#441 - DARPA Insider: Steve Jobs CIA Deal, Stargate Argentina & Facebook Weapon | Sharon Weinberger

So your new book The Valley of Death is a very timely title in line with all the crazy shit that's happening around the world right now. And I also want to get into all of the other stuff that you've covered, like DARPA and crazy, crazy nuclear explorations that you've done. But first of all, how did you get interested in covering and reporting on all this stuff originally? On national security and defense, or the crazier side of defense. So after graduate school, I studied Russian, Eastern European studies, a discipline that I'm not even sure exists so much anymore. And I ended up working in Washington, DC for a while and actually Ukraine for a couple of years in the 1990s for NGOs, grew kind of disenchanted with that and was looking for a job as people did once upon a time in the classifieds of the Washington Post. And I saw an ad for a research analyst at a place called SPC and I hated the job I was at so I'm like, I can do research. And I showed up at the job and I had no idea what SPC was and it was in Northern Virginia. And I picked up the pamphlet and the lobby and it said SPC, finding better ways to wage war and protect the peace. And I'm like, oh, it's a defense company. I mean, I didn't really have any impression, good or bad of that. And I was hired to be an analyst working as sort of like a boutique consultancy as part of the company that did studies for the Office of the Secretary Defense, the civilian part of the Pentagon leadership. And I was sent around the country to interview directors of defense laboratories, military labs. So, you know, in 2000, I saw anthrax under the microscope at Fort Detrick and I just became fascinated by this whole area of science and technology that was part of the national security state of what they did and why they did it. So, I worked on some studies like that for a couple years and then my boss ended up going into the Pentagon in, actually in late 2000 and I did not want to become a Pentagon bureaucrat and there was an open at aviation week and I became a journalist working on tech and national security. Oh, interesting. So, when you were looking at, you know, secret, crazy, imaginary weapons, where were you going to find this kind of stuff like who were you talking to, what kind of sources were you using? So, I first, it's sort of that first book or actually it first started as an article I wrote for the Washington Post Sunday magazine was because one of the first things I learned when I was doing interviews around the country at laboratories and as a journalist was I was always sort of interested in people who held, I mean, weird as derogatory that held beliefs that I didn't understand and you think of that maybe in terms of cults or, you know, sort of fringe things, but what I came to realize was that the millet, this sort of national security community was its own subculture. They lived in sort of a cloistered world and they would kind of grab onto things that were sort of crazy. I mean, if you think about a lot of the background of nuclear weapons, it's sort of crazy. We might end the world. And so I was at a congressional briefing, this was probably in like 2002 or 2003 and it was for staff and maybe there were one or two members of the press. I may have been the only member of the press and a guy behind me asked and it was a briefing by the head of an agency called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. It used to be called the Defense Nuclear Agency, it basically does nuclear effects and a guy in this small audience who I learned was a nuclear physicist started talking about complaining about something called a hafnium bomb or isomer bomb. And you know, this was pseudoscience being funded and what was this guy going to do about it. And so afterwards I ran up to the guy in the audience who asked about it. He was a nuclear physicist who used to work for State Department and he sat me down. I think it was in the Senate cafeteria and started telling me this outlandish tale about how the Pentagon was funding a nuclear hand grenade that basically you have isomers which is certain isotopes and physicists will give you much better explanation than me. Certain isotopes can live in sort of excited states, high energy states. And nuclear physicists have long been interested in them and if there was a way to release their energy quickly to trigger them, you could create an explosive that was maybe 100,000 more times powerful than conventional explosives. So it's still a step down from like a true nuclear weapon, like a fission weapon. But you could have a hand grenade with sort of nuclear type power on it. And that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was funding it and the guy I was talking to, he was outraged. He said it's dangerous because it's destabilizing the arms race, but it's also pseudoscience. It's based on some guy at Texas who did an experiment with a use dental X-ray machine. And I just, I had to get to the bottom of it. I'm like really an X-ray machine, a dental X-ray machine. You know, the Pentagon's putting millions of dollars into this. And that was kind of my first foray and just trying to figure things out. Like, if this is a crazy project and it was pretty crazy, how does it get funded and how does it get this momentum inside the Pentagon? And for me, it became a metaphor for a lot of the craziness that we see inside the national security community. But that was sort of my entrance into this sort of crazy world. Yeah, it's a very interesting way that hold defense, that underground like secret defense operation works with these companies that are developing like crazy imaginary tech. You know, when I first read about DARPA, it was, I think it was Annie Jacobson's book. You know, she was explaining how some of the stuff that they're developing is just like, they're throwing shit at the wall with unlimited amounts of money. And I think they call it like blue sky research where they can just like any kind of crazy science fiction idea, let's try to figure out how to make it real and we have unlimited budgets because all this money is defense and it's allocated from the Pentagon and we can do whatever we want with it. And you know, lots of companies are making tons of money coming up with all kinds of like different futuristic, you know, almost fantastical sounding things that don't, that kind of defy logic, right? But it doesn't matter like if it, if it seemed like something that's, you know, maybe not possible for another 20 years, well, we should definitely start throwing money at it and researching it right now before like other countries start doing it. So yeah, I've always been super interested in, you know, what they're doing and you know, one of the other really crazy things that I learned is they have like these meetings where they get all these top science fiction writers to meet them, like once a year at the Pentagon to like brainstorm on ideas for future technology and weaponry. They've done stuff like this. One of my, I like to say that every reporter has their white whale, you know, that thing that they're chasing. Yeah. I have a couple. One are microwave weapons. Oh, yeah. Sometimes I'm fascinated me, but the other are related to what you just spoke about. So there have been DARPA and the Army and other parts of the Pentagon have convened science fiction writers for scenarios. One of the things that I pursued after 9/11 was variety magazine of all places broke a story about how after 9/11 the Army convened top film screenwriters for sort of a secret session saying, okay, 9/11 happened. It was something we didn't anticipate with hijackers using, you know, box cutters. So let's get screenwriters together and have them come up with scenarios. Other things we didn't anticipate. And they had all of these a list screenwriters get together and basically swore them to secrecy. So variety, I mean, they have sources in the movie world. They broke the story about the meeting and I did what I do, which is I filed a Freedom of Information Act request. This went on for a couple of years, they denied the request, but confirmed when did they say this meeting took place? So this is a long time ago. I think it happened probably within a year of 9/11. And so there really was the feeling, I think, from the screenwriters who showed up that like, oh my God, we can't say anything about it. Like now, I mean, you have to take us back to the atmosphere after 9/11. And I think there was a lot of concern, but now some of them would talk about it. You should get them to talk about it. I'd be curious. So I tried to get the information out of the Pentagon. So I think, you know, file a FOIA, you wait a year, they deny it, you appeal it. And they finally came back and confirmed that the records existed, which is one of the most important things for FOIA. And then they said, but these are pre-decision, which is one of the exemptions under FOIA. And I regret that I dropped it at that point. I have a couple other FOIA lawsuits going on, but I need to pick that one up because it's, you know, we're 25 years out. I mean, I wanted to know what were the scenarios? What did they dream up? Yeah. Steve, I sent you a link the other day. Remember I think the thing about Vince Gilligan? Vince Gilligan wrote a pilot episode for a spinoff of what was the show that Vince Gilligan did? I think it was the X-Files. It was an X-Files spinoff called the lone gunman or something like this. I sent you a link to this there, did you remember? And the whole premise of the pilot episode, which was like a one-hour episode, was like a plane flying into the Twin Towers, a plane flying into the Pentagon. You read about this recently? Yeah. It's almost like identical to what happened on 9/11. [BLANK_AUDIO] viking bad Vince Gilligan co-wrote a TV episode about a hijack passenger plane flying straight towards the World Trade Center, premiered six months before 9/11. In the story, a secret group inside the U.S. government takes remote control of a Boeing 727, full of passengers, and the plan is to crash into the Twin Towers, blame foreign terrorists, and start a profitable war. More than 13 million people watched it, and the show has cancelled a few months later, and most people forgot it ever existed. On September 11th, when Gilligan watched the attacks happen on CNN, like everyone else, he looked at the smoke rising from the towers and thought to himself, "Wait a minute, I wrote this." Yeah, that's why I mean. I think that goes to why they convened these film people, these screenwriters, because, you know, they saw like, "Okay, maybe it's a lack of imagination that people in Hollywood that they can think of scenarios that we didn't think of or we didn't take seriously." But reminds me, I need to actually see the government on that one, because I don't know what. Well, I think, you know, I can see the argument in sort of the first few years after 9/11 that they didn't want to release those scenarios, like why provide a blueprint. But I think at 25 years out, you know, it's your. They didn't want to release what specifically? So they did what I wanted to get from them through this FOIA request was the actual scenarios that the screenwriters came up with, because the idea was they convened them, and they had them come up with, like, what are other terrorism scenarios? 9/11 scenarios that we should be thinking of. Right. And apparently, they different screenwriters and film people came up with ideas and brief them, and I wanted to know what those were. I still think we, the public, should know what they were, especially 25 years out. Yeah, 100%. Because we know that they war game all kinds of crazy stuff, right? Like, they've war-gamed nuclear war, I'm sure, with, you know, every possible country that has nuclear weapons and, like, what that would look like, and how to prepare for it, and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, it's just seeing shit like that is, you know, it's, you know, are people around the world just watching American television programming and saying, "Oh, that's a good idea, let's do that." I mean, I sometimes wondered about that, you know, science fiction and movies works both ways. People can get ideas from them, but a lot of time they're getting ideas from what shows up in the news or what they're seeing. So, it's hard to say, like, you know, does that give someone idea? You know, content, you know, the world trade centers have been, the towers have been built thinking about the possibility of an aircraft hitting them. So, it's something that was sort of out there in the ether, but, you know, clearly it should have been taken a lot more seriously. And didn't you, you wrote something about Facebook in 2011, working with, like, or like, changing modern warfare? Yeah. So, not even Facebook specifically at the time, but, wow, this takes us back. You know, now everyone's talking about LLMs and AI. So, so, around 2011, so take this is sort of, you know, height of the war, the US war in Afghanistan and the biggest killer, if I remember, either, the biggest number of casualties at the time of US and coalition forces were roadside bombs in provides explosive devices, IEDs, the insurgency and the Taliban were gaining power. And so, there was this idea on the Pentagon of using this nation, like, network science. You know, part of what Facebook is about and all of the social media companies looking for connections between people. And suppose we use network science to predict where's going to be, where's the next bomb attack going to be? Who is the next insurgent? You know, they, they were looking at prices of apples, of gas, of every, all of this data and information, everything that you sort of hear about now with Palantir, they were starting to look at then to see if they could make predictions. And what still stays with me is, I didn't interview at the time with the chief scientist, a Pentagon guy who was sort of in charge of the bomb fighting effort, of the science efforts. And he was directing a lot of this network science predictions. And, and at some point in the interview, you know, because they were trying to stop the growth of the Taliban. They were trying to stop the insurgency in Afghanistan. And he sort of stopped mid-interview and said, you know, the Taliban are holding their own and they're doing it without the fancy science, without computers. Right. And it kind of, one of the themes I try to come back to is that science and technology can be the answer for a lot of things, but it really solves our problems. It rarely solves warfare, it changes it. With exceptions. There's an argument to be made that, you know, we're not trying to solve any kind of problems that are just trying to to make money and pump up our GDP and, you know, support this sort of financial industrial complex that lays on the top of the military industrial complex and sort of feeds it, you know. Can I say both things are true. So I, I think I've interviewed and spent time with enough people in what you might call, you know, the military industrial complex that the people, there are a lot of people inside it and people in the military who want to do good work are doing good work within the constraints that they operate in. They're not motivated. I mean, some of them are, but a lot of them are not motivated by money per se. But I think what you correctly point out is that the financial incentives of the system make it that way. You know, we decided after World War II to have a standing armament's industry and everything created out of that. As you said, it creates really, really, really strong financial incentives to keep building weapons and technology. Yeah, 100%. And, you know, like you were saying, even though we are, you know, you hear all these crazy stories about all this super advanced stuff that DARPA is building and, you know, some people think that the trillions of dollars that was allegedly missing before 9/11 was all money that went to black projects or like was funneled to like, you know, secret stuff that they couldn't declare through Congress because it was, they wanted to make sure nobody knew about it. And if we do have like all this crazy futuristic technology, why can't we use it in this war with Iran? You know, like it seems like we're losing this war, using conventional super advanced, extremely expensive military equipment. And, you know, they're outgunning us with super cheap, disposable drones and stuff. Yeah, like we're running out of interceptors. It's crazy. Like, nobody spends like we do in defense. There's so much dysfunction in our defense industrial base. 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Application times may vary and rates may vary. To the classified weapons program, so one, a couple things are true. There is a lot of funding for classified projects in the Pentagon and Black projects. There's things that are classified. We know they exist, but the details of them are classified, and then there's the true Black projects, a sort of aircraft that we don't know exists, the satellite systems that they just don't even acknowledge exist. But the thing about classified programs, maybe less so with satellites, is a successful classified program. A successful Black project is hard to keep secret forever because you use it. In Abadabad, with the Osama Bin Laden raid, and oh, we have stealthy Black Hawk helicopters because they crash. Once you use something, it's very hard to keep it classified. It's the unsuccessful ones that get canceled, that we often never hear about. And that's sort of disturbing because like, you know, these are your taxpayer dollars. It's my tights. Everyone's taxpayer dollars. What about like even the continuity of government type stuff? Like the people that have written about like underground bases and stuff like this, that some of this missing money has gone to. Oh, absolutely. And that one is a little bit trickier. So I remember visiting, I mean, I think they still give public tours. I recommend it is the Green Briar. People call it a bunker, but I think it actually technically wasn't a bunker. So this is in this West Virginia. There's this super luxury resort called the Green Briar. Kind of like makes me think of like dirty dancing the resort there. And it had a secret deal with Congress for decades to be. And again, people call it a bunker, but it was really more of a fallout shelter. It was fallout shelter. There was a bunker part to it. And so in case of nuclear war, Congress would take over. There was a secret facility. Right. That parts of it were open but dressed up as like regular parts of the hotel. Parts were truly secret. And so in case of nuclear war, Congress would go there, and they'd also take over the luxury hotel as well, not just the underground part. And that was part of continuity government operations. And it was leaked the Washington Post, I forget what year. In the early 1990s, after the Cold War ended, they were preparing a cover store in the Washington Post-Sunday magazine about it, and then Washington Times heard they were, and I think they technically scooped them, but the rumor I always heard was that House Speaker Tip O'Neill leaked the existence because it was such a waste of money. It was built for the era of bombers, and by the time ICBMs came around, like they would have just nuked the Green Briar before Congress ever got there. But it's a fascinating, and it was sort of an open secret. Like it had been rumored for years. And when I interviewed one guy who was there about like, how could you not know? Like literally, how could you work here for a couple of decades? And he's like, you know, we got families, we've got sickness, like we got taxes, we got, we just had things to worry about. We couldn't worry about the rumors. - Right, now going back to what we were talking about him and he go about the Facebook thing. Isn't it true that Facebook came from a life, something called a life log? So I am not the best historian of Facebook. So life log was a, there's a tendency, and so I don't know if this is the true in this case. So life log was a proposed DARPA program. - Right. - That was going to sort of record sort of everything you, I mean, kind of what we do now with a lot of our smartphones. So at the time, it was very controversial. Like it would record every, your entire life. Everything you hear, see, say, there's a tendency, I'm very much about like, I like to see the connections. There's a tendency to be like DARPA worked on it and then it happened and so it's a DARPA program. I don't think there was a direct, I think life log was very prescient in knowing what was coming down the pike of us recording everything around us in some cases, but I don't know that life log had a direct sort of connection to Facebook, but I don't know if someone said, actually Zuckerberg looked at it and got the idea from it. - Can you look it up Steve? - I'd be curious. - And find the connection. And we looked this up before with Sam Tripoli. I remember there was like a crazy clip that we ended up posting about it 'cause he was like, he was saying DARPA created life log, which ended up being Facebook and he was showing us a date. He was like, the date that he founded Facebook was correlated with some other date. That was very significant to life log. Remember that clip, Steve? - I mean, I think I'd be accurate to say that Facebook kind of created sort of funny when you think about it. They wanted a military program for a life log and then like Facebook created it and we like voluntarily signed up for it. That's a lot of what you see. Like a lot of people make the connection between another DARPA program, total information awareness. And Palantir, and I always, and so I first started writing about Palantir about six years ago. And there's even, it's a Mark Bowden book which says that Palantir perfected what total information awareness started. So I went back to Admiral Point Dexter. He'd been Ronald Reagan's national security advisor. - Director, yeah. - He had been convicted related to the Iran Contra scandal later that was overturned. But Admiral Point Dexter had started and run the total information awareness program at DARPA in 2003. And so I went to him and asked him, is it true that that Palantir grew out of total information awareness? He's like, it's absolutely not true. I know because Peter Tiel, the co-founder of Palantir and Alex Carp, came to see me around 2003. And I, you know, he had left DARPA 'cause like Congress got wind of it. He was pushed out of DARPA. He'd gone back to the private sector, but he still worked with one of the contractors. And so he wanted Peter Tiel and Alex Carp to work with one of the total information awareness contractors and Tiel and Carp were not interested. I think Point Dexter's words to me was they were arrogant, young guys. They're not so young anymore. None of us are. And they went in a different direction. So that's where it's sometimes difficult to say like DARPA did it. Now what? - If I was John Point Dexter, that's what I would say. - Yeah, well, there's that too. Yeah, yeah, there's that too. Definitely prediction markets came pretty directly out of DARPA's work. - Right. Would you find Steve on the life log? - I'm curious now. - There you go. - The relationship between DARPA's life log and Facebook is centered entirely on a striking chronological coincidence. On February 4th, 2004, wired published a report that the Pentagon's, that DARPA had officially canceled life log on February 4th, 2004. The exact same day, Mark Zuckerberg officially launched the Facebook. - The Facebook. Yeah, so sometimes there are certainly DARPA things where I can be like, oh yeah, that came out of DARPA work. Like one of the fascinating things about total information awareness was officially, it was canceled, but Point Dexter confirmed to me what others had already said, which was they canceled the unclassified part of it. And then they took a lot of it and moved it over to the classes that were on, what they were doing was trying to test the waters to see how the public would react to that idea when they presented that in front of Congress. - I mean, yeah. - Which they did, you know, they got a good reaction. And I think that gave them, you know, you know, help them inform what they were gonna do moving forward. Because, yeah, what Palantir has done with total information awareness and a lot of people will say, like Whitney Webb's one of the people that write a lot about this is that, that's basically just that whole program going private. And the way that Palantir has been integrated into this company called Satellogic with this guy who is like the Elon Musk of Argentina, Emiliano Cargamin, who is also a partner with, it's a partnership between this guy Emiliano Cargamin, who's the Elon Musk of Argentina, Elon Musk and SpaceX and Palantir. And they're launching these satellites up into space which have like unbelievable resolution, like apparently better than any other satellite that has ever been launched into space. And like they can really punch in and read, they could probably read your mind for all I know, but they could definitely read like your phone or something like that. And then Palantir's injecting their AI into it and they're using this to create this massive surveillance grid. And from what Whitney Webb had reported on with what's going on with Argentina and Millay and these data center, oh yeah, another part to this whole chain is Sam Altman and his company, which is going to be using those data centers in Argentina. But for what they're trying to do, like their ambition is pre-crime detection. Like using algorithms in their AI and everything to create a digital twin, like they take all the citizens and they create like a digital twin, they are doing this in Argentina, like they've talked about this publicly. And use that digital twin to analyze what your future crimes will be. And the satellite and the Palantir AI and SpaceX and stuff, they're all working together on this, which is freaky. - I mean, the government has been trying to do the US government one iteration or another of this going back since 9/11. I mean, I don't know. Do you remember when the behavior detection officers used to sit, these were TSA officers? This is not that long ago. This is like maybe less than 10 years ago that it was canceled and they were called behavior detection officers and they were TSA officers who would stand in line and they had been trained to buy your facial expressions, see if you were a terrorist, you know? - Oh wow, I wanted nobody. - And then they were building the compliment to that was they were also going to build the sensors that were sort of like the pre-crime detector. So then they were gonna take what they had trained these people to do and then have sensor systems that would detect whether you're lying, whether you have terrorist intentions. And you know, the problem with a lot of this, it doesn't make it less insidious, but the problem with a lot of that stuff was it didn't work. Like it turned out the behavior detection officer program was based on really kind of shoddy science. - What were they using to detect, to analyze the faces and determine what was-- - Oh, so a journalist, she's gonna hate that I name her, Johnna Winter, she's at Reuters now. She got a great reporter and she got a hold of the list of things that they were supposed to look for. And it was like things like nervously touching your hair, I mean, kind of like common sense stuff, it doesn't tell you, like are you a terrorist or were you late for your flight and you're upset? Yeah, it was, it just didn't work very well. - Yeah, look up the, Steve, look up the Merlin project, the Merlin project and then maybe like type in, Palantir next to it, or Satellogic, Satellogic is the other big company. - The trajectory of Palantir is amazing. - Yeah. Merlin is the next generation Satellite constellation by Satellogic designed to provide daily global remapping and persistent theater scale monitoring at one meter resolution. The first Satellite of Merlin one launch October 1st, wow, just a couple of days ago, a 2026 VS SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force. Now what does it say? The core capability is keep going down. On-board processing, process is images, image data directly on the satellite using artificial intelligence. Keep going down. Yeah, the people that I've been reading about that have been reporting on this, say that this is like a freaky invasion of privacy. Yeah, so what you're seeing is satellite capabilities that had, and this is true, not just in satellites, but in other areas of technology, military technologies or military-like technologies that once only the government had are proliferating to the private sector. So the one-meter resolution was something that was like very closely held by the military, and now you have companies developing it without military money that can sell that to a country, you know, there are export control regulations for US stuff, but you can sell the services they've been concerns about private stocking, about privacy, and those are all good concerns to have, and we're just sort of at the beginning kind of upward slope on it. Yeah, we're moving, they're moving everything like with all that, like that even NASA is going from in-house to out-house, like they're moving it out. Elon Musk was the start of that, the idea of having, you know, there were a lot of people that really doubted he could do it, but the idea, you know, space rockets that commercial companies could do it is still like, wow, and he's been successful. Yeah, well, I mean, he's had like a lot of help along the way, like the people that were close to him, like even the guy who think I invest, who investigated some of like the early explosions that he had with some of those rockets with SpaceX, was like, one of the guys was like a former head of NASA. Yeah, one of, actually, SpaceX's first contract with government was with DARPA. Oh, really? Yeah, I mean, I recently even interviewed the head of DARPA, who at the time who gave it to him. You know, sometimes, I've heard, he didn't, to me, he sometimes credited, you know, he's taking credit for like really getting SpaceX off the ground, but it was the first contract and gave them access to Kwajlin, which is a military testing facility in the Pacific for some of the early SpaceX launches. And the DARPA director at the time, Tony Tether, he even said, I think it was the second launch, which was unsuccessful. And they had, I'm the guy who played Scotty on Star Trek. They had a bunch of people's ashes that were supposed to be blasted into space, and that ended up in the ocean, and that had a DARPA's like, we didn't, like, we had no idea that there were, you know, people's remains on this rocket. There's a reason Omnida Muscaria shows up everywhere throughout history, from ancient folklore, video games, and even holiday imagery. But it wasn't until I actually tried it until I really understood why. People report specific experiences with Omnida, feeling more settled in the evening, waking up, unusually rested, and having vivid, almost cinematic dreams. For me, I like to take two or three capsules at the end of a long work day, and I can say, all right, the work day is finally over. I can leave that all behind and settle in and be in the zone with my family. My dreams are way more vivid and meaningful, and I really love waking up, feeling more clear-headed. The brand I trust is Omnitara. 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And to me, when I ended the DARPA book 10 years ago, that to me was both the most wow, and also disturbing thing. People worry about AI rightfully in some cases, in some cases, I think it's overblown. But the idea of people being connected directly to computers and what that means for us in the future, I still find like, you know, our brain is just the most essential thing of what makes us human. And I still in some ways find that the most crazy and also worry some in a lot of ways. Why would DARPA want to create this? Like, what is their goal? Is it to create super soldiers or is it like. When they started in the 1970s, yeah, I interviewed the guy who started the program, George Lawrence, and he's like, yeah, it was science fiction. The idea that you could control, you could have a pilot control an aircraft with his mind. It was completely science fiction, you know. So they can control the people with the brain chips? They want it well, they looked at it that the people using the brain chips would be able, you would use your brain, you would have a chip in it, and it would allow you to interact directly with mechanical objects, with aircraft, with tanks, and that, you know, neural link today is to allow people to operate a computer just by thinking about it. And so, of course, they said, like, yeah, they always had the idea that there were medical applications of it, but DARPA wasn't in the medical business. They started the program with the idea that this could someday lead to people controlling missiles, aircraft drones with their minds, yeah. Wow. Yeah. And somehow it got out of DARPA, and you think Elon Musk is now its private. Well, they, a lot of DARPA work, a lot of DARPA work is classified, a lot of it is not classified. So in the 1970s, when they started this program, they were funding work at universities, so it was not, it was not classified work, it was not closely held. And that's a lot of what DARPA has done over the years, like with computer networking and ARP, and that which became the internet, they might have classified applications for it in mind, but they're often funding work at universities out in the open. Right, right. Yeah, some of the, what was that, the first computer they came up with? Didn't they come up with like the first, like, wasn't it called like the maniac, or like the, the iliac and the maniac? That was outside of DARPA, yeah, but I mean, that was outside of DARPA. And allegedly, that was used by Vaughan Neumann or something to calculate the exact altitude to detonate fat man and little boy to cause the most civilian casualties. Yeah, I mean, the early computer, so DARPA was formed in 1958, so a lot of that computer work, I mean, a lot of it ended up going into DARPA indirectly because they began funding computer science, but that predated DARPA. Okay. Okay, that makes sense. Maniac was in 1952. Oh, okay. And have you seen the stuff that they're doing? Like, I was reading something actually a while ago, we talked about this, but they're funding one of the universities in North Carolina. I think it's might be Chapel Hill. They're funding like psychedelic research. Again, so I haven't, I mean, I have to admit, I haven't followed them. I've been more on the venture capital stuff the past couple of years, so like you I read about stuff. You know, there has been this resurgence of interest in psychedelics. There was a lot of interest in it, instead of the 1960s, I think early 1970s as part of the counterculture. And DOD, both, well, there's the famous unwitting MK-Alture experiment that I'm sure you've heard and read a lot about. And now there's a resurgence of interest in it in treatment for soldiers, I believe, with PTSD. And I know that there has been military funding going into it. So I actually didn't know that DARPA was funding it. It wouldn't surprise me if they are. I always like to say like in the, I have opinions about the areas where I have personally done a lot of research and interviewed people on it. So I don't, I don't know. I hear amazing anecdotal stories. I would want to know more like, okay, is the science of it? Is it helping people? What do the studies say? I'm sort of open-minded on it, but I don't have good or bad on it. Yeah. There's some tortured history there. I heard that. What they were trying to do was basically get soldiers off the battlefield in Ukraine because they had an issue with like, you know, not enough soldiers. Soldiers were getting coming out with like crazy PTSD or psychological trauma. What they wanted to do was they wanted to get them back, give them some crazy psychedelic like psilocybin or whatever, and get them right back out on the battlefield. Like get through the trauma, process all the trauma or whatever, get back out in the battlefield. And what they were trying to do from the thing that I read, which was they were, I think it was like a $27 million fund to North Carolina Chapel Hill, was take the psychedelic effect out of psilocybin. So that these soldiers could get, you know, theoretically, like maybe this will have the same effect on them without having this psychedelic trip. And you could just send them back out. Right, like Rinsom River, yeah, just get them right back on the battlefield. Or maybe, you know, this is like my speculation. Maybe they could, if they could do that, right, like they could give these soldiers psilocybin and without them tripping, will they still have those other effects, like more like mental focus, better edge detection like their science that says it increases visual Cuity things like that, you know, make them think different. I don't know. I mean, so DARPA has long been in The super soldier business like how do we get soldiers to be more effective to go with less sleep to be stronger To you know be better Sniper's all of those areas darn instead of these areas go up and down instead of their interest It was very high during the global war on terror because we had a lot of soldiers deployed on the ground a lot of special operations Wouldn't surprise me that it's again come I mean I see it coming back now and what I always tell people like you know There's always sort of an underlying science. This will help, you know medicine. It'll help other areas Yeah, I know there was a lot of controversy about the Department of Defense sort of renaming itself the Department of War But at least it reminds people that when the Pentagon Funds something at the end of the day. It's funding it to fight wars. It's a quiet part out loud Yeah, it says the quiet part out loud. So I was I mean, they should get congressional approval, but I don't Calling it Department of War at least tells you what it is We had this guy Simon Dixon on the other day, and he was like what was he saying? He's like he's like for all the shit of the Trump administration is doing He's like the one thing I do appreciate is there at least being honest about everything like Department of War They're being honest like we're just not defense. We're just gonna like do firing squad Extreme. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they say a lot of stuff out loud that was already there and Department of War is part of it. Yeah totally now. What were you saying early about you? Microwave weapons. Okay, so this is probably my biggest white whale So I'm sure you've heard about Havana syndrome. Yes, okay, so I've probably I think there's a lot of people out there who think I'm sort of like a Non-believer in Havana syndrome Yeah, you know Jack Murphy was talking about this with us a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, Jack's an awesome reporter and he's done great reporting on this. So where I've sometimes been a critic is I only know What I've read and from the interviews I've done Havana syndrome is really hard because you have that core group of CIA officers who were in Havana and Were medically affected by something and it sounded like a number of them were like really in bad shape and were Evaluated medically and then there was all this controversy the doctors couldn't agree there was Competition between a doctor and Miami and then at you pen between what was affecting them So my argument is long been like and then the group of people affected grew was like Russia. It was China It was the country of Georgia. It was people on the White House ellipse like the number of people just grew So I I don't know I do believe that there are a number of people who have studied have suffered from something But I have long been obsessed about classified weapons separating it from that for a second because it has been so classified over the years There has been a lot of research into it. I was given the these code names of classified programs I have a current lawsuit trying to get their records out of the Pentagon. They acknowledged that the code names existed They're hello good bye and good night. And these were classified weapons programs Run during the Cold War possibly after Hello was was auditory effects of microwaves. This is the idea that microwaves can create the The sensation of like voices or sounds in your head So one was called hello One was called goodbye We know what goodbye was because goodbye became the goodbye weapon and was declassified and it's today called the active denial system It was never it was kind of a stupid idea. Do you remember hearing about the pain ray? It would like burn the top layer of your skin. So this was very there was they were trying to deploy it actually to Afghanistan in the in I mean Sometime between 2009 and 2011. So it was this microwave weapon and It creates a burning sensation. It's an invisible beam and it creates a burning sensation and the idea was maybe they could use it for Non-lethal effects like you could put it on a base. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah Like crowd control, crowd control exactly that the origins of that was the code name goodbye And then you'll sometimes see references that active denial system came from the goodbye weapon Okay, I actually volunteered as a guinea pig for that Not that scary. It was raining out rain attenuates the beam didn't work that well But that that weapon had a lot of problems the third code name was good night And this was a microwave weapon that would heat up a part of your brain and kill you. Oh God. Yeah So I don't know how far I know where the goodbye weapon went because that was declassified I don't know what happened to hello and good night But I know that the Air Force continues to keep research on classified weapons classified So I have an active lawsuit going on to get those records out of the Air Force. We'll see where it goes There was just sort of a status hearing or something How would they use microwave weapons to put voices in your head? So there is this thing and there's a lot of misinformation about it Called the the fry effect Okay, and it comes from a scientist Alan fry. I've interviewed him. Yeah, I've heard of him. Really interesting guy really good guy Who I think it was in the how far back did it go to the first publish and then I may be missing this up I think it was in the 1960s that he first published He had heard reports that people working in antenna fields which generates microwave energy We're hearing sort of like clicking sounds like in their head So he went out he was a biophysicist he went out and experimented you know on himself and he brought deaf people with him People who didn't have the ability to actually hear things and the deaf people he brought They heard this sensation of clicks and noises in their heads and so he published a number of papers on it And he never worked in classified areas So he had a lot of interest in his work from China Russia on the defense department, but they kind of went their own ways so One of going back to my obsession with microwave weapons every sort of ice I like to joke every like five to ten years. You'll hear someone talk about the theoretical voice of god weapon Yes, and so this was the idea of harnessing what's called the microwave auditory effect harnessing this microwave energy And using it as a weapon. So one of the theoretical ideas like a sia weapon or what it would actually would injure people Or would just be like a psychological thing a psychological thing that you would you know project what would be the voice of god and say You know god a law whatever you believe in orders you to put down your weapons. Yes A little of a crazy idea. I mean what it or a little bit. It's super crazy and I um Pull up the Jesus thing the Havana Jesus story Remember we looked that up we could bump that guy the other day. He's like that wasn't real. That was Darcy So I you know in every few years you'll see like a A bit like an unclassified contract given to a private company I even knew the head of one of these companies that got a contract And I knew the guy and I'm like what was this contract about yeah, and he's like oh We had a couple Russian scientists on staff emigres and like they'd heard about this in Russia And so I went to them and I'm like what are you doing? And he's like they were like zapping each other They were like practicing they were testing on each other And he's just like it was crazy, but he's like it never went anywhere um So I like to state what I know I am obsessed by the the class if I work in microwave weapons because I think conspiracy theories come when governments keep things hidden Exactly Yeah, and so I want to know And then they blame us if they call us crazy for coming to conclusions. Yeah But I do not so the reason I can't get from there to Havana syndrome I don't know. I don't know what is caused the people suffering and I don't want to Say that they aren't suffering for I think some of them absolutely are. I mean you I've heard interviews with them But I've seen the microwave Devices um that the US developed so let's take the the pain rate the active denial system for out control So when I volunteered to be a guinea pig. I think this was like in 2011 The thing like it didn't work in the rain. It was on a humvee It took like 12 hours to power up. You can't move it anywhere And even then the weapon was a failure. It was just it was too limited It had like badly buried a report that um an an airman who volunteered as a guinea pig got like badly burned There's supposed to be an automatic shutoff of the weapons So it doesn't actually burn you. I think it gave him third degree burns. He had to be airlifted out Um, it was just a disaster of a weapon. So For me to believe that microwave weapons um Were used in a place like Havana means that Cuba russia someone shrunk it down kept it hidden and you know the the electronics to shrink it down. This is like Physics is the same all over the world that you shrink it from like a humvee that takes 12 hours to power up and doesn't work in a lot of conditions And only went a certain distance. Yeah, and then you Put it in a Havana and it could go through walls and follow specific people I don't know. I don't know what has caused their effects. I have long been a skeptic that it's microwave weapons I am open to proof to the contrary But I haven't seen where we are. I mean, that's why I'm suing the government like I really am curious the origins of this research how far it went But what I've seen you're suing who specifically. Oh the the U.S. government, the Pentagon. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's why, so when you file a freedom of information after request and they deny it, you can open litigation. You can sue them and say, yeah, so I've done this over the years. When I was working on the DARPA book, I sued them successfully for these interviews that they did with all the living directors of DARPA. And yeah, so it's out of, like in this day and age, where like FOIA requests take, you know, a couple decades, it's often one of the more, if your case is good, it's one of the more effective ways to get information out of them. - Do you think that's partially the reason? No, I don't want to, that's not the video. There's a, I'm talking about the CIA Jesus that they wanted to project over Havana, I remember. - Yeah, I'm not, I'm searching for that. - I don't know that one, that sounds wild. - Yeah, pull it, we pulled it up, you pulled it up on Google. - This is what we, we pulled up. - Yeah, this is gonna get us copyrighted though. - Oh man. - Yeah, pull up the description on Google AI. It broke it down and told you the name of the documents that it was declassified on and all that stuff. Wait, when we had Darcy on, what was I just saying? I forgot what I was just saying. - Jesus projected out. - Oh, no, you're talking about FOIA. Do you think that's partially the reason why they want to privatize all this shit? So that you can't FOIA like these private companies? - I think it's a nice side benefit of it, for sure. I think the reason it's being privatized is because Silicon Valley venture capital is realizing there is a whole ton of money to be made in defense. So it's a couple of things that are going on. So one, it's money that can be made. - Right. - So the control, you know, it used to be that a government was the only one who could launch rockets. Elon Musk had proven, no, others can do it. Now, in fact, like looking at microwave weapons, there is a company now that I interview in my book, Epirus, which is building high powered microwave weapons, not against people but to take down drones. That would have been unthinkable for a private company to do a couple decades ago. All of these companies, Palmer Lucky, sort of the Hawaiian shirt wearing guy, a lot of people recognize with Andrew. They're using venture capital, private capital to build weapons that once only the Department of Defense or war would have fun. - He's Peter Teal Funded too, right? - They did get investment from Peter Teal's Founders Fund, yeah, I mean, 'cause they have all the Lord of the Rings connections, the Palantir, Andrew. - Oh, yeah. So the plan to fake the second coming of Christ over Cuba was proposed under Operation Mongoose, also known as the Cuban Project, it was a covert campaign designed by the Kennedy administration to stabilize and overthrow Fidel Castro. The concept was referred to by skeptics as the elimination by illumination was a psychological warfare strategy designed to exploit the religious beliefs of Cuban, Cuban's heavily Catholic population. The setup was used a US submarine to quietly surface just off the coast of the Havana Harbor. And the submarine would fire low burning star shells into the night sky to create a luminous glowing silhouette on the clouds, which would be interpreted by the population as a miraculous projection and the second coming of Christ. - That's crazy. - Accompanying the propaganda would proclaim that Christ had returned to denounce Fidel Castro as the anti-Christ, and the US military hoped this optical illusion would spark widespread panic to undermine the Castro authority. And this was declassified under what and when, Steve, keep going down? - I probably the church committee. - Okay, yeah, an operation, Mongoose. Keeps, okay, yeah. Yeah, this is legit. There's actual documents. - No, no, no, no, like that. Mongoose, I've definitely heard of. - Yeah, people hear this on the face, Fidel like, "Oh, that's fake, that's a conspiracy theory." But no, you can read it. And let's just classify it, Steve. - Let's go to my point that like in some ways the national security, because there's a lot of ideas that you would just be laughed at. If you propose them in public, although we kind of get that now sometimes, but when something is classified, you get these proposals and nobody's, there's no one around to laugh at them or because they're not sort of vetted and they're like, "Oh, yeah." I mean, I would hear this, like at one point DARPA was blending a particle beam and it was gonna be powered by doing a nuke under the great lakes. It was crazy. - Whoa. - And it's even the guy who was sort of in charge of the study said this was crazy. But when you get this close, people, they're like, "Oh, yeah, that's fast." Oh, that could work. Money, money, money. - It's money, it also just like, you know, sometimes it's good to laugh at an idea. Sometimes that's healthy because you can realize like that sounds kind of stupid, right? Like do you think that idea's gonna work? - No. - No. Yeah, and that's what I mean by like sometimes the sort of military, the national security community is its own subculture with its own fringe ideas. - Yeah, so you're saying they don't have like, they're kind of in their own echo chamber. - Exactly, they're in their own echo chamber and there's no one around to laugh at them. - You might notice it in a photo before you notice it in the mirror. But that hairline is moving backwards folks. While hair loss is common, that doesn't mean it's gone forever. Now thanks to hymns hair loss solutions. hymns gives you access to prescription treatment personalized to you. Your plan can include finasteride, an ingredient shown to stop hair loss and manoxidil, which is used to regrow hair in as little as three to six months. You answer a few questions online and connect to a licensed provider who will determine if the treatment is right for you. 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And that they were gonna release chemicals on the battlefield against the enemy that would like oxytocin that would just make people love each other or turn them gay. And you know, you have to make fun of this stuff, but then like I, the reason why, I thought I hadn't thought of the gay bomb in years. And I thought of it because Palmer Lucky, there's a clip right now that's really big on X of Palmer Lucky talking about like apparently, I guess it's a startup idea. And I don't know if he was being facetious so I don't want to make fun of him too much. - Yeah. - Where he's like oxytocin would be the end of divorce. Like we could use it for marital counseling. Yeah, this is just really big on X in the past couple days. - Okay. - And it comes from that, I know that having interviewed Palmer, he spends a lot of time reading old reports on the defense technical information service. Like old Cold War era reports. And so it wouldn't, I don't know where he got it from. It wouldn't surprise me if he got this marriage. Oh, yeah, that. - This is it. All right, let's put the headphones on. We can hear it. - I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling. We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well. There's a lot of people who want to stay together. Most of the people who don't want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids. And we can, look, if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not. But if they were, then oxytocin doping to stay together. - I've heard about that before. - It's really critical, right? So people sort of drift apart over time. Oxytocin is safe. But if it's understood, we use them under-- - It's the bonding, it's the bonding hormone. - That's right. It's the mammal pair bonding chemical. There's things you can do to increase the uptake and it's very well understood. Also, totally unregulated, which is great. Unregulated spaces are a lot of-- - You can go buy a kilogram of oxytocin on sigma-aldrich chemical supply right now. - Hello, Code Palmer. - If you do that, maybe you won't, maybe you won't die alone. - Is this guy married with kids? - He is married. In fact, he's married to Matt Geetz's sister. - No, right. - Yeah, yeah. - Oh, that's weird. - It is a little weird. I mean, I don't, I've got no, you know, you love who you love. - Oh, wow. - Small world, right? It is a small world, yeah. - Yeah, that's weird. So you were saying that this, that there was a, the gay bomb would release a shit like oxytocin and make everyone put down their arms and just loving each other. - It was theoretical. The idea was maybe that they would turn gay and that would despair that it was a great, it deserved to be mocked. And so, yeah, I spent a lot of time earlier in my career just like mocking these dumb ideas. Maybe even too much. I think some people got really insulted, but I'm like, I kind of needed that. Like all these crazy ideas. And that's sometimes, I don't want a mock bomb or lucky, but like, sometimes that's what I hear now. Now that a lot of this work has moved to the private sector to venture capital, I'm starting to hear some of these same crazy ideas only instead of enclosed Pentagon meetings, they're like at conferences talking about them. - Well, maybe the issue is when they were young, they got made fun of too much. And now their goal is to create weapons that will kill lots of people 'cause that makes them feel good. But we had this guy, Connor Leighi on the podcast their day who was, he founded an AI safety company and he was originally working a lot on AI, like developing LLMs and stuff like that. And his whole view on all of this is like the nerds that are creating all this super dangerous stuff. whether it be like DARPA stuff or AI superintelligence, he's like, they're all nerds and nerds are cowards. And he's like, they're not gonna stop doing something because of the morality of it. - I mean, I think it's the money. I think it's kind of what you said. I mean, the whole AI discourse now, it's like, it's gonna kill us all, but why don't you invest a lot of capital in our companies? I don't, and I think the public is getting increasingly, like there's just this cognitive dissonance that the public is picking up on. Like really, and you wanna put a data center in my community, but you're saying AI's gonna have 10% chance of killing us all. Like that doesn't make sense to us. - It is very strange. - Yeah. - I don't know what it's about. I don't know if it's like something just to freak out the population, you know, or if it actually is as real as the superintelligence idea is as real as they say it is. You know, I even heard recently that like Elon Musk and Wario or whatever his name is at Claude. And then Sam Altman all went to the president and said that we need to stop. We need to halt this for a little bit. And he said, no, we gotta keep going. - Yeah. - I wonder how much of it is real and how much of it is theatrics to. You know, you gotta wonder that in today's day and age. - I think there's a lot of it is theatrics. And I think, you know, there's a tendency to dismiss the public as sort of like, you know, not dumb, but like, oh, they don't know. But I actually think like, it goes back to the conspiracy thing and it's the flip side of the government conspiracy. When people hear things that don't make sense, you know, people saying things like it's gonna kill us all, but we gotta move forward really, really quickly, they rightfully become very suspect of it. And I think that is what we're seeing in a lot of the backlash against AI right now. - Well, tell me about this particle beam up and under the lake where they got made. - This was Project CSA. This was an early DARPA project. So, Christopher Wallace was the scientist behind it. So that the DARPA used to have this group of scientists advising them called the Jasons. - Yes. - Yeah, and these were sort of eminent nuclear physicists, other top scientists. The Jasons still exist, but they're no longer reporting to DARPA. And I think they kind of don't do as much of the, they still do interesting work, but probably not as much as they used to do. So the Jasons, these were these outside scientists, they had top secret security clearances. And there was one of them, he's often called the Greek elevator repairman who was born in Greece, not quite self-educated, came over to the States, was sort of a certified genius and was behind a lot of very weird weapons projects. And one of them was Project CSA, which was the idea of building a particle beam that would shoot down ballistic missiles. And so I interviewed the DARPA guy who was in charge of it. And he's just like, okay, this was a stupid, I mean, not stupid, but he's just like, it's not feasible. Like, it couldn't, it could work theoretically, but the amount of money, what you would have to do to make it work is just impossible. So he's like, I'm going to convene all the Jasons and I'm going to make them confront the ludicrous of it. - Okay. - Yeah. - So he gets them together and they're talking about like, it would take like the entire national electric grid to power this weapon. And so the guy behind it, Christopher Falls, he gets up and he's like on the board and he's doing these figures, okay, he's like, we could drain the great lakes and draining the lakes would generate the power. And the guy trying to cut was like, how are you going to drain the great lakes? And he's like with a nuclear suppository, we're going to put a nuke under the great lakes which will help drain it. And this guy is just like, this is crazy and the other Jasons are sitting around nodding their heads like saying like, yeah, that could work. - Where would the water go? - It would, I don't even know they got that far. (laughing) - Yeah. - And this was somehow created particle beam. - This would power the particle beam. - Power the particle beam. - And the particle beam would do what? - It would shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile. That was the goal, yeah. So projects he saw was not built. We, yeah, so it was eventually killed off. - How, you did a whole book on nukes, right? You traveled the world, we traveled the world looking at some of the decommissioned nuclear sites. Is that right? - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - But what was your book called? - Nuclear Family Vacation, yeah. - What, what was that about? What made you wanna do that? - So it was the idea, I mean, part of it at the time was being a little bit of a workaholic. And so was doing a lot of travel on vacation time to nuclear sites to write about them. And it became this idea like, well, what if we went around to, you know, to see what can you see as a tourist? Okay, we had access to some places that were harder for tourists to get to. It was easier to get us pressed. But I think pretty much all of the places we visited in theory were places to include Iran at the time, which said we welcome nuclear tourists. And so we went to Semi-Politansk in Kazakhstan, which was the Soviet's nuclear testing site to the Nevada test site outside of Las Vegas where the U.S. tested nuclear weapons, it's still a military testing site, to quadriline this island in the Pacific where we launch intercontinental ballistic missiles to see if they can still hit things that we want them to hit. And just traveled all around the world and then to Isfahan, the uranium conversion facility in Iran, was also one of the places we visited. And so the idea of it was to get a sense of how much we forget that this infrastructure of the Cold War is still operating. Like even when we visited Greenbrier, the congressional, the continuity of government site, for Congress, so officially it had been decommissioned. But when we went there, there was still an area where they're like, "Oh yeah, we're not allowed to show that, Homeland Security." So it was pretty clear that some part of it at the time, probably not as a fallout shelter for Congress. Some part of it was still being used for some sort of classified storage or facilities. But a lot of the places, the whole point is like we forget that like we still have a hair trigger alert for nuclear weapons, we like an hour and the world could end in theory. Russia and the US still have their ICBMs targeted at cities, at nuclear sites, at installations. There's less concern now that the United States and now Russia would go directly to war, but that still exists. And so part of it was to remind people, that's why when I hear also the apocalyptic statements about AI, it's not that I don't believe them. I don't think there's a lot of evidence for a lot of them. But I'm like, there's actually something real that can kill us within a couple hours, like all of us, like in civilization as we know it. Like that's a scenario that we understand. I'm not sure I see yet the scenario for AI killing us all. - Well, if you hear all these stories about these bots escaping open AI and like the hugging face thing where they're able to hack other companies and get into their databases and manipulate things like that, my biggest fear is like what if they could escape and get into like nuclear facilities and like set off nukes or biological weapons facilities and let loose biological weapons, things like that, things like that we already have in place, that's freaky to me. - It is freaky and I think those are things that we need to make sure don't happen. I think the pushback I've seen, and there's people, you know, much sort of technically better able to throw shade at some of these claims, is that a lot of these like, oh, we did it again from the companies is like they set the rules. You know, they gave these bots access to the internet. Like, oh, it escaped. Like it did things they didn't expect, but they also didn't have the sort of safety guard rails in place they need. So someone would have to decide to give AI access to our nuclear command and control. I think the thing that people are worried about as as AI gets more and more integrated into our military structure and command and control, there will be decisions made like how much, okay, so if it's generating targets, you know, should it generate, should we let AI generate, you know, targets for nuclear weapons, like how far does this go? And I think those are the discussions that you're starting to see now. But I don't, I don't love the scary, like, you know, when people say like, oh, 50% chance it ends human civilization. I'm like, how did you arrive at that number? Like sure, maybe, but did you just make it up and you're planning for an IPO too? So, yeah, that's weird. Yeah. What do you think the current threat is today of a nuclear war? Like how, like all these places that you visited, like do you think that that's like a real threat or do you think that like the sort of prisoner, dilemma, game theory thing is going to continue working like it's been working since the 40s? I think that the idea that the threat of an all-out nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia is less now than during the Cold War. Like, it's still there and it's still an incredibly scary scenario. But it's less now because, you know, the United States and Russia have, we're not locked in the, oh my God, are they going to nuke us first? Do we nuke them first? We're not anywhere near the dynamic that we had in the Cold War with that. I think the concerns that are rightfully there are other countries that are have or developing nuclear weapons. That, I think, is like a regional exchange or on in Pakistan. What if Saudi Arabia develops nukes? Israel has nukes that we don't acknowledge. North Korea. I think those are the bigger concerns today. But, you know, the fact that we still have them that there's the arms control agreements have lapsed. Like, that should be it. concern for all of us. - And also the nuclear submarines that are off the coasts of both the coasts of the United States. Like there was an image that we pulled up before where it shows all this nuclear submarine traffic highways and where they patrol around the world and it's insane. They're off the California coast, they're off the Florida coast, the whole East Coast of Florida, nuclear and Chinese submarines patrolling also up like off the coast of Greenland up there. It's terrifying because they could launch, they could service a submarine and launch a nuke that could be here in, I don't know how long, probably 30 minutes, you know. It doesn't have to be an ICBM. - Yeah, and that's the thing. You know, when I think again of scenarios that could end humanity, like nuclear weapons are still the one way that it could really happen. And wouldn't it be good if we did everything? To just say like, okay, well, sort of nuclear weapons haven't been used since World War II and so, you know, deterrence works and things like forever, will it work forever? So wouldn't it be good to do everything you can think of to do whether it's reducing the stockpile, whether it's having arms control agreements, whether just working with countries that do have nuclear weapons to, wouldn't you want to do everything you could to reduce the chances of a nuclear exchange? Like, I think you would. And we're not doing that now. What was it like going to Iran? - So Iran at the time, so when was this? It would have been like 2007 or 2008. It was a very different time. They were sort of opening up. And so that's where they said like, we welcome nuclear tourists to visit our peaceful nuclear facilities. And so they allowed us to visit Isfahan, which was a uranium conversion facility. But then we were there, we were like, well, can we visit this just acknowledged site in the tons where allegedly was some of the sort of more secret work was going on. They're like, oh yeah, soon. But yeah, not right now. So it was a dog and pony show. I mean, the US does this too. But I guess it was interesting when we look at where we are now. I mean, I sort of remember, because you see what they show you. Like, here's our facility in the cameras that show that we're being monitored. And we're not really enriching uranium to weapons grade. But we weren't spies. And it was clearly, they're showing you what they're showing. But I think what was really interesting there at the time is we kept asking our translator. We wanted to see the old US embassy in Iran, because this is what we grew up with was the hostage crisis. And I've seen pictures there of down with the evil empire. And our translator just kept trying to avoid taking us there. And we realized he was embarrassed, because most of the younger people you would meet were so happy to see at the time Americans. And they looked at Iran that part of society as being Western oriented. And so badly wanted contact with the United States. So for our translator who was probably at the time, mid to late 20s, like it was embarrassing to see this old part of Iran, the sort of down with the US. But now it's a whole new ball game with the military operations there. I think it's a shame that this is where we're at. - Yeah, I was watching an interview that somebody was doing with one of the head spokespeople for Iran, maybe this might have been a couple months ago now. And he asked him the question. He was like, you know, all this nuclear stuff seems to be like the fundamental common denominator for all of your biggest problems. Like you guys are in like a very oil-rich part of the world. Like, why can't you guys go to fossil fuels or whatever? And the guy's answer was like, oh, well, you know, the environment, green energy and all this stuff. And it just seemed like a cop out. It didn't seem like he really believed that. - Yeah, we were set up like one of the, at one point, they said, okay, we're gonna take you now to interview a prominent nuclear scientist. And we were just taken there and we interviewed him, which was mostly a lecture about US imperialism and the Iran-a-Rock war. - We didn't get in many questions about nuclear anything, but we were introduced to him is he's a professor at the university. It turned out he was on the UN sanctions list and then Iran, Iran, Israel eventually assassinated him when they did these assassination campaigns. - As they do. - As they do. Yeah, I took them twice. He was, they did one assassination and he survived. And then I think it was more recently, maybe a few years ago. - This was a scientist? - Well, we were introduced to him as a professor at the university. - Okay. - And I think as to the extent he was on the UN sanctions list, he was high up in Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program. - Yeah. Yeah, we had, we had John Karyaku on one, most recent time he was on. He was explaining to us how there was this, I think they called it the national intelligence assessment that they do where they get the head of all whatever, 20-something intelligence agencies that exist. And they all come to a round table. They all go into their own organization, no department, and they do like an assessment individually. And they try to assess does Iran have a nuclear weapons program? Like are they trying to develop nukes? And they all, the head of each intelligence agency came to the department and to a round table meeting. And they unanimously came to the conclusion that no, they don't have any kind of program to develop a nuclear weapon. And this happened twice according to John. So it's very strange, it's very strange that we ended up in this war on the idea that Iran has nuclear weapons, especially coming right on the heels of the government saying, after they dropped those bunker buster bombs on the tons, I think it was, saying that they pushed them back 25 years or whatever it was. - I don't think I believe that. And I think whatever happens with this war, assuming that Iran comes out of it, and I think they will. Wouldn't, if you were whatever remains of the government around, wouldn't you want a nuclear weapon? Like if we had a nuclear weapon, this wouldn't have happened. The US doesn't bomb countries with nuclear weapons. I think if anything, they'll come out of it pretty convinced that they need one. I'm sure that the US campaign has set them back. Has it set them back 25 years? I don't believe that there. They're both the knowledge and the distribution and the fact that we weren't even able to take out all of their ballistic missile capabilities. Like they have been very good at hiding things underground, fortifying them. I think they'll come out of it with the ability. I don't know how long it'll be. You'll probably need another national intelligence assessment to come to that conclusion, but it's not, I don't think it's going to be 25 years or anything close to that. Yeah. What do you know about in the United States, like our ability to intercept nuclear missiles or nuclear warheads? Because they have these merged weapons now, where the tip of the missile will have three or four nuclear warheads, right? And they can blast those off instantaneously, where there's one can be targeted towards Washington. Another one can be targeted towards New York or whatever. Like do you know what our capabilities are for intercepting those? So my understanding, and I'm not always the most update today, is that the technology has certainly gotten better. It's gotten better, whether you say over the past 10 years, 20 years. Certainly from the, it's got a lot better since the very fanciful ideas under Ronald Reagan, where we were going to have an X-ray laser in space that was going to be fueled by a thermonuclear explosion. So we've developed more realistic capabilities, but they're pretty limited. We do not have the capability, if it were a Russia, or even like a China, or countries that have, you know, one a large, a large number, we don't have the ability to defeat it. So the question is, how good of capabilities do we have to defeat like a single missile from like a rogue state, North Korea, or maybe someday Iran? And I am not the most update to that, but I think we have like, maybe we could, like maybe even probably, but it's not anywhere near 100%. And so yeah, now, so when a country can murve, when they can have multiple warheads, where they can do decoy warheads, which is super cheap, you just put a bunch of decoys out there. - Right. - And it's the arguments for why these systems can be overwhelmed pretty easily by even a semi-sophisticated state. I mean, it just depends where you want to put your money. Like we have the ability to make it even better within limits, but you can spend a lot of money. It's sort of like what's going on Iran now, you know? We can intercept Shahed drones, but it costs a whole lot of money to do it. And it's a lot harder when it's intercontinental ballistic missiles. But it's the same thing, like the cost of defense is so much more than the cost of offense. - Especially their offense. - Their offense. - Because our missiles cost a ton of money. - Yeah, so is that where you want to spend, you know, your entire budget? I mean, I guess you can. And I think that's a problem you can spend a lot of money and still get limited effectiveness. So that should be the debate that we should have now, but I don't really see it going on. - Yeah, I know we do have like the interceptor missiles at like Vandenberg and I think in Alaska, we have some interceptor missiles. But from what I understand is we only have like, you know, maybe 40 or 50 of them. Yeah, we have a limited capability. So like if there was a hypothetical nuclear attack on the United States from Russia or North Korea, are they just going to launch one nuke, or are they going to launch the motherload of nuke? Right. Right. And if we only have 40 to 50 interceptor missiles that are who knows what they're probably, how accurate they are of targeting, it's like shooting a bullet out of the sky with another bullet, right? Yeah. So like, what's the accuracy of that? Is it 100%? I doubt it. No. So if they launch hundreds of nukes and we only have that many interceptors, that's not going to be good. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I think that there was that film House of Dynamite. And like with every hypothetical fictional scenario, people criticize this or that. But I think the underlying issue it was bringing out that these systems have limited capabilities and, you know, they might hit it, they might not. And that wasn't even like, that was like, you know, one or two, I think the scenario is like one or two missiles incoming. So you get to like 20, 30, 40, 100, yes. It's not. And that's, you know, you hear now a lot of talk about golden dome. It's golden dome. So golden dome is Trump's idea of basically expanding missile defense to, you know, kind of back to the Ronald Reagan ideas. We're going to have an impenetrable shield, which is basically building different systems. So under Ronald Reagan, there was this idea called brilliant pebbles, which was going to launch these killer satellites in space that would intercept the missiles. And it was a little bit quite crazy at the time. And it would have cost an immense amount of money to do it. And there were lots of questions about the feasibility. And it was killed off like a lot of programs when the Cold War ended. So now, instead of brilliant pebbles, they have brilliant swarms, which is the resurrection of this idea of having satellites that, you know, are in orbit and then can be used to intercept an incoming missile. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, that's freaky. You know, the other crazy thing about these bombs is that they can, if they detonate them in the atmosphere, it takes out our entire grid. EMP, electromagnetic pulse, yeah. And we were doing a crazy test during the Cold War detonating nukes in the atmosphere. Yeah. You know, who, well, one of the projects, the guy who was behind Project Sisa, this Greek born nuclear physicist, he was also what was it called, Project Argus, which was going to blast nuclear weapons in the upper atmosphere to create a shield to take out ballistic missiles. Right. So that guy, Nick Kristofall, yes, it was Nicholas. He was behind a lot of these crazy ideas, yeah. Project Argus, they wanted to detonate nukes in the atmosphere and the idea was that this would create. It would be, in the upper atmosphere, it would create these killer neutrons that would take out sort of it would take out the electronics, the device, the navigation device or GPS of these rockets. Yes. Yes. That's that shit crazy. It did. I mean, they did the experiment, but they never built. You know, a lot of these, there's a lot of things that can theoretically work, like the nuclear physics are there, but the technology often is not or, you know, what you would have to build is just decades and decades out there. The argument of this brilliant pebbles to brilliant swarms is that Elon Musk, what made brilliant pebbles, one of the things that was wrong was it was so expensive. And so the argument I've heard now is that Elon Musk, who has brought down the cost of launching satellites, a great deal that maybe now it would be more affordable to launch these, you know, I don't even know how many hundreds of satellites you would need, but I don't know that that solves all of the problems with it, but that's the argument. Yeah. We have so many satellites up there now, too, like this, I, you know, the Kessler effect, I think it's called, where like, there's like so many satellites, what was the problem with the Kessler effect would eventually, there'll be so many satellites that will just be crashing into each other and like falling. It's a runway chain reaction to growth. One gets destroyed, it creates like billions of pieces of trash that just destroys everything else. Like creates billions and billions of pieces of trash. Right. There's like tens of thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth though. Space trash, yeah. Yeah. Which is insane. Wow. You know, and they're launching them every single day. You know, you can drive over to Cape Canaveral right now and I guarantee you there's a rocket that's going up with the satellite today. Yeah. It's wild times. Yeah. It is wild times. You know, I don't know. You would think, too, that they would have like, you know, all this money that goes into these programs and these scientists that are trying to invent wild shit like, haven't they, why haven't they figured out a better way to launch it into space other than like shooting jet fuel out of a rocket? There have been some wild ideas for good, like, like, there was like a slingshot idea. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There have been other proposals, but I think they exist in the theoretical. I mean, there's a thing with, you know, Elon Musk, there's people, you know, there's, I have a lot of problems with Elon Musk. So there's the argument like, well, he didn't really, you know, he took government money and built on government research and all of that is true. But he really did bring down the cost of space launch, not, not initially through any sort of advanced technology, but just through some basic engineering, like, how do we, how do we make it cheaper? Not like, how do we make the best rocket ever, but how do we make this cheaper? But and so one argument is, like, is that really that, and, you know, important? Like, well, yeah, it actually was, because like, getting things into space was just so costly. He made it cheaper, but, you know, lots of other problems with him. What is your opinion on those things that those fighter jet pilots were seeing that was reported on in the New York Times in, was it 2014 maybe? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I guess I'm, I'm of the opinion that it was artifacts that it was, you know, we see things all the time. I mean, I think there were people who, you know, there was a big craze, if you remember, I think it was like a year and a half ago of all of these drones that were suddenly appearing with our military bases. Over New Jersey. Yeah. And then there were like reports. And I think a lot of them really were drones, but then you started getting people calling in like, I see a drone and people are like, that's an aircraft. That's a commercial aircraft. So I don't know what they were seeing going back to those reports. What was it? Like, Tic Tac or something? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's videos of them that had gone released. So I don't know. The state answer was that we don't know what it is. Yeah. I think there's a lot of things where we don't know for sure. So I don't know. But to go from there. I think there should have been DARPA. So yeah, that's always, you know, what I get going back to the conspiracy thing, when what I don't think they were some of the crazier reports that, you know, you've sometimes heard about like a secret anti-gravity technology or that it was UFOs, I look for the easiest, not the easiest. I look for what's the most logical explanation. We do know that the Department of War, Department of Defense has a lot of classified programs. And we do know that they fly them. And we do know that sometimes they don't always tell people. So could it be classified systems, I don't know about those videos specifically. But I have seen, and I think there's lots of evidence for the Pentagon allowing sort of misinterpretations of things like, oh, it was a UFO. They'd rather have people believe it's a UFO or something far fetched than like, oh, my God, they saw our actual classified program. Exactly. So they're perfectly happy to let a lot of that misinformation go. Yeah. I think, you know, out of all the people I've talked to, I would say the majority of people seem to believe that that was some sort of secret military thing. They would have been testing on our top military equipment on like our top Navy pilots to see like what they thought about it or like how the jets could react to them or whatever. You know, maybe it was some sort of thing they launched off of a submarine or something like that, because those test ranges would be like the perfect place to test some shit like that. I don't know, but to me, I look for the explanations that make the most sense. It doesn't mean they're true. But it's like, it's like to just speculate, you can't speculate, there's something wrong with speculation. But like, I feel like sometimes the truth is a little bit right in front of you. And I want to get to the bottom of things. I think that's my obsession. And I don't know, I don't like things where it's like, oh, it's a, I mean, how do you disprove that it's a UFO? How do you prove it is? Could be, but that doesn't seem like the most likely explanation. I'd rather look for the likely explanation, then if that's not true, move on to the next one. Yeah. The problem is they just, they release vague, grainy videos and we have a handful of pilots and wizos talking about it and giving their account of what they saw. And then you have this crazy performance in Congress where you have all these people lining up and all these politicians talking about it and these alleged like secret skiff meetings where they're going to tell them the truth and we're going to get to the bottom of this. And they create this big media, media hype around it. And I'm asking like, why, like why is the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street, you know, Wall Street Journal, all everyone is covering this crazy story. Some people, they make it their life's mission to find it out, they turn it into their religion almost. And then the other people just write it off like, "Oh, it's nothing, it's just a waste of time, you should ignore it." But there's a reason why, I believe there's a reason why all of these publications, all these big news media outlets are covering it, nonstop, even on television, and you have Congress and the government talking about it in generals, who was like, what was the guy, Clapper is like one of the head people behind this, like spearheading this thing, trying to get it out there, James Clapper, the guy who lied about the NSA spying on Americans. So it's like, what is that? Why are these people so involved in this story? I mean, that's sort of the frustrating thing for me on a lot of things that veer between conspiracy and not conspiracy, like the truth is really important. And when you get, so I get frustrated sometimes with press coverage, it's sort of going for the clicks. Like, oh, there's unknown, but like, well, what is it? Let's focus our time. I guess that's my obsession with microwave weapons. So I don't know that, you know, whether Havana, syndrome, exactly what it was caused by, but like, let's focus on like getting the government to declassify work that it did possibly with people on classified weapons. And it's the same thing with this, like, I don't, like, let's not just write stories about unknown objects, let's actually try to get to the bottom of what it is. Or is it all a diversion? Like, look at this shiny object over here, don't look at, I don't know, the Epstein files or whatever else. Yeah. Or, you know, our stupid classified program that isn't working. I mean, I don't know, but like, yeah, let's get to the bottom of it. And I think there's just a lot of, like, you know, kind of the what sells. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I totally agree with you there. Hold that thought. I'm going to use the restroom real quick. Okay. We'll be right back. Yeah. I was reading last night. I read your, one of your recent pieces that you did on this Paris Arms show. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not like hydrogen-powered drones or whatever. And that reminded me of the story that, when that new Jersey drone story was happening, there was a couple little stories that came out where one had crashed and they said it was like some crazy hydrogen-powered drone and I never heard of that until I read your article about that Paris Arms show last night. Yeah. That is, I don't know. I didn't, I actually didn't know that that was one of the crash jones what they saw. So this is sort of one of the things that you're seeing in drone technology now to be able to get them to stay up longer. But there's, you know, the whole drone revolution like that, that, I mean, when you actually talk to people who have been on the Ukrainian battlefield, like that's wild, especially because right now, you know, you're moving, the drones, most of them, I mean, vast majority of them are still piloted by people. There's someone on the ground. And if the reports are accurate that you're starting to now see true sort of AI-operated drones on the battlefield, like that, that's just a whole new level of warfare that is right. Was there stuff like that at that arm show? Not well. Yeah. Okay. So what? What was it like at that arm show, by the way? Like, what, first of all, what made you want to go there and like, what were you looking for? And what was it like? So I'm embarrassed to say I've been going to arm shows for like 25 years now. Oh, wow. That's cool. Yeah. And so one of the things that I look for is you can get jaded. I mean, were, like, anything like the movie Lord of War? Have I seen that? I mean, it is, oh, I have seen that. It is, it's crazy and the thing is you can get jaded to it like, oh, okay, I'm at a big like rather than plastics, it's, you know, arms. So I try to go in and think about like, what do I see here that's new and surprising? Because that will tell me something about where warfare is going. And sometimes it's easy to miss the things because you get so jaded like, I'm at an arm show. There's a lot of stuff that kills people. So one of the things that was so interesting about this arm show was that there were, I think, 80 Ukrainian companies. Ukraine is becoming whatever, you know, if they get out of this war, which I certainly hope they do, it is going to become a defense, like a weapons making powerhouse of Europe. There were 80 companies there. It's more than there were probably US companies there. And so there was one company swarmer, which I wrote about a little bit for New York magazine. Eric Prince is on their board. Everybody's favorite mercenary. They claimed to have software that allows drones. It's like AI operated software that would allow swarms of drones to operate truly autonomously. I do know. Yeah, so I don't know whether this company has everything they claim they have, but it's coming. I mean, this is clearly coming down the pike. Like I think you're starting to see it in small ways. There was a New York Times report about a Russian drone that was operated fully autonomously, meaning it could choose the targets. So we all know that this is the future. It could be the future in six months, you know, or a little bit longer, but it's coming. I remember seeing something on the Palantir website a couple months back, maybe even a year ago, where they were displaying some sort of animation of like a swarm of drones attacking like an aircraft. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they played it during the Army Navy game. I saw that. They got a billion dollar aircraft charging now by a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of drones. That's insane. Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, Palantir does those commercials because they want people to believe that they're, you know, at the forefront of all this. Yeah, my thing with Palantir is like they are Peter Teal was once quoted as saying, I'd rather be seen as evil that incompetent. Yeah. He just said that, right? He said it again. And he, the thing with the remember about Palantir is there is a lot of people focus on sort of the all-seeing surveillance company Palantir and they're, you know, those are things to worry about and think about. But I also worry with a lot of these sort of Silicon Valley origin defense companies that they tend to also exaggerate their capabilities. And that's part of what Peter Teal is talking about. Like, well, maybe it's better for people to think that we can see everything because that's better for our valuation than if we're competent or if we don't work. And I'm not saying that Palantir doesn't work, but my bigger fear is not that Palantir the company becomes the all-seeing surveillance company. But those are the technical capabilities we're seeing move into the private sector and companies like Palantir are profiting off them. Yeah. Well, I don't think anyone right or left any normal person who is not a billionaire invested in this stuff is on board with any kind of surveillance whether it be the government or a private company. I think that's one of the main things that people have been coming together on in this time that we're in right now. Like, there's been more issues, I think, over the last year that you've seen that have been bipartisan issues that everyone have seen become like the Epstein files, the surveillance stuff, like the flock cameras, everyone hates the flock camera stuff. And, you know, like, these endless wars. I think that's like the one sort of like, you know, silver lining to all of this stuff we're seeing. It's the same thing. Like, if there's anything that gives me optimism because I hate the divide in society. Like, it's fine. People are always on a different political views. But I think that we are going to see a level of political unity on the opposition to a lot of what's coming out of Big Tech and Silicon Valley. Like on AI, on data centers, on a lot of the Silicon Valley defense weapons where they're sort of wrapping themselves in the flag of patriotism, but it's really about money. I remember the most surprising thing when I was working on my latest book was I went to meet with one of these big defense venture capitalists, who's, you know, one of the big names in defense investing. And I was asking him about this hypersonic aircraft that a private company was building. You had to say who this was? I can't. It was on background. Okay. But I was allowed to use the interview. And a lot of experts had told me that a man, like a hypersonic aircraft that can carry people is still like decades and decades away. This whole we can do much harder to do something that, you know, actually carries people. And so I asked this person, well, why are you invest in this company? You know, and he's like, I don't care whether it flies. I'm like, what do you mean you're invested in it? And he's like, I don't care. I care that they have a business plan. Like this is how much the Pentagon is spending on hypersonic weapons. And this is how the company is going to capture that money. He's like, you know, the defense department buys stuff all the time that doesn't work. I thought he was being facetious. Like I thought he was just kind of joking. I kept pushing him on it. And I'm like, you really don't care. And I think the quote he said was like, well, I care that it's kind of cool and that it earns money. But he's like, DOD buys crap all the time. So if they don't care what they buy, what they buy, why should I care? And it really did clear. And I still think he was being a little bit facetious. I don't know. Maybe not. Or just saying the truth. But I think that's the point that when it comes down to adventure capital is not here to save America. I think if it saves America, they're cool with that. They're there to earn money on their investments. And we must, you know, we shouldn't forget that. Right. Right. You know, Palantir wants us to believe they're saving Western civilization. Do they believe that? I don't know. But they care more about their market valuation. Well, it doesn't seem like they're saving Western civilization with the way the economy is going, the value of the dollar is going down, and it seems like the US dollar might not be the world reserve currency for much longer with how this whole thing is strengthening China. It seems like they're trying to whosever in charge, and it doesn't seem to be the politicians. Like it doesn't seem like Trump is in charge. It certainly seems like there's somebody above the layer of whoever is in the White House and whoever is running Israel. There's a layer, a financial layer above that that is pulling the strings and trying to rebalance and reshape the world and the balance of the world and where the money goes. I think those are the financial incentives. I mean, who do you think is? BlackRock. BlackRock is making tons of money off of the war, and they're making tons of money on the rebuilding of Ukraine when they got to rebuild contracts with Ukraine. I'm sure they're going to make tons of money somehow through this Iran thing when there was a story came out that we were going to give them like a couple billion dollars or whatever to rebuild Iran and all this stuff. I just know there's like, if you follow the money with these companies like Vanguard and BlackRock and Stage Street, there's, you can lay out the path and track everything that's happening. There's a clear pattern there happening, and it is, but if you just look at the layer of the government, it doesn't seem like anything makes sense. First of all, this is not what anyone wanted. Second of all, this is not strength in the United States economy, at all, or this does not strengthen the defense of the United States at all. So, the only thing that makes sense is the financial layer. I think that companies operate two incentives and the incentives are to earn money. I mean, what if it's nobody's in control, but every just operating to the incentives they have, which is in a lot of these cases, in the case of companies is always to earn money. What are the incentives of the people in the White House? Like, I don't know. Maybe that requires a psychiatrist to figure that out, I don't know. But no, it's not working, like, not working for the economy. Right. So, what made you, this book, Valley of Death? How did that whole thing start for you? What made you want to write that book? So, I'd finished the DARPA book about ten years ago, I think came out 2016, 2017, and so, as I mentioned, I go to a lot of arm shows, like a lot of arm shows. Right. Yeah, yeah. I still want to talk to you about that Paris arm show. Yeah, and I always look for, like, I have to step back because you can get jaded. And I almost want to be, like, back where I was, like, the first time I walked into a arm show, it's like, oh my god, like, what the, this is freaking crazy. And I want to almost bring myself back to that because you need it. But in 2017, I started noticing something when I was going to these arm shows, which was like, you know, you have the banners for Lockheed Martin or Boeing or General Dynamics, it certainly has to seem like banners for, like, Google and, like, Amazon Web Services. And then, Palantir, which Google, Google, oh, yeah, I mean, Google was going big into defense around 2017. And I'm like, so Silicon Valley is now getting into defense. And I thought that was weird. And then a former DARPA official dropped by my office. It was after the book was out. And I was talking. I'm like, I'm really interested in the relationship, like, that Silicon Valley is moving back into defense. He's like, oh, they always were. I'm like, well, what do you mean? And he's like, well, do I ever tell you about how I save Steve Jobs? I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, I save Steve Jobs in Apple. And I'm like, and he said, I was like, well, I'm not, you know, I'm half joking. And he said that when I, when he was DARPA director in the early 1990s, so this is when Steve Jobs had been pushed out of Apple in the mid '80s, formed his own computer company next, which built these very beautiful computers, black, super expensive. Nobody was buying them. It wasn't doing well. And Steve Jobs have visited DARPA and DARPA, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, and this guy, Vic Reese, still live, I think he's like 91, now great guy. And he's like, I am not, he's like, he's like, I was not a computer expert. And he's like, all I knew was this guy was really good at pitching. And so he's like, okay. He bought like a few dozen of these computers for DARPA. And then he's like, I heard from one of my employees at DARPA that the national security agency had bought like a whole lot of them. And then he's like, and then I heard that this contract, this federal contract had saved the company from like, pretty much going under. And I'm like, so, okay, that's wild, how, how am I ever going to prove this? Because he's like, I, you know, he's like, I don't really know about the NSA. It's what I was told. I, you know. And so every few years, I would kind of like, this was 2017. And then about three or four years ago, and I was working at the Wall Street Journal, I saw like a little obscure LinkedIn post, some guy I'd never heard of who talked about me, Steve Jobs, and the NSA. So I contact the guy. And he's like, yeah, yeah, I worked on that contract. He's like, but it wasn't really the national security agency. That was just the cover story for the CIA contract. And he's like, I got to set you up with my former boss, who was a senior CIA official. He lives in Philly now, and he'll tell you the full story. So we all got together for dinner around DC's Union stations, former CIA official. And he starts telling me this wild story about how he, you know, dropped in to look for Steve Jobs at next headquarters in, I think there was, it was initially the late 80s. And he met with Steve Jobs eventually, and they bought tens of thousands of these next workstations for, it was a CIA contract for what was called program B at the time, which was the satellite program, that eventually all became part of the National Reconnaissance Office, the spy satellite agency. So they were buying these computers. What did you say? What was called again? Oh, for the National Reconnaissance Office, NRO. Something B. Program B. Program B of the CIA. CIA's program B, which I think eventually became part of NRO. Got it. And so I'm like, is it true that this contract saved Steve Jobs? He's like, you know, essentially, he said yes. And then I eventually interviewed the guy who became the head of the National Reconnaissance Office. I interviewed people who worked with Steve Jobs at next, maybe like probably eight or nine people. And they all said, yeah, it's not that the company would have gone bankrupt, but it was fake, or may have gone, but it was failing. And this contract saved the company. It gave him runway. It proved him as an entrepreneur. And the operating system, so it allowed Steve Jobs to leapfrog back to Apple, where he then became CEO again, and the operating system from next became the operating system for modern Apple products. So let's see. And that's sort of the opening chapter of the book is this. I remember thinking, like, how is nobody ever told this story? Because there were hints, like people knew that some of the next computers ended up in the National Reconnaissance Office. And they knew it came out after Steve Jobs died that he had a top secret security clearance. But nobody ever knew why. And it turned out they got him this top secret clearance for this contract, specifically for this contract. And so for me. You need a clearance, though. Well, because they so they didn't want him to know everything they were doing with these computers. But they wanted to read him in a little bit, because they want, you know, he was an icon, like he understood the future of computing. And they wanted to be able to share some information with them. He ended up giving lectures at the CIA. And so this idea that sort of pervade today was just true partly that he was this counter culture figure. I mean, he was, you know, he was kind of into like, you know, some counter culture stuff. But like, he was perfectly willing to work with the CIA. He was not an anti-government guy. And so for me, it was this wild story about the nexus of the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. And so it was my jumping off point. So what is the real relationship here? And why are we seeing, why are we seeing Peter Tiel and Alex Carp and Palmer, like he why now are there all of these, you know, call them tech bros or I sometimes call them war bros in the book? Why are they moving into defense? And, you know, what are the, you know, is there an upside? Are there downsides? I think there's a lot of downsides. There could be some upsides. There was a statement that Alex Carp made. I think against Google at one point, because Google had some sort of contract that they said they said, we're not going to do this anymore. This is going to kill innocent people. And then Alex Carp made some sort of statement, he's like, if we're going to have the privilege of living and working and making billions of dollars in America, we should work for the national security state or whatever. That has been Alex Carp's message from the start of Palantir that we will, you know, we're going to work with the government, with the military. So what is true, he's by the way, not for nothing, that New York Times piece that came out on him maybe two years ago was very weird. He said, one of the quotes that really stuck out with me was he said, the idea of taking lives and saving lives is really interesting to me. That was his quote. And now I never forgot that. Alex Carp is this fascinating figure. So the guy who wrote that New York Times article eventually wrote a book with Alex Carp. I mean, I think it was an independent book, but he had access to Alex Carp for a couple years. Also was a classmate of his from Harvardford College. So he wrote this whole book called The Philosopher of the Valley, a really interesting book because it has all this wild stuff. Alex Carp has a black mother and a Jewish father. Today, he identifies as this, we kill people, volunteer kills people. He is very pro-Israel, has spoken out publicly against the protests that broke out on college campuses after the war in Gaza. So there's a little line in the biography, so written by the guy who wrote the New York Times article about how he, in his college yearbook photo, at Haverford, he's portrayed with a cafe on. - What's that? - That's the Palestinian scarf that you see all over. And so I'm like, okay, I gotta find this photo. So I went to the archives, to the archivist, and I'm like, could I see the Haverford College yearbook for 1989, and they're like, oh yeah, we're not allowed to post it online, but I can send you a copy. So they sent it to me, and it is the white, I mean, you can probably pull it up online 'cause people have posted it for my book now. - Okay. - He was a social justice activist. He blamed Ronald Reagan for-- - Run the photo. - Who am I looking for? - Alex Carp. - Alex Carp, okay. - Alex Carp wearing a what? - A cafe, K-E-F-F-F. - Okay, okay, okay. - So yeah, so he identified as black at the time. He was a social justice activist. He blamed Reagan for increasing racism in the United States, and apparently, I mean, I don't know how to interpret a massive cafe in your college yearbook photo, other than you were probably supportive of the Palestinian cause. So whatever one's views on the conflict, I guess it's the hypocrisy of it that, you know, you went through this period in college, as many college students are. Oh yeah, that's for my book. - Oh yeah. - Oh yeah, oh, that's Alex Carp. Looks very different. - He looks very, very different. - So I don't, so I have nothing like, I don't believe the same things I believe 20, 30 years ago. So my problem is not that, or what his beliefs are. My problem is twofold, is the hypocrisy of it. And then second, that I don't think it's how I don't care, I mean, whatever people's views are of Israel and Gaza. I don't think you want the head of a defense company commenting on protests on American college campuses. I think you want your defense companies out of domestic politics. You, even out of sort of international politics, you don't want them staking out their own sort of foreign policy. I mean, if to the extent you want defense companies, and whether you're for or against them, but if you think they should exist, you probably want them to produce weapons that work for the government and stay the heck out of political issues. And I think it's this melding in Silicon Valley of the political power they want, with the military power that they're building with control over, you know, the privatization of technologies, and you put those two together and it's a very dangerous combination. - And with the way they're acting, right? It does seem performative, like with some of the clips that you see about carbon public, talking about like fentanylase urine, or like recently, it was some sort of thing where they were interviewing him and he like kind of got in the reporter's face and was trying to like intimidate him. You know, are they signaling to something that we don't see? Like, why are they trying to push forward this like persona, this tough person funny guy persona? Like, you know, Elon's another, a whole nother rabbit hole. - Ah, it's a whole nother rabbit hole. - But like, you know, and then the fact that their, you know, Peter Tee was one of the biggest donors to JD Vance and like a supported Trump the whole time is very, very unsettling. You know, him and Mary Adelson, and I forget who the other one was, there's three main ones, but yeah. - Yeah, I mean, so there's, I have a theory 'cause I've long thought, I mean, Elon Musk is his own, you know, rabbit hole together. - Yeah. - I have a theory with Palantir. So by their, their stock is heavily invested in by retail investors, individual investors. So, you know, usually whether it's Lockheed Martin Boeing or even Coca, you know, there's a certain amount of institutional investors that are looking at. Palantir has always played to individual investors. They sell Palantir merchandise. They're very, oh yeah, you can get Palantir, it's crazy. And part of the reason is because the retail investors, private investors, they tend not to be as concerned as an institutional investor might make with the fact that it's okay, one of the most, it has been at times the most valuable defense company in the world by market capitalization, by, you know, basically it's stock, but they have a fraction of the revenue, a fraction that a Lockheed Martin has. They can grow. I don't know how they ever grow big enough to reach their market valuation, but if you convince institutional investors, so I think this message of like kick butt and we kill people, I think they think that that has appealed to these individual investors. I suppose it has, based on the market valuation. But I think there could be an expiration date to that, and then the company is in real peril. - Which is weird because it doesn't seem like anybody likes Palantir. It seems like everyone, every person that I ever talked to, any person who talks about this shit on the internet for a living, they all hate Palantir, and everyone seems to agree. Maybe they can do that publicly and also be like, tell their financials, hey, throw some stocks into Palantir, I wanna make some money too, but you know, I gotta tell everyone how evil they are. There's this trend that I've read about, and I've written about somewhat with like the drone companies in the stock bubble of what's called dystopian investing, and it's sort of the theory of it is that you have, it's the same people investing in prediction markets, that there's a tendency like our economy is so messed up, I'm never gonna be able to afford a house, so maybe my way to make some money in the world is to invest in defense companies and make these crazy predictions on polymarket. I don't know, that's one of the great questions in my mind is why is Palantir's message so appealing to a large number of institutional investors? And it may not be, as you said, it may not be that they like Palantir, it's sort of like the dystopian vibe, like nothing matters, so. - Well, if you wanna make money, right? - Yeah. - I mean, I'm sort of worried for our economy, and also just that trend, that idea, that like nothing matters, I'll never make it, so why not just bet? I don't think that's healthy for anyone. - No, and what were you saying in the connection when was with Palantir market, too? - Oh, it all goes into this concept that I've read about on dystopian investing, so if you don't think you're ever gonna be able to, if you can never afford house or any of the normal things that you think you could have just by working, why not try betting the prediction markets? - Didn't you also say that Palantir market was somehow tied to? - Oh, DARPA. Yeah, so DARPA, back going back to the point dexterities of DARPA, so this is around 2003. A lot of these programs got in trouble. There was life log, there was total information awareness, and the third program that got in trouble was called Maps. What did Maps? It was the early, you can just Google Maps and DARPA. Yeah, policy analysis market. It was the early, it was the predecessor to the prediction markets. - Wow. - And it was also an Admiral Pointexter project. - DARPA launched Future Map Project, which included the policy analysis market PAM, an electronic futures exchange designed to let people trade contracts on geopolitical developments and stability in the Middle East. Wow. - I mean, and look what you have now with insider trading of people betting on Iran's, I mean, it's, yeah, it's kind of crazy that that was, yeah, 2003 and here we are 23 years later, and now we have a big insider problem of potentially military people in, you know, and I'm sure it's few, but the few matter who are essentially leaking information onto these markets by and effect by betting on them because they have insider information. - That's so crazy, you know, it freaks me out, like when you have companies like Palantir and Peter Teal, and combine with all the Satellogic satellite stuff and then the AI, and combined with, you think about like that, combined with having like these stable coins, how they want to create this like digital currency so they can control your money similar to how China does it, that really freaks me out. It, you know, combining the total information awareness with our money and like this push towards these stable coins and to getting, you know, everything pushed into digital. That really freaks me out more than anything. And then like also this Satellogic company was heavily funded by Cantor Fitzgerald and-- - Oh, wow. - And yeah, Howard Lutnik, like he is like really big behind all of this stuff. And he's, you know, really tight with Trump and you know, he, everyone kind of forgot about him after 9/11, you know, right after it happened. And then he never really was public. And then until, you know, 2016, 2017, when Trump came around again, then he's like, you know, all over the place making all kinds of money on all of this stuff. - I mean, we're seeing a lot of people connected to the administration making a lot of money. It's good for some people, that's for sure. - Yeah. - Mm-hmm, yeah. - And then Google, you know, I don't know, like where-- - Oh, yeah. - How specifically is Google? Where do they tie into all this? - So Google ties in in a lot of ways. So, one of the. connecting thread. So some of the earliest money that Palantir got, they got their first government investment from InQTel, which is the CIA venture arm, the venture arm of the CIA, gave Palantir 10 million and more than 10 million, it gave them sort of the entry, sort of the stamp of approval of the CIA that gave them sort of the entry into Washington. So InQTel was also behind the investment in something in a company called Keyhole, which was bought by Google and became Google Earth. So Google's long had like strong connections to the national security world. But all of this really came to a head in around 2018. So there was this project, an AI drone targeting project called Project Maven. Yes. And it was mostly, it was like, you know, this is early days, not quite 10 years ago, and it was basically to, you know, they build it as a research project, but it was about coming up with targets for drones to strike. They're like, oh, it's just research. And Google had the initial contract for it because Google had in the past and still, you know, it did work with the military. But it came, if you think back in 2018, it was the first Trump administration, the outrage over a lot of the Trump policies, particularly in the workforce in Silicon Valley. And so when it leaked that Google was working on a drone targeting project, it sparked a walk out at Google. This huge employee walk out. And at the time, you know, you had the tech company's competing for workforce. So Google's like, okay, okay, we're going to drop this. We're not going to work on project Maven. And I'm like, oh, this shows like Silicon Valley doesn't want to work with the defense department. That lasted like less than a year. Yeah. So a year later, Google's like, just kidding. Actually, we're competing for this military cloud contract. And yeah, it, yeah. And then they, they got involved in other things. So what that did, though, the Google walkout, it gave Palantir, that's where going to the carp quote, it gave Palantir the perfect excuse to be like, we're willing to kill people. They took over the project Maven contract. And today, what's called the Maven smart system is the targets that the AI targeting system for the military. So it kind of made Palantir, you know, Palantir has always had ups and downs till then, but it really let them get into the Pentagon. And it is now, so Palantir technically doesn't do the AI. They do the system that the AI models deploy on. Okay. Yeah, it's a little complicated. So I don't know, do you remember the conflict between Anthropic, the AI company and the Pentagon? Yes. So the background to that was early in the year, when we kidnapped, charged Maduro, brought him back to the States. So apparently Anthropic, so Anthropic's model was deployed on this Palantir system. It's like, you know, like basically Palantir is the visualization you see. Okay. That's what Palantir does is the user interface and the model on it was Claude and Thropic's model. Okay. So after the Maduro raid, apparently Anthropic was all freaked out because they care so much about humanity. Right. That they called up Palantir. They like, we want to know how our models were used. We're worried that they were not, we have all these red lines. Palantir told you basically turned around and tattled to the Department of War. They're like Anthropic is all worried about how their models are being used. And so the Chief Technology Officer at the Pentagon for Uber Executive goes ballistic and he's like, who the heck is Anthropic to tell us how we use their models? So they ended the Anthropic contract, designated them a supply chain risk and then did contracts with Google, with OpenAI and with XAI Elon Musk company. And basically like, we're not going to work with Anthropic anymore. And I actually, I think some people, I don't know what lesson people took from that. Maybe that Anthropic was so principled. I take a very different lesson that the Pentagon is very, very freaked out about the fact that they don't have control over technologies that they once had. And this is true of Elon Musk. The Pentagon can't just order Elon Musk to make Starlink the Internet satellite constellation available wherever they want. It's a private system. Elon Musk owns it. And if he doesn't want the Ukrainian military to use it, that's on him. He owns it. And the Pentagon is kind of freaked out about this. Like, what do we do? You know, the head of Lockheed Martin, like we don't call the CEO of Lockheed Martin to ask permission to use a stealth fighter against Iran. You know, we own the underlying technology that we can just do what we want with it. And they're very freaked out by this situation where a lot of increasingly important technologies like AI, like Elon Musk's space systems are controlled by private companies. And you might think, well, can't the government just national? It's like, no, actually, they can't. They really can't. The laws, I mean, I think there was one example where Truman tried to nationalize the steel works during the Korean War. And the Supreme Court basically told him he can't do that. He doesn't have the authority on his own to do that. So no, we can't just force. I mean, we have ways to influence private companies, but we actually don't have the legal authorities for the president on his own to just say, like, okay, you got to do this. And that's that's freaking them out, right, fully. That's, that's definitely scary, you know, because that basically just means the private companies control the world, right? Like they kind of, they have their own, if they have autonomy and they have more, more power than the actual government does. Yeah. Like, what does that mean? Is this still a country? I mean, that was the other starting point for my book. One was the Steve Jobs story. And the other was a secret, a, a study that the Pentagon commissioned in 2013 to see if a rogue billionaire could build and sell nuclear weapons for a profit. Like, could they technically do it secretly? And then could they make a profit doing it? And I got to hold this study. And the study was like, yeah, be a billion dollars and five years, but yeah, be a pretty good business. And I went back and interviewed the participants in the study, because it doesn't name any specific billionaires. And I'm like, were you thinking of like an Elon Musk? And they're like, yeah, like an Elon Musk, like, like, you know, they weren't saying Elon Musk per say in 2013. I don't think people thought of Elon Musk that way. What about the head of a cartel? Yeah. No, that was exactly the head of a cartel, a billionaire, Wagner, like the Russian mercenary company. They said the idea was to see what happens when these private technologies are accessible to people with money and the dangers of them. Right. And not to me, Justin. I think that's so, you know, in 2013, it was such a like forward thinking idea. And maybe even some of the participants like, I kind of thought the study was silly. Others took it. It was just like mixed bag. But looking now where we are today with Elon Musk and others, like, no, I think what the issues that the study was looking at were really super relevant. Well, I think the study has been proven in the Epstein files. How, like, which part of the Epstein files? Well, there's emails between Epstein and Houd-Barak talking about selling weapons to, you know, civil warring tribes in the Congo and Sierra Leone and making money off selling surveillance equipment drones and all kinds of weapons to, like, various, you know, civil wars happening around the world and profiting off it personally. I think there's a lot of people doing that. Yeah. So why wouldn't they sell a nuke to somebody? Well, I think that's the thing. I think they would, like, there was actually an interview earlier this year. I think in February that Axios, which is a DC political news organization, interviewed Palmer Lucky and they asked him, they said, is there anything you wouldn't build? And he's like, ah, and they're like, what about nuclear weapons? He's like, oh, I would totally build nuclear weapons. I'd build vision weapons. I'd build fusion weapons. I think they're a stabilizing force. And it's like, wow. Now he wasn't talking about doing it elicently, but just that idea, like, yeah, I would totally build nuclear weapons. Like, there's, it's a, I don't understand. Maybe it's that thing. Yeah, but do you think people like Palmer Lucky really have the power? Like, do you think that guy really has like the people who gave him money and funded him? Do you think they're really going to let him have autonomous power to run around off the leash or do you think they can control other than he does? Not to say that. Actually, an interesting question, because you know, people often mistakenly say he's the head of Anderl. He's actually not. He is, he's a founder of Anderl, but he actually, he's not the CEO. He's not the president. He's basically the public face of it. He spends a lot of time on X. So, and he, he even he'll say, like, oh, going on podcasts, like he wouldn't have time to run a defense company. So I do think in some ways, he is, you know, the public face of the company. How much control does he have? That's actually a great question. I don't have a solid answer to that. I don't, I don't think he's totally a figurehead, but no, I don't think he's though he doesn't call the shots. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I just can't imagine that that guy would have that, you know, just on judging on face value, I can't imagine, but I imagine there's a lot of people behind the scenes that are pulling the strings that are going to make the decisions for him. Right. And he, he feels like more of just like a figurehead and like a, you know, like a Ronald McDonald for Andrew. Can I quote that? Can I use that and attribute it to you? Because I think that's the Ronald McDonald of the Andrew. Yeah. You know? It does feel that way. It does. It does. I could be totally wrong. It's like I said with all, I think the truth is a little bit in between and maybe leaning a lot towards that because they are so tied to their investors. Like that is their biggest fear because they have taken $11 billion in investment, $11 billion. That's like money going in. And those investors are valuing the company at 60 billion. And Andrew, like the big, like there was a statement about Andrew, if someone calling them the Theoranos of defense, you know, kind of be honest with me. Yeah. Right. And I don't know. But I'm like, I'm not seeing a lot of their stuff. Like I know their stuff was unsuccessful in Ukraine. They've pretty much admitted it as much. They tried to send drones over there, we're just shot out of the sky. Yeah. One of their unmanned submarines was captured by Iran. Oh nice. Yeah. Because it was malfunctioning. It was basically just sitting there. Right. It's not great advertising. So that would go to support the idea that this whole thing is just a bubble. I think we are in a bubble and the defense tech companies are-- Is that Andrew, submarine? Yeah. I think that's the, is that the go shark? The go shark. Yeah. It's go shark. I think dive was the one that was captured. That's a crazy look. Yeah. I mean, they put out great PR. I just don't know. I don't see their stuff being used. Remember what I said about the classified programs? Yeah. You find out about the unsuccessful ones. Yeah. I worry. I don't know. But I think Andrew may have that problem. Like we're seeing the thing, the only things we're seeing out of Andrew are like kind of the failures. So do they have some successes? Did you see the crazy Columbia class nuclear subs that they built? That who built? I think the defense. The defense department. Yeah. They're apparently like a billion dollars per submarine and they did like, I don't know, like 12 or 13 of them or something like that. So expensive. Yeah. And that's the argument of an Andrew. And all of these companies are like, well, we can do it cheaper. You know, we're Silicon Valley. We innovate faster, we're cheaper, but we're not like, I guess my point is like we're low on interceptors. We're literally running out of interceptors. If Silicon Valley is so cheap and smart and fast, like help us solve that problem. And they're like, oh, we are. It's like, well, really? Back to Google. Didn't DARPA fund the search? Yeah. I think it was that they were involved in the early computer science work. The founders of Google had, like, I mean, DARPA was the preeminent funder of computer science back in the day. Yeah. I remember reading an article once that was explaining how Brenn was getting visited at Stanford by, you know, leaders at CIA and SA and DARPA. They were all interested. And they were sort of like incubating that search tool. Yeah. I mean, Silicon Valley itself and the Cold War, I mean, it grew out of military funding. So there's this image that we have of Silicon Valley of like the anti-military. And what I argue is that was always a bit of a myth. What happened was in the late '80s and '90s, especially in the '90s, there was the end of the Cold War, the peace dividend, the defense department budgets fell drastically. At the same time, the computer, the personal computing revolution was taking off and the consumer market and the commercial market. Silicon Valley didn't need or want to work with the defense department because it had a whole other market. And so I'm not saying that people don't have real beliefs. Like I think if you're a tech worker who came of age at a certain time in Silicon Valley, you're like, I'm a commercial tech person. I don't want to work with the military. But you're operating environment affects you. And so you had a generation of tech workers who were like, Silicon Valley is not military. We do consumer. But if all your competitors are doing contracts with the military and doing this stuff, you have to compete with them. Well, that's what's happening now. That's what we're seeing now. That more and more. Like, there's now, I think in 2025, there was 50 billion in venture capital that went into defense, weapons, these new startups. And you're seeing Google going more all in on this Amazon is a big military and CIA contractor. People don't think of it. But it is. It's the largest, largest cloud provider. His dad used to be a head guy, DARPA. A DARPA. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. I think it was father, grandfather, maybe grandfather. Bezos is dad. Yeah. So it's just like the connections are there. There was like, there was never, it's not so much. I think it wasn't that Silicon Valley and the Pentagon were separate. They separated when they're financial interests separated. And then, you know, what I talk about in the book was, okay, so what happened particularly in 2016, '17 that Silicon Valley started going all in defense? Oh, well, you can actually trace that to sort of the Mark Zuckerberg. Remember, he was like handing out copies of President Xi, the Chinese President's book to Facebook employees that the tech companies, you know, until about, you know, from the late ought to, about probably 2015, 2016, they thought China was the next consumer market. So Airbnb went in, Uber tried to go in, Facebook went in, they all thought, remember, like, we're all going to make a lot of money in China. It didn't work. And so by 2016, '17, most of them were like closing up shop in China. Well, there's this whole other market, only it's not for selling to China. It's for building weapons to battle China because the Pentagon was labeling it an adversary. We need to prepare for a possible war with China over Taiwan. So all these investors who had made their bets initially on the Chinese market were like, okay, maybe the better market. I mean, they may not have thought that in their head, but they essentially turned from the consumer market, which was not available to them and into the military market. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, that Xi dinner just happened here where they had all of the tech leaders were there. They're just there. Yeah, given them a trophy, the big Eagle trophy. I mean, Musk has always been the conflicted character there because he of the different tech CEOs, he has business in China with the Gigafactory. So he has always been more careful than the other tech CEOs about not being negative on China. There had been some, I think the Wall Street Journal reported that when he was going to merge all his companies together, Tesla and XAI, that he was finally going to divest from China because that would cause him problem on the Pentagon contracts, but Musk denied that report. But the China issue has always been very, very problematic for Musk. Yeah. I think Apple still relies pretty heavily on China as well. They do, but you know. They diversify into Taiwan, I believe, but. But Apple is the one company that is not among the war bros. Like Apple, Apple, you know, you can, you know, the military buys Apple devices, but Apple doesn't have, it's not like Google that has like big military contracts. So for Apple, you know, they don't really, I think they would like to divest from China because they kind of see which way the winds are blowing, but they're under a different framework than the companies like Google and Amazon, which have large military and intelligence contracts. Yeah. There was a, we had a gentleman on the podcast a couple days ago who was explaining to us how China is like all up in Canada, like in the Pacific coast of Canada that are doing deals with the Canadian government where they have like full, like, I think military shit there. And as well as like deals with the rare earth minerals that they have and like the oil and all that stuff up in northern Canada where they're like all up tied up into the Canadian government that have all kinds of deals with the Canadian government. I didn't even know. I mean, this is where, you know, I mean, the Biden administration was concerned about this too, but like the Trump administration was early, you know, even back in the first Trump administration, they were very worried about Huawei and trying to roll back Europe's use of Chinese telecom companies. So yeah, this, this, this is an issue. And I think that the, yeah, it's, I, I, like, I think that of the things that I sometimes criticize the government about, it is good to be worried about that and do something and that you need to take Greenland. I don't know about that, but like the concerns about China are real concerns. Yeah. And China is also buying lots of weapons from Israel. I think you talked about this in your, in your article about the Paris gun show. So China and Israel have had weapons deals in the past. I don't know so much about right now. I mean, Israel has historically been like, you know, their, their defense industry is big for them. Right. So they have historically been willing to sell to countries and do deals, including with China that the US is not willing. And it's been a big problem because a lot of, there's been a lot, there's a lot of US investment and paying for Israeli defense technology so the US has been very angry and the past about Israel doing deals with China. I actually don't know about right now what Israel is doing. So what shocked me about your article about the Paris gun show was how, first of all, I didn't realize that they're, the amount of weapons that they sell, like their, their military industrial complex was so big. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because all I hear about is all the money that we give to Israel for weapons or there was that recent, that recent story that dropped where we gave them like a bunch of these 2,000 pound bombs that was worth like, forget how much, a few billion dollars maybe and then that's about right. Basically, what we did was we gave them cash and they used that cash to buy, to buy all these bombs and things like that. So it was this weird money washing thing that's happening and it's like, okay, we're doing that to them, for them to buy all these weapons, essentially welfare to them, then why they had this giant, like, arms deals. like selling billions and billions of dollars with the weapons across the world. That kind of like blew my mind. - Yeah, we have made, I think, you know, we're seeing a political change there and I think Israel's preparing for it. There has always been attention in the US-Israeli relationship. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot of co-production. We invest, we give money to Israel. That is a problem. The problem that Israel is having now, is it? So it's like we have all this venture capital money going into our, we have our Silicon Valley. A lot of that venture capital money is also going into Israeli defense startups. And like American money. - American venture capital money, yeah. Now the problem is there is a little bit, as you know, of a backlash against Israeli defense industry because of what's going on in Gaza. So a lot of what's happening is Israeli companies are incorporating in the United States to sort of shed their Israeli identity. In part because they want to sell to the Pentagon and the Pentagon doesn't like to buy from foreign buyers as much as Israeli or not. And the other is because they don't, you know, there are, you know, European countries. They don't want to be identified anymore as Israeli because of the backlash against Israel. - And they're, you were saying that at the gun shows, they were like, like, like, coordinating them off. - Yeah, so France has been one of the European countries that's been very critical of the Israeli military operations in Gaza. And so they did this crazy thing where they first, a couple of years ago, they first tried to ban the Israeli companies and Israeli companies sued in court and were able to go. This time around, they said, "You can't display offensive weaponry." Well, Israel's view is like, well, everything we have is defensive because we're only defending ourselves. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was something that they called it defensive offensive offensive offensive. - Defensive offensive weapons. - I was like, what? - Yeah, I mean, both sides handled it badly. So the French Ministry of Defense did an inspection of the Israeli defense industry is huge. They always exhibit very large at these arm shows. And so they, companies that they felt were displaying defensive offensive weaponry, offensive weaponry. They literally had the show-build barriers around them. And so, and that wasn't a good look to, for anyone. So you kind of had these big barriers around and just, it was just. It felt like it was a bad way of dealing with what is a political problem. Like if you really oppose this war in Gaza and Israeli operations, you know, the French government has better ways of messaging. - Of course. - Yeah, rather than like-- - Putting goofy barriers at a gun show when you're just making money off them. - You know, you're not really doing anything. - It was a goofy way of handling the issue. And I don't think did anything. It's just signaling, right? - It's signaling and not in a useful way. - And the Israeli companies are trying to disguise themselves as American companies? - Well, so there's two different parts to it. So one part is Israeli companies have long had problems. They've always wanted to sell to the Pentagon. And the Pentagon just doesn't like to buy from foreign buyers. Like, we like to source domestically. So Israeli companies have always had a problem with that. Some of it is probably outright anti-Semitism that they've gotten a lot of just hatred thrown at those companies. And a lot of it is genuine, not, I mean, I would argue not anti-Semitism. There's also a part that's just like political opposition. Like why should we support Israeli companies if given the extremely high death toll in Gaza? - So there's different components to it. - In 4K all over the internet killing women and children. - Yeah. So, you know, is it disguising? I mean, yeah, I guess you could interpret it as disguising. It sort of, you know, they wish, whatever their explanation is, it is financially beneficial for them to identify as US companies, yeah. And so even like, I remember interviewing one investor who was like, yeah, it's ridiculous. Like, you'll see slowly, like, first they'll incorporate in Washington. And then you'll see them sort of like scrub their website. And I remember I wrote about one company that was a prominent Israeli company. And I wrote a little thing about them in a just a random article and one of their PR people coming up and they're like, can you take out that it's Israeli? I'm like, what? It was pitched as an Israeli company. And she's like, oh, well, they're moving their headquarters to D.C. and I'm like looking up the company and it's like, they may be someday, but like right now their headquarters are in Tel Aviv. I'm not going to, like, I can't, I wasn't even saying anything bad about the company. It was just like, describing it as an Israeli company. So there is this effort to, I don't know, redo their image, their public image of these companies. Yeah. That's crazy. And then, so, and then, the other thing you were describing is that it seems like everyone's for all the Ukraine, all the Ukraine stuff. Like, the Ukraine war is the noble war to fight. It's the virtuous war. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right, right. And so there's, you know, a lot of raw, raw for Ukraine, but there's a lot of problems with some of the Ukrainian companies as well, you know, you know, there are corruption problems. I know that will shock you. There's a lot of IP problems, like there's allegations that some of the big, because you know, when you're trying to just fight a war for survival, you don't care that you're violating someone's patent on a missile. You're just building. Right. But if you want to sell that abroad, there's IP issues on the drones. Again, it goes to your war of survival. You don't care about Chinese components, but if you want to sell on the international market or to the US, having Chinese components on drones is going to be a big issue. Yeah, the Ukrainian arms industry, it's going to be a big deal for Ukraine, no matter what, but they've got some problems, yeah, corruption, that's. Yeah. And this whole thing now that I haven't, I'm not super informed on it, but it looks like that the UK is trying to ramp up investments in defense stuff for the Ukrainian Russia War. Yeah. Yeah. What is that all about? Well, I mean, so Europe as the Trump administration scaled back our support for Ukraine. I mean, we still support them in a number of ways, but in terms of the actual weapons and money, more and more of that came from Europe, but you're also seeing a couple different things. So you're seeing private money, in some cases, from Europe and from the US, investing in these Ukrainian weapons companies, so that's one component of it. And then there's the like the what's good for us component, Ukrainians now have more experience in drone warfare than any other country in the world, like they are experts in it in building them, defending against them, operating them, and, you know, there are parts of Europe, and I think to some extent, they use it like well, we would like to benefit from that. We would like that expertise to help our industry. And so there's a lot of back and forth where Ukraine is trying to get the best deal it can get, but also even in Europe and the US, there's the idea like, well, can we get your data? Like, you know, we also want to be good at driving, you know, in part for business, in part for worries about Russia, so it's a back and it's, you know, everybody's got a financial interest. Yeah, it certainly seems that way. You know, I don't understand why. What is this? You create a UK invites Ukrainian companies to grab a piece of an innovation fund, of this was just published yesterday. The UK has a big pot of money to invest in defense, defense innovation, some 800 million pounds. Wow. A lot of money. Fair amount. Yeah, we want to get that capability out of Ukraine. So they want to, I mean, they basically want to get that knowledge, that technical capability. When I was at the arm show in Paris, when I was speaking to one of the Ukrainian companies and they said the big problem we have is like the Germans are coming in and swooping and hiring all of our engineers, like all of our guys with like engineers with battlefield experience, building drones and the Germans are hiring them. So like everybody kind of wants a piece of the war action. Yeah, that's wild. The Ukraine thing, it boggles my mind, you know, because there's like so many different, you hear so many different people saying things out loud, like you had a Lindsey Graham before he died. He was saying, you know, I think he was in Ukraine when he died, wasn't he? He had just returned from Ukraine, he literally just finished a trip there, if I'm not worried. Yeah, he made some public statement about like, there's all those rare earth minerals. We can't let China get those minerals. We got to make sure we get them, you know, trillions of dollars, he said. There were a rare earth minerals there. And, you know, it is also bizarre that Russia hasn't used any kind of, you, I would imagine Russia has a lot more capable weapons that they could use on Ukraine that they're clearly not using, right? Like they have tons of hypersonic missiles, they haven't used any of those. You know, they could use tactical nuclear weapons and that's like, you know, some of the fear mongering that like to say, like, oh, they could nuke us and we need to keep going with this war or whatever, but it is interesting to see like the amount of restraint they seem to have had. I mean, yes, I guess because Russia can, you know, they've demonstrated, for instance, in Chechnya that they'll just, you know, raise cities as you can kind of see what the war in Ukraine, they're more and more going after, I mean, they've always gone after civilian infrastructure, but their tolerance for hitting civilian sites in Kiev is going up, you know, week by week. They have proven they can be even more brutal than they've been. I don't have a good answer of the way out of the Ukraine war. I think it's remarkable that Ukraine has, and it's not saying there's not much to criticize in the Ukrainian government and the institutions. that they've held on as long as they have is pretty remarkable. I worry that, yeah, that the level that Russia will escalate in brutality escalate because you're right. There is more they can do. I think on the nuclear issue, you know, they've sort of rattled the nuclear saber a number of times in trying to get the US and Europe to back off. I think for them, that's a pretty big risk as well. - Yeah. - But, you know, the worry is, if Putin really feels cornered, you know, what would he do? - Yeah. - How bad can it get? - Yeah, would he do that? I don't know, you know? 'Cause if he launches a new, it's the end of days, right? For everyone. 'Cause we have protocols in place, and we have all the satellites that can detect as soon as a missile launches, like we unload back on them. - So I think I remember the reporting that I heard, I mean, but when I was at the Wall Street Journal, if I remember right, was back in the early days of the invasion when there was a real concern that he was going to use a, he would use a nuke in the conflict. And apparently, I think it was Burns and the head of the CIA warned Russia, like if you do that, we will retaliate conventionally, but with massive retaliation. So, I mean, that is the tricky part of deterrence. How do you threaten escalation in a way that stops someone from doing something really bad with nukes, but not in a way that you risk ending the world? It's a, I don't think you can use nukes without ending the world. You know, it's like, you know, Trump's threatened to nuke Iran how many times now, and it's just like become the boy who cries wolf. It's just, and no one believes him anymore. - And if anyone does use a nuke in a conflict, it's just the genie out of the bottle. Like then, like we haven't used one since World War II, it just becomes terrible. - Yeah, especially everyone's, a lot of people speculate that Israel could use a nuke on Iran. And that would be very bad, because first of all, Israel isn't even signed the nuclear treaty, and they're not even allegedly-- - They don't acknowledge. - They don't acknowledge that they even have nuclear weapons, but I mean, if you're to believe the whistleblowers who have come out and exposed it, you know, I think it's pretty obvious fact that they do have loads of nukes. - Oh, they do, they definitely have nuclear weapons. - Yeah, and like what would we do, you know, if they did that? I don't know. (laughs) - I mean, I would have to assume that would be a last resort for-- I mean, who knows, I mean, you kind of look at where the government in Israel is going. I mean, that's the thing, like what is a lot, how do you define a last resort? I don't know. - Yeah, I don't know either. And there's just a lot of, it's just too much to follow. You know, there's so much shit happening out there. And to be able to, like for someone like you to report on this stuff, it must be, you know, like navigating a frickin' maze, a hornet's nest of stories. And, you know, even dealing with sources. Like one of the crazy things that Jack Murphy was telling me a couple of years ago when he was on here, when he first started reporting on the Ukraine War, like right after it broke out, he was doing a story on how the CIA was using one of its proxy intelligence sources-- - Yeah, never this. - In somewhere in Europe to conduct sabotage operations. Inside Russia, right, like with like, in factories and railroads and stuff like that. And then when he was doing the story, he didn't tell me the publication, but he said it was like a really big news publication, like one of the top five or whatever. And like he was working on the story for months and months and there was like six months he was working on the story, like with all of his sources, he had tons of sources, like former CIA, military people, who were telling him all this stuff. He was corroborating it amongst different sources. And then like right up to the time when he was getting ready to push the publish button with that publication, he got in the call with the editor, and they're like, okay, we got to do one more phone call with a deputy director of the CIA. And they're like, okay, and then the CIA, the deputy director goes, no, we completely deny all of this stuff. So Jack's like, okay, great, we'll just put that as a footnote at the bottom of it, you categorically deny any of this stuff's real. And then the editor of the publication goes, no, we have an off the record agreement with the CIA, so we're not gonna publish this story anymore. And then excuse that they always use is you're putting innocent lives in danger, you know, to report on the stuff. That's a huge issue. - So that's generally the way the CIA has operated when there's a story coming out that they don't want, is they'll put a very high level person on the phone with an editor of a publication. And the first argue a couple things that I've been on the other side of that receiving that call, they'll argue that you're like hundreds of thousands of people, you're gonna end the world. That's our first argument. And if you press them on that, like, well, will they tell me how? Like I don't want to end the world, I don't want to get people killed. And then they kind of like have problems. And then they try to argue, well, the story is wrong. When you're like, well, okay, if the story's wrong, how's it gonna end the world and get people killed and all that. And so having been out of those conversations and go, you have to go through a point by point. You know, inevitably there might be ones, you know, they'll, it's shades of gray, like the story is correct, but they are not gonna tell you what's incorrect and correct. So they just argue, it's all wrong. I find it a really not a productive way to carry yourself as an agency. I would put it at that. But apparently it's been. - Product, well, I mean, depending on who you are. - I guess you are productive for that. - Yeah, certainly not for the journalistic outlets that are reporting on stuff or captured by them, you know. - I mean, but Jack is, I mean, having worked with him. So I edited him on a couple stories to Rific Reporter. Like I would take him to the bank. - Yeah, he's the best, he's incredible. But I mean, you know, that's just one of the things that has frustrated me over the past couple of years. Not just the fact that, you know, big mainstream publications are deeply connected with these agencies that have the power to pull stories or to, you know, whether they're doing it with, you know, like with hard power or if they're just like convincing them that it's the wrong thing to do, whatever they're doing, it's, that's not journalism anymore. - And yeah, to take us back to history, the reason why Edward Snowden went to Glenn Greenwald was not to the New York Times was because the New York Times had sat on the warrantless surveillance story. That famous post-9/11 story that the government was doing warrantless surveillance. And the government had convinced the New York Times for, I forget how long it was over a year. The New York Times did eventually run the story, but they sat on it at the government's request for quite a while. And that was the reason that Edward Snowden decided not to go to the New York Times. So it's, you injure yourself, you risk injuring yourself as a media institution. It's, you know, it's not that you don't want to listen to government, you can let them make their case, but you don't have to listen to it. - Yeah, and that's one of the big reasons that we ended up where we are today, which I will say, I believe that a vast majority of people in this country under the age of 65 probably, don't trust the government, anything they say. I think a majority of people, their North Star of Truth is whatever the government's saying, the opposite is true. - Yeah, I mean, if you, you know, people have written about this sort of the decline of trust in institutions, not just government, but media as well, which is unfortunate. But I think, and public health, and inside, when you see an erosion of trust. - Public health, Jesus, yes. - Yeah, when you see an intrusion, it's easy, I guess the easiest way is like, oh, people are dumb. They don't know, people are not dumb. They may not always be right, but they're not dumb. And they know when people are not telling the truth. And I think you're right. Yeah, people don't trust the government because they have seen too many times. And you see that, unfortunately, in other areas as well. I mean, I say unfortunately, but it's not because those institutions are blameless. - And I always get freaked out because a lot of news media and journalism relies on social media to disseminate their information. I would say more so than even like television and stuff like that, like traditional media. And if these private companies are in control of all of that, well, like who's to say, what they're gonna let out, you know? And is it all free? Is it, how is that regulated? Are they using AI to regulate it? How do they, how do we know when they're turning different knobs up, turning other knobs down? And you got to ask the question, like, in a time we're in now, like post-COVID, and when after Trump took office, it seems like all the limits are off on social media. Now, and after Elon bought X, it's become like this wild, wild West. - Oh yeah. - Anyone can say anything they fucking want. And that is very strange to me. Like, why are they doing this? - Yeah. - You know, is there a reason for this? I don't know. Like, are they trying to, I mean, some people speculate that maybe they're doing it so like they have AI tracking, like what I was telling you earlier about that story in Argentina, how they're trying to make digital twins of their social media people, social media presence. Like, are they trying to get some sort of a better understanding of how all these people are? Like, if you let anyone just say whatever they want on social media and be radicalized to the nth degree where you put them not only are they able to get away with anything they want, they say on X or whatever platform it is, but the algorithm also pushes them into those echo chambers where they can be. become more radicalized, and you also, you know, these come X's part, has an AI, you know, they're close, he's close with Palantir, are they like creating some sort of a digital twin of everyone on X so that when they do want to eventually put some crazy totalitarian lockdown on stuff, they know who's who, and they know like how to, how to game out how, you know, or predict how that person is going to act in the future. I don't know where it all ends up, I worry about that, but it's like I said, I just worry about this concentration of power, so you have concentration of power in like military technology, in politics, in media, I mean Elon Musk owning X in all of these areas. And I see this in other, I remember a wired magazine ran a negative article on Andral, and so one of the co-founders of Andral started tweeting on X about like, well, maybe we should just buy wired, and I'm like, okay, that solves that problem, and it's, everybody wants to control sort of the operating system, which includes the media and everything else. And yeah, I mean, to what end, well, this is-- Yeah, Elon just bought a dot com, is that what it was? He bought Sam Altman, created this thing called dot, and then Elon, like Lily went and bought the website, dot, dot com, for like, who knows, I think it was speculated to be like 20 million dollars. You just bought it on his phone real quick. Yeah, I mean, that's like, not that for him. But yeah, you mentioned the health, the, like, the healthcare stuff, like the HHS stuff, and one of the things, I don't know if you talked about this in your DARPA book, but like, didn't they try to create like a health version of DARPA? Oh, yeah. I mean, so people-- And that was somehow tied to like, Kushner and Ivanka. I mean, Kushner was tied to a lot of stuff right now, so it wouldn't surprise me. Yeah, there have been all of these, there is an intelligence ARPA, there's health ARPA, there's an energy ARPA. Nobody's ever actually been really successful at cloning DARPA. And I think because no, you know, DARPA has, I mean, as you talked about earlier, they have a lot of independence, not total, they can't fund whatever they want, but more so than other agencies. And even when people want to start a new sort of ARPA, they don't want to ever give it like that much money or control or freedom like DARPA's had over the years. So those efforts have not been successful, but, I mean, they still have money, and certainly wouldn't surprise me that there's connections to Trump administration or Trump family. Sounds bad. Right. But I've been reading lately. Yeah. It's all insane. But Sharon, thank you for doing this. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you think we should cover? I mean, we've covered a lot of material. Yeah, we have. Yeah. Yeah. So, tell people about, so your new book is now available everywhere in the book. Valley of death. How big tech is feeling the future of warfare available everywhere. Bookstores, Amazon, Barnes Noble, anywhere you want to buy it. Yeah. Okay. Is there any, like a website or anything else, people should go to to find out more about you? Yeah. So my website is www.shareandwindbreaker.com. I work for the Bolton of the Atomic Scientist. We do the Doomsday Clock. They can go to the Bolton of the Atomic Scientist website. I write for a lot of places as you've seen. Yeah. And I just, you know, I think it's, I, as I said, I am optimistic that I see the public, whether it's my book or there's a lot of other good books out there right now, that they're engaging on these issues and that they're worried about them. And I think that's, I don't care whether people agree or disagree with, you know, my views. I care that people are engaged in the issues. And I think it's like, we talked about the optimism. Like I think there's a lot of sort of cross-partisan interest in where things are going. Mm-hmm. I totally agree. Well, thank you. And thank you for doing what you're doing. Thank you. Very impressive work. We'll link all your stuff below for folks. And that's all. Thanks for having me.