking move.

You know, and so I would take my kick, be like, here, take this.

I'll go get a new one.

You know, and so to see, you know, I know Vortex Optics is doing some cool stuff too with

rifle scopes that actually went out to

I think it was 82nd airborne first before special ops which I loved and then you know so the helmet you know the question is is it still going to be military-wide or is it totally yeah that's the plan you know the program is about soldier born compute and so you know there there might be variants of this that are relevant for different pockets but like

Every soldier is going to, in modern warfare, every soldier is going to need compute.

They're going to need some way of controlling controlling assets that are autonomous.

They're going to need some way of interacting with the battle space from a command and control perspective.

They're going to want that heads-up display that gives them kind of superhuman vision into the environment they're operating in.

And the idea is like you can make this inexpensive enough that you can deploy it broadly across the entire service.

So that is the idea.

How are you guys coming up with these ideas?

I mean, who are you using as advisors on stuff like this?

I mean, it's always about the warfighter.

Everything goes back to the guys at the end of the chain that are doing the jobs.

And so we have an enormous percentage of

Andrew employees have military or intelligence service.

So we're going out and recruiting directly from the people that we're serving as customers.

And we also are very tied into the communities that we're serving

as.

contractors.

And so we spend a lot of time in DC.

We spend a lot of time downrange with the users.

And that all feeds back into our innovation engine internally.

Damn, that's awesome.

What are you most excited about at Andural?

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.

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 Andrew is that our value add is speed.

And so, you know, we want to be able to iterate quickly as we see the threats changing in the field.

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

Yeah, so it's called the Collaborative Combat

Aircraft.

So the idea is that you have a manned aircraft like an F-22 or an F-35, and the pilot can basically command a bunch of smaller aircraft that fly around it to go and conduct different missions.

So you extend sensor range, you extend shooter range,

you basically can create a network around that manned aircraft

to do the job at significantly lower cost and at no risk to human life.

And this is a concept that has been batted around the Air Force for a long time.

And

we're really excited to be partnering with them on delivering that.

And that will be the first things that we build out of the Arsenal Factory in Ohio as well as we'll start rolling the Fury aircraft off the line.

So the Fury aircraft will be manned.

No, it's unmanned.

It's unmanned.

Yep, but it'll have its own fleet of smaller aircraft.

It is an autonomous wingman to a manned aircraft.

Okay, so that would be those, these are the autonomous aircraft around the manned aircraft.

That's right.

How many will, how many,

like, how many aircraft are we talking?

How big is the fleet?

I mean, you could, you could control.

a bunch of them.

You could control, you know, dozens if that was the conop that they wanted to choose.

I don't know if you've read the book or seen the movie Ender's Game,

but it's basically the, it's a science fiction novel.

And the idea is that there's this guy, Ender Wiggins,

who is effectively controlling an entire like alien battle from a bunker where he's just there and he's giving commands and the, 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 as where we think that the next generation of autonomy is going, is that you're going to have orchestra conductors and they'll be, you know, sending these things out on missions to go and do things rather than 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 tributable assets.

I mean,

what does the future of 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 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...

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 lethal decision, there has to be a human that hits the button that says do it.

But

that hasn't been the case for decades already.

There's SeaWiz, the close-in weapon system that is on naval vessels.

It automatically engages with threats, aerial threats to the naval service vessels.

There's no human directing the cannon as it's shooting at things and shooting them out of the sky.

In fact, there can't be because

the entire challenge that it's facing is moving at superhuman speeds to eliminate threats.

But there should be a human that's accountable for these decisions.

There's someone somewhere that you're going to be able to shake a stick at and say, this robot did something that it shouldn't have done.

And it's your responsibility to know what mission you set the robot off to do.

And so I think that we're really moving in the direction of

more autonomy that is engaging with fewer of these manned exquisite platforms that are very expensive.

But there will be people that are making the decisions about how those missions are conducted, what strategies are utilized, and things like that.

How far out 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 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

the false narrative of stability, global stability, then we're not going to feel much of an incentive to move in that direction anytime soon.

So I think it just really depends.

You know, the humanoid robotics, I think, are kind of the thing that comes up most when people think about the autonomous battlefield.

It's like, are you going to have a bunch of Tesla Optimus robots running around with firearms shooting at each other?

Like, I don't know, maybe on some timeline, there could be something like that that's happening.

But in the near term, I think it's like assisted

by humans operating in theater, in the field

with robots and support.

gotcha

you know i mean do you have any

fears about

ai in the battle space

um

i mean look humans make a lot of bad decisions yes they do like you know a super immature you know 18 year old with you know six months of training is not necessarily going to make better decisions than a robot 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

AI destroying human civilization?

No,

I don't think that's 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, they're wired and they can't be interfered with by, by the electronic warfare stuff.

So there's a lot of back and forth, you know, trying to keep ahead of your opponent in how you're approaching airspace.

And I think that's like, that will be a huge part of getting this right in the future is that we need

We need our aircraft to have the ability to operate without comms connections.

You can't rely on GPS.

You can't rely on remote piloting.

You need to actually be able to dead reckon or navigate optically by

landmarks on the ground and things like that.

So that is a big challenge that everyone's working to figure out with high fidelity.

Do you guys have a lot of equipment going over there?

Yeah, I mean, we have 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 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 um we're really honored to be part of that

what's your biggest concern in the world right now

um

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 political, a political understanding of that, but it's not clear to me that there's like a level of seriousness to actually do the things that are required to reduce that risk across both of those two dimensions.

What do you think the things that are required to reduce that risk are?

Well, I mean, there's like the kind of impacts of Belt and Road, where you have, you know, natural resources,

production, you know, all of the things that are kind of economic drivers for growth in China 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 that's a real problem.

Um, militarily, I think, you know, Xi has been very explicit that, you know, he intends to reunify China.

Um, and Taiwan has like a ticking timeline of 2027.

Now, is he going to move by 2027?

Like, I don't know.

It depends on how seriously you take him at his word.

But there's a lot of risk,

particularly if you think about even just semiconductors as

an important part of our technology ecosystem.

Like if

China takes Taiwan and shuts down our access to TSMC,

that's a huge problem for the U.S.

economy.

So we really need to think through all of that.

But

the Chinese

different, they have a different cultural history than we do.

And when you try to frame their actions through like a Western understanding of the world, you reach very different conclusions than they reach.

Like, you know, Western history is, you know, be open about your strength.

And, you know, this is where the piece of strength came thing came from.

It's like, we're going to tell people what we have and why we're strong.

And that will prevent them from doing crazy things.

The, you know, the Assassin's Mace story, which is like a parable in China, is

hide your strength, bide time, and then strike when you have an unfair advantage.

And so

it's to their advantage to go into these international dialogues and say like, oh no, we're weak.

We're not competing.

We don't have the ability to do that.

Like, you know, we want to be part of these discussions.

And we actually listen to them and we like we're making decisions based on believing that.

But their entire like, you know, moral background in the way that they think about these things is very different than

even like the, you know, nursery rhymes that have led to creating Western culture.

And so I think we have to start looking at them through the right lens in order to make the right strategic decisions to prepare for the worst.

Do you feel like that's starting to happen?

I feel like people are definitely taking it more seriously than they did even five years ago.

You know, when we started Andrew

in 2017, we were telling the story to to investors.

Like, we believe that the future of national security is near-peer conflict.

Like, this is about great powers.

Like, we were moving out of counterterrorism.

That was eight years ago.

And it was super weird to even be telling that story.

And today, I feel like, you know, no one, 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.

I'm definitely with you on that.

I mean, you know, at breakfast, we were talking about, you know,

it doesn't sound like, in your opinion, we are ahead on China on much of anything.

I think we have

we're more innovative.

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.

And I think that we've put ourselves in this situation where,

you know, we have to start making these crazy bets in order to figure out our way around the supply chain that has been created over the last 30 years by a very effective Chinese strategy.

Do you think that they will, I mean,

do you think they will take Taiwan kinetically?

I mean,

this is the question with Xi.

It's like he has said that he's going to reunify.

And,

you know,

there's a question about like how important that is to his ability to continue ruling if he doesn't stick to his word.

But I think we should take him seriously.

He says he's going to do it.

Of course, there's like some edge case that Taiwan doesn't object and just lets it happen that means that they won't go into a military conflict.

But I would rate that as a pretty low probability.

And so,

you know, they've got a short timeline to get their stuff together to be able to credibly deter Chinese aggression.

And so that's kind of the small window that we're in right now.

Yeah, you know, I don't, I just, I don't know.

I went over there, you know, and interviewed the vice president.

Very enlightening interview.

I've been really worried about it too, you know, and I think that that is what could trigger, you know, World War III.

But

man, I mean, when she started talking about the cognitive warfare and, you know, the

psyops and the propaganda and stuff that's going on there and how divided it actually is, and when I learned more about, you know, 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

yeah that other party takes over it's it's done not a shot fired yep i mean that is the optimal case for china obviously is that they can use soft power means to just do it kind of in the way that they did hong kong um

and i don't think there's a 0% probability that that's the way that it goes down

so yep yep what I mean anything what what else about China is bothering you how how How ahead are they on manufacturing and AI?

I mean, they have like 250 times the shipbuilding capacity that we have.

I mean, that's like a huge problem

for us being able to keep up militarily.

We've gutted our entire industrial base in the United States in service of globalization for economic optimization, and China has been the primary beneficiary of that transition.

I think that like, you know, they're just, 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 Founderson, we often hear hardware builders talk about is that even if you had unlimited money and you were going to set up a factory in the United States to build something that is currently being built in China, you wouldn't even be able to operate the factory because like the skill that's required 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 know how to run these machines.

And so, um, we have to figure out some way to reskill.

And I think autonomy in factory work is going to be a big part of this as well.

And it's actually a great argument for why we should be leaning more into AI rather than less from a jobs perspective, because the alternative to leveraging modern software in order to reindustrialize is just continuing to outsource to foreign countries.

And I don't think we have the time or the economic will to 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?

BRICKS.

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 powers.

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 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

their military readiness was pathetic.

Their vehicles had dry-ratted 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

So

one of the kind of critiques of younger generations, my own generation, millennials included, is that because of short form video content largely, we've lost the ability to consume long form

media.

Like we don't really read books anymore.

And I feel like this is a huge problem.

And so I got together with a few friends of mine and we started a consumer hardware company that builds a wearable e-reader.

And so it's like, you know, a Kindle that you wear in a pair of sunglasses.

And

kind of the thesis is that we don't need do everything devices to do everything.

Like sometimes you want a single purpose device that actually removes you from the do everything context that's highly distracting.

More minutes are read on the Kindle app on Apple devices than are read on Kindles.

No, shit.

And so, you know, our perspective on this is like, what if we gave someone a better reading experience, a better technology than what they previously had?

Would we see, you know, longer reading sessions, more frequent, more pages read?

And it's been really cool to see that adoption take off over the last couple of years.

So I'll send you an e-reader that you can check out.

Right on, man.

Yeah.

I would love that.

Let's see.

Other side quests.

You know, I think that

there are only so many things that a person person can do before they stop being effective

at any of them.

So I'm probably at just about capacity right now.

Well, I mean, I thought you were, you know, that, you know, 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.

We've been, my wife and I and another couple have been doing these kind of faith and work oriented Bible studies where they're kind of like graduate classes.

We assign a bunch of reading and then we get together and we do discussion.

Originally, that started off as like, you know, 10 people and then it was like 50 people.

And this last session that we did in the spring was like over 100 people

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.

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 should always

be alert to these things.

You know, there's also kind of one of the stories that Jesus, the parables that Jesus tells the disciples is the vineyard owner.

It's like your workers want, they want to be actively working when the vineyard owner returns.

And so if you sit and you get complacent

and you're not ready, then

that's a tremendous cost to your own soul.

And so I believe that

we should be ready and we should prepare as if those times are coming.

I think a lot of the things that we're seeing happening globally are really concerning with

an increased push for a global rather than a national identity, 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 beware of anything that resembles these sort of fake unity movements that are driving people into

complacency.

Well, Trey, we're wrapping up the interview.

I got one more question for you.

Yep.

If you could see three people on the show, who would they be?

Oh, man.

I think that there's like 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

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 know, you have this like kind of bifurcation of some of them believe that we're going into like existential

risk to humanity and other people that have a more optimistic version.

I think playing on that tension could be really fun.

Mike Gallagher, former congressman who ran point on the TikTok ban, he's at Palantir now.

And he would be a really interesting person to chat with probably.

So a former politician, but now working in tech.

JD, I think, would be an awesome one.

Right on.

He'd be great to bring in.

We're trying.

Great.

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 you again and best of luck and all your great.

Thanks, John.

I'm Sean Ryan, former Navy SEAL, CIA contractor, and host of the Sean Ryan Show.

Much of my life has been dedicated to seeking truth and getting answers no matter how uncomfortable the questions are that we have to ask.

But in the age of the PSIOP, that search has never been more difficult.

In September of 2022, the U.S.

Army's 4th PSYOP Group released a cryptic video on YouTube.

There is another very important phase of warfare.

It has 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 PSIWAR soldiers.

The series you're about to listen to is an attempt to answer that question and an even bigger one.

The global power brokers that conduct psychological operations constantly evolve.

Technology like AI has evened the playing field and now, in the era of social media, in the democratization of information, all it takes to conduct a psyop is a smartphone.

Like and subscribe.

In each episode, we look at a different method of psychological operations, how they've evolved, and how they are being deployed.

There's a quote that is attributed to a scientist named E.O.

Wilson that says, We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom.

This is a life raft in that sea of both information and misinformation.

PSYOPs are all around us.

They're conducted by corporations, governments, activist groups, intelligence agencies, foreign adversaries, and anyone who knows how to shape perception to get what they want.

The series provides an in-depth look at how these psyops work from conversations with whistleblowers, experts, historians, tech innovators, and more.

We look at world events that are being shaped by highly constructed psychological operations specialists and look at the terrifying possibilities of where this could all be headed.

Along the way, you'll learn about everything from Russian troll farms, fake ghosts in the jungles of Vietnam, and mind control cults to the CIA's involvement in Hollywood.

Do you have any people

paid by the CIA

who are working for television networks?

The early history of psyops and psychological experiments laid the foundation for what we see today in modern campaigns that seek to divide culture over polarizing issues.

We look at where we are and how we got here.

But ultimately, this series is a toolkit to help you understand how you're being manipulated and how to spot the signs of a psyop.

Before the Army's viral PSYOP recruitment video ends,

the words on screen inform viewers that war is evolving and all the world's astage.

This series is a peek behind the curtain.

Welcome to the PSYOP.

Buy it today at SYOPShow.com.

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