Anduril Founder Trae Stephens on Our Modern Defense System

[MUSIC] When you are pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture, you get criticized. You do? Yeah, did you hear about that? I didn't find the one. I found someone I respected and we made it the one. In the sort of longing kind of view of love, people understand each other as if by magic. Nothing in itself is addictive, one on one hand. And in the end, everything could be addictive. If there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life. I'm Gwyneth Pantrow. This is the GOOP podcast, bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers and seekers, here to start conversations. Because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world. Here we go. Hello and welcome to the GOOP podcast. I'm Gwyneth Pantrow. My guest today is someone you almost certainly wouldn't expect to find on this show. And that's exactly why I invited him. Trace Stevens is the co-founder of Anderl, one of Silicon Valley's most provocative AI defense companies. And a partner at the Founders Fund. He operates in a world that feels pretty far from the conversations we usually have here on the GOOP podcast. But this year, I'm really making a conscious effort to seek out people whose perspectives genuinely challenge my own. I wanted to have Tray on because I really admire Tray for his brilliance. He's known as one of the best investors on the planet. And also for his values, he's a very faith-based man. And I learned so much from talking to him. I think I almost envy people who have faith of that depth. Tray and I cover a range of topics today, including the core mission of Anderl, national security, the formative experiences that shape us, and America's relationship with defense today. Silicon Valley's evolving relationship to religion, which is super interesting. And on how Tray reconciles his Christian faith with an industry built around weapons and warfare, which is super interesting and provocative. Let's get into my conversation with Tray. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you so much for joining me. That's so fun. I've been trying to get you on this pod for a while now. I think because, well, when we met, I was really impressed with who you are. And when I learned about you, and that we seemingly have different points of views on things, and I really have made a commitment this year to kind of index into other points of view. I mean, I think we're probably aligned on a lot of things, but I have a lot of questions for you. And I guess I'll start with, I'll go out on a limb and say maybe some of my group listeners haven't heard of you. So will you just kind of start with that? Who are you, Tray, Steven? Yeah, I am a working tech. I'm both a partner at Founders Fund, which is a venture capital firm as well as the best one, right? I mean, you said that. It's the best one. It is a very, very good venture capital firm. And also the co-founder of a defense technology company called Andrewl, but maybe more centrally than that, I'm a Midwesterner who I've been married for 18 years. I have two small kids grew up in a lower middle class household and have kind of been on a ride for the last now 42 years in my life. I could never have anticipated that I would have ended up where I've ended up today. Amazing. So on your way to getting on this path, so will you tell me a little bit about when you were in high school, 9/11 happened? And from what I gather, that fundamentally opened something in you. Can you talk a little bit about what that was? I was in New York that day. And I actually, I walked out and at the end of the day and saw building seven come to the ground. And I think it fundamentally changed me as well. But I was already an adult with a job so it didn't shift my path in terms of my profession. But as I understand that was indelible for you. Yeah, you know, growing up in rural Ohio, obviously I knew a lot of people that served in the military. It's like kind of core to the culture of the town that I grew up in. My uncle was in the Air Force. Some of my cousins had gone out of high school and gone into the Marine Corps. But there was really no point in my 18 years of life up until that day that I ever felt like there was anything resembling an existential threat to me or my safety or the safety of my family, the safety of my loved ones. There was obviously the first Gulf War, but it never felt close to home. You know, these things are happening so far away. And I think on 9/11, there was this kind of moment where I realized all these things that we thought were guarantees in the American experiment don't feel super guaranteed anymore. And I decided at that time that I wanted to serve the country and go into national security. I wasn't sure if that meant like going into a military role or going into, you know, a political role. But I ended up deciding that I wanted to go the intelligence community route. And that's kind of what set me on my path to Washington DC. And how did you choose Georgetown coming from Ohio? Like was it because of the proximity to DC? And you knew you wanted to somehow interact with government or be involved in government? Well, I was mostly interested in finding like a university that was a good path to get into the intelligence community. Georgetown is the best of the schools for that specific thing. So you go from Georgetown into the intelligence? Are you in the CIA? I am not in the CIA. Yeah, I went into a counterterrorism office at one of the intelligence agencies. That's cool. It sounds much cooler than it actually is. I was afraid you might say that. Yeah, I mean, is it cumbersome? Is it inefficient? Is it like what is about working in the government that makes it not exciting? It's not what I expected. And it's highly bureaucratic. So I grew up watching James Bond, watching the Born Identity. And you don't actually get James Bond when you show up. You get like Mr. Bean, right? Like I had Windows 98 and a CRT monitor in 2006. I mean, no one threw me the keys to an Aston Martin. I didn't have Jarvis from Iron Man to talk to. I was just running what I called coffee break searches where you open up a bunch of tabs in a very outdated version of Internet Explorer and you run searches and then you walk away. And you go get coffee. And then when you come back 15 minutes later, hopefully you have little downloaded CSB files like Excel spreadsheets essentially. So I think I just I had expected that it was going to be a lot more advanced than it was. And the people are highly patriotic. They care about the mission. And that was really inspiring. But bureaucracy is brutal at that scale. Is it still that way? Did you find that? Do you find that now? The bureaucracy is every bit the same as it used to be, you know, people matter a lot. Like individuals, individual people matter. They set culture and I think, you know, there are ebbs and flows of how this goes. I'm hopeful that, you know, the people that are working in our national security apparatus feel supported by their leadership to take risks and do things that I certainly didn't feel empowered to do. How does one do that? I mean, how do you bring assets for myself too? Like, how do you how do you bring an intellectual, cultural shift to an organization, like, whether it's a government or, you know, I assume it or if it's like more of an incumbent company. Like, how does one make that shift culturally? Well, I think there's like all sorts of micro things that you can do. But at the end of the day, like, culture is set at the top. And as someone who's now in a leadership position in multiple different places, I don't want to believe that's true because I want to believe that it's like diffuse throughout the organization. But people really do look to, like, how do our leaders behave? What are the what characteristics are they bringing to bear? If the leadership is incredibly conservative and incentivizes, you know, risk of rejection. Yeah, risk of burst behaviors. That's what the whole organization is going to do. And so I think what I would have liked to have seen when I worked in the intelligence community was empowerment and promoting people a merit rather than tenure. And I would have liked to have seen them say, I don't know if this is going to work, but I believe that we need to try. Right. These things. Entrepreneurial spirit. Yeah. If you think about like the biggest moments of growth and change in the government over the course of our 250 year history as a nation, all of these moments had founders. Right. You know, we had like the founding fathers, obviously, who drafted the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, but even more recently, you look at, you know, getting through the Cold War without firing a shot with the Russians, building platforms that change the course of humanity like technologies. The internet was invented in DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. All of these things had individual people that were entrepreneurial, that were taking risky steps to do something that hadn't been done before. And the difference with that today is, you know, any major program. Is there a single person that's responsible for it? Like can you really shake a stick at an individual? Not really. We've kind of stripped the individual out of accountability. Yeah. And distributed the responsibility across many, many people. That's right. Yeah. So like one interesting way to think about this, it's just aircraft specific is that more time has passed between when the SR71, the fastest airplane to ever fly. The SR71 was initially flown to today, then from the right flyer to the SR71. Oh my God. So we have this tendency to think of like history as this like, it's been, it's been so long. It's actually like, we made a lot of progress in not a lot of time. And then it wasn't our ability to build things that, you know, stagnated. It was bureaucracy that created that stagnation. And one of the former undersecretaries of the Army, this guy named Norm Augustine, who later was the CEO of Lockheed Martin. He said in 2054, the entire United States defense budget will buy one airplane. Obviously, that's like an extreme thing to say. But I think, directionally, what he was saying is like, look what we're doing. Like we've created this tremendous bureaucratic bloat that makes it really hard to get anything done. And we're not going to make that like right flyer to SR71, you know, trajectory as quickly as we did if we continue down this path. Yeah. I do have a hope that that is fundamentally, fungible the way that we have set these things up. Like, I think it's possible. And just it requires heroic leadership, I think a will to shake things up. And no matter how aggressive and entrepreneurial it seems like people are, large bureaucracies have a way of breaking the spirit. And so it will require kind of an all of culture effort. And something that I've actually heard you talk about before that I agree with completely is I think some sort of mandatory civil service would be incredible for the American people. And by that, I don't mean military service. I'm not saying everyone should go and serve in the Army or the Marine Corps or the Navy. What I'm saying is if you can go and work at City Hall for local government, just for a couple of years after graduation, I think it would be shaping for the lives and careers of the young people that are going into those roles. But it would also be revolutionary for the government because you would break these systems of entrenched bureaucracy and put young people in them that say, "Guys, this is crazy. Why are we doing things this way? This doesn't make any sense." I think that's politically very, very difficult to pull off in 2026. Yeah. I do think that some kind of civil service where you're banding together and you're thinking about the country as a whole, especially because things are so divisive. I think if people could engage in that way and contribute while also understanding that they're part of a greater thing, I think it would be great. I mean, I was an exchange student in Spain and at the time, military service was required. And I thought that was insane. I was 15 and I was like, "What do you mean you have to like my Spanish brother had to go to the Army? My sister's had to go to the Army?" And they said that it was such an important part of their formation and that it gave them such a deep relationship with their country. I mean, I don't necessarily, I mean, having sons, I would worry about mandatory, if we're going to be involved in wars and things like that. Would you be concerned if your son was going and working at City Hall in LA? No. And I think that's like, ultimately that's what you're trying to do is you're trying to give that exposure to, you know, look, we're all getting so tribal and so charged. If people had exposure to the way things worked, I think they would be able to take a step back and say, "This isn't really about politics. It's about how ineffective our bureaucracies are." And we should be building these things to serve the American people and not to serve our own tribal political interests because that actually doesn't solve any of the problems, it just makes it worse. I think this is the way you open this conversation by saying, "This is your year of trying to engage more dialogue and without that sort of open respectful dialogue, I'm not sure we can fix any of these problems that we're seeing in the country and that feels really important to me." I couldn't agree with you more, it's like the, you know, I notice with my own husband who's the best person ever in the world. And he is, he's so progressive, like he has such a sweet heart and he wants to like make sure everybody's looked after. And I think in this climate, you know, sometimes I'm like, can you, I'm like, can you just listen to this? Like, can you, you know, can, you know, it is very triggering for people like they've become, this becomes so binary, I think, and I am trying to, in my journey through being an American right now, trying to, I don't know, I guess sort of weave together lots of different points of view and also to get out of that place of like righteousness and anger and fear and, I mean, I'm pretty centrist and my husband thinks I'm a Republican. But I think it's, which I'm not a Republican. I mean, I don't feel anything right now to be totally honest with you. I feel like I'm completely independent. But I do think that, you know, we were just in Nashville over the weekend and we went to see Bluegrass and there was this amazing girl playing on stage, young woman. And, you know, she was talking about, if she obviously had like completely different points of view than my husband. You know, so I'm sitting there like, okay, you know, I guess you can, and I just thought, no, but this is so beautiful to see somebody who clearly is such a good person coming from such a different place, like, isn't that more valuable to understand ultimately? Yeah, we don't really gain anything from shutting people out and not hearing what they have to say. You know, I think this is like the greatest risk to a lot of what's happening in technology today. If you think about the centralization of AI is, it's just self reaffirming. It's like when you go and you ask questions to a large language model like chat GPT or Claude or whatever, it basically is just going to tell you whatever it is. Which one do you want to hear? I switch between them based on strengths of what I'm specifically trying to do. Fundamentally, they're all just going to basically tell you what you want to hear. Right. But can't you say, like, challenge me at every point. Don't tell me what I want to hear. Who does that, you know? My husband actually did that. Oh, well, that's the way it is. Claude, yeah. That's impressive for your husband to do that. I think most people are just, like, pretty happy with being told, you know what, you're right. That seems good. And there goes, there goes the friction and friction is where I think character is built. 100%. And I think that goes especially for things like relationships where, you know, for millennia, people were paired off intimately with others in local communities. It's like people would meet at school or at church or, you know, at the Elk's Club or whatever it is. And they would be matched based on we have a longstanding friend relationship or I think they're funny. I think they're charming. You know, we have mutual friends. Today, that's not really how it works, right? Like the online dating scene has created this sort of parallelization around optionality. It's like, they're meant to date in really high volumes, but not to actually connect in any way. And so if you look at the filters, like, I think it's like 10% of men get 90% of the right types of positive matches and the bottom 50% of men get no matches at all, well, what does that do for society where you've created this, this kind of environment that's super self selected in like a mass optionality framework, you get loneliness, despair. and young men unemployed or underemployed in their parents' basement, never matching romantically with another person, going to LLMs, getting self-validation, having them tell them all the things they want to hear, becoming addicted to porn, gambling, and you can see these like literal tech companies that are emerging around these exact ideas. And that's the powder keg for any civilization. I mean, assassination attempts against presidents, who are these people? They're young men under 40 that are unmarried, that don't have kids, so I mean, we've created this as a society. So what do we do about that in your view? Well, I think this mandatory civil service is actually kind of a good idea. It's like you guarantee employment, which is really important in this era of like a reformation of what jobs look like with AI, I think being able to guarantee that, I think getting people back into local communities as a focus is really important, rescaling, retraining people. The trades, I think, will be a big part of rescaling over the next 20 years. We need people to be electricians, to be plumbers, to be, you know, all of those things welders. And this is like the funniest thing to me about recent government policy is that under the Obama administration, they had this huge push around rescaling the workforce. And what did they do? Code academies. It's like literally the first thing that gets replaced by. What a farmer. Unbelievable. It was a good idea. It was a good idea at the time. But man, they couldn't have chosen a worse profession to rescale people into. Man. You said something earlier, you mentioned about the Cold War. And I was thinking about, you know, I was in seventh grade. I'll never forget moving to New York City to start seventh grade like in the height of the Cold War and being petrified at night that the Russians were going to bomb us. So I grew up with a slightly different idea of safety, I think, because of that. Because I think it was also specific to being a New York City kid. And we are this huge country where protected by two oceans. So I understand, you know, and then I was there again, of course, as I said before, during 9/11. So I think I did always have a slightly, I wouldn't say, I didn't have that idea of American safety that a lot of people did just because of my specific New York City upbringing. But I think a lot of people still have that sense, right, that we're safe because we're this big country between two oceans and wars historically haven't happened on this soil for a long time. Is that an erroneous, like how do you feel about, I mean, especially because you're somebody who's helping to keep us safe, like what, what are the things that keep us safe and do we have the wrong idea or, you know, are we lulled into a false sense of security here? Yeah, you know, these things end up being like super idiosyncratic based on what's happening at a time of maturity, like even just the few years difference in age for us is like you lived through the heart of Reagan rearmament, like the very tail end of the Cold War. I was six when the Berlin Wall fell. And so like by the time I have active memories, you know, we're in like George H. W. Bush era, the like globalization push for H. W. Indiclin. So very, very different time, but not actually separated by very many years. I think, you know, what's happening today is there's like this sort of speed running of geopolitics that has been happening over the last six or seven years, where you had this transition out of counterinsurgency non-state actor conflict. This is, you know, the war on terror, essentially, where we're not fighting governments, really, we're really fighting terrorist organizations that are decentralized. It's highly fragmented. They're doing insurgencies inside of urban environments and transitioning from that into a great power conflict, where we're thinking about how do we deal with the threat from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, very, very different approach you have to take to build protections from great power, rather than counterinsurgency. And then along those lines, we had, you know, Ukraine, we had October 7th, we have the conflict with Iran. And, you know, the threat to Taiwan, you know, Xi, Xi Jinping saying we want to retake Taiwan, reunify by the end of 2027. So it's a very different geopolitical environment than the one that I was working in in the early 2000s in counter-terrorism era. When we started Andrew, the company, the defense tech company I started in 2017, it was super unpopular. I think people were roughly just like, I don't know, we're sort of coming out of this whole, like we're in the Middle East thing. It seems like everything is basically fine. There were employees at Google who were protesting the Google working on a Department of Defense contract and they ended up pulling out of that. So it was like really an unpopular moment to be thinking about this. Just a few years later, it's like Ukraine flag and bio, like everyone has sort of changed over to this idea of wow, the threat of authoritarianism globally. And what that does to free democratic peoples is terrifying. And the whole momentum shifted almost overnight into like a posture of we have to be prepared to draw hard lines around what we're willing to allow to happen. So will you tell me a little bit about the founding story around Andrew in 2017? Yeah. I have been thinking about this space, obviously, my whole career. And one of the realizations that I was coming to was we've relied on nuclear deterrence. And I'll explain what all this means against great powers for almost a century now, like 75 years, where you basically say, we don't believe that you're going to attack us. Right. Because we have nuclear weapons and we will retaliate. And then you get into this idea of mutually assured destruction that if we fire a nuclear weapon at a nuclear power, they're going to fire nuclear weapons at us. War games. Yeah. And before you know it, everything is kind of toast. And that like basically worked, but you see a lot of this like sort of fringe conflict where the belief is as long as it stays below a certain threshold, no one's going to launch a nuclear attack. And that's like kind of the line that we're drawing. But we don't want any of these conflicts to happen. I mean, look at how many lives have been lost in Ukraine. Like I think it's like over a million casualties now. It's on the Russian side alone. Yeah, on the Russian side alone. So I think it's really important to figure out how to use conventional deterrence rather than just nuclear deterrence. And what I mean by conventional deterrence is, can you convince your adversary that the cost, both monetarily and in human lives, will be too high to even think about going into conflict. And this is what Reagan did in the closing years of the Cold War. As he said, I'm going to build up and we're going to get to the point where the Russians are going to have to the Soviets are going to have to look across the ocean and say, do we want to continue down this path? Are we going to win? And ultimately they decided, no, we're not going to win. We can't keep up. And this sounds sort of uncomfortable. You know, it's like if you think about like the spectrum of possibilities on a quad chart where it's like, you know, feels good, is good, feels bad, is good, feels good, is bad, feels bad, is bad. This definitely is in the feels bad is good quadrant. It's like, I would prefer to not have to do this. It would be great if we could just say diplomacy works every time we can convince people without any projection of power that they should do things the way we want them to do it. But it's just not how the world works. And we found this in the early days of World War II where Chamberlain and the United Kingdom was all about appeasement. appeasement is not deterrence. You can't prevent people from doing bad things by really believing deep down inside that they shouldn't do bad things. And so the idea behind it is very optimistic. It's just not realistic. And so the andral story from the beginning was, can we create a new era of conventional deterrence where we can build capabilities that are so inexpensive and so high capability that our adversaries will say, I don't want to get into this exchange. Like we don't have any advantages anymore. Even though theoretically you profit from a conflict. Sort of, although by the time you're in a conflict, all of the things that are going to be used in that conflict are in inventory. Like the way the andral is approaching this is we're not trying to build technology to solve problems today. We're trying to build inventories of capabilities that prevent the problems of tomorrow. And so I don't view, first off, I don't think like wartime profiteering is ethical really in any way, regardless, but I think the important thing is we need to build up a capability advantage over the next 100 years, regardless of what's happening right now. How are we going to prevent these things from happening? Because I think deterrence is really the key. It's, yeah, it's super important. We don't want conflict to happen. I have spent my entire career working in defense. I've never once met a general or an admiral that says, you know what I want to do today? I want to write letters to the parents of children who died in combat. Nobody wants to do that. This belief that we're like hard charging, like throwing people, like as meat bags into combat. It's just not true. And I think this is really kind of the motivation for building Andral is let's make it really improbable. That will do that. And is Andral, will you explain like, are you making kind of next generation things that are, when you say they're less expensive, they're more efficient? Like, hopefully they're never used and they stay in warehouses and nobody dies. But like, what do they do that's different than existing or earlier defense technology and weapons? Yeah. They're probably like two different categories. That you can put them in, oftentimes, these things overlap. On the one hand, it's low cost. And this is what we would call like a tritable, which means if it is lost, it's not a huge deal. Like, I've never heard that word before. It is a very defense specific word. Okay. So imagine like, if you are, you know, you have an F-22 or an F-35, a multi-hundred million dollar fighter plane with human beings flying them, are you going to send them into combat? Knowing that there's a high probability that they will be shot down, that's horrible from a loss of life perspective. It's also a tremendous financial burden that you're carrying by the loss of that asset. What if you send in an asset that cost one-one-hundredth of the cost and had no human operators? I'm not as concerned about what happens to that. That's what a tritability is. And that's really what Andrew List focused on is building low-cost systems that are a replacement for very high-cost human systems and things that are autonomous that are more accurate and are able to execute their mission with a lot more precision than. What would be an example of that? Like drone? Yeah, drones. Most people think of drones as aircraft, like small quadcopters or whatever. Bones are a lot of things, they're airplanes, they're ground vehicles, they're submarines, they're basically anything that is a autonomously operated or remotely operated by a human system robot. So yes, it includes that. But it also includes things like interceptors, for example. Just in the Iran conflict alone, we fired thousands of interceptor missiles. The most common high-end interceptor is a Patriot missile, which was originally developed in the 1960s. These missiles cost millions of dollars, like variants between, call it two and a quarter million dollars, up to about eight million dollars. Every time we fire one, in a conflict in which you're fighting MiG-29s, like a Russian fighter plane, shooting a helicopter. I thought that was going to happen. Yeah, you saw that. You know what this is? Shooting a three million dollar missile, that's, okay, yeah, that's what's required for that mission. A million dollar missile. But right now, what we're dealing with with the conflict with Iran are small drones that cost tens of thousands of dollars, not tens of millions of dollars. So every time one of those comes in, we're shooting at it with a multi-million dollar missile. Currently? Currently. Okay. Completely impractical. And so are they efficacious though? They're amazing. They're truly amazing interceptor systems, highly accurate, but very expensive. And so part of the mission here is, can you build robots that use computer vision, machine intelligence, to dramatically lower the cost of that intercept? So could you build an interceptor that could take out that category of threat for hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than a million dollars? And that's one of the kind of areas that we're building, yeah. Just being a father, this is kind of like, I don't know, I think when we have children we're so fundamentally changed. And how do you think about national security through that lens? Well, I mean, going back to my own personal story. I want my kids to grow up without fearing for their personal safety. You know, if you think about Maslow's triangle, let's take care of that basic human need. And I want to do it in like the least aggressive and splashy way. You know, my kids are 10 and 12, they're in fourth and sixth grade. And they're just getting to the age where their teachers and their peers are like sort of familiar with what it is that I'm doing. And that the way that we present what we're doing is important to me because I want them to be able to be proud of what it is that we're doing without feeling like they're in this really weird kind of Twilight zone where they're constantly having to defend with their peers, what it is that their dad does for a living. Of course. We're just complicated and I recognize it. Yes, of course. Very complicated. But I think we need to bring, you know, that's the nature of everything. I mean, we as human beings are complicated. We have all kinds of gradations of light and dark and, you know, we're always sort of fighting with the good wolf and the bad wolf within us and to a certain degree. And I think, again, that's this like reductiveness in the culture around this is good. This is bad, I think is ultimately. So not only harmful, but also I think against like intelligence, you know, that kind of lack of understanding that there are layers of things and complications to things. But. Yeah. And the tension is important. Yeah. You know, just a few weeks ago, the Pope was kind of pushing back against what was going on in Iran and I think it was during his Easter homily where he said, God does not hear the prayers of those who are waging war. And as a Christian myself, I think hearing that, you know, there's a number of ways you could respond, right? There's you could respond by saying, wow, this guy is a cook. He's like rejecting millennia of just war theory, which is like the Augustinian tradition around engaging in war. You could look at it and say, wow, what am I doing? Like the Pope himself is telling me that the thing that I'm doing is bad. Or you can approach it from a perspective of tension. It's like, what is the truth that the Pope is trying to get across? Or you could approach it from a more mystical aspect of Christianity, like as opposed to taking it literally, and this is just a random hypothesis that's occurring to me, you could think like that, you know, if you were using it as a metaphor of like, you know, somebody who is like engaged in againstness all the time, you know, as opposed to like, but maybe he was referring to actual war, but I it could have been something, you know, more more mystical or metaphorical. Totally. And I actually really like that framing. It's like if your approach is an approach of waging war, where your heart is in a place where you're, I want to go and conquer or destroy, there's probably not a great way to justify that morally, right? If your heart is a heart at peace, you know, like there's a difference between peacemakers and peacekeepers, right? Like peacekeepers are saying, I'm just going to passively not create conflict whereas peacemakers are saying, sometimes you have to create conflict to, you know, to engineer, to engineer a longstanding peace. And so if you're approaching it with a heart of peace, I think it's very different at a mystical level than approaching it with a heart of war. But, you know, even, you know, the wisest beings in the universe, like Yoda himself said, wars not make one great. And I think there's a lot of truth to that and I think some of that is kind of what's coming out in the Pope's statements around saying, look, if you're measuring your greatness in the size of your conquest, like, you're not going to be in a good place. But if you're measuring your success in the peace that you create in the long term, God is not sanctioning that conflict. It's not like he's saying, go and, you know, go and rip. I don't think that's what that's what that's saying. I think what it is is like, are we creating the just conditions through which we are doing this in the most ethical way possible in order to create a longstanding peace? Sure. Can I ask you about your faith because I was reading about it and I, I feel sort of, I don't know if N.V.S. is the right word, but I, and I feel like a spiritual person, but I don't have of necessarily a framework. I wasn't really raised with one. My dad is Jewish, my mom is very episcopalian, and so there was a little, and they got married in the '60s, and it was a little bit of a, it was a very abnormal culturally for a marriage like that to exist. And I felt like when I was growing up, everybody was sort of tiptoeing around the subject of that makes sense. And so we were raised kind of with traditions, but not like a framework of religion, and my friends who have faith have this thing that I don't have, that I'm sort of like, I don't know, again, I don't think jealous is the right word, but I want to understand it more. Is your faith, were you raised in that? Did you find it? I would just love to hear more about it and what it does for you. - Yeah, I was raised in it. So my grandfather was actually the pastor of my church growing up. So as he often joked his family had a drug problem, which is that they were drug to church every Sunday. (laughing) I was regrettably not, they wanted to be there. But yeah, I kind of grew up going to church. My mom and my dad are, you know, incredible, beautiful believers. Really, I think taught me to challenge and to press on play areas where I had questions. So it didn't feel super simplistic. It felt a bit more robust, probably given that. But then I went to Georgetown. - Right, Jesuit. - You would think that the Jesuit Catholic thing would have been kind of a identifying characteristic of the academic experience, and it really wasn't. I think for the first time in my life, I was presented with a world that really said, you have to be able to explain why it is you believe, what you believe. It's not enough to just say, like, well, this is, I'm a Christian. That's just, there's nothing else there. - Kind of a get out of jail free card in a way. - Totally, yeah. And so really in college, I had to go through what's called apologetics, which is like a defense of faith. Like, why is it that I believe this? Does it stand up to scrutiny? - Reason, and am I comfortable with the things that I've thought that I've believed my entire life? And there were some areas where I think I came through that experience and said, I don't know, maybe it's, I would frame it differently than maybe the way that Sunday school would have framed it growing up on-- - Like what would be an example? - I think I'm a lot less convinced of, like, literal interpretations of parts of the scripture. That's not to say that I don't believe in them or I don't believe in the narrative that created the theological traditions and practices that we hold today. But like, it's not super important to me whether or not the earth was created 10,000 years ago or 10 billion years ago, I just don't care. There's no part of that, like, makes me feel more true to my life, it just doesn't matter. So I think that was part of it. But then indeed-- - And also, the metaphor, right, doesn't the metaphor plan to some of that? I mean, I would imagine when you read the Bible, there are parts that are inhumane and brutal and things that Jesus didn't say. And sometimes I think, like, even the Old Testament, when I study that through a mystical lens, so much of that is about, is metaphor. And it's meant to be taken as, like, about ego or ego diminishment or ways to become who you truly are as opposed to, like, what's literally in there? - Well, I think that there are some parts that were kind of ambiguously metaphorical and there are other parts that were explicitly metaphorical. You know, it's, I don't think it's, you know, random that Jesus approached almost all of his teachings in parable, like, he wasn't telling historical stories. He was just saying, like, let me tell you a story about a man with two sons and, you know, a man that was sowing seed and on pebbled ground. These are all metaphors, they're all parables. And I think that the human brain learns in this way from experience and story. And so I think just like holding on to the need almost to be intellectually right about something. And just saying, look, the idea is my heart. That's the part that matters is like, where is my heart? What am I learning from this? How is it shaping my character? And I think that became really important to me. And what I, my experience of that entering into the marketplace, going into government work, being in tech, working in venture capital, it's like there are so many people that are brilliant and it's super intellectual. Maybe they're trying desperately to get in touch emotionally with like what's missing in their life. - Yeah. - And it's really common actually to find people that are like, I don't know what it is, but there's something missing. Like I've made it, I have all this monetary success, I have fame, I have influence and power, but like something's missing. And there are all of these philosophers that have been talking about this for thousands of years, Pascal, CS Lewis said like if we find that there's something missing, it wouldn't that suggest that there's something more, there's something higher. But then you have pop culture icons, mo money, mo problems, Kanye talks about this, over and over, Eminem talks about this. It's like, I think as like a rural kid from Ohio, I grew up looking to these, you know, exemplars in our society of what success looked like and thinking like wow, they have their stuff together, they've really figured it out. And then you get to that level and it's like, man, there's so much emptiness. Like people that are just searching for meaning. Do you, I mean, I imagine you must kind of rub shoulders with a lot of these guys, right? And you're in your position who feel kind of, I don't know, they like, there's a vacancy or a lostness or like, do you, when you are with some of these guys who are super powerful and wealthy, do you, do you feel like, you know, I don't know, imparting wisdom to them? Do you, is it difficult to be in circles with people who, I don't know, I would, you know, are morally, I would say maybe not aligned? - Well, I actually don't think there's that much moral misalignment. We can come back to that, but I think that, you know, coming into really like Founders Fund in 2013, 2014, I had no expectation that I was going to show up and suddenly I'd be like, the Christian guy in tech, I think ultimately what happened is that people would ask questions and I would just actually answer them. I wasn't afraid to say, yeah, I'm a Christian and I actually believe this stuff and I've thought a lot about it and here's why, I think that this is true. And over time, it just kind of snowballed where more like I would do a whole pitch meeting with a founder telling me about their company and then afterwards they'd say, can we talk privately? And then they would say, I'm really struggling with this part of my life. I heard that you're a Christian, can you pray for me? Can you like suggest what I might be able to read that could help with this? And ultimately, like God is going to decide what he wants and when the doors of the window is open, I'm just trying to walk through them and I've been really surprised at the response to that, the people that have reached out to ask for. I wouldn't say wisdom, I'm not sharing anything that's new, I'm just sharing my experience and the things that I've read or I've learned in that I think might resonate with them. And so it's been really cool to see and I do think that there's like sort of a new openness that didn't exist even 10 years ago. You know, there's, I don't know if you've watched the HBO show Silicon Valley, which is-- - I haven't actually, so I-- - I mean, it's so cringy because it's so true. It's actually sort of painful to realize that the parody is just more or less reality. But there's an episode where they say, you know, in Silicon Valley, you can do anything. You can like, microdose, you can be in a polychule. The only thing you can't do is be a Christian. - Oh my gosh. - That was 10 years ago. And I feel like today, you know, this experience of Eastern mysticism and all these things that the tech founders of the early 2000s went through, there's this really interesting resurgence and interest for the classics. You know, people look for an international religion. - Right. Is that because we're like, it marries well with more right ideology, do you think? And that's kind of the prevailing ideology? Or do you think that it's like this? I don't know, I think that when I hear you talk about it, I feel like there's-- this very fundamental thing and being a human being that we don't have answers that if things can feel incredibly lonely and that they're existential questions all the time and we, I think that's why people used to love their kings and queens because if there's hierarchy or there's order that's endemic, we feel safe. So I mean, do you think that from like a Christianity perspective, the reason that it's sort of more on the rise is because the whole country seems to be going more conservative? I don't think it's political. I would say that it's probably a couple of things. The first is that I think people that have been seeking didn't find what they were looking for and whatever the prior paradigm was. And so I think that they're increasingly open to trying to explore things that maybe they hadn't considered. And I think that's aided in many ways by how imitative humans are. We have a tendency to sort of pair it, what people around us are doing. And once it became acceptable where there were enough people that were exploring it, it was now culturally okay to be out talking about it. And to your point about kings and queens, this is actually a great example from the Old Testament. I think it was the book of Judges, there was a situation where the Jewish people did not have a king, but all of the neighboring kingdoms did. And they actually came back to the prophet and they said, give us a king. And he was like, well, why? Why do you want a king? And they said, well, all of the other civilizations around us, they all have kings. And he said, but this is what happens when you get a king. You get all these bad things. And they said, we don't care. We want a king. And so he gave them a king. And then all of those bad things happened. And I think ultimately that's like the memetic nature of our humanity is like, we want what other people want. And that desire is imitated in both good ways. That's how we learn by imitating our parents, by imitating our siblings, older siblings, our peers. But there's also a lot of negative parts to that as well. We're imitating ego, we're imitating greed, we're imitating loneliness. And social media, for example, is the mass accelerator of imitation at societal scale. And we've seen the deleterious outcome of that sort of investment. For sure. I think it's really important, too, to always question as you go. When you're engaging in a belief system, I mean, maybe this is the person that I am, I've always pushed back and questioned things. I think that's a really important part as well. Do you agree? Of 100%. Yeah, I think there's this kind of genius interview question that I always ask that's, what is something you believe did be true that you believe most of your peers disagree with you about? That's a good dinner party question. It is. And it's actually really hard for most people to answer the question. Because if they really think about it, do you actually believe anything that you think would be upsetting to your peers? Yeah, that's it. That is a really good question. I would have to think about that. What's your answer to that question? I have so many. I also-- this is what I do for a living, right? This is what I think about all the time. Yeah, I think we want to constantly be fighting against this impulse to just be chasing whatever it is that's happening. I mean, Silicon Valley has-- people think of them as like them, the tech industry. They think of the tech industry as just like incredibly opinionated sort of free-thinking group of people. It's really not. I mean, it's highly mimetic. It's like they were super progressive. And now there's like this turn to traditional religion. And they went from like being very against things like defense tech to being like hyper-for defense tech. If they were early investors in Andrew. Yeah, exactly. And so you get like these wild swings. And it's just like-- What does that mean to you as somebody like a man of real faith when you see that pendulum swing around you? I just want to be true to my convictions. And that means that I'm constantly wanting to ask myself, why is it that I believe this? Do I believe it because it's comfortable to believe it? Because the people that I care about their opinion of me believe that thing? Do I believe it because it's a desire for something that I want that's purely imitative of someone else's desire? I'll give you a great example. I'm going to criticize myself. But sort of in a way that like I'm open to accepting that this is a Valley criticism of myself. I love Aston Martin's. Love them. Why is that a criticism? Why do I love Aston Martin's? Why? I want to be James Bond. If I just saw a lineup of cars and the whole James Bond franchise never existed, I don't think I would have necessarily picked out an Aston Martin as my favorite part. But it's only criticism depending on which James Bond you're talking about. That's true. That's true. Some are better than others. And I'm very curious to see who the next one is going to be. But I think being able to be honest with yourself to say, I want that thing. Because someone that I admire, some model that I have, also wanted that thing. And they're like in the Aston Martin example. I'm comfortable with admitting that that's the case, even though it's sort of like devalues my interest in some way. Because it's like, I'm just borrowing someone else's desire. I don't think that-- I don't think it devalues that. I mean, I think inspiration is such a beautiful quality. Like, if you see somebody and they inspire you, and if there's a way to personify that or make it tangible, like, I don't know. I do that all the time. That's a good point. It's a good point. As long as you're choosing good models. Yes. You don't want to be inspired by bad models, right? But yeah, no, I think that's right. What inspires you? You know, learning, curiosity. I'm such a fundamentally curious person. I can go down rabbit holes for hours. I love understanding other people and other points of view. And helping people inspires me a lot. Like, I spend a lot of my time trying to understand what somebody needs. And I think it comes from a place of my own pain, too. Like, trying to-- I think I'm very good at feeling people and seeing people and helping-- my inclination is always to pour into that. And it makes me feel very inspired. And that there are endless possibilities. What is the source of that, would you say for you? It's like, where does that interest in pouring into people come from? I think it's a very fundamental part of me. And again, I think a lot of it comes from pain. Certain things that I went through in my life. And I think there are negative parts of that, too. There's a hypervigilance that I have that comes from a life of a lot coming at me and certain traumas and things like that. And I think that the bad side of that hypervigilance is that my nervous system is fucked off a lot of the time. And I think the upside is that I can feel people, and I sort of love people. What about you besides an Aston Martin, of course? You know, I think you and I actually have this in common. I lost my dad when I was 30. Wow. He was 58. Oh, my God. Which I think is the same as when you lost your dad. I was 30 as well, I'm sorry. I lost him to Alzheimer's, which is pretty crazy, to like see someone you love, like kind of deteriorate and not become themselves. And also someone you presumably had on a pedestal? Yeah, yeah. And there are all these things that I feel like I would sort of make fun of him for ill, like playfully, not like behind his back. And like characteristics of him that I was like, man, I'm never going to do that. Like I remember in high school, he would always make me change the oil in my car. And he was like, try this, like it's a life lesson. You have to learn how to do this because how else are you going to do it when you're an adult? And I was like, dad, I'm going to go to Jiffy Loop and pay someone else to change my oil. But then the first year after he passed, I guess months after he passed, my wife was pregnant with our first son and we were, I was getting the nursery ready. And I was trying to hang a chandelier in the nursery and I just couldn't do it. I couldn't figure out how to do it. I didn't know what I was doing. And I just remember like laying on the floor and weeping, being like, man, I don't think I really appreciated him. enough when he was around because like right now this is the time that I would call my dad and say like dad help me do this thing. And I just didn't I realized like for the first time like I don't have my dad anymore. That's I mean it's crazy. It's like a 30-year-old. I was supposed to have like decades more with them to have grandchildren that I could bring to him. And I think it just like it really changes your perspective on the time that you do have with your loved ones in particular. Like I I want to be around for my kids for their kids. And I want to appreciate like the moments that come without just getting caught up in like I'm on a wave and the wave is just like full-speed ahead all the time. What do you think he would say now if he could see what you're up to? Oh he would just be all he would make him find me God's. He could not suffer. Like making bomb jokes? You know he could not suffer a single moment of being happy for me. In the most playful way he'd be like oh wow great job you got straight A's back to work you loser. Yeah I think I think he would have he would have privately been very proud of me and publicly he would have been very jokey about about everything that's happened. Wow okay you made me cry. Yeah me too. I want to ask you one last question. This is this is a question that my husband asks a lot because as I said he's very progressive and if you read the Gospels it's very I mean Jesus is very unambiguous around like you know all the things and make sure inherit the earth and love thy neighbor as thyself. And in our climate right now like some of the rhetoric is not that right. How how do you hold those things at the same time genuinely like as somebody who worked in a Trump administration like is that how does that work? Yeah I mean you're absolutely right you read the sermon on the mount it's very clear about where we should be spending our time and effort and my share. And again I kind of think about this on that quad chart that I was describing as like there are a lot of things that feel good and are good you know that you think about things like healthcare or nonprofit work or you know working with at-risk communities whatever. There are a lot of things that we can all agree are in the is bad feels bad category like you know child sex trafficking murder theft and then you have this these complicated the complicated diagonal the like is bad feels good and these things are like sort of culturally in a moment where you know it could be things like gambling. Like I would argue that gambling is really it's there are probably some some demographics where it's not a huge issue but really it's like robbing from the poor in many cases. It's also reinforcing what you were talking about earlier the sort of culture of you know basement culture. Right exactly. On pornography is another one of these where you could frame it as some sort of like female empowerment thing but like the damage that is doing to society is probably not not even worth it if that were the argument you were making legal legalization of drugs you could probably put in that category. Obviously you can make arguments around the edges of these things I'm painting an overly broad picture intentionally. Then you have this other quadrant of is good feels bad and I am not in any way going to defend that national security working in national security feels good it doesn't it doesn't feel good law enforcement doesn't feel good. I would call this quadrant like duty and responsibility like on a personal level the gospels are checking the condition of our heart turn the other cheek absolutely we should do those things you know how we respond to giving with our personal finances you know there are three different stories in the New Testament in the gospels of Jesus telling people to give away some portion of their wealth but he told all three of them but he told all three of them different amounts he told one give away half he told one give away I think a third he told another to give away all of their wealth he was speaking to the condition of their heart where is your idol and he was saying look your idol is your wealth you need to turn from your idol so I think these things are speaking to the the condition of our hearts on a personal level. Society I think we have to respond to things differently and I think those frameworks are governance it's you know what is good governance how do you care for society how do you provide the conditions through which people have the freedom and the expression for those character their heart condition and unfortunately due to the the nature of the real world they're a bad actors and we have to do what we can to keep those bad actors from taking whatever they want and that's really where defense comes in that's where law enforcement comes in and there's an ethical way to do that we don't need the accelerated intense rhetoric I don't that does not jive with me personally but we do need to like actually have laws and boundaries yeah and as a resident of San Francisco I can tell you the difference in a city that doesn't prosecute crime in a city that does prosecute crime and people are going to reach a better place personally fulfillment with abundance in a society that respects law and I'm simultaneously admitting that that doesn't always feel good. Well I'm afraid I've gone a bit over. So I thank you so much this has been such an interesting conversation very edifying and I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in. This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studios. I hope you'll listen, follow, rate and review all of our episodes which are available for free on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey or wherever you get your podcasts. The good quality gift guides are our calling card. We scour the earth for the best options in every category to make it easy for you to find the right gifts for everyone on your list. Think beautiful jewelry, thoughtful wellness tools, smart kitchenware, clean beauty and more unexpected finds. Whether you're looking for a little luxury or a big splurge you'll find something that feels personal in our curation. Explore the gift guide at goop.com and as our gift to you, take 15% off your first purchase with code pod gift. Exclusion supply.