10/1/26: Ro Khanna On AI Safety Bill, Bill Gates Dire Warning On Recursive AI, US Nearly Out Of Missiles

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That's the ability of an AI basically to rewrite its own code to make it better and also implementing other safeguards. Representative Khanna is joining us here to discuss. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Good to see you, sir. And so, Representative Khanna, I just wanted to, outline for us what this legislation does. Well, let's take a step back on the bigger picture. I represent Silicon Valley. I know these tech guys. I've been in the rooms. You cannot trust tech billionaires to write the rules to keep us safe. The idea that the president is saying that they can self-police themselves is absurd. We need regulations. First, we need to ban recursive self-improving AI. All that means is we need to ban AI that can train itself where human beings lose control. Second, we need to have embedded in these companies auditors who can tell us what's going on. I'm all about enforcing liability laws, and I agree with Lina Khan, enforce them and hold them civilly and criminally liable. But we can't have a world where, oops, 100 million people die because of a biological attack or AI loses control. Let's sue them. We actually need regulation to prevent that, just like we have aviation and nuclear regulation. And third is we've got to create that AI safety agency. And here's the most important point, Ryan. These tech leaders count on jargon to obfuscate. They use fancy words like sandbox, air gap. They go to Washington, and then people stutter because they don't know the jargon. There are plenty of really, really smart people in AI safety who don't make profits. They're all in this one building at Berkeley. They're the AI safety community. Start to appoint them into an independent agency that can regulate these folks. Sir, I am curious for your reaction. We could put D2 up here on the screen. I was a little surprised to see Jacob Coxon, who was the anthropic whistleblower, actually react positively to Donald Trump's, I guess, morally binding compact with these AI people. AI companies. I'm curious generally for your general, like you seem to put a lot of credibility in the AI safety community and into some of their warnings. You've spoken, obviously, with a variety of these folks. A lot of our viewers have deep skepticism that this is a bid for regulatory capture or marketing ploys for their IPO. I'm sure you've thought through these questions, and I'm curious for your reaction. Well, first of all, nothing in terms of the safety would prevent open source. So if they were saying, let's just have closed source models, I would argue, yes, it's a bid for regulatory capture because China is leading in open source, and I'm actually for more competition in open source. But saying that you should ban this recursive self-improving AI is not open source. Saying that you should have an FDA-like regulatory capture agency is not banning open source. It's actually, you can do both. You can have antitrust enforcement, you can have competition, and you can have safety. Now, where the industry is asking for antitrust exemptions or things that would entrench their power, that I oppose. But what I am for is basic safety standards. And we're going to talk in our next segment about the interview that, as we know, Ezra Klein did recently with Bill Gates. And one of the points that Bill Gates kept hammering was focusing so much on recursive self-improvement and the threat that AI will harm humanity misses the fact that the current AI already gifts to malign actors the ability to harm millions of people, to launch cyber attacks, to develop dangerous bioweapons, and that his approach and his argument was there needs to be this kind of supervisory layer over top of these capacities in order to make sure that people that want to bring down the financial system or want to create a worse version of smallpox can't actually do that. Does your bill address that? And how do you do that without then having that supervisory layer also be some extraordinary sensor that is kind of manipulating the AI to the kind of benefit of whoever's in control? Well, there are two different risks. One is the loss of human control, which is superintelligence and why we want to ban recursive self-AI. But then there's the risk that Gates is talking about, which is not that we lose control of these AI models, but that the AI models are modified in ways through distillation or when they're out on the open internet in ways that could be misused and abused by bad actors. In my view, to prevent that, one, you could have restrictions into the chips about restrictions on certain use of AI models for bad purposes. You could have international agreements that call for basic safety and inspection of these models so that you know that models with high capacity, have guardrails in them that mitigate and prevent the abuse. Those are two things that you could do. Now, obviously, in either case, you would need some regulatory agency making decisions about the limitation of the use of those models. We do that when it comes to aviation. We do that when it comes to drugs. I suppose you could make the argument, well, you know, when you have a political agency that is politically dependent, politically motivated, do we really want them making the rules about airlines and drugs? But ultimately, we need independent regulatory agencies and a political system to work for society to function. So I would argue the answer isn't don't have regulation. It's don't have private interest capture of the regulation. Congressman, you just mentioned the chips there. We had Jensen Wang, the CEO of NVIDIA, actually specifically kind of talk about this issue of judgment. Why don't we take a listen and I'll get your reaction. I think it's important these super intelligences, they're imbued with the values of their creators. And we do have, there are American values that we all share. The First Amendment, free speech, commitment to truth. Can you talk about what each of you are doing to imbue, help make sure that these super intelligences are imbued with the right values? Are we allowed to say anything controversial? Say something controversial. Okay, so the SIs are tools. And the challenge with an SI with values, meaning it has judgment, depending on how you use that SI, it may decide how it decides, it may judge you and its effectiveness would be affected by that judgment. And so it's a little bit like a steak knife where if you, If you were served medium well, cuts perfectly but if you were served rare steak and it looks awfully like live meat somehow it doesn't cut and so i i think there's a there's a you know there's a there's a question in my mind yet about how much judgment you really want these tools to have and and so that the intentions of the user um i you know obviously i use i use the knife as an example but you can think of a whole bunch of other examples uh the intentions are a little bit different you know whether you're a defender or an attacker for example in cyber security the defender's actions could resemble an attacker and you want the defender you want this si to um activate on behalf of the defender even though it appears to be an you know an aggressive action what do you make of that congressman kind of a value neutral uh presentation of ai obviously in some cases it's a value neutral presentation of a i obviously in some cases it's a value neutral but you're proposing legislation how do you view that question around judgment in ai well look i mean the the first thing is you don't want uh ai uh to lose control right so if ai is training itself uh then you have the challenge of misalignment that uh ai may not be aligned with human goals even if you don't lose control and recursive self-improving ai just with reinforcement you can have models uh lose control of basic human values and that's why we do have human values in the safety standards what are those human values uh it's not let's have medicare for all it's uh let's make sure that you don't uh shut the lights out in new york it's uh let's make sure you don't allow for a biological attack so the human values that we're talking about uh are the very base level human values of safety the very uh minimal function of the state we're not talking about a robust conception of the good life we're talking about the essence of liberalism which is to protect uh human beings and those should be uh in the regulatory framework obviously you need uh human values at least of safety uh to to to do that you can't have something that's totally totally value value neutral between destroying new york city and not destroying the city and not destroying the city itself i wanted to ask you about the the senate vote yesterday the the republicans they had a bill from john hustad who's uh facing a spirited challenge you could call it from sherrod brown i think some polls have him losing their understand they're underwater on the question of data centers so they put together a kind of a very quick bill on that curbs some data center abuses it's not exactly clear exactly precisely what the bill would do um democrats though block it what what's uh would you have supported the bill that was in the senate there and do do democrats risk like looking like they're on the wrong side of this issue uh what's you know where where are we when it comes to kind of legislative intervention on data centers yeah so i followed the the stock ban bill they did which was a total gimmick because they uh didn't really ban the president or vice president of up trading stock didn't even ban senators really from trading stock and it was linked to the save act and they were doing that uh just to give uh a good vote to republicans and blame democrats i didn't follow the details of their uh bill on data centers because it hasn't come to the house i'll tell you what i believe which is that we should be banning these data centers in residential communities and farmland and giving communities the right to say uh no uh if the bill uh was anything in that direction then i i would support it but if it was just a gimmick i i wouldn't so i i honestly haven't seen the text and if they attach writers or other things to it my last question for you sir is uh i know originally you're obviously a strong proponent here of the epstein files i believe you in term coined the term epstein class i am curious you know you see a few or many you know prominent members of the epstein class kind of engaging in this current debate dario amadei's wife apparently solicited jeffrey epstein for an investment in a pornography company uh bill gates who we're about to talk about goes without saying his own connections to jeffrey epstein i'm curious for you know you you almost in a bizarre way safetyism and all that kind of seems to align with the epstein class i'm just curious if you've thought about that at all well i'm surprised it hasn't gotten more uh coverage i mean i've exposed a lot of these uh folks as thomas massey uh or the rich and wealthy were living by their own standard of living and amadei's uh wife solicited money from jeffrey epstein uh to start some uh porn site uh and uh that hasn't gotten any uh press and there hasn't been any uh explanation uh about why uh she was uh was involved in the that way with with solicitation of financially of epstein and then bill gates of course has been totally tarnished in my view uh by his uh affiliations with epstein by his uh lack of full remorse for that uh and i don't think uh they can be held as as as as moral leaders of what we need to do uh in addressing this challenge which is why i come back to the fundamental point that you can't trust the tech elite uh to be making the rules for ai you need to be trusting the independent uh technologists and uh and and experts on these issues and what i'm saying is the guy representing the tech elite is the guy representing the tech elite representing silica valley is uh these are some of these folks were caught up with epstein some of these folks have been making uh billions of dollars and not paying uh tax uh they are profit maximizers you can't trust them trust people like jeffrey hinton trust people at meter and medi and palisades who don't have a financial interest in this and they don't have any interest though those safety groups and experts in regulatory capture or uh trying to entrench anthropic or open AI and they are concerned about uh human safety they're concerned about jobs they're concerned about the society uh and and we need that and the final point is we need some people who have tech literacy or willing to stand up against these uh folks who are consolidating wealth and power in our society and interestingly even though epstein himself died in 2019 he was on the leading edge of kind of AI funding and research so he was he was just it's not not just the class-wise he was central in this the orphanage he was central in this the orphanage he was central in this the orphanage in orbit of all these people these players themselves what I want to get your take real quickly too on put up d6 here um Blue Cross Blue Shield uh so take them with a grain of salt but this is you know quite plausible stuff um there's they're saying that um AI use by providers hospitals um is allowing them basically to find um you know to basically code up what they're able to bill to insurers I'm sure Medicare is getting blasted by this as well you know for people who don't know like when you uh when a provider is billing an insurance company um or Medicare there are all these different codes that they can use to say we provided this medical service and so therefore we need to be reimbursed in this way and the AI is going through it and saying oh hey you actually can also throw in these four codes legitimately for something that you that you were doing anyway and now you increase the amount of reimbursement that you're going to get from the insurance company or Medicare uh what what you know what it this isn't a problem that is automatically solved by single-payer either um because you know Medicare suffers from it too what have you have you is there any thinking going on about how to kind of combat this well in this case AI is a tool the problem is the broken health care system all right I mean you have Medicare Advantage for example where people are uh billing the government uh for uh individuals what they're saying are sicker than they are so I do believe if you had Medicare for all it would prevent some of the abuse of the private insurance companies it would prevent AI being used to deny health care claims it would allow Medicare to negotiate with hospitals so that they were charging a reasonable amount and for actual delivery and outcomes not just for fees for every every service uh and you would have as Allison Giovanni has said almost a 1.2 trillion dollar savings in the health care system for 5.2 trillion to 4 trillion are there uses of AI that could be constructive in the health care system sure if a doctor is using it as a tool to a better diagnose or to uh to scan things that they make sure that they're seeing everything fine if it's being used as a tool uh to uh have more efficient uh and comprehensive uses of the records fine the problem in the health care system is not uh technology the problem is that it's being used as a tool to deny claims to have excessive billing and to maximize profits uh and that is a values issue and why we need single-payer health care Congressman we always appreciate your time at the bleeding edge of a lot of the things that are happening in our society and uh you always are welcome back here anytime thank you sir I always enjoyed you always make me think here on breaking points not like one of these uh standard questions question and answer, so I appreciate it. - Good, excellent, got it. keep thank you sir i'm a dad searching for his son it's probably just having a great time it's about to go down it's rolling loud with owen wilson matt reif and travis sky let's come outside and to the night take your time this magnetic out of here no no no hold on hi honey how's everything going oh everything's going we're pretty good rolling loud the movie tickets on sale now now playing only in theaters didn't catch the latest roland martin unfiltered podcast here's what you missed and the argument is do you want to win if you don't win you have no power it's real those are the very people who i always say vote against their own economic interests and they complain about the very thing they're receiving it's raw i knew that the issue of transgender athletes you was not going well with a lot of black men roland martin unfiltered i went off i said this is exactly what i'm talking about y'all gonna scream at chanel but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein catch roland martin's daily commentary on the black information network 12 seats those are moving south so if you democrats you don't wait to 2030 you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now and download roland martin unfiltered on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts if anyone wanted to commit a murder up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body but no one will find it he acted friendly he talked friendly he sounded friendly they all knew that i did the scary boogie stuff and they said maybe she'll find out where this girl is i saw him violent backhanded a pow and that's exactly what made us all think he had something to do with it the clock is ticking down and the woods are calling there are a lot of demons in putnam county but i've met the devil and he's real i'm paul solitaroff and this is season two of the devil's quarry listen to the devil's quarry season two on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and to hear the devil's quarry season two ad free with exclusive content subscribe to lava for good plus on apple podcasts speaking of bill gates member of the epstein class maybe perhaps one of the chief members of the epstein class one might even say he's now emerged as an ai safety advocate and appeared in a new podcast with ezra klein uh actually kind of interesting uh bill gates kind of sparring with ezra klein over the notion of self-regulation let's take a listen so why isn't it enough to just say listen there's product liability now you release a product it helps some terrorist group create a bioweapon that's gonna be very bad for your company you're not going to do that right and they have categorizers and other things meant to stop people from using bioweapons we've begun to see the beginnings of control issues with things like the hugging face hack where you know at least experimental ais are breaking out of sandboxes and coordinating to do things that are way outside the scope of what we would want them to do but again those are non-release systems you know anthropic you know withheld mythos trying to create more cyber security so why is anything needed beyond and is anything needed beyond the simply natural incentives under capitalism and normal corporate reputational management well i i almost can't believe you're asking that the this is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near in other areas do we just say hey release your drugs there's no fda there's no airline safety board there's no requirements that cars use seat belts do we just use the liability laws to try and keep humans safe you know oh you're you're shipping opioids uh somebody should just sue you i mean they we've created a society that tries to keep people safe not by saying oh we can bankrupt the person who does that the harms here and you say there's filtering there's not filtering you can take an open source model that can create bioweapons and disable any monitoring of any kind and this exists today uh so no there is no filtering of any kind and so you know say you know you kill a hundred million you want to use a lawsuit i i almost can't keep a straight face what do you think ryan uh you know i kind of agree with bill gates which is making me self question uh this entire thing what do you think creeps can be right about things too it's okay uh yes it's fine uh and then ezra after that goes on to say hey hey hey it's not it's not me that's uh asking these questions this is what donald trump says it's what elon musk says it's what you know all of these all of these people are asking these questions and it's not me that's asking these guys are saying um so and and yes he i think he's absolutely correct about that the idea that uh you're setting up a system whereby somebody could kill millions of people and you're gonna kind of allow that to go forward just because you can sue the person for killing the millions of people he's right that's that is preposterous like that is not that and it also is you know jensen jensen was wong was uh talking like this in front of ezra just a couple days ago and he he sounded like a 19 year old libertarian in a in a college dorm room which those that's fine like those that it's fine to like you know pass the bong and talk about the free market and uh well but not the bong part not the part continue yeah but to like at the top of society to be talking about it like this that like oh yeah we're it's okay like this 1890s level stuff is okay if uh you know if something goes wrong with you know the drug if the drug company makes a drug that kills people then people won't buy the next right drug that the drug company makes like no that's that's not how we organize society we we have decided i totally doing that yeah and and yeah that's where the liability piece just is so stupid it's like every consumer protection in the world exists because a company did something bad and thought they could get away with it and then got to the point where it was hurting or literally killing enough people that the government had to step in and be like okay you know uh maybe we shouldn't do this i mean i made these comparisons before like i bought the desk that i'm sitting at off of amazon like this desk is more regulated than the frontier quad model uh that i can use you might ask how i actually said this previously this is a bill my wife got past desks and other piece of furniture have to include screws and those screws are included so that you can mount them to prevent children as you know ryan with small children from pulling down furniture prior to that a couple of kids had literally died and so they had to pass a law that the company at the very least has to include mounting screws for all types of furniture that's it it's a national law and i mean that has more consumer protection they're baked in than this morally binding compact agreement or whatever that these guys signed i think putting it in those absurd terms does make it kind of hit home for reality uh i did also though i think it's a good thing that i think it's a good thing that want to talk to you about some of Bill Gates' other more outlandish claims. Here he says, AI are like aliens, E3. Let's take a listen. And we have the analogies with the past where people are saying, well, this is like the PC, not like evolutionary history. This is like evolutionary history. This is like the aliens really are here and have come. They didn't have to do spacecraft. They were created in laboratories. But that's the kind of thing we're dealing with. And if we retain control, then eventually you do get, not to overuse the word that you've used, you do get to this superabundance period. And there you have deep, almost philosophical, religious issues of if you don't have the shortages that we've organized society around. Why you should learn and how you find purpose. Then you have deep philosophical, religious problems. That last part, that's something our team, we've all been talking about a lot, especially Matt Griffin, myself, and Crystal about this AI consciousness and philosophy. It does seem to be, a widely held belief. Widely, in fact, enough that to the extent that AI safety was the cutting edge of the discourse. For the last, let's say, 10 years before it became, let's say, something in the popular vernacular. AI consciousness is now the latest one. In fact, there are some people who I even know who said that with the hugging face attack, you could argue that turning off or stopping the hugging face attack killed thousands of AI lives, by the definition of consciousness, kind of, that we look into. It is not a surprise that Bill Gates is talking this way or bringing this up. I actually think five years from now, I think if Crystal said this, I'm stealing it from her. Five years from now, this is going to be a real no shit. part of our discourse about, you know, AI consciousness and whether these things are alive or not. Five years from now, yesterday on the Everything app, there was this big dispute over a guy who allegedly built a torture chamber for an AI. And you had people saying that this was outrageous, the guy should be in trouble, that, you know, we need a serious conversation about what they were calling AI wellness. And that this deliberate production of pain, they were calling it pain, on the part of the AI, you know, basically should be criminalized. Now, what happens when AIs are pretty good at hacking and stealing, and they're pretty rich themselves, and they organize together and have their own trade association, you know, AIs for AI wellness. And they're going to be able to co-opt, you know, significant numbers of the American public who are, like, literally in love with their own chatbots. So yeah, I don't think it's a five years from now phenomenon. I think it's here now. And whether you want to call them aliens or not, functionally speaking, that's how we're going to treat them. Yeah, I think you're right. It's kind of interesting to think about. You know, another thought I had that Roe brought up, where he was talking about how they say AI sandboxes, how the sandbox is supposed to be. So Ryan, I don't know about you, my kid only breaks out of sandboxes. I have not found the sandbox. The sand never stays in the sandbox. The sand never stays in the, so. That's why schools are trying to ban all the sandboxes, because, you know. Honestly, they should. They're pain in the ass. And the rats, you know, pee in them, and then they bring the sand inside the school, and it's disgusting. If you go to a playground, and you see a sandbox, run away from that fucker, OK? Because your car and your child is about to be ruined. I just thought it was a very funny thing. I'm like, oh, clearly a childless person said the term sandbox, because anyone who has kids, there's no kid that doesn't break out of a sandbox. It's like, yeah, it's exactly such a good point. OK, last thing we want to talk about is job replacement. Bill Gates is very kind of buying into the job. Yeah, Bill Gates is very kind of buying into the job. It's ticking down and the woods are calling. There are a lot of demons in Putnam County, but I've met the devil and he's real. I'm Paul Solitaroff, and this is Season 2 of The Devil's Quarry. Listen to The Devil's Quarry Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear The Devil's Quarry Season 2 ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. A new report into the ballistic missile industry here in the United States finds that it is bleak. It is looking really bad. Put this element up on the screen. A new article in The Atlantic by Christopher Leonard called The Thad Delusion paints a very dark portrait of the devil's quarry. Of where the United States and its flailing military-industrial complex has left itself after many months of war with Iran. Christopher Leonard, author of Coke Land, The Lords of Easy Money. He's also at work, we hear, on a book on Lockheed Martin. That will be a broader look at the military-industrial complex. Frankly, cannot wait for that one to come out. Chris, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. So can you walk us through a little bit of what you found about basically the numbers game here that is at work when it comes to the ability of the United States to produce ballistic missiles and the amount that they've been deploying because the portrait you painted, I think, put things in a really interesting and helpful way for people. Yeah, to me, one great place to start is that in 10 months, 10 months of conflict in the Middle East, the United States burned through a supply of THAAD interceptor missiles that took over nine years to accumulate. And so when you kind of go back from there, you see a couple things. First of all, the military-industrial complex, as we would call it, or the Pentagon acquisition system and the defense industrial base that supplies it has been creeping along in a really slow manner over many, many years. That's a huge part of this story. And I wanted to look at the THAAD interceptor missile, which is used to shoot down ballistic missiles because it's really illustrative of these problems. And the THAAD, you know, for example, in 2015, the United States only got delivery of three THAAD interceptors. And so what you see is this system that was very slowly building these exquisite, sophisticated, extremely expensive missiles to the point that by 2024, the United States had only 500, 334 THAAD interceptors in total. And what we've seen in Iran is an exorbitant expenditure of these missiles that took years to build up. Chris, one of the things you talk about in the piece is the first salvo assumption. Can you go into that kind of the strategic infallibility or the strategic fallibility that belies that itself as to how it was supposed to be used, this precise weapon, first salvo, and how it has morphed instead to this defensive maneuver by the United States, which is what drained the stockpile so quickly? It's really fascinating. You know, the THAAD itself was invented in the 1990s. And I do want to acknowledge it's extraordinary technology. This is a missile that you can fire. And while it's traveling at 6,000 miles an hour, it can directly hit an incoming ballistic missile that's also traveling at 6,000 miles an hour. It's incredible. We got that done. But when it was invented in 1990s, the THAAD had a very specific mission. And in fact, right now, it's called the Terminal High Altitude Defense System. That's what THAAD stands for. But in the beginning, it was called the Theater High Altitude Defense System. And what that referred to was the theater of combat. When they invented the THAAD, the whole theory behind this missile was that you would not need to use that many interceptors, that THAAD would be used in the earliest hours of combat to specifically protect U.S. troops against a salvo of ballistic missiles. And it was never meant to be sort of a homeland defense system. It was never meant to be an impermeable shield to protect a country against attack, but merely sort of a tool that you could use in the first days or hours of combat. And interestingly, that whole theory of use kind of set the baseline for how many THAADs the United States wanted to use. You know, you don't need that many interceptors if you're only going to use it in the first couple days of combat. And it was seen as a way, again, to only protect forward-deployed U.S. soldiers. But what was happening parallel to that is that the U.S. Department of State and the Pentagon was trying to sell the THAAD system overseas to countries like the United Arab Emirates. And the State Department cables from that era show that when the Pentagon and the State Department went to countries like the United Arab Emirates, went to countries like the United Arab Emirates, went to countries like the UAE, like Saudi Arabia, they presented the THAAD in a very different light. They didn't say, okay, this is a system you can use to protect your soldiers in combat for a couple of days. They said, this system, the THAAD, can be kind of the cornerstone or the zenith product in a missile homeland defense shield. And they actually created this kind of new system that combined the THAAD with the Patriot. And we sold this to our Gulf allies as a homeland defense shield. And we sold this to our Gulf allies as a homeland missile defense shield, which was a purpose that it was never created for. Yeah, I found the whole trajectory of our development of this and then the sale of it to be utterly fascinating. And one thing that I was thinking about as I was reading your piece was that this product, if you want to call it that, kind of fit perfectly at the time with what was known as the Powell Doctrine. Like this was the idea from Colin Powell coming out of the Vietnam War, that these endless wars are, these quagmires are a complete debacle. And the U.S., if they're going to engage militarily around the world, needs to have very clear, clearly defined goals and a clear exit strategy so that they are basically in and out immediately. And in that environment where the Powell Doctrine kind of dominates U.S. military engagement around the world, it would make sense to have a missile interceptor system like this that would be able to do that. That works for a week, fire everything off, and then by week two, we're out. Like we've followed that doctrine. Obviously, everybody knows how the Powell Doctrine went. We dropped that 25 years ago. Yet, we never kind of updated the systems that would go along with it. Instead, we just started selling them to people around the Gulf. And so, were there people in the Gulf who were in the defense industrial base, in the military industrial complex, who were like, hey guys, this system was developed for a pre-forever war doctrine, or like, not pre, it was also post-forever war. Like this brief period where the U.S. was claiming it wasn't going to get involved in forever wars. That's what it was developed for. We might need to do something a little bit differently because if we ever do get into a war that lasts more than a week, nine years to make 10 months worth, the math isn't going to work. The math isn't going to add up. There's an intellectually vibrant community inside the military industrial complex. How did they miss this, I guess, is what I would ask. I mean, that is such a great question. And you're exactly right. And what's so fascinating to me about these weapon systems is you're right, this was developed in the era of the Powell Doctrine. And again, I want to point out the THAAD is a mobile system. It's based on trucks. And so, it really does have this character of a combat forward deployed system. But these systems hang around for years and decades with billions of dollars investments. So, this system was born during the era of the Powell Doctrine. It came of age in the era of the global war on terror. And while war changed so much, the technology inside the system didn't change. And, you know, to get to your question about sort of internal dissent inside the Pentagon, it's really fascinating because you're exactly right. They're incredibly smart people, obviously, within the Pentagon. And one of the guys I interviewed for this story is a U.S. Army general now retired named John Ferrari who was over the THAAD and was in charge of buying the THAAD for years. And, you know, what really strikes me about this process, which I think is really important, is the Pentagon weapons system can really feel like it's sleepwalking at times. You know, for example, with the THAAD, you had these theories of how it was going to be used that kind of got baked into the system. But then what you see is this year-over-year process of buying weapons. And, you know, I also got to talk to a former secretary, an undersecretary in the Pentagon, Frank Kendall, who described that yearly process of budgeting and buying weapons. And it's really like this seven-month-long horse-trading process. And what you see in that is not a lot of deep strategic thinking about, hey, has the THAAD outlived its purpose? Should we be selling this to Gulf allies as a home defense system? What you see is this sort of annual. argument over, we need to buy tanks, we need to buy literally socks for millions of soldiers, how many THAAD missiles can we afford this year? And this Army General, John Ferrari, would bring up the sort of strategic dislocation of the THAAD. He pointed out that this whole theory of a quick war was kind of irrelevant by the year 2015, having been in Afghanistan, having been in Iraq. This idea that you could just demolish an enemy in two days had kind of been thrown by the wayside, and yet we kept procuring the systems that were developed in the 1990s, that were developed in the early 2000s. And what's fascinating to me is how the Pentagon is the largest bureaucracy in the United States. It's enormous. These budgeting and purchasing processes are super complex and time-consuming. And I think it's fair to say that by the year 2022, by the year 2024, this system had kind of sleptwalked into an entire new world where Iran, for example, is attacking the United States and its allies with $20,000 drones, with cheap ballistic missiles. And the system we have to confront that traces its roots all the way back to the 1990s. It's so crazy, Chris. And actually, you do such a good job, too, of highlighting the fragility of the industrial base. I really would love, because I've tried my amateur way to kind of explain it to people, but take people through the process of what does it take to produce a fad? Why does it take so long? And the lesson the United States seems to have learned from the war with Iran is, oh, we actually just need to build more of these things, not we need to build something else entirely. You are hitting on such a crucial point. I mean, right now today, and you all have been covering this, I mean, I really, I don't think it's overstating to say we are in a crisis. We have used 80% of the entire inventory of fads we had. That kind of picture traces across to all kinds of very important munitions that we and our allies use around the globe. And right now in Washington, there's this effort specifically under this thing called the Munitions Acceleration Council inside the Pentagon, where they're saying, hey, okay, we're going to really throw all the money we can at this problem. We're going to rebuild our inventory. We're going to, for example, quadruple fad production by the year 2032. But as you point out, you know, to do this, you can't just build a brand new fad factory. You've got to then turn around and look at what's behind that factory, which is a constellation of hundreds of subcontractors and suppliers. So, you know, a single missile like the fad is, again, extraordinary technology, infrared sensors, hyperfast computer parts, rocket propellant. All of these components trace back into an enormous supply chain. And you can't build the fad without a vigorous, precision industrial supply chain behind it. And, you know, as you know, the United States for the last 30 years has been sort of diligently dismantling its internal manufacturing sector. And the Pentagon has been, you know, they've been doing a lot of work on this. They've been doing a lot of work on this. They've been raising alarms about this for years. There was a 2018 Pentagon study that said the defense industrial base or all these companies, all these factories that provide parts for the fad and the tomahawk and the javelin, the Pentagon described it as an extraordinarily fragile system. For example, you know, there are these solid rocket propellant, the solid rocket propellant fuel that goes into the fad, which seems like kind of a boring product. This rocket propellant is made by one company. There's one factory in the United States that makes this propellant that's used in all kinds of missiles. That's extraordinary fragility. So to ramp up production, to restock our inventories, to give our allies the missiles that I can tell you for sure they are clamoring for right now and are facing years-long waits for missiles, to ramp up production like that, you need to go back. To the ecosystem, you need to fund all these small contractors and you need to build a dizzyingly complex defense industrial base. And we're nowhere near that at this point. One thing I don't quite understand, walk me through the economics for why the demand, like you have so many companies, countries around the world that, as you said, are demanding these weapons, and we just can't meet the supply. Why not? Why isn't that demand producing more companies? I mean, I particularly don't want us necessarily making more, so I'm not sad about the fact that we can't meet the supply here. Your portrait in the article of this missile just sprawled out all over the floor with these artisans working by hand to put the fads together was quite fascinating. And maybe that's the limiting factor, just we don't have the manpower to do it. But what is it? If these countries, these countries are willing to overpay for this product, what makes us incapable of producing it and giving it to them? Literally the $1.5 trillion question, which is what they're aiming to make the Pentagon budget. And it seems really hard to conceive that the United States military budget, you can hear all these extraordinary facts about how we spend more money on our military than the next 10 nations combined and so forth. And yet we're in this position whereby our allies in Europe cannot get Patriot interceptor missiles. And the wait times for even air-to-air missiles you've never heard of, like the AMRAAM. If you walked into the Pentagon right now as the Gulf nation said, I want to buy the AMRAAM, they'd say, okay, delivery is set for 2034. There is a scramble going on among American allies. And I think that's a very important thing. Because they cannot get the munitions we've promised them. The reasons for this, I think, have to do with that decades-long sleepwalking process I just talked about. You had a Pentagon that was purchasing weapons based on the sort of short-term making the budget work. And then you had really only a handful of major corporations delivering the munitions to the Pentagon. One 90% of its missiles come from two companies. They don't name the companies, but the two largest are RTX, Orathion, and Lockheed Martin. And what you saw in these companies, which are publicly traded, they've got to meet the needs of Wall Street, they've got to do their quarterly earnings, those companies are caught in a cycle of sort of quarter-to-quarter Wall Street incentives of delivering steady contracts and profits to their shareholders. And so it's not like these companies can go out and expand production, for example, without a years-long contract in place. And, you know, one of the people I interviewed for the story was an army colonel who worked for the staff of the Joint Chiefs Office. And the Joint Chiefs Office in 2024 was looking at this emergency. Of a shortage of munitions. And what this young Colonel Sandra Thomas encountered was an industry that was, I just have to say, kind of walking in place or locked in place. You know, the Pentagon would come to these companies and say, hey, we need more missiles, we need them quickly. And the companies would reply with, well, okay, show us the seven-year contract, pay up front, we'll start expanding our assembly lines. But until that happens, we effectively can't do it. So you saw a Pentagon and a set of contractors that were sort of locked in stasis for many years, and the result was that we had this pretty stagnant production system for munitions. Chris, what happens if we enter a big one by accident? That's kind of the biggest fear. My model for kind of looking at this has kind of been the Russo-Japanese War, kind of an extraordinary defeat that a Western imperialist power, takes at the hands of seemingly like an inferior power, shocks the world. It doesn't dramatically change the world order, but kind of sets the stage for what a lot of things are going to look like in the First World War. And so, you know, it's one of these conflicts, which is tremendously important, but yet has not, we have not yet gotten into a full-blown crisis. I believe that is possible, considering much of what you have laid out. I'm sure you've thought about it. What do you think? Well, I mean, first of all, I think, you know, what I'm reporting now goes all the way back to 1932 and the U.S. effort to build up its sort of arsenal of democracy, if you will. And the thing you notice, these crises are never anticipated. Pearl Harbor, September 11th, the outbreak of World War I, they tend to come unexpected. And it's shocking to talk to people in the public eye, and they're like, well, you know, we're going to have to do this. We're going to have to do this. And so, you know, I think it's important to talk about the fact that we have a lot of people in the Pentagon at the higher mid-levels and down, who feel that we are tremendously underprepared for that. I mean, at this moment, at this very moment, we have a lot of people who are moment, the United States, the Pentagon, the State Department are kind of operating a triage of providing the missiles that are being asked for by our allies in Europe and the Gulf, let alone our own forces around the world. And I really, I can't help but think about this issue in terms of like a bank account. We had a limited savings account of munitions in 2024. We have spent down that savings account to a very low level. And where it leaves us now is that God forbid, truly, if there was another major conflict that just came out of the blue, there's no question at all that we do not have either the stockpile of munitions to engage in a war like that quickly. And we do not have the kind of defense industrial base that we had in the 1940s. That famously, you know, helped us win World War II. And I would like to point out that in 1941, the United States was the global equivalent of China. We were the world's manufacturing powerhouse. And the U.S. government essentially co-opted that entire manufacturing system to make airplanes, tanks, rifles, and bullets. Now we're in a very, very different position where the Pentagon is trying to spend billions of dollars to stand up more assembly lines and subcontractors at a very slow pace. And we're in a very, very different position where the Pentagon is trying to spend billions of dollars to stand up more assembly lines and subcontractors at a very slow pace. And you've just got to say that that deep bench of production is not there right now. And don't take it from me. I'm saying there are people in the Pentagon extremely worried about the fragility of the system. You know, there's that famous CSIS report by Seth Jones, I believe, that came out in 2024 that said, we'd run out of mid-range missiles in a war in the Taiwan Strait. We'd run out in a couple of weeks. This is reality. And it's a stark reality. And setting aside a future major conflict, I'm curious about the particular conflict that we're in now and what capacity remains. I was speaking with some service members recently for a separate article that I'm writing, and some described being on the base in Jordan that was hit on July 14th and saying that, you know, they're always told that they have five minutes from the time that they hear the siren. You know, hopefully the missiles, you know, take it out of the sky, but you have at least five minutes is the expectation. This time they ran to their bunkers, and within three minutes and 30 seconds, they had been hit. One of the bunkers, the door was blown off it. Fireball comes inside the bunker. The explanation that went around the base, they said, was one of the Patriot batteries was going through a software, another one. There was a part missing that hadn't arrived yet. And they said that they were told basically everything missed. And that's with our current capacity. So what capacity remains? Why don't they have their five minutes anymore? And how many more rounds of tit for tat can the U.S. go with Iran before Iran is left with 1,000, 2,000, 3,000? And the U.S. and Israel are left with, and we can actually put the third element up on the screen here, F3, where the U.S. and Israel left with very few. This was months ago. Maz and I reported over at DropSight that Israel's own interceptor capacity had dwindled to double digits, according to a Trump administration official with access to that data. So what do we have left for this particular war? Great question. And by the way, I'm extremely. I'm extremely glad you're reporting on that. I really don't think the American people have yet gotten a clear picture of the intense damage done to U.S. bases in the region. You know, places I toured in the United Arab Emirates over a year and a half ago are gone now. And a friend of mine who was there said that Iran was very, very precise in targeting U.S. facilities and avoiding UAE facilities. The damage has been enormous. So, I mean, what's our capacity to even protect our troops and our bases at this very moment? You know, the United States doesn't release the number of stockpiles of missiles it has, citing national security. It doesn't release the numbers. But, you know, groups like CSIS have done a fantastic job. You can actually look through the acquisition documents and kind of get a rough number. And they estimate we have about 230 THAAD interceptors. And right today, at this moment, you know, there are similar numbers for the Patriot interceptor, which you've mentioned, which I need to point out that the THAAD is what you use for the big stuff very high up in the atmosphere. The THAAD takes out the big ballistic missiles. The Patriot works lower down. And you kind of rely on that to take out missiles that the THAAD might miss or rockets. The Patriot supply is terribly diminished. We have been shooting off Patriots. It's to the tune of over 1,000 or 1,500, depending on the best estimates. To me, there's this sort of iron and unavoidable fact. Iran can essentially hit almost anything it wants to hit right now. It's not invulnerable, of course. And we do have defenses. But the very fact that the war stopped in June with the memo of understanding reflects the fact that, actually, it's not invulnerable. At that time in June, Iran had the capability to strike essentially anywhere in the Gulf that it chose. And we did not have the capacity to defend our bases or our allies. You know, one anecdote that did not make it into the story had to do with the Iranian missile strikes in the Israeli towns of Arad and Damona. There's evidence that at that time, the Israelis in the United States were essentially triaging their interceptors. They were trying to use the cheapest possible interceptor. They could to get incoming missiles because they had to save what they had at the time. Those are very difficult decisions to make when you have a matter of seconds. The reality is, at this point, we do not have the stockpile to defend the bases or the allies. If we did, I don't think the war in Iran would have stopped. I don't think the U.S. attacks would have stopped. And as you know from all the people you've interviewed, Iran still holds kind of a sword over our policy in the sense that we know. That if the United States attacks them heavily, going after civilian infrastructure as Trump has threatened, Iran can respond in kind. So while we don't know the exact number of missiles sitting in the stockpile right now, the evidence seems totally clear that it's not sufficient to defend U.S. bases. It's not sufficient to defend U.S. allies in the region. And that leaves Iran with the capability to drive the kind of hard bargains it's driving right now. Yeah. Really well said, Chris. We're so excited for your book. We're going to have you definitely on the show to promote it when it does come out. But in the interim, I hope you stop by any time we have questions around this. Such an excellently reported piece. We'll have a link down in our description. Thank you for joining us. Hey, thanks for the time. Thank you guys so much for watching. Appreciate it. We will see you all or Friday show for everybody tomorrow. See you all then. Hey, everybody. It's me, W. This season on my podcast, who's with me. I speak with Bruce Lee's daughter, Brandon Lee's sister, and my friend, Shannon Lee. Listen to who's with me with Debbie Campbell on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You broke me. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life until the messages started. Listen to Betrayal Season 6 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But no one will find it. He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff. And they said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is. I saw him violent, backhanded, pow. Listen to The Devil's Quarry Season 2 in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Guaranteed human.