Alternative Realities: Investing in National Security

Well, we have a lot to talk about, but before we get into the Security and Resiliency Initiative, I just want to set the scene.

I'll read from an op-ed that Jamie Dimon wrote last year.

Yep.

this struck a chord with me so in 2021 i was running a manufacturing business and when covid kicked off it became extremely challenging to get a lot of products and materials from overseas particularly so computer chips specialty steel we had challenges with workforce kind of retention a lot of folks choose training just to kind of prioritize their health leave the workforce and challenging to get people you know to trained up and replace those people um I think that was a wake up call for a lot of folks in manufacturing about how vulnerable the global supply chain is.

So from your perspective, how did we get here and what are some of the big gaps you see in the supply chain today? Well,

it's interesting you had that firsthand experience.

I think Jamie was more right than any of us could have imagined when we began this.

And it's been great to see the U.S. government, states, we've done a number of things with state initiatives, and now around the world joining this.

And I think the first thing is the reality of understanding their supply chain and the weaknesses in that.

We've hired A variety of people, Kevin Quinn joined us, Michael Johnson joined us, Sarah Rourke, Trevor Burns, a whole variety of people with different experiences, including supply chain.

And I think one of the main places we have spent time has been supply chain.

So we did a number of critical minerals deals.

We've done some other deals I'm sure we'll talk about.

But most of those begin with the resiliency of the supply chain and realizing that we did a lot of this to ourselves.

We used to be the largest producer and refiner of critical minerals.

We decided to not do that.

on purpose.

We used to make most of these things ourselves.

So it's kind of reimagining and coming back to things that we were good at.

And we'll talk a little bit, I'm sure, about workforce and training and the like.

But others begin by saying there's a lot of good news.

I think that what we found in this five or six months is a lot of really good news out there.

It's going to take a little while.

It's going to take money.

But there's a lot of fantastic things going on.