Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering. Everyone talks about Anduril and Palantir and SpaceX. Those are the three companies that in the last 10 years have broken into the defense sector to challenge Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, sort of the older primes. My job is to create five more companies that work in the department and bring new capabilities. The executive orders are awesome, so AI action plan, because at least it sets a marker out there and says to the world, "We, the United States, is going to be dominant in AI." So it's pretty exciting for a tech guy to be at that part of Department of War.
And this is exactly like Uber, right?
Like, look, we have a stealth bomber behind us. It's the same thing.
Competition with Lyft, like competition with China, you know, same thing. Yeah.
What is the biggest misconception about Palantir?
Yeah. Honorable Michael, welcome to Sorcery.
You could call me Emil. You know me from the old days.
No, we're going to call you Honorable Michael.
So, you have many roles within the Department of War. Could you list out all of them?
Well, the primary role is I'm Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, and that has a bunch of cool stuff in it like DARPA, which is, you know, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They invented the internet. I have the Missile Defense Agency there, which was supposed to create the Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars, from the Reagan days. And then I have a core R&E, research and engineering function, that's working on new stuff with the best scientific labs in the country. So that's the main job. And then I'm also the Chief AI Officer for the department, and that organization is called the Chief Digital and AI Office. And then the Defense Innovation Unit, which actually is based in California in Mountain View. And the idea there is to take all these startups that are doing defense tech and help them figure out a way to do business with the Department of War more easily.
And so how did you get into this position?
Well, I was radicalized, I would say, in 2017 where being—when being a Trump supporter was not cool. And, you know, I was in San Francisco at Uber at the time, and, you know, I was like, "Someday, you know, I'm going to go back into government." So I finished Uber, I moved to Miami, and then I met President Trump, had dinner with him in, I want to say, December of '23 before the primaries. It was an honor to do that, obviously. I started working on the campaign, and then I started working on the transition team. And I'd always loved defense, and I'm in the coolest part of defense, like space lasers, like the coolest tech stuff that's happening in the whole Department of War is happening in my group. So it's pretty exciting for a tech guy to be at that part of Department of War.
And this is exactly like Uber, right?
Look, we have a stealth bomber behind us. It's the same thing.
Competition with Lyft, like competition with China, you know, same thing. Yeah. No, it's very different obviously, but I will say that with this president, this Secretary Hegseth, who are disruptors—if you think about like, what is a political disruptor? Someone who sort of comes in and looks at the world the way as it is and says, "This needs to change."
And so if that authority is delegated to me, I could come in and look at what's literally the biggest bureaucracy in the world, right? Three million people at the Department of War, and say, "What should we be doing differently?" Clean sheet of paper. And that's pretty empowering. It's kind of awesome. So in that way, it's like Uber.
In that way, it is. I'm curious cause, you know, you have the private sector experience, you're in the public sector, we're almost a year into the new administration. What's the biggest surprise that you've had?
The biggest surprise is both the quality and camaraderie of the people at the top of the government. I mean Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick, Secretary Hegseth, Marco Rubio, like some real talent. And then at the Department of War, my colleagues, Mike Duffey, who runs Acquisition and Sustainment—they buy the big airplanes like behind us—the head of policy who's working on the Ukraine-Russia policy and all that. It's really just Brad Hansell who runs the Intelligence and Security department. They're just great people who are dedicated to mission and going for broke, and it's really awesome. There's not a lot of political infighting. This is about like a team effort. So that's really surprising. I thought politics was going to be knock-down, drag-out.
With a trillion dollars, almost a trillion dollars in budget, that's a pretty substantial—
Substantial allocation to have there. As you think about that and the efficiencies of that capital, and the different departments that you span across and you have exposure to, what do you think the biggest allocation will be for?
One thing that happened in the last—especially the last four years, but really over the time period since the war on terror ended, is China started investing in really sophisticated capabilities. We were fighting sort of terrorists, you know, random small terrorists who were using improvised explosive devices, right? That was the enemy. They were really thinking about, broadly speaking, what are we doing in space? What are we doing with missiles, you know, that can travel across the world at hypersonic speeds? Those kinds of things. So we have to catch up. So the budget that we're now trying to save money on bureaucracy and put it toward is new technologies, new weapons, new defense systems. Like think about a drone attack. How do you counter that? Well, maybe you could use high-energy lasers to pop drones out of the sky if they're coming at you at a military base. You could do that using AI in an automated way. So trying to kind of step forward ahead of the adversary as opposed to sort of investing only in the stuff we know, like those things.
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Well, that's a good transition and lead into the six critical technology areas that you're focused on. So you recently just slimmed this down. You concentrated onto six. Why did you choose these six, and where are you seeing the most impact?
So two predecessors ago for the job I have now, they added 10, and that was in 2018. And then the next person added four more, so they were 14. So these critical technology areas were almost 10 years old in 2018. And if something's critical for 10 years, that means you're not making much progress on it. So that's number one. Number two, 14's a lot. When you look at corporate values, a phone number is not 14. People have to keep it in their head so they wake up every morning knowing what's the priority, right? So the first exercise was, what are the priorities, and let's have them be a small enough number that people could wake up every day and know what they're doing, what they're working on, what the most important thing is.
So applied AI is number one. And the reason I call it applied AI is because the big companies—OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI—they're all investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI and AI infrastructure. So all I need to do is take that and adapt it for the department. So apply it. So that's one. Two is scaled hypersonic weapons. A hypersonic missile, it's sort of a geek term for defense nuts, but it doesn't have to be nuclear, but it could travel at over five times the speed of sound, over Mach 5. That means they could get from China to the US in 30 minutes, or vice versa. So they developed those and we have too, but they're really expensive. So I'm trying to scale them and make them cheaper. And there's a lot of companies, frankly, in this area that are working on that.
Another one is scale directed energy, which is this concept I was talking about, shooting down—
You know, space lasers, shooting down things from space, shooting down things on the border that are coming over like drug drones. How do you use energy to do that? And then the fourth one is what we call contested logistics. So if you're in a fight or battle in a forward place, somewhere near China for example, and it's not a home game, they call it the tyranny of distance, right? It's really far away. How do you do food, water, energy, munitions, and make those things available in those areas so that we can win?
And then there's one called battlefield information dominance. Right now, sensors and what you can hear and what you can see, it's all advanced really fast. So everyone can see everything online, in the air, and through the air, and so on. So how do we dominate the information that we're getting in the battlefield so if we ever have a conflict we can win? So those are kind of like the flavor of what we're doing.
And then finally, I guess biomanufacturing. It's how to use biological mechanisms to create new materials. Like, do you know that you could use biological mechanisms to separate rare earth metals?
