Lockheed ($LMT) podcast mentions
Well, I, I do hope that they discuss it. And, you know, there's still agency between now and then. And I hope that the people that are meeting their Chinese counterparts right now recognize the moment that we're in. Um, we have evidence we didn't have before. This is no longer a hypothetical thing. It's important people remember that. Um, and this is the most universal issue, right? I mean, I was just downstairs, watched Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders. When in history You have Steve Bannon, Bernie Sanders, Susan Rice, Glenn Beck, Ralph Nader, all fighting on the same side saying, "This default path is not acceptable." When the scientists, if you had 1,300 employees of Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin say, "Hey, we can't build bigger nukes without them being not controllable," would you listen to those 1,300 employees of Lockheed Martin? I would. So this is not a controversial topic. We just actually have to have clarity, and the evidence speaks for itself. What most people can do is actually just get familiar with what really happened. Sadly, there's not that many great explainers online, but I think that the evidence really speaks for itself.
Tristan Harris · Meet the Press · Meet the Press NOW — September 15 · 2026-09-15I don't think this is political third rail at all. I think there's actually a lot more consensus and a lot more willingness on both sides the potential to do this. I think there always has been. What has changed, if anything has changed, is the appetite of companies. And some of that is kind of the new ways we're designing these. But look, you go back to 1970s, early 1970s, maybe it was late '60s, the government I think took a stake in Lockheed or provided funding to Lockheed. You go through Conrail, you go through kind of the 2008 GM bankruptcies. This has always been something that the government only did in times of distress, and it mostly because that was the only time the companies wanted to play ball. It wasn't the government's, if that was kind of tepid about it. Yes, we have this new dynamic with national securities and SKUs, and we have more openness from the government to be more creative with equity and preferred and all of this. I think it continues.
Matt Frankel · Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing · When the Government Becomes Your Co-investor · 2026-09-15Yeah. Yeah, that's good. And the other one I'd throw out is Lockheed. Lockheed Martin. Lockheed. Okay. Obviously coming out of the wars, World War II, uh, but Last Supper, the defense industry.
David Rosenthal · TBPN · The "Pacing AI" Debate | Nico Wittenborn, Scott Keogh, Mitchell Green, David Rosenthal & Ben Gilbert, Faraj Aalaei · 2026-09-14And then sort of the punchline of the whole episode, which we didn't know going in but discovered, is Lockheed and the military-industrial complex created Silicon Valley. Like, yeah, literally Lockheed created the town of Sunnyvale.
David Rosenthal · TBPN · The "Pacing AI" Debate | Nico Wittenborn, Scott Keogh, Mitchell Green, David Rosenthal & Ben Gilbert, Faraj Aalaei · 2026-09-14Yeah, that's crazy. And I think there were something like 10 times more employees working in the secret Lockheed Lockheed Missiles and Space, than the rest of the tech industry combined at the time. I mean, it's like they, they literally brought everyone here and started it all.
Ben Gilbert · TBPN · The "Pacing AI" Debate | Nico Wittenborn, Scott Keogh, Mitchell Green, David Rosenthal & Ben Gilbert, Faraj Aalaei · 2026-09-14All those early Silicon Valley startups selling chips, who do you think they were selling to? They were selling to Lockheed and the military.
David Rosenthal · TBPN · The "Pacing AI" Debate | Nico Wittenborn, Scott Keogh, Mitchell Green, David Rosenthal & Ben Gilbert, Faraj Aalaei · 2026-09-14When we come back, the relationship between positive thinking and inspiration. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens. The content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive Insurance. Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. How often has someone told you to sleep on it when you have a problem you couldn't solve? Did it work? Today, we're hearing about stories of inspiration and talking with Aap Dijkstra. He's a psychologist and author of the book, "Inspiration: Where the Best Ideas Come From." Up here is a story of inspiration that we received from a listener named Bill in Pennsylvania. He says that as a sophomore in high school in 1979, he got told off by his band teacher, Mr. Price, for surreptitiously reading during band practice. He writes, fast forward 40 years to 2019, I am presently a machine learning researcher for Lockheed Martin. Martin. Early in the year, my manager asked if I was interested in pursuing the Lockheed Martin Fellows career path. This is a rigorous series of technical and professional milestones, each lasting 2 to 3 years. At this time, my career was doing well, and I was very busy with both my work and home life. I knew that going down the Fellows track would be very difficult. I told my manager I would give it some thought, but in the back of my mind, I was really hedging against it.
Shankar Vedantam · Hidden Brain · Blowing Up Your Life · 2026-09-07The day after telling my manager I'd think about it, I went to sleep and I had the most vivid dream reliving that exact scenario from 40 years in the past. I had my book, I was in band class, I was going to sit behind the trumpets, and Mr. Price came charging up the band risers asking me what the hell I was doing. But here's where everything in the dream changed and my unconscious took over. The background faded away Anyway, the music stopped playing and Mr. Price looked at me saying, "Bill, you only get one shot at this. Never waste an opportunity. You will never know what would have happened unless you try it." And I woke up. I remembered the dream perfectly, writing it down because it was so shocking. Somehow, my unconscious mind, through Mr. Price, was telling me that I should really take the leap, do the hard work, and go through the Lockheed Martin Technical Fellows process. The next day, I emailed my manager and told him I was ready to start the process. Ap, what do you make of Bill's story?
Shankar Vedantam · Hidden Brain · Blowing Up Your Life · 2026-09-07Yeah, absolutely. Uh, one of the areas that we were really, that Bloomberg was really looking forward to, uh, to moving forward with was going a step further in the aerospace and defense industry area, not just the primes, not just looking specifically at the companies, but looking at the ecosystem as a whole. So not just, okay, we're looking at Lockheed Martin and the PAC-3 interceptors and where some of those margins are, but also then looking at the air defense market as a whole, looking at, as you mentioned earlier, in terms of Laser Dome versus Golden Dome, or, you know, when you start looking at those pieces, it's okay, there's something called integrated air and missile defense. There's an entire program. There is a big difference between an exquisite munition interceptor like a PAC-3, and there's much difference between that and a high-energy laser that's going to shoot a potential drone or a ballistic missile out of the sky. So when you put all those pieces together, what does the air defense market look like? What does hypersonics look like? What does semiconductors as part of a supply chain concern for the defense industrial base, shipbuilding, You name it, these are some of the areas that we cover down on and, and be able to focus on everything from budgets, component supply chain, regional components. Really, you look at the US allies, if you will, adversary considerations that are driving where those, those markets may be going and then what's next in the queue. So when you look at air defense, a lot of the stuff up until now, a lot of the directed energy stuff we're going to talk about today is some of those futures piece. Where is it in the R&D line for research and development? And then where is it going and when are we transitioning into procurement?
Wayne Sanders · Odd Lots · Why Laser Beams Are the Hottest New Tech in Defense · 2026-09-04You know, Tracy, whenever we talk defense tech in any capacity, there's always this weird thing where it's like we're talking about machines that kill people, right? And it's— I'm reading the— I'm on the Lockheed Martin looking at their Helios integrated weapons system. And it's going through the specs and it's like deep magazine, low cost per kill, speed of light delivery. It's like it's gear, but, you know, these are the— these are the metrics.
Joe Weisenthal · Odd Lots · Why Laser Beams Are the Hottest New Tech in Defense · 2026-09-04Absolutely. So one of the reasons that you look for high-powered microwaves, high-energy laser solutions, this directed energy platform, is because the cost per shot is very low. As long as you have the stream of energy necessary to be able to use it, it's great. The problem is, is that you're waiting for something that is trying to kill you to get close enough to the target so that you can hit this thing with high-powered microwaves or a high-energy laser to be able to knock that out. And oh, by the way, when you have adversary capabilities that are traveling at Mach 5, you're traveling at 4,000 miles an hour. You probably don't want to hope that you can put this, this laser beam exactly where you want it to be in order to do that. So what you're really looking for is there's layered air defense, right? I referred to it earlier as integrated air and missile defense. And this is where it's really important because it's, it's, it's super relevant to what we're talking about right now, especially when you look at investment as well. You have to remain— you have to have exquisite missiles. You have to have your Lockheed PAC-3 interceptors. You have to have your RTX SM-3s and SM-6s. You cannot get rid of those because you have adversaries who have hypersonic weapons. If a hypersonic weapon is launched, you are going to want to use one of your more exquisite capabilities to make sure that you can knock that thing out of the sky and it doesn't kill your soldiers, your airmen, sailors, and Marines and your guardians. You want to make sure that that doesn't take place. So the exquisite missiles are part of this conversation. But the biggest piece, like you're saying right now, is you're identifying that you can win every engagement, you can win every engagement defensively and still lose economically. And that's what we're seeing a lot in Iran right now, is they're just starting to just run us out of some of these exquisite interceptors and munitions. And so the— as you mentioned with Coyote and you mentioned with Vampire, and, uh, BAE has a system called APKWS, which is the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System. Rheinmetall has Skynex and Skyranger. These are cheaper interceptors and guns.
Wayne Sanders · Odd Lots · Why Laser Beams Are the Hottest New Tech in Defense · 2026-09-04But that mid-grade, you know, think about 3 to 5 years, the scalability for the Anderls and the, uh, Castilians of the world, to come in and grab that middle market as well is an area that the, the primes aren't looking to grab into too much, and they're allowing some of these tech disruptors to do it. But you're also seeing a lot of joint ventures as well across the board, not only internally to the US, but also our partnerships around the world. Lockheed does a great job, so does RTX, partnering with some European companies as well, Rheinmetall being one of them, so that they can start to increase capacity overseas as well.
Wayne Sanders · Odd Lots · Why Laser Beams Are the Hottest New Tech in Defense · 2026-09-04