The Wisdom Wall

“pacifism really is a privilege of the protected. Like, there is somebody else who is willing to do those things and build those capabilities to protect our right to say, I don't want to be involved in that, and that's fine.”

“If the incentive is, no matter what it costs you, I will give you 10% on top of that, that's your profit. Well, 10% of three billion is a much bigger number than 10% of a hundred and fifty million. And so, as a traditional prime, you are deeply incentivized to reinvent the wheel from scratch every single time. You're…”

“candidly, in some cases, the ocean is actually harder to build for than space, because space has a lot of just, like, neutralizing effects, right? It's just there. And as long as it's maintained, it can be maintained. I mean, you have satellites that have been, ah, in orbit since the sixties. Um, whereas the ocean is…”

“when I started writing, I had this really strong perspective that, you know, storytelling is really powerful, but at the end of the day, reality wins out. And increasingly over the last two years, as I've written more and kind of unpacked other people's stories, I have increasingly become convinced that stories shape…”

“It's like, if I ask you to build something that you don't know how to build, it requires a ton of experimentation. But if you have a bean counter along the way, where every time you try and run an experiment, they're introducing three to five to 12 weeks of process. To say, well, you need to fill out these forms in…”

“And now increasingly, what is most impressive is that what started as very much a, um, A sort of, like, product suite of adjacencies of, like, these are all things that will augment a lot of existing assets. We're now getting into potentially, like, asset replacements.”

“So like you look at, so Fury as an example, it's not only replacing in some cases, because there are some missions that we no longer need to send pilots into danger, we can do it autonomously, but there are some cases where you still want human judgment and speed and perspective, but you can extend a pilot's capability…”

“this sort of like one-to-one pairing of people who are doing hard things and military mavericks who are protecting and enabling their ability to, to, to execute, um, that has been a very important capability throughout the history of sort of military innovation in the U.S.”

“none of them could have an impact on the U.S. because the U.S. has such a, a unique in history and in geography and, and nation states, such a unique capability. That it is, it is very diff, the US is a, has a lot of unfair advantages, and so what Lincoln says is, if we are to die, we have, we are to die by suicide,…”

“every single time military superiority is front run by industrial superiority. We did that in World War II. The problem is now that China is doing that today.”

“Like, everybody should be having more philosophical debates about the things that they are investing in. We don't have nearly enough philosophical debates about the implications. We just say, Hey, this is a hot technology and it looks like it's ripping and people really like it, or it has a big market for this or…”

“if you can identify the smartest people as early as possible and then support them relentlessly throughout their career, you have this sort of unfair advantage when those people eventually do start companies.”

“fiction, like science fiction should be a guide for how we think about building reality.”

“Startups are supposed to fail. Like that's like, there are ideas. It is literally a mechanism of iteration and experimentation. Like startups are supposed to go out, try something, experiment. And if it fails, then the capital and the, like the, both the like, um, currency capital, right. And like the monetary capital…”

“every once in a while that hype needs to deflate and flush out the hucksters. And candidly, the more that that hype ebbs and flows, the less likely it is that hucksters are going to come in because they've gotten hurt too many times.”