The Ledger, every show

“Then President Trump got elected, and I was like, wow, this is a moment where, you know, you have a disruptor at the top, he chose Secretary Hegsass, and that meant all the problems I'd seen, you know, there'd be a clearer way to solve them, and you could see …”

“We got them down to six and there were the places where I thought we had the greatest opportunity for change and for growth and impact on our combat power and for our industrial base. And that was a starting point. An applied AI was number one”

“Imagine decades of satellite imagery that you could use to train a model and get insights and then use that to do anomaly detections. You could find out what's happening. So you take a human analyst and you increase their throughput by a thousand.”

“So, and they, these things, these war games have been on the on the shelf for a long time. Every, every scenario has been planned for years ahead of time. Midnight hammer and Iran was planned years ahead of time in terms of how would you do it if you were goin…”

“70% of the casualties are for drone, but because of drones.”

“I mean, it's, I believe that a sophisticated drone war is going to be drone swarms controlled by AI to some degree or another, right?”

“They have drone swarms because they can force the companies that make them, not just DGI, to interoperate.”

“We have Google for all lawful use cases on, on classified networks, and we're trying to move them to classified networks. They're just, They have to build out infrastructure because this stuff's complicated.”

“There's more defense tech venture capital than ever by, you know, three X more than last year.”

“So I cut them down to six after studying and I made it more action oriented. So we put sprints behind them like you would an engineering team.”

“The number one is applied AI. Because we're not building a foundation model at the DOW because there's being hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by the private sector on this. So how do I adapt or use what's being developed in the private sector and ap…”

“Without the drone warfare in, in that area of the world, you probably would have seen way more human casualties. It's already devastating. It would have been way more devastating.”

“I had some like Databricks engineers, former Databricks engineers, former Meta engineers, former AWS people, Tiger team, 60 days good, great collaboration from Gemini from Google's Gemini, who already works at Department of Warsets, some familiarity with our a…”

“Three point oh is coming in a couple of weeks. Then we're going to do Grok. With XAI and we'll see where we get to with the other two.”

“And then we have this U S tech force that, that Scott Kapoor from Andreessen Horowitz is deployed. And we were hoping to get thousands of people out of college for a two year stint, sort of make it you know, this is your service to the country as a technologis…”

“We're going to change the way we buy the way we do RFPs. Even like we, for an RFP, it used to be, Here's a 300 page requirement document. Please fill it out and we'll decide if you win or lost. Now we say, well, here's our problem. We're trying to achieve this…”

“I have the Office of Strategic Capital, which has two hundred billion dollars in lending authority low cost loans, and that both sends a demand signal to these companies that other private capital crowds around it, equity capital often, and it's, Low cost loan…”

“So the Google win was just getting everyone the basic access to AI so they could get familiar using it and understanding it. Then we're going to do it. Then I would say that's a corporate use case, right? Like any big organization. Then we're going to do the s…”

“For these frontier AI companies, for example, I'm not gonna try to build our own model here and spend a hundred billion dollars. Why wouldn't I work with the best minds in industry, have them make something that, for our use case, that builds on what they've a…”

“I'm not only taking the frontier models and just making them available. I'm doing it across classification levels. I'm combining some of the most, you know, important data that the United States has from an intelligence standpoint, we're deploying it to war fi…”

“These critical technology areas were almost 10 years old since 2018, and if something's critical for 10 years, that means you're not making much progress on it.”

“Applied AI is number one. And the reason I call it applied AI is because the big companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI, they're all investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI and AI infrastructure. So all I need to do is take that and adapt it for the departm…”

“The three I'm most proud of, ah, in a very recent term, is we've done three deals for critical minerals, ah, to reduce our dependency on China in like, 45 days.”

“But I think they're really a nuts and bolts software company with forward deployed engineers, That are smart, that sit with a warfighter, and solve, like, everyday problems you would in any organization, ah, as much as they do the other stuff.”

“I think those days are over and the number or percentage of people that will say that about a Palantir or Google or any one other company has shrunk so much that hopefully it doesn't matter.”

“I was like, we should buy Lyft. He's like, we should crush Lyft.”

“And my job is to create five more companies that, you know, work in the department and bring new capabilities.”

“A country is not a country without a border, right? And not being able to control comes in means, means you can't serve those who come in very well. And if the idea is we have a melting pot so that everyone who comes in here, we take care of, they're entitled …”

“University of Florida where Ben Sasse He's done a really good job sort of taking the politics out of school and letting people speak and debate and come out critical thinkers.”

“Within two hours, we had a handshake on a deal for 707 hundred sixty million dollars. His corp dev guys were going nuts, because he was making deals on his own.”

“And I was on Jieda, which is the joint IED on, you know, task force. So we would do crazy things like sprinkle markers into the fertilizer plants in Pakistan that were used to make the IEDs so we could Track them.”

“These days of sending hundreds of thousands of ground troops into a meat grinder, it's nothing country, this country should ever do again.”

“We had a female general manager in Milan, and they posted her face all over the city saying, kill this woman. They snuck into her apartment at night and hung a sign from her apartment to the apartment across the road, Saying she, you know, she has a relationsh…”

“A thirty-something former Bain consultant, because they had a little chip on their shoulder relative to McKinsey Consultants. They want to win, they're more analytical, so less theoretical in strategy, and more like, okay, I'm going to do this.”

“We lost half a million customers.”

“The next wave of AI, which is going to produce mass efficiency, mass knowledge dissemination nowhere but here. You know, we're going to have the first of everything in this new platform that's building. If you thought about the last platform as the iPhone and …”

“I was a business guy, and as you know, business guys are not top of the totem pole in Silicon Valley, right, in general.”

“I never get emotional back and that gives me power, right? It gives me power to, because I'm regulated, They're unregulated and uncentered, and that means they make more mistakes than I would. And so if you could be a shock absorber to emotion in negotiations,…”

“The small talk stuff is fine, but it's, it sort of betrays a little naivete, like that you care, or they care, because if there's, you're in a serious negotiation, no one cares about that. They just care about, like, what you're trying to do.”

“And we were spending A hundred million dollars a month competing there.”

“Bill Gurley was on our board, lost her nerve. And the reality is there's another economic principle called loss aversion, right? If you invest thirty three million dollars in Uber and it looks like ten billion four years later, ten billion on a thirty three mi…”

“There are going to be fewer tech acquisitions in this antitrust environment. Fewer, much fewer. So your outcomes for mid, middle companies like tell me are going to be farther, you know, fewer and farther between.”

“Biological organisms can create TNT, gunpowder, you know, energetics, if you will.”

“And we've been behind again because some of our adversaries have been dumping Dumping, like with rare earth metals to get us dependent on battery technologies, on critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, you name it.”

“Not maneuverable, but they're not going at hypersonic speeds also.”

“So we know how to build our own. But we have to do it more cheaply. We have to do it at scale. We have to do it, and it's a deterrent effect, right? It's just like we had nuclear missiles, and the Russians did, or Soviets did. If China, the China has them, we …”

“If you could synthesize that information so they can make that decision, and you're using more sources by definition almost, the data and choices are going to be better choices.”

“The idea of taking one person and giving them the power of 10 people makes them better at what they do by an order, potentially an order of magnitude.”