So, I like to start these interviews off with real zingers, like real tough questions. And the first question I have for you is, you know, exactly how long did it take you to change the letterhead from Department of Defense to Department of War?
As soon as Secretary Esper announced it, we all changed our Twitter handles. We all changed our email signatures. So, 24 hours before we'd accomplished the goal.
That's like private sector efficiency there, man. Steve, how many push-ups—how fast can you do the PHIT challenge? The 47 push-ups, we did it in about a little less than a minute. Amazing. Amazing. I see these guys are not just smart guys, but they're fit and they're efficient. So, I mean, let's talk a little bit about your journey to public sector, to my world. You came to my world, my friend. I've known you for a long time, and we have a lot of friends in common, and you've done some pretty amazing things in the private sector. I think one of the things that makes President Trump special, and he's done this I think even better in the second iteration of his political career, which is he's got these special people from the private sector, people the government could usually never afford. Certainly, couldn't attract to take time, divest themselves, do all the things you got to do to be able to work for us, for the taxpayers. Tell us a little bit about that journey. Why did you decide to do it? I'm sure it comes at a huge financial cost to you. Thank you, by the way, for doing it. Tell us a little bit about it.
Well, early in my career, I got to be what was called the White House Fellows. It's a non-partisan program, yeah, in 2009, after I sold my first company that did speech recognition technology in the 2000s. And I was like, I'll try this government thing, and I got assigned to the Department of Defense at the time. So, I got to spend a lot of time in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan seeing what our soldiers would actually do on the war field. And for someone who was in tech, it was sort of a whole new thing. And even though I'm not as technical as Steven, not even close, I was the most tech guy there at the time. And I was like, someday I'll come back when I actually have some more experience.
And when President Trump got elected and he chose Secretary Esper, I thought, all right, these guys are going to be innovators. We're going to break this system down and rebuild it in the way it should be built cuz it hasn't changed in 50 years since the Cold War. And when I got selected, I had one conversation with my wife and she was like, "We're actually doing this." And I said, "Yeah, we're actually doing this." And it's been the best job I've ever had. It's been a year so far.
We're super blessed to have you. You know, I think people lose sight of the fact that the US government spends $800 billion a year on military spending and we have to essentially defend the world. I mean, we are literally defending the world right now. And you know, that is I think three times more than China, if I'm not mistaken. I think China's about 250 billion. Russia, I think it's like at 80 billion. So, it's 10x what Russia spends. Steve, I was reading that DARPA was responsible initially for almost like the creation of the internet, right? This is one of the projects that DARPA took on. For the audience's sake, tell us a little bit about DARPA's mission, what role it plays, and how you have led DARPA. We met at this incredible conference in Teton, and we've been there for a couple of years. I think this country would be lost without both of you in terms of our ability to respond to threats dynamically. But tell us a little bit about DARPA, what it does, and your role.
Absolutely. So, you know, when you kind of zoom out and look at 1957, we had a Sputnik moment as a nation. We were surprised by our adversary's advanced technology. And the president said, "Never again." And so, on February 7th, 1958, President Eisenhower created DARPA. And ever since then, we've really been focused on two things: creating technological surprise on the battlefield to deter and defeat our adversaries, and making sure we don't get surprised. And so, when you think about Emil having a large portfolio of research, he's got stuff that's sort of on the fringe, and that's me. I'm his guy that's just doing the crazy stuff because we can't afford to be surprised.
And let's be fair. Warfare is changing so rapidly. I mean, we see the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. We see all the challenges that drone warfare poses to conventional weapon systems. How expensive—sort of, it becomes a math problem, too. It's very expensive for us to hit a drone with a Patriot, right? With a thousand-dollar drone and a ten-million-dollar missile. Emil, let's talk a little bit about procurement, because I think when you analyze the China spend versus the US spend, you look at two factors. One of them is labor cost, which for them is obviously free, right? Essentially, it's a communist country. And the second one is procurement. Like, they don't have procurement problems. They just say, "Hey, we're going to do this," and they do it. And so, obviously, their quality probably is not as good as our quality in terms of shipbuilding and things like that. But the procurement beast, it's like eating an elephant one bite at a time. How have you approached this gargantuan issue and what have been your wins there, if you have any?
Yes, so I'd say that I don't believe any of those numbers out of China or Russia, by the way. They're spending a lot of money.
Yeah, way more than that.
You mean you don't believe propaganda from China and Russia?
No. You shouldn't either. You shouldn't either.
Seriously? Okay. Thanks, guys.
So there's the labor advantage, but there's another thing they've done which we've done to ourselves in some way, which is outsource our supply chains. Right? When we admitted China to the World Trade Organization, we outsourced an incredible amount of our manufacturing.
Over a generation: critical minerals, the ability to manufacture parts, all kinds of things. And they took that and became—
So silicon chips in Taiwan, telecom equipment in China, you name it. And they didn't have concerns about the environment, the labor concerns, all the things that we care about in a civilized society that's trying to improve all the time. They put that into effectively an industrial machine, and when that industrial machine is empty cuz our economy is slow, they fill it with building weapons.
So their arsenal's huge and it's been the biggest military build-up in world history in the last 15 years. So we who have way more sophisticated weapons, way better technology, we have to go to the other end of the spectrum and add mass. Mass autonomy, like what you're seeing in Russia and Ukraine with drones and where the front lines are robots on robots. We have to learn how to develop things cheaper and at scale so that we have both ends of the spectrum: the exquisite stuff that beats them, and then the mass that matches them. And if we have both, that's at least what I'm trying to do in this next few years I got left.
Right. And I mean how much of it is trying to create efficiencies too? Like, I mean, these budgets are massive. We have a massive deficit. Like, I don't know how we balance our budget ever if we ever do, right, if we don't look at at least becoming efficient in our defense spending. I would love for your—I know it's kind of a political question, but I mean if you feel comfortable just spinning off on that a little bit.
I mean, you know, DOD started with that in mind.
And DOD made some really great changes, but it's sort of like the government has to continually DOD itself, right? You always have to be looking for what's being wasted. And you know, I just ran into something that we were spending billions of dollars on translation services. And you know, everyone can translate anything on their phone right now. So you're like, "Well, how does this match up?" So it's finding these opportunities where tech is advanced where we can find taxpayer dollar savings. So I think about that every day.
Steve, question for you in the conference that we were at, without getting into the details. It was essentially like this idea of how does government interact with the private sector on defense. I think in the past defense spending was led by very few primes, right? And sort of very government-driven. And I think we've now realized that there needs to be smaller companies that are coming up with ideas, as Emil said, to sort of disrupt and be disruptive and be ahead of the curve. How do you see that sort of dynamic playing out, the private sector-public sector interaction, and your role in that?
Yeah. So, you know, I was the chief engineer at Project Maven back in the day, right? We were really focused on getting AI onto the battlefield. And I kind of took three lessons away from that work. The first one is you got to understand the technical details and be a master of kind of the scientific and technical aspects of the technology that you're building. The second one is you've got to work side-by-side with the people that are actually operational, that understand the real problems. And the third thing is you've got to work with the private companies that are on the cutting edge.
And so, I kind of bring that same attitude to DARPA, right? And I say, "Okay, how do we aggressively partner early on and invest in the academic institutions that can really drive knowledge forward and create the talent pipeline?" And then the non-traditional companies that can move fast and build technologies that we don't have today. There's also, because of classification and because of systems engineering challenges, there's some incumbents that are really, really good at what they do as well. So really, it's about kind of bringing it all together and moving as fast as we can. So that's kind of how my brain works and what I've seen work as we're actually fielding technology.
So I have a follow-up for you. I was recently with a group of West Point graduates—or students, I should say—and I said to them, "You need to prepare for the future of warfare, right?" And one of the sort of arguments that we had, disputes if you will, is when you think about automation and AI and automation—in other words, a combination of two things, right? Like autonomous, let's say airplanes, and then AI-controlled autonomous airplanes, right?
