MICRO JOURNEYS PODCAST

In this episode of Micro Journeys: Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo travels to Tantan, Morocco, embedded alongside the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team at African Lion — one of the largest multinational military exercises in the world. Daniel sits down with Captain Vincent Gasparri, a West Point-trained nuclear engineer who leads the Bayonet Innovation Team, a unit dedicated full-time to integrating commercial technology into one of the US Army’s most forward-deployed brigades. From FPV drone strikes to autonomous ground vehicles operating in real time across the Sahara Desert, this episode pulls back the curtain on what the future of warfare actually looks like when it leaves the lab and hits the field.

War is changing — and the data coming out of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is accelerating that change faster than most people realize. The proliferation of small unmanned systems, the integration of artificial intelligence, and the demand for faster commander decision-making are no longer theoretical challenges being studied in laboratories. They are problems being solved in the field, in the heat, in the dust, and under pressure. Captain Gasparri and his team of seven are at the center of that effort, stress-testing commercial technology in austere environments and iterating in real time to ensure soldiers will actually use what they are given.

The solution is not about replacing the soldier — it is about empowering the soldier, keeping humans firmly in the loop, and building systems that serve the formation rather than the other way around.

In this episode of Micro Journeys, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with two of the most quietly consequential figures in U.S. military operations in Africa — Lieutenant Colonel Kyle Thomason, Provost Marshal for the Southern European Task Force Africa, and Lydia Benyam, Lab Manager for the Joint Theater Forensic Analysis Center, or JTFAC, located at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. Recorded live at the African Land Forces Summit, the conversation pulls back the curtain on a capability most people never knew existed: a small, internationally accredited forensics lab operating in East Africa that is turning physical evidence from some of the world’s most dangerous environments into actionable military intelligence, successful criminal prosecutions, and tools for regional security across an entire continent.

Most people picture forensics through the lens of a television crime drama — DNA swabs, fingerprints, a lab in a major U.S. city. The reality of what Thomason and Biniam’s team does is far broader and far more consequential. Operating across two core categories — the who and the what — the JTFAC handles everything from DNA identification and latent prints to firearms analysis, serial number restoration, chemical detection of explosives and drugs, and full electronic data extraction and reverse engineering. In a region where bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics, techniques, and procedures, the pressure on this team to stay ahead of the threat, while producing evidence that holds up in international courts of law, is constant and unrelenting.

Benyam and Thomason explain how a combination of rigorous science, cross-agency collaboration, and emerging AI technology is allowing their lab to do exactly that — not only keeping pace with a changing threat landscape, but expanding its reach to partner nations across Africa and beyond.

In this episode of Micro Journeys, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Barry Broome, CEO of the Greater Sacramento Economic Council (GSEC), for a wide-ranging conversation that traces one of the most unlikely and compelling careers in American economic leadership. From a blue-collar upbringing in Ohio shaped by Marine veterans, Irish immigrant values, and a deep sense of civic duty, to running gang intervention programs in Cleveland’s most underserved neighborhoods, Barry’s path to the top of regional economic development was anything but conventional. What emerges is a portrait of a leader forged not in boardrooms, but in the foxholes of broken cities and forgotten communities.

Long before Barry became the architect of Sacramento’s semiconductor future, he was navigating the wreckage of the American Rust Belt — watching cities like Cleveland lose tens of thousands of jobs in a single week, witnessing real estate rendered worthless by industrial pollution, and choosing to walk away from a $100,000 corporate offer to keep working for $18,000 a year in the inner city. That decision, and the values behind it, set the trajectory for everything that followed — from leading economic councils in Michigan and Phoenix to ultimately landing in Sacramento, where he has spent eleven years transforming a government town into one of the most dynamic regional economies in the United States.

Barry Broome’s answer to collapse has always been the same: simplicity, resiliency, and the relentless pursuit of trust — building coalitions across universities, energy companies, government, and industry until an entire community moves as a single unit toward a shared economic vision.