Darren Farber
speaker
722 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 26 May
Darren Farber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And that's the analog to DeepSeek is that I think that was a shot across the bow. Hey, maybe there's a different way to do this. Thing is that new technologies, the phase shift or the sigmoid curve can be really, really quick in a war. It can be much faster than a commercial environment. And so we're seeing that too. I also think that It's a love letter to some of the old stuff.
And these missile systems get cooperatively upgraded. It's not like the Patriot missile from 91 is not the Patriot missile of today. And we've cooperatively upgraded it with the manufacturers a hundred times. So I think there's lots of technological capability. You have to remember, before the wall fell, two thirds of the world's scientists worked in defense.
Everyone was working on these problems. Jim Simons at Renaissance worked at the Institute for Defense Analysis, which is around the corner from the Pentagon. So it was actually pretty difficult to have a huge preponderance of scientists working in these technologies and capabilities. Wall comes down, last supper at the Pentagon, merging... all these defense businesses.
And it's no coincidence that you get an internet revolution on the back end of this, a biotech revolution on the back end of this, because we let loose this technical ability all over the country and really all over the world. And so now there's a little bit of, we're going to suck some of this capability back in here and it's going to manifest itself in some new businesses, which is wonderful.
But I think the lesson learned is going forward, it's going to be a combination of old and new.
I think it could be accurate and fall down. I actually think it's a false choice. So in the opening skirmish of the drone swarms fighting each other. OK, one drone swarm wins. Let's just say the casualties are 75 percent. What's next? Do you want to kill everyone in that theater of operation? Should everyone be dead or do you need to take it over?
The second you need to take over an environment with people. Well, guess what? Old stuff. Here comes the old stuff. We're going to need some of the old stuff. We're not thinking much about the Gaza contingency as a place to learn stuff. There's tons of stuff to learn of what's happening there. One is how to hide from a vastly superior force is clearly go subterranean. There's a whole tactic there.
And the other thing is some of the most capable things the Israelis have in that theater are up-armored bulldozers, bulletproof bulldozers. These are the unsung hero of the Gaza contingency and tanks following right behind it. I think when you're clearly outmatched, you're going to revert to this form of insurgent behavior where you're going to bed in the population.
If they want to take over the population and not kill the population, we're going to need to move to some hybrid of old and new. Look, the Israelis have tons of technology. And don't get me wrong, the drones and the technology were very important. I don't know if you saw the Senoir video of that drone just hovering. So super important.
But tanks and bulldozers and troops in Gaza were pretty damn important, too. And so I just think the phase of the warfare will ultimately lead to using some old stuff at some point. I just don't think it'll kick off in the same way anymore.
Yes. The fact that there's this interest going back to that conversation with the Chinese industrialists. Oh, no, no one would go into this thing. Well, I remember no one wanted to go into this. I remember protests in Mountain View at Google's campus that they shouldn't be doing work for the Department of Defense. And I feel like that is wholesale gone. Yeah, that was not long ago.
Yeah, it wasn't that long ago. So that's pretty good, man. I'm pretty happy about that.
You would call next-generation defense. I think it's going to be very challenging. And I worry about that, too. I worry about capital leaving the system. I'm old enough, 99, 2000 is not an ancient memory for me. And so the technologies that came out of that push were absolutely meritorious. And the capital structure for a lot of these businesses didn't work.
I think at the limit, maybe a global crossing or something like that. But global crossing built was so important and we still use it every day. And the recognition by capital markets that this was extremely important and that it would fundamentally change our life was right. It was a good directional view. It was a very bad weighing machine in terms of
rate of return of capital, how much needed to be deployed, how much you would get back. There was a lot of carnage on the back end of that. So I worry about that in these next generation defense rounds, because you have to understand how the budget is built. The budget is not built 3G style and zero-paced budgeting. We look at the previous requirements for the year.
We look at these different colors of money that Congress appropriates to the Pentagon. So in a synthetic attempt to control the way the Pentagon spends, We give it types of money, operations and maintenance, research, development, and technological evaluation.
For many years, there was something called GWAT, Global War on Terror money, Commander's Emergency Response Program, which Dave Petraeus was very important in creating a form of money that allowed him a more permissive environment for a theater of war. He co-authored a manual called Money as a Weapon System, how they would use it in a theater. So those colors of money
drive to dictate spending to a certain extent. And so when you set up the budget, it's largely allocated. You know who's going to get the money. It's not like people look at the last year's NDAA and say $858 billion without any black ops or special appropriations in it. And that's my damn. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. These programs are accounted for.
It goes on this multi-year contract or this or this or this. And so to grab market share takes much longer than a conventional market. And I think the investors in this ecosystem have to understand that. You're not going to take over a market in 24 months unless it's fundamentally a brand new requirement and we haven't run the competition yet.
So that's where I think these next generation defense businesses are uniquely set up because if the requirement's new, there's no incumbency advantage. You don't have to dislodge an existing program. It's not a gerrymander into a district, all these kinds of things. So if it's fundamentally new and novel, then there's a much greater opportunity, obviously.
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