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Trey Stevens, welcome to the show, man.
Man, it's great to be here. Thanks for bringing me out. I've been pumped about this.
I love everything that's going on with Anduril. The Palmer episode was fascinating. What a cool dude to be around. And so yeah, we've been dying to get you in the studio and it's been almost a year I think since Palmer's been on. So I'd love to get some updates and what I really want to do is life story on you, get into everything that you know, childhood, how you got into tech, all that stuff, and then we'll end with everything that's going on in Anduril.
Sounds good. Let's do it.
Perfect. All right, everybody starts with an introduction here. Trey Stevens, co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril Industries, a defense tech powerhouse that's redefining national security with AI and autonomy, a partner at Founders Fund. You've backed game changers in government and defense tech since 2014. Co-founder of Soul, a wearable e-reader so you can read without distraction. Intern at the Afghan embassy in DC, an early Palantir employee who helped turn data into Intel. A husband, a father, a devout Christian, you're unapologetic about your faith in Silicon Valley. In fact, you preached to tech entrepreneurs in 2024 on how Jesus would approve of building righteous AI weapons. You are a sneakerhead and a prepper.
Love the prepping. Love all of it.
But yeah, I wanted to talk about, you know, in 2024, you preached to tech entrepreneurs on how Jesus would approve of righteous AI weapons. There's not a whole lot of Christians out there from what I know.
There are not. It is a pretty godless city with a pocket of really strong believers and community.
Do you get a lot of pushback for that or for being a Christian out there?
You know, when I first moved to San Francisco, that was kind of my expectation that there would be sort of hostility. But I haven't experienced that at all. I feel like really smart people, they generally think of Christians as being simple-minded. And so when you come at them and you're clearly not simple-minded, they're just curious. They're like, I don't get it. How could you be both smart and also have this kind of crazy faith that I don't take seriously? And so it's actually been a great opportunity to open doors for people just asking those questions and being able to go into apologetics, explain to them why, you know, I think that their lack of faith is just as much of a faith as mine. Like, you have to be kind of crazy to believe that all of this came from nothing over millions and millions of years. That requires as big, if not a bigger leap of faith than what I believe.
That's what I think, man. Have you ever heard of Lee Strobel?
Of course. Yeah. Case for Christ. Yeah, man.
I read that back in high school, man.
I've had him on three times. And when he talks about, you know, his time as an atheist, he's like, man, you have to have — it's like more work to gain faith that there is nothing out there than there is to actually believe. And I love that guy.
Yeah. No, it's absolutely true. And I think that we're seeing a bit of a renaissance where people are coming back to this idea that look, even if they have a hard time with the belief in the supernatural, they're starting to kind of grok this idea that a society unmoored from truth, foundational truth is really dangerous and not a society that they want to live in. And that's kind of opened the door to being able to have these conversations with people about, you know, why we believe what we believe and why we believe that that is not only good for our souls but also good for humanity.
So, people are interested. They're asking questions out there.
Yeah, people are super interested. You know, even in the last just 18 to 24 months, the churches in San Francisco are seeing enormous growth. Especially in Gen Z. I'm sure you've seen some of the stats that show that, you know, there's this resurgence of faith with Gen Z, particularly with men in Gen Z, which is really unusual, like looking at historical trends over the last hundred years. So, it's been really cool to see.
Yeah, that's like I mean, I feel like that's worldwide, not just San Francisco, definitely in the country. But, I mean, why do you think that is? Why do you think so many people are tapping into the Bible and coming to Christ right now?
Well, I think there's been such a push really since like the 70s, but especially in just like the last 5 years around this kind of completely godless approach to life. And some of those lies are being exposed. I think we're starting to see societal dysfunction, a breakdown in trust in institutions. You know, you have all of these different factors and young people are in an interesting position to look at that and say, man, none of the things that I thought I was promised are real. Like all of these ridiculous kind of wokey ideas around how the world is supposed to function. They don't actually work. Like society doesn't work like this. You can't just walk around not believing in anything. You have to believe in some sort of truth. And I think that's kind of reawakened people to this idea that there's something in classics that are worth looking at. You know, I don't know if you're a fan of the HBO show Silicon Valley, but there's this narrative that was picked up for like the first 20 years of the 21st century around weird Eastern mysticism and Buddhism and stuff like that. And the CEO of Hooli, the big company in the HBO show, had like a mystic, like a monk that was his mentor and adviser. And that was really like the moment that was like Burning Man Silicon Valley style. And it was kind of a joke. It became a meme where people are like, wow, this is really silly. Like all these things that were being told are just really silly, you know, untruths. And you're starting to see people kind of turn from that kind of Eastern mysticism thing and look back at the Western classics, which, you know, Judeo-Christian ideas, seem a lot more moored in some way.
Yeah, I think I mean I think things just got so chaotic and the trust in pretty much any institution is at an all-time low right now. I think people are just looking for anything that makes sense. You know, and obviously truth, but because so many lies have been exposed at this point and conspiracies have come true and yeah, I think it's just caused mass hysteria and confusion and people are just looking for something to settle into that's solid, that's truth. But it's cool to see, man. It's really cool to see.
Yeah, it's been great. You know, my wife Michelle, she has started this organization called Acts 17, which is the reference to the apostles speaking in Athens to the intellectuals, to the philosophers and arguing with them about apologetics for why the message that Jesus brought was the message. It was the truth. And it all started with my 40th birthday party. So, I'm not really — I don't really like parties very much, but my wife was adamant that we should gather together a group of friends. And I thought, wow, the best way for me to avoid having a huge group of people hang around for my birthday is to do it at our house in New Mexico. Because no one would come, obviously, if I just do it away from where anyone is. But we planned this weekend where Friday we called the roast. Saturday was the toast and Sunday was the Holy Ghost. And the roast was my best friends coming together and roasting me. Including a former guest of yours here on the show, Sham Sankar, did a roast of me. And then on Saturday, my favorite band, which is a '90s era punk ska band called Goldfinger, they came and performed. It turns out you can just hire '90s era punk skas, which is pretty cool. And then Sunday, my partner at Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, gave a sermon. 250 people ended up coming to this crazy birthday party, most of them not believers. But the feedback that we got after Peter gave this sermon was incredible where people were like, man, I've never heard a presentation of Christianity that challenged me intellectually in this way. And so we just kind of ran with it. And Acts 17 has done incredible events with people like Peter, with Francis Collins, who was early in the genetics movement. He was the director of the National Institutes of Health. And starting to kind of expand. Over the last four weeks, Peter has done an Acts 17 series on the Antichrist actually in San Francisco.
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Did you go to that?
Yeah, I was — I mean my wife runs the organization. So.
Really cool. I mean Peter has been talking about these themes around the Antichrist for a long time. During COVID he and I did a small group Bible study exploring the concepts around the Antichrist, read a bunch of books, did discussion groups around it and I think he's really hammered into his thoughts around what that means to the world today and how that should affect the way that we behave. And it was cool to see that hundreds of people showed up for four consecutive weeks wading through a sea of protesters standing outside the building to come hear a Silicon Valley billionaire talk about faith and why he believes in the gospel.
Man, I think that's awesome. Was that the — was it the Times or I can't remember the interview where they asked him if he thought he was the Antichrist.
Yeah, there's a famous clip with the interview with Ross Douthat where Ross said something like, do you believe that humanity should continue to exist? And he paused for an uncomfortable amount of time and then eventually said yes. But yeah, I mean he's been talking about this for a while. He did a series in Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson from the Hoover Institute talking about it. He did the interview with Ross Douthat. He did a lecture series at the University of Austin as well. So this is on the top of his mind.
Man, I would love to have seen that. That would have been awesome. They didn't record it, right?
Totally off the record. Yeah. So, no shared notes, no video, nothing.
That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. How many people went?
I mean, there were a few hundred people for four consecutive weeks with overflow, like people sitting in the lobby watching a simulcast. So, there were a lot. It was pretty crazy. Also, the majority were not Christians either. It's, you know, just people in tech showing up curious to hear what he had to say. I think that's kind of the lesson here from an Acts 17 perspective is that you don't want to get ordained ministers to come in and do a Bible-thumping presentation of the gospel. You want to get people in the marketplace that aren't known for being Christians. And then put them in a context where they're talking to people who wouldn't expect them to talk about their faith. And I think there's a tremendous opportunity to leverage that not only in tech, but in other leading industries, whether that's finance, media, entertainment, whatever.
That's interesting, you know, that it was that good of a turnout and that it sparked that much interest, especially from non-Christians.
Yeah, that's very, very interesting. You know, back to your remarks that, you know, I can't remember exactly what it was, but Jesus would basically have no problems with people in defense tech building weapons to annihilate evil. I mean, where did you come up with that?
Well, I mean, there's a long thought process that gets to that point, but it actually all starts with just war theory going back to St. Augustine. You know, I think it's really easy to forget in a 21st century context that the laws of engagement in warfare and the way that the West approaches combat are all rooted in just war tradition from the fifth, sixth centuries. And the idea is basically that pacifism is a really convenient belief to hold inside of a hegemony with a monopoly on violence. It's very easy to be a pacifist when you have a state that is going to protect your right to be pacifist. You can't really be a pacifist if you exist outside of a society like that though. And so then the question is how do you engage in a just way with protecting innocent life? And there are all sorts of principles around this. There's, you know, a principle of just cause, like, do we have the information that we need to make a decision, a righteous decision about whether or not we're going to go and engage in violent conflict. There's the principle of discrimination. If you're going to do it, are you going to do it in a way that is highly discriminate? That you're attacking the right players, the combatants rather than innocent life. You have the principle of proportionality. Are you responding in turn to a conflict or are you going way overboard and increasing the stakes and the level of violence by your counter response? Anyway, there's all of these principles that St. Augustine laid out thousands of years ago. And the way that that kind of applies to modern day is really interesting. So if you think about the way that conflict, violence has emerged over the course of human society, you know, it started, we're hitting each other with rocks and things like that, the Cain and Abel story and then we figured out bow and arrows and swords and eventually we got into catapults and trebuchets and the advent of gunpowder. We're just climbing the curve of the amount of destruction a single individual is able to inflict on another party or another set of parties. That kept going up that curve up and up and up until the atom bomb. And that was kind of the moment where humanity looked at ourselves in the mirror and we said this can't go on, we can't just become ever more destructive. And the Cold War was really the story of humanity figuring out how to deescalate that level of violence. And so during the Cold War, you see things like precision-guided munitions. Like, we can shoot an AIM-9 through windows of buildings and take out combatants inside of buildings without destroying the building or harming innocents that are outside of that room. Everything is just about precision now. And so my view from the Anduril perspective is if I'm building technology, if I'm participating in the development of next-generation munitions, next-generation weapons, we should be doing that in a way that is more edifying to the principles of just war theory. Can we make things that are more discriminate, that are more proportional, that are more precise? So that we're putting the humans — the sacred nature of human life — we're removing those people from dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs and enabling us to engage in combat, engage in geopolitics, the real geopolitics in a way that reduces the loss of innocent life.
Wow. You really went down the rabbit hole with this. Is this because you had — was this a tough decision for you to get into defense tech? I mean, was there an internal battle going on in your head on, all right, we're going to do this. These are weapons. These are, you know, we're going to be used in war. I mean, was that a big decision for you?
Yeah. I mean, as a Christian, obviously, I think about this stuff a lot. Like, you know, I don't — at the end of my life, I believe I'm going to be judged for my actions on earth. And, you know, I don't want to be doing things that are acting in opposition to God's will. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I think like one of the misunderstandings that people outside of the industry have is they sort of believe that there are like this cadre of generals in the Pentagon that are sitting around like plotting how they can like enact violence on the world or something like that. And you know, you served — the reality is that no one wants to write letters home to the parents of children lost in combat. Nobody wants to do that. What we want to do is we want to deter combat. And, you know, Reagan talked about this all the time. Peace through strength. Peace through strength. Peace through strength. That's what we want to do. We want to make it so unthinkable to do things that we believe are wrong that people just won't do them. And that's ultimately the goal of defense tech. It's not to make it more violent, more terrible. The goal is to make it so lethal and so much of a disadvantage to our adversaries that they would just never even think.
Biggest deterrent of all.
Yeah. Exactly. And so yeah, I think about this all the time.
Right on. Right on. I think about it, too. But I love what you guys are doing and it protects our country and I also believe in peace through strength. So yeah, but a couple things to get through here before we get into the interview. I got a couple gifts for you here. So, everybody gets these. Vigilance League gummy bears made in the USA. Legal in all 50 states for now.
Yeah, for now. Until, you know, until RFK deems red dyes to be illegal.
But they taste pretty good.
You just have to put some of that blue drink inside of them and then they'll be protected forever.
And then this is the first time I've given one of these out. So, you know, after interviewing so many tech innovators like yourself, it's made me want to get in the game really bad. And so, and then through a lot of the interviews I've done, I've interviewed a lot of high-profile people overseas and in DC. So, I've always been very concerned about phone security.
So, I went down a rabbit hole to find the real black phone and I found this company called Glacier. Have you heard of it?
Okay. So, Glacier was started by a bunch of former Intel guys in the Intel service. And so that phone, it's a hardened iPhone and they do an overwatch of the phone, you know, no data leaks out. They have all American VPNs. They have burner numbers. So you get an endless amount of burner numbers. You can get any burner number, any area code you want. And so, you know, if you're doing a political donation, booking a hotel, ordering a pizza, talking to somebody you never want to talk to again, you can use one of those burner numbers and they can even tell if — they can't tell what it is, but if Pegasus were to wind up on it or something, they'll be able to know, hey, something's acting funny on your phone. So, it's like the ultimate black phone. And it has a secure messenger service that actually tunnels your entire organization. And so you can't have like a Signal debacle like we saw at the beginning of the administration. It would be impossible to accidentally text Sean the reporter and not Sean the podcaster. But yeah, I thought — so anyways, we're starting a company with them and those are extremely expensive to get. So I said why don't we do a consumer-based one that's a little more application that has a lot of the same features but maybe not quite that high speed that people could actually afford. So we're rolling that out towards the end of the year.
That's awesome. Thank you so much. I go through a lot of effort every time I travel internationally to have burner devices and things like that. So this is something I think about a lot.
Dude, I'll teach you how to use it.
Yes. The guys will like that.
And then all right, last thing before we get into it. So I got a Patreon account. It's a subscription account and we've turned it into quite the community and I offer them the opportunity to ask every guest a question. So this is from Tyler Wilson. Given your past work in the intelligence community and your time advising the Trump administration, what are the most significant misconceptions the public has about the relationship between Silicon Valley and the US government?
Yeah. No, that's good. There are a lot of misconceptions. I think they're constantly changing because obviously the administration's changed, the politically appointed officials changed and so you get this kind of eb and flow of how that interaction has been shaped. If you go back to the Obama administration, basically everyone in tech had supported Obama when he was elected president but there was really no presence of tech people in the administration. He ended up going with government insiders and academics and things like that and so the connectivity was really, really low. Obviously going into the first Trump administration, Peter and Palmer were the only tech billionaires that were engaged in that administration from the very beginning. And then Biden came around and again the whole tech community jumped out in support of him. But there's been a bit of a shift now where people are starting to realize that all of this time and effort and money that they put into courting the Democratic establishment didn't really give them the connectivity to drive any of the change that they wanted to see. And so I think in this administration, there's been a real effort by the administration to understand what it is that is going on in tech whether that's with AI regulation or with crypto or with defense and trying to figure out ways to pull them into that conversation. And so you get people like Michael Kratsios who is Peter's chief of staff who's running the Office of Science and Technology Policy. You have David Sacks working on AI and crypto who was one of the original PayPal mafia. You have Emil Michael who is the COO of Uber that's now the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. And so that tie is much stronger than it has been in modern history.
Yeah, it definitely seems that way.
Yeah. And so I think from a misconception perspective now, I'm always reminding defense tech founders that the government, they're not buying the best thing to solve the job. They're buying relationships and decades of service and things like that. And so, you really have to understand how to talk with the government and how to sell to the government in order to actually get any of the technologies on the defense side that the warfighter needs to win. And that's just a very different problem set than engineering a good product. There's more to it than that.
Yeah, it definitely seems like the pulse has changed in Silicon Valley. That's for damn sure. Especially with these younger guys, these younger innovators. I mean, they are very pro-administration right now.
Yeah, I think I mean there's always time for that to shift. But there's a lot more optimism about that engagement than there has been historically.
It's good to see. It's good to see. But all right, let's move into your life story. So where'd you grow up?
I grew up in rural Ohio. North of Cincinnati, about 30 miles north of Cincinnati. Kind of small town USA. It's called Lebanon, Ohio. You know, we had kind of the quintessential downtown area with a vintage soda fountain and the public library and our claim to fame in town was the oldest inn in Ohio. It's called the Golden Lamb. For those politicos out there watching the show, Rob Portman, the former congressman and later senator from the state of Ohio, owns the Golden Lamb. And so there's like this crazy connection there. Just one town over from Middletown, which is where JD grew up. So some of the same stories that he talked about in Hillbilly Elegy about kind of the rise of industrialization in Ohio and then the collapse as a result of globalization. And I was kind of in high school as we were going through that massive shift where the factories were closing, people's parents were out of jobs, strip malls were vacated. It was an interesting childhood for sure.
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What'd your parents do?
My dad was a mechanic. And he built roller coasters actually. So, there's a big amusement park in Southwest Ohio called Kings Island. And from the day he graduated high school until the day he retired, he worked at Kings Island as an amusement park mechanic.
My mom was all sorts of things. She worked in accounting. She was a substitute teacher. She worked at the public library in Lebanon. And she was a mom. Very active in my brother and I's life. So, yeah.
So, very blue-collar family.
Super blue-collar family. Yeah.
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.
Very recently, like in the last five years or so, we've kind of rekindled our sibling love and we do a bunch of stuff together. He and I just went on a fishing trip up in Alaska in July. Trying to spend more time hanging out with each other.
Good. Good. What are you guys fishing for up there?
Well, that trip was a lot of salmon and trout. But Alaska is an incredible ecosystem. I mean, they have everything. I think in the three days that we were fishing, we caught chum salmon, king salmon, sockeye salmon, basically every species. And then nailed some huge rainbow trout as well, which is really fun.
Oh, it's the best. For someone like me that lives and works every day in a city, there's something about going out and standing in rushing water and feeling the tension of the line in the current. It totally disarms you and is just therapeutic.
Yeah, it's super therapeutic for me. What were you into as a kid?
I mean I fished a lot. My dad was an avid fisherman and hunter. And so kind of did all those outdoor stuff with my dad. We lived on a bunch of acreage in the middle of the woods in a log cabin that my dad built literally with his bare hands by himself. And so kind of grew up playing in the creek and hanging out in the woods, building tree houses with my brother. Also I played basketball, ran cross country, played ultimate frisbee in high school. That's the only thing that I carried over to my college experience from the athletics perspective. And we were super active in our church. My grandfather was the pastor of our church growing up. So we were really active in the community there as well.
Right on. Right on. I mean, so were you a good student?
Yeah. I mean, I was a bit of a nerd. No doubt about it. Public school was an interesting experience. You know, 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 can kind of get stuck in the rut of feeling like everyone's just goofing off and you're just trying to get through school. But yeah, I graduated top of my class, got great test scores and then got rejected everywhere that I applied to college. So, this is the lesson of some of what JD talked about in Hillbilly Elegy.
How did you — I mean, how do you get into tech coming from — I mean spending all your time outdoors, fishing, hunting, blue-collar home, public school. I mean very non-traditional tech path.
I was always interested in tech. My mom's brothers were really into it growing up and so 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 the motherboard and yeah, we kind of built that. Always was really interested in it but had no interest in going into tech. That was not a part of my plan. I actually thought I was going to be a journalist when I was in high school. Senior year comes around, September 11th happens and I had this kind of watershed moment where I was always patriotic, but I never thought of it as something that I wanted to do as a vocation. And everything just changed on that day and I decided that I wanted to go into service for the country. And went down the closest path I could find to working in intelligence and saw a demo of Palantir in my first job in the intelligence community. Got into kind of a battle internally about using Palantir, got denied and then jumped ship really early on and joined Palantir before we had any revenue or really any users and the rest is history and I've been in tech since.
Can we go back to your time in intelligence?
What kind of stuff were you doing?
I was working on counterterrorism primarily on computational linguistics around Arabic name matching. So in college I studied — I was a Middle Eastern studies major. So learned Arabic, studied abroad in Egypt. And the intersection of people who could write code and could speak
Arabic was, you know, very very small.
And so, you know, the most common name in the English language is John. It's like 3% of English-speaking men are named John, first or middle name. Obviously, in Arabic, over 30% of men are Muhammad. And it's spelled a million different ways. I mean, you could in a transliterated sense, Ma, Mu Ha, Mm- A., you know, you could imagine all the permutations of that. And when you're dealing with intelligence reporting, you know, the writer is effectively choosing how to spell these names just transliterated. And someone had to go out and figure out how to merge these records to identify the individuals that were crossing all of the reporting that was being collected. And that was my job. I was the guy that was going in and trying to make sure that this Muhammad was the same as this Muhammad was the same as this Muhammad. So that when we pass those reports down to you guys in the field in Afghanistan or in Iraq that you had reliable intelligence that you could act on when you're kicking down doors.
Interesting. How long did you, how long were you in the intelligence war?
I only lasted about two and a half years. It was a short battle with bureaucracy and I was defeated.
Got to get 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?
Yeah. It's a really kind of an under the radar thing, but under George Tenet, the CIA set up this essentially a venture fund called In-Q-Tel, and their job was to scout for technology that would be useful to the mission of the intelligence community. And now they serve a bunch of different customers. You know, they work with Department of Homeland Security, with the Pentagon, like they're kind of all over the place. But at the time they had funded a work program for Palantir in a few federal intelligence agencies. And they were doing a road show and they gave a demo that I was at and I'm like, 'Oh crap, this would literally save me like 20% of the time that I spend every week doing searches in these databases.' Because basically the way that I would do it is there are, you know, 12 different databases. You go into each one of them, you write a really complex query and then it would just be running in the background. It's like, 'All right, well I'm going to go get a cup of coffee, go, you know, talk to a couple people and come back and hope that I have an exported CSV file that then I can merge into an Excel spreadsheet and run concatenate functions to try to, you know, narrow it down.' But in Palantir it was like bringing Google to that siloed intelligence infrastructure where you could just run the search once and it would just return everything instantly. And so in its simplest form it would have saved me probably a day of work every week. But, you know, there was no requirement, as you're familiar, there's no requirement. There was no funding to, you know, build anything like this. And so it was really hard to get it brought into the door. So I switched over to the private sector and worked at Palantir instead.
So what I mean, what, a lot of Palantir's, everybody's worried about it. Everybody's worried about, you know, are they spying on us? Is this going to be the newest Patriot Act? What I mean, what are they, are they spying on us? What is it?
Yeah. 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, structure investigations around that data that are sharable with other people. And these are things that in any normal world you would be like, 'Yes, we want our war fighters 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, you know, we have to hold together with duct tape. And so I think a lot of the concern about Palantir is really, you know, people expressing a concern about democracy. They're saying, 'I don't believe that the American people can make good decisions about policies, and therefore I don't want our federal, our civil servants to have the tools that they need to actually, you know, enable the policies that we as a democracy have decided that we want to go after.' So, it's kind of troubling.
Yeah. You know, it's, I mean, it's every time I talk to any of my buddies that are still in special ops or in intelligence, I mean, they're all raving about Palantir and talking about how, you know, everything from a javelin shot to a sniper shot to, I mean, targeting and everybody's raving about Palantir. It's using it in war. And you know, then you have everybody else that's sitting here at home that all they do is complain about it. I mean, where does the misconception come from that they are spying on everything and everyone?
No, I mean the media has a lot to do with it. You know, in the early days of Anduril, there was a kind of a profile that was written about the company and the headline of the story was something like, you know, 'Anduril is enabling a surveillance panopticon' or something like that. It's like this is just not helpful. Like that's not what we're doing anymore than it was what Palantir is doing. You know, no one at Palantir is like, you know, sitting down at their desk and like looking up text messages that their girlfriend sent or something like that. It's just like that's not what's happening at all. But I think we're like programmed for hysteria. And, you know, I do think that this philosophical challenge is very real that it's really expressing a distrust in democratic institutions. And that's a cultural problem that exists way beyond the scope of what Palantir is being asked to solve.
How long did you spend there?
I was there for six years.
You know, most of the time that I was there I was working with Shyam Sankar who, you know, trying to figure out how to make the business development engine work. You know, the kind of unfortunate reality is that I showed up and I was the least talented person technically, but the least, you know, awkward socially. And so what do you do? Well, I got put in charge of sales. And so, you know, Shyam and I were kind of tasked with figuring this out. Really everything I know about this space, I learned from Dr. Karp, the CEO, and Shyam, as we were kind of trying to figure it out together. It took us years to like break through the ceiling of, you know, how do you sell really complicated software to the US government. And at the end of that, you know, call it 5 and a half year period I was feeling pretty burned out. But over the time that I had been there I got to be friends with Peter Thiel who is the founder of PayPal, the co-founder of Palantir. And Peter just out of the blue asked me if I would come join him at Founders Fund. So not having any interest in venture capital or frankly knowing anything about finance, I kind of jumped ship and joined Peter in San Francisco.
No kidding. You know, back to Palantir spying. Joe Lonsdale had a great quote yesterday. He was talking about, you know, if you saw how the government managed data, you would want us in there. And he said, you know, we're the ones watching the watchers. I thought that was pretty good because everybody's worried about the watchers. But
Yeah, I mean the reality is like the idea behind Palantir was that there shouldn't be a trade-off between doing your job well and like protecting privacy and civil liberties. That's like the entire founding story of the company is that for anyone with an engineering background, you don't believe you have to make that choice. That's a false choice. We can do both of these things. You know, there's all sorts of critiques that you can make that, you know, I would critique myself for in the role that I was in at Palantir as well is like maybe we didn't do a good enough job telling the story. Maybe we tried to be a little bit too secretive. Maybe we could have been more out in, you know, showing people what it is that we were doing. Obviously, there's limitations to that working with the intelligence community. But, you know, if we hadn't done it, it's not like it wouldn't have happened. It would have just been done by Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics or Booz Allen Hamilton or Deloitte much less well and with less thought put into the protection of privacy and civil liberties. So, you know, a lot of this just comes down to storytelling I think.
So you're at Palantir, you believe in it before you're even working there. You know, back when you were in intelligence, you spent six years there and then you go into venture capital with Peter Thiel knowing nothing about finance or VC. I mean, why, what was it, Peter? Is that who you believed in? Why did you make that transition?
Yeah, you know, when Peter first asked me to do it, he asked if I could go and meet up with the leadership of the fund. And I remember sitting down with Lauren Gross, who's the COO of Founders Fund, and, you know, we're having breakfast together, and she kind of looks at me and she's like, 'Why are you interested in venture capital?' And I'm like, 'Oh, oh no, you misunderstand. I'm not interested in venture capital. I'm doing this because Peter asked me to.' And I can't even imagine what the internal conversations were at Founders Fund coming out of this interview process where people were like, 'Wait a second, this guy doesn't even want to work here. Why are we interviewing someone that doesn't want a job?' And so, you know, it was kind of a weird like nine months that I was talking to Founders Fund before nine months and finally Peter was just like, 'No, we're doing this.' And it's like, you know, he's the co-founder of the company I'm working at. It's like, I don't know, is this an opportunity or is it an order? Is it some combination of both? Am I being like, you know, fired from Palantir and being like rescued and brought over to Founders Fund? Still to this day, 12 years later, I'm not sure what the real story is. But yeah, it was a weird transition for sure.
Did you like venture capital?
Yeah, I mean I love what I do. I feel very blessed to, you know, have this really cool, you know, job where I get to learn about like everything. 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 who want to solve these really meaty problems. And the expectation isn't that I'm going to know everything there is to know about nuclear, like you had Scott Nolan, my partner, who's building General Matter. It's a nuclear fuels company. I don't know anything about nuclear fuels, but I get to learn from the founder of that company. And get excited about the thing that they're excited about. And that's really what every day is. Every day is just like an experiment and curiosity.
So, was that what you were doing? Were you looking for founders that you wanted to invest in?
Yeah. It's still a big part of my day-to-day. You know, we just have pitch meetings. My first year at Founders Fund, I did 500, just over 500 pitch meetings, which is a lot.
You know, I've ratcheted that down a bit. I have a better sense for the types of things that are going to be a good fit. But you know, it's a big part of what everyone in this industry does is you're just meeting with really compelling people day in and day out.
What is it, I mean when you're looking for a founder that you want to invest in? What is it that does it for you? What are you looking for?
Well, you know, this is probably like the most common question that VCs are asked because I think people really want to believe that there's a rubric, that there's like some sort of table and in the meeting I've just got the table out and I'm like checking off like do they have this trait, do they have this trait? In reality, it doesn't really work like that. There's something that's way more gut and intuition based where, you know, within about five minutes of a pitch meeting you can get pretty dialed to know okay this is one that we might take a shot at, like there's something really vibrant about this person, there's something that's super differentiated about this person. Peter wrote a book called Zero to One. In the book he said that, you know, we're all drawn into mimesis and so like most normies are 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, you know, peer group validation and they're going to do weird stuff. And so if you think about the most successful founders of our generation, people like, you know, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, like these are like sort of weird people. And, you know, they're maybe somewhere on the autism spectrum. And that kind of acts as their superpower because they're not actually concerned about what other people think about them. And that ends up being a tremendous unlock. So, we're really looking for people like that where you meet them and instantly you're like, 'Okay, this person is not just trying to be like a cool kid from their business school class. There's something else to it.'
Interesting. Interesting. What are some of the most successful founders that you've invested in? Who are they?
I mean, Founders Fund has an incredible track record. We were, you know, the first investor in Facebook, in SpaceX, in Airbnb, in Stripe, Anduril, Palantir. We've been kind of at the very beginning of most of the last 20 years of technology, which has been really cool to be along for the ride for.
I'll bet, man. There's been some awesome stuff that has come out of that.
Yeah, this is, I mean the history of the PayPal mafia is truly incredible. Like if you think about this one company ended up kind of seeding either as investor or founder, most of the companies that we think of today as being kind of definitional of the tech success story in America. And it just all started with, you know, one group of people starting one company.
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Yeah. So then you met Palmer.
Then I met Palmer at Founders Fund.
We were the first institutional investor in Oculus. So he had started this virtual reality company. Ended up getting acquired by Meta for a couple billion dollars. And, you know, I think he was just on this path that he just thought, you know, I'm going to be the VR guy. Like that's what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. But I also knew just from hanging out with him that he was really interested in national security. In fact, 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 Anduril, he was the first person I went to and I just said like, 'Hear me out. What if we started a next generation defense prime?' And he was like, 'Oh man, I'm doing this VR thing. Like, I'm super passionate about this, but you know, I don't know that I'm ever going to do anything other than VR.' And that obviously only lasted until he got fired for his politics, and then he was right back on the Anduril story with me.
Right on. Was he always out there? Board shorts, mismatched flip flops.
Yeah, buying shirt. I would love to say that like he's changed or like matured by the standards of society, but he's exactly the same person that he was when, you know, he was a teenager starting Oculus. Money, success, fame has not changed him.
Good. I love that. I love that. All right, real quick. I got to hear some quirky Palmer stories. Let's hear it.
Yeah. No, I mean, he is such an interesting person. You know, I could spend all day talking about this. In the early days of Anduril, he and I would travel to DC a lot together and, you know, I would show up for a two-day trip and I'd have my rolling suitcase and a backpack and he would just be at the airport just standing there with no bags. Like, 'Palmer, we're going to be there for two days, man. What's your plan?' And he would just be like, 'Oh, I've got it. It's in my cargo shorts.' And 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. And, you know, he's sitting in like the middle seat in economy at the back of the plane. It has taken us years to get him to the point where he's just like happy to do things in a way that keep him safe. It's been a real struggle. One of the other fun, he's a huge gear head. He loves cars. He has a ton of cars. Most of them don't work. Which is a constant thorn in 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, 'Trae, there are only two cars that you should buy. Cars that run really well and American cars.' And, you know, I think when Oculus was first acquired, the first thing that he did is he went out and he bought a Honda Odyssey Elite minivan. Which is like, who does that? He wasn't even married. He didn't have kids, but he went out and he bought a minivan. So yeah, he's always super super entertaining.
He's an animated character. There's no doubt about that.
At his wedding, there was like this entire contingent of like Japanese anime people that like in the industry that were like Palmer zealots and they showed up with like custom vinyl figurines of him and his wife. I mean, it was like holy shit. He's like this weird celebrity in the anime scene.
Oh man, that's hilarious.
Super super fun. Could not be a quirkier and yet smarter person. He's just the perfect combination.
What kind of stuff is that guy innovating at just in his free time? Have you seen any of his crazy gizmos?
I mean right now he is so focused on Soldier Borne Compute, like building the helmet, that I think it's consuming like all of his creative energy. It's, you know, it's the perfect thing for him. It's, you know, seven years into Anduril, he finally gets to return to his roots and work on the thing, you know, giving our soldiers superpowers. And it has to just be the most fun for him of anything that we've done.
That is pretty cool, man. That is pretty cool. So, I got a quote from you here that says, you said the tech at your government desk was worse than what you had in your college dorm. What did you mean by that?
Well, yeah. You know, the day I showed up, I think I had expected that there was going to be some like James Bond moment, like I'm going to sit down and I'm going to have this supercomputer and someone's going to like throw me the keys to an Aston Martin, 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, you know, I was going to walk into this incredible tech forward environment and it turns out that it was like I would do these, you know, coffee break searches and stuff like that wasn't at all what I expected.
Is that what inspired you to get into defense tech eventually?
Yeah, it's really the Palantir story, like, you know, finding out that 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, the standard way for getting software tooling historically or at least post Cold War has been, you know, you put out an RFP and all the defense primes, they all bid on it. They present white papers. They say like how many heads it would take for them to write the code and then they get hired on a cost plus basis where they're reimbursed for the hourly labor with some 7 to 12% 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, like why are they going to go sit in the concrete basement in the DC area, getting crapped on by bureaucrats and just like, you know, punch guard checking in, checking out for work. And that just seemed like the whole incentive structure was broken. And so I didn't do it because I was like, man, I really want to be like a tech entrepreneur. I did it because I thought it was the right thing for the country.
That's cool to hear. That's cool to hear. What was the first product you guys wanted to develop at Anduril?
Well, I mean, we have this pitch deck, like a very bad Google Slides deck that we used to recruit our first 12 hires. And one of the slides in that is like a list of things that we wanted to build. We didn't know which thing would be the first thing that we wanted to build, but we had this list. And it was kind of cool like earlier this year, I opened up the slide deck in my Google Drive, and it turns out that we've built like almost all of them.
Yeah. And it wasn't like intentional like okay let's go back to the deck and do the next one. It was just kind of organically how it unfolded. So really the first approach that we made is like you have to build something that is going to be pretty fast. Like you have to be able to get it out into the field quickly. You don't want it to be a science project. And you want there to be a significant amount of political urgency around the thing that you're going to build so that you can drive a different kind of decision-making rather than business as usual procurement policy. And so for us that meant that we landed on Sentry Tower which is now deployed not only at military bases but also on the southwest border in the United States with the border with Mexico. Obviously, in the first Trump administration, this was a big concern. Whether or not you have a border wall, you need to know what's going on. And so, we built this autonomous sentry tower, that was, you know, completely off-grid mobile, so you could pick it up and move it around. Had, you know, a solid state metamaterial radar, 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 going to go and take a look at. No, that's something that we expect to see. And over time you train that model. And that has now grown into a massive program. We cover an enormous swath of the southwest border and we're expanding constantly delivering more towers to get more and more coverage on the border. But the important thing about that initial work is that all the lessons that we learned from that, the AI computer vision system, the operating system for surfacing tracks to the users of the platform ended up being the exact same backend 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 is called Ghost, to interceptor missiles to submarines to autonomous fighter planes, they all have that same operating system on the backend that we call Lattice. And so we're still getting amortized research and development out of the very first thing that we started building 8 years ago.
Damn. Where did you guys come up with the list?
It was just, you know, sitting around with Palmer, me, Palmer, Matt, Brian, and Joe just, you know, riffing on what we think would make sense for us to build, leveraging that combination of software and hardware. And, you know, I'm honestly kind of surprised that we ended up doing almost exactly what we said that we were going to do at the very beginning.
Crazy. Do you have that slide with you by chance? I'd love to put that up.
Yeah. Yeah, I can show you the slide. Yeah.
Perfect. So what did come next?
So we went, the next product after the Sentry Tower was Ghost which is just a flying version of the tower. It's a modular payload drone that could do autonomous identification, detection, and tracking of targets. And so you can kind of think about it as like a helicopter with a pilot where you just tell it, 'Hey, I want you to go and do this mission. Like go and see if you can find things that look like this.' And then it would just go and conduct a mission and then report back to you when it was seeing things that were interesting. And these are now deployed all over the place. They're 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 the first version was not explosive. It would just fly like a bowling ball into a drone. And then we've continued to level that up into Roadrunner, which is kind of like a reusable interceptor. Barracuda, which is like a missile, more like an interceptor, cruise missile, and kind of expanding that out over time. But the goal is really like all domain, like you want to do 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 sharable on that front yet.
Damn. What are you guys doing in space?
Actually all of our space stuff is classified. So that's like the one domain that I can't really say much about.
All right. How about under the sea?
Yeah. So we have a whole platform called Dive. Different sizes. DiveLD, which is a large diameter dive, is like the size of a pickup truck basically. Again, same software. You know, you send it out on missions and it can do everything from pipeline inspection to, in theory, you could do kinetics. You could, you know, drive it into the side of an enemy warship. We started a joint venture with the Australian Navy to build an extra-large version of Dive that's called Dive XL. Really clever 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. We 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 under sea. And so we also have Copperhead which is kind of like a modular payload delivery vehicle under sea which is kind of a euphemism for a torpedo without saying torpedo. But yeah, we're always building new stuff in 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 and getting these to the end user?
Yeah, know it's a good question. I mean the, as far as like doing things at limited scale, like we can ramp pretty quickly into the limited rate production on all of these. I think, you know, the example of Sentry Tower. I mean within a year of the company starting we were rolling these things out in production. With Roadrunner, I think it was like 18 months from the beginning of that program until we were delivering units into the field. And this is for a reusable cruise missile. I mean this is like a really complicated product. With Dive it was, you know, roughly on that same timeline call it 18 months. The challenge of course and the thing that we're focused on primarily as a business right now is production scaling. Like how do you go from building hundreds of things or single-digit thousands of things to building tens of thousands of things. And I think the name of the game in this autonomous future for national security is what we would call a tradable mass which is like, you know, are we building $15 billion aircraft carriers, $300 million fighter planes in, you know, very small unit numbers or are we building thousands or tens of thousands of much less expensive things that have comparable capabilities or better capabilities that if we lose them in combat it's not the end of the world. Like you can resupply that stuff really quickly, but our production capacity in the United States has totally atrophied. We just don't even have the capacity to do this anymore. And this is really what our focus is right now. We're building a huge factory campus in Ohio to enable us to ramp production capacity. And it's a new muscle for the business. Kind of in the same way that, you know, Tesla went from building the Roadster to building the Gigafactory and starting to sell hundreds of thousands and millions of cars.
Mhm. How big is the manufacturing facility in Ohio going to be?
Yeah, I mean, long-term it will be around 5 million square feet. The first building is going to be just under a million square feet. And that will be up and running in the late first quarter of 2026 and moving pretty fast.
Thanks. Yeah, that's awesome. It's a sort of a weird homecoming for me. It's like I left Ohio and now I'm going back and, you know, working on this crazy factory. Got to bring my mom to the ribbon cutting ceremony.
Dude, how, I mean, she's got to be just so proud, you know, to see how far you've come, you know, in life and with everything you're doing now. What's that feel like for you to be able to bring your mom to that facility?
Yeah, I know. It's really cool. I mean, I was talking, I just spent some time with her this weekend back home and I was talking to her about like what our family story has been in Ohio and she was kind of going through the list of all of these factory jobs that my family had had. It was like my grandfather worked at, one of them worked at 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. And that was the story of my family. I mean, that was it. And so more than just like coming back and being like, 'Hey, mom, look, I'm doing this cool thing and we're doing it in Ohio.' It's really about like reinvigorating this family story. Like we need to bring production back to America. And it's very cool to be part of bringing that back to my family story. In addition to just doing it at a more macro level.
How are you guys, I mean how is Anduril finding the people that have the skills to do this? Because I mean it's been so long since we were in production and manufacturing.
Yeah. It's been, I mean how long has it been? It's been at least 20 years.
I mean all this sort of started falling apart I guess when I was in high school which was like 20 years ago. You know all the steel production left Ohio. There were huge steel companies in Ohio. Armco was I think the biggest employer in Middletown where JD is from and, you know, none of that is there anymore. My uncle worked at Mound Steel which was another big steel producer in Southwest Ohio. It's no longer there. So, you know, I think there's definitely 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. You know, automotive OEMs, there's a lot of production that left Dayton that's coming back, glass manufacturing, things like that. And so, there is still kind of the industrial blood in the water. But, you know, some of it will be reskilling people and bringing more of that back through education, through continuing education programs. You know, kind of the craziest thing to me about the way that we've been approaching this for the last
Decade is that like the government could not have gotten this more wrong. Like if you go back to Obama and you look at the like upskilling programs that they were doing, it was all software development. They were like running, you know, coding boot camps, teaching people how to write code. What's the first job that's going to be replaced by AI? Coding. That's like that is the thing that is going to be hit the hardest at like mid-tier, lower tier, mid-tier software developers. Like we should have been training people to build stuff like we have to re-industrialize. This is like absolutely critical for our country and we just totally, you know, swing in a mist on that for the last 10 years.
Will you guys be using a lot of humans for manufacturing or will that eventually become an AI manufacturing facility?
Well, I mean we're going to implement all sorts of technology in our production system. Like there will be autonomy, there will be robotics. All of that is absolutely true. But we're also going to employ thousands of people. That you need to be able to do that.
If you're building up like a simple, you know, simple, I use very loosely, but if you're going to set up like an assembly line for something that's going to be produced over and over again, certainly you can like build in entire steps of that that can be purely automated. And you know, this is what companies like Tesla have done significantly better than the traditional automakers. But you also have a bunch of people involved and you're constantly moving things around. You know, like the government isn't just going to have an insatiable demand for any single one of our products. We're going to have to make the factory modular enough that we can be responsive to the needs of the warfighter. So sometimes the factory might be pumping out autonomous Fury fighter planes. At other times it might be pumping out Roadrunners. At other times it might be pumping out Barracudas. And so moving that around, reconfiguring the space so that we can meet those production demands.
There's gonna be a lot of people involved with that.
So it will be, so the production facility will be, it will do one product at a time.
Well, I mean the idea is that it will be modular and flexible and so you know we can reset things to, you know, rebuild these lines that enable us to scale. The Ukraine story is a great example here. So, you know, despite what most people think, the supply that the United States was giving to Ukraine was mostly Cold War era technology, Javelins, Stingers, things like that. These things were built in like the '60s and the '70s. And when we realized that we were burning all of our inventory in that supply mission to Ukraine, it's not like the manufacturer of those weapon systems had active production facilities. Like, they didn't exist. Like these companies were pulling people out of retirement to rebuild assembly lines to make these weapon systems. And so, this is what we're trying to avoid. We want to build the institutional knowledge to be able to turn quickly to produce the things that have demand and to do it in a single space so that we're not over-specializing those spaces for single systems.
And a lot of, so a lot of your guys' products are significantly cheaper than the stuff that we're using today.
Correct. That's the goal. I mean, everything we build should at least be, you know, a few times less expensive than the alternative.
Would you say it's better than what we've been using?
Well, I mean, part of this is like a question around how exquisite you're building it. Like, are you building something that's like a Frankenstein that has to do everything well? I'm sure you've heard stories about the F-35, which is like when you're building a joint strike fighter that you're going out to every one of the services and you're saying, 'Marine Corps, what do you need? Air Force, what do you need? Navy, what do you need?' And then you're building that aircraft that meets the needs of all those services. Well, you end up with a $300 million airplane. Norm Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin, sort of tongue in cheek said, I think it was 2050 was his mark. He said, 'By 2050 the entire defense budget will buy exactly one airplane.' Like that's basically the track that we're on. We're on this track that we're building these overly complicated things. And yeah, they're actually pretty awesome. Like the capabilities of the F-35 are 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, you know, thousands of man-hours to build a single unit. I think the answer to that is clearly yes. So in some cases it'll be like, you know, over the horizon totally new technology that changes, you know, a CONOP. In other cases it's just a much lower cost version of something that is a great capability that we just don't have the ability to even buy if we wanted to at scale.
Gotcha. Gotcha. Well Trey, let's take a quick break. When we come back, I want to talk about the helmet and where you guys are at with that.
All right, Trey, we're back from the break. Dude, nice shooting.
That was fun. It was good.
You don't shoot often, do you?
I mean, I shoot a fair amount. I have a clay target range at my house in New Mexico, and I, you know, I grew up with a hunting dad, so we would shoot in our backyard all the time.
