 A lot of what I would like to accomplish is actually to change the discussion around defense acquisition reform. My name is Eric Lofgren. I'm the Emergent Ventures Fellow at the Mercado Center, and I'm an Emergent Ventures Grantee. I kind of fell into defense work, but then once I was there, you know, I kind of got thrust into a lot of cool projects, and one of them was actually looking at past rates of price growth for different weapon systems and comparing that to other segments of the economy and inflation in general, and we kept finding that from any different types of platforms that prices were growing above inflation, the question was, well, should we extrapolate that forward onto new weapon systems? And that was essentially a lot of recommendations coming out of the working group I was working with. So during that time, I kind of brought up some methodological issues and just questions in general as to whether that was the best path forward. And there was an instance where Lieutenant Colonel kind of brought me into his office and he said, you know, well, look, when I was a young lieutenant, I used to think there was a lot of awkward or screwed up things about the defense acquisition process, but in fact, when you look at each of the processes, you find out there's a really good reason for all of them. And, you know, that kind of quelled me for a little while, but it didn't sit so well. So I thought, you know, just do what I do best, right, like go back into history and just look at the Department of Defense from a historical standpoint and really come to understand where did all these processes come from in the first place and then connect them back to economic theory, contracting, budgeting, systems engineering and the like. And that kind of gave me a purpose for understanding what it was that I did. And then it kind of gave me a drive to pursue that further. So my EV project is essentially finishing what I had been working on for several years, which is a history of thought and defense acquisition. So that was a book project that was trying to synthesize a lot of ideas that I had found after going into history and finding that there were a lot of top thinkers that actually dissented to what I would call the consensus view of defense acquisition. A lot of what I would like to accomplish is actually to change the discussion around defense acquisition reform. There seems to have been a pendulum of reform going back and forth on various things like contracting and the requirements processes, but I'd really like to bring the discussion back to the budget process, which really hasn't changed since 1961. And I think the book, along with the blog and the podcast and writing and producing called acquisition talk, I think those would hopefully provide a platform for a new discussion on acquisition reform, especially related to the budget process.