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 War on the Rocks.

A few weeks back, we sat down with Michael Kadenazi, the Assistant Secretary of Defense

for Industrial Base Policy, and an event sponsored by Altana, and we spoke about the

direction the department is going on, you guessed it, the industrial base.

It was really a good conversation.

It was great to see Michael for the first time in years.

Enjoy the show. So Mike and I actually go back. We were catching up a little bit. We first

connected about 10, 11 years ago.

2015, I think it was. And he's just gone onward and upward. So Mike, thanks for making the

time to join us to have this conversation. My pleasure.

I'm a huge fan of the product and the organization.

It's an incredible forum for the industry and thank you for hosting me.

Thanks.

So you have a pretty big job, industrial base.

You've been hard at work since, what, September now?

About four months.

Yeah.

And have you solved critical minerals yet?

So solved it. They're no longer critical. We are working on a whole host of things. As you've seen,

we've done some really transformational things. I actually, I've told everybody, I've spent more

time on chemistry than I have since 10th grade. I have periodic table of the elements. It's taped to the

...