Episode 650. Kevin Baron — founder of Elevation Global Strategies, former Defense One executive editor, and one of the sharpest national security minds in the business — joins Paul fresh off the AUSA conference in Washington. Forty thousand people. Seven hundred companies. Anduril and Palantir surrounded by throngs waiting for a meeting. Pete Hegseth on stage getting repeatedly disrupted by Code Pink protestors who registered their way in. And underneath all of it, a $1.5 trillion defense budget proposal, a drone revolution rewriting what a modern military even looks like, and private capital pouring into the sector at a pace Baron says he’s never witnessed before. This is the war economy the cable news cycle keeps missing.
From there, Paul and Kevin connect the dots most people don’t see: how Formula 1, NASCAR, and the global sports boom are now a live test track for American defense technology, why GM Defense brought a Cadillac F1 car to AUSA, and what Austin’s rise as a defense-innovation hub tells us about where the money and the talent are actually heading. They talk the Trump brothers’ Florida ecosystem, the Neo Primes squeezing Lockheed and Boeing, the live sandboxes of Ukraine and Iran, and the dangerous short-termism baked into this moment. Plus Football Friday picks, Explosions in the Sky, and why the Washington Commanders is still a terrible name. If you want to understand the machine behind the headlines, this is the conversation.
In this episode
- Kevin Baron on AUSA 2026: 40,000 people, 700+ companies, and the most crowded defense expo he’s ever walked
- Why Anduril and Palantir had mobs around their booths — and what it says about the new Neo Primes
- Code Pink crashing Pete Hegseth’s speech four times, and why Hegseth almost never speaks in unscreened rooms
- The $1.5 trillion defense budget proposal — and the slush-fund money Congress is being asked to rubber-stamp
- “Nobody needs an MRAP right now” — how drones and code replaced ships, tanks, and legacy platforms
- The private capital gold rush: family funds, JP Morgan convenings, and a Mar-a-Lago-adjacent defense boom
- GM Defense, the Cadillac F1 car, and the real overlap between motorsport and the military industrial base
- Austin as a defense innovation hub: DIU, ARL, Fort Hood, and veteran-founded AI companies like NOTA
- Football Friday picks: Indiana over Ohio State, Notre Dame rolling, Giants statement game, Niners as the best team in football
- Why Paul still thinks “Commanders” is a bad name, and Kevin’s push for the Washington Generals
