Misunderstood Power: Emil Michael on the Truth About the DoW & Defense Tech

With great honor, Mr. Emil Michael, the Under Secretary of War for Research & Engineering (USW(R&E)) and Chief Technology Officer for the Department of War (DoW), joins Sourcery in front of a F117 at the Reagan National Defense Forum 2025 to dispel common misconceptions about the DoW, modern defense technology, & the role of companies like Palantir, SpaceX, & Anduril. Drawing on his unique path from hyperscaling Uber into a global technology company to now overseeing the DoW’s research, development, & prototyping enterprise, he breaks down how the system actually works behind the scenes. He also outlines the DoW’s 6 Critical Technology Areas — Applied AI, Scaled Hypersonics, Scaled Directed Energy, Biomanufacturing, Contested Logistics, & Battlefield Information Dominance — and explains how these priorities reflect the realities of modern warfare rather than the myths often portrayed around the sector. Bonus: Newer companies Emil Michael highlights as emerging leaders in defense innovation include Planet Labs for commercial satellite imagery, Neros as a next-generation drone company, Hadrian for AI-driven advanced manufacturing, and a broader group of frontier AI companies now engaging with the Department of War. Emil Michael: https://x.com/emilmichael Molly O’Shea: ⁠⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ https://x.com/MollySOShea%E2%81%A0 Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryvc https://x.com/sourceryvc%E2%81%A0 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 YouTube: https://youtu.be/6Lfst-RXX9k 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • Carta—Carta connects founders, investors, and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital. Trusted by 65,000+ companies in 160+ countries, Carta’s platform of software & services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest, and scale with confidence. https://carta.com/data/sourcery/ • Public–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://www.public.com/sourcery https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga http://public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm under secretary of war for research and engineering. Everyone talks about Andron, Palantir and SpaceX. Those are the three companies that in the last 10 years have broken into the defense sector to challenge Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, sort of the older primes. My job is to create five more companies that work in department and bring new capabilities. The executive orders are awesome. It's just AI action plan because at least it sets a marker out there and says to the world, we, United States, are going to be dominant in AI. So it's pretty exciting for a tech guy to be at that part of Department of War.

• 0:32Molly O'Shea?

  And this is exactly like Uber, right?

• 0:36Speaker 00

  It's exactly like Uber.

• 0:39Molly O'Shea?

  We have a stealth bomber behind us, it's the same thing.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Competition with Lyft, like competition with China, you know, same thing.

• 0:46Molly O'Shea?

  What is the biggest misconception about Palantir?

• 0:49Speaker 00

  About Palantir?

• 0:49Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean.

• 0:54Molly O'Shea?

  Honorable Michael.

• 0:57Molly O'Shea?

  Welcome to sorcery.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  You could call me Emile, you know me from the old days.

• 1:00Molly O'Shea?

  No, we're gonna call you Honorable Michael.

• 1:04Molly O'Shea?

  So you have many roles within the Department of War. Could you list out all of them?

• 1:10Speaker 00

  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 RNE, a research and engineering function that's working on new stuff with the best scientific labs in the country. So that's like one big, 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.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:11Molly O'Shea?

  So how did you get into this position?

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Well.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  I was radicalized, I would say, in 2017 when being a Trump supporter was not cool. And, you know, our employee, I was in San Francisco at Uber at the time. And, you know, I was like, someday, you know, I'm gonna go back into government. So I finished Uber, I moved to Miami. And then I was, I met President Trump, had dinner with him. And I want to say December of '23, before the primaries. And it was, it was an honor to do that, obviously. I started working on the campaign, and then I started working on the transition team. And I'd always loved defense. And I'm in the coolest part of defense.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  Like, space lasers, like, the coolest tech stuff that's happening in the whole Department of War is happening in my, in my group. So it's pretty exciting for a tech guy to be at that part of Department of War.

• 3:10Molly O'Shea?

  And this is exactly like Uber, right?

• 3:14Speaker 00

  It's exactly like Uber.

• 3:16Molly O'Shea?

  It's like, look, we have a stealth bomber behind us, it's the same thing.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  Competition with Lyft, like, competition with China, you know, same thing.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  No, it's very different, obviously. But I'm able to, I will say that with this president, the Secretary Hexath, who are disruptors, if you think about, like, what is a political disruptor? Someone who sort of comes in and looks at the, at the world the way, as it is, and says, like, this needs to change.

• 3:45Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  And so if that authority is delegated to me, I can 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 so that's pretty empowering. It's kind of awesome. So in that way, it's like Uber.

• 4:04Molly O'Shea?

  In that way, it is. I'm curious, because, 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?

• 4:16Speaker 00

  The biggest surprise is like, is both the quality and camaraderie of the people at the top of the government. I mean, Scott Besson, Howard Lutnick, Secretary Hegseth, Monica Rubio, like some real talent. And then at the Department of War, my colleagues, Mike Duffy, who runs Acquisition and Sustainment, they buy the big airplanes like you have behind us. They had a policy, who's like worked on the Ukraine-Russia policy and all that. It's really just Brad Hansel who runs the Intelligence and Security Department.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  They're just great people who are dedicated to mission and going for broke. And it's kind of, 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 knocked down, dragged out.

• 5:11Molly O'Shea?

  With a trillion dollars, almost a trillion dollars in budget, that's a pretty substantial big. Substantial allocation to have there. How do 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?

• 5:31Speaker 00

  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 in, at hypersonic speeds? Those kinds of things. So we have to catch up. So the budget that we're now trying to save money on bureaucracy and put it toward is

• 6:13Speaker 00

  new technologies, new weapons, new defense systems. Like think about drone, a drone attack. How do you counter that? Well, maybe you could use high-energy lasers to pop out drones out of the sky if they're coming at you at a military base. I mean, you could do that with using AI in an automated way. So. Trying to kind of step forward ahead of the adversary as opposed to sort of investing only in the stuff we know, like those things.

• 6:40Molly O'Shea?

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• 7:21Molly O'Shea?

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• 8:06Molly O'Shea?

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• 8:47Molly O'Shea?

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• 9:32Molly O'Shea?

  What really stands out is how clearly it explains why each stock is included. And before you invest, you can even backtest your idea against the S and P 500, so you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing. And beyond Generated Assets, Public lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto, all in one place. They'll even give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com/sorcery. Paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the description. 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 it onto six. Why did you choose these six?

• 10:16Molly O'Shea?

  And where are you seeing the most impact?

• 10:19Speaker 00

  So this, the 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 there were 14. So these, these, these critical technology areas were, 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 is 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 unless having be a small enough number

• 11:02Speaker 00

  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, in AI infrastructure. So, all I need to do is take that and adapt it for, for the department. So, apply it. So, that's one. Two is scaled hypersonic weapons. So, hypersonic missile, it's sort of like, it's kind of a geek term for defense nuts, but, but it's like, it's like, you know, nuclear weapon that you're making, or it doesn't have to be nuclear, but it could travel at over five times the speed of sound, over Mach five.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  That means it could get from China to the US in thirty minutes, or vice versa. So, they developed those, and we have two, but we're, 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 scaled directed energy, which is this concept I was talking about shooting down. Like Everest and. Yeah, you know, space lasers, shooting down things from space, shooting down things from 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,

• 12:30Speaker 00

  like, you know, somewhere, you know, near China, for example, and you're not, it's not a home game. They call it the tyranny of distance, right? It's really far away. How do you do things, food, water, energy, munitions, and make those things available in those areas so that, you know, it's a, you know, we can win? And then there's one called battlefield information dominance. So, right now, like sensors and what you can hear and what you can see, it's all advanced really fast. So, everyone can see everything, online and, you know, 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.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  And then finally, I guess, bio-manufacturing. It's how to use biological mechanisms to create new materials. Like, you know that you could use biological mechanisms to separate rare earth metals?

• 13:24Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  So instead of mining them out of the ground and doing this like nasty refining process, we use biology to do that. Use biology to create synthetic blood. You could use, I mean, there's a lot of applications. You use biology to create new metals and materials that we didn't have before. So that's another big area for us.

• 13:42Molly O'Shea?

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

• 13:52Speaker 00

  We are definitely in a moment where we have to catch up our industrial base. Like, you've heard this industrial base problem, right? And it's, and the critical minerals is a great example. Pharmaceuticals, there's a lot of great examples of where, for economic reasons, we outsource to other places. And then it turns out, if that party that was you outsourced to doesn't want to give them to you anymore, you're in, you're in big trouble, right? So we over-outsource things that are critical to our, our country. So redomesticating those is part of a 1938 moment. Building our defense industrial base up that was focused on old weapons,

• 14:33Speaker 00

  old ways of doing things, so that now we have new ways of actually building hardware combined with software to make sure that we can deter adversaries. Because really, the goal is deterrence. And no one, you don't want to fight a war. You want to prevent war. And you can only do that by being strong. So that 1938 moment is, is here, where we finally, after COVID, looked at our supply chains, we looked at our defense industrial base, we looked at, so sort of some of the, the companies that have all left the Midwest and this devastated communities, the influx of drugs and all those things, and said, but wait a minute. We have to like rethink the whole architecture of our, of our war-making abilities so that we can keep peace. So I feel like it's that moment. I wake up every day thinking that way.

• 15:17Molly O'Shea?

  Now that you're closer to the military and you're seeing the impact on troops, on their families. What do you think is most critical for the United States to be aware of or should know between the difference of government support and actually people on the battlefield?

• 15:35Speaker 00

  You know, we had, you look back on the wars that we had, the Second War in Iraq and Afghanistan war, and there were long, expensive conflicts where the benefit to the United States, looking back on it, was negative. It wasn't even neutral, right? It cost a lot of people their lives. And Afghanistan is still Afghanistan. It's in some ways worse, right? The Taliban have taken over. So when you think about warfighters and soldiers, you think about if we ever have to send them to war again, it better be for the right reasons. And it better be that they're equipped with the right stuff. Because I remember one of the first projects I did in the Pentagon when I did sort of a fellowship a long time ago

• 16:20Speaker 00

  was how do we build a tank that doesn't get blown up by these roadside bombs? And it was really hard to get it done because of the procurement process and all bureaucracy in the Pentagon. So I never want to have that happen again. If we're going to send people out there and have their families sort of wait for them, we better be prepared for them. We better sort of be on their side.

• 16:39Molly O'Shea?

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

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the Russia-Ukraine war taught us a lot of things. They're fighting over territory, right? Quickly, like that war became a robot war, a drone-on-drone war. The front lines are robots against robots, right? And that was a, it was, it was sort of a totally new way of thinking about war. And then they started inventing, how do you do, use fiber optic cables to communicate to that drone if, if the satellites are jammed. And how do you do software so that it could do automatic target recognition and all these things? So they're innovating at a pace with drones that's sort of unbelievable. So what we're learning from that, what we have to do is make sure we have our own drone arsenal,

• 17:47Speaker 00

  big and small. Big ones go boom, bigger, and they're sort of less about territorial conflict and more about, you know, responding to an attack or initiating an attack in response to something else. The small ones are about making sure that, that we have an arsenal that, that we have at, at foreign, at military bases that could send out. They do reconnaissance too. They don't just go boom, right? And, and then the other side of it is how do we counter drones? So we're gonna have to be prepared to make sure there's no threats. We still have on the southern border, we're less worried about people coming over, but worry about drug drones and those sorts of things. So drone dominance is, is a real

• 18:31Speaker 00

  thing that we're trying to perfect at the Department of War.

• 18:33Molly O'Shea?

  What are some of the recent technology partnerships that you've done?

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Uh, well, the three I'm most proud of, uh, in a very recent term is we've done three deals for critical minerals to reduce our dependency on China in like 45 days. And so we're really taking this seriously. I mean, it's kind of awesome to be able to do that. Now we're also working with, you know, I've kind of, I have a, you know, being for the business world, I've invited all the tech companies that have defense applications in, and I've met with, you know, probably a hundred or 200 of them over the last six months that I've been in office. And I, we're able to award contracts and do contests for who could do the best this or that, and award contracts for them across the board. So, because

• 19:18Speaker 00

  I want investors to keep investing in these companies and I want companies keep succeeding. And so I'm trying to move, move all the barriers. And I think next week, we'll be announcing sort of a launch of, of AI in the department, Department Y for the first time ever, you know. Uh, so we've got a lot of great initiatives and those are some of the partnerships I'm excited about.

• 19:39Molly O'Shea?

  So I want to talk about AI. Uh, the AI action plan, I think that was the last time I saw you, maybe. Um, but the AI action plan came out, three executive orders upon that. It seemed like a really big moment for, you know, I mean, we saw this at the inauguration and then we also saw this there. There's like really beautiful combination of private and public sector, Silicon Valley and DC. It almost felt like a tech conference. I'm sure like you saw lots of your friends there and then new friends and everything. But I want to talk about the AI action plan. How is that being implemented? And is this going well? Is this like picking up steam? Like, how have you seen initiative versus action and like the gap between the two?

• 20:20Speaker 00

  The executive orders are awesome. And so is the AI action plan because at least it sets a marker out there and say, it says to the world, we, the United States, are going to be dominant in AI. Right? And then what are the components to do that? The best chips, we need more power for data centers. We need the AI companies to be free of sort of state regulations and all these things that could hold them back. And those things are going to make that industry sort of the potentially the biggest industry that's ever been created. And we wanted to be built here. And I think the four great companies in that industry are based here. Chinese are doing, there's distilling models, they're doing things to sort of catch up in their own way.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  But we're putting that into action. We're trying to get permitting for data centers to be faster. We're working on nuclear power generation for data centers, which we'd stopped as a country essentially for decades. We're making sure to keep our best chips here from Nvidia. We're trying to have our, you know, we opened up a chip factory in Arizona that does Nvidia, you know, TSMC and Nvidia chips. We're doing our own lithography now. We're doing all kinds of things to enable this. And what I'm trying to do at Department of War is make sure now we're using that for sort of enterprise use cases, for intelligence use cases. Like imagine, we've been taking satellite imagery for 50 years. Imagine training a model on everything you've ever seen and then trying to train to look for more stuff in the world.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  And then for warfighting use cases, logistics, modeling and simulation, how do you model like a video game, what will happen in a conflict? So you're more savvy about it?

• 21:58Speaker 00

  And then also, like, how do I do that with to design things using AI, right? At the front end as opposed to like CAD drawings and human drawings? And so on that that you say, oh, that didn't work. The physics didn't make sense. So using that to do physics and upfront design. So we're working it and it's going fast, faster than ever I could have ever imagined.

• 22:20Molly O'Shea?

  Between everything that you've looked at and the geopolitical pressures and China and new technologies, what do you think is the biggest capabilities gap for the US warfighter?

• 22:33Speaker 00

  I would say that, you know, when we think about, we used to have a treaty, we used to have a arms race with Soviet Union, right?

• 22:41Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  We had this concept of mutually assured destruction. They have so many missiles, we have so many missiles, and eventually we'll control the amount of missiles and then no one will use them. And that kind of worked, right? We never had that deal with China. So they've developed certain capabilities and certain hypersonic missile categories at a price that that we haven't achieved yet, which is why one of my critical technology areas is high scaled hypersonics at cost. So that's probably the area I think about the most.

• 23:13Molly O'Shea?

  So I recently had Alex Karp on the pod. We did a nice walking tour. And I have to ask you, what is the biggest misconception about Palantir?

• 23:23Speaker 00

  About Palantir?

• 23:24Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, Palantir is a software company that innovated by by taking, you know, they were sort of the first big data company, if you will. And in some ways had AI capabilities that delivered useful software to the government. And it's been amazing to watch how people use their product in the department for all sorts of things, just inventory, right? We didn't know where our stuff was. We were spending trillions of dollars over the years. Where are our tanks? Where's our munitions? Where are these things? How do we understand where they are in their lifecycle? How do we repair them? All the things that were really just basic stuff.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Protesters want to talk about, you know, some of the other stuff they do that they think is more controversial. But I think they're really a nuts and bolts software company with forward deployed engineers that are smart, that sit with a warfighter and solve like everyday problems you would in any organization as much as they do the other stuff.

• 24:26Molly O'Shea?

  Why do you think people think they're evil?

• 24:29Speaker 00

  People are crazy.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  I think, you know, if helping the American government do lawful things makes you evil, I mean, you know, who's not on that list? I mean, we all support our government. We live here, right? We support our elected government regardless of the party. So I think it sort of harkens back to, like, along, it's probably before your time, but there was a sort of a solicitation on who would sell the first cloud software to the government. And Google bailed because their employees were like, "No, you can't..." So imagine selling, they wouldn't sell cloud to the government, but they'd sell it to companies in the foreign countries? It's sort of crazy. I think those days are over. And the number or percentage of people that will say that about a Palantir or Google

• 25:16Speaker 00

  or any one other company has shrunk so much that hopefully it doesn't matter.

• 25:20Molly O'Shea?

  Why do you think all of these defense tech companies do have like, they do get automatically bucketed into this evil group even though they're meant to help?

• 25:33Speaker 00

  You know, it's an interesting thing. I think in some ways, the farther you are removed from the problems that a conflict can cause, the easier it is to disdain what it costs to keep the country safe.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  So if you're in a bubble of, you know, privilege and freedom and so on, and you haven't been around long enough to, or you're, you don't know anyone who's been to the battlefield, right? Or you haven't read enough to understand what the risks are and threats in the world. It's easy to say, "Well, companies who are in that business are bad." But I guess anyone who touches that world in any direct or indirect way, I think it's a quick appreciation for what it takes. And, you know, people use, like, Paul Verlukki uses words like "extreme violence." And, and yes, it's a jarring word, but it's like, yes, if you're fighting a war, don't you want to extract extreme violence on someone who's trying to harm you or your community

• 26:37Speaker 00

  or your country? And I think the, you know, some of the nomenclature sort of triggers people. And people think this is a kumbaya world, and it's just not.

• 26:48Molly O'Shea?

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

• 26:51Speaker 00

  I gotta tell you, I worked for one Secretary of Defense when I did this White House Fellowship, Robert Gates, and he was renowned as one of the great Americans, one of the great American leaders in defense. Pete Hegseth, I think is going to be, and is already, probably the greatest Secretary of War in our lifetimes. He is a leader. He comes in with no biases, like didn't come from the defense industry. He wasn't a four-star general who's sort of like, this is the next job. He wasn't in politics. He comes in with a fresh outlook and say, what's broken? And what's working? And let's start there. So his leadership skills are extraordinary.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  He put together this team that I was talking about earlier that's cohesive and working together. And he's open to any idea. And I think it's a privilege to work for him, and every day I feel that more. And, you know, he's one of the best leaders I've worked with. I've worked with a lot of good leaders and partners in business and so on. He's one of the best I've ever worked with.

• 27:54Molly O'Shea?

  Going to that point, how does that differ from working with Travis Kalanick?

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Well, Travis was in the tech business, so he had a vision to start with when we started Uber. Strong opinions. And he and I would go at it more because I was in the tech industry. So we grew up in the same business, right? So what, our partnership was different. It's like we argued for who had the best idea, right? And he came in, he was obviously an engineer, and he came at it from a hardcore tech standpoint. I came at it from a business standpoint. I was like, we should buy Lyft. He's like, we should crush Lyft. You know, so we had those kinds of debates. It's different in this relationship, not only because, you know, he's, you know, third in line to be President, you know, he is at the top of the government and looking at world affairs in a very broad way. But, you know, I didn't grow up in this industry.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  He served as a military member a long time ago. But, so we're less, you know, crushing ideas that are, we've like held deeply for 20 years and more looking at, why does this work this way? Should it work this way? At a sort of clean sheet of paper. So a different kind of, different kind of relationship.

• 29:09Molly O'Shea?

  I guess to close out, as we think about the world of innovation and technology, especially as it pertains to venture capital and the dollars going towards the defense tech sector, what are some of the most interesting or exciting companies that you're looking at?

• 29:25Speaker 00

  You know, I like, you know, everyone talks about Andro 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, Northrop Grumman, sort of the older primes. And my job is to create five more companies that, you know, work in the department and bring new capabilities. So I'm excited about everything from Planet Labs that does commercial satellite imagery, to Neros, the drone company, to Hadrian, that's doing AI manufacturing, which I find fascinating. We were just there yesterday. You know, these are companies are

• 30:09Speaker 00

  awesome and they're doing great things. And they're doing things that are hard, that are about hardware, not just software. And I'm frankly enjoying working with the frontier AI companies. They're all eager to help the Department of Defense do things that they haven't done before. So those are the exciting things right now.

• 30:25Molly O'Shea?

  Having fun?

• 30:26Speaker 00

  It's the best job in my life.

• 30:28Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Well, Emile, sorry, Honorable Michael, it's a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 30:34Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.