Mother Jones illustration; Ik Aldama/dpa/Zuma, Ben Birchall/PA Wire/Zuma
Despite reaping billions in the weapons industry as cofounder of the military-tech company Anduril, Trae Stephens says he does not believe that “wartime profiteering is ethical, really, in any way.”
That was just one takeaway from an hourlong conversation he had with Gwyneth Paltrow on her Goop podcast last week, during which Stephens held forth on God, great power conflict, the male loneliness crisis, and what he thinks the Pope really meant when he said “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
At first glance, they make a strange pair: Paltrow’s known for hawking vaginal eggs and antidepressive flower essences; Stephens sells drones. But the Goop podcast is actually the perfect stage for Stephens to do a little reputation-management for Anduril, which develops unmanned submarines, border-surveillance towers, missiles, and “smart battlefield” technology, with the aim of killing thousands more cheaply than traditional weapons might.
As for Paltrow’s role in the reputational war, on last week’s podcast, she appeared determined to make weapons-tech legible and even appealing to Goop’s affluent, wellness-focused audience. She sympathized with Stephens’ plan to build up America’s military arsenal, because of her trauma around the Cold War and 9/11: “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 gonna bomb us.”
Each spoke of their childhoods, and their children. Stephens wondered whether his children could be proud of him “without feeling like they’re in this really weird twilight zone where they’re constantly having to defend with their peers what it is that their dad does for a living.” His job is, after all, “complicated.”
Paltrow, charitably, responded that “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 to a certain degree.”
But the ease with which Paltrow and Stephens traded thoughts on light and darkness elides the morally questionable convergence of woo-woo, hippie aesthetics and the Silicon-Valley defense-tech universe. It comes amid a larger rightward turn in both Silicon Valley and American wellness culture, perhaps best exemplified by the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Things got particularly odd when the two dug into religion. Stephens, a devout Christian, brought up the Pope’s Palm Sunday homily, in which Leo XIV declared that “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those that wage war.”
“You could look at that and say, wow, what am I doing?” Stephens said. “Like, the Pope himself is telling me that the thing that I’m doing is bad.”
Luckily for him, Paltrow was there to apply a thick layer of mystical equivocation and soften the blow.
“You could approach it from a more mystical aspect of Christianity, like, as opposed to taking it literally,” she said. “This is just a random hypothesis. It’s occurring to me. If you were using it as a metaphor of someone who is engaged in against-ness all the time, you know. It could’ve been something more mystical or metaphorical.”
Stephens liked that. Warmongering can be good, he seemed to interpret, if only done with a pure heart, and without against-ness. “And so if you’re approaching it with a heart of peace, I think it’s very different on a mystical level than approaching it with a heart at war.”
