The Exchanges

Q So how did you get into this position?

A Well, um, I was radicalized, I would say, in 2017 when being a Trump supporter was not cool, and, ah, you know, our employee, I was in San Francisco at Uber at the time, and, ah, you know, I was like, someday, you know, I'm gonna go back into government, so I finished Uber, I moved to Miami, and then I was, ah, I met President Trump, had dinner with him, And I want to say December of 23, before the primaries, and I got, it was, it was an honor to do that, obviously. I started working on the campaign, and then I started working on the transition team, and I'd always loved defense, and I'm in the coolest part of defense, like space lasers, like the coolest tech, uh, stuff that's happening in the whole department of war is happening in my, in my group, so it's pretty exciting for a tech guy to be At that part of the Department of War.

AI assessment note: “I started working on the campaign, and then I started working on the transition team”

Q Substantial allocation to have there. As you think about that and the efficiencies of that capital and the different departments that you span across and you have exposure to, what do you think the biggest allocation will be for?

A One thing that happened in the last, especially the last four years, but really over, over the time period since the war on terror ended, um, is China started investing in really sophisticated capabilities. We were fighting sort of terrorists, you know, random small, small terrorists who were using improvised explosive devices, right? That was the enemy. They were really thinking about, broadly speaking, what are we doing in space? What are we doing with missiles? You know, that can travel across the world in, at hypersonic speeds, those kinds of things. So we have to catch up. So the budget that we're now trying to save money on bureaucracy and put it toward is new technologies, new weapons, ah, new defense systems. Like think about a drone, a drone attack. How do you counter that? Well, maybe you could use high energy lasers to pop out drones out of the sky if they're coming at you at a military base. Um, you could do that with using AI in an automated way. So trying to kind of step forward ahead of the adversary as opposed to sort of investing only in the stuff we know, like those things.

AI assessment note: “put it toward is new technologies, new weapons, ah, new defense systems.”

Q A big theme and what many people are talking about is the emphasis on drones and drone warfare and how the future of wars will be actually through systems like drones. We won't have to send people, hopefully, ideally. Um, because you see everything from prototypes to actually investment, could you just share the state of, like, where you see drone technology and these new kind of innovations?

A Yeah. So the, what, what is, the Russia-Ukraine war taught us a lot of things. They're fighting over territory, right? Quickly, like, that war became a robot war. A drone on drone war. The front lines are robots against robots, right? And that was an, it was, it was sort of a totally new way of thinking about war, and then they started inventing how do you do, use fiber optic cables to communicate to that drone if, if the satellites are jammed, and how do you, ah, do software so that it could do automatic target recognition and all these things. They're innovating at a pace with drones that's sort of unbelievable. So what we're learning from that, what we have to do, is make sure we have our own drone arsenal, big and small. Big ones go boom, bigger, and they're sort of less about territorial conflict and more about, um, you know, responding to an attack, um, or initiating an attack in response to something else. The small ones are about making sure that, um, that we have an arsenal that That we have at, at foreign, uh, military bases. So they get sent out. They do reconnaissance too. They don't just go boom, right? And, and then the other side of it is how do we counter drones? So we're gonna have to be prepared to make sure there's no threats. We're still on the southern border. We're less worried about people coming over. We're worried about drug drones and those sorts of th…

AI assessment note: “they started inventing how do you do, use fiber optic cables to communicate”

Q A lot of people in the defense sector, or maybe it's the war sector now, think that we're in 1938. What's your position on this?

A We are definitely in a moment where we have to catch up our industrial base. Like, you've heard this industrial base problem, right? And it's, and the critical mineral is a great example. Pharmaceuticals, there's a lot of great examples of where, for economic reasons, we outsource to other places. And then it turns out, if that Party that was, you outsourced to doesn't want to give them to you anymore. You're in, you're in big trouble, right? So, we over outsource things that are critical to our, our country. So, re-domesticating those is part of a 1938 moment. Building our defense industrial base up that was focused on old weapons, old ways of doing things, so that now we have new ways of actually building hardware combined with software to make sure that we can deter adversaries, because really the goal is deterrence. You don't want to fight a war, you want to prevent war, and you can only do that by being strong. So, that 1930 moment is, is here where we finally, after COVID, looked at our supply chains, we looked at our defense industrial base, we looked at So, sort of, some of the, the companies that have all left the Midwest, and these devastated communities, the influx of drugs, and all those things, and said, wait a minute, we have to, like, rethink the whole architecture of our, of our war-making abilities so that we can keep peace. So, I feel like it's that moment. I …

AI assessment note: “So, re-domesticating those is part of a 1938 moment.”

Q sector, Silicon Valley and DC. It almost felt like a tech Conference. I'm sure like you saw lots of your friends there and then new friends and everything. Um, but I want to talk about the AI action plan. How is that being implemented? And is this going well? Is this like picking up steam? Like how have you seen initiative versus action and like the gap between the two?

A The executive orders are awesome, and so is the AI action plan, because at least it sets a marker out there and say, it says to the world, we, the United States, are going to be dominant in AI, right? And then what are the components to do that? The best chips, we need more power for data centers, um, we need the AI companies to be free of sort of state regulations and, and all these things that could hold them back, um, and, And those things are gonna make that industry sort of the, potentially, the biggest industry that's ever been created. We want it to be built here. And I think the four great companies in that industry are based here. Chinese are doing their distilling models. They're doing things to sort of catch up in their own way. Um, but we're putting that into action. We're trying to get permitting for data centers to be faster. We're working on nuclear power generation for data centers, which we'd stopped as a country essentially for decades. Um, we're making sure to keep our best chips here from NVIDIA. We're trying to have our, you know, we opened up a chip factory in Arizona that does NVIDIA, uh, you know, TSMC and NVIDIA chips. We're doing our own lithography now. We're doing all kinds of things to enable this. Um, and what I'm trying to do at the Department of War is make sure now we're using that for sort of enterprise use cases, for intelligence use cases. Li…

AI assessment note: “we're putting that into action. We're trying to get permitting for data centers”

Q What are the biggest lessons that you've learned from Pete Hegseth?

A I gotta tell you, he, I worked for one Secretary of Defense when I did this White House Fellowship, uh, Robert Gates, and he was renowned as one of the great Americans, one of the great American leaders in defense. Pete Hegsus, I think, is going to be, and is already, probably the greatest Secretary of War in our lifetimes. He is a leader. He comes in with no biases, like, didn't come from the defense industry. He wasn't a four-star general who sort of, like, this is the next job. Uh, he didn't, he wasn't in politics. He comes in with a fresh outlook and say, what's broken? And what's working? And let's start there. So his leadership skills are extraordinary. He put together this team that I was talking about earlier, that's cohesive and working together. Um, and he's open to any idea. And I think it's, it's a privilege to work for him. And every day I feel that more, um, And I, you know, he's one of the best leaders I've worked with. I've worked with a lot of good leaders and partners and business and so on. He's one of the best I've ever worked with.

AI assessment note: “Pete Hegsus, I think, is going to be... probably the greatest Secretary of War”