Christopher Kirchhoff, co-founder of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and co-author of “Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War”

And what do you see right now, that $200 billion, where's the best money spent since you're so up close? What do you think the biggest opportunity is?

Right now, technology, as we all know, is changing really rapidly, particularly with artificial intelligence, also with autonomy.

And so these firms are the closest, far closer than the traditional firms, to the revolution in artificial intelligence.

And they're able, because frankly they bring much more modern ways of coding and building products to the fore, they're able to build technology faster, generally at a lower cost, and oftentimes much more effectively.

than the traditional defense firms.

And so new defense tech firms like Anduril, like Shield AI, really are changing the game.

Are you saying that the majors, as they call them in D.C., Lockheed Martin, et cetera, that they just couldn't pivot faster, that they didn't see it, they didn't have the right technologists, they were making too much money? Was there a way for them to step into this part of it? Because it just seems like there's so much money involved that they would try to pivot as well.

They're shackled to a way of building technology that is outmoded.

I'll give you one example.

On the cover of our book, Unit X, there is an F-35 fighter on top of an iPhone.

Two incredible pieces of technology.

The F-35 is a fifth-generation stealth fighter, unquestionably the best in the world.

However, its design was finalized in the late 1990s.

The production contract for the F-35 was let in 2001.

It didn't become operational until 2016.

So as the F-35 is rolling down the runway in 2016, its processor, the GPU inside of it, is now 100 times slower than the processor in the iPhone 7 released that same year.

Because the commercial way of producing technology is much quicker.

It iterates every year.

It upgrades.

It's able to take advances in technology and immediately incorporate them in products.

So these

are essentially two completely different systems of building technology, one old, one new.

In the last two weeks, Meta announced that they're going to start selling to Defense Tech.

They're open source on the AI front.

What's your reaction to that?