Liberating the Human Middleware: Pat Shanahan on Why AI Frees People Instead of Replacing Them

Liberating the Human Middleware: Pat Shanahan on Why AI Frees People Instead of Replacing Them

Pat Shanahan has deployed some of the most complex systems ever built. Thirty years at Boeing on the B-2 bomber, the V-22 Osprey, the F-35, the 777, and the 787. Then Deputy and Acting Secretary of Defense under Secretary Mattis, leading a department of more than 3 million people. Then the turnaround of Spirit AeroSystems. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019, and he helped Brad and the team at Scale AI. In this episode of Deployed, Brad Porter and Pat Shanahan get into what it actually takes to put hard new technology into the hands of the people doing the work. Pat tells the story of betting the company on designing the 777 entirely on a computer, and the moment on the factory floor when everyone was sure it would fail. They cover his rule of "only three miracles at once," why every deployment is a people problem before it's a technology problem, the difference between AI "safety" and product integrity, and why a man who has shipped at the largest scale there is wishes he could go back 20 years in his career with these tools.

The Demo Was Never the Hard Part: David Mindell on What It Takes to Deploy

Brad turns the tables on his former MIT professor, David Mindell. David is a historian, deep-ocean robotics pioneer, founder of Humatics, and now an investor in industrial transformation through his firm Unless. They trace the thread from James Watt’s steam engine to robots two miles deep in the ocean to the warehouse floor: why the demo is never the hard part, why industrial transformation runs on “human time” and takes about 30 years, why the real automation problem is too few robots rather than too many, and why — from Thinking Machines to OpenAI — there’s no technology story that isn’t a human story.

No Such Thing as a Purely Technical Decision: Scarlett Koller From MIT to Mars to Mithril

Brad reconnects with Scarlett Koller, who he first met as an MIT sophomore for Amazon’s original Prime Air intern cohort, back when drone delivery was a “60 Minutes” segment, not a product. She’s since delivered on SpaceX Crew Dragon, NASA Perseverance, and Amazon Kuiper, and now runs Mithril , a deep tech startup reshaping space sensing. They trade stories on why NASA’s shuttle veterans cared so much about a simple handle, why people are harder to engineer than radiation, and how an antenna the size of a volleyball court, controlled to the thickness of a sheet of paper, could keep us from losing low Earth orbit.

The Most Expensive Introduction Ever Made: Ross Fubini and Anduril's Origin Story

Brad reconnects with Ross Fubini, the two met as Netscape interns when being a nerd wasn't cool. Ross went on to accidentally make the most valuable introduction in Silicon Valley history, connecting Palantir's first employees, then built XYZ Venture Capital around the network that followed. They trade notes on what the browser wars actually teach us about the AI wars, why only 40 people in America know how to sell tech to the Pentagon, and whether OpenAI ends up like Netscape: world-changing, then gone.

The Global Software Market Is Just Too Small: Bilal Zuberi on Physical AI's Moment

Brad Porter sits down with Bilal Zuberi: MIT PhD, former Lux Capital GP, and the investor behind Applied Intuition, the most profitable physical AI company you've probably never heard of. They dig into why the smartest money is leaving mega-funds, what separates visionary founders from execution founders, and why the entire enterprise software market is smaller than most people think. Bilal makes the case that AI's real impact isn't in chatbots, it's in a physical world that's stayed dumb for decades.