Anduril Founder Trae Stephens on Our Modern Defense System

23:36Yep. Like the very tail end of the Cold War. I was six when the Berlin Wall fell. And so like by by the time I have active memories, you know, we're in like George H.W. Bush era, the like globalization push from H.W. into Clinton. So very, very different time, but not actually separated by very many years. I think what's happening today is there's this speedrunning of geopolitics that has been happening over the last, call it six or seven years, where you had this transition out of counterinsurgency, non-state actor conflict. This is the war on terror, essentially, where we're not fighting governments, really.

24:22We're really fighting terrorist organizations that are decentralized. It's highly fragmented. They're doing insurgencies inside of urban environments and transitioning from that into great power conflict where we're thinking about how do we deal with the threat from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. Very, very different approach you have to take to build protections from great powers rather than counterinsurgency. And then along those lines, we had Ukraine. We had October 7th. We have the conflict with Iran and the threat to Taiwan. Xi Jinping saying, we want to retake Taiwan, reunify by the end of 2027.

25:09So it's a very different geopolitical environment than the one that I was working in, in the early 2000s, in counterterrorism era. When we started Andrel, the defense tech company I started in 2017, it was super unpopular. I think people were roughly just like, I don't know, we're sort of coming out of this whole war in the Middle East thing. It seems like everything is basically fine. There were employees at Google who were like protesting the Google working on a Department of Defense contract. And they ended up pulling out of that. So it was like really an unpopular moment to be thinking about this.

25:50Just a few years later, it's like Ukraine flag and bio. Like everyone has sort of changed over to this idea of, wow, the threat of authoritarianism globally and what that does to free democratic peoples is terrifying. And the whole momentum shifted almost overnight into like a posture of we have to be prepared to draw hard lines around what we're willing to allow to happen.

26:16Gwyneth Paltrow:So will you tell me a little bit about the founding story around Anderil in 2017? Yeah. You know, I have been thinking about this space, obviously, my whole career. And one of the realizations that I was coming to was we've relied on nuclear deterrence, and I'll explain what all this means, against great powers for almost a century now, like 75 years, where you basically say, we don't believe that you're going to attack us because we have nuclear weapons and we will retaliate. And then you get into this idea of mutually assured destruction, that if we fire a nuclear weapon at a nuclear power, they're going to fire nuclear weapons at us.

27:03Gwyneth Paltrow:War games. Yeah. And before you know it, everything is kind of toast. And that like basically worked. But you see a lot of this like sort of fringe conflict where the belief is as long as it stays below a certain threshold, no one's going to launch a nuclear attack. And that's like kind of the line that we're drawing. But we don't want any of these conflicts to happen. I mean, look at how many lives have been lost in Ukraine. Like, I think it's like over a million casualties now. On the Russian side alone, I think. Yeah, on the Russian side alone. So I think it's really important to figure out how to use conventional deterrence rather than just nuclear deterrence.

27:42And what I mean by conventional deterrence is, can you convince your adversary that the cost, both monetarily and in human lives, will be too high to even think about going into conflict? And this is what Reagan did in the closing years of the Cold War. As he said, I'm going to build up and we're going to get to the point where the Russians are going to have to, the Soviets, are going to have to look across the ocean and say, do we want to continue down this path? Are we going to win? And ultimately they decided, no, we're not going to win. We can't keep up. And this sounds sort of uncomfortable.

28:19You know, it's like if you think about like the spectrum of possibilities on a quad chart where it's like, you know, feels good is good. Feels bad is good. Feels good is bad. Feels bad is bad. This definitely is in the feels bad is good quadrant. It's like I would prefer to not have to do this. It would be great if we could just say diplomacy works every time. We can convince people without any projection of power that they should do things the way we want them to do it. But it's just not how the world works. And we found this in the early days of World War Two where Chamberlain and the United Kingdom was all about appeasement.

28:58Appeasement is not deterrence. You can't prevent people from doing bad things by really believing deep down inside that they shouldn't do bad things. And so the idea behind it, it's very optimistic. It's just not realistic. And so the Andrel story from the beginning was, can we create a new era of conventional deterrence where we can build capabilities that are so inexpensive and so high capability that our adversaries will say, I don't want to get into this exchange.

29:29Gwyneth Paltrow:Right. Like we don't have any advantages anymore. Even though, theoretically, you profit from a conflict? Sort of. Although, by the time you're in a conflict, all of the things that are going to be used in that conflict are in inventory. Right. Like, the way that Anderil is approaching this is we're not trying to build technology to solve problems today. Yeah. We're trying to build inventories of capabilities that prevent the problems of tomorrow. Interesting. And so I don't view, first off, I don't think like wartime profiteering is ethical really in any way, regardless. But I think the important thing is we need to build up a capability advantage over the next hundred years, regardless of what's happening right now.

30:17How are we going to prevent these things from happening?

30:20Gwyneth Paltrow:Because you think deterrence is really the key. Yeah, it's super important. We don't want conflict to happen. I have spent my entire career working in defense. I've never once met a general or an admiral that says, you know what I want to do today? I want to write letters to the parents of children who died in combat. Nobody wants to do that. This belief that we're like hard charging, like throwing people like as meat bags into combat. It's just not true. Nobody wants to do that. And I think this is really kind of the motivation for building Andrel is let's make it really improbable that we'll do that.

30:59Gwyneth Paltrow:And is Andrel, will you explain like, are you making kind of next generation things that are when you say they're less expensive, they're more efficient, like hopefully they're never used and they stay in warehouses and nobody dies. But like, what do they do that's different than existing or earlier defense technology and weapons? Yeah, there are probably like two different categories that you can you can put them in. Oftentimes these things overlap. On the one hand, it's low cost. And this is what we would call like a tritable, which means if it is lost, it's not a huge deal. I've never heard that word before.

31:38It is a very defense specific word. So imagine like if you are, you know, you have an F-22 or an F-35, a multi hundred million dollar fighter plane with human beings flying them. Are you going to send them into combat knowing that there's a high probability that they will be shot down? that's horrible from a loss of life perspective. It's also a tremendous financial burden that you're carrying by the loss of that asset. What if you sent in an asset that costs one one hundredth of the cost and had no human operators? I'm not as concerned about what happens to that. That's what a tritability is.

32:19And that's really what Andrel is focused on, is building low cost systems that are a replacement for very high cost human systems. and things that are autonomous, that are more accurate and are able to execute their mission with a lot more precision. What would be an example of that? Like a drone? Yeah, drones. Most people think of drones as aircraft, like small quadcopters or whatever. Drones are a lot of things. You know, they're airplanes, they're ground vehicles, they're submarines. They're basically anything that is autonomously operated or remotely operated by a human system robot. So, yes, it includes that.

33:02But it also includes things like interceptors, for example. Just in the Iran conflict alone, we fired thousands of interceptor missiles. The most common high-end interceptor is a Patriot missile, which was originally developed in the 1960s. These missiles cost millions of dollars, like variants between, call it two and a quarter million dollars up to about eight million dollars every time we fire one. In a conflict in which you're fighting MiG-29s, like a Russian fighter plane, shooting a couple. I saw Top Gun. Yeah, you saw Top Gun. You know what this is. Shooting a three million dollar missile.

33:42That's OK. Yeah, that's what's required for that mission.

33:45Gwyneth Paltrow:Three million dollar missile. But right now, what we're dealing with, with the conflict with Iran, are small drones that cost tens of thousands of dollars, not tens of millions of dollars. So every time one of those comes in, we're shooting at it with a multimillion dollar missile. Currently? Currently. Okay. This is completely impractical. Are they efficacious, though? They're amazing. Okay. Truly amazing interceptor systems, highly accurate, but very expensive. And so part of the mission here is can you build robots that use computer vision, machine intelligence to dramatically lower the cost of that intercept?

34:32So could you build an interceptor that could take out that category of threat for hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than millions of dollars?

34:41Gwyneth Paltrow:And that's what you're building now? That's like one of the kind of areas that we're building. Does being a father, is this kind of like, I don't know. I think when we have children, we're so fundamentally changed. And how do you think about national security through that lens? Well, I mean, going back to my own personal story, like I want my kids to grow up without fearing for their personal safety. You know, if you think about Maslow's triangle, let's take care of that basic human need. And I want to do it in like the least aggressive and splashy way. You know, I have my kids are 10 and 12. They're in fourth and sixth grade.

35:24And they're just getting to the age where their teachers and their peers are like sort of familiar with what it is that I'm doing. And the way that we present what we're doing is important to me because I want them to be able to be proud of what it is that we're doing without feeling like they're in this really weird kind of twilight zone where they're constantly having to defend with their peers what it is that their dad does for a living.

35:56Gwyneth Paltrow:Of course. Which is complicated. And I recognize it. Yes, of course. It's very complicated. But I think we need to bring, you know, that's the nature of everything. I mean, we as human beings are complicated. We have all kinds of gradations of light and dark. And, you know, we're always sort of fighting with the good wolf and the bad wolf within us and to a certain degree. And I think, again, that's this like reductiveness in the culture around this is good, this is bad, I think is ultimately so not only harmful, but also I think against like intelligence, you know, that kind of lack of understanding that there are layers to things and complications to things.

36:38But yeah, and the tension is important. You know, just a few weeks ago, the Pope was kind of pushing back against what was going on in Iran. And I think it was during his Easter homily where he said, God does not hear the prayers of those who are waging war. and as a Christian myself, I think hearing that, you know, there's a number of ways that you could respond, right? There's, you could respond by saying, wow, this guy is a kook. He's like rejecting millennia of just war theory, which is like the Augustinian tradition around engaging in war. You could look at it and say, wow, what am I doing?

37:17Like the Pope himself is telling me that The thing that I'm doing is bad. Or you can approach it from a perspective of tension. It's like, what is the truth that the Pope is trying to get across?

37:28Gwyneth Paltrow:Or you could approach it from a more mystical aspect of Christianity, like as opposed to taking it literally, and this is just a random hypothesis that's occurring to me. You could think like that, you know, if you were using it as a metaphor of like, you know, somebody who is like engaged in againstness all the time, you know, as opposed to like, but maybe he was referring to actual war, but I, it could have been something, you know, more, more mystical or metaphorical. Totally. And I actually really liked that framing. It's like, if your approach is an approach of waging war or your heart is in a place where you're, I want to go and conquer or destroy, there's probably not a great way to justify that morally.

38:17If your heart is a heart at peace, you know, like there's a difference between peacemakers and peacekeepers, right? Like peacekeepers are saying, I'm just going to passively not create conflict. Whereas peacemakers are saying, sometimes you have to create conflict to, you know, engineer, to engineer a longstanding peace. And so if you're approaching it with a heart of peace, I think it's very different at that mystical level than, than approaching it with a heart of war. But, you know, even, you know, the wisest beings in the universe, like Yoda himself said, um, wars not make one great. And I think there's a lot of truth to that.

38:57And I think some of that is kind of what's coming out in the Pope's statements around saying, look, if you're measuring your greatness in the size of your conquest, like you're not going to be in a good place. But if you're measuring your success and the peace that you create in the long term, God is not sanctioning that conflict. It's not like he's saying, go and, you know, go and rip. I don't think that's what that's saying. I think what it is is like, are we creating the just conditions through which we are doing this in the most ethical way possible in order to create a longstanding peace?

39:45Gwyneth Paltrow:Can I ask you about your faith? Because I was reading about it and I feel sort of, I don't know if envious is the right word, but I, and I feel like a spiritual person, but I don't have like necessarily a framework. I wasn't really raised with one. My dad is Jewish. My mom was very, you know, Episcopalian. And so there was a little, and they got married in the sixties and it was a little bit of a, it was very abnormal culturally for a marriage like that to exist. And I felt like when I was growing up, everybody was sort of tiptoeing around the subject, if that makes sense. And so we were raised kind of with traditions, but not like a framework of religion.

40:31Gwyneth Paltrow:and my friends who have faith have this thing that I don't have that I I'm sort of like, I don't know, again, I don't think jealous is the right word, but I, I want to understand it more. Is your faith, were you, were you raised in that? Did you find it? I would just love to hear more about it and what it does for you. Yeah. Um, I was raised in it. So my grandfather was actually the pastor of my church growing up. So as he often joked, his family had a drug problem, which is that they were drugged to church every Sunday, regardless of whether or not they wanted to be there. But yeah, I kind of grew up going to church.

41:17My mom and my dad are, you know, incredible, beautiful believers really, I think, taught me to challenge and to press on areas where I had questions. So it didn't feel super simplistic. It felt a bit more robust, probably given that. But then I went to Georgetown and Jesuit. You would think that the Jesuit Catholic thing would have been kind of identifying characteristic of the academic experience. And it really wasn't. I think for the first time in my life, I was presented with a world that really said, you have to be able to explain why it is you believe what you believe. It's not enough to just say like, well, this is, I'm a Christian.

42:03That's just, there's nothing else to it.

42:06Gwyneth Paltrow:It's kind of a get out of jail free card in a way. Totally. Yeah. And so really in college, I had to go through what's called apologetics, which is like defense of faith. Like, why is it that I believe this? Does it stand up to scrutiny, reason? And am I comfortable with the things that I thought that I believed my entire life? And there were some areas where I think I came through that experience and said, I don't know, maybe I would frame it differently than maybe the way that Sunday school would have framed it growing up. What would be an example? I think I'm a lot less convinced of like literal interpretations of parts of the scripture.

42:49That's not to say that I don't believe in them or I don't believe in like the narrative that created the theological traditions and practices that we hold today. But like, it's not super important to me whether or not the earth was created 10 ,000 years ago or 10 billion years ago. I just don't care. Right. No part of that, like, makes me feel more true to my faith. It just doesn't matter. So I think that was part of it. But then the other—

43:40Gwyneth Paltrow:so much of that is about, is metaphor. And it's meant to be taken as like about ego or ego diminishment or like ways to become who you truly are as opposed to like what's literally in there. Well, I think that there are some parts that were kind of ambiguously metaphorical and there are other parts that were explicitly metaphorical. You know, I don't think it's, you know, random. that Jesus approached almost all of his teachings in parable. He wasn't telling historical stories. He was just saying, let me tell you a story about a man with two sons and a man that was sowing seed on pebbled ground.

44:29These are all metaphors. They're all parables. And I think that the human brain learns in this way from experience and story. Um, and so I think just like holding on to the, the need almost to be intellectually right about something and just saying, look, the idea is my heart. That's, that's the part that matters is like, where is my heart? What am I learning from this? How is it shaping my character? Um, and I think that became really important to me and what I, my experience of that entering into the marketplace, going into government work, being in tech, working in venture capital. It's like, there are so many people that are brilliant and it's super intellectual.

45:19Maybe they're trying desperately to get in touch emotionally with like what's missing in their life. Yeah. And it's really common actually to find people that are like, I don't know what it is, but there's something missing. Like I've made it. I have all this monetary success. I have fame. I have influence and power. But like something's missing. And there are all of these philosophers that have been talking about this for thousands of years. You know, Pascal, C.S. Lewis said, like, if we find that there's something missing, wouldn't that suggest that there's something more, there's something higher?

45:57But then you have, you know, pop culture icons, you know, mo' money, mo' problems. You know, Kanye talks about this over and over. Eminem talks about this. It's like, I think as like a rural kid from Ohio, I grew up looking to these, you know, exemplars in our society of what success looked like and thinking like, wow, they have their stuff together. They've really figured it out. And then you get to that level and it's like, man, there's so much emptiness, like people that are just searching for their, for meaning.

46:29Gwyneth Paltrow:Do you, I mean, I imagine you must kind of rub shoulders with a lot of these guys, right? In your position who feel kind of, I don't know, like there's a vacancy or a lostness or like, do you, when you are with some of these guys who are super powerful and wealthy, do you feel like, you know, I don't know, imparting wisdom to them? Do you, is it difficult to be in circles with people who, I don't know if I, you know, are morally, I would say maybe not aligned? Well, I actually don't think there's that much moral misalignment. We can come back to that. But I think that, you know, coming into really like Founders Fund in 2013, 2014, I had no expectation that I was going to show up and suddenly I'd be like the Christian guy in tech.

47:31I think ultimately what happened is that people would ask questions and I would just actually answer them. I wasn't afraid to say, yeah, I'm a Christian and I actually believe this stuff and I've thought a lot about it. And here's why I think that this is true. And over time, it just kind of snowballed where more like I would do a whole pitch meeting with a founder telling me about their company. And then afterwards they'd say, can I can we talk privately? And then they would say, I'm really struggling with this part of my life. I heard that you're a Christian. Can you pray for me? Can you like suggest what I might be able to read that could help with this?

48:10And ultimately, like God is going to decide what he wants. And when the doors or the windows open, I'm just trying to walk through them. And I've been really surprised at the response to that. The people that have reached out to ask for, I wouldn't say wisdom. I'm not sharing anything that's new. I'm just sharing my experience and the things that I've read or I've learned and that I think might resonate with them. And so it's been it's been really cool to see. And I do think that there's like sort of a new openness that didn't exist even 10 years ago. You know, there's I don't know if you've watched the HBO show Silicon Valley, which is actually I mean, it's so cringy because it's so true.

49:04it's actually sort of painful to realize that the, the parody is just more or less reality, but there's an episode where they say, you know, in Silicon Valley, you can do anything. You can like microdose, you can be in a polycule. The only thing you can't do is be a Christian. That was 10 years ago. And I feel like today, you know, this experience of Eastern mysticism and all these things that the tech founders of the early 2000s went through, there's this really interesting resurgence and interest for the classics, you know, people exploring traditional religion.

49:41Gwyneth Paltrow:Right. Is that because we're like, it marries well with more right ideology, do you think? And that's kind of the prevailing ideology? Or do you think that it's like this? I don't know. I think that when I hear you talk about it, I feel like there's this very fundamental thing in being a human being that we don't have answers, that things can feel incredibly lonely and that there are existential questions all the time. And I think that's why people used to love their kings and queens, because if there's hierarchy or there's order that's endemic, we feel safe. So, I mean, do you think that from like a Christianity perspective, the reason that it's that it's sort of more on the rise is because the whole country seems to be going more conservative?

50:37I don't think it's political. I would say that it's probably a couple of things. The first is that I think people that have been seeking didn't find what they were looking for and whatever the prior paradigm was. And so I I think that they're increasingly open to trying to explore things that maybe they hadn't considered. And I think that's aided in many ways by how imitative humans are. We have a tendency to sort of parrot what people around us are doing. And once it became acceptable where there were enough people that were exploring it, it was now culturally OK to be out talking about it. And to your point about kings and queens, this is actually a great example from the Old Testament.

51:25I think it was the book of Judges. There was a situation where the Jewish people did not have a king, but all of the neighboring kingdoms did. And they actually came back to the prophet and they said, give us a king. And he was like, well, why? Why do you why do you want a king? And they said, well, all of all of the other civilizations around us, they all have kings. And he said, but this is what happens when you get a king. You get all these bad things. And they said, we don't care. We want a king. And so he gave them a king. And then all of those bad things happened. And I think ultimately that's like the mimetic nature of our humanity is like we want what other people want.

52:07And that desire is imitated in both good ways. That's how we learn by imitating our parents, by imitating our siblings, older siblings, our peers. But there's also a lot of negative parts to that as well, where we're imitating ego, we're imitating greed, we're imitating loneliness. And, you know, social media, for example, is it's like the mass accelerator of imitation at societal scale. And we've seen the deleterious outcome of that sort of investment.

52:40Gwyneth Paltrow:For sure. I think it's really important too, to always question as you go, right? Like when you're, if you're engaging in a belief system, I mean, maybe I've just, this is like the person that I am. I've always pushed back and questioned things. Like, I think that's a really important part as well. Do you agree? 100%. Yeah. I think there's this kind of genius interview question that I always ask that's, what is something you believe to be true that you believe most of your peers disagree with you about. That's a good dinner party question. It is. And it's, it's actually really hard for most people to answer the question because if they really think about it, do you actually believe anything that you think would be upsetting to your peers?

53:23Gwyneth Paltrow:Yeah, that's it. That is a really good question. I would have to think about that. What's your answer to that question? I have so many, but I also, this is what I do for a living, right? This is what I think about all the time. Um, yeah, I think, I think like we want to constantly be like fighting against this impulse to just be chasing whatever it is that's happening. I mean, Silicon Valley has people think of them as like them, the tech industry. They think of the tech industry as this like incredibly opinionated sort of free thinking group of people. It's really not. I mean, it's highly mimetic.

54:03It's like they were super progressive and now there's like this turn to traditional religion. And, you know, they went from like being very against things like defense tech to being like hyper for defense tech.

54:16Gwyneth Paltrow:If they were early investors in Anderle. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, you get like these wild swings and it's just like. What does that mean to you as somebody like a man of real faith when you see that pendulum swing around you? I just I just want to be true to my convictions. And that means that I'm constantly wanting to ask myself, like, why is it that I believe this? Do I believe it because it's comfortable to believe it? Because the people that I care about their opinion of me believe that thing? Do I believe it because it's a desire for something that I want that's purely imitative of someone else's desire?

54:51I'll give you a great example. I'm going to criticize myself but sort of in a way that like I'm open to accepting that this is a valid criticism of myself okay I love Aston Martins love them why is that a criticism why do I love Aston Martins why I want to be James Bond if I just saw a lineup of cars and the whole James Bond franchise never existed I don't think I would have necessarily picked out and Aston Martin as my favorite car.

55:20Gwyneth Paltrow:It's only a criticism depending on which James Bond you're talking about. That's true. That's true. Some are better than others. And I'm very curious to see who the next one is going to be. But I think being able to be honest with yourself to say like, I want that thing because someone that I admire, some model that I have also wanted that thing. And there, like in the Aston Martin example, I'm comfortable with admitting that that's the case, even though it's sort of like devalues my interest in some way. Cause it's like, I'm just borrowing someone else's desire. Um, I don't think that, I don't think it devalues that.

55:57Gwyneth Paltrow:I mean, I think inspiration is such a beautiful quality. Like if you see somebody and they inspire you and if there's a way to personify that or make it tangible, like, I don't know. I do that all the time. That's a good point. That's a good point. As long as you're choosing good models. Yes. You don't want to be inspired by bad models. But yeah, no, I think I think that's right. What inspires you? You know, learning, curiosity. I'm such a fundamentally curious person. I can go down rabbit holes for hours. I love understanding other people and other points of view. I love, and helping people inspires me a lot.

56:48Gwyneth Paltrow:Like I spend a lot of my time trying to understand what somebody needs. And I think it comes from a place of my own pain too, you know, like trying to, I think I'm, I'm very good at feeling people and seeing people and kind of helping my, my inclination is always to like pour into that. And, um, it makes me feel very inspired and like that there are endless possibilities. What is the source of that? Would you say for you? It's like, Where does that interest in pouring into people come from? I think it's a very fundamental part of me. And again, like I think a lot of it comes from pain, certain things that I went through in my life.

57:33And I think being, you know, there are sort of negative parts of that too.

57:39Gwyneth Paltrow:Like there's a hypervigilance that I have, you know, that comes from a life of a lot coming at me and certain traumas and things like that. And I think the bad side of that hypervigilance is that my nervous system is fucked off a lot of the time. And I think the upside is that I can feel people and I sort of love people. What about you besides an Aston Martin, of course? Yeah, I think you and I actually have this in common. I lost my dad when I was 30. Wow. He was 58. Oh my God. Which I think is the same as when you lost your dad. I was 30 as well. Yeah. I'm sorry. I lost him to Alzheimer's, which was pretty crazy to like see someone you love like kind of deteriorate and not become themselves.

58:40And also someone you presumably had on a pedestal. Yeah. Yeah. And there are all these things that I feel like I would sort of make fun of him for it, like playfully, not like behind his back. And like characteristics of him that I was like, man, I'm never going to do that. Like I remember in high school, he would always make me change the oil in my car. Um, and he was like, Trey, this is like, it's a life lesson. You have to learn how to do this because how else are you going to do it when you're an adult? And I was like, dad, I'm going to go to Jiffy Lube and pay someone else to change my oil.

59:18Um, but then, you know, the, the first year after he passed, um, I guess months after he passed, uh, uh my wife was pregnant with our first son and um we were I was getting the nursery ready and I was uh trying to hang a chandelier in the in the nursery and I just couldn't do it like I couldn't figure out how to do it I didn't know what I was doing and I just remember like laying on the floor and weeping, being like, man, I don't think I really appreciated him enough when he was around because like right now, this is the time that I would call my dad and say like, dad, help me do this thing. And I just didn't, I realized like for the first time, like I don't have my dad anymore.

1:00:16That's, I mean, it's crazy. It's like a 30-year-old. I was supposed to have like decades more with him to have grandchildren that I could bring to him. And I think it just like, it really changes your perspective on the time that you do have with your loved ones in particular. Yeah. Like I, I want to be around for my kids, for their kids. Um, and I want to appreciate like the moments that come without just getting caught up in like, uh, I'm on a wave and the wave is just like full speed ahead all the time. Um, what do you think he would say now, if he could see what

1:01:05Gwyneth Paltrow:you're up to? Oh, he would just be all, he would be making fun of me constantly. He could not suffer. Like making bomb jokes? You know, he could not suffer a single moment of being happy for me in the most playful way. He'd be like, oh wow, great job. You got straight A's. Get back to work, you loser. Yeah, I think he would have privately been very proud of me, And publicly, he would have been very jokey about everything that's happened. Wow. Okay, you made me cry. Yeah, me too. I want to ask you one last question. This is a question that my husband asks a lot because, as I said, he's very progressive.

1:01:57Gwyneth Paltrow:And if you read the Gospels, it's very, I mean, Jesus is very unambiguous around like, you know, all the things that meek shall inherit the earth and love thy neighbor as thyself. And in our climate right now, some of the rhetoric is not that, right? How do you hold those things at the same time genuinely? like as somebody who worked in a Trump administration, like, is that, how does that work? Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right. You read the Sermon on the Mount. It's very clear, um, about where we should be spending our time and effort and mindshare. Um, and again, I kind of think about this on that quad chart that I was describing as like, there are a lot of things that feel good and are good.

1:02:54You know, that you think about things like healthcare or nonprofit work or, you know, working with at-risk communities, whatever. And there are a lot of things that we can all agree are in the is bad, feels bad category. Like, you know, child sex trafficking, murder, theft. And then you have this complicated, the complicated diagonal, the like, is bad feels good. And these things are like sort of culturally in a moment where, you know, it could be things like gambling. Like I would argue that gambling is really, it's, there are probably some, some demographics where it's not a huge issue, but really it's like robbing from the poor in many cases.

1:03:41Um, pornography.

1:03:43Gwyneth Paltrow:And it's also reinforcing what you were talking about earlier, the sort of culture of, you know, basement culture. Right. Exactly. Um, pornography is another one of these where you could frame it as some sort of like female empowerment thing, but like the damage that it's doing to society is probably not even worth it if that were the argument you were making. Legalization of drugs, you could probably put in that category. Obviously, you can make arguments around the edges of these things. I'm painting an overly broad picture intentionally. And then you have this other quadrant of is good, feels bad.

1:04:14And I am not in any way going to defend that national security, working in national security feels good. It doesn't. It doesn't feel good. Law enforcement doesn't feel good. I would call this quadrant like duty and responsibility. Like on a personal level, the gospels are checking the condition of our heart. Turn the other cheek. Absolutely. We should do those things. You know, how we respond to giving with our personal finances. You know, There are three different stories in the New Testament, in the Gospels, of Jesus telling people to give away some portion of their wealth. But he told all three of them different amounts.

1:04:59Oh, he did? He told one, give away half. He told one, give away, I think, a third. He told another to give away all of their wealth. He was speaking to the condition of their heart. Where is your idol? And he was saying, look, your idol is your wealth. You need to turn from your idol. So I think these things are speaking to the condition of our hearts on a personal level. Societally, I think we have to respond to things differently. And I think those frameworks are governance. It's, you know, what is good governance? How do you care for society? How do you provide the conditions through which people have the freedom and the expression for those character, their heart condition?

1:05:38Um, and unfortunately due to the, the nature of the real world, um, there are bad actors and we have to do what we can to keep those bad actors from taking whatever they want. Um, and that's really where defense comes in. That's where law enforcement comes in. Um, and there's a, an ethical way to do that. We don't need the accelerated intense rhetoric. I don't that does not jive with me personally, but we do need to like actually have laws and boundaries. And as a resident of San Francisco, I can tell you the difference in a city that doesn't prosecute crime and a city that does prosecute crime.

1:06:22And people are going to reach a better place personally, fulfillment with abundance in a society that respects law. And I'm simultaneously admitting that that doesn't always feel good.

1:06:42Gwyneth Paltrow:Well, I'm afraid I've gone a bit over my time. So thank you so much. This has been such an interesting conversation, very edifying. And I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much. Thank you.

1:06:59Gwyneth Paltrow:Thanks for tuning in. This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studios. I hope you'll listen, follow, rate, and review all of our episodes, which are available for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.