SPEAKER_00: all right everybody emergency podcast time episode 263 of all in we have emil michael the under secretary of war for research and engineering working directly for pete hegsa we had to get this out to you on thursday night because it is an emergency pod one of my old besties emil michael

SPEAKER_01: is here emil and i uh were part of team uber back in the day he was travis's right hand man

SPEAKER_02: some might say fixer and emil michael is now the under secretary for war here in the united

SPEAKER_01: states serving his country like our bestie david sacks welcome to the program for the first time

SPEAKER_04: you know michael how you doing brother i'm doing good uh i hope it was more than the fixer but you

SPEAKER_05: know i mean you got it done you got it done the heart he would give you the hardest things yeah

SPEAKER_08: just that's right fair enough if it was hard and that's what a fixer is an operational axe that's what they call them all right sure uh in brooklyn we call them fixers with us again a rainmaker

SPEAKER_05: there's that too there's that too making it happen with us again chamof palihapitiya how are you

SPEAKER_16: brother great yeah look at that smile what do you got going on you got some pokers in the fire

SPEAKER_18: i'm not going to say in the coming weeks i think some news is going to drop that's my prediction i

SPEAKER_19: don't know are you loving chamof's tweet mogging that's been going on this week so good so good

SPEAKER_23: he's looks maxing by default but he's been mogging the gooners yeah so funny what was your favorite

SPEAKER_24: favorite the one i sent you this morning that you said what you said it's so funny collecting your

SPEAKER_27: losses by tax harvesting what did you say tomorrow said uh oh my god it was just like yes i did yes

SPEAKER_30: i did yes someone said something to shabbat he's like drops in why is everyone so mad at chamof all he did was lose billions in retail investors money but probably one page spax it's not like he then told them to enjoy their capital losses or anything give the man a break chamof's response yes i did

SPEAKER_33: all right piling on is your sultan of science everybody's favorite had a great so yeah some

SPEAKER_16: great science that he brought to the show last week friedberg how are you doing oh yeah i've been

SPEAKER_37: traveling this week back at home all right sax is out today he's very busy on capitol hill we'll talk

SPEAKER_40: about what he's up to next week let's go come on let's go let's go let's go go jason all right

SPEAKER_12: the us and israel launched a joint attack on iran on saturday today is day six of operation epic fury iran supreme leader ali hameni was killed within hours of the operation 40 senior officials

SPEAKER_02: have also been killed death toll so far about a thousand people according to reports tragically six

SPEAKER_42: u.s army reserve soldiers were killed following a drone strike on a base in kuwait a u.s submarine sank an iranian ship off the coast of sri lanka this is the first torpedo kill since world war ii

SPEAKER_12: why we're at war been a bit of a moving target in a debate first explanation from rubio he said israel

SPEAKER_00: was going to attack and the u.s had no choice but to participate later walk that back trump made it clear this is not a regime change effort but we're doing this to stop terrorism and the development of

SPEAKER_02: icbms by obviously a pretty crazy group of individuals and obviously nuclear bombs which we

SPEAKER_12: blew up a couple weeks ago trump also mentioned the people of iran should seize the moment quote and take their country back headseth i believe is your boss emil said quote this is not a so-called regime change war but the regime sure did change and the world is better off for it so here's an interesting poly market right now u.s forces enter iran this is boots on the ground by the end of march 40 chance by the end of the year 59 chance so the idea that we're not going to have boots on the ground the sharps on poly market believe we will will the iranian regime fall by june 30 39 chance according poly market and by the end of the year 51 chance so emil i guess there are two questions people really want to know i'll leave off why we're doing this i think president trump has been pretty clear now

SPEAKER_02: but how long is this going to take is the one question and are we going to have to have boots

SPEAKER_47: on the ground maybe what is success here um i think the the president talked about this is a weeks not

SPEAKER_49: months kind of operation and it's aimed at the essentially disarming the the regime uh or the country from uh in such a way that they can't supply hezbollah hamas um muslim brotherhood all the kind of terror groups that get sponsored by weapons and money from iran not to mention the nuclear bit and that's how you see from the reporting they're going after the depots the the you know we went after nuclear sites before they're a prodigious drone maker these like huge one-way attack drones that can go you know hundreds and hundreds of miles um lots of ballistic missiles uh that are aimed at every country in the middle east as you've seen they've attacked them so i think that's one in terms of boots on the ground there's no scenario where we have some protracted boots on the ground

SPEAKER_12: afghanistan iraq too like scenario freeberg your thoughts on this war obviously a lot of people

SPEAKER_02: voted for trump in order to have the peace dividend that he was in his first term absolutely the peace president and now here we are eight countries have been bombed and we've had two leaders deposed and

SPEAKER_12: one of those two have been killed your thoughts freeberg i think the president and the administration

SPEAKER_54: have probably the biggest meetings of the term coming up in china in april my estimation based

SPEAKER_56: on the conversations and the comments made by the president before he came into office and since he's been in office is that finding a grand bargain or a deal with china is probably one of his top priorities and if you think about the importance of that is the u.s going to wade into a giant global conflict led by a u.s china rift or is the u.s going to find some grand bargain i think he would probably have a preference for the grand bargain and that being the case i think you could look at the in the context of maduro and the actions in iran as creating maximal leverage going into those negotiations that the reason for that freeberg 90 of the oil that comes out of iran goes to china and there's been a long developing and developed relationship between maduro's government and china and these are big economic drivers or support the economic driving in china so creating leverage by having significant influence or damage or destruction to those supply chains for china gives the united states footing to be able to negotiate a better deal for america i would imagine that the president's intention here isn't to go and decide who should be in charge and drive regime change and end in a multi-year conflict with iran but ultimately if there's some transaction with china that gets everyone out of this and puts the u.s on a strong footing where american businesses can sell into china which is very challenging as everyone knows today and there's parity regulatory parity economic and trade parity between the u.s and china there's a point of view on what happens with taiwan and availability of key technologies like semiconductors i think it could be a win-win and i think that a deal with china could be the crowning achievement of this administration particularly going into the midterms so the timing is right and i think that's probably a core part of the

SPEAKER_12: motivation here chamath your thoughts on this action and why we're doing it you've heard obviously the president has his position we're not doing regime change it's a secondary effect obviously but we want to stop those icbms and nuclear bombs from being developed and we want to stop terrorism additionally

SPEAKER_02: freeberg says hey we're framing this great you know discussion we're going to have with xi and china

SPEAKER_12: and oil is part of that where do you think you stand on all this i'll build on both what emil said

SPEAKER_59: and what freeberg said i don't think this is about regime change and i don't think it's about a local regional conflict i think if you take a step back and zoom out the most important thing that we

SPEAKER_61: did in the last three months was by taking out maduro and by taking out the iranian leadership

SPEAKER_59: we have created enormous leverage as friedberg said with china now why is that important

SPEAKER_61: because i think all of this centers around that geopolitical discussion last night something important happened which is that the official chinese bureaucracy posted what their gdp targets were and it was shocking to anybody reading it because what we saw was that they guided to a range of four and a half to five percent which if you look at the historical context of that growth is the lowest that it has ever been in about 30 years so three decades so before they entered the wto and the question that one should ask yourself is when a country that's growing at eight nine and ten percent start to grow at half that rate yet have double the number of people and double the gdp what happens you already have incredibly high domestic unemployment especially youth unemployment does it become more or less chaotic and i think the historical artifacts of every other country would show that it will become more chaotic if you have that as a starting point what is it in china's best interest to do and i think it becomes obvious that the right thing to do would be to invade taiwan why because you start to create a sinkhole that occupies your people that occupies resources that

Chamath Palihapitiya: can get domestic production up and running that can start to generate a war machine and you see the economic impact of war machines in any country during any conflict and if i had to guess just to

SPEAKER_61: build on what emil said the president saw that and i think what they did can be summarized in this chart

Chamath Palihapitiya: which i sent to nick so if your goal is to prevent war with china which is a massive global conflict which could be nuclear which could be cataclysmic how would you do it and this chart paints one way to do it if you look at the conditions inside of the chinese economy the most interesting takeaway is that

SPEAKER_61: they are enormously dependent on imported oil so about 20 of their economy but it's not 20 of their economy because it's a hundred percent of these critical things that create gdp logistics transportation aviation feedstock inputs and of that 19 percent about a fifth of it comes exclusively from iran and venezuela and now all of that is off the table so if you take that and then you see what steve whitkoff and jared kushner and josh greenbon have been doing which is trying to get a deal done in russia and you put all of these things together because by the way if you add russia into that mix it's about 40 of china's oil not only do you re-dollarize not only do you stop the funneling of all of these illicit oil funds to creating chaos all around the world but you hem in china going into a massive moment

Chamath Palihapitiya: at the end of march beginning of april where as freeberg said really astutely there is the potential for a grand bargain and i think that secures global safety in that that is a huge thing for america

SPEAKER_70: amil how much does this have to do with china i think you know my instinct is and i'm not speaking

SPEAKER_49: for the administration on this is that's a second order benefit to some of these things like the um you know and you said eight eight conflicts ever have not been a conflicts there is like we inherited gaza we inherited russia ukraine um venezuela was its own operation and then you could sort of attach to it the drug boats that were coming out of that as like one big operation um and then the houthis was just biden was ignoring the houthis they were just shooting at our ships so that was like very limited in terms of like stop shooting our ships we need freedom of the seas and that wasn't sort of a you know so that's something any president should be doing generally i think um iran being the one you know material conflict outside of venezuela so it's not it's not that many and and how long

SPEAKER_73: did venezuela last there was one raid one i guess that's a really in four hours yeah this is an

SPEAKER_77: important note i think for you emil to sort of uh i've made a lot there's a new approach here with

SPEAKER_00: regard to the these actions which is no boots on the ground and we seem to uh and you of course have

SPEAKER_02: better information than anybody else does i don't think anybody would have known venezuela would have gone as well as it did and so far and listen we got a long way to go with iran this has gone very

SPEAKER_12: well as as well so explain to us what you know and what you the president and hegs have know that we don't that makes these two operations go so smoothly what what is it then there's obviously some new

SPEAKER_86: technology here in the case of what happened in venezuela yeah besides the discombobulator what we've got is

SPEAKER_88: is a very well-trained military like the the global war on terror was disaster in so many respects

SPEAKER_49: but the people now who are fighting that are generals now and so they've learned a lot of lessons

SPEAKER_88: and you compare that to the chinese military they don't have a lot of experience in fact the the decapitation they did in the chinese military the one guy they took out was the one guy who had

SPEAKER_49: experience in vietnam so they don't have uh conflict experience and that matters because you understand going in what are the things that could go wrong um and then you you have incredible technology space

SPEAKER_88: air land sea cyber um all kinds of effects that you could bring together and so you imagine uh a hundred guys goes into the most fortified compound in venezuela where the president is you know take him and his wife out safely and are out with no kias i mean it's incredible right stunning yeah so and they these things these war games have been on the on the shelf for a long time every every scenario has been planned for years ahead of time midnight hammer and iran was planned years ahead of time in terms of how would you do it if you were going to do it um and then you keep refreshing the tactics the tactics techniques and procedures and you're updating them so we have a very sophisticated way of of doing

SPEAKER_91: these things to minimize loss of life and maximize success can i ask a question i don't want to i don't

SPEAKER_61: want to derail this conversation but is the discombobulated real like what can you say about the discombobulated i completely i was like obsessed with this when i saw it on x i was like what is this thing i mean i need it in my house like i just don't push a button about these my kids and that's

SPEAKER_99: just for when helmuth shows up oh my god not meant for your kids i don't know if they're behaving badly

SPEAKER_54: no it's can't talk about it amil do you think we would have been able to pull off that mission

SPEAKER_56: as successfully as we did five years ago ten years ago has the technology improved that quickly that this is not something that's been possible historically and how does that change the the pacing

SPEAKER_88: and the face of war for the next couple of years i'd say no it wasn't only a technology maturation from five years ago it's the uh rules of engagement the rules of engagement that we used to have uh there were some i mean if you read about them some of them are insane like if in afghanistan if the guy had a small gun you had to have a small gun and you know there was this parody in weird ways and when

SPEAKER_49: you're like well but is the objective to have like a fair fight or an unfair fight um well if you're on our side you want to be unfair so the rules of engagement were relaxed to be who writes those

SPEAKER_61: amil who sits in an office and says you can't shoot back if a combatant is shooting at you if you

SPEAKER_88: aren't matched gun for gun yeah i mean who writes that crazy policies that are written into military departments and that's why when secretary hickseth talks about um this kind of thing and what was

SPEAKER_49: happening with him when he was in afghanistan if you ever read his book in iraq he's like the rules of engagement were so punishing that we were we were at risk all the time because you had to have like

SPEAKER_88: a legal understanding what was happening in every minute in the battlefield as opposed to well your job is to you know take out these guys and protect these guys here's your munitions here's like the the the red lines and then like in the middle of that go use your judgment your commanding officer use your judgment on how to win and we kind of gone back to that use your judgment push uh responsibility field still have your red lines but other than that the objective is the objective it's more of a colin powell approach it's like go all in have a clear objective come out use overwhelming force

SPEAKER_91: and we were not doing that for the last four years and then going back to the the face of war going

SPEAKER_56: forward my understanding is that there have been more drones deployed by the united states this past week than we've done in the history of military activity is that right and like how does that

SPEAKER_88: really change things going forward here it changes it big well so so the predator drone was the first big drone program like 10 15 years ago it was this big honkin drone um and then if you remember obama would take out some of these al-qaeda leaders with drones on their balcony and things like that uh i think we uh president trump took out sulaimani with the drone near his car that was the beginning and then the iraq uh sorry the russia uh ukraine war happened where it's like drone on drone 70 of the the casualties are for drug but because of drones so um drone on drone warfare robot on robot warfare those things are the future for sure right and that's why companies like andrel are companies like andrel is because they're making unmanned systems and this has been something you've

SPEAKER_112: specifically been very focused on and you tweeted today a little bit about a competition we'll play

SPEAKER_02: a little video here and this lucas unmanned combat attack systems it used to take a lot of time it certainly wasn't startup time to get new product into the channel for our military to use explain what

SPEAKER_00: program you're running here feels like the darpa self-driving challenge all over again and what

SPEAKER_114: these drones cost i know there's a company making them for i think 35 000 am i correct

SPEAKER_88: i mean the small drones like i'm holding right there and that are way cheaper than that the lucas one-way attack drone which can go five six seven hundred miles at the speed of an airplane carry a big warhead those are like fifty eighty thousand dollars depending on what kind of equipment you put on you put on it but the we have a drone dominance program and the reality and we basically have to build an arsenal for for drones now are we likely to have a territorial conflict like russia ukraine with canada and mexico no but we but we do want to take out drug drones at the border and we want but long one-way attack drones are important for you know any kind of major conflict like you're seeing in iran but also to protect military bases for america 250 world cup uh olympics in 28th like there's other there's a lot more uses of drones for surveillance not just for

SPEAKER_59: you know for combat there you're showing drones that are sort of human operated but how much of this should basically be ai so that it's just some computer vision and again back to what you said before a model understands the rules and the red lines but otherwise is be on task and accomplish your

SPEAKER_88: mission how much of it is one versus the other i mean it's i believe that a sophisticated drone war is going to be drone swarms controlled by ai to some degree or another right to what degree the control matters like for example drones have decoys they could spit out you know they could dazzle they could put out things so how do you discriminate what's a drone and how to hit it you know you can use ai for that because it's learned you know how to do automatic target recognition for example um and then also could it identify a person and that and does that make it safer so it's going after actually someone you want to get and not someone you don't want to get um so there's a lot of uses for ai at the edge if you will um in the future here the ukrainians and russians do something called like a kill box where they lose comms because it's jammed for this drone and then it just starts going in a box and looking

SPEAKER_118: for you know the person that they're trying to get and they're trying they're starting to use ai to do

SPEAKER_71: that wow and china has this ability already probably times some magnitude yeah they have drone swarms

SPEAKER_49: because they can they can force the companies that make them not just dgi to interoperate so

SPEAKER_88: interoperating drones called heterogeneous autonomy right you take different kinds of drones and how they communicate with one another and then make sure they're not going after the same target is like a

SPEAKER_51: pretty complex thing that they're definitely working on and let's talk uh about the fidelity of these

SPEAKER_00: obviously ai is a new technology they it can make mistakes anybody who uses it on a day-to-day basis might experience a hallucination how confident are you in the ai ukraine and russia conflict they obviously are not going to be as thoughtful maybe as we are in putting this together they're in

SPEAKER_12: a hot war right now but we as the united states have to be very thoughtful about this so how confident are you that this isn't going to make a mistake i think that's the key to a lot of this debate and when will it be you know perfect to find as much better and i guess this dovetails with the self-driving you know thoughts it has to be a magnitude better than a human so when will this

SPEAKER_127: be a magnitude more accurate than you know when we have uh make a mistake as a as a military and we

SPEAKER_49: kill a civilian yeah no it's it's a good question and um i don't know when that moment hits that fsd moment where it kind of gets better it's certainly not there and you wouldn't want to take huge risk

SPEAKER_88: with that in like you know there's a gradation of when you would use that and what kind of risk you're trying to take or not if you were trying to take out a drone using ai using a like a laser or something you'd be pretty like okay making mistakes because you just missed the drone you know like whatever with the with the laser laser goes off it's all over um if you're doing something more sophisticated in the population area have a densely populated area you'd take less risk so we're developing procedures tactics for each scenario and this is part of the debate i had with anthropic which is we need ai for things like golden dome chinese hypersonic mixel comes up you've got 90 seconds before it separates and all kinds of decoys and you don't know where the actual payload is and you want to get it hit it from space and a human can't doesn't have the reaction time doesn't have the may not be able to discriminate with their own eyes what they're going after that's a pretty you know low risk thing because it's in space and you're just trying to hit something that's trying to hit you so i think in the next 10 years you're going to see a lot of these applications develop ai to one degree or another so long as we think it's safe and it's not going to do the you know make

SPEAKER_71: mistakes before we get on to the anthropic discussion and we really appreciate you coming here and my

SPEAKER_131: lord this has been so informative so thank you emil for coming here and explaining to the american public and to us what you're working on it really makes us i think speak for everybody really confident in what you're doing it's so great that you've you know left the private sector to do this what i would

SPEAKER_61: say just very quickly emil is i think that not enough people understand that the american military has had to fight with one hand tied behind their back just that little insight that you just gave about afghanistan to me seems so scary because the men and women that sign up for the american military they're doing this to fight on behalf of this country they deserve a lot more than being sent there and all of a sudden being given this rule book and say do your best and it's like oh wait you violated

SPEAKER_135: 19 rules trying to protect america do your job that's insane let's just it's really insane in some

SPEAKER_88: cases and we i my my belief is that's what the frustration for those soldiers who are out there in those wars had more than anything there was the broader frustration like what are we doing here and then the secondary frustration is while i'm here why can't i do my job yeah is there is there much

SPEAKER_54: of a debate internally emil i'm sorry jake out before we move forward on this regarding this idea of

SPEAKER_56: full autonomy in military action i don't want to speak ahead to the anthropic point but it was something that the media seemed to say was part of dario's concern is that when you press the button and hand over complete autonomy and there's a kill action that you're now giving to a robot or to some autonomous system do we then kind of have a moral issue at hand and is that something that's kind of debated or discussed and is that the right way to think about the framing of what goes on i mean we're not

SPEAKER_88: even close to there yet right we're like this the systems are not we we wouldn't feel that a system uh that would have sort of like real risk for a civilian is ready to launch yet so we're not even debating that we're just trying to get basic autonomy in drones basic autonomy in underwater unmanned vehicles basic autonomy that you know you've heard of this collaborative aircraft that fly along with a the jet craft so that it has more firepower but it's still tethered to what the jet does so we're that's incredible yeah yeah so we're just at the very beginning of this stuff and but for golden dome's a good example of like yeah who can oppose that like it's the only way to get out of threat like that um so who could oppose if you have a military base you have a bunch of soldiers sleeping that you have a laser that can take down drones autonomously on that so there's it's it's pretty scenario by scenario but i don't we're not having a lot of debate because the skynet thing is so not a realistic thing at this moment right except if one thing i did tell the anthropic guys i was like you know or yeah i'd tell us any company your models are getting stolen by the chinese they're going to unguard rail them and use them against us and then you want our models to be less capable against

SPEAKER_00: your models it's sort of they're not going to be thoughtful in other words they're going to go for it right and you know if we just benchmark this against where we were at you know but 10 15 years

SPEAKER_02: ago there was the wiki leak of collateral murder i think they called it where we tragically had an

SPEAKER_148: apache take out some journalists and this technology even applied today probably would have avoided that in my mind yeah like we have enough that when you're targeting not drones but you know people on the ground

SPEAKER_49: with an apache this would have probably avoided that yeah or or you know the kuwaiti aircraft hitting you know an american aircraft making a mistake because it doesn't have the identification

SPEAKER_88: i mean it's the same self-driving argument to a degree like self-driving could save lives even though it's scary to look at a car without a human behind the wheel but there's tons of scenarios where it's a way better safer option more precise um than the alternative all right before we move on to

SPEAKER_51: the dario thing and anthropic and that brouhaha there was one piece that we haven't addressed with this

SPEAKER_02: interaction freeberg chamath which is uh the israeli government and their desire to take out this regime and us according to tucker callson and a large contingent of the maga base they feel

SPEAKER_00: that we are captured by this group does israel have too much influence over the united states with regard

SPEAKER_112: to these actions in the middle east this is you know a big debate within the party within the republican party within the maga constituent hey we number one we don't want these wars number two

SPEAKER_00: is israel driving this thing to the point of rubio's quotes that hey we're doing this because israel is going anyway i think we should address it here not that i have a personal stake in this i'll

SPEAKER_155: give my personal opinion at the end i don't think the president is captured by israel in the least i think he decides what is in the best interest of the united states and if israel can be a part of that

SPEAKER_59: then they're a part of it and look let's be clear they're incredibly capable and so in something like this to be able to incorporate the intelligence of massad what you're seeing today in this operation epic fury we're four days in iran has been 90 percent depleted of all of their munitions it looks like they're just firing no more missiles out from iran to anywhere else there's fleets of drones and planes just waiting everybody knew where the iranians were it's great that when we make a decision on something that we need to do we can rely on our allies i think the opposite question should also be asked like what was the uk doing why is spain pontificating why was europe taking the weekend

SPEAKER_61: off before they could even issue a statement why don't you ask that question yeah no it's an equally

SPEAKER_160: valid question you know uh and freeberg do you want to get in on this or no no i'm a jew no one's

SPEAKER_164: gonna care what i have to say they're either gonna they're either gonna be like totally like or they're gonna say this guy's a jew we shouldn't listen to him so like let's move on go ahead yeah

SPEAKER_167: yeah emil any thoughts on this i do i do want to know from emil though like you know is this iron

SPEAKER_56: dome working this laser in israel system is this operational and if so is there any success metrics

SPEAKER_49: you can share around it i mean i think the the golden sorry the golden iron beam was the first generation of of the israeli air defense thing and then they're building building iron beam and and i think it's still early-ish but yeah it works they're they're a technologically sophisticated country that's very small that has like a reason to invest in these things and have a lot of smart people to do them so i think i think it's good but does it primarily work on rockets and i guess i just

SPEAKER_56: want to understand the logical evolution of this because in the 80s and 90s there was a lot of conversation about space-based lasers that could shoot icpms out of the sky to avoid you know global nuclear war and we could always take out every nuclear warhead delivered on an icbm is that technology feasible is there a place in the near future where we could see basically maximal global deterrence using these systems either ground-based or space-based to take out hypersonic missiles i think

SPEAKER_174: i think the the harder but more valuable problem to solve would be the space-based way of doing it

SPEAKER_88: because then um you could get at any kind of almost any kind of threat that hits space but you still need a ground layer because there's cruise missiles that could come at you there's drones and so on so so we call them multi-layers like how do you how do you get every kind of weapon at every layer but you know directed energy lasers as they get more powerful you could take on a bigger weapon farther away right so those uh so those technologies as that as they improve it gets more and more capable and i think all these defense systems uh are going to get more and more capable to get more and more of a variety of weapons that farther farther stand off which is what you want you wanted to you don't want

SPEAKER_49: to shoot it when it's right over tel aviv you want to shoot it you know when it's still over there

SPEAKER_177: their land ideally are the laser interceptors in the field today there's reports that they are i think

SPEAKER_88: there's some i think they've demonstrated some of them got it and is this our technology or israel's

SPEAKER_18: technology because president trump said hey that's actually our technology is there any insight there

SPEAKER_174: we have collaborations with israel on some of the stuff they have their own we have our own

SPEAKER_88: um so it's not this is uh but they're good at tech we're good at tech there's certain there's certain ways you get part of our system and part of their system because it's like a hit it's a quickly evolving part of of science right now how do you cohere beams of light to like get distance how to use high-powered microwave to like just drop drones in their tracks um there's lots of different ways to get at some of these things um and and yeah a lot of it's ours uh and a lot of and some of it's there

SPEAKER_131: yeah and uh to to the earlier question you know i i am pro regime change if it can be done

SPEAKER_00: thoughtfully and obviously isolating a dictator that's the best thing you can do we've done that successfully with you know putin kim jong-un etc keep diplomacy up but if there is a moment in time

SPEAKER_02: where you could free the people of iran after 50 years of being subjugated by these lunatics and dictators i'm all for it and i actually trust president trump to make that decision i know this may sound crazy people think like i'm a libtard or something because of the way my besties frame me on this

SPEAKER_12: program which is completely inaccurate i'm an independent you are i actually were not completely independent you're not and i am just based on my voting okay and i'm not on either one of these

SPEAKER_148: sides i am pro president trump and i trust his judgment i think he has more information that's i think you have more information i actually trust you guys to do it thoughtfully and there obviously was a window here israel can have their own you know motivation that could be the china motivation but there's also spreading democracy which might be the least of people's concerns here but that's on the top of my list i would like to see the people of iran free just to build on your

SPEAKER_61: point jason the thing that emil said before which i think is important as well as we have an enormous amount of learnings about what happened in iraq we also have a ton of learnings between the iran iraq war and a ton of learnings in 53 when us and the british deposed most of they in the or at least fermented that and put the shah and then the shah was booted up yeah if you take those three chapters in iranian history or that regional history there's a ton to learn and to your point there is a way to affect what we need to do without creating some 20 year forever war there was an incredible tweet i don't know if you guys saw this somebody said so every word doesn't have to be three decades and trillions of dollars to your friends in virginia maryland and dc did you guys see that tweet it's true these things can be one and done in and out and if president trump succeeds

SPEAKER_02: here i just want to also give him some flowers here the people of venezuela and the people of iran being free represent about five percent of the people in the world living under an autocracy under a dictator if those both flip back to democracies he'll have done more for the spread of democracy than any president for many decades perhaps in our lifetime this would be incredibly noble

SPEAKER_08: incredibly noble incredibly just and would you in the human rights set want him to get the nobel then

SPEAKER_83: absolutely i'll give him all the nobels like literally if you can all the people all of them

SPEAKER_111: give him every prize give him an officer for physics chemistry philosophy jake how's an independent when's the last time you voted for republican presidential candidate just curious um

SPEAKER_05: yeah say it no no no no um mondale no no i didn't i would have voted for if i was of age i would have voted for um i wouldn't have voted for the bushes i voted for the moderates um uh uh obviously

SPEAKER_199: uh clinton and obama oh we're playing the woulda shoulda game i would have voted for reagan in

SPEAKER_184: this situation i would have bought indy at four dollars well no and i didn't vote for kamala so i'll leave it at that but i voted probably for 35 why don't you say that you voted for president

SPEAKER_18: just say you voted for president i don't want to complicate things but you did so just say it i didn't vote for kamala i'll leave it at that all right it's so it's so weird that you say you'll

SPEAKER_200: say you're a moderate but you won't say that you voted for president trump i am supporting president

SPEAKER_12: trump in about 60 70 of what he does uh let's leave it at that three two all right let's talk about economics impact of oil and insurance oil has rose to 84 a barrel wednesday straight and four moves here's a video is uh basically a standstill at this point here's the clip you can see the traffic

SPEAKER_02: slowing down and then hey some of the dots are even going away that could be uh ships were taking out unless the straight opens 3.3 million barrels of daily production would be lost early next week and then there's insurance companies they've all canceled the war risk coverage of vessels in the gulf effective march 5th supertanker traffic dropped 94 percent within the first 48 hours trump said the u.s will provide political risk insurance for all maritime trade through the gulf especially energy freeberg your thoughts on the economic second order effects that we're starting to experience

SPEAKER_00: here and over the next four weeks could be um you know intense and acute the modern insurance market

SPEAKER_56: emerged specifically to solve the risks of maritime trade so in the 17th century lloyd's of london which was a coffee shop in london where all the maritime traders would get together and they talk about hey what's the safest route so pirates don't get our ship and so you don't run into weather that's where they would kind of have these conversations and eventually they started underwriting the risks of the shipping uh routes and giving each other guarantees they said hey if you make this route great you pay me a certain amount if you don't make the route i'll pay you the lost value and that's how lloyds of london which is the kind of world's biggest reinsurance market started today lloyds of london has 78 what are called syndicate members so these are kind of these pools of reinsurance that underwrite big crazy risks like maritime insurance for folks that are moving oil tankers through the strait of hermuz which the irgc just announced they're shutting down when the irgc announced that they were shutting down the strait of hermuz there's a significant risk of all the mines going in the strait and the ships getting attacked and blown up so loss of value the insurance premium spiked initially from a quarter percent so 0.25 of the value of the ship to 1.25 so it went up by like 5x and so folks had to pay a lot more of the value of their ship in order to continue the routes and get guarantees that they'll make it through and then all of the markets started to shut down so once the conflict got heavier everyone said let's shut this thing down and that's a obviously a massive risk to energy prices globally which drives inflation and puts u.s economic security at risk and so this is a brilliant move i would say the u.s government stepped in with the u.s international development finance corporation which was actually funny enough started a couple of years ago like in 2019 or something like that as a kind of output of one of the agencies that provided credit from usaid much talked about usaid and so they're they're leveraging

SPEAKER_167: the credit capacity of this old usaid agency to go out and say to all the shipping companies hey we'll give you insurance on your routes and the reason they need it is the shipping companies are levered they take on debt to buy the ships and the debtors require that they have insurance or else they're not allowed to take the routes because the debtors are ultimately going to be out the money and so the shipping companies themselves need to have insurance and so this provides a market that has now gone away very smart and ultimately a lot of people are saying this could actually reshore or onshore maritime insurance back to the united states and create an entirely new insurance industry here in the u.s that has historically been served almost exclusively by european syndicates and european partners and it actually creates a big economic opportunity as this war dies down for american insurance companies and american brokers to basically be the underwriters and the guarantors of

SPEAKER_56: this sort of insurance and create a new industry so that's super super interesting kind of side

SPEAKER_01: story on what's going on here all right some breaking news here folks via bloomberg the pentagon has formally notified anthropic that it's been deemed a supply chain risk this has never happened

SPEAKER_42: to an american company it has happened to russian companies uh and chinese companies while white and for background the department of war canceled anthropic's 200 million dollar contract on friday and said they would do this the dispute came down to two clauses according to sources and we have one of the principles here so we will hear directly from him in a moment anthropic had two concerns number one fully autonomous weapons aka murder bots as we previously discussed dario didn't feel that their technology was reliable yet and wanted some assurances the second thing anthropic said was uh they

SPEAKER_12: were concerned about mass surveillance of americans because they believed this technology is uniquely

SPEAKER_00: powerful and uh it's can do things beyond what a series of webcams or a network of 7-eleven cameras can

SPEAKER_131: do pentagon said they wanted all lawful use dario you're welcome to come on the program next week or any

SPEAKER_01: time to give your side of the story but this week we have emil emil your thoughts and explain to us

SPEAKER_209: what happened here and how this broke down it's worth a little history short history so if you remember

SPEAKER_49: the biden executive order on ai which was this crazy executive order that limited the amount of compute any model company could do and was essentially grandfathered in a few small a small number of ai companies that they were going to designate the winners and everyone else was out so they could have more control on what they did um anthropic was one of those winners um and then they were smart active as a good sales strategy to sell into the most sensitive parts of u.s government like all of our combatant commands sent com sent central command that's doing the iran fight now the indo paycom command which is sort of responsible for china several of the intelligence agencies and they did forward deployed engineers palantir style so they're very got very sticky um to the workflows and all that and so i came in and i got the ai portfolio for department in august and i said i just want to see the contracts you know the old lawyer in me and i looked at the contracts i was like holy cow they say you can't use them for you can't use them to plan a kinetic strike you can't use their ai model to move a satellite you can't there was a 20 page you can't do a war game scenario

SPEAKER_88: with it you could do a scenario but you can't like let's suppose you're writing a plan saying like if this happens here's what we would do and it might involve a kinetic strike which causes harm to a human so like well what do you think these folks do you know this is the department of war this is what we do and so i said okay well i i've got a number one have direct relationships with these companies not just through palantir because i want to use it more broadly and then number two i need to have the terms of service be rational relative to our mission set so we started these negotiations and and took three months and i had to sort of give them scenarios about like these chinese hypersonic missile example they're like okay we'll give you an exception for that well how about this drone swarm we'll give you an exception for that and i was like the exceptions doesn't work i i can't predict for the next 20 years what all the things we might do use ai for um and so so all lawful use seems like a good thing if congress wants to act great we have our own internal policies like we'll follow them we're not knuckle draggers here we want we don't want to hurt people unnecessarily so you know it's our province to decide how we fight and win wars um so long as they're lawful and i think at some point it turned into a pr game for them because they were not gonna win this the intellectual battle of well we're gonna stop you we're gonna use our judgment because we think congress is behind and impose it on the us military and it became this like let's find the issues that are most inflammatory robot weapons and mass surveillance and like we're the department war we're not the fbi we're not homeland security we're not you're not allowed to legally spy on americans yeah you're not you're not so it's yeah so you're like and then what it came down to on that issue just as an anecdote is they didn't want us to bulk collect public information on people using their eyes or ai system and they wrote it in a way that i was like so you're telling me before we got to bulk like if someone types in you know shamat's uh linkedin it's i i'm using public available information that i'd be violating your terms of service like yeah well okay let's rewrite it so there's months of this like stuff um which which was sort of interminable and then the trigger point was after the maduro raid one of their execs called palantir who we buy themselves through and asked them uh was our software used in that raid which is by the way classified information anyway so we're

SPEAKER_49: trying to get classified information and implying that if there was use in that raid that that might

SPEAKER_215: violate their terms of service so they wanted to enforce this is very important here yeah they wanted

SPEAKER_02: to enforce their terms of service they went behind your back to try to collect information

SPEAKER_88: to then maybe pull your license for their technology but you know it wasn't by behind my back i don't want to accuse them of that palantir is the prime contractor of their sub um but it raised enough alarm with palantir who's got a trusted relationship with the department to tell me and

SPEAKER_49: i'm like holy what if this software went down some guardrail kicked up some refusal happened for the

SPEAKER_88: next fight like this one and we left our people at risk and i had so i went to secretary hegg seth i said this would happen and that was like a whoa moment for the whole leadership at the pentagon that we're potentially so dependent on a software provider without another alternative that has the right or ability to do to not only shut it off maybe it's a rogue developer who could poison the model to make it not do what you want uh at the time or sort of trick you because you have to trick it i mean all these things that we know or we were about models or hallucinate purposefully or do or not follow instructions like some insider threat stuff so then that culminated in the tuesday kind of dramatic meeting with hexath and secretary hexath and me and and dario um with the friday deadline that that got blown and i never thought they really wanted to make it mil is is the model

SPEAKER_100: entirely hosted by anthropic or just explain to us technically does this sit in a cloud that

SPEAKER_56: palantir runs for you guys um is there really technically a way that employees at anthropic could kind of interfere intervene in the use of the model yeah so they put their model in aws gov cloud

SPEAKER_88: like gov cloud yeah and then palantir serves it from there and they refresh it they held the control plane for the model so so yeah they can change the model weights if they want they can do whatever

SPEAKER_185: they want yeah the insight into this thing is unbelievable not just governments but now if

SPEAKER_61: you're running a company the reality is that what anthropic showed which by the way is their right at some level is that they are going to have a political perspective and a set of terms that reflect their philosophy and that that philosophy can change on a dime but what the government did was also completely reasonable which is we can't rely on you if you're going to be completely unreliable and disallow things that are reasonable i'll give you a different example to make the point there's a state that wants to run some health care program but they're a pro-life state you can't conduct abortions in that state does that mean that the anthropic engineers can decide you know what we're pro-choice so we're going to change the access model and the capability of that model inside of that state is that allowed should that be allowed at one level you'd say this is a private company they're allowed to choose but what that really means is for the government for all the states for any city for every company you cannot choose to only use one of these things

Chamath Palihapitiya: because it is just a matter of time until some person inside of one of these companies goes on some lunatic moral tirade and then jeopardizes your business against something that is nothing about law but is everything about subjectivity that is the huge thing that this thing tore open this weekend so if you're not figuring out how to be multi-model and agnostic across these models you're taking on enormous business risk after friday because you can't tolerate that these folks will do that it's too critical of a technology by the way this is de-platforming all over again remember what happened when you didn't like what was said now all of a sudden you were de-platformed this is that times a thousand because this is not about posting on social media this is about using fundamental

SPEAKER_228: technology to either advantage or disadvantage your business emil yeah i mean i think i described it the

SPEAKER_88: other way the other day as these cut the leaders of these companies say they're going to cause 50 white-collar unemployment this is as powerful as a nuclear bomb it's like 50 000 geniuses in a data center so you could have a small country coerce the world into it's whatever it's really like holy cow all right so this is a general substrate of intelligence of technology that's applicable to a lot of things very generalized it's not like workday saw like hr software we could just use competitor this is going to be part of our everyday life in so many different ways and they're controlling the what whether it has a moral conscience i mean anthropic has its own constitution it has its own soul it's not the u.s constitution so you're subject to that plus whatever whims and how that changes and that's a scary thought

SPEAKER_49: for for americans generally um and i think that did come through a little bit today and in the coming

SPEAKER_51: years is going to be a bigger and bigger deal so take us through open ai software gemini software and groc software have they pushed back on any use or are they like dell or apple they sell you a

SPEAKER_00: computer and you have the computer and you can use it as you will i have any of those giving you any

SPEAKER_174: pushback so groc's all in for all awful use cases across all classified and unclassified networks as

SPEAKER_88: you'd expect because and you know elon's truth-seeking we want truth in department of war we don't want ideology because ideology will mess with operational decisions like you you don't want anyone to

SPEAKER_236: anything to be fake or tilted we're we're surveying google and we have them we have google for all

SPEAKER_88: awful use cases on on classified networks and we're trying to move them to classified networks so just

SPEAKER_00: they have to build out infrastructure because this stuff's complicated so they're in compliance in terms of what you're looking for as a partner and then i guess the last one is open ai and sam seems

SPEAKER_238: to be just characteristically playing both sides a bit no no trying to his credit um i called him and

SPEAKER_88: said i need a solution if this thing goes sideways i need multiple solutions i'd like you to be one of them and he's like okay well what can i do for the country i was like i need to get you up running as soon as i can and he was he was trying to protect anthropic to his credit he was like don't do don't call him a supply chain risk that's bad for the industry let me maybe i can negotiate terms that they'll find acceptable uh but he's in the middle because they they compete for the same researchers so a lot of this comes down to this thousand researchers like baseball players that get traded between these companies money ball yeah right it's a very money ballish sort of thing and there's not that many of them and you lose 20 of them and all sudden you know you they launch claude code before you launch codex or something like that and then the numbers change pretty dramatically so he was being a real patriot um to his credit and trying to him you know help anthropic while they were trashing him and recruiting from his company and i i'm not biased i just i want all of them i want to give them all the same exact terms uh because i need redundancy i want to see if they diverge or not or did they if they converge maybe i only need two over time but we don't know it's too early but why why keep

SPEAKER_54: them in the mix and meal so if there's clearly like a difference of operations and philosophy and how

SPEAKER_56: they want to run their business and there's other models is is their model particularly good at particular applications that make it important to keep it in the mix given that there are three

SPEAKER_88: or four other kind of alternatives here anthropic you mean yeah well because number the number one reason we were having this conversation at all is because they were deeply embedded so now i have to unentangle them and the other companies have not gone as heavy enterprise enterprise sales forward deployed engineers government business so they have to catch up not necessarily the capability of the model but just how do you serve the government the government was just way ahead on that right but

SPEAKER_242: the models themselves you don't think are uniquely advantaged or do you have a view on that at this

SPEAKER_49: point i don't have a view on that i don't think they're you know i mean certainly cloud code was

SPEAKER_88: was innovative and ahead that's true um but i do i believe in 12 months codex is not going to be

SPEAKER_135: close i think it will be i think you're right there's an asymptoting that's happening if you just look at

SPEAKER_61: the like the confidence interval on how over performance or under performance some of the leading models are the error bars are shrinking right the confidence intervals like these things are all kind of becoming the same eventually they're all getting access to enough power enough compute they're generating similar results it turns out which i think you would expect so even more important that you have a complexion of models the other thing emil i don't know if you saw this but they posted about the revenue ramp of anthropic and well i have a small software company called 8090 and i asked the team let's go look at our opex i posted it because i was so shocked at these numbers our costs have more than tripled since november of 25 between the inference cost that we pay aws which is ginormous between our cost with cursor between anthropic we are just spending millions so now more per unit and more more in aggregate both but the problem is that my costs are going up 3x every three months my revenues are not token uses very addictive yeah and by the way because everybody has gotten infatuated with what we call these ralph wiggum loops like just like send the thing off and like it'll just go figure something out a it never figures anything out and b you just get this ginormous bill from cursor so one of the things we had to do was just we had to say guys you got to deprecate cursor because you're just wrapping plot code and charging us way too much for these tokens but i don't know if you're seeing any of this thing where like the tool usage it's so great to use these tools let's be honest it's super fun it's like you feel like a genius but then the roi of these tools are really important i'm not sure that that's as much of an issue for you or not in in

SPEAKER_256: the department it will be it will be for sure as people find more and more use cases the use cases

SPEAKER_137: get more sophisticated so the next marginal thing you have to do is likely to be harder and therefore

SPEAKER_54: be more consumptive right right right let me just ask emil the important question that i think

SPEAKER_56: triggered a lot of the news this week is why then designate them a supply chain risk why not just abandon them move on use the other vendors like why take this kind of punitive action

SPEAKER_174: yeah so i don't view it as punitive and i'll tell you why it's if their model has this policy bias

SPEAKER_88: let's call it based on their constitution their culture their people and so on i don't want lockheed

SPEAKER_49: martin using their model to design weapons for me i don't want the people who are designing the things

SPEAKER_88: that go into the the componentry to come to me because if that poison if you believe the risk you're compounding that risk yes it can enter into any part of the defense enterprise but it's just the defense enterprise so boeing wants to use anthropic to build commercial jets have at it boeing wants to

SPEAKER_49: use it to build fighter jets i can't have that because i don't trust what the outputs may be because they're so wedded to their own policy preferences i guess a dovetail to that is why couldn't this have

SPEAKER_02: been handled quietly is this anthropic who made this a public spat or was it the administration

SPEAKER_262: that made it a public spat or two to ten i mean they have a very good sophisticated press operation

SPEAKER_49: and like really good and painting us as doing mass surveillance where where where your their issue

SPEAKER_88: was like some commercial database thing that someone else could buy they didn't want us to buy to use it which i'm not even sure we buy them except to do recruiting for soldiers and you know we run schools hospitals we do a lot of things that do do we don't just fight wars and um and the way they were able to characterize these two things which are genuinely scary to people but were not the real issues um it was really the you worry i worried about them shutting off our system at a moment of

SPEAKER_263: need or them messing with our system and motor me those were we were scared came to mind is if they

SPEAKER_02: are selling you batteries and you need to use the batteries or the laptops whoever you need to use them lawfully okay that should be enough for them unless they are peaceniks and they don't want to be involved in selling weapons which by the way was google's position for many years they just didn't want to be involved in it because to your point they want to recruit talent that is also aligned

SPEAKER_00: with that so this just seems to be maybe this isn't the right partner for the department of war yeah

SPEAKER_129: if you don't want your stuff to be used for department war stuff you shouldn't be selling to

SPEAKER_231: the department of war pretty straightforward it's in the name it's in the name name well and then also i have to say when you know you said hey we don't know what how we're going to use this thing like

SPEAKER_00: immediately came to mind was like 9 11. you have to go check with them you know if you find out there's another 9 11 unique you know black swan event that's going to occur and you have to go clear

SPEAKER_146: with them like you that was literally the comment that was literally the comment when i was yeah so

SPEAKER_49: it was in a room of 20 people so this is not undeniable if everyone everyone wants to deny it and i was given these scenarios these golden dome scenarios and so on and he's like just call me

SPEAKER_88: if you need another exception and you know i'm like but what if the balloon's going up at that moment and it's like a decisive action we have to take i'm not going to call you to do something it's like not rational and yes uh so that was another holy cow moment of like how they think about it that just

SPEAKER_277: means that what he wants to be is the secretary of war that's right he wants to be the the god

David Friedberg: king there i guess yeah you can't do that the thing that shocks me emil i don't know you maybe

SPEAKER_61: you can't say anything but me guys you can comment on this it's clear that anthropic just lost all the republicans but i think that if they think that they have the democrats that's fleeting as well because i think progressive democrats fundamentally just hate silicon valley and technology and so there's no way they're going to let some god king over here that they don't control either and so in both ways i think they accidentally may have pissed off every constituent the longer term fallout amongst them and progressives will come home to roost because as the progressives want more control and these guys push back on them they're just going to fall into the same situation yeah i mean it's an interesting

SPEAKER_00: perspective i think if you don't want to be involved in war that's your right i think you mentioned this like three times just don't sell bullets if you don't want to be in but you can't call smith and

David Friedberg: wesson and say can i the other thing is what the hell was the senior management and the board talking

SPEAKER_61: about over these last few days because to me it would have sounded insane so then the question is were people just so breathless to buy this revenue curve what is the board doing what is the senior management really doing what do you change guys what do you think you would tell them if you were

SPEAKER_131: sitting inside of the board of anthropic if you're an investor you're on the board what do you say to dario when he says hey i need to dictate to emil and hexeth how they use my tool and everybody else is

SPEAKER_284: just saying lawful use as the standard what's your coaching advice well it's also a very unusual

SPEAKER_56: circumstance because i don't think any business in history has grown as fast as they have in the last 90 days so they've added what was it six billion of arr yeah in a month or something i mean that's

SPEAKER_286: absurd like it's absurd it's absurd it's a great product open claw has driven a lot of this it's

SPEAKER_175: if you're on the board closing your eyes yeah you're shutting the up you're just shutting the up

SPEAKER_167: because something's working you're selling in secondary i think he's off doing his thing and

SPEAKER_56: they're gonna let him do it and i don't think that company's worth 350 billion anymore god knows what

SPEAKER_135: it's worth oh that's interesting where do you if you get put a block of stock right now where do you

SPEAKER_56: put a bid in i'll tell you where oh my god i had i had this conversation at dinner two nights ago it's like you have to pick between open ai at their current mark anthropic at their current mark or google

SPEAKER_170: and it's either multiple from here or net market value creation from here because those are actually two very different conversations explain the difference i think the net market valuation because google's already worth three trillion so if they double they've added three trillion but i think google is the bet i think google is the market value creator bet but i think anthropic is the

SPEAKER_56: multiple bet i think anthropic is a trillion five market cap at the end of the day

SPEAKER_175: unless this blows them up you're still buying the 5x versus the 3x kind of thing you'd buy the 5x

SPEAKER_107: instead of the 2x but if you could put a block of stock now do you buy it at the last post or do you buy it at a discount or do you just say ah i just buy it at the last post dropping is worth a lot more than

SPEAKER_37: 350. that's for sure i i it's undervalued compared to chat cheap they just added 6 billion in the last

SPEAKER_167: month and i will tell you anecdotally anecdotally i am everyone i talked to is on co-work everyone has like gone deep on this everyone's amazed and shocked and actively using it and everyone's saying the same thing which is anthropic may actually both be fulfilling the promise of ai i will also say that it's only going to take 90 days for google to flip on a virtual version of co-work and once google

SPEAKER_170: like has this integrated with g suite and you have a virtual hosted version of co-work i think google

SPEAKER_56: sweeps the market with this same competitor but right now co-work is such an incredible product and everyone's saying the same thing it's like giving elon giving truth to ai elon said something

SPEAKER_59: with respect to grok which was that he expects it to exceed all of these coding models probably in the may spin but for sure by june

SPEAKER_61: so to your point freebrook like what like i guess my question guys to you is like what happens okay what do you guys do emil what do you do when all the models asymptote let's just say by october of this year let's just say i can guarantee you just for the thought exercise by october all the models are the same do you just take a complexion of them all and say great we're gonna build some governance

Chamath Palihapitiya: layer around it and now we're indifferent or like what do you do i would love to be indifferent because

SPEAKER_49: then i could compete on price right and then then i have and then i have one one main and one redundant or two mains and i'd need at least two yeah anthropic's not going to be one of them if they continue sort of with their their sort of posture so then it would be three and if one gets wobbly from a policy

SPEAKER_88: scenario too because they all you know except for elon's is based in san francisco and has that that vibe to hit so uh you kind of want to have two or three at any given time and yeah then i then you price compete them i do think google has a long-term strategic advantage not because not only because of their consumer thing but because they have their own cloud so between them they don't have the margin on top of the cloud that anthropoc will have to pass on so

SPEAKER_113: it's an interesting economic pro uh proposition from them and just to build on your point friedberg

SPEAKER_02: after you finish your uh insightful comments here pull this up nick almost on cue friedberg you're such an oracle here is the announcement from google google workspace is now integrated for agents and 40 agent skills were included today amil you've been great today super honest dario's uh position i'm going to give you some fastballs here dario says the real reason the pentagon and

SPEAKER_00: trump admin do not like us is that we haven't donated to trump while open ai greg have donated a lot here's claude's answer to that claim here's nine companies and their activities with the

SPEAKER_12: administration from the inauguration to attending the inauguration to the white house ceo dinner to the melania documentary if you go through and you look at these nine companies microsoft apple tim apple nvidia nvidia amazon they have all participated there's one company that hasn't participated and that's anthropic r is anthropic being singled out because they are not genuflecting and because they're not paying the cover charge people say this administration is pay for play that's the accusation he's making i'd say maybe there's a cover charge nobody likes to pay it but the other

SPEAKER_302: companies have what do you think here i mean it's one of the dumbest things i've ever heard i i

SPEAKER_88: truly just because i'm like i'm in the department of war i need to win wars if you help me win wars and i don't have to waste time transitioning you out that makes me thrilled um it's sort of it's a criticism on me because it's not like trump president trump dipped in and he's like hey emil by the way those guys didn't get many money you can't use them anymore obviously it's sort of like like invention in his own mind it's like i don't know if people sleep at night if those thoughts get in there um and and i was trying to work with them why would i spend three months trying to negotiate with them to get to a symbol standard if i would have just said okay guys you're out bye so i think

SPEAKER_49: it's just some internal psychosis that's the only way i can explain that okay it could be on dario that

SPEAKER_56: he's antagonistic to the administration both with respect to how he operates commercially and it's also reflected in the fact that he doesn't want to support the administration i have a

SPEAKER_61: different theory yeah i think that they have a massive instance of co-work running internally that helps them come up with business strategy and i bet you there's like some element of ai that says yeah you should do it do it it just makes sense zig where they zag and get more press and so now there's some some clod bot telling them to basically tell the department of war to pound sand it's going to turn out to be the stupidest decision listen if i was chairman of the board of that

SPEAKER_12: company i pulled dario aside and i'd say listen you're obviously a genius we obviously have the

SPEAKER_148: best tool in town this is not a battle you can win and it makes no sense you're going to come across as not being patriotic and tim cook is showing up for the melania premiere would it kill you to support the president would he kill you to show up look what happened i think that's what happened when biden excluded elon that angled him show up for the president i'll tell you show up for america and be a patriot you don't have to donate but be a patriot and show up for the dinners that's

SPEAKER_61: terrible advice here's my advice okay here's your advice okay hey dario call a meal back right now and say you know what sorry we up we're gonna own this and we're gonna put out a press release that says we support our customers use of our models to do everything and anything that's lawful number one and number two that our terms of service are written in stone and that you can expect solidity and reliability from us and this was just the misstep camille how do you respond i mean i would say

SPEAKER_174: that's what i've always wanted i need a reliable steady partner that gives me something that'll work

SPEAKER_88: with me on autonomous because someday it'll be real and we're starting to see earlier versions of that and i need someone who's not going to wig out in the middle and we're just at the early stages and is rational but then you know you called president trump and your 5 000 word essay on friday a wannabe dictator you're gonna have to apologize to more people than just me yeah maybe time to re-underwrite

SPEAKER_184: the position here uh let's just say kumbaya everybody kumbaya we've solved the problem and

SPEAKER_01: look who's on the line surprise guest dario's here i thought i would surprise everybody nick pull dario up

SPEAKER_167: no he's not here what's your view on how the industrial supply chain for hardware components

SPEAKER_56: and systems is coming along in the united states because my understanding is we're trying to reduce dependency on chinese manufactured components where are we with respect to where we need to get to in the

SPEAKER_49: u.s manufacturing supply chain we are early days um critical minerals you see you've seen the action around that um you'll start to see so i have the office of strategic capital which has 200 billion

SPEAKER_88: in lending authority and what we're trying to do is is it's like treasuries plus 100 bips loan to companies show them that the department needs their solid rocket motors their batteries their fiberglass like all the things that we that we're heavily dependent on for our defense industrial base that are completely outsourced to china and domesticate them here um and we've got a bunch

SPEAKER_49: of great people running it so i but it's early days it's going to take for the rest of the term

SPEAKER_88: to get um i think we'll get critical minerals done before the rest of the term where where we have the access to what we need to from us or allied countries um but from batteries is like the next problem i'm trying to solve for example batteries are totally outsourced both technologically and

SPEAKER_49: from lithium to china um and there's like you know kind of call it 20 critical things if i could get to all of them at some level but then it'll take a few years for them to like build plants and do that stuff but they're there it's it's very important i hope whatever administration comes next continues it because i'm all free market but but we outsourced so much that um you know it crippled sort of the the kind of assembly part of putting all these things together do we have a munitions risk right

SPEAKER_88: now given the conflicts that we're involved in we don't have a munitions risk but um we do need to plus up because the europeans are taking a long time to contribute like ukraine russia has consumed a lot of munitions from like all over the world and then uh obviously these conflicts we've been in and um we need to have like the next generation we're still there's still a large degree we're fighting

SPEAKER_49: with 1980 cold war weapons right and not modern weapons and so we need to plus up those things that

SPEAKER_88: to regenerate them i mean our nuclear missiles are 50 years old some of the planes are 40 years old

SPEAKER_56: so all that has to be renewed do you think um it's just speak to the venture capitalists in the audience are we in the early stages of this kind of defense tech boom is defense tech well funded at this point or is it kind of too hypey and bubbly and that's not really the issue it's not about funding

SPEAKER_58: the companies it's about funding some of the further upstream uh issues that we're facing what's what's

SPEAKER_88: your view on where we are there's more defense tech venture capital than ever by you know 3x more than

SPEAKER_49: last year so you know it's growing what i need to do and what department needs to do is have some of these companies win big contracts quick like whether you know andrel sure um uh saronic sure like bunch of these companies so that more money flows in more entrepreneurs do it and i could buy more

SPEAKER_88: because generally i do think warfare is going from big carrier ships that cost 20 billion dollars and a decade and a decade and a half to build to mass attributable low cost um uh things and that's what these new these new entrants can do so we need those to succeed so that the flywheel goes with

SPEAKER_167: venture capital money entrepreneurs capabilities in that sense and what i've heard as kind of the explainer for this is we're moving from the old primes to the new primes that there's going to be a

SPEAKER_56: small set of big winners and then obviously lots of seconds and subs and whatnot is that really how this market's going to evolve so are we going to end up with andrel palantir maybe three or four others and that's where most of the value is going to accrue from a market perspective i mean andrel palantir

SPEAKER_88: want that and i joke with them all the time about it but i i want i definitely want at least a second layer that's innovative and trying to disrupt the first layer all the time i've had a mom and pop like

SPEAKER_49: wholly owned company that that makes these missiles called erams that are we really send to ukraine and they do it with like 30 people and they could do a thousand a year because they've designed and

SPEAKER_88: manufacture it's awesome so i want companies like that to continue innovating maybe andrel then buys them but the one of the reasons the primes are such a small number it's not the only but it's one is they learn how to contract with the government they learn how to go through the bureaucracy and that became a competitive advantage i'm trying to take that competitive advantage away that's a

SPEAKER_61: really important point how do you disassemble all that bureaucracy so that product innovation

SPEAKER_174: can actually get to you yeah so we we still did a big rook so part of it comes down to requirements

SPEAKER_88: reform what used to happen is people like oh we need a new fighter jet so army navy air force put into the requirements and we're you know it would we needed to be stealthy to hold a missile to hold for humans and you know it became this unbuildable thing but the contractor didn't care because they're getting paid cost plus so like sure i'll fulfill your requirements two years from now you're like that was never engineered properly it'll be another few years late and a couple more billion dollars so we're trying to change that to i tell you my common operational problem i need a bunch of missiles that go 500 miles or more that have this kind of blast come to me with solutions as little requirements as possible on that side and then on the contract piece trying to get to as close to commercial contracts as possible and this is going to and this is where the startups are so good

SPEAKER_49: they'll do fixed cost pricing they'll do you know pay you don't pay me as much if i deliver late you pay me more if i deliver early it's very disruptive to the existing system super disruptive but that's that's what i'm i'm like waking up every day trying to do so you could put out as something saying hey

SPEAKER_00: the straightforward moves is super important we need to keep it open we need these type of devices to keep it open but come to us with your ideas and let them be creative entrepreneurs as opposed to

SPEAKER_135: you know just trying to goose the profits yeah it's really brilliant yeah emil you also oversee darpa yeah

SPEAKER_61: yeah darpa is the father of the modern internet and it's created a lot of really critical technologies can you talk about what's going on in there are there interesting things that you think our audience should know about that you're trying to push forward i mean there's it's so much probably my favorite

SPEAKER_49: part of of my my office is like because there that's where you it's sort of the it's still a very honored profession to be part of darpa like you know being a being government service for a long time

SPEAKER_88: is sort of reduced in its stature since the manhattan project now because now now if you're a great ask you know uh someone who wants to do rockets and stuff you go to space act darpa still has the best of the best and so the most creative ideas happen there one of the things that they're working on that's public is they're trying to use biology to synthesize critical minerals so so how do you so how can you just pull them out of ground use biology to do it so you don't need to do all this crazy messy dirty refining that would like change the game big time on our ability to get the critical minerals we need faster and leapfrog the chinese in terms of tech um so they're doing a lot of that kind of stuff they're deep in cyber cyber attacks are the next huge threat with ai right what we saw with creating all these agents to attack systems that anthropic actually happened to them um so they're they're they're working on that's there's not a ton i could talk about kind of darpa because it's so it's so classified but those are a couple other examples for you all right speaking of classified uh

SPEAKER_336: just two quick questions before we wrap here are there aliens and when are you going to tell us

SPEAKER_00: i guess and number two uh in all seriousness i'm curious what have you learned about china and where they're at and the threat there and our ability to counter it like give us some idea of

SPEAKER_02: where we're at as a country because we hear a lot of hyperbolic stuff they're building this incredible mobile small navy they've got hypersonics they're just way ahead of us you know we hear these things but

SPEAKER_129: realistically are we competitive um i fought well i'll answer your first question was i fought for the alien portfolio i didn't get it all the guys on my team were like do you got to get this for us

SPEAKER_88: please talk to the secretary we want to do this but i but i i was like as long as i had a hundred percent access to everything i would do it because that would be awesome it would be amazing right lifesavers would be a game changer but on the second one uh it is true that chinese have had the greatest military build up in world history in the last 15 years and we're asleep at the wheel to some degree because we're focused on global war and terror so they've advanced without sort of us thinking about threat that being said our operational expertise and our space like we have some sophisticated stuff so you know our subs our space layer um we still have the best stuff in the world that does you know but but we have to make sure that gap doesn't narrow right we can't be complacent

SPEAKER_286: we should sleep well at night knowing you're there yeah knowing president trump's allocating money

SPEAKER_00: towards this and he's decisive in his actions but we cannot be complacent i feel like this week was a

SPEAKER_56: true reminder of how fortunate we are to have the defense that we have for the united states when you look at what happened in dubai and in doha and in tel aviv and you see how people in their residential homes are getting attacked and bombed you realize just how fortunate we are to have all of the layers of protection that we have by our government and i've actually come around to this quite a lot i'm a true kind of arguably libertarian at heart small government but the one thing that i've realized is so critical for us to have the freedom to do all the things we want to do is defense

SPEAKER_58: and so i think it's an amazing institution very valuable to the united states emil thank you for

SPEAKER_163: what you do yeah thank you really appreciate you coming on and being so candid and thoughtful and

SPEAKER_354: insightful this has been that was a fun episode amazing episode we'll see you next time bye-bye love you