You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of Worn the Rocks.

There's this new ecosystem of defense companies, this new defense industrial base, the future defense industrial base,

the future innovation base, whatever you want to call it, and it started to take off.

And so I wanted to have a conversation about the relationship between defense and capital.

And this is the first of those conversations.

So I was really happy to sit down with Daniel Guach, the managing partner,, Point 72 private investments, the institutional

private investing business of Point 72 asset management, and James Parker of Leinid.

He is one of the founders there.

Enjoy the show.

Thank you both for joining me for this conversation.

Let's start with you.

Tell us how you got into this and where you come from.

Hey, James, I come at this from the finance side of this market from a unique position in the sense

that I came up as an engineer technically came out of school with an astrophysics

degree but there are no jobs for people with

undergraduate degrees in astrophysics so you end up an engineer by default for some reason.

First job out of school I was at mission control I was on the robotics desk at Mission Control at

Johnson Space Center and if you asked me then if I ever was going to have to

find another job I would have told you no. Unfortunately a 21 year old kid

doesn't really understand the aspirations of a 21-year-old

don't really jive with the bureaucratic nature of large-scale government

...