The Shawn Ryan Show
#245 Trae Stephens - Inside Anduril’s AI Superweapons: Eagle Eye Helmet and Autonomous Tech
16 Oct 2025
Full Episode
Trey Stephens, 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 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 Stephens, 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 Sol and wearable e-reader, so you can read without distraction.
intern at the Afghan embassy in D.C., an early Palantir employee who helped turn data into Intel, a husband, a father, a devout Christian. You're unapologetic about your faith in Silicon Valley. In fact, you preached to tech entrepreneurs in 2024 on how Jesus would approve of building of righteous AI weapons. You are a sneakerhead and a prepper.
Yeah.
All those things. Love the prepping. Love all of it. But yeah, I wanted to talk about, you know, in 2024, you preached to tech entrepreneurs on how Jesus would approve of righteous AI weapons. There's not a whole lot of Christians out there from what I know.
There are not. It is a pretty godless city with a pocket of really strong believers and community. Do you get a lot of pushback for that or for being a Christian out there? You know, when I first moved to San Francisco, that was kind of my expectation, that it would be sort of hostility. But I haven't experienced that at all.
I feel like really smart people, they generally think of Christians as being simple-minded. And so when you come at them and you're clearly not simple-minded, they're just curious. They're like, I don't get it. How could you be both smart and also have this kind of crazy faith that I don't take seriously?
And so it's actually been a great opportunity to open doors for people just asking those questions and being able to go into apologetics, explain to them why You know, I think that their lack of faith is just as much of a faith as mine. Like you have to be kind of crazy to believe that all of this came from nothing over millions and millions of years.
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