Full Episode
Secretary Dan Driscoll, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure. I've never met a secretary of the Army before. You're my first. Oh, I'm so excited to be, you'll never forget. You'll always remember your first. But, well, man, we got a whole bunch of topics to cover in a short period of time. So I want to breeze through and cover as many as we possibly can.
But everybody starts with an introduction. So here we go. Secretary Dan Driscoll, 26th Secretary of the Army, a veteran lawyer and former venture capital executive, also the acting director of the ATF. Raised in Boone, North Carolina, your small-town roots shape your soldier's first approach.
Following your grandfather's and father's service, you joined the Army in 2007 and deployed to Iraq with the 10th Mountain Division as a cavalry platoon leader. Earned a law degree from Yale and then entered investment banking and venture capital, eventually becoming COO of a $200 million fund.
Ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2020, learning many lessons along the way, known for streamlining processes, cutting through red tape, and ensuring that soldiers have the resources they need. A husband to your high school sweetheart, Cassie, and father of two children. Most importantly, you're a devout Christian. And apparently you are a cross between a Baptist preacher and a jihadist.
So let's start right there. What does that mean?
So I started using this line a couple weeks into getting into the job. I think once you realized how decayed and how— calcified, and what I would say is lowercase c, how corrupted the decision-making model in the Pentagon has been for decades.
I basically started telling people, a ton of the senators and congressmen I would meet with, when they would ask for an update, I said I was the mixture of a Southern Baptist preacher and a jihadist who's going to pull the temple down on all of our heads, because we had to rebuild the thing.
Yeah, we had some pretty interesting conversations at breakfast, and I want to elaborate on a lot of those. But yeah, that caught some people's attention.
I was at a conference in the Middle East when I used it, and I think the Southern Baptist preacher part didn't hit with the nuance I was intending. And then I think when the gasped in the room when I said jihadist woke everybody back up that had been zoned out.
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