#239 Dan Driscoll - U.S. Secretary of the Army

At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments, it's about you, your style, your space, your way.

Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right.

From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows.

Because at blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you.

Visit blinds.com now for up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost.

Rules and restrictions apply.

Secretary Dan Driscoll, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

It's my pleasure.

I've never met a Secretary of the Army before.

You're my first.

Oh, I'm so excited to be.

You'll never forget.

You'll always remember your first.

But, well, man, we got a whole bunch of topics to cover in a short period of time.

So I want to...

breeze through and cover as many as we possibly can.

But everybody starts with an introduction.

So here we go.

Secretary Dan Driscoll, 26th Secretary of the Army, a veteran lawyer, and former venture capital executive.

Also, the acting director of the ATF.

Raised in Boone, North Carolina, your small town roots shape your soldier's first approach.

Following your grandfather's and father's service, you joined the Army in 2007 and deployed to Iraq with the 10th Mountain Division as a cavalry platoon leader.

Earned a law degree from Yale and then entered investment banking and venture capital, eventually becoming COO of a $200 million fund.

Ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2020, learning many lessons along the way, known for streamlining processes, cutting through red tape, and ensuring that soldiers have the resources they need.

A husband to your high school sweetheart, Cassie, and father of two children.

Most importantly, you're a devout Christian.

And apparently, you are a cross between a Baptist preacher and a jihadist.

So, let's start right there.

What does that mean?

So,

I started using this line a couple of weeks into getting into the job.

I think once you realized how decayed and how

calcified, and what I would say is lowercase C, how corrupted the decision-making model in the Pentagon has been for decades.

I basically started telling people, a ton of the senators and congressmen I would meet with, when they would ask for an update, I said I was the the mixture of a Southern Baptist preacher and a jihadist who's going to pull the temple down on all of our heads because we had to rebuild the thing.

Yeah, we had some pretty interesting conversations at breakfast and I want to elaborate on a lot of those.

But

yeah,

that caught some people's attention.

I used it.

I was at a conference in the Middle East when I used it.

And I think the Southern Baptist preacher part didn't hit with the nuance I was intending.

And then I think when the

gasps in the room when I said giatist woke everybody back up that had been zoned out.

I'll bet that did.

I'll bet that did.

But a couple of things real quick before we get into the interview.

So everybody gets a gift.

Love it.

Vigilance Elite gummy bears made here in the USA.

You should really buy a couple hundred thousand of those and hand them out to the

soldiers have been asking me for this every single day.

So this is perfect.

Cool.

And

then second of all, I got a Patreon account.

It's a subscription account.

And a lot of these guys have been with me since the very beginning when I was just doing this out of my attic.

And they're still with us today.

And they're the reason I get to be here with you.

So one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question.

So this is from Ken Paul.

It has to do with the ATF.

The ATF has a dismal track record of politicizing guns and gun ownership in America.

Is ATF director, is it realistic to expect the ATF to lose certain regulatory abilities in reference to firearms or even be disbanded

given the current political climate?

Starting off with a hot one.

Let's do it.

So, and this came up during our breakfast.

I think one of the problems the ATF has had for a very long time is similar to something the Army deals with.

So we have the Corps of Engineers.

And if you've had anyone who's built anything in any of the 50 states or worldwide, oftentimes their experience with the Corps of Engineers is terrible.

Everything takes forever.

It's too expensive.

And the outcomes leave a very bad taste in

most Americans' lives, or excuse me, in their mouths, after interacting with them.

And the reason this is the case is not that the soldiers who are part of the Army Corps of Engineers or the civilians are bad.

It's because they personify some of the stupid shit in government when they have to show up on sites.

I think for ATF, if you think about alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, that is a lot of Americans' Americans' favorite things to do.

And so a lot of the rules and regulations around those topics lands on ATF's doorstep.

And so I've gotten to talk to a ton of agents.

I've gone on raids.

What ATF is really good at is violent crime.

If you talk to a lot of the U.S.

attorneys around the country, it is one of their favorite law enforcement groups because they're like the blue collar officers who will get their hands dirty to build these really hard cases.

The other part of ATF, though, which I think probably a lot of your listeners experience more day to day, is the portion that regulates guns in our nation.

And they've gotten, they get swung between administrations.

When an administration comes in and it wants to push

gun rights down or it wants to hold them down or it wants to act and it can't get through the legislator, it goes to ATF.

And so what ends up happening is every four or eight years, ATF will start to do a lot of things.

Like they will make it harder for Americans to act on their Second Amendment rights and actually purchase guns.

They will make it so that if a gun owner or a gun store skips one line on a form where obviously the intent was there not to defraud, they will bring down these incredibly catastrophic consequences.

And so ATF rightfully has taken a lot of heat over the years for those kinds of actions.

And so what we are trying to do with ATF under President Trump and with the Attorney General is return it to its roots of doing what it does best, which is going after violent crime in this nation.

President Trump is incredibly focused.

If you look at what's happening in D.C., and I assume we'll talk about the National Guard there, but ATF agents are playing an incredible role in getting guns from violent criminals off the streets, but empowering gun owners to be able to purchase guns under their Second Amendment who aren't violent criminals.

And so one of the things we're talking about with ATF is doing a complete rebrand and a complete shift and taking it from alcohol, tobacco, and firearms.

And it's got a silent E for explosives and move it over to something like being the Bureau of Violent Crimes, which is exactly what it's actually good at and what most Americans want it to be doing.

Man, that's good to hear.

And,

you know, I know we're not here to really focus on ATF.

We're focused on Secretary of the Army stuff.

But just, you know, I mean, the gun.

The gun rights debate has always been there.

It'll probably always be there until, you know, unless the Second Amendment completely goes away and then it'll take years.

But, you know, we do see, you know, and, and, and there's a lot of confusion on different firearms, and especially those that are firearms enthusiasts with bump stocks.

And a lot of people are pissed off about tax snaps and stuff.

But, you know, I, I can understand the debate, you know, on gun rights.

I mean, we see, I mean, shit, was it last week or the week before the Catholic Church got shot up, a bunch of little kids got killed?

I mean, Uvalde in Texas.

I mean, the list just goes on and on vegas you know and so i mean in your opinion what what is the answer here i mean we we hear people get freaked out about let red flag laws who are who are who are firearms enthusiasts and exercise the second amendment and people get fired up about red flags red flag laws that that don't think we should have any guns or or you know only bolt actions or whatever so

you know with all the school shootings and mass shootings going on and the you know the the threat of jihadists, you know, being inside the country and setting up cells, I mean,

what's the answer here, in your opinion?

What is the answer?

I think it's a,

as you acknowledge, Sean, it's such an incredibly complicated topic

that if you look, I think, at soldier suicide, one of the leading indicators is in that when that moment, the soldier's having that dark moment, they have access to a firearm.

Even if we have instances where many times we had just asked the soldier that morning, how are they doing?

And they they were fine, but you have this quick dip into a bad moment, you have access to a firearm, and you take your life in this incredibly tragic way.

I don't know, though, that it's the firearms' fault.

One of the things the Army has been trying to do is,

should we put weapons in where we store the rest of our weapons and just have them need to get access to that the next morning?

And so try to spread out that moment of

self-violence, self-harm, or community harm from the access to the firearm.

But the problem is that doesn't scale for the average American citizen because our Second Amendment, and this is where I think we as a nation do have a hard time sometime acknowledging the plain English and the plain language.

We come up with this Orwellian doublespeak and we try to talk ourselves into saying it doesn't say that Americans have the right to bear arms.

They do.

Like it is, it is.

Everyone can read that and get to the logical outcome that that is one of our core rights as a nation and there are many benefits from that.

And so I think until we're willing to just have the hard conversation on the merits, we're just going to keep playing on the margins and doing things like using ATF to regulate against a right that is obviously there.

I mean, it scares the hell out of me.

I mean, you know, when we do, when we're talking about mental health, because that's what it all, you know, spirals around, right, is the mental health issue.

And, you know, a lot of a lot of

veterans, you know, that

have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries, depression, PTS.

And, you know, and I think there's a big fear that, because I don't,

I'm definitely a firearms enthusiast.

I also see fucking kids being killed all the time, you know, in schools.

In fact, I just yanked my kid out of school because I wasn't impressed with the security there.

And, and, you know, schools aren't, schools and, and venues aren't, aren't rising up to, you know, it's, it's like, dude, just fucking pay the money, man.

Just pay the money, get the security, get the window window film,

get the blast proof doors, get the camera systems, you know, and it's just so many of these.

Every single time it's reactive, you know what I mean?

And

so, you know, what I'm getting at is, you know, I think there's a lot of fear of people that have, you know, what would be considered a mental health issue, you know, and if those red flag laws go into place, then, I mean, do we all lose our ability to I mean, you trusted us to go to war for the country and use a firearm there.

And, you know, now there's a fear that, fuck, man, I just fought for this country.

I have, you know, some wounds that are invisible, you know, and I don't want to be penalized for my fucking service.

And, but on the other hand, you

have crazy people out there, you know what I mean, that are, that, that.

don't have a record.

They go buy a gun and they fucking shoot a place up.

So

I think one of the problems is, and it's inherent in our system of government, and it does some good things.

I I think it prevents us in any given political cycle from veering too far off the straight and narrow of what our amazing nation has done for 249 years, which is generally speaking doing an amazing job of protecting the safety of our citizens at large.

But when we have these swings with something like gun regulation, I think

a lot of Second Amendment, like people who are very passionate about that right, are right to be worried that when the political spectrum swings the other way, it could be used to decay and attack their right to have a gun.

And so I think this is one of those topics that

much of my role as secretary has been just very complex issues that the only reason it's getting to you is there's no clear right answer.

And this seems to be one of the kind of those same issues because if I think about it again from a soldier's perspective, One of the role, the parts of this role I never expected is, and I just hadn't thought about it.

We have 450,000 active duty soldiers, about 950,000 total and 250,000 civilians.

So 1.2 million total people.

And what we do is, or what I do, I write a letter to the mother and the father and the spouse and the children of any soldier that dies, including when they kill themselves and commit suicide.

And it is.

devastating.

I mean, it is just one of the most heart-wrenching,

miserable parts of this job.

And all you wish is that you can end it.

And so we've started doing a deep dive of how can we actually impact soldier suicide.

And what you learn is we've invested a ton of resources into it.

We have really smart, passionate, caring people working on it.

You have, I think from your experience, Sean, like

you care about your battle buddy deeply.

You care about them when you're in uniform.

You care about them when you're out of uniform.

And yet with all of those positive forces going to this problem, we just haven't been able to solve it.

And so when people come back and they say, hey, maybe the solution is to lock up soldiers' firearms,

you just end up thinking, like, I hear that you are looking at the ultimate tool that created the negative impact on their lives at the end, but I just think the problem is so much more complex.

And to your point, these are the people we trust to go out on behalf of our nation with our most ferocious weapons and defend us.

Like, that just doesn't seem like the right answer.

But there's not really a better one.

Yeah.

I'm going to throw something on your radar if you don't mind.

Yeah, please.

Catherine Boyle, she's a partner.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

Andreessen Horowitz, and she just put a company, I believe the name of the company is called Sharp.

And they're, I believe they're new.

I just dug into this last night a little bit, but basically this is a for-profit company, an organization that is sending coaches into law enforcement, firefighters, first responders,

military personnel.

And I think they started, you know, they started with one little facility.

Now they're in 50 states.

But basically, what they do is they'll take a guy like me or, you know,

a veteran police officer, veteran firefighter, a veteran first responder, and they will insert coaches into these organizations to talk about, you know, what it's like to pull through, you know, what it's like on the other side, you know, the dark moments that you have.

And I think that's, you know, first I was like, oh, you know, it's for-profit, but I mean, the nonprofit sector is so fucking, you know, it's, it's, it's the only thing that works the federal bureaucracy is the nonprofit sector in our country.

Yeah.

And so I just, the company's called sharp, it might be something you want to talk about.

Yeah, we'll take a look for sure.

But, um, but anyway, so anyways, on the topic of violent crime, uh, before we get into your backstory, I mean, we, we are seeing National Guard, Army National Guard get activated into different cities.

LA, D.C.

Let's talk about going to

Chicago.

There's talk about coming here to Nashville, Memphis.

I mean, and that is, you know, I got a couple of thoughts on this.

One, you know, it, it,

it's kind of like the gun rights thing.

It's fucking tricky, you know, and I mean, Chicago, I think that's still what is still the leading murder capital of the country.

I think so.

And Memphis is, you know, a close second.

Nashville's got a lot of violent crime.

We all know about what goes on in L.A.

We all know about what goes on in D.C.

And, you know, but I think the fear is, you know,

ever since COVID, it's been everybody's got fear of, you know, government overreach and rightly so, correct?

So, I mean, is, is this skirting the line of martial law?

And

the caveat to that is, you know, I think about, I just think, what would I think, you know, if I, if I was in Chicago or St.

Louis or DC or, you know, Memphis and I have kids, I don't want my fucking kids getting shot at, you know, and I'm tired of seeing, you know, our youth, anybody just get killed, you know what I mean, from, from the violent crimes out there.

And so, one, I'm worried about martial law, government overreach.

On the other hand, if I put myself in that situation and I live in Chicago and I'm like,

I don't really like, I don't want to go through National Guard checkpoints and I don't want to see National Guard everywhere.

I want to believe that, but, but.

it's not that way.

And so maybe if I lived there, I would, I would, you know, I would be more open to it like well we got to clean this up one way or another you know and so i'm just you know i'm curious

the same token i mean they keep voting for the same type of people that are not going to clean this up and and so do they do they want it cleaned up you know what i mean so i'm just curious you know what are your thoughts on that i think d to just to narrow in on dc um um i i worked on president trump's campaign for uh much of the campaign season um with the vice president and ended up getting to talk to and be part of a lot of conversations with voters.

And if you talk to, in my opinion, the average American voter, like

the types of crime and the decay that we have allowed in our big cities is offensive as a nation.

Like what

A government's primary role is for its people, in my opinion, is to provide security and safety.

That's from international threats and that's from within our border.

And I think what you've seen President Trump do is rightly and righteously react to the voter sentiment and the mandate he was given to stop the violent criminals coming over our border in record numbers.

This is not political rhetoric that just if you actually look at the quantitative data of the number of humans that illegally came over our borders in the four years before, it was insanity.

It's like we think back to this time of Ellis Island and like this influx of new Americans coming.

And we as a nation had consented to that.

We in the previous four years hadn't consented to this and you had this insane

number of human beings from just the inaction of the federal government leading to all these downstream bad effects in communities.

And so if you look at DC, one of my experience so far has been

and we mentioned it earlier at breakfast, but when I got this

Secretary of the Army role and then the acting director of ATF, if you had told me on my bingo card that I would have had a spot where we would be working on the same mission together, I would have told you you were crazy.

But it's been amazing getting to see the National Guard soldiers work with our ATF agents and the rest of their law enforcement brethren.

providing a service in DC that the community loves.

I think if you look at the feedback, and I encourage reporters anytime I talk to them, just go talk to average members of the DC community.

And I think they love it.

These National Guard members go to the same churches as them.

Their kids are in the same school.

They are many and most times from this exact same community.

And what's so cool about the National Guard is you can be deployed abroad for the security of your country, but you can also be used to improve and help secure your own community.

And I think what President Trump is doing in DC, our nation's capital and the most amazing country that has existed in the history of the world, to repair it and beautify it and make it something we can all be proud of, where you can walk your kids down the street and not be afraid of a violent crime happening to you is such an obvious outcome to me that the slippery slope conversation of militarizing DC and whether it's martial law, I think if you actually talk to people, it's nothing like that.

And when we had 15, 18, 20 reporters, and I was talking to them a couple of weeks ago, and one of the places I struggle the most with the press in our country is, and I understand why the incentive structure is this way, but they're incentivized to get clicks.

They're incentivized.

That's how they get their ad dollars.

And so the entire system has been set up to tell a story or create a headline to get a a person to click on it so you get rewarded.

It's classic like Pavlovian behavior.

And so if you think of the Army parade, the Army parade was to celebrate 250 years of our United States Army.

We are older than the United States of America itself.

I tell soldiers often they and the people that came before them and the ones that are coming after actually built and are sustaining this great nation.

I don't know if you remember the headlines, but so many people wrote about this militarized parade that it was going to go down D.C.

with these tanks and it it was going to destroy the city and destroy the roads.

And I mean, I can't tell you, I would guess there were thousands of articles written about this in the months leading up.

This was President Trump's big act to do something despicable, is what a lot of people wrote.

The parade happened and nearly, I think it ended up having more views than the Super Bowl this past year.

No, kids.

Yeah, I think it had 148 million views.

And

as far as I know, we had $800 worth of total damage where one tank nicked one curb.

And almost everyone I know that watched it said, man, that was good, wholesome television.

And our recruiting numbers, like the number of people wanting to join, skyrocketed that day, that week, and the month that followed.

So from my perspective, it was everything we and the president said it was going to be.

And then when I was sitting with these reporters, I asked them, I thought many of them wrote the story on the front end about how bad it could be, but did any of them write a follow-up story to say, actually, it was exactly what they said it was going to be and the slippery slope argument that they continue to make to sell headlines doesn't tend to ever actually happen and so for the average american we keep telling these boogeyman stories about what the president is trying to do to secure our communities and i think it's really harmful it's degrading our belief in the system unnecessarily and every interaction i have had has been a positive one Make every day a Disney Plus and Hulu day and get everything you love in one plan.

Start your day with Monday Mayhem and watch episodes of Bob's Burgers.

How about a touchdown Tuesday with the hilarious new comedy Chad Powers?

Or Whodone It Wednesday with high potential in everyone's favorite amateur sleuths in the hits series Only Murders in the Building.

Maybe you're in the mood for a thrilling Thursday.

Grab some popcorn and stream huge blockbusters like Marvel Studios Thunderbolts on Disney Plus.

Or get caught up with the most enthralling news on what you need to know.

Gather the fam for a Flashback Friday and binge all episodes of Modern Family or Grey's Anatomy.

So discover something every day on Disney Plus and Hulu.

It's the movies and the shows you love every day.

18 and up only.

Offer valid for eligible subscribers only.

Terms apply.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

Support shows up in surprising places.

A group chat.

a kind stranger, a neighbor.

For me, it's my team at work.

Having people like that that in your corner really does mean everything.

And you know what else can help?

Guidance and support from a clinically trained and credentialed therapist.

Like the ones you find at BetterHelp.

Just fill out a short questionnaire that helps identify your needs and preferences.

Finding the right therapist can be really tough.

But BetterHelp's 10 plus years of experience in industry-leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time.

BetterHelp is convenient too.

Completely online, you can pause your subscription whenever you need to and switch counselors at any time for no extra cost.

Plus, BetterHelp is high trust certified and complies with GDPR standards, which means they meet some of the highest global standards for data privacy.

As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise.

Find the one with BetterHelp.

Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash SRS.

That's better

H E L P dot com slash S R S.

Well, that's good to hear.

I mean, you know, I mean, the press is just a fucking disaster.

They're, they're on their way out.

I mean, you know, the latest debacle is, you know, that that African-American guy that stabbed the Ukrainian in Charlotte.

Yeah.

Yep.

With like three times in the neck.

And then, and then, you know, nobody covers it.

I think Fox News eventually covered it.

But then you got Daniel Penny, who stands up for somebody, chokes a bad guy out, winds up dead.

And that's everywhere.

That's everywhere.

Yep.

You know what I mean?

So the press is on their way out.

I think that's why podcasts are just booming right now.

But back to the National Guard thing.

I mean, just for

all of us that don't live in D.C.

or L.A.

or are we in Chicago now?

We're not.

Okay.

I am.

I mean, what does it look like when the National Guard is activated in a city

with a tremendous rate of violent crime?

I mean,

what's the plan of action?

What does it look like for the people that live there?

Yeah, so very specifically, Sean, what we do is we go to a set of people who have joined, they've raised their right hand to defend our country, and we say, you are being activated.

We're going to give you orders to come do this mission that, in the instance of the D.C.

National Guard, is right in the strike zone of what they are intended to do and have always been intended to do.

They, because the D.C.

is a little bit quirky, there's no governor over it.

So the Secretary of the Army, me, is essentially through the pres from the president, through the Secretary of War down to me, has the authority to activate them.

We turn them on, we bring them in, we train them on whatever the mission is.

And then we look to the local, in this instance, we look to the local law enforcement leaders from the federal agency and we say, how can we help?

Where do you need us?

What can we do?

What do you need them doing?

Where can they be most valuable?

Here are the assets we have.

A lot of them are law enforcement officers.

A lot of them have all of these talents.

What's so cool about the National Guard is because they're full-time in other jobs, we can get these really niche experiences to help us.

We have engineers, we have computer programmers, we have people who are in law enforcement, and we can help bolster whatever the need of the community is.

And so as it specifically related to DC in the beginning, we put them out on presence patrols.

And one of the things I think that from my time in Iraq, you heard presence patrol and it kind of like sent shivers up your spine because of the stupid presence patrols that we would do in Iraq,

in my opinion, because the mission hadn't been defined and you would be doing it as more of a check the block exercise.

For this exercise in D.C., that's not it at all.

We have communities and neighborhoods that are suffering terrible, like a scourge of violent crime.

And by having our soldiers there, it is making a meaningful impact.

So I think last week I heard that carjackings in the city are down 85%.

85% since President Trump did this.

And again, to your point, Sean, like no one's writing about it that I'm seeing, but like this is obviously making a difference.

a difference.

And this is the thing that I think happened in the last election.

Americans are just sick of being doublespeak to.

They're sick of the media contorting the story and telling them things that their own eyes are telling them are lies.

And so from everything I have seen from the DC National Guard, they are doing noble missions.

They almost all are happy to be in their own community, and it is going to make a lasting impact and kind of show our nation that we can recover these cities.

We don't have to sit back passively anymore and just say, oh, the criminals have it.

We got to move out to the country to be safe.

We can go in there with the might of the federal government, partner with local law enforcement, and take back these cities under President Trump.

Sounds great.

But what does it look like from the people that live there?

You know, when I hear, I mean, I was in Iraq.

I spent a long time in the Middle East, you know, and I've been a part of presence patrols.

And when I hear a presence patrol,

I think of a convoy of Humbees with 50 cals and twin 240s on the top with, you know, of the turret and up armored.

I mean, is that what it looks like?

Or is it checkpoints?

So

specifically what it would look like is

you would see soldiers, most times from your community, who are trying to help secure your community.

And the way that I, a trailing indicator to me that they are being valued is the number of selfies that these soldiers are taking is remarkable.

Kids are coming up, grandparents are coming up, young and old are wanting to thank them for their service, wanting to thank them for doing this for their community.

When we meet with the DC leadership, this is kind of one of the quiet secrets of the whole thing.

If you actually meet with the police, if you meet with the leadership at kind of nearly all levels in my experience, one of the first things they say is, thank you.

Please tell your members, please tell your soldiers, thank you.

Like, this is really helpful.

We're really happy to have them in the community.

I think if you look at what the D.C.

mayor said last week, they're starting to build a plan around now that they actually have all of these resources and these law enforcement officers, they're leaning into the idea that they can improve their city.

And I think this is exactly what President Trump wanted to do is.

empower DC and empower our nation's capital to fix itself with federal resources and build the momentum to go do this throughout the nation.

What does it look like?

I mean, if you thought of this, I mean, what does it look like if they get into, I mean, I don't even know what we would call it here.

I was just going to call it a tick, a troops in contact.

But, I mean, you know, with the MS-13 gangs, the cartels, the bloods, the crips, I mean, you know,

Hell's Angels, I don't know.

You know, there's gang members all over the place, you know, tons of different gangs.

I mean, what does it look like if MS-13 pushes back against the National Guard and

happens to fire upon them?

I mean, do they have ROEs?

Yeah, I mean,

I think they would see the full might and fury of our United States Army.

They would see the full might and fury of the most powerful government in the history of the world.

And I think the President and Secretary of War have been very clear that they are taking a hard line, and that kind of violence is no longer acceptable in our nation.

And so I don't think we would ever

wish that on our soldiers.

I think anyone who has deployed on behalf of the nation knows the cost that comes from those moments.

I mean, my dad is going on 80, and it never really clicked to me why when I woke him up my entire childhood, I'd kind of poke him and he'd sit up like a mousetrap.

And the day before I deployed, we were at a Ruby Tuesdays in Watertown, New York.

And we were talking about it.

I just asked him if he remembered those moments in Vietnam.

And he kind of was dodging the answer.

And I was like, seriously, like, do you remember them?

And he said, oh, every night I have bad dreams on it.

And it was like for 55 years, the man's been having bad dreams about his time there.

You don't wish these moments of conflict on somebody.

So I don't want to sound light or callous when I say it, but this mission to me, unlike a lot of the ones in the early 2000s, is a noble mission.

It is purpose-built for our National Guard members to provide security to their own communities.

And these are heroes who have raised their right hand and said they want to go do this mission.

And so whoever it is that threatens our soldiers, they will see violence like an act of God coming at them and they will see support coming from all directions.

And I think that they will learn very quickly that the standard of what they are able to do in our nation has changed.

What is the, I mean, what is the long-term plan?

I mean, I don't, you know, I mean, they could move.

They could, you know, these, these cells, these gangs, I mean, they could move to other cities and set up their, you know, where there's, there's less pushback from the government.

So, I mean, what is the, what is the long-term plan?

I mean, we've seen a lot of cities that have just kneecapped law enforcement, Seattle, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, New York.

I mean, the list goes on and on.

And so, I mean, is there a plan to,

and I don't even, I don't know how this works.

You know what I mean?

That's a state and local entity.

So I don't know how much control the federal government would have over that.

But I mean, what is the long-term plan?

I think as it relates to D.C., if you talk to the president or his advisors or the Secretary of War or the Attorney General Pambondi,

they are in it until it's done and they are not defining that moment of done yet because it's gotten so bad that I think a lot of the purpose of this is to wake Americans up and make them realize that they have incredible power in how they vote.

I think you made the reference, Sean.

If you look at a lot of these cities, they keep voting in the same people.

And I think a lot of this is kind of the water getting turned up on the frog.

People don't realize you don't have to be afraid.

You don't have to accept that when you park your car on the street, it's going to get broken into.

You don't have to accept that your 12-year-old can't board a bus and go to the local convenience store and go to an arena to watch a sporting event and come back home.

Like we, as a nation, can win this war and make ourselves safe again.

And so I think the answer for it is it will last as long as it takes under President Trump to return us to a place of less than average violence when compared to peer countries around the world.

And we're not near that yet.

So it's essentially kind of leading by example to the local law enforcement through the National Guard.

Oh, and law enforcement love it.

Like when you talk to the local law enforcement, they've won the lottery.

They have signed up.

One of the amazing parts of being at ATF is I get to be around all these law enforcement, and they desperately want to clean up their own communities.

This is empowering them with all of these new enablers that they just typically don't have.

And so I I think it's less modeling good behavior for them and instead empowering them to do what they are so good at and want to do, but they've just been under-resourced and

underappreciated for so long.

All right, let's move on.

So let's get a little bit of a backstory on you.

Let's do it.

Where did you grow up?

So I grew up in the mountains, North Carolina, a place called Boone, Appalachian State's in my hometown.

Went to a public high school up there.

So it was about 400 kids a class.

Kids would drive from all over the county.

There were no private schools.

It was an amazing childhood.

Most of it spent outdoors, skiing, mountain biking, just playing sports.

Ended up my rising,

when I was going into junior year, I ended up meeting

this woman, Cassie, who was a rising freshman.

I was 18 months older than her, and asked her out.

She couldn't date till she was 16.

We ended up dating, I think, a couple months before she turned 16.

She's now my wife.

We've been together for 22, 23 years.

So it was just an absolutely amazing childhood growing up up in the mountains.

What got your interest in the military?

So

think about this.

This kind of blows my mind when I think back to it.

So the summer before, so I was going to UNC Chapel Hill for college.

And the reading, the summer reading book from UNC Chapel Hill was this book, Absolutely American.

So they had all the freshmen reading this book about these three guys who had gone to West Point and then deployed to Iraq.

And my granddad had served in World War II as a Dakota.

My dad was an infantryman in Vietnam, as I was telling you.

And then, so I had, I had a ton of family members who had served, and it was always kind of like on the back burner.

But I read this book as an 18-year-old and just thought, man,

I cannot miss out on my generation's war.

Like, I do not want to be the kind of person that I'm 40, 50, 60 years old, and they asked the veterans to stand at an event and I stay seated.

Like, I need to go be a part of this.

If this is what our nation needs, I need to go be a part of it.

So I read the book, finished it, and just decided to graduate as fast as humanly possible.

So took a ton of summer school, got out in three years and went to basic training.

What year was that?

Went to basic in September 2007.

Okay, so way past 9-11.

Yeah.

So you know what you were getting into.

Yeah, so it was it was right during the surge.

And so you were at basic training and I did that and then officer candidate school.

But everybody was talking about the surge in Iraq and trying to get you through schools.

The gaps between schools was nearly nothing because we just needed more soldiers.

We needed more second lieutenants.

So went through OCS, did a couple of other schools, ended up at tank school at our armor school at Fort Knox.

And armor is an odd branch in the army.

You basically pair like very heavy tankers, like who are using these exquisite pieces of equipment with scouts who are kind of the lightest formation we have as an army.

So I ended up choosing the scout path, trading with a guy, finished armor school, went to ranger school, which there are two distinct memories from all these army schools that stand out to me forever.

One is in basic.

I can remember it was like a couple of days after starting basic training.

And our drill instructor, drill instructor Wilburn, had picked somebody to lead our basic training platoon.

And I thought I was more talented than that person and I should have been the leader.

So I just after one of the formations went up and I thought rationally explained to her why I was a better choice.

And as you can expect, Sean, that went terrible.

And so I will never forget the humiliation of realizing that that is not what the army is.

And it is my job to shut the fuck up and do what I am told and not provide other commentary.

And then the other one in Ranger School, where

it's the only time I can truly recall, it was Mountain Phase.

We were walking up a hill.

I think I was carrying like a 249

and I slipped and I fell down and I just couldn't get up.

Like it was, I was exhausted.

I was tired.

We hadn't eaten.

I had lost 25 pounds at that point.

And like I was shaking, I was shivering.

I was cold and I was broken.

It just literally is this one moment I'll never forget.

And you're hallucinating.

And it was just this thing that growing up in the mountains, North Carolina is like a reasonably comfortable middle class existence.

You're laying there and you're thinking, oh my God, like I am past what I am capable of doing.

And it's like at that exact moment, guys pull you up, they grab your weapon, they say, hey, we'll carry it for a little while.

We stopped.

I can remember a couple of them like hugging me to get me to stop shivering.

And it's this moment of vulnerability that like, at least for me, was like the start of this moment where I realized like these were the types of people that were going to be in my life forever.

And these were the types of people that were the best among us.

And it was, my, my wife will say of these times that had I not joined the army, she wouldn't have married me.

Like she's very explicit about that.

And it's not,

it's because if you said that, she has, she said it on many, even before this, even before this job.

Because she says it just, it made me a much better version of myself.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah.

That is cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So then you deployed to Iraq, what year?

So got to 10th Mountain Division after Ranger School, 2nd Brigade.

We were there about eight to 10 months.

We were originally supposed to go to Afghanistan, got swapped out to go to Iraq.

We deployed in kind of the tail end of the surge, so 09.

It's like right at the end of the surge, right before the handoff, through kind of the handoff.

And so the way I summarize that time is like, I think when I talk to other buddies who have deployed there at different periods of time, I'd like to think that perhaps we were there at like peak stupid,

where we would go out on these missions and we would be told the number one thing to optimize for was not getting hurt.

They like just Americans had no appetite for soldiers getting hurt anymore.

And I can remember talking to my captain and major and colonels and saying, well, if that's the thing we're optimizing for, just like, don't send us out.

We might as well just sit here because like we can't do our job if that's what you're telling us to do.

And so I can hit some of the more insane stories from that time, but it's like, it just makes me.

so angry to think back on you were risking the lives of me and the guys beside me and under me and for something that just like there didn't seem to be a purpose or a mission at that point.

Yeah, for what?

For what?

Did you see any, did you see any kinetic activity over there?

So by the time we were there,

most of the dumb ones had been killed.

So we would have IEDs and mortars, but no sort of like direct engagements of any sort of substance.

We would do one of the highlights of stupidity to me was

like they sent in a camera crew.

We were going to go after this IED factory.

And it's like, you just imagine it to be a certain thing.

And you maybe have experienced something similar, but you're doing a factory raid.

And so they took two of the platoons.

They're under me.

They're filming, we're doing the plan, we're getting the Humvees, we're rolling out, we're doing the cordon, we get to this place where they think they're making IEDs.

We have the bolt cutters ready to go.

We call up for the clearance and we're told that the new rules of engagement that had gone into effect meant we couldn't cut this lock that was a gym lock that was like the size of what my seven-year-old puts on her locker at school.

And so we end up being told you can't break locks anymore.

We get back in the Humvees.

We drive back over these IED laden roads.

And it was like at that moment, I was like, never again.

Like, we have got to fix this as the nation.

Cause how could you possibly have risked all of these limbs and all of these lives and then let like a little tiny gym locker stop you from this mission?

Holy shit.

That may be the most absurd fucking thing I've ever heard.

It makes my blood boil.

There's a lock here, guys.

Yep.

Let them keep making IEDs.

100%.

We're out.

Yep.

What the?

It's fucking crazy.

Wow.

It's maddening.

And unbelievable.

Now from this seat, because basically the idea was come back, try to get some experiences, come back and make a little bit of a difference.

And

you see how those types of preposterous decisions are output from our training to how we procure things, to how our missions come to be.

No, very few people along the line think that they are leading to that sort of

stupid outcome.

But because few people own it and because very few of the decision makers center center themselves around, well, wait a second, before I decide this thing, how does it actually impact the O1, the O2, the E4?

What are they going to have to do with what I am saying now?

And that has been one of the things that with General George, we have tried to do with every decision is start to model the behavior of, I don't actually care how it impacts you and your Pentagon job.

I want to know, how does it impact a soldier in the field who actually has to do the thing or carry the thing or train with the thing that you're talking about?

Man, that's good to hear.

That's great to hear.

Hasn't been like that in a long time.

So I don't know if I've ever seen it.

But

so that's that's commendable.

Thank you for doing that.

No, we'll see if it works.

We're trying our best.

Yeah, well, it sounds like, you know, from our breakfast conversation that a lot of the, a lot of the, the,

you know, the, the, the brute workforce of the military or the special or the army is pretty damn happy that you're in there.

So they're incredible.

I think that most of these problems are are complex, and there's a lot of blame to go around, and we can cover that part whenever you want.

But the upside is the American soldier, like I can say this with a completely straight face and not trying to be sycophantic.

After getting out, ended up going to fancy law schools and working with fancy law firms and consultants and venture-backed companies.

And you meet all of these really talented Americans

who are good at their niches.

But I would say, like, having been out for 14, 15 years and coming back and seeing the average American soldier, I would bet on them every single time to solve any problem our nation has.

I mean, they are so talented.

They are so innovative.

Their give a shit is off the charts.

I mean, it is just

remarkable to me what our American soldiers are capable of doing.

And I think if we can just unlock that talent and let them run at a lot of the problems our nation and our military are facing, we're just going to see amazing results.

Nice.

Nice.

Let's talk about the road to Secretary of the Army.

I mean, how did that come about?

So

post-Army, so we're in Iraq and I can remember we woke up.

We're about to go out on a mission and I read my email and I had gotten accepted to law school up at Yale in New Haven.

And I was so excited.

And I called my then-girlfriend, Cassie, and I said, oh, this is awesome.

I'm going to New Haven for law school.

And I get out.

And the first thing out of her mouth was, well, I'm not going up there unless we're married.

So I ended up proposing the first weekend back from Iraq.

And then the next thing I heard is we're getting in the vehicles ready to roll out.

And my driver, this guy Bo, looks at me and he said, hey, sir, I'm really excited for you, but could you just please not get us killed today?

And so

that brought me back into the moment real quickly.

So get into law school, ended up going,

I guess about a year and a half after getting back from Iraq.

The day before school starts, I meet this guy

who the Yale Law Veterans

Association, which was three classes of law school or three years of law school, was comprised of like seven total people.

And so, one of the second years was taking out us first years to kind of give us the lay of the land.

And that guy's name was JD Vance.

And so, JD takes us to pizza and he says, Hey, I know a lot of you are going to be self-conscious.

You've been out of school for a while.

Like, you're going to feel like you are less than and not smart enough to keep up.

But if you can just give it a couple of months, like you'll get your bearings and you'll find out that like you belong here.

And I will just never forget that that was the first time I met JD and he was just an incredible mentor that entire time through.

So spent a lot of time in law school, meeting a lot of folks, working at law firms, working for judges, ended up not wanting to do the law full-time.

And so went into finance.

My wife had then gotten into med school in North Carolina, did finance for a couple of years, and then she was pregnant with our now nine-year-old Daniel Jr., living in a different city than me.

So moved from Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina to where she was and full-time dad.

And for about a year, completely ran out of money.

I think we were like negative 25,000 in net worth when my son turned one, ended up meeting a guy who had sold his business for a bunch of money and then spent the next kind of five or six years in like the private equity venture capital world, ended up as COO of a couple hundred million dollar VC fund that a friend ran.

And that time was amazing because what you realize, and we give Silicon Valley a lot of credit for this, I think probably you've experienced this too, Sean.

Most people that start their own business are scrappy and hungry and looking to provide value to their customer.

And they speed through innovation and they get there quickly.

Silicon Valley kind of famously with the venture capital dollars could go even faster and even bigger to do that.

But essentially, the model's been around since I would guess the beginning of humankind, which is if you think you have an idea that's going to be helpful, come up with a minimum viable product, get it into the hand of your customer, have them use it and learn from them.

Do they like it or not?

Pivot it and innovate it and make it better, and then keep doing that cycle throughout time.

And so those kind of lessons of how these companies were able to innovate and these amazing American success stories happened were incredibly valuable to kind of reshape my brain on how things could occur.

And when you had a good idea, how you could scale it really quickly.

And so I ended up doing that for a couple of years, quick pause for 10 weeks to run for Congress in the mountains, North Carolina.

Absolutely got my ass kicked.

I think I outraged the field like two or three, two or three X and just got dominated.

COVID hits.

My wife ends up switching med schools or excuse me, switching residency programs to be in North Carolina.

We're down together as a family.

And so I think it was like 23, 24 were the first two years in like 16 or 17 years that my wife and I had lived in the same city.

It was a remarkable period of reset.

I was helping the VC fund, traveling a bit, getting to be a much more present dad.

We had our daughter Lila.

Then my wife's residency was ending, so she was in that for seven years as a plastic surgeon.

She was going to do this one-year hand surgery fellowship in Los Angeles.

We figured we'd test the West Coast out, try to do some trips with the kids, go see Washington State and Oregon, kind of let them experience that.

We had this one-month gap.

We were doing that classic vacation of taking the kids to Europe.

And right in the middle of the vacation, JD called and said he had been picked to be the vice presidential nominee.

So we were eating dinner in Zurich on a Monday night, Tuesday morning.

I boarded a flight, flew to Chicago, Ubered to an outlet mall right outside the Chicago airport, bought a super shitty fitting suit, belt and tie, and Ubered my happy ass up to Milwaukee for the RNC and then started the next year of adventure.

Damn.

It was wild.

Yeah, it's been a wild ride.

I haven't been a particularly good or present dad last year, but it's been a fun year.

Is that the same suit?

It's a well fun.

I'm just kidding.

We're actually, we were like, we were like a month into the campaign, and this guy who had worked really closely with the president for a long time, this guy, Nick, he comes up and he was like, hey, man,

you might want to buy a new suit.

And I was like, why?

And he was like, you look like an intern.

And so ever since now, I have, I mean, they're not good, but they're better.

Looks good.

I appreciate it.

Looks good.

But,

all right, let's get into Secretary of the Army.

Yeah.

So what are we doing?

What's going on there?

So a lot of stuff has been, a lot of the DEI stuff got cleaned up.

It seemed like it was like overnight.

It's been incredible.

President Trump, Secretary of War, Hex Seth, I mean, they have been laser focused on returning our Army and our military to a culture of lethality and focus on the shit that matters, which is, at least for the United States Army, they are a killing machine that stands by and stands ready to be deployed by our president.

And that is his purpose.

And what peace through strength fundamentally means is the more aggressive and the more pre-violent they can be, the less likely you actually have to use them to do those acts because our adversaries are so afraid of them.

And

they have done, the president and secretary have done a remarkable job of resetting the culture, in my opinion, quickly.

And then a lot of the things we in the Army have done with their air cover have been

a couple months into being here with General Randy George, who's our chief of staff, and he's just awesome.

I live a couple houses from him.

We spend a ton of time together, but we did something called the Army Transformation Initiative, which was essentially cutting.

$48 billion of spending on a bunch of stupid shit that we just didn't need anymore, that for all sorts of reasons we were still buying and reallocating that, those $48 billion over the next five years to things we actually needed.

So those were like two buckets of things we did.

Another bucket was the Army has kind of preposterously given away things like its own right to repair our own equipment, which is just sinful.

So what that practically means, Sean, is you'd have these two, $3 million pieces of equipment sitting on the sidelines for a year at a time.

It was an $8 part that we knew how to 3D print, but we had given away our own right to repair that equipment.

And so it basically this ATI forces us to take back that right.

And then the other thing that we did kind of in those early months was cut headquarters.

So I'm sure you've seen this, but we have have so many human beings, so many soldiers that sit in the Pentagon and sit in our headquarters formations and just are wasting their life away doing what they didn't want to sign up to do.

And so we're pushing them back out to the unit.

So we cut down some of our four-star headquarters.

We've gotten rid of a bunch of three-stars and two stars and are just pushing them back out to the formation.

Good.

You know,

let's start with a $48 billion budget cut.

I mean, you know, a lot of people

would say, oh, I can't believe you're cutting $48 billion out of a defense budget, you know, for the Army.

What did that cut?

Well, so specifically what we were doing is cut to reallocate.

And so this was not intended to be a money-saving exercise per se.

We, the United States Army, spend $185 billion a year.

I mean, it is an enormous amount of money.

There's all sorts of ways I can tell you about how everything you build on an Army base costs 66.5% more than if you build it right on the other side of the fence.

There's all sorts of inefficiencies.

So we're spending that $185 billion pretty poorly most times, but it's a lot of money.

And so what we did is we looked at things like Humvees.

The Humvee has served a purpose.

We have over 100,000 of them, and it is...

pretty effective or reasonably effective at driving down a paved highway and keeping soldiers reasonably safe from risks like IEDs.

What it is not good for is a world with drones.

And if you look at the inflection point in war that's occurring in Ukraine right now,

the Humvee just doesn't work for that.

And so it does have some use cases, but we're way over-indexed on it.

And so what we're doing with some of the cuts from not purchasing any more Humvees is we're reallocating those dollars toward these ISVs or these infantry squad vehicles.

which if you're kind of picturing it, it's like a 1950s, 1960s Jeep, but a lot faster.

It can go off-road and soldiers love it.

And what's so amazing about it is it's made by General Motors and Chevy off the Chevy, Colorado.

And so you're taking this existing platform that has been millions and millions of miles of consumer use.

We convert it with Hendrix Motorsports.

So they're the ones that have all the race car drivers.

They take these things.

They're working with Chevy.

They're making these ISVs for us.

We're putting them in the hands of soldiers.

They're cheaper.

They're faster.

They have a lower profile.

Soldiers love them.

And then what's amazing about these things, Sean, is when we need to repair them in the Indo-Pacific or in Europe or wherever we are, for 80% of the parts, you can just go to a Chevy store and pick it up.

And so instead of relying on these manufacturers who will hold us hostage with these replacement parts, that oftentimes we were talking about it at breakfast, there's parts on some of our equipment that we can't get till 2027, 2028.

And it's a part we could print for a couple of bucks.

And so what's amazing about things like the ISV, which is just the hardware side of things, is we are rethinking as an army, not just what is the effectiveness of specifically what we buy, but how can we repair it in places like the Indo-Pacific?

So

it's not specifically a budget cut.

It's a reallocation.

It's a reallocation.

So we essentially...

We're innovating.

We're innovating.

We found $48 billion

to start that we are going to use and are using to buy the tools of future warfare.

Damn, that's awesome.

It's great to hear that.

The downside is, Sean, as you might expect,

because we had $48 billion billion worth of things people thought we were going to buy, you have 48 billion reasons why people are now angry with me and angry with General George because we've taken those dollars they thought they were going to get, that they thought were going to go in their congressional district, their state, to their, that their lobbyist had thought that they had won that battle and were going to get handsomely rewarded for their work.

And we have.

stripped it from them and we are saying, no, no, no, we are going to listen to what soldiers are telling us, which is they love the ISV and we're going to reallocate reallocate it to things like that.

Man, you know, that's

it's just great to hear.

I mean, I mean, I was using the Humvee back in

early 2000s.

I mean, it's

fucking obsolete now.

Yeah,

it is.

I mean, there's all these new things out.

100,000 Humvees.

100,000.

I think it's 104.

And so when do you, I mean, how do you

how do you get the word from the bottom up of what these guys want?

You know, because it's, I've never seen seen it like that.

So how are you reaching them?

This is full credit to General George and our vice General Mingus and our Sergeant Major of the Army, Mike Weimer.

I mean, these are warriors.

They are incredible men who have grown up.

A lot of them were in some of our more specialized, like Delta units and Ranger battalions, and they have deployed to,

and they have seen the failures of the system.

And so

before I even came in, they started something called Transformation and Contact.

So TIC.

And the basic premise of this, back to the kind of earlier in the podcast, is to take the lessons learned from Silicon Valley and startups around the country and the world of this idea of minimum viable product.

In our instance, our customers are soldier.

And our innovation is oftentimes made by people outside of the Army.

And so what they did is they said, hey, industry, and this was a small-scale experiment to start, bring your stuff out to our formations.

We're going to identify a couple of brigades, a couple of battalions throughout the army, and they're going to be our testbed of innovation.

And they're going to take your stuff out to the field and they're going to try it.

And what ended up happening was soldiers loved it.

These new millennials, like these new,

the soldiers we are recruiting can figure this stuff out incredibly quickly.

They absolutely love training with it.

And we're putting in a lot of instances, the computer programmers, the developers, the manufacturers at JRTC, at our training sites with our soldiers.

And the innovation loop is closing down.

And so, what's there, it's getting tighter.

And so, what's happening is that the types of things that are being offered are better.

So, then that's good.

The next part of it was, how do we actually start to procure that stuff?

How do we buy things quickly at smaller scales?

So, instead of having onesie-twosie tryouts in the field, how can we have units starting to buy stuff?

We've always been able to do it a bit with our special forces, our ranger battalion.

They've been able to do these things, but our conventional army has not.

And they just function differently.

And so we wanted to take a lot of that model and apply it to the main army.

And so for these ISVs, it was a really successful process where we essentially said, cut all the bullshit.

We're not going to wind the procurement process through these 16 steps where anyone along the way can say no, and then it starts back over.

And then, oh, by the way, everyone at each of those 16 steps has for the last 30 or 40 years in the bureaucracy been incentivized to do nothing.

Basically, the only way you get in trouble as a civilian operating in the Pentagon is to do something that goes wrong.

So there's two ways to avoid that.

Way one is do things and not have it go wrong, but just as equally effective for your own career is to do nothing.

So you're just incentivized to have this safety culture where you say no and just try to make it your entire time without doing anything.

And these are not bad people.

They're not patriotic.

It's just that's the incentive structure.

And so what we did for the ISV is we said we're going to put together a hand-picked setup team.

We're going to grab a contractor.

We're going to grab somebody to write the requirements.

We're going to put like the equivalent of a CEO over this group.

Excuse me.

And we're just going to say, figure out how to get this ISV.

And they did, and it worked.

And as an example of what we've done with that ISV, when Chief and I went out to the West Coast, we went to a company called Applied Intuition.

And Applied Intuition does the back-end like autonomous software for a lot of vehicles that you would see on the road.

They're like the software of their main competitor would be Tesla from the software side.

And so we saw them and we said, have you ever done a Humvee or an ISV?

Have you ever tried to make them autonomous?

And they said, absolutely not.

That would be terrible.

There's too much paperwork.

It's going to take years until we get it.

We don't even know how we would make money with it.

And we basically said, nope, it's a new day.

We're just going to send you a Humvee and an ISV.

We're going to drop them off.

And they said, well, what do you want us to do with it?

We said, take 10 days.

Do anything you want.

We don't care.

Just show us what you can do.

So, so probably 20 days from the day we visited, they sent us a video.

They had taken it out to the field.

They had made a Humvee and an ISV fully autonomous.

They had hooked it in with their drone network.

They had uploaded the repair manual for the ISV onto the screen so a soldier could interact with it and learn how to repair a part.

Wow.

And this is 10 days in from a company that had.

10 days in.

So immediately we sent a car carrier, we picked it up, we drove it out, and that thing's been tested for the last couple of months by soldiers.

And we're just learning and we're just trying to figure out, is that good?

Is that effective?

Should we partner with applied intuition?

They've been amazing.

But we as an army can do this.

Our soldiers are amazing and we just have to get out of their way.

So

did you say that was a Humvee that they did that?

They did a Humvee and an ISV.

So basically anything drive by wire they could do.

There are a lot of choices out there when it comes to cell phone service and it feels like more are popping up all the time.

But Patriot Mobile isn't just another option.

They're different.

A company built by people who actually share your values and who are committed to doing things the right way.

They're also ahead of the curve when it comes to tech.

Patriot Mobile is one of the only carriers with access to all three major U.S.

networks, which means reliable nationwide coverage.

You can even have multiple numbers on different networks all on one phone.

A true game changer.

They offer unlimited data, mobile hotspots, international roaming, internet backup, and more.

Everything you'd expect from a top-tier carrier.

And switching couldn't be easier.

Activate in minutes from home, keep your number, keep your phone, or upgrade if you want to.

Go to patriotmobile.com slash SRS or call 972 Patriot.

And don't forget to use promo code SRS for a free month of service.

That's patriotmobile.com slash SRS or call 972 Patriot.

Whether you're juggling tasks or trying to stay clear-headed throughout the day, Ketone IQ delivers clean brain fuel that can help you think sharper, longer, and smoother.

No caffeine, no crash, no overstimulation.

Thanks to the folks at HVMN for sending me their Ketone IQ product to try.

I really like taking ketone IQ before I work out.

It's not an energy drink, but it gives me a ton of energy.

I wish I had this when I was on active duty.

When I take it, I have more endurance, but without the crash.

Ketone IQ uses ketone diol for a fast-acting, natural, slow-release effect with no artificial sweeteners or fillers.

It helps support high-focus tasks by directly powering neurons and stabilizing cognitive output and and it's military tested.

Originally developed to support elite cognitive performance in the field.

HVMN has an amazing offer just for my listeners.

Visit ketone.com slash SRS for 30% off your subscription order.

Plus, receive a free gift with your second shipment.

Fun surprises like a free six-pack, ketone IQ merch, and more.

These statements and products have not been evaluated by the FDA.

These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or condition.

Time is a funny thing.

It's so limited and yet we let it pass by us.

We're all guilty of putting important things off until later.

If you've been putting off life insurance, check out Fabric by Gerber Life.

They make it fast and easy so you can check it off your list right now.

Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done today, made for busy parents like you, all online and on your schedule, right from your couch.

You could be covered in under 10 minutes with no health exam required.

Fabric has partnered with Gerber Life, trusted by millions of families just like yours for over 50 years.

There's no risk.

There's a 30-day money-back guarantee and you can cancel at any time.

And they have over 1,900 five-star reviews on TrustPilot with a rating of excellent.

Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family.

Apply today in just minutes at meetfabric.com slash Sean.

That's meetfabric.com slash Sean.

M-E-E-T fabric.com slash Sean.

Policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company, not available in certain states, prices subject to underwriting and health questions.

So let me just ask you this.

I talked about this kind of stuff with Palmer Lucky quite a bit when he was on, but I mean, and he was talking about kind of repurposing all of our military vehicles, air, land, I believe, sea, too, and

not actually building all new infrastructure, you know, within the vehicles, but repurposing them and making them autonomous.

So if you're, if you in, in

the rest of the Army and you make the determination, hey, this, this repurposed Humvee is incredible.

We need it.

I mean, will we see all 104,000 Humvees?

get outfitted with that and repurposed.

Hopefully.

It's not just a waste.

I hope so.

So, and then so I guess first to Palmer Lucky, he's an amazing innovator.

He is the type of person I think that for decades we

as a nation have let that brain and that asset not be part of the DOD.

And credit to Andrew, credit to Palantir, credit to a lot of these companies that fought through the last decade to be part of our lives because they showed us what could be.

The Army is at a minimum, in a lot of instances, 10 or 15 years behind our commercial counterparts.

And they have showed us that that doesn't have to be the case.

We're actually really optimistic.

And Palmer's coming next week or the week after, we have CEOs from,

I believe it could be the best collection of CEOs to ever step foot in the Pentagon together from FedEx and GM and the Googles and the

Andreals and all of these different companies want to help the DOD and want to help the Army.

And so we're actually trying to bring them together and say, hey, let's start a relationship where it might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but in a year or a decade, we want to be getting the best of what you're all working on, even if it hasn't gone to the commercials or it's been released yet.

And so, it might be Chat GPT-6.

We, the Army, on behalf of DOD, should be testing that and figuring out: are there offensive or defensive capabilities?

Where should we put it in the federal government if there are?

And how do we start to apply that like China does so well?

And so,

people like Palmer are exactly what we should be doing and aspiring to include in our decision-making process because he is such a successful version of just scrappy entrepreneurship and scrappy innovation and adding a lot of value to his customers.

I mean, do you see, is there a shift in the primes?

We talked about this a little bit at breakfast, but I mean, we see Android, Palantir.

I don't know if you guys are doing anything with SpaceX or not, but I mean, we see all these new innovative companies coming out, like the ones that I just listed.

And then we see, you know, the dinosaurs that haven't really innovated much for the past, what, 50, 60 years?

Are we seeing a shift?

Are these new generation defense tech companies going to take over the primes?

I hope they do.

I hope they do.

I think the primes have held us fucking hostage for way too long and wasted a lot of money.

So to start my reply,

I went on record a couple of months ago saying, hey, I would define it as success if in the first two years of my time at this job, I put one of the primes out of business.

So

as you might expect, I then met with every CEO of every prime many, many, many times.

And I've gotten to hear more of the story.

And so what's so annoying and what's so

unsettling about most things in life, tying back to your very first question, it's complicated.

So what ended up happening is in the 90s, late 80s, early 90s, the Army and the Navy and the Air Force and the Pentagon went to the primes that existed.

And there might have been, let's say, 50 of them.

And we said, hey, the world is safer.

We're not going to need as many of you.

You all have to consolidate down because we just are not going to, our defense industrial bay, we're not going to be able to support a big enough one.

So they all kind of spent a couple of years consolidating down.

And then what ended up happening is you basically learn more about how we spend money and how we show our demand signal.

And so you may have Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll saying a thing, but the average tenure of a SEC Army, I think, is 23 months.

So I rotate out.

The next one comes in.

They might have their own priorities.

You have the Senate with its priorities.

You have Congress.

You have all of these bureaucrats.

And so we're really bad at telling them what we want to buy in a way that they can believe and invest against that demand signal.

And so what you end up having is things like cost plus come to be, where almost everybody says that is an offensive model and way to pay a provider of services because they're obviously incentivized to take longer to make more into their expense base so they can charge you more.

Like everyone realizes that.

And I think from the outside, before you take this job, you think,

how is this possibly the case that so many smart people don't know this thing that I know?

As it turns out, you get in and they all know it too, but it comes to be for a different reason, which is because they can't trust our demand signal, they basically have to say, all right, I'm going to work on this thing for you because you can't do it yourself, but you have to pay me along the way my costs.

Because if you change your mind along the way, then I have to be be able to recoup my expenses plus some profit because I have shareholders.

And so as an example of the types of bad behavior that we incentivized, we basically created many and most, I would say, of the bad outcomes and bad actions that our primes do.

And so that does not excuse them.

I still think it may be healthy for the system to put one of them out of business, but I'm much more.

Why do you think that?

Do you think that sends a signal?

I think one of the amazing parts of capitalism capitalism is you see the story of Mark Zuckerberg making billions and billions of dollars and you want to go build that.

Another amazing part of capitalism is if you don't build and deliver something your customers want, you become

a relic and you go out of business and the system resets and kind of the wave washes over the sand and it starts again.

And the problem with our primes is they have integrated themselves so deeply and entrenched themselves in our Defense Department build cycles that it would be really hard for us to operate without them.

And so I actually think it would be healthy for both us and them, for all of us to realize that this isn't intended to be a permanent relationship.

They have to earn their way back in each and every time they build something.

But in order to expect that out of them, that means we, the Army, have to change our behavior too, which is a little bit harder and it's hard to say.

And so I guess back to the original prime question, I think in a perfect world, what they're going to do is, and AUSA is one of our annual meetings where I hadn't been to it, but I've heard it was kind of

some believed it was average in the past.

What we are doing at our next one coming up in October is we're partnering with Wide Combinator, which is a little dated, but I mean, they are an innovation engine for our nation.

And we're going to do a demo today where we invite small startups to come out and we're inviting venture capitalists, government investors.

We're inviting the primes.

And what we're hoping they're going to do is see things and partnerships and acquisitions that they can do to spark innovation, to push them forward and push them faster, and continue to know that if they don't deliver on what they are saying they're going to do, they at least have a sec army who is very tolerant of the idea of them not existing anymore.

Oh, man, I love to hear that.

I'd love to be there for that.

You should come.

We can put you on a panel.

You can be one of our judges.

I would love it.

All right, we'll do it.

Definitely.

You know, let's move into, is that the part that you showed me?

This is the part.

This is it.

I want to bring this up.

This is, this is, this is insanity.

And I think a lot of people know that this kind of shit's going on, but

that part

looks like a $2 part.

I think it probably is a $2 part, Sean.

But it's a $2,000 part.

Yes.

And it's even more sinful than that.

And so this came from yesterday, and we were visiting Fort Campbell and the 101st Airborne,

which I got to go out with him and do a workout in the morning, which I can barely stand up and walk around anymore.

But then I got to do an air assault out of a Chinook, which was just absolutely badass.

And that is, those are some of the parts of this job that are so amazing.

And when I get out with soldiers, it just revives my spirit and my soul.

The balance of those visits and what is so fucking infuriating is you hear stories like this all the time.

And so this story, I will try to take this to a positive ending of the story, but we're going to start pretty dark.

So the darkness is, if you think back to what we did with that ATI and the right to repair, is essentially we have stripped away our right to repair a lot of our own equipment.

And so this was a triple seven, so one of our big kind of firing weapons that fires 155s.

This was tied into kind of the wheel well and the wheel,

the components that keep the wheel on.

And this part, if you want, we want to get it from the manufacturer, it's currently on back order till mid-2027.

So this $2 part that they're going to charge us, I don't know what the exact price is for this one, but for some of these,

we can manufacture it for $2 and we end up paying $200 or $2,000.

But even more sinfully, we can't actually even get to the part, even though we know we could make the part.

And so of our triple sevens at the 101st Airborne, which is one of our amazing units, I think 80% of them right now are down.

80%.

80%.

80%.

And this, they were showing me, one of them or a few of them are down because of this one part, which we know how to 3D print.

I think, Sean, you could probably take this to some of your buddies within two miles of the studio and they could figure out a way to make this for you.

And so, the

enraging part of this story is we have allowed these soldiers to believe it is the case that for a year,

two years, three years at a time, we are not going to have them training and using and being ready to deploy with their equipment that we're giving them.

And it's okay to let it stand by.

So, that enrages me.

The next part that enrages me is 80-80% of that specific weapon system is not functioning.

Yes.

And many of them are not.

How long has this shit been happening?

20, 30, 40 years.

Who's responsible for that part?

This is the problem.

And so this is where the story gets complicated.

So if you were the maker of this part, you actually don't know when we want these parts.

We, the Army, can't commit to you most times in multi-year contracts.

And so because of the way our funding cycle works from Congress, we are basically bound to only commit ourselves to spend money in one given year.

So if you're the manufacturer of things like this, you can't trust me that in a couple of years you're going to make any money for the

cast that you make, for the manufacturing line you have to keep up.

And so you have to hedge.

And so you have to wait until I put in an actual order and then you have to go spit out some number of those that will allow you to make a profit.

And so what has basically occurred is these companies have been forced by us because of our kind of stupid spending models to essentially hedge their bets.

But what that means is when we finally come to them and we say, hey, we need a bunch of these, go fast, they say, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It's been a long time since you've given us this demand signal.

We're going to have to turn on

the engines and get the people retrained and get you the things you want to need.

And we need a bundle of a thousand of them until it's worthwhile for us.

And so they've been losing, we've been losing, and most sinfully, the American soldier has been losing because of these models.

And so that's the downside of the story.

The upside and why I want people to feel incredibly excited about where their army is and how our soldiers are innovating is we can 3D print this part really quickly.

I mean, lives have been lost because of shit like this.

Unequivocally.

So

how did that happen?

I mean, you just discussed it, but at what point in time did we, did the, did the U.S.

military give up the right to repair their own fucking equipment?

That is, that is.

That is insane.

That's just insane as not being able to cut a fucking bolt lock off an ID film.

It's utter, it's,

it's offensive.

Like there's no other way.

And this is the thing that I think nobody owned that bad decision.

And so this is what we're trying to change fundamentally is after leaving that unit yesterday, I was talking to the commander and I said, hey, as a, as an experiment, can you assign each one of those broken pieces of equipment and have an individual soldier own the responsibility of getting it back online?

And I will take all of the risk.

I don't care where they build the part.

I don't care how they build the part.

Just get it back online and let's see what happens.

Because very worst case in this instance, the wheel falls off when you're pulling it somewhere.

Some sparks may fly.

There could be a slightly bad outcome, but this is not a helicopter flying out of the sky.

This is a relatively low risk experiment to do.

But what we haven't done is empowered our soldiers to go be the brilliant innovators that they are.

And with, if you look at modern manufacturing and you look at the ability to 3D print metal parts, what we kicked off about a month ago empowers our general in charge of our materiel command to basically say, okay, I'm going to take on the risk for this.

I'm going to scan it really quickly.

I'm going to get a digital design file.

I'm going to print it.

I'm going to get it out to the field and I'm going to underwrite that risk.

Or I'm going to ask my commanders down below me who have the deeper understanding of the nuances of the situation to underwrite the risk.

But we're no longer going to accept that we can't repair our own stuff.

And if very worst case, we accidentally violate a clause of a contract, who gives a shit?

I've told everybody we have a thousand lawyers.

We'll fucking see them in court for 50 years.

It doesn't matter to me.

Just go fix our stuff.

And so this is the back to the upside of the story.

The soldiers are feeling it.

They're excited.

They're empowered.

We're giving them the start of this equipment to start to manage their own things.

And then if you actually think about

what warfare will look like in the Indo-Pacific, President Trump talks about this.

I mean, this is pretty obvious, but China is 60 miles from Taiwan.

We're 6,000 miles.

We have to get so much equipment over to ourselves to sustain the joint fight.

The way that we're going to do that is not through the old model of parts and procurement.

It is by innovating using things like 3D printers.

So

is this like a law?

Or is this a mindset that we've adopted?

It's a contract.

So we signed a contract and we gave it.

So you would be selling the Army a thing.

You would say, hey, I'll sell you this thing, but as part of this, it's kind of like a razor-razor blade model.

I'll give you the razor, but I want to sell you the blades.

And so I might mark down the price.

And these are all the games that have occurred for 30 years.

I'm going to mark down the original price of this thing I'm selling you because I know you're locked into me to buy all the replacement parts going forward.

And I can charge you a...

20X profit margin on that.

And so the way the whole system has occurred is we, the Army, sinfully would enter these contracts where we committed to you, our vendor, vendor not to repair our own stuff but hold on but hold on but then you said that you know and i understand the distrust right i understand the distrust but then when you ask them to do it then they don't then there's pushback correct so what we didn't do many times is we didn't set up requirements of well if you're going to say i have to use you to repair my own part you can't charge me more than a certain multiple of the cost to you we didn't tell them you have to keep parts on hand so that you are able to empower us to repair our own equipment at some certain time.

And so what has occurred is you then have all this profit-seeking behavior from them, which is rational, but

we can't keep our equipment up.

Soldiers suffer, and we don't have a very strong legal mechanism to go after them.

And so what we have said is, fuck it, we're just going to do the right thing.

Good.

I mean, sounds like a simple warranty could get you out of that contract.

Hey, the wheel doesn't work anymore.

That's exactly 100%.

Or we'll find somebody else that will.

Yep.

Geez.

You know,

kind of switching gears here a little bit.

My attorney, Tim Parlator, we talk a lot about the military and what's happened over the years.

And, you know, he's one of Hag Seth's guys.

But, you know, one thing that Tim brought up to me is,

how do I put this?

We were basically talking about upper enlisted, upper brass, you know, and that a lot of the experienced guys, the guys that were in it for the right reasons,

the people that have been to war and they're hitting that 05, 06 level, you know,

guys that have been E9s for a while that are moving up.

I mean, we're seeing a lot of the experience leave.

At least we were in the last administration and the previous administration.

And, you know,

they leave because they get demoralized by the bureaucracy of the military.

And so we're losing really good guys.

Like, I'll bring up an example, Captain Brad Geary, you know,

amazing career, you know, and he got out, you know, he retired early for other reasons that happened at Bud's.

But, I mean, basically what I'm saying is we...

We seem to be losing all the people that are in it for the right reasons, that want to fight for the country, that want to

all the things that you were just talking about, see simplistic solutions to a lot of the problems that we're having, and they're frustrated and they're fucking leaving.

And then we have guys, you know, that have never seen combat and a lot of them,

there's like some kind of underlying jealousy or, you know,

it's almost like they look down that you actually did the job on the ground.

You went to war, you have combat experience, and they hold that against you because

maybe they're just not comfortable on their own skin and I've seen some of that cleaned up I mean I just saw Jamie Sands was fired he was one of the admirals in the in the SEAL teams and I've worked with him you know I mean it it's created a rot a fucking rot within

our defense capabilities and so What I want to ask is, I mean, are you seeing that gap start to change where a lot of the upper brass and upper enlisted bureaucrats, the rot,

are you guys removing them or pushing them back out to the field?

Or

are we rewarding the guys that have done the right thing and that are in it for the right reasons?

So

that's hard.

It is hard.

I mean, it's hard to be.

It's hard.

Whether you're a special operator or a conventional guy, I mean, it's very hard to have a leader who's never fucking done the job, like Jamie Sands, who's, you know what I mean?

I mean, I'm going to be honest, that's why I got out.

I did a very short career in the SEAL teams.

It was just shy of six years.

And that is why Jamie Sands is a major reason why I left and why a lot of people left and continue to leave.

And there's hundreds of Jamie Sands out there.

So, I mean,

I'll just leave it to you.

Yeah.

And I think the president and Secretary Hexeth have done an amazing job.

The president has done this across the entire federal government.

He's empowered.

He's picked leaders who are unconventional.

I mean, I'm a 39-year-old Secretary of the Army with 1.2 million people and almost $200 billion under me.

Secretary Hegseth, I think he would say the same thing, and he's done a remarkable job of getting embedded in the decision-making of picking our current leaders and our future leaders, where I think most secretaries of previously defense now of war might not have been as involved as this our secretary is in those decisions, but he's not letting it happen passively anymore.

He is digging in.

And I don't have as much experience in the other services, but I think he's done a remarkable job across the entire Pentagon doing this.

I think if I look at our leaders, the ones that come to mind at the very top, I think we have like the person running Europe for us is this guy, CD or Chris Donahue.

He was a Delta guy for 10, 15 years.

If you look at our superintendent of West Point, Delta guy for 10 or 15 years.

Our sergeant major of the Army, Delta guy for a long time.

I think he was their sergeant major of the Army Weimer for 20 years, 25 years.

Our vice chief of staff, General Mingus, I mean, we were talking about it at breakfast, but

these guys are my heroes.

I mean, you look at his hands and they're burned and his nails are kind of all funky looking because he ran into a fire to save people in his PET clothes.

Our General George, who is the

chief of staff of the Army, has deployed many, many times.

Purple Hearts, the entire thing.

And so I would say the middle is the harder place to spot.

And I live within a couple of houses of most of those men I just referenced.

And we have beers on each other's porches and whiskeys and spouses over and kids and grandkids.

And you get to know the content of the character of those men.

And it's, I've, my wife has remarked to me how amazing it is that as just a civilian, my seven and year old are getting to live with and get to know and learn from like the absolute best our nation has to offer.

And I mean this very sincerely.

There are things I can offer to my kids, but those men and women in uniform are modeling behaviors for them that I'm so grateful that they're getting at these formative years.

That is not to sidestep the issue you're referencing, which is the rot.

which is any given individual, or if you look deep in the system, it does exist.

You have a lot of people, particularly in the preceding four years, but probably for the last 30 or 40 years who've been shipbags.

You have people that have avoided taking on the responsibility of their title and the duty that they had to the soldiers beneath them and beside them.

I think if you look at the wars that we faced, that a lot of us deployed in, yourself included, Sean, I mean, those were not a ton of like profiles and courage sometimes of the people that would come in.

They would mark their territory red.

It would be yellow six months into the deployment.

It would be green when they left.

It would start back to red.

And they weren't, I think, telling their leaders, hey, this mission is fucked.

And you are risking my men and women's lives and limbs repeatedly with no clear leadership.

And that did exist.

And so I think

I am

both incredibly grateful and incredibly

humbled to get to experience and lead and be in this space with these amazing people while at the same time, under the leadership of Secretary Hegseth, laser focused on any place there is rot.

There is no time to let them remain in that job.

We have got to either, to your point, kick them back out to the formation, see if they can learn what it's like to actually lead soldiers and be uncomfortable, or kick them the fuck out of the army, because we don't have time with the threats worldwide.

to allow ourselves to continue to be just in some instances mediocre.

We have got to be excellent.

We've got to empower people to go do what soldiers do best.

And when you get a good E9, when you get a good Sergeant Major, you can feel it.

I was visiting a unit at,

I think it was in Hawaii with the 25th.

And this Sergeant Major, I mean, everywhere we went, he is walking out into the parking lot to pick up trash.

He noticed that our security vehicles were blocking traffic.

He peels off immediately.

He directs traffic for 20 minutes.

I mean, he is the definition of a servant leader.

And so we have these amazing gems of leaders and we just I owe them and Secretary of Headseth owes them and the president has empowered us to act on giving them the best colleagues they can possibly have.

How do you think you fix this for the long term?

Have you thought about that?

I mean, because, you know, the administration could totally change, you know, in three years from today and everything, you know, goes back to the way it was.

So have you thought about how do you fix this for the long term?

So that, I mean, you can fire everybody, but, you know,

the way the system runs, I mean, you get rewarded for things that, you know,

the

pathway to advancement seems off to me.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.:

I think you model the right behavior.

And so,

again, a strength and a weakness of our system, just our political model is you have these pretty big swings right now between political parties, which reference the will of the,

which is because of the will of the voters.

And that's powerful, and that's amazing, and that's sacred for something, an institution like the United States Army.

I think what we are trying to do is, and Secretary Hegset does this really well, model right what right looks like, model empowering the good leaders to make the hard decisions for their soldiers, model no doublespeak, model this idea that

I blame the primes and I blame the legislators and I blame all sorts of the civilians, but

the military leadership, the soldiers, the generals also own a portion of the blame because for many years they were performative.

To your point, the best way to get promoted oftentimes was to not say the hard thing and to not risk that promotion because the farther you got up in the system, the more it was kind of based off how good your relationship was with the board picking the next one.

And so you just weren't incentivized to create strife.

And so I think what we are trying to do is model this idea that you need to be willing to go in there.

And nearly every single day, I talk to General George, this might be our last week together, but let's just run at the problem as fast as we can.

And if we get yelled at by senators publicly in our hearings, if congressmen call and threaten us, that's okay.

That's the system working well.

We just need to be willing to get fired and move on and hand the baton to the next leader.

I mean, do you think you could quietly change the incentive structure to advancement

without

going under the rate going under the radar of the Senate?

Yes, for sure.

And so

we are actively working at, because everything I just described is an individual human issue.

The systems are also what are going to lead to the good or bad outcomes that we want.

And so systematically we're going after our acquisition.

Systematically, we're going after our training.

Systematically, we're also going after how we promote people.

And we're trying to get rid of things

that i think we believe and the secretary believes were put into place to be more performative and instead what we're trying to do is reward those leaders who have um measurably made the hard decisions and who may be a little bit rougher on the edge and have a little bit of uh a complicated history have gone too far in some instances and in in an attempt to do the right thing and no longer reward the ones systematically who have just stayed plain vanilla and have managed to rise because they just stay right in the mean.

Man, you're making me want to join.

How has recruitment been?

We've been just fucking crushing.

I am so excited every time I see the president to

just tell him how, I mean,

When I talk to soldiers and we try to be out of the building at least 50% of our time,

they can feel a difference under President Trump.

They feel like they get to be the warrior class again.

There are two different numbers we look at.

Basically the recruiting numbers, so the leading indicator of the health of our army from a human perspective is the recruiting numbers.

So we hit our 12-month goal, seven, eight-ish months into the year.

We have probably 30% in our waiting pool for the next year in our depth.

We are just on fire.

And then kind of equally or more important to my mind is our retention numbers.

And so these are soldiers in our formations who are getting to see what our leadership is like, who are getting to see are we empowering them to be innovators, who are getting to see are we preparing them for the next major conflict?

And our retention numbers, we hit our 12-month goal six months into the year.

And so we are on absolute fire under the president's leadership with people wanting to serve in the United States Army again.

Are you seeing any pushback from the ROT,

from the upper brass that we were calling the ROT earlier about how the systems are changing?

So

the problem with that class of person is

they are very good at optimizing for

the preferences of the day.

And so what you don't spot is obviously is you don't spot them pushing back in a way that you can pinpoint necessarily because they optimize for whoever the current leadership is.

And that's what makes them so hard to root out sometimes is you wouldn't see an offensive or like a kinetic pushback.

You You actually just try to sniff out, well, wait a second, when we leave power, are you the type of person that will continue to be a leader of men and women?

And will you fight for them when we're gone?

And so it's a little bit more tricky to spot.

So I think I would say to your answer, I haven't seen a lot of it, but I haven't seen a lot of it because they're good at not showing it.

So it doesn't necessarily mean it's not there.

I mean, early on, there was a lot of rumors that a lot of these guys were kind of convoluting to get Heg Seth out of there because of this.

I don't know how true that is.

You know, I've got a couple degrees of separation from the Pentagon, but

do you know if there's any truth to that?

So

my interactions have been, and I've said this on record, off record, on background,

I have Secretary Hegseth has been, I think, an unconventional pick deliberately from the president.

And I don't claim to be nearly as good as the Secretary Hegseth, but unconventional too.

But from Secretary Hegsteth's interactions with everyone I have seen in the building, he is a warrior leader.

And when he gets up in front of soldiers, airmen, Marines, I mean, they are so fired up under his leadership that

you can feel it.

You can sense it.

Like it is just one of these human things where I think you have a,

you can't fake that kind of stuff.

They're proud to be there.

They're proud to be there.

They love him as their leader.

They're proud to serve under him and under the president.

And so from my perspective, I haven't seen it in any meeting.

I haven't heard any soldiers say it.

I've heard nothing but glowing rave reviews.

It's good to hear.

That's good to hear.

Back to kind of recruiting, you know.

We were chatting, you know, breakfast about, I think it was at breakfast about, you know, the older generation always says that the younger generation is weaker.

And it's, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's just

walked uphill to school both ways.

Exactly.

And so what i want to ask you is and i don't know how much exposure you have it sounds like you have a lot of exposure because you're actually interacting with the soldiers you know at all levels all over the all over the states and even out of the states and so what i want to ask is

more specifically about the gen z

generation yeah in the military you know the gen z gets a lot of i think they're very innovative and and and are very good at problem solving from a lot of the things that i've seen from from

Gen Z.

I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

So I went down to basic training maybe a month and a half ago at this point at Fort Jackson,

where I had gone and got to go on some rotations or do some lanes with these men and women who were

three to five weeks into their time in the Army.

And other than just noticing how old I've gotten when I contrasted myself with their youthfulness,

it was remarkable to me some of the things they were teaching their cadre.

And by that, what I mean specifically is we had started putting up drones on their lanes to show them what do they look like from the sky.

How do they conceal themselves from these drones?

And one of the things that was different about BASIC when I went through than when they are going through is the basic training drill sergeants are actually now leading them.

They're serving as their squad leaders.

They're serving as their platoon leaders and part of the training cycle.

And when I would talk to these drill sergeants, what they would tell me is each iteration of this exercise with these soldiers who had been in two to five weeks, they were actually learning new things that were making them better at the exercise that they were passing on to the next cycle of students.

And actually some of these lessons when we were pinpointing it were trickling up to the Pentagon.

And so what's kind of so remarkable about that Gen Z crowd and their kind of tech savviness is we have to have it as a nation.

Back to Ukraine being this kind of the Silicon Valley or the innovation point of war, what's happening is this mixture of digital tools and hardware tools are both being used to inflict violence on human beings.

And I think we as an army, and if you look at my generation, and we kind of understand hardware, I have a dash of digital experience, but you talk to these new soldiers coming in and they can pick up an FPV drone and they can figure that thing out in two minutes.

And from playing video games growing up, this is kind of what's wild to me.

All of, I'm not a gamer, but will remark that i am just so bad at the controls and getting it to work you give it to a 19 year old and they're able to get it in windows they're able to get it to open doors they're able to get these drones into places that the rest of us can't just instinctually and that may sound trite and that may sound um like a minor issue but i when i've done raids with the atf the way they now do their raids is they knock down the door they get a stronghold right inside the building and then they spend like 15 minutes holding that stronghold and sending drones in to check all of these different rooms.

And it's completely changed their TTPs.

And I don't know that that's right for the Army, but at least we are now getting to mix in this new set of skill set, this new asset that we as an Army desperately know we need.

And we know that when you look at what conflict looks like around the world right now, it is moving in that direction that we are over-indexed on a set of human beings like me that are pretty decent with a rucksack, pretty decent with hardware, but are pretty soft on the digital skills and balancing that out with our new recruits is just an amazing asset for our nation.

Yeah, that's uh, I love to hear that, you know, and so I want to talk to you about, you know, warfare is changing at a rapid, rapid pace.

I don't even know if I would recognize the battlefield at this point anymore.

And I mean, all the stuff with drones, the autonomous vehicles, I've interviewed Dino Mavrucas, you know, the founder of Saronic.

Yep.

And, you know, Palmer, Palantir guys.

I mean, everything has changed so much in the past,

since I was in 20 years.

I mean, it's like I said, it's almost unrecognizable, especially with the drone stuff.

I mean, what does the future of warfare look like?

So what it is not is, it is not like if you think of our most elite units from our time in, they'd come in low on Blackhawks quietly, quickly.

They'd get dropped off a click or two from the objective.

They would come come up on the house.

They would come up on the objective.

They would room clear it with like a choreography and a violence of action that was just like majestic.

They would nearly always accomplish the mission and be gone quickly.

When you talk to them today, that black hawk is not getting in unseen.

There's acoustic sensors that hear it miles out.

When they land, we, the United States Army, and have owned the night for a very long time.

We now have infrared drones that are out.

They're watching everything.

Sneaking up on the objective quietly when there's a drone overhead with ammunition just doesn't really work anymore.

And so what we are having to do is reinvent ourselves from both that small, specific conflict and specific issue to this idea that we haven't really faced a peer in conflict in a very long time as a nation.

And going to war in Afghanistan or Iraq looks very different than what a long-term contested environment would look like 6,000 miles from our homeland.

It just requires a complete rethinking of how we're going to do it.

And it requires much more dependence, I think, on innovation.

So

the future fight looks like a lot more human and machine and instant connection between our humans and our things and our sensors.

And it looks a lot more like layering and generative AI and compute on the edge or on the battlefield that can process through these really complicated questions and problem sets really quickly.

Because if you think about defending against a drone swarm, I mean, the number of decisions that have to be made, you have a finite number of resources.

They're going to come at you from all sorts of directions.

They're going to be working in tandem.

And just one human brain is no longer capable of dealing with that problem.

And so we are going to have a mix of machine, digital solutions, and humans all having to work together in concert.

And just the energy required to make that work is incredible.

So you think about how do we actually get all the batteries that are necessary out there?

How do we get all the fuel?

Like the requirements are just

completely different from what I think you and I saw.

And this is kind of back to that set of CEOs coming to the building in two weeks.

What we're really optimistic that we can do is out-innovate our peer threats by bringing to bear the American industry and the American innovation and the American ecosystem of just problem solving that a place like a China,

they have some very talented people, but they're a lot more homogenous in how they think about problem solving.

And our strength as a nation is that we have all of, we empower all sorts of people to solve our problems.

And that unlocks all of these things that just have historically led us to be dominant.

And so we are highly focused on systematizing that innovation.

These days, it's hard to trust what's in your food or where it's even coming from.

The supply chain is a black box, labels are misleading, and most of what ends up on your plate isn't local.

That's why I'm so glad I found Moink.

They work with real U.S.

farmers who raise animals outdoors, get paid fairly, and produce meat you can feel good about.

It's delivered straight to your door and it actually tastes like meat should.

I've tried it and you'll taste the difference too.

Join the Moink movement today.

Support American Family Farms and join the Moink movement today at moinkbox.com slash SRS right now and get free bacon for a year that's one year of the best bacon you'll ever taste but for a limited time spelled m-o-i-n-k box.com slash srs that's moinkbox.com slash srs you maintain your gear so it lasts and your skin's no different it's the first thing exposed to the elements every single day caldera lab is built to help repair and protect your skin so you can look and feel your best every day.

Caldera Lab creates high-performance skincare for men by combining cutting-edge science with powerful natural ingredients.

It absorbs quickly with no greasy mess.

You guys know I'm a stickler for clean ingredients and Caldera Lab really delivers on that.

Each product is backed by science, built for impact, and thoughtfully formulated.

with safety and sustainability at the forefront.

I know, I know.

Guys don't have time for a a skincare routine, but Caldera Lab makes it easy with four simple steps that actually work.

There's the clean slate balancing cleanser, the eye serum that helps reduce dark circles and fine lines, the base layer that's a deep hydrating moisturizer, and then there's the good,

a powerhouse serum that has over 3.4 million antioxidant units per drop to help reduce signs of aging.

Take care of your skin like you take care of your gear.

Go to calderalab.com slash SRS and use code SRS for 20% off your first order.

That's calderalab.com slash SRS.

These statements and products have not been evaluated by the FDA.

These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or condition.

I mean, with all the autonomous vehicles and drones and, you know,

all the new software, the Palantir stuff, I mean, I would imagine imagine that that

would replace a lot of human beings in the military.

And

I don't say that lightly because I wouldn't want to be replaced if I was in the military.

I don't want to think that a machine or anything can do what I used to do as a SEAL.

But

now that I'm out and I'm on the flip side, I'm like, well, that's less lives lost.

That's

better families at home because you don't have the family dynamic of a guy that's deployed all the time and suicide rates and all that kind of stuff.

So I, I,

and warfare is obviously just evolving and it is, it is, in my opinion, making

ground guys, air guys, you know, the, the, the, the typical stuff that we've seen since World War II.

I mean, it's, it's, I think that there is an element that is rapidly becoming obsolete.

And so what does the future of Manning look like?

Aaron Trevor Brandon.

So

if you think about the, the kind of fight in the Indo-Pacific and the value the Army in particular could have, I think a lot of people debate theoretically these kinds of issues and enjoy that much more than I do.

I think my perspective is typically to date, all of human history, the vast majority of it, has unfolded with human beings on land.

Sure, humans are at sea sometimes, sometimes in their air, sometimes they're in space.

But to date, there may be an inflection point for that too.

Humans on land is where the story of humanity is unfolding.

And so I think if you think about conflict, if you think about war, I don't actually think we think that there will be a decrease in the number of humans involved as soldiers.

I think those humans will be empowered with all sorts of tools that they just didn't have before.

And I think the requirements of those humans will be different.

Where with the 101st yesterday, one of the things we were talking about is we have this software factory as an army.

And I was a little hesitant at first to think, why aren't soldiers doing software development for us?

But a lot of what it is, is just empowering and training our soldiers to know what digital tools exist and how can they use those tools to achieve their commander's intent.

And so if you start to think about it that way, after seeing it, I was like, oh man, maybe we should be training some number of soldiers per platoon to know what they can do.

Because what that fight probably looks like in the future is getting soldiers on to the or near the objective, having them conceal themselves, having them figure out what

assets exist in the community or the area where we're sending them, how do they tie in and bring in those assets, make it part of their toolkit, and then how do they fight from there?

And so that to date is a, I mean, quantum computing could change this and generative AI models could eventually get to a point they're as effective as a human brain.

But until that day comes, or if it comes, it is going to be an American soldier innovating on the ground with their peers and figuring out how do they do whatever it takes to accomplish the mission.

And I would bet on humans in that instance every single time, empowered with these tools.

Because one of the things that is worrisome about the digital environment is if you look at what's happening with drones,

the more tech savvy and the more digital a drone is, the easier it is to jam, the easier it is to take down.

And we were talking about this at breakfast.

It's actually these wired old school drones that are proving very effective.

And then one of the most effective things against that wired drone is a net gun, which just absolutely blows my mind that we are back to net guns, but it actually is working.

And so there's this balance between, and this is kind of similar with the Humvee and the ISV and how we think of the equipment we give our soldiers.

We actually need a balance of digital tools and analog tools and a balance of robots and humans.

And it is, there is not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution for warfare, but instead a training and a mentality and a model that you are empowered to go figure out whatever you need, go build it, 3D print it, wherever we send you in the world, and go get on the objective and win.

I would like to go a little farther into Joe Morpher.

I mean, we just saw the event, you know,

I don't know, was that six months ago, maybe the event in Russia or whatever?

Operation Spider's Web?

Was that a couple weeks ago?

A couple months ago, the army

where the Ukrainians used their drones and took out, yep, so a couple months ago in Russia.

It was.

So, essentially, and I think the exact numbers are: Ukraine launched about $40,000 worth of drones into Russia and took out perhaps up to $10 billion

worth of equipment.

I mean, that should just absolutely and utterly blow people's minds when they think of the sheer scale that we think Russia created between three and four million drones last year.

China is up in the 10 to 14 million drones created last year.

I mean, the number of these things that are existing in the world is just utterly staggering.

How was that out plant?

Did you have any part in that?

So if we did, but we wouldn't talk about it.

But I think what is publicly available is

the Ukrainians through all sorts of different means.

So, and this you could let it go to your imagination how they did it, but it could be things like balloons, it could be things like driving over the border, it could be things, whatever the actual way of getting the thing into the country is.

Many and most countries have pretty big borders, and you just have to get a drone in, which is not particularly difficult, and get in some number of hundreds of those and then give them an explosive, put them up in the air, have a first-person pilot fly it into a thing.

Like it's not a particularly technically challenging problem that led to an amazingly effective hit against Russia.

And one of the things we talked about is like if

Ukraine is the Silicon Valley of war and that's where the vast majority of innovation is coming, I mean, Russia is in that fight.

So they're capturing a lot of that innovation, and yet they still lost $10 billion worth of equipment.

You know, you brought up an interesting point at breakfast when we were talking about this.

You had mentioned

this is how all of our helicopters, all of our planes, all of our predator drones and drones, I mean, a lot of our Humvees probably tanks, everything, ships.

Jeremy brought up Pearl Harbor.

I mean, this is how we store all of our stuff.

So what is our defense if

cartels, Russia, China,

name adversary, Venezuela, you know,

what is our defense if they are to smuggle

$40,000 worth of drones over the border and hit some of our strategic bases?

So I think the

kind of amazing thing about President Trump is he just instinctively knows this stuff.

And so when you think of about Golden Dome, the way I hear him talk about Golden Dome is we have got to protect the skies of the American homeland.

And so, one of the ways that my brain has processed that is when you think of drones, it's kind of like this idea of like a golden mini-dome where we need to, on a smaller scale, protect our skies from these threats.

And so, the good news is the federal government is all over this.

The Secretary of War just signed a couple of weeks ago this JIADF, so Joint Interagency Task Force memo that basically put the Secretary of the Army, so me and the Army, in charge of counter drone for the Pentagon.

And then one of the benefits of being ATF acting director at the same time is we've talked to, I've talked to the Attorney General, we've talked to the CIA, we're basically doing a whole of government sprint to scale our solutions that we have for this problem because we know how serious it is.

And so this is one of the threats that our country faces, but every country faces this threat.

I mean, this is going to be a

threat on borders and arenas and stadiums and ports and just kind of the entire world will face this new form of violence and this new scaled way to inflict harm on fellow human beings all at once.

And where I am incredibly optimistic is the president saw this coming and gave the authorities to the Secretary of War, and then he's passed it down to the Army.

And we are moving out of this problem with lightning speed to scale solutions, not in the coming years, but we expect to have kind of very public displays of how we are able to defend our nation in the coming like 60 or 90 days.

In 60 to 90 days, that will be unveiled.

Yes.

Amazing.

Amazing.

You know, talking about, I mean, Secretary of War,

what

the War Department,

what do you think about that?

I think it's awesome.

I think

that this is all, people can view it as a much more nuanced

topic, or people can view it as something that's performative, or something that is more intended for media spectacle.

I don't think that that is what the president saw in this at all.

I don't think Secretary Heg says saw that at all.

I think everything we've talked about today, this is just a furtherance of this very deep, legitimate belief that we have come off course as a former Department of Defense.

And instead, we need to return to this focused mission of we exist to precipitate and effectuate war on behalf of our nation.

And what that means is that means acting violently against others who threaten our way of life.

And

that is its purpose.

And all of the other shit that we have

optimized for over the last decades has made us,

it hasn't just made us less effective in some instances, it's made us ineffective.

And that is no longer sufficient.

And so what the president is doing with this renaming, I think, is very important and exactly what the American people elected him for in November.

Well, I mean,

George Washington originally named it Department of War, correct?

And then at some point along the line, it became Department of Defense.

And then now we're back to Department of War.

And while I do understand everything that you just said, and I don't disagree with it, I do think that there's another side to this where, you know, sometimes I worry that

the U.S.

may be coming across

a little aggressive.

I mean, we saw the stuff with Greenland, Panama definitely don't disagree with the Panama Canal stuff, but, you know, I mean, it's aggressive.

The tariffs.

Now, the Secretary of War, I mean, do you think that that paints a picture to the rest of the world that we are becoming maybe a little bit too aggressive and there could be some long-term problems from that?

I think

the entire concept of peace peace through strength, like again, I think this is just something the average human knows is true.

They feel it in their bones.

They saw it on the schoolyard with the bully.

They like, they know that the stronger you are, the safer you can be.

And I think we've just gotten afraid

as a nation of saying that and just being comfortable with the idea when another nation faces conflict, the very first country they want on their side is the United States.

Like they, they not, they may say they don't like it, but that is because they haven't felt an existential threat in a long time.

I am nearly certain that if we someday face a lead up to or an actual version of something like a World War III, no one will be complaining that we started to reorient ourselves to be the strongest possible versions of ourselves, to be oriented to this posturing of we are ready to deploy our soldiers to war at a moment's notice to keep our country safe.

I am nearly certain in that moment, moment, which is, again,

the fundamental purpose of a nation is to protect its people and reorienting ourselves toward that, reorienting ourselves to this idea that we're not afraid for some people to say, I don't like that.

That's okay.

Don't like it.

Don't be a citizen in our nation.

Don't come visit.

That's okay.

You can choose a European nation to spend your summer and not come spend your tourist dollar here.

I don't mind, but I think this idea that we should contort ourselves as a nation to a softer version of ourselves just so that we don't offend others with our words or our actions

seems both incredibly silly and incredibly short-sighted, and not the mandate that the president was given in November.

He talked about doing all of these things, and Americans showed up, and all seven of the battleground states went to President Trump because of exactly this kind of true belief in what America can be and should be.

Do you feel like this has pushed some of our adversaries closer together?

I mean, we just saw, you know,

Putin,

Modi,

Ping, Xi Ji Ping together.

I mean, now, you know, I also want to pay to the audience, this isn't like a brand new fucking alliance that's that's happened.

I mean, BRICS has been around for a while.

For those that don't understand what BRICS is, basically,

it's an alliance of countries that want to destabilize the U.S.

dollar so that

we don't have, basically, we don't have the poll that we have right now.

And I mean, do you think that

some of the things that I just rattled off, maybe one in particular, Secretary of War or Department of War, I mean, do you think that's pushing these guys to

form their alliances quicker and start to come up with plans and how to combat us?

I guess the honest answer is maybe.

My instinctive answer was going to be no.

And the reason I was going to, I'm going to disclaim the intellectual or hedge with the intellectual honesty of these are really complex issues.

It could be happening.

The reason I don't believe it's true is

I think that that kind of

friendship or that kind of alignment is so fragile that the odds that a future conflict where it would really matter to us, it would hold, I think is unlikely.

I think all of their leaders are smart enough to know that.

And so I think most of it is performative.

I think when you look at what like North Korea, as an example, sent to the front line, it seemed more performative.

Like it didn't, I don't think the Russians thought these 10,000 North Koreans that seemed to get slaughtered within the first couple of weeks made a meaningful difference.

And I think if you actually look at the outputs of those nations,

they are not relying on each other.

to build up their security.

They're not relying on each other at scale for their economic growth.

I think they are cautiously willing to be seen in a photo frame together, but it is not much more than that.

Okay.

Fair enough.

Fair enough.

I hope that's true.

Who do you think are, I mean, who do we, who's America's biggest threat right now?

China.

China.

I believe that too.

Why do you think that?

I think you listen to their words at first.

I mean, I think they view us as their biggest threat.

Their economy has

been gangbusters for a couple of decades.

Their ability to just manufacture and output things that currently may not be tools of war, but could be converted to tools of war at scale is pretty remarkable.

Their innovation, the number of PhDs they are spitting out, the number of patents that they as a nation are being awarded is just unbelievable.

And if you look at their focus on a long horizon and their tolerance for short-term pain, I think that

in some ways can be a weakness of our system is that we can't focus on the long-term all that well.

And our system of government forces us to think more short-term most times.

And that gives a different set of strengths.

But I think if you look at that collective set of characteristics for China, it puts them kind of far and away as our pacing threat.

But that being said, I think when I look back to my Title 10 authorities to man, train, and equip the army and get it ready to deploy anywhere in the world on behalf of the President and Secretary of War,

we are, General George and I, are hyper-focused on creating an army that not only will dominate the Indo-Pacific in a fight with China if we have to, but is ready to go anywhere in the world at a moment's notice and fight any conflict, regardless of who it is against.

And so that requires us, because if you think of most of human history,

I think most people who have thought they could predict the future have turned out wrong.

And so we need to develop an army knowing that we may be used anywhere in the world at a moment's notice.

That might not be who we think or where we think we're going.

Did you just say you think that China is leaps and bounds behind us?

No.

Okay.

I thought I heard that.

I hope I didn't.

I mean, they are, they're very close to us.

And I

outdoing us on manufacturing, our supply chain, the fentanyl precursors.

I mean, list goes the bricks, you know, all this stuff.

I mean, they, this,

I hate to say it like this, but it seems like

they have us or are close to having us at every angle.

And,

you know, I talked to a lot of innovators, a lot of tech guys on this show.

All of them are saying the same thing.

I mean, U.S.

shipbuilding capacity is what, 1% of the entire world.

China's at 50%.

There's also, you know, there's also the fact that they, you know, maybe some of that's a little over-embellished because

their companies depend on

that narrative.

But I don't know how many ships are actually war-fighting ships.

I think a lot of them are just container ships that they could repurpose.

But,

I mean,

what are your biggest fears with China?

Well, so, and just to go back, because when this goes live and I listen to myself, if I had said I wasn't nervous of where China is, I'm going to be a Paris.

So I hope that that's not what came across because China's incredible.

Their system of government, what I was intending to say, gives them strengths in certain things because of what they can focus on long term.

But it makes, I think, a lot of their

outcomes more narrowly predictable.

Meaning, like if you look at DeepSeek as an example of something where their generative AI model kind of caught the world on fire when they released it, as far as I last know, much of the work that was done for DeepSeek was piggybacked off the innovation of open AI.

And what China is really good at is fast following.

It is really good at

getting what we, the United States and other nations develop and quickly mimicking and copying it.

That is a superpower of theirs.

But we, the United States, also have strengths that

I think when we lean into those strengths and empower them as a Department of War, like we have incredible outcomes.

But back to the kind of question you were asking, what I am most nervous about with China is their ability to be hyper-focused on an outcome.

And they don't have to go through the same political cycles we do.

Their pain tolerance can be a lot higher than us because they don't have to suffer the same sort of short-term political consequence that I think a lot of our leaders have to suffer through.

And define short-term as two or four years, not that short, but much shorter than China's 100-year horizon.

And I worry that they will

view us from the lens of the previous four years as not

strong enough to hold them back, not having the political will to engage with them, and that they have taken all of these

technological leaps in the previous decade, and then it makes them more aggressive.

And I worry that they act in a way that forces us to send our American sons and daughters to go engage directly with them.

What are some of their weaknesses?

We talk a lot about their strengths on the show.

I think my audience is very well informed on everything they're doing and all the strengths and vulnerabilities that we have.

But what are some of their vulnerabilities?

I think

you could just, I don't know if you saw

the parade recently.

I think what you get out of

totalitarian governments is you get a

homogeneity is a lot easier to achieve.

And homogeneity is a strength for some things.

What it is not a strength for, in my opinion, is warfare.

And so when you you think of what China is really good at, I don't think the idea of commander's intent is something that they have ingrained into their soldiers.

I think what that means for the listener who might not have served is the United States Army prides itself on this concept of commander's intent, which is if I work for you and you give me a mission, I want to make sure I know why you want me to do it.

I push that down.

through my guys and we go out and execute.

And what that specifically means is there are all sorts of moments on any given mission where it is complicated, it is unpredictable, you don't know what to do.

But with commander's intent, I don't have to wait.

I can say, I think I know what you wanted me to do.

I'm going to innovate in this moment.

I'm going to make a decision.

I'm going to be scrappy and I'm going to go get.

the job done.

What other nations do and what China does is they are a lot more myopically focused of, I've told you to walk 100 yards to the right, stand there, don't move until I give you the next order.

And that can work in some moments.

It works really well on parade fields.

It works really well at

personifying this idea of leadership.

But in a moment, and you know this, Sean, when the bullets start to fly, you need men and women on the ground who feel empowered to go win the fight.

And that scrappiness is what the American GI has had for so long.

And I don't think if you look at China's leadership structure, I think the farther you get out from their core decision-making body, the worse the outcomes typically are.

And I think they know that.

So no critical thinking on the ground of

immediate leadership.

I would guess they would self-identify as that being a problem.

I mean, I think another vulnerability is the population decline that's going on over there.

I mean, they had the one-child policy forever, and now there's this massive imbalance from male-to-female population.

And I mean, you know,

men with men can't make babies.

At least this four years they can.

You know, you could Google that, and it'll probably give you something different.

But

I mean,

but I think that is

a weakness of theirs that

is not talked about much.

Now, that being said, I mean, when we're talking about autonomous vehicles and the future of warfare and AI and all of that, I don't know how much that actually matters

a declining population when they can, I mean, I guess they wouldn't be able to manufacture as fast.

Yeah.

But

I think

the problem with all of this is this is new to humanity kind of stuff.

This is the ability to, through Neuralink, hook your brain up to a computer and what you can do with that and what you can do with

the mixture of human machine and what you can do with drones kind of swarming around our ISVs as we go into conflict and just all of these different iterations of once if quantum computing comes and the speed of decision making, the ability to process complex information quickly.

Like, I think it's kind of outside of our ability to know what that is going going to be.

And so

I think that there is a real possibility that some of the things China is pretty effective with today, when we hit moments of warfare and conflict, we are able to degrade those capabilities quickly and they will have had an over-reliance on them in combat, where I think their safe self-driving capabilities may be amazing in Beijing and they may be effective on the battlefield, but they also might not be.

And I don't know that they have invested and continue to invest in training these exquisite human beings like we have in our soldiers that at that moment where it kind of all degrades back to just humans on the ground with commander's intent, who's going to win, I am incredibly optimistic that our soldiers win that fight every single time.

How would this, I mean, how do you envision this would happen if something were to kick off, if World War III were to kick off or China, U.S.

war were to kick off?

I mean, how do you envision that coming to fruition?

So one of the kind of most complicated parts of this is this low Earth orbit where most of the satellites are.

You could envision a world in a World War III scenario where somebody blows something up in the low Earth orbit.

They create a debris field and it takes out.

all of the satellites, all of the communication devices, everything in that kind of range, which changes warfare instantly.

I never thought about that.

And that's where this over-reliance on technology, you need to have redundancy at every single step.

You need to be able to use cell phone towers.

You need to be able to use the old school radios.

You need to be able to use hand signals.

Because in that moment of existential fight where everything is on the table, it's just not going to play out in this very clean way that we're predicting today.

All we know is we need a depth of solutions and an innovative soldier and empowerment.

to them to go look at the space in front of them and decide what they need at that exact moment.

What about Taiwan?

Yeah.

I mean, would that kick something off?

We don't even recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country.

I think there's only 12.

Is there only 12 countries that consider them to be a sovereign country?

So, you know, if China were to kinetically take Taiwan, which probably wouldn't take much, right?

I mean,

where do we stand with this?

I think that that is one of these incredibly complicated questions that I am glad I am not the president.

I am glad I am not the secretary of war.

I would not envy having to be in that room to make that decision.

But what I can tell you is if

whatever the president needs the army to do, we would do it well.

We would do it effectively.

And as long as we are able to continue this momentum of returning our soldiers to this idea that the failure is not an option, we don't fight wars, we're winning wars.

We would do what we needed to do and we would overcome the enemy in that instance.

Why would we do it?

Why do you think Taiwan's such a strategic location?

During, I'm going to, this is the first time in our two and a half hours.

I'll give you a weak answer.

Well, I mean, they could have been intellectually weak, but not intentionally weak.

One of the things before I did my Senate hearing that you learn is you basically learn to deflect answers.

You learn to basically say, like, oh, that's a great question, Senator.

Let me follow up.

Or, like, you asked me a thing, the classic politician thing.

What I want to be cautious about doing here is getting out in front of the president or secretary of war on such a current topic.

And so,

and one of the things you also don't do is answer hypotheticals.

And so, I'm going to dodge your hypothetical, but flag that I'm doing it.

And instead, I will say, I think when we think about these things broadly,

America for a long time, we have been an ally that countries could rely on.

They could rely that in their moment of need, no matter what had happened that day before or the couple of years before or how trade talks had gone, when they needed us, we show up, we show up in force and we help them win.

And so I think there is a lot of strength.

to be shown knowing that America stands by and stands ready to support our allies.

And if you think, and if it is very clear that the Pentagon and the President are picking and have identified China as our pacing threat as a nation, I could absolutely envision a world where that could be over a red line that the president has drawn.

But I also want to be unequivocal in saying he has not told me that.

And so I would

stand by and stand ready with the Army to do what we needed to do for the fight.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I mean, I'll said, it's such a strategic location.

One, because the chip industry, and we rely on those chips.

Two, I think if we didn't intervene, that that that would show tremendous weakness in that part of the world.

And with everything that BRICS is trying to do, that might amplify it.

And more, I mean,

new sheriff in town, right?

China.

Guess what?

You're on us now.

When I was

visiting Hawaii and Philippines and Guam, and

the domino effect concept of, I think, when you get out to that part of the world, we are currently doing, in my opinion, a very good job of joint exercises, Talisman Saber that we did in Australia firing a prison missile.

And we are pushing forward a lot of our tech innovation.

We are getting our soldiers onto the ground, into the theater to be ready to help for exactly what you're talking about.

So that most and nearly every country I have talked to loves it when they have soldiers on the ground because what they know is when America puts one of our soldiers on the ground somewhere, if you fuck with that soldier, you are going to have a beast coming behind you.

And we have for a long time time as a nation held that model and i have no doubt under president trump if somebody harmed one of our soldiers they would be held to pay

might not be able to answer that this and if you can't that's fine this is an exciting setup to a question i i understand no i mean i'm just saying that i understand that we can't uh

lift the veil on all of our plans and that would be detrimental but um

kind of what i'm getting at is is i don't think that if if china were to take Taiwan, which a lot of people, I think, think that it would be kinetic because of all the

show of force they have there.

They're

building artificial islands to push the boundaries out.

And, you know, so it looks like it might be kinetic.

But I think what a lot of people don't know is that

there's a two-party system in Taiwan, and one wants

Taiwan, they want democracy, they want freedom, and then there's, and then there's the other, you know, side that is very pro-China, one China policy.

And so I think that

I think China's smart.

I think they know that we would probably intervene if they did go kinetic.

I don't know what recourse we have through with

the cognitive warfare that they are applying to the Taiwanese and spreading propaganda and why they need to have the one China policy.

And it's,

I mean, for lack of a better term, it's mind-fucking these people out of thinking that they want freedom.

And so if they are successful in that and they take the chip industry and they take Taiwan, you know, through a

non-kinetic method, I mean, do we have a plan for that?

What do we do if that happens?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So

without answering to the particulars, because

as you flagged, I think that these are things

we very rationally and deliberately leave decision-making space for the President and Secretary of War on.

I can say, kind of unequivocally, if you look at what we're doing with our defense industrial base,

we are hyper-focused on building resiliency for things like chips.

If you compare and contrast, and these are all publicly available information, the number of drones we're capable of manufacturing today versus the number of drones China is capable of manufacturing today, we are much less than.

I'd say in in six or 12 months, that number is going to be totally different.

I think

a lot of the ways that we make the situation you described less relevant to us as a nation, we would still be

acutely aware of it, and the president would make his decision and we would follow through, but it would be less impactful to us when we return manufacturing excellence to our nation.

And so, one of the things we, the Army, are doing that will probably the next six weeks at the same conference I was talking about, we're doing is we're looking at all of the assets we have on our depots and our arsenals and our bases.

And we have lots of land.

We have land that is already protected.

We have land that is ready to have manufacturing facilities put on it.

And so as an example of a thing we are considering.

We're going to invite a lot of private equity investors and larger companies to come to this event and look at what we have to offer them and look at our needs.

And there may be instances where for like data centers, as an example, if you build your data center on our Army depot or arsenal or base, you use 90% of it to sell, you give us 10% of it, and we, the Army, can use that.

And it is kind of this net positive.

We are also looking at chips and we're looking at brushless motors for drones, and we are looking at all of the things that we as a nation would need to continue to fight and win wars.

And we are going to try to be able to manufacture the vast majority of that in our own nation.

How close are we to seeing an end to the Russia-Ukraine

I think nearly every time I've been in the White House, I have heard the president and his team focused on bringing peace there.

I think he rightfully says that war

is

a tragedy on a global scale.

He is working to bring those two parties together to find peace.

And I am optimistic that under his leadership,

he will be able to do it.

I want to stress, though, that I think this is back to that media narrative.

When people blame him for this, it's insanity to me that he's the only leader in the world, I think, that would be capable of, if you had told me that the war concluded next week, I would believe it would be true under his leadership, where I think nearly any other individual just couldn't bring those two parties to the table and get them to come to a place of agreement.

And so, um, I don't know what it ends up looking like, I don't think anybody does, but I think if you listen to what is occurring and you listen to how the parties are speaking about it, I think their respect for the president and respect for our country increases the odds of it being done sooner rather than later.

Which, again,

this was now my second politician answer is a little bit mushy and a little bit like of a sidestep.

But I think on this one, no one knows is probably the short answer.

That's kind of what I thought.

Last, last subject.

Okay.

Israel.

Okay.

What's going on?

What's going on there?

We see the Gaza stuff.

They just hit Qatar.

You're hitting all the hot topics.

Just saving up for the air.

I get it.

I get it.

I think this is another meeting.

It's very, very, very, it is very much divided.

It's another one of those things that's dividing the United States.

I mean, on one hand, we have people that say Israel is our greatest ally ever.

On the other hand, we have people that don't understand why they're an ally.

And I understand both sides of this, you know, but I mean,

I think that the big fear amongst Americans is that we don't want to go to war for another nation.

And so, you know, what is Israel's plan over there?

I mean, they blew up some Catholic churches.

We see all the kids in Gaza.

We see all the civilians getting killed.

I mean,

the land there just looks completely decimated.

And, you know, and then, you know, they hit Iran or we hit Iran, you know, because of them.

I mean, what's going on here?

So

this next remark is not meant to be trite.

It's not, I think any of your listeners, I think you'd feel the same.

Anyone who's deployed to a war of any scale, it fucking sucks.

Like

war as hell.

I think the negative externalities, the civilians that die in these instances, is just a catastrophic catastrophic outcome that has existed since the beginning of mankind when people go to war.

And I think if you look at Israel and if you look at what kicked it off, their righteous anger makes all the sense in the world to me.

I cannot imagine living with a neighbor who was inculcated from birth to hate me and want to kill me and wipe out my family and my society.

Like that is a starting point.

If you just frame it from that and then let the narrative, like let the rest of the situation play out, I think is informative of why they are acting so aggressively like they are to basically finally get rid of this threat to their homeland.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to say at what cost, like what is, when does the cost become too big?

And I don't know that anyone knows what the answer is.

I am optimistic that, again, with the president, his near daily engagement in this topic, with Witcoff out there all the time, with how much the president has built up the trust of the Israelis, that he is willing and able and

historically has stood by them.

I think he is uniquely well suited to bring peace.

I think the fundamentally the problem is: I don't know if Hamas is willing to accept peace, and I don't know that they could actually control their own people in a way to perpetuate peace.

And I think that's what fundamentally creates the quagmire of

what does good enough look like to end the war.

I think this, though, to me

is much closer to a Pearl Harbor incident for them than it is to an Iraq and an Afghanistan for the United States.

I can completely mandate.

I mean,

Afghanistan kicked off because of 9-11.

Yeah.

A lot more people killed there than October 7th.

Yep.

We didn't decimate entire cities.

Yeah.

Maybe Fallujah.

Yep.

But

not like that.

I mean, 60,000 several months ago dead.

60,000.

That's a lot of fucking people.

It's a lot of people.

No, and I'm,

and this is where human storytelling, I don't want to

be

intellectually fraudulent in my reply, but my understanding

from visiting there and from friends who live there and from people who are in the military there, my understanding of the hatred and the proximity and the closeness and the ability for violence to be inflicted on the Israeli homeland again and again and again is just different from what we faced with the threat in Afghanistan.

distance of miles made it so that I think we could get to a place we felt comfortable as a nation going pencils down faster.

And we didn't, and we should have.

And I think we look back and many and most people would say we should have set a mission, accomplished it quickly and gotten back home.

And it was kind of

abhorrent how we ran the thing.

But I think it is fair to say say what israel is facing is different

okay

what should i be asking you that i haven't asked you oh that's a fantastic one um

i think the other big part of this is

um

how do we how do we as an army

fund

the types of ideas that come out of garages.

I think if we look at the success of Silicon Valley, I think one of the questions, if I were you, I would ask me is, how are you going to take the lessons of Silicon Valley from scaling solutions really quickly and get them to soldiers?

Because I think that's like one other leg of the stool that we've talked about, how we actually buy.

We've talked about getting it in the hands of soldiers.

We've talked about the systems for promoting and training our soldiers.

I think the last piece or the last big leg is like, how do we actually get dollars?

Because people need dollars.

They have to go buy stuff.

They have to to feed their families.

They have to like live long enough to get their idea from their head to the chalkboard, to the manufacturing floor to the soldier, back to the manufacturing floor to scale.

And so like, that's another kind of hard problem to solve.

I mean, I think we're, you know,

maybe this is off, but I feel like we're off to a great start.

I mean, through my interviews with all these founders of defense tech companies, I mean, these guys are gung-ho.

And, And, you know, in the last administration and in Trump's first administration, I mean, we saw Google, Microsoft, Apple kind of turn their backs, you know, on American defense.

And now, you know, fast forward like eight years, nine years, whatever, now it seems that the culture has completely changed in Silicon Valley.

And then we see El Segundo rising up.

And, and, and so, I mean, these guys are hungry.

They're innovating.

They want to, they, They want to make America and the world a better place.

They're strengthening our defense tech.

And so, I mean, if,

you know, from an outsider looking in, it seems like we're off to a great start.

I love it.

That makes me more optimistic.

What we're trying to do as an army is cradle-to-grave funding.

And so we spend so much money.

And one of the things we've done so pathetically is we do like a performative funding cycle where we'll

do something like an XPRIZE and then nothing ever comes of it.

When you actually see what it takes for these companies to survive and thrive, it requires consistent mentorship, consistent communication.

And every company that's scaling faces this moment, or the vast majority of them, of kind of an existential threat and can they get to the other side of that thing?

And I think what the venture world has done so well for a lot of companies in other sectors is they've given them those tools to succeed.

I think for defense companies, again, kind of other than Palantir and Enterroll from a while ago, it was really, really hard.

And they had to survive some pretty bad ecosystem environments.

And what I'm hopeful for is that both they will start to pull others up, the primes will start to look around and say the best way to innovate is to partner.

And then we, with our big purse strings, will say, we're going to bring in experts who can help you grow.

We're going to deploy our dollars.

We're going to monitor you from formation through your

seed funding through Series A, all the way up through that scaling, because this may seem esoteric, I think, to some listeners, but fundamentally, this is how we will do it.

And this is how we will create the pathway to success for the decades to come.

Because all back to everything we talked about with what future war is going to look like, it is not just going to be big, beefy Ranger soldiers kicking down doors, but it is going to be computer developers who are up all night in their garage, innovating on the next thing to give to those soldiers to take out to the the fight.

And we as a nation have got to figure out how to do both.

Did I read something the other day?

I think I read something the other day that said that

USG is going to be investing

in some of these defense tech companies.

I mean,

what do you think about that?

Is that good for us or is that bad for us?

I think what you're referencing is that we might take a stake in some of the primes.

I don't know the particulars of,

because I saw the same thing.

I think these are complicated questions and complicated problems.

Meaning, if we took a stake in a prime, as an example, I think we then may be incentivized as a government to reward that prime longer than we otherwise would have.

It would be a stickier relationship with that prime, which could be valuable for that prime and could block out other innovators.

And so you could both convince me that that's a good idea and we should have a 10% stake of all the primes because of the bad acting and the number of dollars we put into their RD and this idea that the American taxpayer deserves a return on all of those dollars.

You could just as equally convince me that once we've done that, we are going to act in ways that continue to perpetuate inefficiencies in the system, block out the small and growing companies and will lead to worse outcomes for soldiers.

And so I don't know that we are moving down actively a path of doing that, but I think either direction

we could make work.

Makes sense.

Makes sense.

I haven't thought too much about it yet, but yeah, I saw that and it caught my attention.

So we haven't taken a 10% stake in any.

As far as I know, as of this moment, I haven't known.

Perfect.

Well, Secretary, I appreciate you coming.

And it was an honor to interview you.

I am grateful for you having me.

Thank you.

Cheers.

Want to shoot some guns?

Let's fucking do it.

All right.

No matter where you're watching Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this, please like, comment, subscribe, and most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can.

And if you're feeling extra generous, please leave us a review on Apple and Spotify Podcasts.