Welcome, welcome, welcome to Our Armchair Expert, Experts on Experts. I'm Dan Sheppard, and I'm joined by Monica Padman.

Hello.

Hello. We have a very unique topic we've never covered in the past. It involves war in the military. We have Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchoff. Raj is a serial technology entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, and a former director of the Pentagon Defense Innovation Unit. And Christopher Kirchoff is an expert in emerging technology, and he helped create the Defense Innovation Unit, which he continues to advise for. So their book, which they have out now, is called Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War. These two lay out an assessment of how insanely out of date most of our military stuff is.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

Yeah, there's some shocking incidents where you're like, that can't be true. There can't be a several hundred million dollar plane with the operating system 100 times slower than an and yet it is. So this was fascinating to me. Please enjoy Raj and Christopher. Wundry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wundry Plus in the Wundry app or on Apple podcast, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcast.

He's an armchair expert.

He's an armchair expert.

This would make you happy. That door is about two days old. This used to have no door. I spied the post. You already saw it. Yeah, awesome. This used to hang proudly right there. My wife hates it. Monica doesn't love it. So now it's been...So my favorite.It's.

Not my favorite?

I love military vehicles. It didn't make the cut.It.

Didn't make the cut. Raj and I got a big fight over the cover because the F-35 is the latest and most modern fighter jet. But he's an F-16 pilot. Of course, he wanted an F-16 on the cover, and the publisher was trying to say, it's not as advanced as the other. And Raj wasn't into that answer.

Well, Raj, I hope you incorporated this into your argument that I think, iconically speaking... Well, no, this doesn't work either. Really, the F-14 Tomcat, you could make a real argument for that being on the cover.

That was a cool airplane.

It's the most iconic because it's a top gun. What would they fly in the new top gun? F-18s. Okay. Also could have made an argument for the F-18.

I mean, F-16 I could kick an F-18's butt.

Oh, okay. So the F-18, it's only advantage as it can be launched off of a carrier. Exactly. But the F-16 is fastest and most nimble and all that. Exactly. So you guys are going to quickly bond over being in rural Georgia with your parents. I know.

I saw your background in Duluth. I grew up in Warner Robbins. No way. My parents still live there.

My parents as well. Everyone's hanging out in Georgia.

Fun. You're eating that good food?

Yeah. Eat it up?

Do your parents love cafeterias?

Only if they have Indian food, I guess. Okay, yeah.

Well, my mom, my dad doesn't love cafeterias.

No, he likes standard fare. No, he likes standard fare.

Applebees, chili. Suburban food. I was at the Americana, which is a mall here, an outdoor mall this weekend. It's just like suburban at its core. It made me so nostalgic. I love suburbia.

You might move back.

I'm not ruling it out. There's something very safe about it to me, but probably because we grew up like that.

What age were your parents when they came? Chris, do you go by only Chris or Chris? Yeah, just Chris. Perfect. Okay, I'm going to exclude you for a minute as we go through Raj's story. Then we're going to go through your story. Then we're going to go through your combined story. Then we're going to defame the government. We're all going to hug. It's all going to happen here in the next 78 minutes. But when did your parents come?

My parents came to the US in the early '70s when they changed the rules or removed the quotas and America needed doctors, engineers. There's a whole flood of Indians and Vietnamese and Chinese that came.

In which box did Did your parents check?

My father was a doctor, so he did his residency here in the US.

Oh, wonderful. In Atlanta?

No, actually at Henry Ford Hospital. In Detroit? In Detroit. So he came from a place that's never seen snow to maybe too much snow. Wow.

That's a big adjustment.

Home of the Betty Ford Clinic over there, too.

Yeah. Henry Ford Clinic is where he did his residency.

How did he end up in Georgia?

We progressively moved south to warmer Climes. More appropriate climate. He went to Kentucky, and then we ended up in Georgia. Set up a private practice, probably delivered a thousand babies in rural Georgia.

He was an OBG. What's the G-Y-N? When did we switch from just-Gynecologist. We used to just say OB, but now we do the whole thing. It doesn't really matter. Mom, what'd she do?

She worked as a medical technician until She had me and then my sisters and helped raise us.

You were growing up in Georgia and you're obsessed with airplanes as a little boy?

Absolutely.

Starting from what? Top Gun?

Top Gun, seeing air shows. There's an Air Force base in my town. Oh, no kidding. I grew up watching jets fly around, and they had an annual air show where you could go in and touch and feel and sit in the cockpits. I said, Boy, this would be cool to do one day.

I don't know that people realize how dangerous air shows are. As far as spectator events go, they're probably at the top of the list of potentially fatal.

Got to know what you're doing. For who?

For the spectator?

Sure. There's always the most spectacular. They always go viral. There's always these spectacular crashes at the end. They're showing off a little bit. Sometimes they're in older airplanes, probably.

You I'm a load of the ground. Marging for air is a little lower.

Low to the ground is an issue. Okay, so when do you decide you're going to pursue flying?

When I graduated high school, I wasn't quite ready to sign up for the military. I go up to the northeast, Princeton, for undergrad. It was there that I actually got my policy license, like 50 hours in a Cessna, realized I love flying. I started off as a pre-med engineer, every immigrant's family's dream. All of it, you did it all. I did it all. But then freshman year, I dropped out of engineering. Sophomer year, I dropped out of medicine path. Then junior year, I decided, You know what? I'm going to join the military. Totally a black sheep.

Okay, but you finished, obviously. You got a VA from Princeton. What happens after college? When do you end up flying in combat?

I went to officer training school after graduation. I had signed up pre-9/11, and I ended up going to flight school in December 2001. I was actually living in Manhattan on the 11th. But we knew what we were training and learning, we were going to get to use. Then I spent about five years full-time in the military, and I've been a part-timer since, but ended up deploying and going to the Middle East three times. Three times? Two to Iraq, one Afghanistan.

What year Afghanistan?

Afghanistan was my last tour, so that was 2012. Okay.

You also ended up getting an MBA from Penn.

I did.

What age was that?

That was after my full-time tour. I went back and I was a consultant for a year, making PowerPoint slides at McKinsey, and then did two years of business school. I was early '30s.

When When you, quote, retire as a pilot, is there a wide open door for you to enter the military-industrial complex? Is there many jobs waiting for you to consult?

Perhaps. I didn't really pursue that, but I stayed in the reserves. I wanted to keep serving I wanted to keep flying. And so I stayed in the reserve for many years, to this day, in fact. Okay, yeah.

So if they ever needed you, you would be ready to go.

Exactly.

And then you became a serial entrepreneurial startup investment person. And that's post-MBA from Penn?

That's post-MBA. I realized I'm just really not a good employee, and I wasn't going to be hired as a CEO somewhere, so I had to start my own company.

And you had a bunch of success in that. Okay, now, Christopher, a buck I. You didn't go to Ohio State, but you're an Ohioan. Yeah, I grew up in Columbus. And I'm a Wolverine, so there's beef.

We're at least 10 feet apart.

But we put our differences aside when we would meet at Cedar Point.

Oh, my God.

Second in a row. You must be very familiar with Cedar Point.

Do you remember riding the Magnum for the first time?

The XJ 220? Yes.

We just did this. We just had a Michigander on earlier today. We spent an hour talking about Cedar Point and the Magnum and the millennial.

The Gemini, the millennial. The millennial, the fox or whatever. Because he had the wooden Gemini, which was like the throwback toaster that your parents could relate to. The wood would creep.

The noise.

The Magnum. It was like the Starship enterprise. It was the new thing right there on Lake Erie.

Fastest, highest.

Kristen was first there for opening day.

Yeah, it's quite a bit of bragging rights here in the household.

It's like we don't talk about Six Flags like they talk about Cedar Point. It's because it's garbage. No.

Yeah, it doesn't compare to Cedar Point. That's exactly the way you don't talk about it. We're just humble. You'd be better off going up to Kings Island from where you guys were located.

I don't even know what you mean, but I think that was rude.

They have the beast. Okay, so you're in Ohio, and what tickles What was your fancy?

Growing up, super nerd, runner, got into Harvard, which is fun. I'm the first kid in my high school to do so, so I wasn't going to say no to that.

Can I ask what mom and dad did?

Mom was a teacher. Dad was a conducting professor at Ohio State. So we grew up around Ohio State University.

Did he want you to go there?

There was a lot of pressure. Their view as the honors program at Ohio State is fantastic. My parents were each the first in their families and the only ones actually to go to college. They came from a very humble place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with German immigrant parents. For them, the Ivy League, it didn't make sense for them to think of their kid going to the Ivy League. But luckily, I had a high school principal who was smart enough to push me in that direction. I'm so grateful for her intervention because that made a door open that otherwise wouldn't have.

Then after Harvard, you go over to Cambridge and get a PhD?

Yeah, it was phenomenal living in the UK as an American as the Iraq war is kicking off, the second Iraq War, seeing America through other people's eyes, getting to have European and international classmates, going home with them, meeting their families, doing a lot of backpacking and traveling.

What do you think that experience did to your worldview?

Well, it certainly broadened it. Backpacking in countries that maybe don't have nearly the wealth that America does. I got a chance to live in Cairo for a month during the early stages of the Iraq War when Abu Ghraib, when that scandal was becoming public. Not a great time to be American. Well, you're out at cafés with your American-loving, English-speaking, Egyptian friend, and we're all looking at the same picture on television. What do you say? So that was an introduction to US power used very inappropriately and seeing firsthand repercussions of that globally.

It's very easy when you're here in the bubble to not think of our role on the international stage. But once you leave, you recognize however present we are in every conversation because we are this 800 pound guerrilla. And I don't think we think about it much when we're here inside of it. But it doesn't take long being outside of it to recognize we're changing the course of the river so dramatically and everyone's got to respond to it. And how could anyone not be minimally a little scrutinizing of that? Because when we decide to do things, it ripples across the world in so many ways. You need to leave here to actually witness that and feel it. I remember I was doing a movie in 2003 in New Zealand, and we had just done some invading, and there was a Vidak, and someone had written USA in spray paint, and the S was a swastika. And I was like, Oh, that hurts. I don't like that. That's a bummer. It's worthwhile to just pop out and glance through the windows.

We were in India at the beginning of the year, and we were privy to some meetings we should not have been privy to. We just happened to be a fly on the wall a little bit. And they were talking about the American election coming up, and it is so interesting hearing another country talk about this election and how it looks. It looks one way to us, obviously in it, but hearing the outside is like, oh, boy.

Yeah. The season of America. Yeah, the season of America. That's right. As they all watch. Okay, so you end up with the PhD in political science. Yeah. How does one apply that trade once you get that PhD?

Well, I got lucky in that many years earlier as an undergraduate, when I started doing summer internships, I realized right away that I loved working in teams rather than solely in a study Carroll writing papers. I knew right away that academia wasn't going to be for me. Then I fell in love actually with science policy. I got a chance to work a couple of summers in the White House Science Office. I set that as my North Star, going into technology policy. I studied aspects of the sociology of technology for my PhD and then had worked. Actually, I dropped out of graduate school three times to take different government jobs. Oh, wow. That was a fantastic way to set up your career. But by the time you graduate, you actually have a network and a sense what you want to do, in a sense, more importantly, where you want to go.

Yeah. So maybe this would be a great time to lay out a historical foundation for the military-industrial complex, for the government's role in both technology. We have had so many technological breakthroughs that have been war-derived. Of course, the Manhattan Project, vulcanization of synthetic rubber for World War II, all these different crises during wartime have led to great technological advancement. So let's just start with how this whole system set in motion. Sure.

Historically, the ability to produce and innovate industry is what has allowed America to succeed and have this dominant military force. You reference World War II. We outproduced every other country in airplanes and ships and technology.

Bing, ding, ding. Henry Ford Hospital converting some factories into airplane factories.

Exactly. Henry Netzen and Kaiser that revolutionized the industry. Then it goes on from there. At the end of that war, we had nuclear weapons, and it just continues. But back then, the US government was the single largest funder of research and development in the US and in the world. Technologies that were invented for the military or even NASA I think Velcro, then came down to the commercial. Gps. Gps, guidance systems, computers, all of these things started in the government. But then there was this revolution where the consumer electronics and computers for private enterprises, that R&D began to outpace. Those lines crossed in the mid '80s, and now there is far, far more investment in the private sector. But the challenge is the government hadn't reformed. They still acted and had processes like they were the single biggest buyer in the world. That works when you're buying aircraft carriers. It fell down when you think about the revolution of iPhone or cloud computing.

Yeah. Would it be fair to say that they were great at is funding enormous projects that required so much startup capital that no privateer could have possibly done that, generating the return from the marketplace? The initial investment was so enormous that they were going to have a monopoly on that.

Exactly. The things that they were buying, aircraft carriers, there's only so many of them. It wasn't a huge market. Even if you think about big computers, mainframes, the government was the biggest buyer, and that's who you sold to.

A couple of libraries had them. Bill Gates lived next to one, thank God. Right.

No one thought you'd have more power in your iPhone than the latest fighter jet in your pocket. It's a whole different world now.

I guess also, can we say there was probably some incentive, or maybe it was fear-based, that there should be this impermeable wall between what they're working on in the Defense Department and what the consumer has? It could have started with a kernel of good faith. They needed to have their own technology that would be separate from individuals and citizens?

Yeah. We talk more about what's happening in this divide between the valley, the consumer world, and the Pentagon. It's all for good intentions. The government's full of patriots that think they're doing the right thing. They just couldn't fathom that small little startup companies starting in garages would ever outpace the billions of dollars that they were investing in military-grade type of things. So it was a fundamental disconnect in frames of thinking.

Also in the business landscape, some of these companies, the DuPonts, right? Some of these 3M, these humongous monolith companies, IBM, these were companies that were built on government contracts. If you wanted a huge Fortune 500 company, that was a good place to look. But now all these other companies start dwarf these original, previous generation monoliths.

Yeah, you look at Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, each one has 3X the market cap of the entire defense industrial base combined.

And so they used to have all of the leverage. These companies were among the biggest. They had the most lobbying money, I would imagine. We got to get into what grift was going on because I'm sure it was plentiful. As that whole landscape changes, no one there is adopting to it. I think a great real-life example is you flying an F-16 above Iraq on the border of Iran. And explain what happened in that scenario.

It's 2006. I'm in my first combat deployment, mixture of excitement, fear, and duty, and all of that nervousness washes away when you actually sit down in the jet and strap in for your first mission. But you go off, and our mission is to support our ground troops, Marines, army folks on the ground. We're doing a lot of operations on the border of Iraq and Iran. F-16 is an amazing airplane. It has GPS, at the time, the world's most maneuverable fighter. But we are circling around those troops we're helping on the border at 500 miles an hour. If I look down on my screen, there's no moving map. There's no easy way to know exactly where I am on the border. At 500 miles an hour, it doesn't take you too long to go in the wrong direction. God forbid, you start an international incident or even worse, the general finds out and sends you home in a ball of embarrassment.

I'd imagine some are even automated. There's anti-aircraft artillery on the border. If you skew eight miles into their airspace, you might inadvertently deploy some We don't know what's going to It could be very bad.

That same year, though, I could rent a small Cessna aircraft and have a moving map on the predecessor to the iPad, this compact IPAC. That whole thing cost maybe a couple of hundred bucks. It really struck me. Why does my $30 million jet lag behind what I'm using to play Tetris back in the barracks. We were flying single-seat aircraft. A lot of us were like, You know what? We're going to fly with these things strapped to our leg and use them to make sure we're on the right side.

You were Using a consumer product that was $300 in a $20 million jet. Exactly. And that was a light bulb moment for you?

It was. It was the first realization this consumer technology world in the private sector is just different, and we need to find a way to access it.

Okay, if we had to pinpoint when the old paradigm started breaking down or being as effective as it could be, again, let's just remind people, so if you have the biggest Navy in the world, that's a good sign, right? If you have the most aircraft carriers, the history of warfare heavily favored those with this enormous industrial capacity and building these huge things and expensive airplanes. When does that start tipping?

So it's really the advent of software and the power of software that makes an airplane or a ship all the more effective. And in fact, what we would say a modern fighter jet is really a flying computer with the software providing the most capability. I'll talk over Chris in a second, but in 2001, Secretary Ash Carter, while he was teaching at Harvard, wrote a seminal paper saying that the future of military deterrence and power will originate from adopting commercial technology, from machine learning, from computers, from what software can do. That was the first time that a senior defense policy leader really wrote that and advocated for that. Fifteen years later, he was in a position to implement the change he had predicted.

To root us in history here, the Cold War ends, and there's this notion that we have a peace dividend. We've been spending an enormous amount of our nation's wealth protecting ourselves, protecting our allies. We have an enormous military that because we no longer have a societal threat, we can wind down. At that moment, there was a lot of consolidation in the defense industry. The military did get smaller, military budgets got smaller. But that was also the moment that, historically, government R&D, which had been in the lead, flatlined right as the technology technology economy took off. If you're in the military or a military scientist, you're used to darpa every five years inventing just something amazing, whether it's GPS or stealth technology, like a real game changer. You just assume, Okay, well, that's going to keep happening. But if you don't realize that the trends are now working against you, that actually, corporations like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, as they grow into BMS, are going to have thousands more engineers, computer scientists working on pioneering advanced technology. If your lines of vision are turned towards the military's labs and the companies that the military typically works with and not the technology economy for consumer devices, you miss this revolution that a few people did spot as it was starting to happen.

How much of the problem with relying on Darpa or government-funded research and development, how much of their failing as a product of no competition?

Interestingly, Darpa is an incredible research lab, arguably one of the most successful in history alongside Bell Labs and a couple of other iconic places. But their track record of actually taking their leading edge innovations and getting them into the military. So actually having, whether it's the Air Force or the Army or the Marines or the Navy, adopt some of their technology is only middling. It's around maybe 50%, maybe even lower. That speaks to the inherent conservatism of militaries, and it's not just the US military, it's militaries everywhere who tend to want to do things the same way, because for them, large and significant change can be really scary. It's hard, absent a war, to actually test new systems and know they're actually going to perform. That's why we see in military history all these incredible transitions, whether it's from cavalry to mechanized Infantry, whether it's from the battleship to the aircraft carrier. But every generation or so, we typically get very surprised in war with a whole new paradigm of technology moving in.

Well, just to be specific in the book, it says, Initially, the cavalry did not want tanks.

It's really amazing. The British Navy didn't want steamships. There was a belief in the army that there was no need for airplanes, so we actually had to start the Army Air Corps, which became the Air Force. Once the Air Force started flying man bombers and fighters and intercontinental ballistic missiles and long-range missiles were invented, there was a belief that even we rely on those, that we still needed to have manned fighter aircraft in the lead. Then I got to watch the Air Force go through yet another transition with the advent of drone warfare when I was a young age in the Pentagon. These are technology revolutions that you have to catch in time. Because if You get behind the power curve of them and another adversary picks them up, you can be very surprised.

In the late '30s, there were folks that said, Hey, airplanes can drop bombs and attack ships. There was a famous general, his name was Billy Mitchell, that proved this and had a demonstration where they sunk a Navy ship with airplanes. Everyone thought, Hey, this couldn't be possible. This guy's a quack. Even after he demonstrated that, they ended up courtmarschaling him and removing his rank. It's really hard to go against these entrenched interests.

Have you guys spent any time in trying to figure out what motivation creates this? Because right on the surface, I would say, Well, you want to do what worked in the past. The last thing you did that you were successful at, you're prone to want to repeat that. Secondly, though, I would imagine it must suffer a little bit from the actual ranking system of the military, that it's so hierarchical and that the people that end up in positions of power are generally going to be older. You think that's in the recipe of why militaries are so traditionally conservative.

I agree with that. I mean, there's a lack of imagination. The other one is, if you're a senior general commander, you've risen to that by being very successful in the system that you grew up in. And so to say that, well, that doesn't even matter anymore. It's not, again, that these people are bad. It's just such a different frame of reference. You can't even think of this new world.

Yeah, you're almost asking them to embrace something that self-preservation would prevent them from doing.

Exactly. This is very generous, but could it be an ethical question of if we start adding in all of these things, how intense will it get?

It could be. I think you're onto something which is think about risk, because in the end of the day, what's the job of a military civilian commander? It's to deter war. If we have one, make sure it's not a fair fight for our men and women in uniform. If you're trying something new and you're really scaling it, you're taking risk. Is it going to work? If it doesn't work, that's bad. And not only your own job is at risk, but all the folks that it's supposed to support. So there is that conservatism. But the difference now is that change is happening so fast, and there are so many examples of what that change is going to bring that if we don't move and innovate, we're going to be in a really bad place and not be the preserves of peace around the world.

Okay, so one evolution that's happening is the tech evolution and the price of all these items, they just keep falling, falling, falling. That's one unique trajectory we're on. But then also the nature of warfare evolves from World War II, Vietnam, to Afghanistan, to where we're at today. Walk us through how wars were fought and how they're increasingly being fought.

Ukraine really has become the battlefield of experimentation. You can definitely catch glimpses in Ukraine of the future of war. Raj and I got a chance to visit by invitation of the general staff there last October and actually see some of the systems on the ground that we had helped develop when we were leading defense innovation at the Pentagon Silicon Valley office. What you're seeing is incredibly inexpensive drones because microelectronics have fallen in price, fighting alongside the set pieces of land war. So tanks, artillery, trenches. But interestingly, those drones over time are getting more and more effective. If you go back just a couple months ago, we gave the Ukrainians in the beginning of the war 31 and A1 A1 Abrams battle tanks, the most advanced battle tank in the world, not only in the US arsenal, near-arsenal of any of our allies. The Ukrainians have had to evacuate all 31 of those tanks from the front because a quarter of them were destroyed by Russian Kamikaze drones. Oh, wow. If you think about that in historical perspective, that could tell people like Raj and I that we're at one of those transformational moments where a century of mechanized warfare that began in World War I, where the tank began to replace Calvary could now be happy again with drones.

It's important to pause here and note that even Calvary was expensive to maintain. But the cost of a Kamikaze drone is what? Two, three, $4,000 versus a three or $4 million tank. If you're a modern military and you've made all these investments in things like tanks and you have to fight a ground war and your enemy has no tanks but is ready to invest a lot in drones, you're now really behind the power curve.

Yeah, and there's probably some temptation to throw good money at bad. You're already so hot committed to all this equipment you've paid for that to move off of it is really hard, emotionally.

It's not just emotional. I mean, there is a whole political economy and structure to the way in which the Pentagon budgets in five-year budget cycles that commit to advance buys. And a lot of the larger defense companies have figured out how to maintain political support, have wisely distributed the manufacturing of a lot of their large weapons programs across the United States. So many large weapons programs will be built in 40, 45, 47 US states. And so, of course, there's naturally a lot of resistance because people worry about job loss.

Congress has the power of the purse. So it's not that the Department of Defense can make its own decisions on what to buy. Congress has to decide how much money is going to get allocated at the Air Force or the Navy. How many ships are we going to actually buy? Congressional folks are in the business of being elected. Having jobs in your district helps ones get elected. And so there's that whole other influence side that self-feeds on this thing.

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Well, before we get into how you guys end up coming to work together, I would love to just touch in on some of the examples of where we're at just before you guys join forces and start DIU. Walk us through some of these ships and these jets. One of them that I found fascinating that's in the book is that the F-35, which became operational in 2016, that all of the designs for it were frozen in 2001.

This takes us back to the fact that in this country, we have two completely different systems for producing technology. We have one for the military, and we have one for everything else. The military one is a highly regulated one. This has to do with the fact that you can't go on Amazon and price shop for fifth-generation fighters, right? Yeah. There's really only a company or two or maybe three that can produce them. You host a competition, one of them will win. Then to make sure that the taxpayers's interests are being protected, the Pentagon has an elaborate system of auditing that actually makes companies that work with it develop a bespoke system of accounting so that their auditors can go in and check numbers so we don't have a $1,000 toilet seat and $500 hammer. But the problem is that this system is laborious, costs a lot of extra money to administer, and once you won the contract, there are no competitive pressures. Until then, we end up in this world where a jet whose design is frozen in 2001 doesn't actually start flying until 2016, 15 years later. Oh, my God. And think about how many generations of technology have come in between it.

That's why on the image of our book, Unit X, we have that F-35 fighter alongside an iPhone.

The iPhone wasn't even invented in 2001.

The iPhone currently processes information at 100X the speed that the F-35 does.

The original chip in the F-35 was about a Pentium 4. You have to go to the Computer History Museum to be able to find a working Oh, my God. They have upgraded So they've upgraded three times since. The third upgrade they're presently testing, it's not yet operational, but I can't wait until this fall. I'm going to go out and buy an iPhone 16. It's going to be great.

Yes, 16th iteration.

This brings us back to why the mission that Secretary Carter gave us to open up shop in Silicon Valley is so important. Because if you're going to be going after critical military technology at a time of changing paradigms of warfare, you better be getting the stuff that's being upgraded yearly, not the stuff that takes 15 years to go from drawing board to operational.

And what's the price tag on a F-35?

It's a $2 trillion program over 30 years. And so that's budgeting the cost of Air frames and also all the maintenance that has to go on and all the personnel to support them. Each aircraft is, what, 300 million?

Probably like 100 million to buy one and same amount to run it for 20, 30 years. Oh, my God.

How many drones is that? Someone divide 300 million by 3000. That's a lot of drones. Yeah. Again, you're so far down the line on this thing. For someone to stand up and go, Guys, honestly, we should just pull the plug on this entire thing. No one could do that, could they?

One of the things that has been a little bit frustrating to watch is there is now a very legitimate debate in Washington over which weapon systems we should provide the Ukrainians. We were just saying them F-16 jets now. Many people call for F-16s to be sent earlier. There's a concern on the one hand in the sitting administration that if we give the Ukrainians too many powerful weapons too soon, we could provoke Putin into widening his own war. But of course, the counter view is if we don't arm the Ukrainians to the teeth, how are they going to defend their own country. And so there's a super active debate going on about that where people are literally in a slugfest on television on the morning shows today on this issue. None of them are asking the question, maybe we should cancel the next aircraft carrier we just and spend the money on experimenting with drones, on experimenting with all these new experimental systems that look like they're going to change warfare quite quickly.

Now, really quick, is it fair to point out, though, I can imagine a debate happening where the last 30 years of war we've had have been smaller groups, weird landscapes. It hasn't been two superpowers going head to head on a battlefield for territory. So that in some sense, we do want all this shit. If we have a full-blown war with a G7 country, we do want the F-35 and the aircraft carriers. But then we almost need a different military that's handling all these insurrection groups and stuff.

Yeah, it's a really good point. It's not an either or. If we think about F-35s and some of these other very modern systems, we do need some of those things. They have some really amazing capabilities like being stealthy. That is what our industrial base builds really well. There's no commercial will need to have a stealthy iPhone. We need these technologies, but there's a difference between hardware and software. The current industrial base is actually really good at building hardware. If you want to build an aircraft carrier and keeper for 50 years or a nuclear submarine, we actually do a pretty good job. But the delays and the cost overruns are from software because the best software engineers are going to Google and Apple and others. So how do we disaggregate the software from the hardware? That's one. But I think that's pretty obvious. Now, it's really hard to actually make it happen. Chris and I were in charge of part of making that happen. That's one question. I think this next question, though, which is harder, is if we believe that drones are going to play a decisive role in the future and smaller satellites and other commercial type technology, what are we going to not do?

So we have 12 aircraft carriers. Should we have 11? Should we have 10? Now, those decisions are really hard. Everybody loves drones until you say we're going to have one less aircraft carrier.

Yeah, especially given what is our current most likely engagement, really. We're talking China, primarily, and you're talking about Taiwan. You're talking about trying to defend Taiwan right now. All of a sudden, aircraft carrier is damn well better have them.

But they may not be survivable. That's the issue.

We're like the bad news crew here today, bringing lots of bad news.

I'm trying to set you up for this terrible thing I read about the seconds.

There's another development that is happening in advanced militaries around a new missile that's called a hypersonic weapon, a hypersonic missile. So this is something that goes significantly faster than anything has gone before. And not only that, but unlike a traditional missile, which has a ballistic arc, it flies in a predictive way in the same way that you throw a baseball. These weapons are maneuverable. Right now, we have no effective defenses against them.

Right now, radar picks it up. They know the known arc of that size thing moving at that speed and they can predict an intersection point to shoot it.

Our destroyers and aircraft carriers are outfitted with specific systems to defend the carrier group against a ballistic and airship missile.

They're good at predicting where a ballistic missile will be traveling.

But hypersonic weapons, simply at this point, cannot be defended against because things like aircraft carriers are not stealth. They have a huge rate or cross-section. They're very easy to find. So the reality is that, like tanks, aircraft carriers are no longer going to be effective platforms for close-in fighting against advanced adversaries.

They're just too vulnerable with these new supersonic missiles. Yikes. Okay, so tell me how you two end up crossing paths. You're out doing a lot of tech stuff in Silicon Valley Silicon Valley, Raj, and you are working in the Obama administration.

Yeah, I'm a young political appointee in the Pentagon and at the National Security Council. Although it turns out Raj and I actually crossed paths in Iraq, of all places, because I served as a civilian there during his first combat tour, which means he was actually flying some of the combat air patrols over the Green zone and over convoys.

But I was very junior relative to the environs that Chris was advising. I was just a line pilot. But yeah, we had intersected a few times in DC DC. This is 2015. Secretary Carter, who is now Secretary of Defense, runs the largest bureaucracy in the world, 3 million people on a budget of 700 billion, and says, I'm now going to implement the change that I had predicted in 2001. So he comes out to Silicon Valley and is the first sitting Secretary of Defense to visit in over two decades, has this big meeting in Stanford and says, Hey, I understand there's a divide, there's mistrust. You have to understand this is right after the Snowden disclosures, where a bunch of tech companies said, Our intelligence agencies can't be trusted. In fact, they hosted the meeting when he spoke at Stanford, because I think Google didn't allow them to speak on their campus. And so he said, But I'm going to solve this. I'm going to put an office here, and we're going to drill holes between the divide. Unfortunately, what then happened was they took that office that he had envisioned, Defense Innovation Unit, experimental. You got to have an acronym if it's the Pentagon.

Yeah. It got pushed down to a couple of layers into the Pentagon staff, and some well-meaning people that didn't understand the valley at all came out there and said, Yeah, my boss wants me to do it. I'll help make it happen, but didn't put a lot of energy behind it. They had this team of 20 people in a sleepy army building in Moffet Field. When I visited, they were working on folding card tables and internet hotspots for six months because they couldn't figure out how to get internet in the heart of Silicon Valley. Oh, boy. It wasn't off to a really good start. But to Secretary Carter's credit, he had enough friends in the valley. He said, Look, this ain't working. You need to figure it out. So he's trying to do it from within. The people that they selected were just not of the valley. They'd never been there. They didn't have the network. They weren't set up properly. So to his credit, he decided to do a reboot. Chris and I got recruited to come in, along with two others, Vishal and Isaac, to take over, bring in a different view. Chris was an insider.

He knew how the Pentagon worked. He knew how Washington I just sold my first company. I understood a little bit how the Valley worked. Most importantly, he said, I'm going to take this unit, and Roger is going to report directly to me, direct report to the Secretary of Defense. So, barocracies are painful. But the good news about a bureaucracy is there's one person at top. And if they say jump, everybody jumps. And so we now had his backing, which was amazing, and we moved really, really quickly.

Okay, now was the goal handed to you, Bring us up to speed, A, or bring us up to speed, start leading us. And also, how much awareness did they have of what China was doing at that time, or is that something that the Unit X figured out?

They had a very good view of what China was doing. They knew we needed something different to counter that. Just traditional buying of equipment wasn't going to work. We needed to get things like artificial intelligence and cybersecurity into the mix. Our mission was, how do we accelerate the delivery of commercial technology into the hands of the warfighter?

You've got to, I imagine, go through the major military contractors because these systems will be implemented in the things they're making.

Yeah. Here's one of the most incredible moments that we experience. This colossus of a contracting process that I described earlier with its rules and regulations to prevent the expense of toilet seats and hammers meant that the average contract took 18 to 24 months to negotiate under something called the federal acquisition rules, which is like a dictionary size than a rules and regulations. So if you're a startup in Silicon Valley facing the pressures of being an entrepreneur and having to show your venture investors their potential return on their investment, you can't wait for two years for a contract to maybe or maybe not come through. And then if it comes through and you're successful in the first instance, you may not even get the second production contract because somebody with better lobbyists could come along. So we had to figure out a way of doing business at Silicon Valley speed. There's an incredible story we tell in the book about a woman, one of our colleagues named Lauren Daley. She was 29 when we met her. Her father actually was a tank commander in the army. Her way of serving was to become a civilian in the army and become an acquisition specialist.

Because she's a total acquisition nerd, she was up late at night reading the Just Released National Defense Authorization Act, the law that Congress passes that governs the Department of Defense. She came to Raj and I, our first week in the job, and said, Hey, there's a A single sentence in section 815 of the act that I think could allow us to do contracting really fast. Raj asked Lauren, That sounds great. Can you write this up? Lauren says, Well, here's a 20-page paper on how to do it. We have this incredible aha.

What was That's not one line?

It was inserted without the knowledge of a lot of other people by a renegade Senate staffer who was fed up at the old system of contract. The key innovation was to allow something led under a different form of contract to straight, if it worked at the pilot phase, into production. No renegotiation. What ordinarily would have been a four-year process to first get the initial contract, then recompete it for the production contract, could be telecomed down to a 30 to taxi day, work it out between the two parties.

Wow. This is saving literally years and years by one line.

No one saw this before?

It was amazing how this worm hole was built. Then Lauren and Chris get on a plane. Two days later, they Washington. They meet the top Pentagon acquisition lawyer. They meet the general counsel of the Pentagon, and they convince them that this is a good idea and legal. Then most importantly, Secretary Carter signs off on it by the end of the week. Now we have this new way of doing contracting, 60 days to meet an amazing startup and give them funds and a pathway to scale. Fast forward now, 10 years after Lauren invented this thing, over $70 billion worth of procurement by the Department of Defense has gone through what she's put together. Oh, wow.

So once you have that at your disposal, do you set up shop somewhere and start hearing pitches? Am I understanding it correctly, you are now in a position to basically be a venture capitalist with the government's money. You can hear pitches of great tech that would benefit the military, and you can deploy those people to start working. Absolutely.

We had an office in Mountainview, California. Then we opened one up in Boston, Austin, Texas, and of course, the Pentagon. Because actually all of our battles were there, not on the West Coast. And we built a team of about 100 people whose job was to match customers, meaning problem set owners in the Air Force, in the Navy. And we figure out which companies could solve them, and then we help put them under contract. It's taxpayer dollars. You have to be good stewards of the money. We have to be efficient and make sure there's enough checks and balances. But we moved really quick. And most importantly, you think back again to 2016, and most startups didn't want to work with the government. And in fact, their venture investors would tell them, Hey, don't spend time here. These contracts take 2-3 years. You got to make this 18-month gate. My first company was a cybersecurity company. My engineers were all from the National Security Agency, the government. We knew what we were building would have been valuable, but even our lead investor said, Just don't do it. When we sold the business, we had zero sense of government revenue.

We began to prove that, Hey, that's different. Now, there's a big boom in venture investing in defense technology.

Okay, so what I was curious is it hard to raise capital for these companies when you know there's a single customer. It's like your growth potential is weirdly augmented.

The Pentagon is really not just one customer. It's 800 different customers from within different offices. It's an $800 billion budget. Then you've got allies and partners around the world, civilian agencies, and depending on what they're building, because Silicon Valley traditionally wasn't building bombs and bullets. They're building software, low-cost hardware. There was other commercial applications to what they were building as well.

Walk me through an example of, as you said, there's customers, and I would imagine what you're saying is there's someone in the Air Force, and she's like, Here's this problem we have. We don't know what to do. They start, they come to you, they tell you the problem, and you pair them with some startup that you think might have a solution?

Well, we run a whole contest where we understand their problem. We were working with the special operators, and At the time, most of the conflicts were in the Middle East, and one of their missions was to go roll up suspected terrorists. You'd go to that suspected terrorist home, knock on the door, go in, try to identify them, and take them back for questioning. As you might imagine, the first guy that buss down a door of a potential terrorist house is under high risk of getting shot. The special operators were working on ways to solve that. One of their ways of thinking about it was to build an Ironman suit.

Sure. They had just seen the Why not?

Which is great, but it just violates a couple of laws of physics trying to make it actually work. They spend a billion dollars on it.

You got to track down Tony Stark first, which is hard.

Yeah, exactly. We said, Well, we met this really interesting drone company. It was a couple of engineers out of MIT, and one of the cofounders had actually been a Navy SEAL. Their idea was to use a small drone. We'll send a drone in. Maybe the first one's got a little explosive, breaks open the door, and it'll go in, self-navigate, and identify what's there. Is it a family? Is there three guys with guns? And then have that information so when US or Afghan troops go in, they have some knowledge. So that's another way of, Here's the problem, a different way of thinking about it, and now let's find the right set of companies to solve it.

And that device was successfully implemented? Was that developed in work?

I believe it was.

Shield AI is now giant. It's a unicorn.

That's the MIT guy's drone company?

Mm-hmm. We covered already how Congress is the holder of the PRRS. Imagine, Roger, and I, this is the appointment of our lives. Getting tapped personally by the Secretary of Defense for this really high-profile mission that is a zero-field mission for the nation. We really need to help the military make this pitted. Secretary Carter flies out on Air Force Two. His motorcade comes to Moffet Field. There's a row of television on camera as he announced as Raj and I and the two other members of our leadership team in front of a giant crowd of a who's who in Silicon Valley. Everybody goes to the bar that night and celebrates. This is the beginning of an amazing new venture. Then Raj gets a phone call two days later from a friend of his on Capitol Hill that says, I want you to know something. Your budget just got zeroized.

Oh my God. Zeroized. Zeroized. I don't know what that means, but it doesn't sound good.

Zero does not sound good when it comes to budgets.

So it doesn't only mean your budget is zero, which you would imagine, but it's done with prejudice, so the Pentagon can't move money around to support it. Budget is going to happen in three months. And so we just took this job and we're like, it's all going to be over. So we switched into to hyper drive to try to get projects done, show worth. But then I fly to the hill to understand this. I'm like, I can reason with these people. Let me just explain to them what we're trying to do and why it's a good idea. And what we learned is that there was a couple of Senate staffers or House staffers that were unhappy with Secretary Carter because these Congressional staffers and the members go on trips around the world, Congressional delegations. Well, the transport for those trips is provided by the an arm of Defense in some Air Force plane. For whatever reason, either Secretary Carter or someone on his staff, more likely, had not approved a few of these.

Well, let's just be specific. They wanted a golf stream. Oh, my God. They wanted a private jet. That's right. It's not like they were denied business class seats on Delta. That's right. On Delta, yeah. They asked for a golf stream, and they were told no.

To go on a vacation, essentially.

Well, I'm sure there was some work-related thing. Alleged. Even if it was dead work-related, the notion that they might have to fly private.

Exactly. The staff berates me for this, and I said, Well, the secretary doesn't work for me. I work for the secretary. But these were the kinds of challenges and individual things that we had to overcome.

Logistically, how does it happen? They set a budget for the Department of Defense, and it's $800 billion. That's right. Carter has direct say so on where that money is spent or no?

This is one of the secrets of government, is that even the President only has so much authority. You would think the Secretary of Defense could just control the budget of the Department. In fact, the budget of the Department is broken down into what? About 500 individual stovepipes.

20,000 line items.

To move money across any of them, you have to have the unanimous permission of four Congressional committees. Congress effectively has a veto. This is the design of the founders to have separation of powers between the branches of government, which prevents tyranny, but also makes innovation really hard.

And personal grievances.

Well, that's That's it. I mean, it's not a bad thing that Congress is stewards of taxpayer dollars and trying to protect it. But you think about it, $800 billion budget. There's probably 100 staffers that are in charge of this. Each staffer essentially controls $8 billion. So they have a lot of discretion. And so things like this, they have control over and they can influence the department. And so they knew that this project, DIU-X, was important to Secretary Carter, and they were going to hold it hostage.

Until they got a golf stream to Bahamas. Oh, my God. This is so stressful. I know. It's so petty.

Government is so stressful.

Yeah, that's one of my questions is, what are some of the insane and petty personal grievances within the government that prevented advancement? But tell us what happened the first time you guys go to Washington. You've been issued government credit card.

This is another can't believe it moment. We're on the airplane flying to Washington, and this is supposed to be our-Not a Gulf stream. Yeah, not a Gulf stream. Coach in United flying. This is supposed to be our grand arrival in Washington. Secretary Carter has just announced us we're going to go meet with the heads of each military service, all these four-star generals and admirals, and figure out what's most important on their list of things they want us to work with. In the middle of the flight, we get an email from the government rate hotel we're supposed to stay at, not the Ritz. They say, I'm sorry, but your government credit card has been rejected. Can you please provide us with another form of payment?

Oh my God.

It dawns on us that the first set of people that originally administered this office who had been taken out of the chain of command with the announcement, out of spite, rather than transferring our government cards, had just turned them off. Here we are landing, showering at the Pentagon gym for $8 because you're not allowed to check in to your hotel early and get it reimbursed under the government rules. And now we're having to pay for an Uber to go to Capitol Hill out of our personal credit card to go figure out why our budget budget was just turned to zero.

What a great start you guys were off to.

What a waste of time.

Let me ask a nosy question. Raj, you sold a company. If I volunteered to start working with the government for whatever reason, they've decided I would be a good asset for them. And they were like, Yeah, you got to fly coach. I'll pay for it myself. Then when I get there, I'm going to stay at a nice hotel. Were you allowed to do that?

You probably could have figured out, but this is week one. I'm trying to figure out the system. Not a great look. I want to stay where my team's staying.

I just think it's interesting. Think of Bad Boys. Mike Lowry was rich, the cop. So he drove a Ferrari. He didn't drive a cop car.

Another question is, why would you... You sold a company, and now you're washing your body in the Pentagon bathroom. Are you like, What am I doing? I can just go, What is this?

The advantage that the Pentagon, the government has, despite all the bureaucracy and pain, is that the mission is very noble. The mission is to prevent wars, and if we have them to win, and for all the mistakes that America has made, it is still the beacon of democracy and self-determination. It's the world's oldest democracy. My family, immigrants from India like yours, Monica, and the opportunities that me and my sister's got were absolutely incredible. My dad went from a small rural village with the electricity at 12 to his kids going to Ivy League schools. Where else are you going to get to do that? I think this is the advantage that the government has. They're the more high ground. It's like an tanker. It's really hard to move. Lots of brucuracy. But when you move, you've got a lot of mass going down a different way. In fact, when Chris and I were approached, we first said no, several times. I said no three times in this job. It seemed like a lot of pain. But they had this guy named Todd Park. He was the CTO of America, a very successful entrepreneur in his own right before going in to government.

He's the most convincing man I've ever met. He literally said, Look, this is the most important thing you can do for the nation in the world. You need to come in and do this. And he was right. And so we felt like we had the power and the backing from the Secretary of Defense to go do this. In the end, yes, there's all kinds of little pains that you have to go through. But when we were recruiting and building the team, man, we were able to get some of the best executives and technologists in the country.

Well, look, this is the very beginning of the country. George Washington did not want to be President. He certainly didn't want to be President in a second term. But you get called on. It's like, it's you or this thing crumpled. Anytime you can really get a sense that you're to have a true impact. Yeah, almost impossible to say no. So let's go through some of the successes you guys have. Tell me about getting called in and them telling you, Look, we need for you guys to figure out now that North Korea can launch nuke that will reach Seattle or LA, we have got to figure out how to down those or how to account for those.

When I was on the National Security Council, we would enumerate the biggest worries that we had, and North Korea was in the top five. The reason was their Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program, which had been faltering, was nevertheless progressing to a point, and they developed enough nuclear warheads that they could, for the first time, pose a credible threat of striking in the United States. We have a very elaborate missile defense system that is successful with high rates of accuracy, downing small numbers of incoming missiles. But the minute you get a certain number of incoming missiles, that system will ultimately fail. This is, of course, a zero fail mission. That puts incredible pressure on the military because the only other way to prevent North Korea from being able to successfully attack America is to actually strike that missile as it's being ready for launch on the ground. But this is incredibly difficult. North Korea is a large mountainous country. Because it's been essentially at war since the Korean War in the '50s, it has gotten very good at hiding its weapons in caves and moving them from location to location and then popping them out, literally in a few minutes, launching something and then going back into hiding.

Yeah, I was going to say, they don't have missile silos, right? They have these mobile units that can drive into position.

Well, this was what made their tactical position even stronger because Now all of a sudden, they're not any longer at fixed locations that we know in advance. They can move their mobile launches around. So this is where Silicon Valley comes in. So how can you possibly successfully find needles in a haystack? There's a commercial space revolution going on. Superpowers used to be the only entities that had spy satellites that could actually take high-resolution images from space and relay them back to the ground quickly. But now all of a sudden, you have a lot of commercial companies taking cheap hardware, literally taking iPhones and putting them on satellite busses. And because the cost of launching this into space had gone so much lower with the SpaceX and the arrival of competition in the space market, you could now very affordably launch small satellites. And so that brings us to a company that we found called Capella.

Capella was built by an individual named Payam. He was an immigrant from Iran. I think he was a JPL before. And then he was at Stanford, and this was his master's thesis. He decided to build a company that would build small cube satellites that would do synthetic aperture radar on the cheap and be able to, because it was cheap, instead of a multibillion dollar Greyhound bus, you can have a lot of them and have a lot of revisit rates. More importantly, ultimately, you could share that information because it wasn't classified like our exquisite system. It took a lot of machinations and a lot more bureaucracy busting to finally get it working. But if you look at some of the public images when Russia invaded Ukraine, it was Capella's satellite imagery.

Capella is not launching. Did they pay to be launched by SpaceX? That's right. And just to put it in a perspective, Elon Musk has launched 5,000 satellites of his own.

Eighty % of all masks that went to space last year was launched by SpaceX.

And an individual owns 5,000 plus satellites orbiting. So again, when you talk about them having to integrate with the private sector, It passed the point where, of course, you have to. Just for the government to catch up with Elon Musk, it would be years and years out.

This is all part of the shift that Secretary Carter spotted in 2001. And it's not just in Starlink and other Elon Musk space systems or access to space. It's also in artificial intelligence, which is predominantly driven by the private sector, and which is likely to become one of the defining technologies in conflict as well.

The only place we have a clear lead still.

Exactly. We have a clear lead, and large language models didn't originate in some government lab. It's in three or four companies in a 20-mile radius of San Francisco.

The solution to this North Korea issue was to be Are you photographing with this private sector company as much of the landscape as possible at all times and analyzing that to track the movement of these?

Yeah, that was the Capella play.

That's in action. That's currently being done.

It is. The project has moved on to when we were involved with it. But the idea is to leverage the much greater number of less expensive satellites that you can have gathering data. Then also to use AI algorithms to help you find those needles in the haystack. We're dramatically dramatically improving our situational awareness of what's happening around a key and very serious threat to the United States.

Yeah, I would imagine the good analogy or parallel would be the AI that reads radiologist images and they're diagnosing cancerous tumors at 82% versus a human. I imagine it can view all these images much more efficiently than we can.

It's not just that company. There's three or four other now commercial satellite companies. Again, to highlight different is from 10 years ago to now, there are hundreds of space companies being funded by the private sector. The other thing that makes us different, if you're building an aircraft carrier, you as a taxpayer, pay for all the research and development. We fund that, then we go buy it. Private sector is funding these technologies and taking that technology risk. It's actually unburdening even the US government for the cost of many of these things.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If You Dare. Okay, so some of the innovations that you two oversaw at the Defense Innovation Unit, let's list some of them. You've got the AI-powered drones that can fly into buildings and map the interiors. We talked about that for the Special Forces. Flying cars that can land like helicopters. Tell me about this pitch? Was this a customer first or did you get pitched by a supplier, basically?

Oftentimes, we'd hear both because we're constantly looking at companies and we're hearing problems. And then our team says, Boy, there's a new way to maybe do this. There was a tragic accident in Afghanistan where a Chinook helicopter got shot down by terrorists and a couple of dozen of our finest Special Forces warriors died. And so then the thought was, Instead of putting them all in one helicopter, can you have a bunch of smaller helicopters? Could they be more quiet? That's what electric motors did. And so there's a company called Joby that we had met, and we connected them with the Air Force, and we at DIU ended up buying the first vehicle and allowing the Air Force to test with it.

And they have them in their fleets, and they work?

They're We're going testing right now. So there's a whole bunch of them down at some of our test ranges where Air Force pilots are flying them and testing them. What do they look like? They look like a small four-person car, but instead of just one big propeller like a helicopter, it's got eight small little propellers. Then it takes off and then they turn forward, and now it flies forward, and it's all electric. Wow.

Are they doing the flying or is it all automated?

It's a little bit of both.

Oh, my gosh. I can't wait for that. Optionally manned. I hope that's huge, and then it bleeds down into the private sector for very cheap.

Well, that's really what they want to go after. While the government is great because they use them, they have testing ranges. In fact, they didn't want our money. They wanted access to test ranges. That's why they took the contract. They really want to build flying Uber Ubers. That's the market they want to go after.

Oh, my God. That's crazy.

Flying Ubers.

Flying Ubers.

Let's talk quickly about China, because I imagine as you were engaged in this project and you were having some success, there still must have been enormous frustrations around every corner. I imagine still to this day that you have great concerns about the rate at which this transformation is taking place. Let's talk about how China differs from us and what things they're able to do that's helping propel them very quickly in this direction.

First, it's important to take a step back and acknowledge that China, in just a generation, has taken nearly a billion people out of poverty and is today our second largest trading partner. So unlike the Soviet Union, we have a much more complex relationship with China.

Mutually beneficial on a lot of levels.

But for sure, as a national security strategist, the worst fear of any national security strategist is not actually a terrorist attack or a war in the Middle East. It's a war between great powers. We haven't a great power war since the Second World War. Between the first and the Second World War, we had 130 million people killed. It's hard for any of us to imagine the implications of a great power war. The question, of course, then is, how can you prevent it? What are the steps you need to take to drive down the risk of great power conflict to the lowest possible amount? In military parliament, the steps you take are to increase deterrence. In other words, each individual situation where your potential adversary might be tempted for their own reasons, for their own motives to undertake an action, you want to have them outmatched and out foxed so that they know if they try that, that they're not likely to succeed. The theory there is that if you're not likely to succeed, if nobody is likely to succeed or benefit- Mutually assured an violation.

Exactly.

A huge push into the commercial sector for the Department of Defense to modernize its own arsenal was about taking our nation's military to the next level of sophistication. Because the Chinese with the newfound wealth that they've generated, have purpose-built their own military to be able to compete with ours.

They're not as trapped in the dogma that we are.

It's even more interesting than that. They study every US military exercise and conflict, and every conflict around the world. In fact, more than 120 papers have been written by Chinese academics about the conflict in Ukraine to try and pinpoint what are the weaknesses that we could capitalize on. Not only are you not beholden to a way of doing things, but you can actually purpose build your military to compete.

They're like watching game footage as a team preparing to play.

This is the reason why we can no longer, in our battle plans, anticipate bringing our aircraft carriers anywhere near the Coast of China or another advanced adversary without them getting sunk because of this evolution. So that's the backdrop to this great race to try and deter a potential great power war. But the systems that we each have set up to do that are very different.

China also recognizes that this commercial technology is really important, and they do have some advantages, particularly around low cost manufacturing. So 90% of the world's consumer drones are built by one company, DGI, that's based in China. The Chinese approach, or I should say the CCP, Chinese Communist Party's approach to this, is something they call Civil Military Fusion, which is CCP members sitting on the boards of these companies, basically knowing that they can, in time of need tell these companies what to do?

Well, they have an explicit directive, right?

Exactly. And the authority to do it because, well, it's an authoritarian government that can just do whatever they please.

So their mandate is anything that is developed by any private company that could benefit the military, the CCP, is ours to use.

Exactly. And we can change production and whatever we need to do in time of war. We don't do that here in the US. We have liberal Western ideals and values. We have a clear line between our private sector our government sector. We need to double down on what has made this country successful and have our own version of civil military fusion that doesn't compromise that. It's through incentives and contracts and human understanding. Part of the issue is that these worlds have driven apart, the DOD and the civilian world. Military service has almost become hereditary here in the US. You're a tenant likely to serve if your mother or father is served in the military. We've closed every active duty base in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is arguably a hotspot for technology. People that grew up there, they don't have the kids of servicemen and women in their schools. They don't run into them at church or the baseball game or wherever. Their understanding of the military is through Hollywood, which may or may not be exactly right. I think we have to figure out ways contractually and culturally to bring these worlds together.

We will have cooperation in time of need like we did in World War II, but none it's forced.

But the government needs a new publicist because it does not... People are, I think, understandably critical, and they don't know a lot about this, like what we can be doing to help.

And they should be. I mean, again, that's what makes this nation great, is that we can criticize and we can sharpen ideas.

Yeah. How much of this problem do you think stems from our relative distance from all these things we see going on in the world? Do you think your average person in America It's quite easy to tune out what's going on. And war seems, although you know it's happening, it's always so far from here, even the ones we've always waged. The only one we've had on soil is with Mexico and ourselves. So I would compare it to, vaccines suffer from their own success. None of us here have seen someone with polio, so we're not too worried now about polio. So how does that play into it? Do you think people would have more of this on their mind if they were in closer proximity to this?

This is not a new problem if we think about how we mobilize for World War II. There's fewer people then that had passports and traveled the world than today. So I think it's really incumbent on our political leadership to explain to the American public why is having treaty allies around the world important? Why is our relationship with Taiwan important? Why is NATO important? Why do these things matter to the American way of life and how we've benefited from the relative peace that the world's had? And so I think this is not a new problem, but we have to educate and we have to tell stories and tell it in a way that's not condescending and people can understand.

There's a bit of a paradox that people don't really broach much, which is no one wants to hear this, but if you want great peace, unfortunately, you probably have to have a humongous stick. We have to, in some days be overly prepared in order to reach this point you're talking about where people know it would be futile to mess with us.

It was fascinating for me, somebody who doesn't come from a military family who never imagined I would spend a career working in national to show up in Silicon Valley, having been part of the national security establishment for over a decade and served at high levels and seen how decisions were made and come to an understanding of the threats that we face and why we take some of the actions and not agreeing with all of them, but having a sense of things. I arrived in Silicon Valley and encountered that earlier version of me that was very alienated from the idea of the hard power of the military. People who were my age or younger who grew up remembering Abu Ghraib and the botched initial invasion of Iraq and other military misadventures. A lot of people were not particularly happy at that time with our campaign of drone strikes around the world because they read in the newspapers that there were, at times, a lot of civilian casualties.

I'll add in there. I think we've become increasingly aware of CIA blowback. We're aware of how the Taliban came about. We know that's from the Russian. We've learned that we've created a lot of the problems we're currently dealing with. So there's just an overall skepticism of the approach, which is very fair.

Very understandingly, there's also a revulsion to actually thinking through a weapon system and what it does. So you sit down with a really smart engineer who could capably make a self-driving car, and you ask them, Well, what about a self-driving tank? So you wouldn't have to have humans in it, and they don't want to have the conversation. Then you have to back up and say, No, I'm not like Dr. Strangelove who's in love with the bomb. I'm in love with the idea of building a military so sophisticated that we never have to use it because the cost, particularly of modern war, would be catastrophic. I mean, in a way that none of us really can imagine or appreciate. It takes a long time to walk someone through that moral chain of logic where investing in military technology is one of the essential ways to maintain the peace. Then once people begin to understand that, they become a lot more open then to working with people like Roger and I, Defense Innovation Unit.

Yeah, on the human level, if you meet a young officer, enlisted person, that's the tank driver, and you get to know them, and you get to know their families, you realize they're trying to do their job well. They believe in peace, and they're going to do whatever they can to support it, but they're going to be in that tank. And your technology might allow him or her to come home to their family. I think it just puts a different face to it.

Yeah, it's all very complicated. I have my own personal experience with the widget is in general, I've always been very against war. I've gone to Afghanistan twice on USO tours, and I've met all those dudes and women over there that are on top of a mountain for 72 hours straight with no water. It's a gnarly ass job that people are doing for us. I think whatever your position on it is, in theory, ideally, it should be as safe as possible for those people that are doing it for you. You should be very mindful of how to make that as easy for them and as safe for them as possible.

Exactly. Unlike other countries or other authoritarian countries, we have a say. You have a vote.

Yeah, it's just tempting to be naive, but in the current day, Russia has invaded other country. It's not really that theoretical. You can't really sit on the sidelines and say, Well, no, everyone's just going to play nice and the world's still nice. Unfortunately, it's still not very nice.

This invasion, what we saw in Israel on the seventh has, I think, woken up people in places like the valley that not everybody's going to play by the rules and be nice. Actually, I'm quite heartened to see the amount of energy and interest. You're right.

It's our great challenge. We do not want to dissolve the barrier between government and private sector. We don't want a totalitarian. So How do we outcompete the Chinese without the aid of totalitarianism? That's on our plate to figure out.

I think we double down on what has made America great. Free flow of capital, free flow of talent, may the best idea and the best person win, and we don't compromise our values because I think this battle between democracy and autocracy is the greatest challenge of our generation.

What is the thing that has you both most worried?

If you're an avid consumer of the news and just keeping casual track of what's happening, you can begin to start to connect the dots. You have drones in Ukraine now that have taken off the battlefield our most advanced battle tank. In Israel, similarly, the conflict of October seventh kicked off when Hamas defeated the Israeli border wall, this modern Majina Line. They did it using this ingenious trick of using quadcopters to drop grenades on the generators powering the Israeli surveillance towers. Similarly, Hezbollah launching out of Lebanon, is using loitering munitions, so drones that fly around till they find a target, to effectively depopulate the northern 10 miles of Israel because the Israeli Defense Forces haven't figured out an effective way to defend against them and cruise missiles. So you have 85,000 Israelis that have had to flee their homes and evacuate. And you move up to the Red Sea, we've read about disruptions to global shipping, the 12% of global shipping that pass through the Red Sea.

From the Houti? What are they? Houti rebels who are using drones, cruise missiles, and now autonomous sea drones to not only attack oil tankers, but also to attack sophisticated US destroyers.

So these dots are starting to connect, and they're telling us we're in one of these paradigm shifting moments of military technology. And the military we have today might not be the military we need urgently tomorrow, both here in the US and with our allies. So this raises this issue that, again, we've been able to take for granted for a long time, and it should hopefully push it to the front of our minds and the front of our civic conversation.

Would your wish be that we start allocating more and more to this area of spending and away from the old?

My worry and my optimism are, I guess, around the same issue, which is through the efforts of DIU, other organizations, other entrepreneurs, we're really at this tipping point of being able to scale this relationship between in the commercial technology world and the DOD. What I worry is, are we going to take these lessons and implement them, scale them, help the American public understand why it's important and help preserve the piece, or are we going to allow it to stall because now we have to start making harder decisions.

Well, and you're at the mercy of an ever-changing administration because even in the life of the DIU, you guys had a lot of support, and then you had less support, and then you had less support under Biden for two years, and then increased support. So it's like you're also at the mercy of this ever-changing administration, right? Yeah.

But historically, our domestic conflict stopped at the nation's edge, and we had a a more unified front from foreign policy. So I don't view this as a bipartisan issue. But I think whoever the next president is, he or she is going to have to make some really hard decisions and bring our citizens along to make not only just allocation decisions, like what should we buy and build, world, but also knowing that the foreign policy decisions we make in Ukraine and Taiwan and others that authoritarians are watching and they're taking lessons. And as Chris said, you can draw a line from, we'll draw an Afghanistan to Ukraine to maybe what a dictator may or may not do.

Oh, boy. Well, fascinating endeavor you guys went on. The book is called Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of war. I just, fingers crossed, that's a very speedy process that continues to accelerate.

And that the American citizens participate. I mean, that's what this takes.

The good news is I've never seen more amazing engineers and young scientists and smart people interested in this problem, both from a technology and a policy standpoint. They're starting to get involved. I think there's a famous Churchill quote that you can always trust America to do the right thing after they've tried everything else. Maybe we're getting past to try everything else. You two must have watched Oppenheimer with a particularly familiar feeling.

I mean, to see Einstein say, I'm not going to participate, and then this person say, I am, and the conflict inherent in all this, understandably so.

That's what I was referencing with the ethics. That did pop off a new age that is ethically ambiguous.

Yeah. Well, when you're reverse engineering, it gets to me very clear, but I understand. But yeah, when you're reverse engineering, the fact that one of us is going to get this bomb, who do you want it to be? Or that we're going to restrict AI here? And it's like, well, do you think the other people are going to restrict it? The decision is often made for you. Unfortunately, it's not ideal, but there's a certain reality.

Yeah. The thought experiment I say is, do you want America to continue to be the world cop and setting standards, or do you want an unelected member of the Communist Party?

Oh, boy. Okay. Well, Raj, Christopher, this was It's fascinating. Again, I hope everyone checks out Unit X, How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War. Good luck to you, gentlemen, and thanks so much for spearheading this. I'm very grateful to you both.

Yeah, it is.

Really interesting.

Truly. We're working on flying cars for everybody in LA, so the traffic gets better.

That would be so great.

What a circus that would be. Can you imagine 4,000 flying vehicles in the air? We can't even fucking drive down the road in 2D.

But we get to Santa Monica so quick.

If you lived, yes. I'm ready. Thank you. All right. Be well, guys. Stay tuned to hear Ms. Monica correct all the facts that were wrong. That's okay, though. We all make mistakes. Should I ask my daughters to bring me an ice cold Diet Coke?

If you'd like to.

You're supposed to be able to use them in this capacity at some point, right?

What if they overheat on the walkover?

Like, errand boys?

How would you feel? Aaron girls? Yeah.

I think they'll be okay.

Can I have one?

A Diet Coke?

Yeah, if they're going to-Wow, that's exciting. I'm going to try it.

Let us here. We'll start with a call to Carly. I got a real sweat going you.

Yeah, I'm sweaty.

Are either of my daughters in there? Lyn, would you run up a couple of ice cold Diet Cokes for me? Of course. Oh, my God. You're the greatest. Right there. Okay? Okay.

What a nice Aaron boy.

This is a ding, ding, ding, because really all my updates involve Lincoln as a worker.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, but I can- Let's hear it. You want me to start there? Yeah. Because I could start Friday with Bob's Big boy. My entire weekend, your weekend was your parents, visitors. Yes. And Neil. And Neil. Friday night, and mind you, I have been trying to get them to do this. I bet this was my fourth attempt. It always unravels. I'm like, Guys, let's go Friday night up to Bob's Big Boys in Burbank. It's old car night. Yeah. I don't know why they... I couldn't get them interested.

Yeah, I understand why.

Well, okay. But I'm explaining to them how good Bob's is.

Well, yeah. Did you tell them about milkshakes?

Well, I told them about the hot fudge ice cream cake, which, again, I don't think their imagination ran wild enough with them. Because they were very ho-hum about it. I'll even say not even trusting me. So after a couple of different meltdowns, finally they agreed- Yours.

No, no, no.

The girls take turns. It's like one of them is always in the mood to give it shot, and then the other one decides they're not. And then a power struggle ensues. Sure. The four alphas under one roof. Power struggles are a dime a dozen. Sure. Okay, so we go. We take the road master, and you're getting a call. Is it spam? No, it was just a- I sounded like a mom. So much phone's ringing.

I know.

Somebody's phone? Oh, my gosh.

Thank you.

Here she is.

I was walking and I wanted to make sure they weren't shaking their head.

They didn't run. Believe it or not, that one's for Monica. Thank you.

That's very nice.

Why don't you join me for two seconds? Because I'm actually telling stories that involve you. I'm starting with Bob's?

Oh, Bob's Bigsby's. Yes, Bob's Bigsby's.

Bob's Bigsby's. Yes. I was first trying to set a little context, some history that I've tried to get us to go many times, right? Yes, that's true. Then I'm trying to be generous about my explanation of why it's been impossible. What would be your explanation?

What do you mean?

How come we couldn't get it going?

The both times that we tried to go, me and Delta were both upset. For the first time, I was freaking out. And then Delta also, she's in a growth spurt, so she's- Yeah, she had a little thing. She's burnt the fuse.

You know what? That's not even important. It is important only in that it finally happened.

It happened.

He was so happy. He was getting in the car and he just had this big smile on his face. I can tell you I'm really happy.

Well, and we took the Roadmaster, so all three of us... The roadmaster, Monica, has a 60/40 split seat. So it can either be two individual seats or it can be a bench seat.

Yeah. So it was dad, me, and Delta all sitting in the front.

Mom opted out.

She was performing.

Yeah, she was at re-ference.

Or she was rehearsing to perform the following night.

I see.

So the three of us are sitting in the front bench seat of the roadmaster, And we hightaled it over there, right? Oh, yeah. Lots of smoking tires, burnouts. Setting the right vibe to go to car night.

Exactly.

So that part was already fun. Then we get there. And Monica, the His thing was- Was Bob there?

I have to ask.

There's no such thing as Bob.

He's a fictitious guy. No, but you know, that's Bob, my friend Bob.

Oh, the figurine? Yes, of course.

Loud and proud. Remember, he was stolen last time I was there. Wait, what?

I was there. Oh, you witnessed it. I thought a collar told us they We were gone.

No, no. I went and Bob was gone. Are you serious? Yeah, and it was a horrible, horrible event.

Oh, no. Monica, I'm so sorry. Thank you. We had a much better time. Okay, I'm glad. I'm so glad.

I'm so happy to hear that. He was front and center when we pulled in. And we pulled in and we They're going through the lot in the road master. And- The first thing we- Well, before that, we got to talk about how Delta was so...

She wanted to prioritize. She was so mad at dad that he was not parking in the parking lot and not circling around for parking spots because she wanted our car to be praised. She wanted it.

I understand. She's like, What's the point?

Then when we saw a spot that was free later in the night, Delta was like, Can you please pull the road master up? Then we were like, Okay, we'll just sit in the parking spot. When Delta just sat down in the parking spot.

Well, did I grab the car?

Because I had to park on the street. There was no spots. And then when we walked in, Delta was just really crestfallen that no one's going to be able to appreciate the road master. Because it did get a couple crained necks as we were driving through It was a lot. So then we park it, and then Delta is like, pop your hood. And I'm like, Delta, the engine's so filthy. It's shameful. And then when you have a nice hot rod like mine, you should keep the engine bay clean. And I just haven't.

But Delta was so hell-bent on doing it. She was so determined. So she convinced him.

She won. I popped the hood, and then she monitored how many people were gathered around it the whole night. Okay, now cut to, we get out of the car, we start walking through the lot, and the very first thing we stumble upon... Let me just describe the dude. He looked like Mark Borchard from American movie. He's 6'2, skinny as hell, long black hair. And Lincoln, he's talking to a guy about his '68 Camara, and what does he say to the guy?

And he says, This thing eats Fords and shits dodges.

Oh, my God. He was so proud of it. He wasn't so proud of it. It wasn't even a- This thing eats Fords and shits dodges.

It was a small block, Camaro. It wasn't very good. It's not.

There's no way it's eating for it. Well, most people who have to shit talk- Can't back it up. They can't back it up. That's why they have to say it. Real good speak for themselves.

Like, the road master might have been the fastest car in the whole parking lot, but I wasn't sitting around there telling people about that. You're telling us now. I'm just telling 2 million people now.

The roadmaster wasn't the coolest one. We saw one where- How dare you?

She has to be honest. I know.

I appreciate your honesty. I know. I had to be honest.

This is live radio So it requires honesty. Exactly.

We saw it somewhere bouncing and stuff.

Oh, there was a low rider that came in and was bouncing in the parking lot. I told the girls I'd almost bought a low rider seven or eight times, and then they beg me not to. I'm like, What are you talking about?

I didn't. I was fully supportive. I just didn't want to say and challenge Delta. That's true.

Delta was against it.

Delta was very up.

I'm against it.

You're against it. Delta was like, It'll ruin your reputation.

Yeah. What does that mean? What does that mean? As a podcaster?

Well, I agree that... Well, we like mixed messages, so I guess it's mixed, but it's a little like- What do you think?

It's cultural appropriation? Is that what you're fearing? No.

To me, it's like...

You can be honest. Remember, we're on there.

I feel like it's age.

Okay. Continue.

Are you saying he's too old or too young?

I think he's aged out of a low rider.

No, you got to check out the low rider community. It's mostly like 50-year-old Hispanic dudes, primarily.

Yeah, the guy- And East LA. The guy that was driving it was- Was older.

Yeah, he did.

He was like, nephew, son, whatever.

Okay, so maybe it's a mix of culture and age.

Well, it's huge in the Latino East LA community. It's also huge in the black community on Crenshaw. Yes, that I know. Which means if you're already Latino and black, I think I can hop in the mix. It's already a wide net. No. Okay. Moving on from the cultural appropriation. We all saw cars we liked. We got to pick our favorites.

Yeah.

I just want to point out is Lincoln, before Before we even got into Bob's, she goes, This is so fun. I was so happy. My little girls, my beautiful little blonde girls who I was holding their hands walking through the parking lot of the car show.

We looked so girly, and then we were clicking on the cars and everyone was like, What? Yes.

The only voice. Again, mixed messages. We like that.

Exactly.

The fact that my little girls were into the hot rods and scoping out every little aspect of it. What a moment for me.

You were so proud.

I was. Cut to us and Bob's big boy. Yeah. Let's go through the order. Delta grilled cheese, fries, chicken tenders.

Lincoln. I was on spaghetti and what was it?

Yes, you had another side item. Me, a couple burgers. Oh, burger.

I had a burger.

Oh, yeah, you had a burger and spaghetti. I had a burger and spaghetti.

Nice. I love that. Did you get a milkshake?

Oh, I did. We also got milkshakes because dad said that the best dessert there was...

A hot fudge ice cream cake?

Yeah, the hot fudge ice cream cake. And then we asked the server for it, and she was like, I'm sorry, we just ran out of the cake.

I was upset as Delta was about the- That's really upset.

He was so sad.

So then in place of that, we order two kids' milkshakes.

I love their milkshakes. Exactly. They're good.

They're pretty good, yeah. But Top-notch. Exactly.

Very thick.

And then the server comes over again after, I think it was 15 minutes. And she's like, Well, we're cutting up more cake if you guys want some.

They just dropped the milkshakes. They take three sips. She comes back with an update. We now have more devil food to make the hot fudge ice cream cake. We get one of those. Oh, you were puking so much. So many no-nos for dad. No sugar, no-no, no gluten, no-no.

So after he had eaten most of it, we went out. He puked in the Bob Big Boat.

That guy. It's a tongue twister.

There was a restaurant in the toilet, and then he got out. And on the way, he was spitting out the window because he was puking. And then he got over and hunched over in the bushes when we got home and just started puking. And then he went to the middle bedroom and said, I need privacy to puke.

I'm leaving the restaurant and I burp and I realized, oh, my God, I'm throwing up. It was so sad. I got to hit a bush, then I got to hit some stoplights. It was a mess. I cannot eat that. I know better, but once a year, I got to do it. You ate the entire thing. No, wait. Hold on a second.

You're misrepresenting. You mean it was two bites, and we thought it was really good, but I was very full, so I didn't eat And then you were like, Oh, well, it's just sitting there. I know.

You can't just fucking disrespect a hot fudge ice cream. But you did agree, right? It was delicious.

It was amazing.

It was so good. So they said, What a night. What a night. What a 10.

It was amazing. We got home at like nine. It was beautiful.

Next morning, Lincoln, come out to the garage. It's time to load all the cabinets with all the tools. And I'm talking, I had two humongous on wheels toolboxes from the old house and a cabinet full of products, whatever. Lincoln helped me all day long organize and put everything in the cabinets, hang stuff on the wall.

I love being your little sister. I love being your hype man.

You're such a hard worker.

Seriously, I like to volunteer. I'm like, Hey, do you need any help? I would love to do something.

Wow. I'm impressed.

It was a great weekend.

It really was. It was amazing.

And did you have that sense of satisfaction I had when you've worked hard and you look at it and it's all done, and then I'm just in a great mood?

Yeah. I'm working towards that because I'm doing a school I'm in work right now with TD.

I know. All right. Well, thanks for coming in and dropping the Diet Coke and being a part of the real-time update. Yes, thank you so much for bringing that. Yeah. Thank you for one of the best weekends I've had this year.

Of course. Of course. You're my dad. I love you so much.

You're my best buddy. I would do everything for you. And what a partner on the work scene.

Yeah.

All right. I love you. Bye.

Bye, Buck. Your parents? Yeah. I mean, I don't think they... Felt it? Must have been driving, too.

Does anyone know what level it was? 4.4. Oh, I called it. I don't know if you heard me in the garage. I said four. It's always off a little bit, but it was close.

There's a nice- There was a big earthquake about 30 minutes ago. Yeah.

Rob and I were standing under the attic in the garage, and it was a big... It's like someone shoved the world.

It's crazy. And I was in the car driving, and I didn't feel anything.

No clue.

No idea.

Pool was rippling.

That's nuts. Yeah.

It's good, though. We want fours.

We do? We want fours. Because it breaks up.

Yes, we want fours pretty often. That makes sense. And then you don't get the seven.

The big one. The big boy. They keep calling it the big one.

They call it the Daddy Long Nights.

Big boy.

Oh, big boys. They call it Bob's Big Boys.

All right.

Well- I thought about hanging a daily affirmation above my eye mirror because I've had a week of a lot of physical labor, and I'm so happy at the end of it. Yeah. I know it's a very Buddhist thing, but I need an affirmation that's like, work is fun. Work is good. In my mind, I'll make work something I don't want to do. But then when I do it, especially if it's physical, I feel the best I can feel. I need to look forward to work. That's what I want to do. I want to reframe it where it's like, I'm so excited to do the work.

So what would you write?

Yeah, I've been workshopping some things. Okay. Now I'm nervous to say them because they're not on the top of my mind. Okay. I had a couple of contenders that felt good.

You want me to close my eyes? No.

Well, that always does help. Can you think of one?

Well, no. But the other day was the Lion's Portal. That's a huge day. Lion's Portal? Yeah. It's a huge day for manifesting. It's over, but everyone has their own affirmation on the Lion's Portal. Okay. Well, each sign has its own affirmation based on the Lion's Portal. So hold on. Let me find it.

Do you think mine could have said, work in the garage will equal nirvana?

I do think that. Okay.

I would start believing in astrology at that point. I'd have no choice.

I can't find it, but damn it. Mine was like, I say, I'm a magnet for abundance, and I welcome prosperity into my life. Oh, wow.

I think I found it. What is your sign?

Mine's Virgo. His is Cancer. No, mine's Capricorn. I mean, Capricorn.

Easy confusion. That's Aaron's. Virgo. I am worthy of all success, love, and abundance that I desire.

That must be a different site.

But it's at least comforting us the same message.

Exactly. That's true. So what's Capricorn?

Capricorn. I set powerful intentions and focused on turning them into reality. That's like work.

It is. What is yours, Rob?

Mine wasn't great. Let me see. I I'm aligned with the energy of Lion's Gate portal.

That seems really good.

That might be the best one. It feels like maybe all of them. Yeah. Oh, wow. Oh, my God. I'm aligned with the Lion's Gate portal.

What I don't like about that is the lion is in it both. Yeah, the whole thing. I don't love that. Aligned is too close to lion. Oh, bad writing. I wish they had picked a different word. I got you. Word choice. But I do think it's the best one.

I think you're on. Congrats. I think you're on, yeah. Congrats.

Speaking of Lion's Gate portal, this is for Raj and Christopher.

Unit X.

Unit X voice.

You feel like that's why is that related? Because of Raj?

I'm just going to start saying that now. Okay. Like, Speaking of, and then it's not Speaking of, but anything can be Speaking of.

Okay. It just sounded mildly... It's fine for you because you're Indian. But if I was saying, I go, Astralogy, Lion's Gate, Speaking of, Raj, and blah, blah, blah, it might sound like I'm suggesting Raj has some relationship with astrology.

But I don't think... Do Indians have a relationship to astrology? They must.

I don't think so. This is an age-old... Where does it originate? I don't know. Do you know? That's a good It feels very Indian to me. Why? Well, it feels very Indus Valley.

Well, but you think it's Huy?

Mesopotamia.

Oh, okay.

Not far off. And spread to India. India next. It was certainly in India before it was in the US of A.

Well, it probably also was in China because that's why we have Chinese- Herbs? Years and stuff. Year of the Dragon, Cat.

Chinese New Rabbit. Yeah. I think those are two separate things, but that's okay.

Well, it's just like- They're both archaic calendars. Yeah, it's all calendar systems, like the Abacus.

But the Chinese calendar, they're on year like 48, 50 or something, right? They're thousands of years ahead of us. They didn't reset when Christ was around.

Anyway. Oh, yeah, Raj. Okay. Raj and Christopher were cool.

They are. One more thing. Okay. I mean, ruminating on this. Let's hear. I used a bad example. You You called me while I was working out, while you were recording an episode of Saint.

Yeah, which will be out on Wednesday. Okay.

And you asked me if I thought the tradition of asking your father-in-law for your daughter's hand in marriage was dumb, right? No.

Well, can I give a little more context? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so someone wrote in and just was pondering that question. Liz and I, obviously, have opinions on it. I actually said whatever the person wants is going to, obviously, who cares, right? But I said, But the permission piece I do find very antiquated. And then Liz, she was like, I don't even really like the father-daughter dance. And I was like, Well, that depends on, again, the family.

It depends on the song.

The dynamics. Oh, God.

I want to sex you up. Oh, gross. Yeah, that would be... No. Don't that even come out of your mouth. It came out of your mouth. This is a hypothetical gross father and daughter.

This isn't me. I see. I thought you were saying you would like that. No, okay.

There's also a mother-son dance.

I know. We were saying in general, she didn't love that. And I was saying I didn't really love that either, because that will have been the first time my dad and I have ever and that wine. Why in front of all these people? Whatever. I agree. I'm just getting you all wrong because I said, Well, I imagine Dax is really, really, really looking forward to dancing with the girls at their wedding. They love to dance, and they have that type of relationship. But I don't think there's any chance he expects the husband to come to him. And I said, Why don't we call and ask? And then, spoiler, but please still listen to Sinkt, but spoiler, You did expect that.

It's not that I expect it. It's that I would like it. Okay. Yeah, I would like it. To me, it would say a lot about the young man. And as we explored what it is... Now, again, I completely agree. The origin of the dad giving the daughter as a piece of property to a new man is rough and not great. And just not current. It's not current. But I was saying that I think what it has evolved and morphed into is this act of humility that the young man entering the family can show to the patriarch to be respectful. And I had given an example that I later thought of a better example. It's been driving me nuts. I wish I had said it when we talked.

Okay, but you're saying it now, so that's good.

Yeah. My direct analogy is Christmas.

I love Christmas.

I love Christmas. I love celebrating Christmas. The origin for me is I'm not into it. Sure. Right? I mean, I'm not religious, although I believe Jesus was a man on planet Earth. I don't think there's ever been a God on planet Earth.

Chinese calendar.

Chinese? Yes.. Yeah, I was just like, to me, that would be the perfect comp. I don't sit around and get hung up at all on the notion that it is quite obviously a religious holiday, but I'm celebrating it and getting my own meaning out of it, and it's totally fine. Sure.

I think if people get their own meaning, it's great. I don't personally love the meaning that you like.

Humility?

Of humility towards the patriarch. Because I made clear if this potential husband of mine is dying to do this, I would make clear it needs to be both of my parents. I am not interested in it just being my dad, and they can hang out. I'm not saying they can't be friends, but I don't like that piece of the men have a sick... I just don't... I don't like it.

And then Mike Hunter, that was, I will slide in and take over the role that her dad had in the family. I'm not going to slide in and take over the role that the mom had.

I know, but that's so like, the roles now are all... There isn't. That is when at a time when there was a very specific thing men did in a very specific thing women did. Now it's not.

I can only speak for my family. My family is still very mom-dad, and it's very specific. And when mom broke her tire on Friday, dad gets a call and I figure out how to get it up to the tire shop, and I get that fixed. Then there's still very mom-dad roles in my family. Sure. And there's very much mom-dad roles in Kristen's parents' family. I'm not against mom-dad roles. It's fine to me that people would like to mix it up. I have no issue with people mixing up.

Yeah, because you just said you love it.

But I also love my system, and I don't think it's inherently wrong for two people to enjoy those conventional roles.

Yeah, but as we literally just said an hour ago, you love that your daughters walk through the cars and know stuff about the cars. And they might marry someone, and they might be, especially Lincoln. She's the one putting your garage together. She'll probably be the one doing a lot of that stuff. Yeah. I just don't mind that there's- It doesn't have to break down.

I just don't mind that there's a matriarch role and a patriarch role in a family. I like that. I like it a lot. I like living in it. And so knowing that that's the role I have, and I'm taking over in this man, Tom, is passing the baton to me in that role makes a lot of sense that I go to him and say that, as it makes a lot of sense for Kristin and my mom to bake together on Christmas. That's a thing for them that they both enjoy, that this roles that they have in love in the family and that they do together. I don't think it's wrong that they like that.

No one's saying that's wrong. But if the dad loved to bake, and Kristen, if your dad was alive and he loved to bake, and she loves to bake. She should bake with your dad. That would be fine. Yeah. I guess that's my whole whatever. Yes, you did say all this on Wednesday's episode, and I just find it interesting. Everyone has a different take on I, of course, asked my dad, they're in town, and I brought this up to him and I said, Would you expect that or want that? And he was like, What? He could not wrap his head around this. He really was like, That's not my job to say. I would say, Go ask her. If it's a permission thing- It's not either or, though. No, but he does not- Want that. He doesn't want that.

He thinks And I believe that. But also, I don't think your dad wants your boyfriend to come talk to him at all. Is that also fair?

That's not fair.

What do you mean? Call him on a one-on-one and want to get into some conversation about marrying you. Does that sound- Oh, marrying. I thought you meant He's not comfortable to him at all?

No, that's my point. He's like, That's not my business. I mean, he wants to know if I'm in a relationship. He wants to meet those people and have them be a part of his life, too. But he said what would upset him is if I If I didn't call.

Sure, of course.

If I didn't call and tell them, that would be disrespectful. Yes. But for it to be not his kid, he didn't care. But I knew that about him. He feels zero I'm the patriarch of this. He doesn't have that. He does dad-like things. I'm not saying that.

He forever was helping you with your finances. And so he's going to die.

Oh, my God.

Well, he's going to. And I bet it'd be comforting to him that you had a husband that could take over that role for him. The thing that he thinks you need him for, it would be very comforting to know you found someone that can provide that need to you. So whatever Remind me, whatever needs end up being fulfilled by me to my girls. And you're right. I don't know, maybe there'll be better mechanics to me. But whatever the thing is that I'm doing as the dad that helps them feel safe and makes me feel like they're safe, it would be very comforting to me that the man they're marrying or the woman they're marrying is going to take that on. I would die much more at peace knowing, oh, that's great. She found someone that's going to do the thing I did.

Well, that is the difference. Once I moved out here, they relinquished that.

Wasn't he doing your finances until two years ago?

He has helped, but he doesn't feel like that's my job here. If I ask him for help, he'll help me. But that's not a role he takes on as his to me. At this point, he's like- You're on your own. You're on your own. And not forcing me to be on my own. I've just done that. I have figured out a way to have all those things that I can't do on my own, met not by him and not by a husband, by people I pay.

Sure.

Or your friend, sometimes. Or friends, people in my life. Even recently, when he was here, we were talking about some financial stuff, and he was like, Well, he said, Send it to me. And Mom, he definitely thinks of them, I I think, as like- One monolith. Yeah. And it was interesting, though, and this did make me sad. He was like, Your mom and I are really the only people, and they're right, the only people on Earth who have my best interests at heart. They're the only two people. Yeah.

Well, Neil.

He does, and he doesn't. He's still his own. It's different when it's your parents. Yes.

The level of...

Yes. The level of, they're the only people who's my happiness, success, anything, is the only thing that really matters to them.

Their number one priority.

Yeah. And even if I got married, that's not the same thing. It's not. You get, if you're lucky, two people on Earth who you're... It's scary, because you're right, they'll die.

They'll die.

Can you knock on wood?

I'll tell you something that is insanely important to me, the most important thing in the world, which is when I'm with my girl Girls, if a lion came down the street, I'm running at the lion. They're going to get away. If a car comes creaning towards us, I'm throwing them out of the way and I'm dying. If some guy with a gun comes, I am at any moment going to lay down my life for these girls to protect them. And that's probably the most important thing to me. And I want the boy who marries either of those girls or the woman, I want to look at them and know that they're going to do that, too. That's very important to me. And I want the young man or woman to come to me and say, I'm dedicating my life to this person, and I would stand in front of a train for them. If I can't be there, I would really like to know someone else has taken on that responsibility.

Yeah. That would make me feel good. I think that's the hope for whoever you marry, that they would do something like that for you. Yeah. That's the point of it, I guess. But the reality and the truth is, you're all still individual people. I'm not diminishing the importance of love and marriage because I think it does have a...

There's pros and cons, and one of the pros is the safety.

There's a huge level of safety. Yes. That's the biggest pro.

You make a lot of compromises for that safety, but yeah, that's the big upside.

It is the thing that I feel is missing. But I mean, 50% of our country gets divorced, right? So it's just enough stats that show that safety is a little bit of an illusion.

Or at least the timeline of it for sure, yeah. I don't know.

When he said that, my dad, and when he said it just so obviously, right? It actually made me feel very grateful for them, obviously, but it made me feel very lonely. I was like, Oh, my God, that's true. There's two people only on Earth who really have my best interests at heart. It's a little daunting. Sure.

When did he say that? On this trip?

Yeah.

Okay. All right.

Raj. Raj. Raj. Raj. My dad.

Tradition. India. India. Yeah.

Okay. Oh, this was cool. This was a Cool thing that happened. At the beginning of the episode, you said something like, blah, blah, blah for the next 78 minutes. You just made that up, that number up, and it was 78 minutes. No. And that's after editing, it was 78 minutes. So there's no way you could have known.

Oh, my, Sam.

So, Sam.

Lazy, Sam. I know. Lazy. Well, he's on vacation. It's a cute clues. We could look at it as lazy or very playful winks.

That's true. You can choose how to look at it.

I'm going to I'm going to go with playful winks.

I was listening to this meditation yesterday, and she was reiterating, it's very Buddhist, teachings, and she's a psychologist. And she was reiterating that your thoughts are real, but they're not true. I like that. And all your thoughts are an interpretation. Every single thought is an interpretation. And so you do have the power to say, I choose not to think this way, or I can choose not to think of it this way because this is one interpretation, and I can choose a different interpretation.

Work. Ding, ding, ding. My daily affirmation.

Yeah, exactly. So that was cool. That was Raj. What if we use Raj as cool?

That would be cool. Very Raj.

That'd be Raj. I don't think we can. Okay. Now that we tested it, I don't think it works.

Oh, wow. Did you see my garage? It's very Raj. I'll just say it's Raj. It's my garage.

Oh. Yeah.

You see my Raj garage?

I mean, I guess it's a positive. We're saying cool.

Remember what was his dojo Casa, Ken's dojo Karate Kasa or something in-Yeah, I forgot what it was called. And Barbie? Well, mine will be Raj garage is my equivalent.

That's cool. Well, that's Raj. Yeah.

Sorry. His Mojo Dojo? Yes. Casa House. Mojo Dojo. Is Mojo Dojo Casa House?

Oh, my God. Anyway, that was cool. That was cool, Sim. 78 minutes. The OB versus OB-GYN OB/GYN, which has now come up a couple of times. Ob stands for obstetrics. Ob/gyn stands for obstetrician gynecologist. Ob/gyns are medical doctors who specialize in both obstetrics Why does it look so weird? Obstractics. No.

Let's try again. Reset. We're still rolling. Back to one.

Obstetrics and gynecology, while obstetricians and gynecologists specialize in one area each.

Okay. Would it be your preference to always be with someone that did it all? I would because why have to go to a second person and form a new relationship? If you've got that trust, that foundation.

It's true. I guess so.

And you don't want to... How many people you want in your vagina? A lot. Well, it depends in what capacity, I suppose. But in a medical capacity, I would think you'd want to limit it. Yeah.

I think mine's an OB. I don't think it's OB/GYN.

Wait, you're going to just a baby deliverer?

No, I'm sorry, you're right. I think mine's just a gynecologist.

A G-Y-N?

Yeah. I don't even really have one. Okay. Also, your practitioner can just give you a pap smear and stuff.

Do you want to start going to a Rob statistician?

Raj, you mean?

Rob statistician?

No.

That would be Rob would be your obstetrician. I know. But Rob and Ob was right there.

Oh, I see. Rob statistician. Or a Raj statistician.

Yeah, that's it. That's where the pap smear is cool.

Schmier, eeu.

Smeer. Schmier.

Schmier.

No, eeu.

Papschmier. No, stop.

That's a cream cheese.

What is it? Papschmier? Yeah. I like Schmier better.

That's disgusting.

Because it feels like you're spreading out things to get in there.

But Schmier is like- When you Schmier- It's cream cheese.

It's like a gunky substance.

Yes, gunky.

But spread. You spread a Schmier. No. Okay, let's go on. Sorry, Raj. Sorry, Chris.

Sorry, Rob. Flying cars.

Okay, great. That was a cool fact. Any others?

I wrote it down because we had someone on earlier that day who referred to flying cars. It was so random. And then we had them on, and we were talking about flying cars. And that, again, sim. Okay, the war is on US soil. You said there were two. There are- Can I try them?

Yeah. I under hit it. We got to go with the Revolutionary War, number one.

American Revolutionary War.

The War of 1812. Yep. The Mexican-American War.

Spanish-american American? Yeah. Okay. Spanish-american War.

Sorry, then became Mexico. Yeah, Spanish-American War. Civil War, and we out.

King George's War and French and Indian War.

Oh, those are past the Civil War?

Before.

Before. Okay, I missed those. Okay, so was that six?

One, two, three, four, five, six.

Well, I was way under. I can't remember what I said, but I bet I said- You said two. Okay, so 300% off.

The Churchill quote is- He was a quote machine, wasn't he?

They pop up all the time. There are so many incredible quotes. Oh, did I say the one about America? Is that one one you're going to reference?

Well, the one Raj said is Americans will always do the right thing only after they've tried everything else, which is great.

Yes.

It looks like there's a- After they've tried everything else. That is- It's really on point. That's wonderful. Yeah. There's an NPR on this.

On that quote?

Yeah.

Yeah. Flying cars. Yes. Frisbe. Next.

This week, Congress dedicates a new bust of Winston Churchill in the Capitol Statuary Hall. The sculpture is meant to honor the British Statesman's Legacy of Determination Resolved. This is 2013. Okay. So it was an episode about him.

He's become very unpopular to celebrate.

I know. Yeah. I don't know enough.

Well, I think he had some of the fiercest colonial policies. Still great quotes, though. It's like Mike Jackson. Still really good songs.

Really Great Station.

Hey, all. Really great station. I should ask your parents if Did you ever hear that on the radio down there in Georgia. That's where it's from.

Yeah, I've never heard it. Yeah.

You weren't listening to country, though.

Yeah, I was sometimes. You were? Yeah. I like country.

Oh, really?

Sometimes.

Okay.

Yeah, this is about his quotes. People can listen if they want. Okay.

A riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a paradox. What's that one? He's got another great one about that, too.

You want to look that up?

A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

America is, he said.

What is that? What was he referencing? Describe a situation that was difficult to comprehend. Okay. Time he was analyzing the early events of the second war to end all wars. Say it one more time. It's so good.

A riddle wrapped in a mystery.

Inside an enigma. A riddle wrap- You love that? I love it. Interesting. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside of an enigma.

To me, it's a little bit like a line with the lion's portal.

It's not for me. It's not for you. Okay, great.

I like this other one, though.

Okay. You think it reeks of colonialism, that one?

What?

A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside of it. No, I just...

I think it...

You just think you put three words together.

I mean, the same thing. Yeah, I don't think it's that clever. Okay. That's it.

That was it.

Yep. That was it for Raj and Christopher. I like what they're doing.

I like what they're doing. Is it at all up to your interest in war developments? I think it's very disturbing to learn that the F-16's NAV system was way worse than a $300 garment.

Than their Nintendo. Yeah, right.

So that's concerning. And then a call to update, for sure, I'm in. But then I have this... It's like, get rid of aircraft carriers, get rid of these jets, get rid of blah, blah, blah. But then these things, they bubble up in the news and you see be like, oh, shit, that stuff was pretty darn effective in this moment. I just wonder, I think the future is so hard to predict.

Well, it is, but it's about allocating. I don't think it doesn't have to be a full removal. Exactly. It's just adding more. I mean, we're going to be so behind if we don't.

Oh, yeah. I'm just thinking of the more big mechanistic version of war versus tiny drones and this and that. And yet the Ukrainians just punched through two Russian lines, and they were using all this heavy equipment we gave them. So I read that headline, and I'm like, well, shit, it's still working there. I know there's supposedly drones that are knocking out tanks and all, but boy, that seemed to be useful.

Well, it seems like maybe we need both right now, but I bet in the future We'll need less and less of these older school things. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know anything about war. You don't even like thinking about it, right? Yeah, I hate war.

I do, too. And yet it's a reality that still it's maddening. It's truly maddening that we're at the level we're at technologically, communications, shared culture, and it's not gone.

I know. Globalization, and yet there's many active wars right now.

Yeah, is so disheartening that we can't. And there was the reigning theory in the '50s is that we would become so economically intertwined that that would basically neutralize everything. And that just didn't happen. We just can't get away from it.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Did Churchill say that?

That's Lincoln, I think.

Who said that? That's Lincoln Shepard?

I think Lincoln Shepard said that. Absolute power corrupts Absolutely. Lord Acton. Oh. Tufts. Tufts. Acton to Nacton? Riding to Bishop Creighton.

Oh. Oh, my God.

You know, a lot of these sayings exist, and then one really famous person says it in the public record, and then all of a sudden... I know. You know my My favorite one that I've seen attributed to 10 different athletes?

Which?

You missed 100% on the shots you don't take. Like Wayne Gretsky. It's supposed to be Wayne Gretsky. I saw it written as LeBron James. I've seen it written as Michael Jordan.

It probably wasn't an athlete who even said it in the first place.

It was probably Lord James talking to Bill Byron. Oh, my God.

Maybe it was about gun shooting shots.

Yeah, cannon foughter.

Yeah, cannons. My favorite quote ever is MLK, but there is some It's that maybe he said it after somebody else said it.

It's contested. What's that?

I forget.

Oh, your favorite quote. Do you remember the essence of it? No, I knew.

I know it. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

Yeah, that's a goody. I love that one. That's a really goody. Obama would quote that quite often.

Yeah, he had it broidered on the rug of his oval office. Oh, yeah.

My favorite is no man Lincoln's memory is so great that he can afford to lie. You do say that a lot. And that's Lincoln. That's a good one. That's good. It's so true. When you tell a lie, and once I heard it articulated that way, I realized it's so true. You can't remember lies. You can remember the truth. But when you tell a lie, a month later, when you try to tell the same person the same thing, there's something very fascinating that lies don't imprint the way that reality does.

Yeah, that's definitely true.

That's why bullshit testimony, as they get interviewed time and time again, nobody can keep their story straight. They wrote it down and they read it every time before they go in there. So, yeah, No man's memory is so great that he can afford to lie. It's so good. And it almost convinces you there's no point. Just don't lie because you'll never remember.

Yeah. Honesty. Ding, ding, ding.

That's your favorite quote.

Honesty. Ding, ding, ding. All right.

All right.

Love you. Love you.

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