YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Brown

lines on the record: 71
first: 2018-03-28
most recent: 2018-03-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We got really lucky because in our corner we had Ash Carter, Secretary Ash Carter, who really believed in this mission and said, I want you to find a way to do this. And if anybody tells you you can't do it, you bring him to me. So we did the first thing you always do in these situations, we took a lot of lawyers to lunch. And we discovered a very obscure provision of law called Other Transaction Authorities that actually lets you do this for advanced technology. You get to work outside the federal acquisition rules quickly. You get to sit down with companies. You get to share information. It had everything we were looking for. And shockingly, very few people in the department were using it.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They sure would. The result of that is the government system, particularly the defense acquisition rules, are set up to deal with companies where there's often only one vendor. So that raises the question of how do you get a fair price for the taxpayer. And the way that you get a fair price is you list out 45 pages of specifications for the toilet seat. And you say you must meet this in a certain cost. And that's how we know we're getting a fair deal for the taxpayer. That works okay for a nuclear submarine. It doesn't work as well for gear that's much more commercially available. And that's where the problem exists because we don't need a drone company selling drones on Amazon.com today that could be used in military mission to fill out 65 pages of technical specifications of what their drone should be.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's get into the procurement issue, and then when we give up, we'll talk about some more of the things the defense department needs going forward. The procurement is they design things very specifically. We always get story after story about that, that they design a toilet in a way when there's commercial toilet industry's fantastic. They design in a certain way they need to have it. It creates enormous costs. It's out of control costs, and then all these Beltway bandits take advantage of the situation and know how to work the system. And then there's all the people, the revolving doors of military people into military contractors, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because they buy everything. The military buys everything.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wild. So it vibrates the jawbone in such a way that causes your eardrum to vibrate. So imagine you're on a patrol in Afghanistan or you're jumping off an airplane or you're in a helicopter. There's lots of noise. You're having to grab a walkie-talkie or grab a microphone, which is not great because, or put headphones on to hear, because you're wanting to keep track of your area, what's going on around you. So this technology, just a little retainer like then you clip onto your teeth proved to be really useful to troops on patrol.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're welcome under test ranges in a hurry. That's a great asset the department has. Similarly, we can get you user feedback really quick. So there's a great example of one of the technologies that we deployed to Afghanistan with some troops. They were able to give the engineers some real criticism about what wasn't working, which caused three iterations in the tech that made it much better, that allowed that company. The tech actually was an amazing communications two-way communications device. It was a mouthpiece.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Real opportunity there. But we provide some additional benefits too that has been important for startups. We have things like test ranges that are really easy to get on. So if you're a flying car company and we work with a couple of those, we can get you on our.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you know anybody that has tech that might be relevant to this problem? If you do, put us in touch, and then we ran a competition and we had an open bidding competition that anybody could enter. We found some firms that had great tech. They did, and we were able to move forward in that particular case with the tech pilot.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so maritime surveillance. Right now it's really expensive to take airplanes and fly them with sensors looking, for instance, for boats carrying drugs. Wouldn't it be amazing if instead of flying 737s with military gear on them, we could take low-cost drones, put the same surveillance packages on them, either on the surface of the ocean or in the air, and perform the same mission for much lower cost. So the group that brought that particular problem to us then caused us to go and do some market research to ask the question among folks in the venture capital community, technologists we know.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it sure is. We were lucky to partner with a number of folks that are of the valley and have a network of relationships here and have run startups and been CEOs at tech companies and executives and know their way around far better than I do. So we were able to use them to help us navigate the rollout here. And we did that by first coming up with a particular challenge that we wanted to work on. Somebody in the military would bring us a hard problem. They were dealing with an actual real-life mission that they figured commercial tech might be able to help with.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Yeah, there's a $25 trillion consumer technology market, and MyTech is going to sell great there. And if you go to an investor and you say there's this teeny federal market, they fill out a lot of paperwork to get into, and they don't tell you if we're 18 months whether you're in or not, we want to focus on that. You don't get funded So we knew that if we came out here with the regular tools the government uses to buy technology, we'd fail. So we knew we had to find a different set of tools. And we did. And because of those new tools, can let a contract in about 30 days from start to finish rather than 18 months.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and this is not making investments in the Silicon Valley Venture Capital way of buying equity. This is actually buying technology from companies, piloting it. And then there's a really neat superpower the office has that Congress gave the department, which said if you do a technology pilot and you buy it a certain way, you can immediately, and it works, you can immediately allow anyone in the department to buy that technology at scale.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Washington They do. I mean, it's pretty small, though, to be honest. They do have. So Inquutel is the strategic investment firm that you referenced earlier that works on behalf of the intelligence community. And then you have a couple other representatives running around. But the plain field is really pretty open. I mean, there's not too many people out here that ingest a lot of technology and get it working in the Felcher government. So we wanted to come out here, actually spend money, actually buy technology, pilot it, and then if it worked, use it at scale in the department.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Came out to the land of they do have blackberries. The land of only place that still has blackberries in Washington, D.C. So what was your idea to come in here? Because again, a lot of agencies have representation here in Silicon Valley or have opened up offices.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of the people that was supposed to speak at my White House farewell in August of 2016 could make it because she had to go to a very important meeting, which I later find out was on that topic.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I was looking actually at technology. And, you know, tech is throwing national security a huge curveball right now because you have all the scary things that we all know about. So missiles and nuclear technology from other nations. But then you have other kinds of commercial technology coming online. So you have really cheap microelectronics. Those microelectronics power drones. People can put Grenades on drones. There's all kinds of examples of emerging technology primarily coming out of the startup world, coming out of Silicon Valley in essence. Now, there's a huge opportunity to a lot of this technology from a national homeland security standpoint, but there's also a huge risk. So we looked quite a bit at that topic”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, you know, the National Security Council is a fascinating place to work, first of all, but 90% of the folks there are worried about what's on fire today or what's going to be on fire tomorrow. And that, of course, is appropriate and necessary. So knowing that, they decided to create a small office that was trying to figure out what would be on fire five years from now. That office has kept on going. In fact, the person who took my desk, believe it or not, was the one who wrote the Deep State Banker memo and then got fired.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crystal balls. No, I studied technology policy in college and when I got my PhD and then started off in Washington and National Security. And it turns out there's a whole lot of technology challenges in national security. It's ended up working quite extensively for all the years of the Obama administration on different tech issues. And through that had a chance to work for the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and work very closely with Ash Carter before he became secretary. And as a result, when Ash thought about forming this office, he realized that he would need a combination of people to help run it, that the office would have to, of course, know Silicon Valley, would also need to know Washington and the military. And that's an awful lot to ask of one person. So he decided to create a partnership and threw me in together with three other people with very different skills. I was sort of the Washington guy sent out. This was actually a problem at the time had five suits.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. What were you doing there? What was it? I was the director of strategic planning, so I was in charge of the office, the NSC that was supposed to look into the future and worry about what to prepare for next.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And going back to Stanford in the 60s, actually, so there's this incredible deep history out here of federal funded innovation that has really helped commercial firms flourish. But that, interestingly enough, has died out a bit. And there's definitely been a gap, particularly in the last 15 years, a gap that we were in part designed to fill.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was, but in 2001 he was merely professor Ash Carter at the Kennedy School government, and he wrote an article that said the rate at which commercial R&D is growing is quickly going to surpass what the federal government, the Defense Department, spends on R&D. And so less than a generation from now, the Defense Department is going to have a real problem. It's going to be out of touch unless it pivots to private R&D. And so he wrote that article in 2001, of course, fast forward in 2015, he becomes Secretary of Defense in one of his first initiatives is essentially making that pivot happen. So that's where myself and three other founding partners get launched out here to Silicon Valley.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm Kara Swisher, Executive Editor of Recode. You may know me as the general in charge of the Militia Etheridge, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Reco, a podcast about Tech and Media's key players, big ideas and how they're changing the world we live in. Today in the red chair is Chris Kirchhoff, a former partner at the Pentagon's Silicon Valley office DIUX, which stands for Defense Innovation Unit Experimental. What a name. It funds private companies in exchange for commercial products that can solve national defense problems. He's also a visiting technologist at Harvard University's Institute of Politics. Chris, welcome to Rico Decode.”
2018-03-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Flying cars are the future of military transportation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT