Steve Kwast
speaker
426 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Steve Kwast’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And back and forth. Just like the Federalist Papers argued, should America have a Navy or not have a Navy? And it wasn't a no-brainer. It was a real argument that a Navy is too expensive. Why would we spend money on a Navy? Because your survival depends on it. If somebody who is not your friend decides to use it as a weapon against you.
So this goes back to why I have found what I consider to be the most brilliant engineer that many of us in the military have been watching for decades, and I joined him to start this company, Spacebuilt. It's an infrastructure and a logistics company, because the nation that dominates space will be like those small nations back in the day, like Spain, Portugal, or England.
All they had to do is invest in a dominant technology of shipbuilding and deep-sea navigation, and they dominated the global economy, dominated for a hell of a long time. Space is gonna be the same way. So when you ask me, which countries do you look at? It's not about the country or even how much money they have. It's about how they develop the technology.
So a country as small as New Zealand, which is a very aggressive space country. I mean, Rocket Lab started out of New Zealand. And they could dominate the global economy. What is Rocket Lab? Rocket Lab is a company that was started in New Zealand. Its American headquarters is in Long Beach, California. And they build rockets. to go to space, like Elon Musk does, reusable rockets.
So it's an example, though, of the fact that you don't have to be a big country. You have to have the right idea.
It's a great question, and it goes to a deeper conversation that would be fun to unpack even in our time together today. And it's rooted in human nature, but I suppose the most iconic description of why was from President Eisenhower as he was leaving office, where he said, beware of the military-industrial complex. Now, in his private conversations, you know, the Congress was a part of that.
And so I, you know, the military industrial congressional complex. And, you know, it's human. I say it's rooted in human nature because very good people can have good intentions. And I'll describe it like this. We have a problem as a nation, and we need airplanes. So we build an airplane, and it's the solution. And then everybody celebrates that solution.
And then there are companies that build that solution in every state. And they have congressional caucuses that support that solution. And then they have lobbyists that those companies hire to be in the halls of Congress whispering in the ears of the politicians that this is the only way. This is the way you go forward. Incrementally innovate in this solution.
And so let's say there's a new technology. that makes the way we're building an airplane irrelevant. But it gets no oxygen because the lobbyists will whisper, that's dangerous. Elon Musk has encountered this in spades. When he first started this idea of reusable rockets, people were laughing him off the stage.
Gwen Shotwell was laughed off the stage in Asia in some of her early speeches about what they were gonna do. As you guys are Buck Rogers, you're in fantasy land. This is not real. And this is just a Ponzi scheme of trying to take people's money and waste it.
Until he proved it, but it took a lot of money to break through And part of the reason is because there were a lot of people getting very rich at building a rocket to go to space and then burning that rocket up and having to build a whole new rocket. So the analogy would be for all of us, imagine buying a car, your favorite car on the lot and driving it until it runs out of gas.
And then you have to burn it to the ground and you have to go buy a new car to get back home. That is the economic model we were using to go to space.
And all it took is one innovator, but the amount of, I can remember in the military as we were supporting him, we were supporting Elon Musk because this was gonna be transformational to the next step of building infrastructure in space to support American interests as this new domain was evolving. In other words, peace through strength.
I would, the leaders of the Air Force and of Congress would come to me and say, Steve, see, you're wrong. Elon Musk blew up a rocket. And he's a fool and we're not gonna give him any money. But they were listening to lobbyists saying, Elon Musk is a risk. You need us to build your rockets. And the only way to do this safely is to build it, launch it, and then let it burn up in the atmosphere.
And that's the trap of mindset. That's the trap of being stuck in an intellectual rut of how you've done things in the past and not being able to leap to something new because it succeeded for you in the past. So why change? If it's not broken, don't fix it. It goes back to another saying, everybody loves innovation as long as it's been done before. This is why we're stuck.
But there's another side of it that's a little darker. And this gets back to what you do. What you do is you are trying to find truth. And we are living in an age where we are moving from an industrial age to a networked age. And we're like teenagers and we don't have the tools to know what truth is. Look at the AI, look at the lies in the narrative.
Then we get social media that's like, oh great, now we can triangulate truth. We don't have to rely on just one news broadcast. and believe the TV because we found the TV is aligned to us. But now those that understand that information is the most powerful weapon in the human race, that the most lethal weapon is right between your ears.
And if I can influence what's going on between your ears in what you see is true and what reality is, I can shape that so that you act in my best interest, not in your best interest. And so part of what happens here is our government tells us stories about what is true, who's the bad guy, who's the good guy, Here's why your tax money needs to go to this. Here's why we need to have inflation.
And we all believe it because we love our country and we don't want to be at war and we don't want insecurity. We want peace, prosperity, and health for us and everybody on the planet. But there are perverse incentives for big companies and governments to weave a tale
that deceives the population to perpetuate the wealth, control, and security of a very small group of people that are getting rich on the current methodology. So even though we may have solutions for the energy problem that include nuclear, that include solar power from space, that include helium-3, that include hydrogen, all these clean energy solutions
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