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

27:19She 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.

27:59Good, 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. um 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 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 and just therapeutic yeah that's super, super therapeutic for me.

28:46What 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 a bunch of acreage in the middle of the woods in a log cabin that my dad built with his, literally with his bare hands by himself. And so kind of grew up playing in the creek and hanging out in the woods, building tree houses with my brother. Also, I played basketball, ran cross country, played ultimate 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.

29:28My 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. and at times that was sort of frustrating because you know you can kind of get stuck in the rut of feeling like you know everyone's just goofing off and you're just trying to get through through school but yeah I had a you know graduated top of my class got great test scores and then got rejected everywhere that I applied to college so this is the the lesson the lesson of some of what JD talked about in Hillbilly Elegy.

30:29How did you, I mean, how do you get into tech coming from, I mean, spending all your time outdoors, fishing, hunting, blue collar home, public school? I mean, very, I mean, non-traditional tech path. I was always interested in tech. My mom's brothers were really into IT growing up. And so, you know, my uncles hung out with my brother and I, And we built our first 486 computer together, like went to Micro Center Mall and picked up, you know, the motherboard and the, 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.

31:12I 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 saw a demo of Palantir in my first job in the intelligence community, got into kind of a battle internally about using Palantir, got denied, and then jumped ship really early on and joined Palantir before we had any revenue, really any users, and the rest is history, and I've been in tech since.

32:02Can we go back to your time in intelligence? Absolutely, yeah. What kind of stuff were you doing? I was working on counterterrorism, primarily on computational linguistics around Arabic name matching. So in college, I studied, I was a Middle Eastern studies major, so learned Arabic, studied abroad in Egypt. And the intersection of people who could write code and could speak Arabic was very, very small. And so the most common name in the English language is John. 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.

32:46And it's spelled a million different ways. I mean, you could, in a transliterated sense, M-O-H-A-M-E-D, M-U-H-A-M-M-A-D. You could imagine all the permutations of that. And when you're dealing with intelligence reporting, the writer is effectively choosing how to spell these names, just transliterated. And someone had to go out and figure out how to merge these records to identify the individuals that were crossing all of the reporting that was being collected. And that was my job. I was the guy that was going in and trying to make sure that this Mohammed Atta was the same as this Mohammed Atta was the same as this Mohammed Atta, so that when we passed 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.

33:34Interesting. How long were you in the intelligence for? I only lasted about two and a half years. It was a short battle with bureaucracy, and I was defeated. Got to you. Got to you. And how did Palantir pop onto your radar? So I'm not sure. Are you familiar with In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital firm? I am now. Yeah, it's kind of an under-the-radar thing. But under George Tenet, the CIA set up this essentially a venture fund called InkyTel. And their job was to scout for technology that would be useful to the mission of the intelligence community. And now they serve a bunch of different customers.

34:20They work with the Department of Homeland Security, with the Pentagon. They're kind of all over the place. But at the time, they had funded a work program for Palantir in a few federal intelligence agencies. And they were doing a roadshow. And they gave a demo that I was at. And I'm like, oh, crap, this would literally save me like 20 % of the time that I spend every week doing searches in these databases. Because basically the way that I would do it is there are 12 different databases. You go into each one of them. You write a really complex query. and then it would just be running in the background.

34:58It's like, all right, well, I'm going to go get a cup of coffee, go talk to a couple people and come back and hope that I have an exported CSV file that I can merge into an Excel spreadsheet and run concatenate functions to try to narrow it down. But in Palantir, it was like bringing Google to that siloed intelligence infrastructure where you could just run the search once and it would just return everything instantly. And so in its simplest form, it would have saved me probably a day of work every week. But, you know, there was no requirement, as you're familiar. There was no requirement. There was no funding to, you know, build anything like this.

35:41And so it was really hard to get it brought into the door. So I switched over to the private sector and worked at Palantir instead. So what, I mean, what a lot of Palantir is, everybody's worried about it. Everybody's worried about, you know, are they spying on us? Is this going to be the, you know, the newest Patriot Act? What do you, I mean, what are they? Are they spying on us? What is it? Yeah, I mean, the misconceptions around Palantir are crazy. I mean, they're not bringing any data. The data belongs to the customer. It's just architecture for data management. Like, you have to have some sort of software infrastructure that allows you to store data, search data, you know, explore data, analyze data, you know, structure investigations around that data that are shareable with other people.

36:37And these are things that in any normal world, you would be like, yes, we want our warfighters to have the best tools that they can to do the job that we're asking them to do. And so I think a lot of the hysteria, like philosophically, is really troubling because basically what people are saying is that we, a democratic society, have elected representative government to make decisions about how we should, like make decisions around the policies that we want to enact to protect our society in the national security context. but we don't want them to have the best tools to do it. We would rather them have crappy stuff that barely works, that we have to hold together with duct tape.

37:15And 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 enable the policies that we as a democracy have decided that we want to go after. So it's kind of troubling. Yeah, you know, it's, I mean, it's, every time I talk to any of my buddies that are still in special ops or in intelligence, I mean, they're all raving about Palantir and talking about how, you know, just everything from a javelin shot to a sniper shot to, I mean, targeting and everybody's raving about Palantir.

38:03It's, it's, it's, it's in, that's using it in war. And, you know, then you have everybody else that's sitting there at home that, that they, all they do is complain about it. I mean, where does the, where does the misconception come from that they are spying on everything and everyone? No, I mean, the media has a lot to do with it. You know, in the early days of Anderil, there was a kind of a profile that was written about the company and the headline of the story was something like, you know, Anderil is enabling a surveillance panopticon or something like that. It's like, this is just not helpful.

38:37Like, 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?

39:14I 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 Shamsankar, who you know, trying to figure out how to make the business development engine work. You know, the kind of unfortunate reality is that I showed up and I was the least talented person technically, but the least you know, awkward socially. And so what do you do? Well, I got put in charge of sales. And so, you know, Sham and I were kind of tasked with figuring this out. Really everything I know about this space, I learned from Dr. Karp, the CEO, and Sham as we were kind of trying to figure it out together.

39:57It took us years to like break through the ceiling of, you know, how do you sell really complicated software to the U.S. government? And at the end of that, you know, call it five and a half year period, I was feeling pretty burned out. But over the time that I had been there, I got to be friends with Peter Thiel, who is the founder of PayPal, the co-founder of Palantir. And Peter, just out of the blue, asked me if I would come join him at Founders Fund. So not having any interest in venture capital or, frankly, knowing anything about finance, I kind of jumped ship and joined Peter in San Francisco.

40:33No kidding. You know, back to, you know, his Palantir spine. 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 pretty good because everybody's worried about the watchers. Yeah, I mean, the reality is, is like the idea behind Palantir was that there shouldn't be a tradeoff between doing your job well and like protecting privacy and civil liberties. That's like the entire founding story of the company is that for anyone with a brain that has an engineering background, you don't believe you have to make that choice.

41:16That's a false choice. We can do both of these things. You know, there's all sorts of critiques that you can make that, you know, I would critique myself for in the role that I was in at Palantir as well. Maybe we didn't do a good enough job telling the story. Maybe we tried to be a little bit too secretive. Maybe we could have been more out and showing people what it is that we were doing. Obviously, there's limitations to that working with the intelligence community. But if we hadn't done it, it's not like it wouldn't have happened. It would have just been done by Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics or Booz Allen Hamilton or Deloitte much less well and with less thought put into the protection of privacy and civil liberties.

41:56So 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, 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.

42:38And 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 are like, wait a second, this guy doesn't even want to work here. Why are we interviewing someone that doesn't want a job? And so, you know, it was kind of a weird, like, nine months that I was talking to Founders Fund before. Nine months? Nine months. And finally, Peter was just like, no, we're doing this.

43:14And 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 Founders Fund? still to this day, 12 years later, I'm not sure what the real story is. But yeah, it was a weird transition for sure. Did you like venture capital? Yeah. I mean, I love what I do. I feel very blessed to have this really cool job where I get to learn about everything. This is like the beauty of VC as a job is that we're just going and interacting with the most interesting, most passionate people in the world.

43:57who 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.

44:28We just have pitch meetings. My first year at Founders Sun, I did just over 500 pitch meetings, which is a lot. Wow. I've ratcheted that down a bit. I have a better sense for the types of things that are going to be a good fit. But it's a big part of what everyone in this industry does, is you're just meeting with really compelling people day in and day out. what is it i mean when you're looking for a founder that you want to invest in what do you what is it that does it for you what is yeah looking for well you know this is this is probably like the most common question that vcs are asked because i think people really want to believe that there's a rubric that there's like some sort of table and 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.

45:20There'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 we're all drawn into mimesis. And so most normies, they're just aping what everyone else is doing. And so they want to be like the Uber for X or something like that. But the really generational transformative founders are the people who aren't tied into peer group validation.

46:08And they're going to do weird stuff. And so if you think about the most successful founders of our generation, people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, these are sort of weird people. And they're maybe somewhere on the autism spectrum. And that kind of acts as their superpower because they're not actually concerned about what other people think about them. And that ends up being a tremendous unlock. So we're really looking for people like that, where you meet them and instantly you're like, okay, this person is not just trying to be like a cool kid from their business school class.

46:46There'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 the first investor in Facebook, in SpaceX, in Airbnb, in Stripe, Andurl, Palantir. We've been kind of at the very beginning of most of the last 20 years of technology, which has been really cool to be along for the ride for. I'll bet, man. There's been some awesome stuff that has come out of that. Yeah. Yeah. 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.

47:43And it just all started with, you know, one group of people starting one company.

47:51this summer serve up the cookout classics oscar meyer hot dogs and heinz mustard grill up a dog add classic yellow mustard or loaded chicago style we all know it's not a cookout without oscar meyer and heinz yeah so then you met palmer then i met palmer the founders fund Mm-hmm. How did you guys meet? We were the first institutional investor in Oculus. So he had started this virtual reality company, ended up getting acquired by Meta for a couple billion dollars. And I think he was just on this path that he just thought, I'm going to be the VR guy. That's what I'm going to do for the rest of my life.

48:34But I also knew just from hanging out with him that he was really interested in national security. In fact, when he was, right after Meta was acquired, he moved or got a house in Woodside, which is really close to Facebook's headquarters. And he drained his swimming pool and he was building a ramjet in his swimming pool in Woodside. And so he and I had talked about that a couple of times. And when I had this idea for Anderil, he was the first person I went to. And I just said like, hear me out. What if we started a next generation defense prime? And he was like, oh, man, I'm doing this VR thing.

49:13I'm super passionate about this, but I don't know that I'm ever going to do anything other than VR. And that obviously only lasted until he got fired for his politics. And then he was right back on the Andrews story with me. Right on. Was he always out there? Board shorts? Mismatched flip flops? Hawaiian shirt? I would love to say that he's changed or matured by the standards of society, but he's exactly the same person that he was when 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.

50:01Let's hear it. Yeah. No, I mean, he is such an interesting person. You know, I could spend all day talking about this. In the early days of Anderle, 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 my cargo shorts. And he'd have, like, his toothbrush and a stick of deodorant in one of his cargo pockets. and he'd have like two days worth of clothes in his other cargo pocket.

50:37And, 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.

51:18Cars that run really well and American cars.

51:26and uh 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 he wasn't even married he didn't have kids but he went out and he bought a minivan um so yeah he's he's always super super entertaining he's an animated character there's no doubt about that at his wedding there was like this entire contingent of like japanese anime people that like in the industry that were like palmer like zealots and they were they showed up with like custom vinyl figurines of him and his wife i mean it was like holy he's like this weird celebrity in the anime scene oh man that's hilarious super super fun uh could not be uh a a quirkier and yet smarter person.

52:21He's just the perfect combination. What kind of stuff is that guy innovating in his free time? Have you seen any of his crazy gizmos? I mean, right now he is so focused on Soldier Born Compute, like building the helmet, that I think it's consuming all of his creative energy. It's the perfect thing for him. Seven years into Andrel, he finally gets to return to his roots and work on the thing. you know, giving our soldiers superpowers. And it has to just be the most fun for him of anything that we've done. That is pretty cool, man. That is pretty cool. So I got a quote from you here that says, you said the tech at your government desk was worse than what you had in your college dorm.

53:08What did you mean by that? Well, yeah, you know, the day I showed up, I think I had expected that there was going to be some like James Bond moment. Like, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to have this supercomputer and someone's going to like throw me the keys to an Aston Martin. That's what I thought. Like a laser watch and things like that. And I sat down and I had Windows 98 and a CRT monitor. And I was in a cube with two other people who like didn't actually work. They just like talked about, you know, local sports teams most of the day. And so it was a crazy transition from believing that I was going to walk into this incredible tech-forward environment.

53:48And it turns out that I would do these coffee break searches and stuff. It wasn't at all what I expected. Is that what inspired you to get into defense tech eventually? Yeah, it's really the Palantir story. Like, you know, finding out that there was, it wasn't that there weren't people that cared about this. It was that they didn't have a seat at the table. You know, like, you know, the standard way for getting software tooling historically, or at least post-Cold War, has been, you know, you put out an RFP and all the defense primes, they all bid on it. They present white papers. They say how many heads it would take for them to write the code.

54:35And then they get hired on a cost plus basis where they're reimbursed for the hourly labor with some 7 % to 12 % margin attached to the top of it. And then they get their special badges, and they walk in every day, and they sit at their desks, and they have no incentive to move fast because they get a margin on top of every hour that they work. And it would be crazy to believe that we're employing our best and brightest in these roles, especially 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.

55:11Like, why are they going to go sit in the concrete basement in the, you know, D.C. area getting crapped on by bureaucrats and just like, you know, punch card checking in, checking out for work? And that just seemed like the whole incentive structure was broken. And so I didn't do it because I was like, man, I really want to be like a tech entrepreneur. I did it because I thought it was the right thing for the country. That's cool to hear. That's cool to hear. What was the first product you guys wanted to develop? At Anderil? Well, I mean, we have this pitch deck, like a very bad Google Slides deck that we use to recruit our first 12 hires.

55:55And 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. 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.

56:29Like you have to be able to get it out into the field quickly. You don't want it to be a science project. And you want there to be a significant amount of political urgency around the thing that you're going to build so that you can drive a different kind of decision-making rather than business-as-usual procurement policy. And so for us, that meant that we landed on Century Tower, which is now deployed not only at military bases, but also on the southwest border in the United States, 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.

57:07And so we built this autonomous sentry tower that was completely off-grid, mobile, so you could pick it up and move it around, had a solid-state metamaterial radar, an 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 gonna 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.

57:52We cover an enormous swath of the southwest border and we're expanding constantly, delivering more towers to get more and more coverage on the border. But the important thing about that initial work is that all the lessons that we learned from that, the AI computer vision system, the operating system for surfacing tracks to the users of the platform ended up being the exact same back end that we used for every subsequent product. And so it was kind of the AI brain was the real product. And then whether you made a sentry tower that flies, which was our next product, which was called Ghost, to interceptor missiles, to submarines, to autonomous fighter planes, they all have that same operating system on the back end that we call Lattice.

58:43And so we're still getting amortized research and development out of the very first thing that we started building eight years ago. Damn. Where did you guys come up with the list? It was just, you know, sitting around with Palmer, me, Palmer, Matt, Brian, and Joe, just, you know, riffing on what we think would make sense for us to build, leveraging that combination of software and hardware.

59:07and I'm honestly kind of surprised that we ended up doing almost exactly what we said that we were going to do. That's crazy. Do you have that slide with you by chance? I'd love to put that up. Yeah, yeah. I can show you the slide. Perfect. So what did come next? So we went, the next product after the Century Tower was Ghost, which is just a flying version of the tower. It's a modular payload drone that could do autonomous identification, detection, and tracking of targets. And so you can kind of think about it as like a helicopter with a pilot where you just tell it, hey, I want you to go and do this mission.

59:45Like, 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. are deployed with US forces abroad. They're also deployed in Ukraine. So it's become kind of a core product line for us. And then we went from there into counter drone. We started building interceptors for small drones. We have a product called Anvil that is, the first version was not explosive. It would just fly like a bowling ball into a drone. And then we've continued to level that up into Roadrunner, which is kind of like a reusable interceptor, Barracuda, which is, you know, like a missile, more like an interceptor cruise missile, and kind of expanding that out over time.

1:00:33But the goal is really like all domain. Like you want to do, you know, work in space, work in air, work on ground, work on the surface of the sea, subsea, and Palmer's new obsession is subterranean, which, you know, not a lot of details that are shareable on that front yet. damn what are you guys doing in space uh 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 uh we have a whole platform called dive um so different sizes um dive ld which is large diameter dive is like the size of a pickup truck basically um again same software you know it out on missions and it can do everything from pipeline inspection to, you know, in theory you could do kinetics.

1:01:22You 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. And we just completed the delivery on a program of record for Australia, where we'll build a bunch of these for them as they're kind of transitioning over to the AUKUS treaty, where they're getting the delivery of nuclear submarines from the United States. So they obviously have real concerns about the sea space around the continent, and we're spinning up a bunch of work there with them on that as well.

1:02:04We also have a product called Seabed Sentry that is kind of a platform that you can drop 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 and all these domains how i mean How fast, I mean, I'm sure it's different for every product, but I mean, how fast are you guys manufacturing getting these to the end user? Yeah, no, it's a good question.

1:02:48I mean, as far as like doing things at limited scale, like, you know, we can ramp pretty quickly into the limited rate production on all of these. I think, you know, the example of Century Tower, I mean, within a year of the company starting, we were rolling these things out in production. With Roadrunner, I think it was like 18 months from the beginning of that program until we were delivering units into the field. And this is for a reusable cruise missile. I mean, this is a really complicated product. With Dive, it was, you know, roughly on that same timeline, call it 18 months. The challenge, of course, and the thing that we're focused on primarily as a business right now is production scaling.

1:03:27Like, how do you go from building hundreds of things or single-digit thousands of things to building tens of thousands of things? And I think the name of the game in this autonomous future for national security is what we would call a tritable mass, which is like, 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.

1:04:04But our production capacity in the United States has totally atrophied. We just don't even have the capacity to do this anymore. And this is really what our focus is right now. We're building a huge factory campus in Ohio to enable us to ramp production capacity and it's a new muscle for the business kind of in the same way that you know tesla went from building the roadster to building you know the gigafactory and starting to to sell hundreds of thousands of millions of cars how big is the is the manufacturing facility in ohio going to be yeah i mean long term it will be around five million square feet um the the first building is going to be just under a million square feet and that will be up and running in the first late first quarter of 2026.

1:04:50Man. Moving pretty fast. Congratulations. Thanks. Yeah. It's awesome. It's sort of a weird homecoming for me. It's like I left Ohio and now I'm going back and working on this crazy factory. Got to bring my mom to the ribbon cutting ceremony, which was pretty cool. Dude, I mean, she's got to be just so proud to see how far you've come in life and with everything you're doing now. What'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 what our family, like our family story has been in Ohio.

1:05:34and she was kind of going through the list of all of these factory jobs that my family had had. It was like my grandfather worked at, one of them worked at Frigidaire, one of them worked at NCR, National Cash Register. I had an uncle who worked at Ford. Another one of my grandfathers worked at General Motors. I have an aunt that works in eyeglass manufacturing. And I started kind of searching around when I was sitting there with my mom and every single one of these factories is no longer there. Like our industrial capacity that was kind of the heart of, you know, Ohio's economy for so long, completely collapsed.

1:06:10And that was the story of my family. I mean, that was it. And so more than just like coming back and being like, hey, mom, look, I'm doing this cool thing and we're doing it in Ohio. It's really about like reinvigorating this family story. Like we need to bring production back to America. And it's very cool to be part of bringing that back to my family's story in addition to just doing it at a more macro level. How are you guys, I mean, how is Enduro finding the people that have the skills to do this? I mean, it's been so long since we were in production and manufacturing. Yeah. I mean, how long has it been?

1:06:50It's been at least 20 years. Yeah. I mean, all this sort of started falling apart, I guess, when I was in high school, which was like 20 years ago. You know, all the steel production left Ohio. They're huge steel companies in Ohio. Armco is, I think, the biggest employer in Middletown, where JD is from. And, you know, none of that is there anymore. My uncle worked at Mound Steel, which was another big steel producer in southwest Ohio. It's no longer there. So, you know, I think there's definitely still skilled labor around. There's a big Honda factory on the west side of Columbus. Intel has been trying to open a chip fab on the east side of Columbus.

1:07:35Automotive 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. Kind of the craziest thing to me about the way that we've been approaching this for the last decade is that the government could not have gotten this more wrong. If you go back to Obama and you look at the upskilling programs that they were doing, it was all software development. They were like running, you know, coding boot camps, teaching people how to write code.

1:08:23What's the first job that's gonna 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 eventually become an AI manufacturing facility? Well, I mean, we're going to implement all sorts of technology in our production system.

1:08:58Like 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. But if you're building up like a simple, you know, simple, I use very loosely, but if you're going to set up like an assembly line for something that's going to be produced over and over again, certainly you could like build in entire steps of that that can be purely automated. And, you know, this is what companies like Tesla have done significantly better than the traditional automakers. But you also have a bunch of people involved and you're constantly moving things around.

1:09:33You 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 the production facility will do one product at a time?

1:10:06Well, I mean, the idea is that it will be modular and flexible. And so we can reset things to rebuild these lines that enable us to scale. The Ukraine story is a great example here. So despite what most people think, the supply that the United States was giving to Ukraine was mostly Cold War era technology. Javelins, stingers, things like that. These things are built in like the 60s and the 70s. And when we realized that we were burning all of our inventory in that supply mission to Ukraine, it's not like the manufacturer of those weapon systems had active production facilities. Like, they didn't exist.

1:10:48Like, 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?

1:11:31Well, I mean, part of this is like a question around how exquisite you're building it. Like, are you building something that's like a Frankenstein that has to do everything well? I'm sure you've heard stories about the F-35, which is like when you're building a joint strike fighter that you're going out to every one of the services and you're saying, Marine Corps, what do you need? Air Force, what do you need? Navy, what do you need? And then you're building that aircraft that meets the needs of all those services. Well, you end up with a$300 million airplane. Norm Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin, sort of tongue in cheek said, I think it was 2050 was his market said, in 2050 the entire defense budget will buy exactly one airplane.

1:12:08Like 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.

1:13:00Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, Trey, let's take a quick break. When we come back, I want to talk about the helmet and where you guys are at with that. Great. Perfect.

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1:15:46all 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 i have a clay target uh range at my house in new mexico and i you know i grew up with a hunting dad so we would we would shoot in our backyard all the time Well, shooting clay pigeons doesn't have anything to do with pistol. You did pretty damn good. I was impressed. Much appreciated. Nice work, man. It was fun. But yeah, so I know we were getting ready to talk about the helmet that you guys are making. Yep. But we went down some rabbit holes there on the break.

1:16:21So about getting into college was the first one. Yep. So you got rejected from sounds like just about everywhere you applied. I probably should have dug into that a little bit more. and then you enlightened me on the break. So why did you get rejected? I mean, you're making good grades, obviously bored because you're ahead of your class, graduated top of the class. What is going on? Yeah, I mean, at the time it was really mysterious. I genuinely had no idea what was going on. You know, I feel like growing up, everyone just kind of told me, you can do whatever you want. You can go to school wherever you want.

1:17:02Like, 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. The one school that I got into was UNC Chapel Hill. And my high school girlfriend was already committed to going to Elon, which is just right down the street from North Carolina. So I went over to her house that same day and I'm like, man, I don't know what happened, but I got rejected everywhere. You know, I guess the upside of this is that we're going to be going to school close to each other with me being at UNC.

1:17:41And she was like, yeah, about that. She broke up with me. Oh, the same day that I 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, 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, this is what you're going to do. And so a week later, I hopped on a plane and flew out to D.C., and I posted up in front of the admissions department, demanded to see the dean of admissions.

1:18:18And 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 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.

1:19:03And it's like completely under the radar. No one would expect that this would be the thing, obviously. But, you know, it adds nothing to the demographic of the university. The university has to—there's no cost for them to pay in relationships with guidance counselors. They get nothing from, you know, bringing on another man or bringing on another white kid. And so it's the easiest possible rejection. Like all these top tier universities, they have this stat of how many 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.

1:19:47where for every black and Hispanic kid that didn't get a spot on a class by pulling away the affirmative action programs, it wasn't the white community that was benefiting from that at all. I think it was like a tiny increase in acceptance rate for white kids. It was actually the Asian American population that realized like 80 % of the growth under that demographic shift. And so, you know, I think this is kind of what JD talks about in Hillbilly Elegy as well. It's like, you know, the rural white communities were just decimated and they were left out of the American project. Is that getting better now?

1:20:27I actually don't think so. I think that low socioeconomic status white communities in America are just like, it's not on the radar of most of the people that are thinking about trying to bring people out of poverty. And I think every other demographic, every other ethnic demographic in America has better emissions rates for low socioeconomic status, except white communities. It's like the one that just gets no, there's no credit that's given in the emissions process. Now, to Georgetown's credit, they let me in, which is crazy that I pulled this stunt and ended up going to Georgetown. But, you know, I think like looking back on that, that was 2002, 23 years ago.

1:21:17Like, 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 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 led to these disenfranchised populations where I grew up in Ohio, as we've already talked about, it was just gutted by globalization, by the deindustrialization 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.

1:22:08And, you know, I think J.D. becoming the vice president is very much part of that story. It's like he's very aware of, you know, how this all happened. I mean, thank you for sharing that. What I kind of meant is, you know, with poor white kids getting denied university who deserve to be there. I mean, 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 i mean i think that that doesn't uh 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 That's what I meant.

1:23:05So, I mean, what do you think this has done to the workforce, to schools, to people's sentiment about going to college? I mean, by starving poor white kids, the opportunity of education. Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of, you know, issues in society that are driven primarily around what was fundamentally a boomer problem. Like the boomers basically convinced all of their children that that was the path, that like they needed to go to college. That was how you became successful. But there's not like a bunch of white collar jobs that require, you know, liberal arts degrees from, you know, four year regional universities.

1:23:52And so I think that you had all these people taking on a tremendous amount of student debt, and then they graduate and they realize that whatever they're doing, they didn't need a college degree to do it. They would have been much better off just not taking the debt. But more importantly than that, going back to the industrialization challenge, is that there are all of these skilled labor jobs that don't require college education, maybe vocational education, that are significantly better paying. They're more in need in our economy. It's a tremendous gap that we now have as we're trying to re-industrialize.

1:24:25And we as a country need to come together around this idea that there are multiple paths to career fulfillment. It doesn't all go through four-year universities. And the four-year university story didn't really even work anyway. It was just kind of a racket. It's insanely expensive now. I mean, I was just talking to Eric, our COO last night. his son's getting ready to go to school and is looking at Vanderbilt up in Nashville. It's like$280 ,000 for a four-year degree. Yeah. I think that's pretty common. Holy shit, man. Yeah. No, it's crazy. And the old American dream of go and get the college education, get a good paying job, get married young, buy a house, it doesn't happen.

1:25:13That 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, I can't even be in the market to buy a house. It just doesn't work. The debt loads are tremendous. There's not enough housing. It's hyper-competitive. We've kind of robbed an entire generation of what we used to think of as the American dream. I mean, do you think that's true? Do you think that's 100 % true or is that in and around bigger cities? I bet if we go to where you grew up in Ohio or where I grew up in Missouri, there is plenty of affordable housing.

1:25:56No, that's absolutely true. In cities, that is the problem. In large sections of America that are more rural or suburban, I think the American dream is still somewhat alive. But the problem is that the jobs 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. 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, I love company towns.

1:26:40I think company towns are amazing. I wish we had more of them. What Walmart has done in Bentonville is incredible. I would love to see other major companies set up their headquarters in places that are not, you know, part of the current economic growth story in America and see if they can build old company towns as well. That would be really cool. Well, I mean, what do you think, you know, back to the college stuff, I mean, where do you think this goes? Do you think that four-year universities are kind of becoming obsolete? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that they're, I wouldn't say they're obsolete, but they're highly specialized.

1:27:22And 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. So the traditional kind of liberal arts education, I think it's much harder to make the argument that people should be going into$300 ,000 of debt to do that. We just need to have an aspirational path for vocations that don't require that. And I think it's really on millennials at this point as they're raising their own children to make sure they understand that those paths are cool. They're OK. 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.

1:28:08Like, I'm okay if they don't do that. I'm okay if they decide they want to be chefs or artists or whatever. Like, there's – society is larger than just, you know, desk jobs, white-collar desk jobs. You had some – we were kind of talking about – a little bit about the attack on the family dynamic here, and you had some pretty interesting stuff to say about that. I'd like you to dive into that a little bit. We're talking about AI girlfriends, online dating, just all that kind of stuff. Yeah, you know, in the early days of AI Companions, I started playing with all these apps just to get a sense for how they worked and how it felt as a user of the applications.

1:28:57And 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 way that people have gotten into relationships historically, which kind of worked in local communities.

1:29:37It 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. place. But today, like the whole online dating trend has shifted that massively, where you're no longer looking at local communities. It's more of like a local maxima, like within 30 minutes or 45 minutes of where I live, what are the options? And it's like paralysis by analysis. Like, you know, people are like, oh, there's always more fish in the sea. I can always go on more dates. There's always, you know, more people out there that I need to meet before I settle down.

1:30:19And what's ended up happening on these online dating apps is that, you know, a tiny percentage, I'll speak specifically about men, a tiny percentage of men get the majority, the vast majority even, 80 plus percent of matches go to like a tiny percentage of generally like over six foot two, you know, very physically attractive. It's hard to convey personality traits. in a way that would have mattered in local communities. And the sadder part about this is that the bottom 50 % of men on dating apps get literally zero matches. No shit. Zero. There's no matching that's happening. And I think ultimately what that leads to is that you have all these people that are unsatisfied in their jobs, unsatisfied in their relational life, and they become the powder keg of civilization.

1:31:12You 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 have a companion that's always there that will never say anything negative. It's just going to be my own little world, and they're going to validate what I say. And sometimes the things that they validate end up being violent, whether it's suicide in the worst cases or school shootings or whatever else.

1:32:03Man, 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, being a tech guy, you have two kids yourself. I mean, this is something that me and my wife go back and forth with all the time is, you know, we're trying, I mean, porn, you know, so, I mean, it's so easy to access now social media, all the predators and all the, you know, shit trying to lure kids in sexually through social media platforms.

1:32:57I mean, you know, my friend Brian Montgomery says it best when you give your kid a phone, you're not giving your kid access to the world, you're giving the world access to your kid. And so, you know, a discussion that happens at my house a lot is, you know, where are we going to, are we going to homeschool our kids? Are we going to put them in a school somewhere? What are we going to do? and what do we do about technology because on one hand it's i i feel like you know me personally you need to you need to protect your kid you know from the world and the access that they're that they're going to get with some of the technology on the other hand it's like shit i mean you can't shelter him too much because then he's going to fall behind because the whole world is heading this way it's already here and so i'm curious you know and and you know i don't know if you want to say the ages of your kids or not, but, you know, they're older than toddlers.

1:33:50And so, you know, how do you handle that with your wife? I mean. Yeah. I mean, we try to be really thoughtful about this. Our kids are 10 and 12. You know, our sort of policy on smartphone access and social media is that we're going to hold out for as long as we possibly can. And, you know, there are great examples, like the babysitter that they have had for the last few years. She just left for college and she literally just got social media before she went to college. And she's 18 years old. It's like, it's possible to be cool and sociable and relational and smart and not subject yourself to that unnecessarily at too young of an age.

1:34:34And so I think that's kind of our policy with our kids is to try to keep them in that zone for as long as we can. So no smartphones. No smartphones. I mean, they don't even have an Apple Watch yet, which I think is you're starting to see that kind of happen with kids in that range where their parents don't want them to have access to social media, but they want them to be reachable, textable, callable. We haven't even done that. They haven't demonstrated that they need it. And you can see all sorts of sort of questionable behaviors that happen with kids when they're eight years old when they're the way that they use their iPads even it's like wow these things are super addictive and you can you can see it in kids in a kind of a supercharged way now one of the things that that we do that I love I just did the second version of this is um when they turn 10 we go for a father-son road trip from San Francisco to Disneyland and on the road trip we listen to an audiobook about the birds and the bees and we have a completely trapped environment where we're both looking forward to the road.

1:35:39He can't jump out of the car and he has to sit through seven hours of content about peer pressure and social media and pornography and the sex education. We do the whole thing. And so I just did that two weekends ago with my youngest who just turned 10. And it starts the conversation. And it's like, look, we're not gonna hide this. We wanna catch it early enough that you're not gonna learn all this stuff from your friends. I'd much rather you learn it from me than you learn it from your friends. And we start trying to teach them through open dialogue about, you know, these important topics that have the potential to literally ruin your life.

1:36:16Yeah. 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 is probably something comparable out there today. Passport to what? Purity. I'm getting it. 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. Or maybe it's not for kids. No, no, it's very much for 10-year-old kids. That's the framing. So they don't have no tablet? They have an iPad, but the iPad is for travel.

1:36:59Okay. When we're on an airplane or something like that. They don't have day-to-day privileges to screens. when do you think you'll give it to him? 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?

1:37:39Like, they want me to put my phone away too. And it's a good reminder. Like, yeah, if I'm going to have this rule that I believe that you shouldn't have it because it's bad for your brain, like, yeah, 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 have like no fear that your kids will miss out on, you know, that they'll be behind by not having a smartphone. What are they going to miss out on? I can't think of anything good that comes out of this. I don't know, you know what I mean? Just like iOS or, you know, Windows back in the day.

1:38:12I mean, just knowing how to use it. Oh, no. I mean, they're tech native. I mean, kids today, like, you know, hand them an iPad and they just intuitively know how to use it. It's like I don't have to teach them how to do it. They're using laptops at school. They know how to type. They can navigate a Mac OS. They're fine. They're going to be fine. But I can't think of any positive things that they're missing out on by not having an iPhone in their pocket. Yeah. Yeah. I love hearing it. I love hearing that. It is tough. If you don't have the other parents at the school aren't on the same page, it can become highly problematic socially.

1:38:51Well, see, that's what – I mean, do you have that experience? Are most of the parents on the same page? They're on the same page. At the school that my kids go to, kids are not walking around with their smartphones at 12. That's the first time I've heard that. It seems like everybody is just like, here you go. Here's the babysitter. Here's a phone. We haven't had that problem yet, but who knows? Good for you, man. I walked in in the middle of the conversation with you and Jeremy. You were talking about historically how societies collapsed. You're talking about 20-year-olds. And where were you going with that?

1:39:25Yeah. Basically, every collapsed civilization in human history has been driven by underemployed, unhappy, single men in their 20s. That's like, that is the powder keg of civilization. And, you know, for centuries, we actually did a pretty good job with this in America. Like, you know, there was always work. And there was, you know, we were doing a pretty good job with pushing the family. But we're in this really weird window now where, you know, it is very common to see people disaffected, disengaged, unhappy in their 20s. And I think any rise in political violence, activism, it's going to be out of that community by and large.

1:40:07And so that doesn't mean that we need to police that community better. It means we need to find ways to engage them in things that they want to do, like employment-wise. and we need to figure out ways to get them into productive, personal human relationships with other people. How do you think we do that? I mean, you know, the really kind of cliche answer to this that sounds like a very me answer is go to church. Just got to go to church. Like, it's a great community. There are people that you have values alignment with. They're going to hold you accountable. Like, you know, the church as an institution has been, a bulwark for this for thousands of years.

1:40:50And I don't think it's any different today than it was in 100 AD. Man, I think the messaging has to change. It's time and time again, it seems like we're teaching people just to become victims. That's what I see. I mean, I kind of disagree with it. I think you can buy a house early on. 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 a little bit. I don't like remote work. I'm not clear that works, but yeah. But you know what I mean?

1:41:31But I think the messaging has to change. You have to empower people and tell them. I mean, that's one of the reasons I do this show and bring people like you on here. It's like you grew up blue-collar family, very small town in Ohio. And now, you know, you're the co-founder of Anderle. 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, it's be ashamed of who you are, you know, you were a slave owner, you're a victim of slavery. You're, you know what I mean?

1:42:07And it's like, dude, this, like, what the fuck are we doing here? Like you have to empower these people, our people, Americans, and ingrain it into their head that like, you know, this is the best country in the world. This is, you know, the American dream still is very achievable. And I'm a testament to that. You're a testament to that. A lot of the people that work here are a testament to that. I mean, a lot of the people on the show have been a testament to that. And, you know, but just like time and time again, it's like these, it's like they're being taught to lose. Right. Well, there's a loss of personal agency where I feel like this isn't just true of America.

1:42:49It's true of Western civilization writ large is that no one believes in the great man theory of history anymore. It's like almost cancelable to talk about it where like people matter, like individuals are driving things for it. And this is why Founders Fund is called Founders Fund, is we invest in people. I don't want to hear a bunch of disconnected business ideas from, you know, nameless, faceless groups. I just, I want to meet the people. And that's what we're investing in. And you can look at, like, Europe as the, you know, 10-year forward future of, like, wherever culture is going. And, like, you look at the bills in the EU.

1:43:25They'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 whoever. Like we believe that there were great men in history that made a difference. But I think that we're slipping perilously into this trap of victimhood and just believing that like people can't actually make a difference, which is a lie. Do you think we're destined to just go down the same path Europe went? Or do you think we might get on the right path here?

1:44:05I mean, 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. chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month each lasting four hours or more botox on a botulinum toxin a prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start it's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month it prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo prescription botox is injected by your doctor effects of botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing speaking breathing eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition.

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1:45:30At OLLI, we've got wellness down to a science. From PMS to pregnancy to menopause, our women's wellness line offers science-backed support for every stage. No judgment, no shame, none of the stigma. Just supplements designed to meet you wherever you're at. OLLI, choose science over shame. Find support at a retailer near you or on OLLI.com. That's O-L-L-Y.com. All right, let's move back to Andurl. 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.

1:46:19And 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 he got to the point within the last 24 months where he thought, man, we could really do this. Now, there's a program that already existed inside of the Pentagon called IVAS, which was a a contract owned by Microsoft actually. And we went out and we acquired the Microsoft division that was doing the I-Vest program.

1:46:58And so we're now working on this kind of with the team that has been iterating on versions for a while. We've taken wildly different directions in a couple of places. We've partnered with Meta, which was kind of a coming home for Palmer, which was cool to see Zuck and Palmer kind of make up and be friends again. And also working with companies like Oakley. So it's been really cool to see that coming to fruition. Not a whole lot of publicly shareable stuff right now, but you're going to see some of this start coming out in the coming months. Cool. I mean, will we see it this year? Actually, I don't know the specific timing, but it will be in the next few months.

1:47:42When do you think the product will be on soldiers' heads? it's a good question i don't know the specific answer to that from a timeline perspective is it still going to everybody in the military not the way palmer described it is this is going on everyone's head that's just special operations which i fucking love because i mean special ops always gets all the cool toys and gear and stuff and everybody else is kind of like left behind which i hate saying we were talking about equipment you know what i mean in in my time in the seal teams and you know we 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 bad totally it's funny but it's not i mean these guys couldn't even move right you know and so i would take my kid like here take this i'll go get a new one you know and so to see you know i know vortex optics is doing some cool stuff too uh with with with um 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 it's still going to be military wide or is it totally yeah that's the plan, you know, the program is about soldier born compute.

1:49:06And so, you know, there might be variants of this that are relevant for different pockets, but like every soldier is going to, in modern warfare, every soldier is going to need compute. They're going to need some way of controlling assets that are autonomous. They're going to need some way of interacting with the battle space from a command and control perspective. They're going to want that heads up display that gives them kind of superhuman vision into the environment they're operating in. And the idea is like, you can make this inexpensive enough that you can deploy it broadly across the entire service.

1:49:40So 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 So we have an enormous percentage of Anduril employees have military intelligence service. And so we're going out and recruiting directly from the people that we're serving as customers. And we also are very tied in to the communities that we're serving as contractors. And so we spend a lot of time in D.C. We spend a lot of time downrange with the users.

1:50:18And that all feeds back into our innovation engine internally. Damn, that's awesome. What are you most excited about at Andurl? I think FURI, the collaborative combat aircraft program, kind of autonomous fighter planes, is a huge force multiplier for the military. So really excited about what we're doing there. I guess all of the stuff that we're working on right now is really exciting. I think all the counter-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 five years or something are very driven by shooting down autonomous assets as being the most important thing that you can do.

1:51:05And we've been leaning in really heavily on that as well. So I think there are a lot of challenges. And the beauty of being Anderil 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 plane a little bit or is that all? Yeah. So it's called the collaborative combat aircraft. So the idea is that you have a manned aircraft like an F-22 or an F-35, and the pilot can basically command a bunch of smaller aircraft that fly around it to go and conduct different missions. So you extend sensor range, you extend shooter range.

1:51:47You basically can create a network around that manned aircraft to do the job at significantly lower cost and at no risk to human life. And this is a concept that has been batted around the Air Force for a long time. And, you know, we are we're really excited to be partnering with them on delivering that. And that will be the first things that we build out of the Arsenal factory in Ohio as well, is we'll start rolling the Fury aircraft off the line. So the Fury aircraft, it 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.

1:52:26Okay. So that would be, these are the autonomous aircraft around the manned aircraft. That's right. How many aircraft are we talking? How big is the fleet? I mean, you could control a bunch of them. You could control dozens if that was the con-op that they wanted to choose. I don't know if you've read the book or seen the movie Ender's Game, but it's basically a science fiction novel. And the idea is that there's this guy, Ender Wiggins, who is effectively controlling an entire alien battle from a bunker, where he's just there and he's giving commands. And the starfighters and stuff like that are all operating autonomously in the battle space.

1:53:10And 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 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 can imagine this on service vessels, with submarines, with ground vehicles. Like, we're moving in that direction with these attributable assets. I mean, what does the future of warfare look like for you, you know, in your mind?

1:53:50I mean, 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 comes up frequently when you start talking about autonomy is this idea of, like, full autonomy versus human-in-the-loop autonomy, which is, like, the idea that when you're about to make a, you know, a lethal decision, like, there has to be a human that, like, hits the button that says do it. But that hasn't been the case for decades already.

1:54:28There's CWIS, the close-in weapons system that is on naval vessels. it automatically engages with threats, aerial threats to the naval service vessels. There's no human directing the cannon as it's shooting at things and shoot them out of the sky. In fact, there can't be because the entire challenge that it's facing is moving at superhuman speeds to eliminate threats. But there should be a human that's accountable for these decisions. There's someone somewhere that you're going to be able to shake a stick at and say, this robot did something that it shouldn't have done. And it's your responsibility to know what mission you've set the robot off to do.

1:55:09And so I think that we're really moving in the direction of more autonomy that is engaging with fewer of these manned exquisite platforms that are very expensive. But there will be people that are making the decisions about how those missions are conducted, when strategies are utilized, and things like that. How far out do you think we are from seeing the battlefield being 100 % autonomous? Maybe there's decision makers. Well, there will be decision makers somewhere else. But I mean, how long do you think it is before the entire battlefield is autonomous? us. Yeah, I mean, so much of this is probably driven by geopolitical realities rather than, you know, hard technical realities.

1:55:55If we were to enter into like a major global conflict with a near-peer foreign adversary, like we would probably try to accelerate to that much more quickly. But if we're kind of lulled into complacency by, you know, the false narrative of stability, global stability, then we're not going to feel much of an incentive to move in that direction anytime soon. So I think it just really depends. The humanoid robotics, I think, are kind of the thing that comes up most when people think about the autonomous battlefield. It's like, are you going to have a bunch of Tesla Optimus robots running around with firearms shooting at each other?

1:56:32Like, I don't know, maybe on some timeline there could be something like that that's happening. but in the near term I think it's like assisted like by humans operating in theater, in the field with robots and support Gotcha I mean do you have any fears about AI in the battle space? I mean look humans make a lot of bad decisions Yes they do Like, you know, a super immature, you know, 18-year-old with, you know, six months of training is not necessarily going to make better decisions than a robot from an ethics perspective. And so, of course, like, you know, I want these things to be conducted in the most just way possible.

1:57:28But 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 really on the near-term horizon. What kind of lessons are you guys learning from Ukraine, Russia? Yeah, 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.

1:58:15Yeah, I've heard of it. Yeah, they're literally drones towing like, you know, a mile of fiber optic cable so that they're wired and they can't be interfered with by the electronic warfare stuff. So there's a lot of back and forth, you know, trying to keep ahead of your opponent in how you're approaching airspace. And I think that's like that will be a huge part of getting this right in the future is that we need our aircraft to have the ability to operate without comms connections. You can't rely on GPS. You can't rely on remote piloting. Like you need to actually be able to dead reckon or navigate optically by, you know, landmarks on the ground and things like that.

1:59:00So that is a big challenge that everyone's working to figure out with high fidelity. Do you guys have a lot of equipment going over there? Yeah, I mean, we have stuff in country. It's a great kind of place for us to learn. And we obviously believe it's really important to supply equipment via the allies and partners that are doing work there with the Ukrainians. I mean, what does it feel like to see the equipment that you're building out there? I mean, this is why we started the company. The purpose is to be relevant and to be active. And I think part of that is building the engine for the United States.

1:59:43which is the vast majority of our business is building that engine for them. But the U.S. government makes policy-level decisions about where we send our equipment to be helpful to our partners abroad. And we're really honored to be part of that.

2:00:03What's your biggest concern in the world right now?

2:00:08I mean, China is a huge risk, not only militarily, but also economically. And I don't think we're taking that quite seriously enough. I think there's a political understanding of that. But it's not clear to me that there's like a level of seriousness to actually do the things that are required to reduce that risk across both of those two dimensions. What do you think the things that are required to reduce that risk are? Well, I mean, there's like the kind of impacts of Belt and Road where you have natural resources, production, all of the things that are kind of economic drivers for growth in China that have been stripped out of the United States that we have to figure out some way to bring back.

2:00:53Like, do we actually have the ability to acquire the raw materials that are needed even for the things that we want to build without going through China-controlled assets? Right now, the answer is no. That's a real problem. Militarily, I think Xi has been very explicit that he intends to reunify China. And Taiwan has a ticking timeline of 2027. Now, is he going to move by 2027? I don't know. It depends on how seriously you take him at his word. But there's a lot of risk, particularly if you think about like 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.

2:01:42economy. So we really need to like think through all of that. But the Chinese have, 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 peace through strength thing came from. It's like, we're going to tell people what we have and why we're strong, and that will prevent them from doing crazy things. The, you know, the assassin's mace story, which is like a parable in China, is, you know, hide your strength, by time, and then strike when you have an unfair advantage.

2:02:26And so, you know, it's to their advantage to go into these international dialogues and say like, oh no, we're weak. We don't, we don't, we're not competing. We don't have the ability to do that. Like, you know, we want to be part of these discussions. And we actually listen to them. And we're 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 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.

2:03:06Do you feel like that's starting to happen? I feel like people are definitely taking it more seriously than they did even five years ago. When we started Anderil in 2017, we were telling the story to investors. We believe that the future of national security is near-peer conflict. This is about great powers. We're moving out of counterterrorism. That was eight years ago. And it was super weird to even be telling that story. And today, I feel like no one's confused about this anymore. 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.

2:03:51Yeah. Yeah. Definitely with you on that. I mean, you know, at breakfast, we were talking about, you know.

2:04:01It doesn't sound like, in your opinion, we are ahead of China on much of anything. I think we have, we're more innovative. Like, the entrepreneurial energy that we have is a tremendous advantage. We're really good at software as a country. We're the best in the world at building these software capabilities. there are a lot of things that are really important that they have massive advantages on and um like what like production um you know they have entire factories that do autonomous production of cruise missiles for example like i mean they're just way ahead of us on that also all the natural resources stuff the belt and road strategy you know for better or worse was a genius play by them to go and scoop up access to all of the raw materials.

2:04:54And we just watched them do it. I know, man. And I think that we put ourselves in this situation where we have to start making these crazy bets in order to figure out our way around the supply chain that has been created over the last 30 years by a very effective Chinese strategy. Do you think that they will, 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.

2:05:37He 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.

2:06:14And I think that that is what could trigger World War III. But, man, I mean, when she started talking about the cognitive warfare and the psyops and the propaganda and stuff that's going on there and how divided it actually is and when I learned more about the actual history of China-Taiwan, I 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, if that other party takes over, it's done. Not a shot fired. Yep. I mean, that is the optimal case for China, obviously, is that they can use soft power means to just do it kind of in the way that they did Hong Kong.

2:07:04And I don't think there's a 0 % probability that that's the way that it goes down. So. Yeah. What else about China is bothering you? 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 they're so much better suited to addressing these long-running problems with making things in the real world than we are.

2:07:58One of the things that we often hear at Foundersun, we often hear hardware builders talk about is that even if you had unlimited money and you were going to set up a factory in the United States to build something that is currently being built in China, you wouldn't even be able to operate the factory. Because the skill that's required to make these things with high yields and quality, it's all in China. We don't even have people in the United States that know how to run these machines. And so we have to figure out some way to rescale. And I think autonomy in factory work is going to be a big part of this as well.

2:08:35And it's actually a great argument for why we should be leaning more into AI rather than less from a jobs perspective. Because the alternative to leveraging modern software in order to re-industrialize is just continuing to outsource to foreign countries. And I don't think we have the time or the economic will to to make a different decision on that fact Like we just need to we need to push as hard as we can Are there any other countries that you're concerned about other than China? I mean, are you concerned about Russia? India Yeah, you know, I think that there's 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.

2:09:22That'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. 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-routed tires. It was like, we think our bureaucracy is bad. I'm sure their bureaucracies are all really bad too. They're not 10-foot giants. But we need to be prepared as if they are.

2:10:04And so I think there's a lot of global threats that we need to take seriously. What kind of side ventures are you doing? um well uh the the one that i've been most interested in is this uh this project called soul um 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 uh media like we don't really read books anymore um 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.

2:10:47And 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. 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?

2:11:29And 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. I would love that. Let's see, other side quests. I think that there are only so many things that a person can do before they stop being effective at any of them. So I'm probably at just about capacity right now. Well, I mean, I thought here that you hosted Bible studies in Silicon Valley where Christianity was once borderline illegal. Yep. Are you still doing that? Yeah. Let's see. The most recent one that I did was in the spring. My wife and I and another couple have been doing these kind of faith and work-oriented Bible studies where they're kind of like graduate classes.

2:12:24We assign a bunch of reading, and then we get together and we do discussion. Originally, that started off as like 10 people, and then it was like 50 people. And this last session that we did in the spring was like over 100 people, like one weekend night every week. So it was a pretty wild experience. It's cool to see so many people, not all of them again, Christians, just showing up because they want to dive into theology. So yeah, that's been happening. Not doing one in the fall. I think I'm a little underwater at the moment. Right on. I mean, you know, as a Christian, we've had a lot of guys on talking about end of the world type stuff.

2:13:07And a lot of people are kind of thinking that maybe we're possibly in end times. Where are you at on this? Yeah. I mean, Peter's been doing this Antichrist lecture series. He and I have been talking about this for a long time. You know, I think that the Bible says that we will know neither the day nor the hour. It doesn't say that we won't know the month or the year. It just says the day or the hour. I think that, you know, you should always be alert to these things. You know, there's also kind of one of the stories that Jesus, the parables that Jesus tells the disciples is the vineyard owner.

2:13:46It's like your workers 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, you know, an increased push for a global rather than a national identity, kind of the push for one world order. You know, the motto of the Antichrist in the Bible is peace and safety. People think of it as like this satanic kind of thing, but actually it's a mirror of Christ.

2:14:32The Antichrist is a deceiver. And so, you know, I think it looks more like a push for one world government than it does, you know, a destructive, you know, nation state or something like that. So I think we just need to be aware of anything that resembles these sort of fake unity movements that are driving people into complacency.

2:14:58Well, Trey, we're wrapping up the interview. I got one more question for you. Yep. If you could see three people on the show, who would they be? Oh, man. I think that there's very mission-driven companies that are out there that are still somewhat stealth. So I'm assuming that this is not part of the recorded portion. Oh, no, it is. It is. Oh, man. Well, then I have to be careful to not throw stealth founders out to the wolves here. Let's see.

2:15:35I think diving into the foundational model AI founders could be really interesting, like pulling in people who have perspectives on how AI is going to shape in the next 10 to 20 years. Okay. You have this kind of bifurcation of some of them believe that we're going into 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.

2:16:18JD, 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. Best of luck in all your endeavors. Thanks, Sean.

2:16:49I'm Sean Ryan, former Navy SEAL, CA contractor, and host of The Sean Ryan Show. Much of my life has been dedicated to seeking truth and getting answers no matter how uncomfortable the questions are that we have to ask. But in the age of the PSYOP, that search has never been more difficult.

2:17:18In September of 2022, the U.S. Army's fourth PSYOP group released a cryptic video on YouTube. There is another very important phase of warfare. It has as its target, not the body, but the mind of the enemy. Between clips of troops assembling chess pieces and social unrest,

2:17:46phrases begin to appear on screen. They ask, have you ever wondered who's pulling the strings? These are the Psi War soldiers. The series you're about to listen to is an attempt to answer that question, and an even bigger one. The global power brokers that conduct psychological operations constantly evolve. Technology like AI has evened the playing field, and now, in the era of social media, in the democratization of information, all it takes to 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're being deployed.

2:18:31There'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.

2:18:52PSYOPs 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.

2:19:13The 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.

2:20:13We look at where we are and how we got here. But ultimately, this series is a toolkit to help you understand how you're being manipulated and how to spot the signs of a psyop. Before the Army's viral PSYOP recruitment video ends, the words on screen inform viewers that war is evolving and all the world's a stage. This series is a peek behind the curtain. Welcome to the PSYOP. Buy it today at PSYOPshow.com

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