The Pomp Podcast - #487 Tony Thomas on Defense, Technology, and Leadership

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

Tony Thomas is a retired 4-star General and was the 11th Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). General Thomas is one of our nation's greatest warfighters and he also happens to be an even better human being.  In this conversation, we discuss the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the modern battlefield, the greatest threats to the United States, Tony’s leadership lessons, and the intersection of defense and technology, including drones, machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and the newly formed Space Force.  ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= The Rodman Law Group is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs realize their vision by helping them operate defensibly in sectors where laws and regulations haven’t caught up to the realities of the industry. The Rodman Law Group’s legal expertise combined with its understanding of blockchain technology makes it the ideal legal service provider for the industry. http://www.therodmanlawgroup.com/pomp

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Tony Thomas is a retired four-star general and was the 11th commander of U.S. Special Operations Command. General Thomas is one of our nation's greatest warfighters, and he also happens to be an even better human being. In this conversation, we discuss the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the modern battlefield, the greatest threats to the United States, Tony's leadership lessons, and the intersection of defense and technology, including drones, machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and the newly

formed Space Force. I really enjoyed this conversation with General Thomas, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is BlockFi. They provide financial products for crypto investors. Their products include a high yield interest account, US dollar loans against your crypto collateral, and no fee trading on their new crypto exchange. You can go to BlockFi.com slash Pomp and sign up for an account today. You also, if you have an account, can sign up for the new credit card that will pay you in Bitcoin rewards rather than cashback or airline months. That's right. It's a regular credit card, but it'll pay you in Bitcoin instead of cashback or airlines points. So head on over

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group has the two things you need in a lawyer. Not only are they great when it comes to legal expertise, but they also deeply understand the industry in which entrepreneurs and investors are operating. So if you need a lawyer, please go check out the Rodman Law Group. You can go to therodmanlawgroup.com slash pomp and get a pretty good discount on their legal services. Again, therodmanlawgroup.com slash pomp. Go talk to Dave Rodman and his group. Not only have they have great legal expertise, but they also deeply understand Bitcoin, crypto, and the blockchain industry. The RodmanLawGroup.com slash Pomp. All right, let's get in this episode with General Thomas. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan

Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got a very, very special treat for you today. I have General Thomas here. He's a retired four-star general and the former commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. Thanks, Bob. Good to be here.

Absolutely. Let's just kind of start off with you've got this incredible storied military career, one of the nation's greatest leaders. Walk us through kind of your journey in the military and then kind of transitioning out what you're doing today. Well, at the risk of coming off with what seems like false humility, while a lot of people claim least likely to be here, I am pretty sure I could compete very well in that space. I'm the oldest of six kids, grew up in the Philadelphia area, and all the kids were progressively smarter than me. And again, it sounds like false humility, but it's doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, RNs, and biochemical engineers, literally in that kind of descendancy. And so I literally mucked through 10 years of schooling. My parents thought I was the biggest underachiever on the planet, and I was very close to being detained for juvenile delinquency. And I got, you know, blessed by a bolt from the blue visiting West Point with my little brother, a Cub Scout.

I'd already quit the Cub Scouts because they were too regimented for me. And as I hit West Point between my sophomore and junior year, it just impressed me that I needed. I went back home and literally told my mother I need this place. And she pooh poohed it. She was my biggest supporter. But she thought, no, there's no way you're going to correct yourself. and I say, the first thing I need to do is, uh, I'm in Catholic school. The nuns will never believe it. I need a bump from Catholic school into private school. I get a haircut and start doing the right things. And that literally, and I, I look back cause I had just such an utter lack

of maturity back in those days for anything, you know, uh, down the road or what am I doing with myself? But I look back now to that one, you know, incredible, um, seminal moment for me that then birthed a four-decade career in the military that was just pretty historic. I have friends that joke that, and it's probably not too far off, that I'm the Forrest Gump for the last 40 years of our military experience because I literally have been in almost every situation and or a historic moment in our military. And I've happened to have been there by hook or crook. In that time frame, in the four decades, I have been married to the same great woman for 36 years. While we've been locked in for COVID for the last year,

we've discovered that the secret of our longevity is that I was gone most of that time. So she's even more revered for having put up with me for all those years. We have two great kids. She gets the credit for raising them. They're both West Point graduates. Both have served our country as soldiers. I'm very, very proud of them. And then most importantly, we have four grandkids now. So, you know, that's where we are now at this point in time. And I'm learning what I need, you know, what I'm going to be when I grow up after the military, because I'm now in that phase of life. You've had a full life for sure and much more to come. I want to talk a little bit, just let's start with kind of the military experience. You were able to really experience

a number of different situations, both foreign and domestic. And when I asked for questions on Twitter, one of the main topics is just kind of the wars in the Middle East, right? So Iraq, Afghanistan, maybe kind of just give us a quick lay of the land in terms of your evaluation of just where are we with those? And kind of what are the things that people should be paying attention to or talking about today as we look at kind of the wars that we're currently engaged in? Yeah, this is an incredibly tough topic. I don't think it's discussed thoroughly enough, and that's part of the problem. I feel expert in terms of experience in that I served every year from 2001 to 2019 when I retired. I was there for all of or parts of every year in Afghanistan,

in. And then I have about four to five years across that time frame of experience in Iraq. So I'm both an expert and I'm to blame, right? I'll accept that, that I was not part of the solution. First of all, I think it's too cliche and it's very easy for politicians to disparage endless wars when reality is, it's kind of like the old theory, if you don't know where you're going, any path will get you there. But in some of these cases, we didn't have a strategy for war termination for what it was going to be like at the end, or at least what we wanted to be like. And we fumbled. Afghanistan was sort of righteous. We got attacked from there. We went with our blood up. It was a punitive raid. And then we progressed into nation building and things like that that we

never wanted to get into. In Iraq, you could argue that we all did a student body left at a particular point in time for reasons that politicians laid out to us. I was a relatively junior officer at the time. And then we created our own worst nightmare. We created an insurgency as the occupiers in Iraq after we had dismantled all the security apparatus and we got stuck there. And so these things have just festered mostly because, and I don't mean this in any way political, we've had an end date instead of an end state type approach. And so across multiple administrations, we have anchored a hard date that we're done by this date. Well, what's that do for your adversary, which just tells them, hang in there. The United States will lose patience and

then they'll leave. And in every case, we've emboldened them. So we have mucked along like this for 20 years now, specifically for Afghanistan. And it annoys me. I take it personally when there's commentaries that general officers thrive in the military industrial complex thrive on this. I can't speak to the military industrial complex. I'm not part of it in the afterlife life either. But every general officer or admiral that I know has a son or a daughter serving in the military. We're very cocooned in kind of our relationship. And the good news is our kids like the profession from their attachment or their connection to it. A lot of them join, but none of us are advocating for endless wars or these situations where we're putting our kids in harm's

way, literally with skin in the game. But that's very, again, it's easy for that to be played off in political discussions is, oh, those generals who want war. You know, I was a colonel when I went to war in Afghanistan for the first time. And then you're a rose to, you know, to my ultimate rank. Yeah, it's one of these things where I always tell folks and most people on the podcast know, but for those that don't, I served in Iraq for a year. And you just talk to a veteran, especially someone who's been to a combat zone, and they are usually the closest to a pacifist that you will find, right? In the sense of they don't want to go, they don't think that we should be sending soldiers, but if you send them, they will do their job and they will do their job well.

And so I think that it's kind of a very nuanced conversation. Talk a little bit, this idea of kind of an end date versus an end state. There's a lot of folks who just say, well, you know, end of 2021, let's just pick up and leave. Kind of what would the negative side effects of doing something like that be? And then I guess, you know, fully understanding that it's a complex issue, but just kind of how do you think we get out of those two wars, if at all possible? Yeah, I probably should have started with, and I'll state now that everything I'm saying is my opinion. Interesting phenomenon in the United States these days, you have a lot of former generals and admirals who are very prominent. It's bred to rabid thoughts, you know, go figure on

either side of the spectrum that we should keep our pie holes shut forever and never be heard from again, or we are somehow uber citizens who know more about this great American experiment than anything else. I don't consider both those discards. At the end of the day, I'm a citizen. I was a citizen before I joined the military. I'm still a citizen. I don't represent some cabal of retired general officers or the SOCOM secret society. I think these are my opinions. You could take them uh or leave them um you know um for the for the discussion about could we pull the plug and here's the other i tell this to actually folks in the private sector now here's the problem with being a military professional thrown into one of these conflicts uh we

desperately want to win for the nation so we're way too close to the problem we probably are the most myopic bunch out there that hey we're making progress we want to see progress everywhere i mean The most refreshing thing for me to see in Kabul when I was back there the year 2012 to 2013 for the entire year in charge of special operations was the multitude of young Afghan girls all in their uniforms going to school, which we enabled. It would not have happened if we hadn't done that. And it will absolutely be turned back, I believe, if we just pull the plug. But the bigger, as you pull up from this thing, is the acknowledgement that this is an ideological struggle. This was a group of people that attacked the United States of America for their reasons. The ideology is still very strong, even though we have crushed al Qaeda, even though we have crushed ISIS physically from a military standpoint, we've done little or nothing to really get at the ideology. And so if you pull the plug, I think that Afghanistan will trend badly to become a sanctuary again for bad people who will actually be celebrating that they defeated us, much like they defeated the Russians or the Soviet Union back in the day. And you should expect more of it to come at us. So what should be the end state is some sort of sustainable security where you and I never have to worry about working in high rise buildings in New York City or the Pentagon again. And ironically, one of the companies I work for is on the 80th floor of One World Center.

I mean, they have a difficulty still renting above the 80th floor because people think that there might be another episode that might occur. So we're in that dilemma of how do you, we should pull out. I mean, we should absolutely reduce our signature as much as possible, enable and empower the host nation to take care of their own security, but absolutely leave some sort of insurance policy so that we never get surprised again like we did at 9-11. Yeah. And, you know, obviously throughout this entire conversation, there's so much nuance, there's so much complexity. We're going to spend about an hour and a half talking. So for those that are listening, just bear with us as we kind of move from topic to topic. And please don't assign any malice if we skip over something. It's more so just us trying to get everything in. And General, talk a little bit about just kind of technology on the battlefield.

Obviously, having the seat that you sat in from the special operations side, usually those warriors are, you know, have the access to the top technology. They see kind of things before the general military would see it. How has that evolved through your career, especially while we've been at war for the last 20 years? And kind of just maybe what's like the state of technology on the battlefield today? Great question. And I was lucky to serve with folks who, and I saw one of your previous podcasts where someone acknowledged people being the difference. People are the decisive advantage. I don't know why that's an epiphany for some folks or that we have to rediscover that.

And so I was blessed by working with teammates who were always trying to come up with new, better ways to gain that tactical, technological advantage constantly. The hardest thing to do, and actually the higher I rose in rank, was to harness the good thought fairy and say, okay, money's into that program, but with some sort of agility to springboard elsewhere when something new or better came up, and then to be able to scale it to the entirety of our force so that we were interoperable. To your point, the folks that I work with in the special operations community are riding leading-edge technology real-time. Um, you know, almost, you know, not quite to the degree that, you know, uh, you know, some of the folks I'm associated with now, but right in trail with that, where they know what's out there and the, and they're already applying it, you know, uh, tactically or operationally, uh, in, in the living laboratory that we've been afforded for the last bunch of years.

Um, so it, it is, you know, it, it was very refreshing to see how they understand the technology can and can implement it. It is incredibly frustrating, even more so for me now that I'm out of the military, on how inept the department is in leveraging the technology that's available. For all the things I just described, if it's thrown into the milieu of the Department of Defense and its programming approach and acquisition approach, that's a five-year, seven-year, at least, acquisition cycle. And you know how fast tech is changing inside that cycle. That's a recipe for being an anachronism right from the beginning.

So we have to smash that gap and partly as the idiosyncrasies of the department to be able to really leverage the extraordinary technologies that are available today and in the future. I want to throw out the names of a couple of types of technology and just have you riff on your thoughts and how that's evolved. Maybe probably the most famous one when people think of technology in the military is kind of all the drones and unmanned aerial vehicles. How has that evolved over time, and how do you evaluate where we are today with that? You talk about a technology that was turned on us a little bit. If you'll remind me later on, because I was as myopic and dawdling as anybody else in service until I had the epiphany moment with courtesy of Eric Schmidt, and it's been written about, but I'd like to come back on that. But the drone piece, it was kind of fascinating in that early on in places where we didn't have access, we leveraged our drone technology to great success. Think of MQ-1 Predators. Think of MQ-9 Reapers. Think of all the exotic space-based stuff we had to see into places and to discern targets, if you will.

I know that's unsavory to some people, but that's the nature of warfare. And then apply in the most precise way possible. And I can't emphasize this enough that it was a non-starter. It was a mission failure for us if we had any collateral damage. We wouldn't take that shot if we thought we had any collateral damage in terms of innocent civilians in the mix. But we leveraged that stuff to a great extent. Where I say it was turned back on us, I was out in vicinity of Mosul, Iraq in 2015 or 16. And Mosul was my hometown for 15 months from September 07 to December 08. And in this time frame in 1516, ISIS was now taking DJI quadcopters and equipping them with little 40 millimeter grenades on the bottom of them. And they would literally just send up these off-the-shelf quadcopters, find your locations, and then drop these 40-millimeter grenades with a little shuttlecock device to stabilize it. The day I was out there, or shortly before I was out there, was called the Day of the Drones by the Iraqis. And ISIS, on that day, in a city about the size of Philadelphia, had put up about 70 different quadcopters, many of them armed. And at one point in time, they had a dozen to two dozen up, and we had no response for them.

think of this, we had air superiority. Every pointy-nosed fighter in the world was above us to provide us that sort of air cap. But underneath that, you had off-the-shelf technology that was wreaking havoc for us and caused us to do a complete turnaround. That is only the precursor for swarming unmanned technology in the future. And this is not just a war zone challenge. This is a New York City challenge. This is a Philadelphia challenge. This is any city that's out there that some Yehu wants to leverage that technology, again, to do bad things. It's something that we need to roll up our sleeves and understand as a threat, and more importantly, to come up with appropriate counters that will keep us safe. Yeah, what you're really highlighting

is there's almost this element of as we improve, we're also teaching the insurgency kind of some of the techniques and techniques that they can pursue as well. Another type of technology that has become more prevalent over the years is everything from artificial intelligence and machine learning. So kind of just the ability to use software to become smarter, to analyze data, more predictability to it. What's your evaluation of where we are there? Yeah. And you've actually, you're a great straight man. Excuse me. You've got me back on the one epiphany moment I had. About a month after I took over SOCOM, I was very busy as the JSOC commander before that, the Joint Special Operations Command for those who are unacquainted

a phenomenal command that I really did not want to leave. It was the best job I ever had, but I got pushed up to, it was probably the Peter principle play, to the four-star level to be the SOCOM commander. But in my first month in the job, I hosted a visit headed up by my former mentor and friend, Bill McRaven, former SOCOM commander, who was in charge at the direction of the Secretary of Defense of the Innovation Group in the Department of Defense. And it had the Eric Schmitz of the world and a bunch of other very, very bright and talented folks to look at the department and to honestly try and help us leverage technology. And so a month into command, I get this coterie of people descending on SOCOM. They spent a day with us. And at the

end of the day, we're riding down Bayshore Boulevard, not too far from my home here, in a typically black suburban, right? And Eric Schmitt felt compelled to give me a report card on special operations. And in short order, not lacking any confidence, he said, your people, amazing people i thought check if you took nothing else away incredible talent he said you prototype pretty effectively and we had taken him to our softworks facility where we try to do you know rapid you know prototyping etc and i thought yep we've been failing fast long before i ever read about uh you know that that thought you know failing fast um he said you absolutely suck and he was actually more colorful than that in terms of applied uh predictive computing

machine learning, et cetera. I thought, woo, where's he going with this? He then went on to say, General, I know you live in a very complex problem, but if I got under your tent for a couple days a week, I think I could solve most of your wicked problems to simple up-down switches with advanced algorithms. He might have said quantum computing, but about that time, I was ready to kick him out of the car because I thought, oh, you're so arrogant. How could you not understand the complexity of what we do? Luckily, Admiral McRaven engaged him because it allowed me to think for a moment, and it smacked me in the head that, oh, he's absolutely right. What Google, what these companies are doing in terms of applied machine learning is absolutely apropos to almost

everything. I can't think of any exceptions, to be truthful, of what we do in the military if we embrace and leverage this technology. And so we went down the road. I hired a chief data officer for SOCOM, phenomenal talent, who's now the Defense Department's chief data officer. and then we proceeded to try and educate our force because as you know the biggest challenge is a lot of people can spell AI and they know nothing about neural networks they know nothing about Bayesian analysis and I'm the dumbest guy in the room but you need to wrestle with this every day to understand it especially as it's mated with what problems are you trying to solve what's the data that's pertinent to it how do you how do you arrange that because most importantly and this is

where I think for all those that are opposed to leveraging and enabling AI we've had the luxury for the last 20 years of not having to make, for the most part, time-sensitive, compressed decisions under incredible duress. Our future adversaries are not going to give us that luxury. In fact, they are hell-bent on getting AI. Putin has said, he who gets it first wins to be able to make the most rapid decision-making, be the most influential in the information space, et cetera, going forward. We need to embrace this and then ride that ragged edge up to, do you hand the keys to the car to enable the AI to take the shot or not? That is the crux of the debate, but I think you should run well up to that before you turn over trigger and then embrace the situations,

the one-offs, where it might be advantageous to say, yep, in those scenarios, AI must be able to take the shot or it may be an existential threat that you will rue the day. You won't have the chance to rue the day. You'll be gone. What's so fascinating to me is there's kind of like how effective is the technology? How would we apply it? And then ultimately, how do we almost go through the governance of the technology, right? Who gets to take the shot? Is there a human override? Do we trust the software? How accurate is it? What's the efficacy? All that kind of stuff. Another technology. And there's an event that I'd encourage everybody to get online and look at, DARPA, who's enabled some incredible technology into our force, recently

hosted a dogfight event with the Air Force. And to the Air Force's credit, they signed up and said, OK, we're going to let you throw an unmanned, AI-enabled capability against our very best. Think of Nellis guys, you know, Top Gun kind of guys. And it almost it it had me torn because you had you watched an incredibly talented human being pilot literally perplexed by an AI enabled craft that beat them five out of five times. And you can see this. You can find this on on YouTube. It's at the end of the session. So if you want to cut to the chase for that, that video. And and so the takeaways were clear. I mean, you know, this AI in a dogfight scenario, if we think we're going to be in those kind of scenarios in the future, is a considerable technology.

What I was, I shouldn't have been surprised because it's human nature on the backside, was essentially the pilot lobby that came on and said, whoa, not ready for primetime. And by the way, that craft was doing suicidal tactics to get the win. And you're thinking, stop. You know, stop for a moment and think what you just said. The AI does not know fear. The AI does not know fatigue. The end, and I hate doing this too, whether it's fighter jockeys or aircraft carrier captains and all, is to pose the next hard question of, okay, I got it that you're beholden to

your current craft, your current platform. Do you want your kid to go up against an AI, airplane, missiles, whatever it might be in the future with the technology that we're leveraging now? And the answer is clearly not. then when are you going to do that leap ahead to have that capability where we're going to reduce the threat, which is kind of an American ideal, but also be at the fore of this technology? And folks have used the nuclear analogy, and I agree. It is part and parcel to the seminal moment of the development of nuclear weapons,

and we should be thinking about it as aggressively and solving it, and not get caught up in the policy conundrums, et cetera, that will presage actual discussions. Yeah, something related to kind of the AI, machine learning, computer vision, the drones, et cetera, it's just robotics in general. And it feels like there's a big push right now where people are saying, well, why are we risking human life? Let's just send the robot army out and we'll kind of trot them out and they'll do a great job. And hopefully they don't turn against us. What's the evaluation of where we are on the robotics side? unfortunately again uh for every place you trot out robots as a solution or unmanned as a solution

there is a man lobby that's you know hold on for dear life against that and you think of the number of things that have changed over time where i i gotta believe it's inevitable but you gotta you gotta overcome that obstacle but i think the most constructive way to get at this in the future and i'm hoping the armed forces embrace this is simulation and or uh testing where you literally say, hey, I'm going out to the National Training Center or the Mojave or wherever it might be, come fight me. And we invite leading-edge technology companies to come in with all the widgets and gadgets and tech and kick our ass. I mean, literally, free play, show us where our vulnerabilities are so that we have that, again, seminal moment to adapt and go forward. Too much

of it, I mean, the DARPA situation I described was extraordinary in that they took the gloves off. It was a it was a dogfight and the Air Force, you know, got was beaten badly. But we didn't come on the backside and say, OK, how do we get that company or that technology into the force as soon as possible? So I think I think, you know, the department needs to embrace and not chase technology. That was one of the lessons we learned at SOCOM that you can chase technology everywhere in the Valley and Austin and Boston, Carnegie Mellon, you name it. you'll chase forever. You'll be chasing individual companies too, by the way, or you flip the paradigm and bring them under the tent, bring companies under the tent. Mostly venture capitalist companies, I think, are really powerful in that they have a broad

array of portfolio companies that, hey, anybody interested in this? Good. Here's the opportunity, the environment to get in and help our national security. The Google experience with Maven, I thought was really cathartic for DOD because you already had the Google workforce, at least a portion of it, saying, whoa, whoa, we don't want anything to do with drone warfare and this sort of national defense. Get us out of this. And Google, people have mistakenly said they balked. They completed their contract.

They just didn't go on to the next phase and was picked up by somebody else. Interestingly, who's back in business more adamantly than ever? Google in the form of Eric Schmidt and others saying, hey, we had that moment. We've had a chance to chat amongst ourselves. We will always have a portion of our people that don't want to do this, but they're back in. But more importantly, in the wake of that, I can't count the number of companies, both startups and established companies, who are anxious to help the department. They want in. They want to be able to help us going forward. The difficulty is the devil's in the details on how they get under the tent and get integrated, but there's not any shortage of companies that

want to be involved in solving these wicked problems. Yeah. When we talk about innovation kind of on the battlefield and within the military, one of my favorite stories is, and I don't know exactly how accurate every single detail here is, but the general story is that the Rhino, for those that don't know, it's basically a box that has got a set of heat that comes out of it. And it's extended out in front of vehicles and it's there to kind of defeat infrared type IEDs. So basically rather than have the engine block be the trigger for an IED and kind of put human life at risk, this is a box that literally just extends the heat signature out in front of the vehicle. And the story that I had heard when I was deployed was basically a very young soldier

came up with the idea by putting spark plugs inside of an ammo box and put it on the front of his vehicle. And next thing you know, the military said, hey, that's a great idea. And let's kind of, you know, get that rolled out as fast as we can to save as many lives as possible. And, you know, regardless of the accuracy of the individual details, there is this debate between can the innovation come from, you know, people who are actually in uniform, who have the experiences and kind of have the ground truth and knowledge versus folks who have the technology experience, and they can come look at the problem set and then develop the solutions. What was your experience kind of in the military in terms of innovation happening internal versus external? And how do

you kind of look at the balance between those two things moving forward? Yeah, I would be suspect of any initiative that was started at the higher level. And the classic that was before my time here at SOCOM that people tried out was called the Special Operations Handgun. And as you might imagine, by the end of the day, this thing looked like the Rube Goldberg, you know, Hubble telescope of pistols that you could never use in, you know, in combat. But it was designed by this headquarters And I certainly know we try to. We don't always stay true to mating operators, practitioners of the trade at the tactical level with the technologists, the acquisition experts to really get that symbiosis for technological development. The harder part, though, and I mentioned earlier, is with all that going and SOCOM is 75,000 strong across the planet, a lot of great individual problem solving going on. How do you identify absolute leading edge technology tactics, techniques and procedures, as you and I would call it back in the day and say, OK, that that's where we need to invest.

And I provide the resources, obviously, to what, you know, to what scale and for how much, for how long to bring it into the force. And so you've got that conundrum of the higher headquarters with the resources and with the budgetary requirements and the problem solving happening at the tactical level. How do you how do you mesh it? I used to use this technique at SOCOM and it would drive some people nuts. and I didn't do it to drive them nuts. And some would call it the old directed telescope. But on any given day, and I tried to get away from my headquarters as much as possible.

I didn't like sitting in an office and we had people in 80 different countries around the world, a lot of them in harm's way. So I'd spent a lot of time on the road, but I couldn't always be there. So in the morning, if I read a situation report that said, hey, Pomp and his guys yesterday just crushed it in this.

And when I say crushed, people always think I'm saying kinetic. It could have been the greatest humanitarian assistance effort. whatever. But as I got that report and say, wow, that was great. Can we reach out and talk to them? And I don't want anybody in their chain of command in between. It's going to be just like I'm visiting them and you pick the location. Again, that's the part that a lot of people didn't like, but I say, just imagine if I were on the road, I'd get that opportunity. And I'd sit down with

our teammates and say, hey, I read last night you did this. Please give me more on it. And my sergeant major would sit there with me, a great former Delta operator. And we'd sit and one, it was selfish because we would get the buzz of, man, these are our teammates. Don't you love being part of this organization? But I would always have this one question loaded for him at the end of the day and say, hey, is there anything I can do from up here on Mount Olympus, Mount Socom, to help you do your job better in the future? And every decent team leader had that answer ready. Oh, just in case you might ask. And it would barely be, if I only had the gonculator or if I had these authorities or if i had whatever and so i'd say good have you asked have you pushed that request

officially up through the you know through the system oh yes sir three bags full i said okay great i will get back to you you know you uh monkey transfer i've got this now i'll get back to you and so we'd meet after that session i'd have my staff in there and say okay team x on the ground wherever says they need this thing the request is out there officially somewhere find it And we would find it at one of our many, too many, intermediate headquarters, stuck with a lot of well-meaning people who were trying to move the rock uphill but didn't have the wherewithal to do it. And I used to joke that, hey, Jeff Bezos is not running Amazon like this. He is running a flat-enough, situation-aware-enough organization that he knows the pacing items for his organization, and he's able to shift resources. And so I would try to get our headquarters, both my headquarters at the macro level, not to sit back wondering what the men need today or the men and women out there need today and those at the tip of the spear to crush that space down so we actually could provide the resources necessary.

We did not, and I would tell my guys, as many painful sessions as I had at Congress, you know, testifying in front of McCain and others, we never lacked the resources for what we needed to do. I mean, I had a $13 billion budget that was just our annual budget. We could get the resources and more if we needed it. All I needed to do was be able to present that, hey, here's the wicked problem, and I don't have the resources for it, and I can't cross-level internally. So I was disappointed that we had our own bureaucratic challenges, even in a force that was considered to be pretty agile. Yeah. One of the things that you're talking about here is kind of just the efficacy, I think, that a lot of these technology firms have had. Right. They obviously they grow because they're efficient both in communication operations and the production of whatever the line of business is that they're in. And what we've seen in Silicon Valley specifically, and you mentioned a little bit with kind of

the Google situation, is a fairly polarized population of workers, right? So there's some people who say, I want nothing to do with helping the United States and kind of our defense operations. I disagree with that body of work. And so if the company I work at does that, I'm going to, on the light end, basically protest it in some form or fashion, or on the kind of more aggressive end, I'm literally going to quit my job and go somewhere else. But there's also another group of people, and this is kind of the Palantirs and the

Andurils and a number of other technologists who say, no, listen, if we do not use technology to protect our country, to give that capability to our warfighters, then we actually are doing ourselves a disservice. And so I'm going to go build a company. I'm going to go work within kind of government and defense, and I'm going to go kind of do my part. How do you think we get kind of a little bit more of a centrist view, right? So rather than have kind of that polarized kind of divisiveness, if you will, how do we start to get folks to understand that the public and private sector can work together, kind of do the right things, but it's also not an unchecked power for the public sector and that there is kind of the ethical conversation happening around technology and some of the other concerns that they may have.

Yeah, I actually think there's an overemphasis on this small group that is adamantly opposed to, you know, to do anything that that aligns them with national defense and or going to war. And I get I mean, go back to the first point. Nobody more opposed to going to war than me. But, you know, sometimes it finds you whether or not you want it. There's a there's a more eloquent quote that goes with that that you're aware of. Um, so, uh, I think the best capture of this that I've read consumed over the last couple of years, Trey Stevens did an editorial that talks to your point that you might not want to do this, but our adversaries are actually going in this direction. Again, some don't think we have any adversaries out there.

I'd love to live in their netherworld. Um, but, um, so it's a, it's a compelling discussion that please understand the nature of the security concerns for the country you live in. And I got it that most of these companies are global. But, you know, if you're if you put your marker down in San Jose or Austin or wherever it is, you know, you know, there's an expectation there. And I'm not I'm not wrapping myself up in nationalism either here, but it's more of a practical thing. But the bigger challenge and what's interesting, my experience over the last two years has been to meet companies that had no intention by design to compete or to provide solutions in the national security space. But their technology is so compelling that in discussions we've said, you know, this could be integrated in the national security. Have you thought about that?

And in a couple of cases, I got immediate pushback of, whoa, that wasn't our founder's vision. But then they come back a couple of weeks later and say, hey, we actually would like to do things for the government. How do we get in that space? And there begins the journey. So, again, how do we, you know, how many times have you and I read that the paradigm is flipped? DoD used to be the center of gravity for a lot of technological development, the Internet, blah, blah, blah. The paradigm is completely flipped. It's no longer the locus of all that. There's some good innovation going on in DoD. The majority of it is in the private sector. How do you how do you establish the dialogue and the venues to match, you know, match the two as constructively as possible going forward? I have not. I mean, I would be very concerned if I was bouncing off a lot of companies that were no at hello.

I don't want any part of this. I am experiencing the exact opposite that one, they're they're appreciative of the national security challenges and concerns now and in the future. They want to be more informed about it. And the majority of them who have technology that's that's that's apropos to it are interested in how do I how do I help? And of course, there's the pragmatic aspect of making a dime or two on that, but that's not where the money is. That's part of the problem is the companies that are successful for the most part have serious, serious private sector success, and they'll realize that the government success will be less beneficial to them, but they want to be in that space. Absolutely. My friend Bill Perkins had a great question on Twitter where he asked, in your opinion today, what are the three greatest threats to America? Are they nation states? Are they technologies? Just when you hear that, what are your reactions to the three greatest threats? You know, we wrestle with this all the time. So and and interestingly, the same five threats that are captured right now with the new administration are the same five threats that four years ago were presented to a different administration. So in terms of nation states or ideological threats out there, everybody knows the kind of road if you're national security is China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and violent extremism. That was a way of describing the Islamic phenomenon that we were dealing with at the time.

Um, I, I think, and we, ironically, back then we, we listed those pretty forcefully in documents to try to get us, uh, more balanced from our counter, counter-terrorist, counter-insurgent effort in the Middle East onto China as a, at least a budding adversary. And four years ago, our national policy, our, our stated national policy was to not refer to China as an adversary. That was that was the administration that President Biden served in before. I think we've had that bipartisan, you know, acknowledgement that if they're not an adversary, they're sure behaving in an adversarial fashion. And if you read their literature, they do believe Xi Jinping and others do believe that there is going to be a meeting engagement sometime down the road here where it won't be ships passing in the night kind of kind of evolution.

And it may not be peaceful. That's where I mean, it behooves us to read what what the CCP is saying about where they see themselves now and in the future. So I do see China. It's irresistible. You just have to read the first chapter of Graham Allison's book just to understand the demographics and the magnitude of the economy. You know, this is not something the U.S. can take on mano a mano. It is it is an incredible challenge from from that standpoint. point. So we need, you know, the point being we need partners. We need, and I read something, I think, in The Economist the other day, the good news is the Western world is still, you know, 60% of the GDP. So you do have leverage now unless you let it wane and die off. So I think China's out there. Russia is not going away. And unfortunately, you're seeing it now with Navalny is, you know, the joke, which I don't think was said jokingly a couple of years ago and

continues to play out is that Putin is not going to go out, you know, vertical. So you've got the power of personalities, whether it's Xi Jinping, Putin, and others, and KJU in North Korea. These personalities that are variables that you just have to consider, you know, will be disruptive going forward. So China and Russia kind of in combination because they're existential threats. And then, you know, people think I'm being too fluffy now, but I would go on to two venues that I'm concerned without the specific threat. One is space. And I saw it to do on Twitter today, disparaging Space Force and all. The newsflash without getting into classified levels of discussion is we are terribly keep you awake at night kind of vulnerable in space right

now. We're way behind. So if you like and if you're beholden, as we are from a national defense standpoint on satellite enabled communications, expect that to be the first lights out shot fired in a future conflict, unless we start, you know, start stepping up to the plate and understanding that venue. And then the other part that's pertinent to that is the information space. And that sounds really fluffy, but right now the amount of disinformation that is running around the world and, you know, again, on your previous podcast, someone was talking about information anxiety. Well, there better be information anxiety because, you know, who knows what's factual in this day and age to base your decisions on, but we have to sort through that.

Yeah. So I know that there's a lot of sensitivities here. So just kind of whatever you're allowed to say, but I want to go a little bit deeper on the whole idea of space and obviously the idea of a space force and all of that. I think people immediately jump to, oh, what are we going to do? Protect ourselves from the aliens, right? Or some kind of some, you know, outrageous kind of edge case type situation. But really what you're talking about here is, one, there's a lot more communication infrastructure. There's a lot of companies that are trying to do multi-planetary travel, or they're trying to do now even space manufacturing. Look at somebody like Varda. There's all sorts of different technologies, whether it's reusable rockets or some sort of

3D printed rockets. You just kind of go down the line. There's a lot of innovation happening here. And most of that is happening in the Western world. But when you talk about kind of the vulnerabilities, uh, in space kind of just from a very high level, like what exactly does that mean? And so for people at home who are thinking about, oh, a space force, like, why is that important? And kind of, how do you just think of space as a, you know, maybe a battlefield that, uh, isn't necessarily contentious today, but could become contentious in the future. I think the space force has been cathartic, uh, and it is, it has woken us up from this naive, uh, dream state assumption, whatever it might be, that space will not be an area, not be a contested area, that somehow that

was going to be off limits. We're not going to do bad things up there. It'll be restricted to normal domains of land, sea, air, et cetera, and cyber. Wrong, wrong, bad assumption, flawed, and has been proven to be flawed. So without even going into classified stuff, you know, just look at open source on what the Chinese and the Russians have already put up there that is not intended to be good it's not intended to play nicely with others um and ask yourself okay what have we done to protect ourselves much less to balance you know that playing field there and so i think uh your space force will help us focus on that i don't think that space force was um sufficiently birthed um with enough of its own wherewithal it's still way too tied to the

Air Force. Now, you can argue that it was part of the Air Force before, but both from a process and a linkage, budgetary, et cetera, it's still very much an Air Force baby. Even as listed as a separate department or separate service, it's not running free yet. I hope it will eventually. But I think it's an area that we absolutely have to have this discussion, this honest discussion Why do we, you know, it's today in Twitter, it's still a little too political on, was this just a wild idea from the previous administration? Hopefully people will pull up and say, okay, do we need to compete up there? The answer is yes. What's the best way to do it?

Whether establishing another service and a combatant command was the way to do it, you could cut that thing every which way and come up with other solutions, but we absolutely need to compete. So I want to go from space and kind of bring it just domestically. Over the last couple of weeks, we obviously had a whole bunch of kind of concerns and then also a couple of different events. One that kept coming up on Twitter specifically was around the Capitol building and some of the activities there. I know you've got some thoughts just on kind of the military's role in a lot of domestic activities, right?

So that's kind of serving as one exact example. but maybe talk just a little bit about how you see soldiers and other military members and kind of their role, both foreign and domestic, and kind of how that's evolving or becoming a bigger focus or more important in their kind of day-to-day operations. Yeah. I mean, really, it's hard to believe that, for me still, that that is in the wake of our recent history, the whole events of 6 January. You know, for those who are not familiar with the military, and there will be a few that listen to your podcast. I mean, we enjoy incredible support from the American public and we should never take it for granted. I have actually, as the older I've gotten, the more

sentimental I feel for Vietnam veterans who did what their country asked them to do and were treated like crap when they came back home. My generation has never had that experience. We've always had yellow ribbons around trees. We've always had thank you for your service everywhere you go. As a SOCOM commander, you know, the most rewarding thing I do now in the private sector. I'm the chairman for a nonprofit that sends our gold star kids, the children of our fallen warriors, our teammates, to college, full rides. We put 41 into college this last year. We put 400 so far, 800 to go. But that's all enabled by great American benefactors out there who give us the wherewithal to do that. So we're very lucky. Now, I say that acknowledging that I

don't think most of america has any idea what we do on a daily basis they know they do know that 700 billion dollars is spent on on our armed forces every year that's a big big budget and but when you start checking down the the list of what that budget buys you know aircraft carriers at 13 to 15 billion dollars a pop you have 35s etc etc nuclear triad to keep you safe against other nuclear threats it ain't cheap to you know to have this you know keep this country safe against all threats. We could do it better. We could do it a lot more efficiently. Uh, there's a lot of waste in our, in our budget, but, um, it is what it is. But in, in that milieu, uh, and in the context of, Hey, we've been in combat for the last 20 years. And some people wonder

why we're still there. Uh, we're, we're about keeping the country safe. We are also for the unacquainted, a great reflection on the American public. I mean, forced, uh, social experiments as, as, as are so-called have, have occurred in the military long before they've ever been manifest in, in, uh, you know, in our society. And you serve, you know, with the, you know, the Penske National Guard there. I mean, we, we serve with people from every walk of life, every, you know, every persuasion and, and whether or not you liked them personally, you got along on team America and did your job.

And, and, and I think we're all better, better, uh, better from that exposure. You know, we are exposed to people from other places, the United States, other thoughts and and and everything that goes with it. And it's it's one of the more rewarding things. But we're not a special interest group. And it really annoys me that too many politicians want to leverage the military as a special interest group. I mean, I don't know what your experience was. We never talked politics when I was in the military. It was something you didn't care as much like, you know, sexual orientation. and you didn't care. Color of your skin, didn't care. We still had some hangouts. We still had some people that didn't quite get the message and needed to be brought along or moved out of

the service. But we all accepted those differences. So we're not a special interest group. That has really come to play this last year in terms of what's the military's role in domestic disputes. And for people to use charged language like civil war and things like that and we've had a civil war you know do your do your homework do your you know do some studies here i mean the thing that almost ripped us apart 140 years ago 160 years ago uh we we lived at you know we 180 years i guess of public math um yeah we've lived that hard um we don't need to relearn that lesson um but where it came to the almost tipping point was hey should our military have some role in these domestic disputes and here's where again a very charged discussion but

but something that is absolutely being reinforced in the military, is every one of us, whether officer enlisted, swears an oath to the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That's not a personal oath to anybody. That's not even an oath to the flag for all those that want to wrap themselves. That's a commitment to our Constitution and to the aspirational goals that were listed in there. And people can disparage the Constitution about being written by a bunch of white slave owners? Yes, it absolutely was. You know, shame on them that they could write a document and not live it at the time. But it was to push us on this arc to be that that shiny beacon on the hill. And, you know, people disparage when I've used that

term. I said, hey, that's not something America, I think, sought to be the shiny beacon on the hill. But when I when I have been in dozens and dozens of countries, especially towards the end my tenure as a four-star, I can't count the number of times I would sit down with heads of states or heads of defense, and they always had some complaint about the United States. There would always be something that, oh, you Americans, you did this wrong, and it usually had something to do with their country, some decision we made or whatever. But in every case, universally, and there was not a single exception, the last message they would ask me to take back home to our leadership was, please stay in the lead. Please stay involved because warts and all,

your country provides a sanity, a balance to this wacky world out there. And that's not to say, you know, we're the greatest country in the world or we don't have our own problems. We just demonstrated that, you know, terribly over the last year or so. But the world, sounds pretty onerous here, is kind of depending on us to provide some semblance of leadership going forward. And it's something that was part of our development, part of this great experiment that we live in. Again, there are a ton of people in the United States that think I didn't sign up for that. Okay. You probably need to go outside us and look back in every once in a while and get appreciation for that. My best buzz comes from Eastern European countries where a guy my age

lived for three decades under Soviet oppression. And they are just so jazzed with being liberated, it's not funny. And to touch that buzz, it gives you a buzz of, whoa, that spark is something special. And we've forgotten it. Absolutely. Is there any idea that what we can do to kind of just better educate, I think, or inform folks here in the United States who maybe aren't fortunate enough to travel to other parts of the world and kind of see it firsthand? Is it just telling more of these stories? Is it somehow trying to take people from different backgrounds and experiences and get them together so that they can learn from each other? Just any thoughts in terms of how do we almost create more of the empathy and really recognize, I think, some of

the advantages that the country has, both from a defense standpoint, but also kind of from a democratic and societal standpoint? Yeah, a lot of ways it could happen, but people need to be open to the thought. I mean, you know, boy, if we pick this scab the last year that every one of us came from somewhere else, you know, you weren't a native here, you know, you weren't a native, you know, for the most, other than that select few who were natives here. And can you reflect on that at all, that you all came from somewhere else? In the tech circles, you know, even with the vaccination, you know, the number of, you know, immigrants who were integral to solving that problem who proudly call themselves americans now and again i i work with a bunch of folks who

are either uh you know first generation expats or the sons and daughters of expats um and you get a buzz from them i mean that they really appreciate warts and all you know what what what we're about and they're actually more offended when we when we when we lose that that direction that that that vector um so those kind of exposure but i do think you just we have to cut through uh you know just the the visceral opposition to we're not the world's policemen we're not the world's you know i what was it what's this morning guy's uh commentary i didn't i didn't sign out to be a role model yeah charles barkley i'm not a role model he's actually a pretty damn good role model these days you know so charles is as uh has evolved over time but

you know but there are a lot of people don't think hey that's not that's not the essence the United States. We don't have to do that. And we don't have to. I just don't like to think of what might happen if we don't. I tend to agree. I want to talk a little bit about your transition out of the military. You're spending much more time in the private sector. You talked a little bit about the nonprofit work you're doing, but also you're spending time with Lux Capital and a number of venture-backed companies. Maybe just talk a little bit as to, as you were transitioning out what were you looking to do, why Lux, and then kind of what you're doing on a day-to-day basis with them. Yeah. Again, I'm blessed by opportunity. So part of our problem in the

military, and I'm a representative, and this is not a pity party for a retired general officer because, and I know that will come up, is none of us is thinking about life after, for the most part. Some of them are. Some people come in the military as a springboard to go elsewhere. But a great number of us are thriving in the moment. We're laser focused on what we're doing. Our nose is to the grindstone. And then what do you know? It's time to retire. It's time to get out. And some have thought about it. We don't adequately prepare people to get out. My seminal moment was sitting down in the space of a week with a retiring colonel and a retiring sergeant major from SOCOM and realizing that both of them had short-sheeted

themselves in terms of transition time and that partly that's on us because we say oh it's about a two-year process to you know to retire and leave the service yet we let them work themselves up to the last day we haven't hired their replacement to force them into that that transition mode and give you time you know go go figure out what you want to do when you grow up so um i entered into that you know that transition kind of the same way of boy i wonder what i'm going to do when i get out. I absolutely did not want to go work for one of the defense establishment entities, which interesting for those who are not acquainted, we're actually precluded. We're putting a two-year timeout, which is a good thing as retired general officers from selling anything back to the

Department of Defense. I think that's good. It should apply to other agencies and entities out there, which it doesn't necessarily apply to them, but it puts us in timeout. So that kind of forcefully had me thinking, what do I want to do besides this? And then I was presented some opportunities in both venture capital and artificial intelligence, which fascinates me. Again, I'm, you know, maybe humored. My advantage to speaking with someone like you today, and I get a buzz out of that as much as I get a buzz out of talking to newly liberated, you know, guys my age in Eastern Europe, is I have sons your age. So they keep me, you know, kind of what I say, Tragically hip. But here's a good example. I was testifying in front of the Senate Armed Services one day, my last testimony, and a senator asked a softball question about the importance of AI. And do you think it's, you know, you think it's important? And where are we? And I think it's transformational and important, should lead a revolution in how we do things.

So I asked my cohort in crime, Paul Nakasone, who's a brilliant cybercom NSA chief. I said, can I answer this question? And I said, I'm a huge zealot for AI. I think we're moving way too slowly and I'm concerned. Well, I wasn't five minutes off the floor. And if you guys ever watch C-SPAN, it's a lot of theater. There's a lot of it's it's it's for it's for the consuming American public out there. And it's not very substantive. The better sessions are in separate offices or private offices. But I was five minutes off the floor of the Senate. And my youngest son, who's mini me, his sarcasm puts me to shame, texts me. And he said, hey, dad, if you're a zealot for AI, I'm Steve Jobs.

And he knows I have difficulty making my my my phone work. But the point being, you know, it's something that my generation needs to appreciate. We're not we're not digital. You know, we're digital voyeurs. We're not we're not we weren't brought up in it. And it is the way of the world now. So too many, my disappointment in the private sector, I'm amazed the number of companies I've bounced into where seniors, what McAfee and Brunson called the hippo syndrome, the highest paid person's opinion,

they're in that corner office and they give the big hand wave for AI, but it's please don't make me wrestle with that because I'll show you how stupid I am that I just am not intellectual about that. But that's the point, get intellectual, get to understand it. and too many companies just won't. It's the five-year-old problem. I don't have to deal with

it. Somebody else will pick it up on their watch. Yeah. It's absolutely fascinating to hear your son text you, right? And it always reminds us that there's more to learn. There's kind of always some other angle. When it comes to the companies that you're helping today through Lux and some of the work there, are there specific things that you try to position yourself in terms of being able to be helpful to the companies? Is it leadership, which obviously you've got a plethora of? Is it kind of defense in some of the mental models and the ways to navigate that space and kind of some of the problem sets? Is it more so from a technology standpoint, capital raising? Just how do you think of yourself as you interact with founders of these businesses in terms of

being able to be helpful while also learning from them at the same time? Yeah, again, I'm very grateful and thankful that I've been hired on in various capacities for some of what you describe, you know, strategic insights, leadership, things like that, a hope for that I can keep pace technologically. And that's where I wrestle as hard as I can. I'll sit through some of that. You mentioned Lux. I'll sit through some of the Lux sessions. And, you know, one of my sons is endeavor to go to med school here and i'll say okay here's the topic for today and my head hurts so you know hard right now because we have the experts there who who oh you know literary phds on the subject and you know i'm not you know i'm not um but but it's just selfishly um it's it's

fascinating to be caused to you know i know i don't you know uh literally i can't create any more creases in my gray space but something's making some some of that ram is getting ejected And something else is being inserted there to make me think more about the future. But I think the other part, too, and I try to in fact, I'm more conscientious about this now, unfortunately, than I was during my 40 years. To my point earlier that a great, great slice of America has no idea about their military. I want to make sure that they can point to somebody. Hey, I know somebody in the military and they walk and talk just like we do. They have the same, you know, challenges, different perspective, whatever it might be.

But just so we're not, you know, left in this little cocoon of I love my military. I can't name one person, you know, other than my distant cousin who served there. So I try and break down that as much as I can as well to make sure they understand their military, you know, their their national security challenges as some of these things come to play. um so i'm again i feel uh grateful that i had the opportunity to uh you know to to participate in that regard and then the tech part i mean it just the amazing world of technological development right now to be in a company that is you know post seed you know not you know not not too far down the road uh boy i mean i i look forward to every monday when we have our sessions where it's you know get ready to scribble and google a bunch of stuff you've never heard of before

and, again, credit to the leadership there, they want to know my opinion. And if I don't, and one of the things I provided to some leadership sessions, it's okay to say I don't know. In fact, that's a really powerful statement sometimes when you're dealing with a wicked problem. I don't know. I don't know. But let's sort through this together.

I encourage people, don't make that your default. You will look like a dumbass eventually. But I don't know is an okay commentary. And often I will come back to these discussions and say, oh, I don't know about that technology or that team or whatever, because we look at it from a couple-tiered optic. But just to be part of that discussion, I mean, it can't help but make you blossom in terms of the forever learning approach that certainly compels me. Absolutely. You've got 40 years or so of great leadership experience in one of the organizations in the world that's known for great leadership. you've probably been to more leadership schools, training, and real-world experiences than most could ever dream of. When you sit down with a CEO, a founder, what are some of the lessons that you

really try to kind of hammer home on the leadership front, whether they're actual kind of tactics and techniques or just more so kind of philosophical mantras that you think are important for founders of organizations and leaders of those organizations to kind of embody and take away from the conversation. You know, I am absolutely guilty of late life development for actually having sat down to acknowledge the extraordinary leadership experience that I've had. I mean, if anything, early on, I kept book, unofficial book on what not to do. I'm not going to do that. That's a terrible example. So you made that mental check to reinforce the good, because that was the aberration. Those were the one-offs, but they're out there. I mean, and I think there's some good

learning involved with that. But it wasn't until much later in life that I just had that dull moment of, man, I need to sit down and put my thoughts together, my experiences together, my insights gained from other people. No credit to myself here. And whether it's, you know, there's a whole compendium of leadership perspectives that I've put together. I don't know what I'm going to do with it someday. And I often share them liberally with audiences when when they're asked, they asked me to speak about leadership, but two, so one thing I offer to folks is especially senior folks, have you sat down and reflected on leadership? What you, you know,

there's, there's tomes written about it. What's your personal experience? What's really resonated with you? It's normally the same sort of things that the Simon Sinek's of the world will, will try it out that are, yep. That's, that's intuitive, but he at least took the time to write them down and present them back to us. Um, but the two areas that I think are intuitive that, that get too much of a hand wave and one is, you know, and I, the mantra I use to try, cause I am terrible. I mean, this was a shortcoming for me that I thought I knew the answer before the discussion

even started or, or I didn't need to wade through some discussion is, and I forget who imparted it to me, but are you listening or are you just waiting to talk? And I try and let that little mantra play on my shoulder all the time that go hang in there. There's something here. Let's just hold on. You don't have every answer, otherwise you wouldn't be here. And the other one that I hear too often is the need for caring leadership. But my point, and I offer it to people, that if you don't know your people, you can't care for them. And the best example that was trotted out to me, and I think it was Michelle Flournoy when she was speaking when I was working at the CIA, she mentioned that in one of her introductory

counseling sessions for a company. And I think this was played to her, but it could have been something that she experienced through somebody else. But as the typical, you know, senior subordinate, whatever relationship you want to think of here, as they did the initial counseling, it's often really perfunctory of, hey, Pomp, what's important to you? Okay, good. Get out there and you'll get him, killer. And in this case, the individual said, what's important to but I'm going to ask you, I want to hear something substantive. I want to know the weekly activity that come hell or high water, you want to attend outside of work that's important to you. And in this case, it was your son's baseball game, daughter's soccer, whatever it might've been,

you know, piano lesson, whatever. Boy, you know, I'm really proud of the way my kids develop in this regard or my, here's my personal thing that I'd like to do. And that was the contract right from the beginning, from that boss to that individual of, okay, good. Tuesday, when you say that happens Tuesday at five o'clock in the afternoon? That's sacred. You never have to come ask me about that. That's on the calendar for you to be there. Now, I'm going to work you to death and we'll be busy as hell, but you've got that squared away. And by the way, if there's other important stuff like that, it's on you. You need to tell me. Don't let that sit on you. But to me, it kind of cracked through that veneer of, oh, caring leadership and knowing your people.

you gotta know them you literally uh the one i've trotted out um and as much what i appreciate what you do you know in twitter and other people is you make us think but the one experience that i trotted out that was really i mean i just changed the way i see things is uh at one point in time i asked my guys i was a big fan of uh anthony bourdain and i asked my guys uh i think i was when I was the JSOC commander, I could never make it happen. But I said, Hey guys, he is everywhere I want to be. And he, and I can't go. He's in Libya at the, after the fall of Malmar, he's in Iran, you know, hanging around in Tehran. I can't go there. He's you pick the place. And I said, I'd look, see if Bourdain will meet with me just whimsically. See if Bourdain will meet with me.

Well, I didn't realize that Bourdain is a student of Vietnam or was a student of Vietnam. You, you, the great episode is when he meets Obama in downtown Hanoi, which is to me, oh, I mean, powerful. And so he agreed to meet with me at a restaurant up off Columbus Circle in New York. And we had three hours of rolling conversation. I joke, we both spoke Jersey, although he would summer over in Paris or France. I didn't summer over in Paris. My family wasn't of that kind of altitude, but it was a rambling conversation all over the map. And I walked away thinking, man, this guy's got it together more than I thought he had it on TV. And what I liked about him is he made you think you didn't have to agree with everything he said, but he made you think was well know Anthony Bourdain killed himself about two months later.

And what struck me at the time is, again, back to this caring leadership is everyone actually wrote up wrote up a description on Facebook of the meandering conversation we had. But at the end, what someone had imparted to me in the wake of that was, hey, every one of us is wrestling with a demon that nobody else knows about. and my point being and i we my star major and i were adamant about this with our with our guys especially as we dealt with tough subjects like suicide etc that everybody you meet and touch every day is struggling with something not i don't care how happy they are every person you know has a challenge they're dealing with how do we relate that to each other or do we just continue the rat race of you know daily existence until you wonder whoa johnny just did something or jane went sideways. And almost invariably, we could see that coming, but nobody took a timeout and said,

how are you doing? Or, you know, where can we help you? Where can we, you know, alleviate your burden here? So, to me, that's the aspect of leadership that is under-emphasized, that you can play a pivotal role if you're inclined to. Yeah, I think it's fantastic. And it really is the difference between kind of the academic exercise of leadership, right? Of kind of, hey, I'm in charge or I'm going to influence you to do something. But once you actually kind of put it into practice and understand that it's not as easy as maybe the books say, there's a lot of good principles in there, but you still have to understand people. And we started off the conversation with, you know, some of the best technology on the battlefield is people. Same

thing here in terms of leadership. Before we wrap up, I always ask everybody the same three questions. And I'm really looking forward to your answers because I think you're gonna have a unique perspective. You're one of probably the most well-read people that I know. What is the most important book that you've ever read? Whether it's importance in terms of just changing your worldview or informing it, or just personal impact on you. When you hear what's the most important book, what comes to mind? Jeez. I mean, I've got my library is right over next to me. And I continually have people throw things at me that are, you know, one better than the last thing I read. One of the guys I worked through before, and I don't know why I missed it, but

Semmy Shackleton's Endurance, which to me is just incredibly inspirational. I have a hard time saying a specific one. My assortment is everything from AI superpowers, like war, essential machine, burn-in, speed of trust, rate by choice, all these things. And here's what's bad. I think you've mentioned before others. I write in the margins of every one of these books, you know, because they all resonate with me. And I hardly ever go back or have the time to go back and look at those. So I'm now going back through some of the books to pull up some of my margin notes and dumping them into whatever I might produce someday to say, ooh, God, there's just so much information out there. But I I'm laughing at you describe me as one of the better read. I am. I always feel that I'm one of the less, you know, I'm more illiterate people of the of the folks, especially that I'm dealing with now in the private sector. They're all they're all very well read. I think you're doing just fine. The next question is is brought to our friends by one that I would recommend, especially at the time.

And I don't think I got up here is April 19, 1945. and talks about how Lincoln holds the country together right at that critical moment of civil war. He's got a bunch of generals that want to drive a stake into the heart of the Confederacy. And he's, think of this, the guy's going to get assassinated, unfortunately, a couple months later. He's literally holding the generals in to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't want it to go to a guerrilla war. You know, if we drive it too hard, you know, you'll have some places you'll be fighting forever. We want to bring them back together. But you think of that, you think of Lincoln's second inaugural, when you walk through the Lincoln Memorial, I mean, you know, what an

incredible leader, you know, just, so there's too many, too many books, whether it's history or other things out there that resonate with me. I love that answer. Sleep. If you are the four-star general in charge of special operations command, I'm assuming you're not sleeping a ton. Maybe now you're getting a little bit more sleep, but our friends over at Eight Sleep, they've got this thermoregulation bed that I've been sleeping on. And I'm now a, I say a convert to the sleep religion, right? Of, uh, I realize how important it is. What's your sleep schedule today? And then how has that changed over the years? It's much better now, although I have two colleagues that are my alarm clock too early in the morning, every morning, whenever they hear the trash

that's when they start wolfing doing Timmy's in the well routine. Um, so it's much better now. Uh, unfortunately I grew up and I'm sure you had that experience from your service time where the mantra was, hey, you can sleep, you sleep when you die, you know, three hours, four hours is good enough. And back to kind of the AI piece, think of the number of boneheaded decisions you're making when you're on the ragged edge of, you know, what you really need, what your what your body needs. And I've seen people function on little to no sleep, but you got to wonder that the longer term effects. So it's better, it could be could be much better. I'm a night owl. And I, I have a tendency to stay up to midnight or beyond almost every night, only because that's when I do some of

my better thinking or reflecting. And I'm trying to curb that back in to force myself to go to bed and jumpstart the morning because I'm not a morning person. I love it. My last question for you, and then you'll get to ask me a question to finish up. We talked a little bit about Space Force and some of what I would consider the very practical kind of challenges that we face. But on the topic of aliens, are you a believer in aliens or a non-believer? I don't think, and I'm fascinated by these discussions, which literally has Department of Defense attribution dripping from them, you know, pilots and whatnot. I'm a show me the money kind of guy for anything that has happened here on Mother Earth. Because I, you know, I think that

One, we can't keep a secret. We can't. I mean, I live the Osama bin Laden piece where we actually did keep a secret up through execution and then it went to a movie right away. Right. So I don't believe that we're capable of keeping a secret. And so if there was a there there, you know, we'd all we'd be a little bit more conversant on it. Um, do I think there's something out there? Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, whether we're the, you know, the fingernail on the big scheme of things, um, I, I don't know. Um, but that's, and that's why I'm jazzed by the thought of space exploration, um, and, and just, you know, seeing what's out there. Um, but I, I don't know, I don't know what's out in the cosmos and I'm like everybody else. I'm interested in finding out. I, uh, I feel the same way. It's probably somewhere out there. I don't think anything's happened on earth. Uh, I'm going to cheat. I'm going to ask you one more question because you brought it up. What were you doing in terms of military position

for the whole Osama bin Laden raid? I was McRaven's number two. So if you read his book, he even tells you that the humorous part was, and I give President Obama absolute props for making a tough decision when half the room was telling him, just bomb it, just bomb it, and we'll see what happens. And because he listened to McRaven, because he listened to Panetta, he decided that's not sufficient we're going to do this thing we're going to confirm or deny that he's there and we're going to have that moment if he is there we will at least you know realize that we dealt with some unfinished business although i'll point out there but hey that was one man there was a network there's still a network out there and so to get caught up in one person is

is it's typically us we always have public enemy number one whether it's noriega or saddam or ubl or whatever. Um, but I was his, I was his number two. The funny part, and he describes it in the book was he kept that very secret. Um, uh, I was his deputy. I was his number two. I found out a month and a half before, uh, we executed, uh, that he had been planning this for several months with two other people, uh, and with Panette, you know, so working, working with, with Langley. Um, and that's when I got read on, but he didn't have the green light. He didn't have permission yet. So a week out, he said, hey, you, me, you go over, do the final rehearsal. I've been part of the previous rehearsals. Go to the final rehearsal.

You may actually have to command it over there because I still have to brief the president unless he says go. And with enough time for me to get over there, you got it. But it says a lot about Bill McRaven that he had no problem saying, you know, here, one of the bigger things we're gonna do lately. I may have to hand it to you. He got the green light in sufficient time that he came smoking across. uh took over the main command and control i was his backup um and then i joke with him that he went back to all the victory parades i stayed over there in afghanistan for another month and a half uh doing my doing my duty and then came home uh to my wife who was pissed off that i hadn't told her about it and others but i mean pissed off in a humorous way that you kept a secret you know

you didn't tell me so when all this is going on uh you know for those who've watched uh many of movies, read the books. Basically, there was an incredible amount of obviously planning that went on. There was literally the recreation of some of the physical structures, both I think in the United States and overseas and kind of preparation. What exactly is going through your head when they get on the two helicopters and they're going to go fly into what could be a pretty combative airspace and kind of go execute what, at least in terms of headlines, is probably one of the most notorious raids in recent American history. Is it excitement? Is it fear? Is it, we better not screw this up?

I mean, just kind of what's going through your head? And I think McRaven describes it. We did, I think, 12 or 13 other missions that night, not in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and at least half of them were much more harrowing or difficult. um we that's the kind of level of operational tempo that that we've lived for a long time of you know things that used to take months in preparation for a one-night special we were routinely doing that one you know the hardest part and and mcraven talks about the book was the potential that the force might get stuck in a bot a bot ironically if helicopters you know

had mishaps um and look as you might imagine we had a plan for that and and it worked for us But the discussion on that was all over the map in terms of would we actually, you know, hunker down? Would we surrender to Pakistani forces? You know, what would we do? And that would have been a pretty anxious moment. But luckily, again, we planned through some of those contingencies and we were able to avoid it. Yeah, well, you guys did a fantastic job. So we appreciate it.

We've got five minutes. And you alluded on Twitter that you want to ask me questions, which scares the hell out of me. But what question do you have for me? Well, you've, again, in my effort to be tragically hip, you've certainly made me think a lot about Bitcoin, about digital currency, etc. My son, my oldest son, has played a key role there as well. And as you might imagine, a good number of the discussions came back to not to challenge you so much on that. And I think the good news is you've caused people, you know, I'm looking at Michael Saylor and Chamath every day. Guys, I had no idea who the hell they were before just to gain more and more insights into, OK, what is this phenomenon?

There's still a hell of a lot of speculation involved. But but, you know, so has every, you know, huge new trend had, you know, those sort of considerations. But so the practical question came back is, and I think you've answered that you think that we'll still stay based on a gold and digital currency kind of basis. But with the emphasis you put on Bitcoin, how do we safeguard that other than its inherent, you know, trust system? if it migrates to where you want it to be as part of both our institutional and our DOD and national security approach to currency management going forward? Yeah, I think one of the key pieces to it is,

yeah, there's obviously the technical kind of system, right? And it's got more computing power pointed towards it than any other computer network. It's, in some measurements, the most secure computing network in the world. It's decentralized, kind of all the things that I think I'd kind of label it's just like the headline comments about the actual technical infrastructure. One of the key

pieces that I spend more time thinking about today and have started to talk about more publicly is just this idea that when you have an open decentralized protocol, you can't prevent somebody from using it, right? What I mean by that is not so much your own citizens, right? You can make something illegal, you can enforce on certain people, but on a global scale, that means that other countries are going to use it, right? And so what is the reaction to that, right? And if you kind of look at the internet as an open decentralized protocol, one reaction is countries that you mentioned as threats, China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, et cetera, if they use the internet, that could potentially be a negative outcome for the United States. And so we can either, one, say, hey, as the United States, we're going to opt out. We're not going to use this open decentralized protocol.

Or two is we can say, no, actually, we're going to use it too, but we're just going to make sure that we use it better and kind of further our position of leadership on kind of that global landscape. And so I think that Bitcoin is actually somewhat similar in the sense of it's this open decentralized protocol that other countries are going to use, right? And so the first reaction when people hear that is like, well, let's not use it ourselves or use it for terroristic financing or money laundering or whatever it is. But I actually think that the reaction that we had to the internet and we had a hand in creating it, obviously, so that helped. But same thing here is we should embrace it and we should say, well, anyone's going to benefit from this. Let's make sure we're the biggest beneficiary, right? let's make sure that we kind of further our position. And so when it comes to kind of the geopolitical stuff, I think that's actually where there's probably less work that's been done so far

and kind of less maybe consensus around kind of how the situation plays out and what the outcome is. From a technical standpoint, I think that there's always the concern around quantum computing or some sort of kind of leap forward in a technical capacity. But also, you know, you as many others listen uh will know is like just as much as the nefarious or malicious technology can improve so there does the defense technology as well right it's kind of this constant cat and mouse game so uh yes there are improvements in terms of the offensive technology but there's also simultaneous improvements defensively and i think that uh with bitcoin specifically there's the the technical advantage it has in terms of it's so far ahead by being the the strongest

computing network, that it would take quite a bit of technological innovation to be able to attack it without there being any sort of improvement in the defensibility of the network. So I see that as kind of unlikely. But even if it then happened, then you get into this world of like, well, if you have the technical capabilities to attack the Bitcoin network, is that really the thing you would attack, right? You almost get to the point of like, well, if you attack and violate the Bitcoin network, then you kind of erase all of the value, right? The whole value is that it's decentralized. It's the strong competing network. And so would you be better off attacking an electrical grid or, you know, banking system or some other kind of apparatus? And so I just think

that it's, you know, somewhat of a foregone conclusion that this open decentralized protocol will persist globally. There's tons of questions around, you know, who adopts it, how, what's the impact, all of that kind of stuff. But I kind of throw my hands up at some point and just say, look, that's how a market gets made, right? And people are literally going to essentially wager hundreds of billions at some point in the future, trillions of dollars on those outcomes. And we'll kind of see what happens. I was going to ask you a follow-up, but I think you addressed it there. I was exposed to an interesting theory recently that we, the US, the Western world should be very concerned with the amount of mining and computational power

that the chinese are are are addressing this phenomenon with from a from a state-sponsored standpoint uh but i think your my takeaway from what you just explained is if you're not going to compete you won't you know you won't flat out um and and so advantage them uh whereas if you acknowledge yep a lot of a lot of effort and the rest of that theory was that they're mining and producing to get u.s dollars in to pay for pay for things which again a fascinating theory anybody we want to challenge this anyone you know want to get well here's what i here's what i say is if every time uh you know another country got an advantage on of us if we just threw our hands up and said oh they're gonna win you know uh let's not play then uh we probably wouldn't be

the united states of america right so i think that uh we definitely like to stack the deck in our favor uh we definitely like to ensure that we're gonna win uh but sometimes it does take competition and so i don't think that we should uh we should shy away from it so i probably should put a wrapper because I'm looking forward to, you and I were talking earlier about all the negative things that will come out of a social media thing. I don't see China as this terrible boogeyman. I do hope that people acknowledge that this, again, is an ideological issue. Their thoughts on human rights and human values relative to ours, and it really boils down to what kind of world do you want to live in? And you can cherry pick the Uyghur experience or

whatever it might be, and other Chinese approaches to dealing with human beings. And you could also just, you know, disparage, as they are right now, our Western ways of dealing with the human experience. But, you know, we're going to have this, you know, this clash of ideologies in the form of economic, military, diplomatic, informational, you know, nuances that I don't think we're ready for yet. I think we're getting there, but it is a compelling issue short of a threat, if you want to accept it as a threat, that's going to crop up here in the very near future. I think that is very well said. Listen, General, I really appreciate the time that you've taken today to kind of go through this. I think people are going to learn a ton from

it. Where can we send people to find you on the internet, hopefully for all of their positive of feedback and, uh, and great questions. Uh, but where, where do you want to send people to, uh, to find you? Uh, God help me. I'm on Twitter. Um, although what's funny is I can't get one of those blue check marks. So I've had people come back to me and say, why the hell are you operating without one of those? You know, Twitter put a, uh, an end on the qualifications for that. So, uh, if you have inroads with Dorsey, tell them that, you know, but I'm, I'm open and available on Twitter. Um, and then people have ways of finding me. otherwise i'm gonna give away my email address or things like that i'm up on linkedin uh for more

uh i hope more i'll give away the email just stick to twitter and linkedin but and i'm all about it so i'm to your point uh in the forever learning mode um i am wide open to constructive criticism so um there were already some precursors when you said you were interviewing me today of uh you know that show people's bias and i get it um but uh i'll probably I will turn them off more than likely, but if it's constructive, it'll make me think. And that's, I'm all about that. I really appreciate that view in the world. So thank you so much for doing this.

We'll have to do it again in the future. Thank you. Continued success out there. Keep making us think.