Trae (Trey) Stephens

You have David Sachs working on AI and crypto, who is one of the original PayPal mafia.

You have Emile Michael, who is the COO of Uber, that's now the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.

And so that tie is much stronger than it has been in modern history.

Yeah.

And so I think from a misconception perspective now, I think

I'm always reminding defense tech founders that the government, they're not buying the best thing to solve the job.

They're buying relationships and decades of service and things like that.

And so you really have to understand how to talk with the government and how to sell to the government in order to actually get any of the technologies on the defense side that the warfighter needs to win.

And that's just a very different problem set than like,

engineering a good product.

There's more to it than that.

Yeah, I think, I mean, there's always time for that to shift, but there's a lot more optimism about that engagement than there has been historically.

I grew up in rural Ohio, north of Cincinnati, about 30 miles north of Cincinnati, kind of small town USA.

It's called Lebanon, Ohio.

You know, we had kind of the quintessential, you know, downtown area with, you know, a vintage soda fountain and the public library.

And our claim to fame in town was the oldest inn in Ohio.

It's called the Golden Lamb for those like

Politicos out there watching the show, Rob Portman, the former congressman and later senator from the state of Ohio, owns the Golden Lamb.

And so there's like this crazy connection there.

Just one town over from Middletown, which is where JD grew up.