No Mercy / No Malice: Chokepoints

As read by George Hahn. https://www.profgmedia.com/p/chokepoints Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:18Speaker 02

  Did you know that mosquitoes have killed almost half of all people who have ever lived? Today, people are fighting back. With support from the Gates Foundation, American scientists and partners around the world have developed a new generation of bed nets that can kill up to 90% of mosquitoes exposed to them, helping cut malaria rates in half. The result? A safer, healthier future for everyone. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.

• 1:50Scott Galloway?

  I'm Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. Since the start of the war with Iran, we've been fixated on the Strait of Hormuz. But in a globalized, digitized world, geographic features aren't the only choke points. Choke points, as read by George Hahn.

• 2:19George Hahn?

  When you compress the carotid arteries, you cut off the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain. This causes unconsciousness in approximately 8 to 15 seconds due to cerebral hypoxia, oxygen deprivation to the brain. Globalization has expanded the economic corpus, resulting in an interconnected world and yielding huge, though unevenly distributed, prosperity. It has also formed carotid arteries the size of, wait for it, the Strait of Hormuz. In 1984, a forgettable made-for-TV movie contemplated a Middle East conflict that closed the Strait of Hormuz.

• 3:03George Hahn?

  For decades, US strategic simulations have explored similar scenarios. In one 2002 war game, the red team, deploying asymmetrical capabilities, including armed speedboats, decimated American naval forces in 10 minutes, effectively closing the strait. Why didn't the Trump administration anticipate this entirely predictable scenario? A: Despite a warning from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the President determined that the regime would capitulate before closing the strait, and that if it didn't, the US military could reopen it. He was wrong. This may be the greatest intelligence failure

• 3:47George Hahn?

  since CIA Director George Tenet famously told Bush it was a slam dunk case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But let's put aside the choke point almost everyone saw coming and discuss some others we choose to ignore. Last year, one company conducted 84% of US space launches and 52% of global launches: SpaceX. Almost 2/3 of the satellites orbiting Earth belong to the company, but it really dominates in low-Earth orbit, where it owns 91% of communications satellites. If you're connecting from a cellular dead spot,

• 4:32George Hahn?

  going online while flying one of 30-plus airlines, out on a boat, or operating in a war zone, you're at Elon Musk's mercy.

• 4:42George Hahn?

  He recently combined SpaceX with XAI at a valuation of 1.25 trillion dollars, registering a 43% equity stake and 79% of the voting power. This week SpaceX filed to go public, seeking to raise 50 billion to 75 billion dollars, meaning Musk will likely become the world's first trillionaire. He says he's "creating the most ambitious vertically-integrated innovation engine on and off Earth with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications,

• 5:25George Hahn?

  and the world's foremost real-time information and free speech platform." In other words, a global communications and information choke point. With Musk, sometimes you get Dr. Jekyll, electric cars, reusable rockets, and medical breakthroughs for treating blindness and paralysis. Other times you get Mr. Hyde, bullying a judge, Nazi salutes, and AI porn. Is Jekyll or Hyde the real Elon? A: Yes. As author Robert Caro, who's written four volumes on power through the lens of LBJ,

• 6:09George Hahn?

  observed, "Power doesn't necessarily corrupt, but it always reveals." "When you are climbing to get power, you have to use whatever methods are necessary, and you have to conceal your aims," Caro told The New York Times. "But then, when you get power, you can do what you want, so power reveals." Musk is, according to The Wall Street Journal, addicted to ketamine, determined to father a legion level of offspring before the apocalypse, and, no surprise, perpetually engaged in custody battles. He also sleeps with loaded guns next to his bed.

• 6:53George Hahn?

  Is this the person we want at the epicenter of space, connectivity, AI, and media? A: No one person should have this much power.

• 7:04George Hahn?

  I have no idea what Musk intends to do with his power, and that's the scary part. He's unelected and answers to no one, as we now live in a society where billionaires are protected by the law, but not bound by it. Even scarier, Musk may not know either. See, ketamine. To paraphrase Richard Pryor, ketamine is a hell of a drug. I tried it once under therapeutic supervision. Shit got real, and unreal, fast. As Shayla Love wrote in The Atlantic, "Excessive use of the drug can make anyone feel like they rule the world." For most people, the danger of that delusion is contained inside a relatively small blast

• 7:49George Hahn?

  zone: the addict, their friends and family, their world. In Musk's case, his world is our world. Last weekend, an estimated eight million Americans participated in No Kings protests. The rallies speak to the moment, but the demonstrators concerned are as old as America. As James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, #47, "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective,

• 8:33George Hahn?

  may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." After fighting a revolution against a monarch, the Constitution's framers split power across three branches of government, devising a system of checks and balances to put each branch in tension with the other two. Cumbrous by design, we spent the next 230 years reassembling the king.

• 9:05George Hahn?

  The Constitution grants the power to tax and regulate foreign commerce exclusively to Congress, but according to Duke Law Professor Timothy Meyer, functionally, trade policy has been dominated by the executive branch since the 1930s. The War Powers Resolution of 1973, sold as a check on Richard Nixon after revelations that he'd secretly bombed Cambodia, actually codified a 60-day blank check for presidential military action. Meanwhile, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed one week after 9/11,

• 9:47George Hahn?

  has been cited to justify classified military operations in at least 22 countries. Congress has never declared war in my lifetime, but we've fought many, and we're fighting one now. On paper, our system was built to avoid choke points by distributing power. We built one anyway. It's inside the Oval Office. For the past century, as we ceded powers from the legislative and judicial to the executive branch, we've been hoping norms would help us avoid strangulation. And it worked, until it didn't.

• 10:31George Hahn?

  Last October, a database glitch in northern Virginia took down Snapchat, Fortnite, Ring Doorbells, Coinbase, Reddit, DoorDash, and about 1,000 other services. The culprit was a malfunction at an Amazon Web Services data center, the third major outage tied to that location in the past five years.

• 10:58George Hahn?

  Down Detector received 6.5 million outage reports. Three companies, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, own 2/3 of the cloud market. These service interruptions rarely result in clients switching providers, leaving is too costly and time-consuming. After a perfect storm of bad code and a widespread Azure outage knocked airlines, hospitals, and banks offline in 2024, one cybersecurity expert said: “This is a very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core internet infrastructure.” If you’re under 30, that fragility is your lived experience.

• 11:43George Hahn?

  That’s what makes the cloud such a potent choke point. It’s hiding in plain sight, until it isn’t. Mistakes that cause outages are one thing, but attacks from malicious actors are the bigger threat. Since 2005, 34 countries have been suspected of sponsoring cyber operations, with China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia accounting for a combined 77% of suspected attacks. Since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran, Iranian hackers have hit a medical technology

• 12:24George Hahn?

  company, stolen and tried to sell data from Lockheed Martin, and breached FBI Director Cash Patel’s personal email. Even more chilling is the emergence of a gray zone between war and peace, i.e. permanent cyberwar. As a 2022 Atlantic Council report explained: “Without firing a single bullet, US adversaries are striking at the fibers of US and allied societies, economies, and governments to test confidence in systems that underwrite both the US constitutional republic and the US-led rules-based international order.”

• 13:09George Hahn?

  In other words, every day unseen hands reach across cyberspace and apply pressure to our air supply. When we gasp for air, however, we demand an immediate patch rather than insisting on redundant airways. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is demonstrating a lesson we should have learned watching Ukraine repel Russia for the past three years. An $82 million fighter jet launched from a $13 billion aircraft carrier is an economic

• 13:48George Hahn?

  Goliath facing a swarm of $20,000 to $50,000 Davids, i.e. Shahed drones. While we're bleeding resources and credibility, China is taking notes and looking at Taiwan. "The single biggest threat to the world economy, the single biggest point of single failure, is that 97% of the high-end chips are made in Taiwan," Treasury Secretary Scott Besen said at Davos this January. "If that island were blockaded, or that capacity were destroyed, it would be an economic apocalypse."

• 14:30George Hahn?

  One company, TSMC, controls 72% of the global foundry market, producing chips for AMD, Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. If China invaded Taiwan, global GDP would sustain an estimated 10% hit, according to a Bloomberg analysis. But China doesn't need to invade Taiwan or blockade it. They just need to flex. Military exercises, missiles splashing down in shipping lanes to spook maritime insurance carriers, a cyber operation that takes TSMC offline for 72 hours, and watch Silicon Valley

• 15:15George Hahn?

  and JP Morgan scramble to derisk.

• 15:20George Hahn?

  The problem is, there's nowhere to scramble to. Despite Biden's carrots, $152 billion in CHIPS Act spending, and Trump's sticks, tariffs, the soonest the US can expect to have meaningful backup capacity is 2030. We've kept China at bay with a mix of globalization, strong coalitions, and military deterrence. The bulwark of allies defending our most critical technological choke point took decades to build, but only a year to disassemble with incoherent isolationist economic policies,

• 16:03George Hahn?

  insults, and now a war that exposes the gaps in our armor. The Strait of Hormuz, one-man satellite network, an autocracy cosplaying as a government, three cloud providers, one island. We didn't stumble into these choke points. We built them. The invisible bipartisan hand of the market has been wrapping itself around our throat this whole time. We mistook shareholder value and purity tests for resilience, finding welcome distractions in big tech earnings calls

• 16:45George Hahn?

  and arguments over pronouns. Life is so rich.

• 17:04Speaker 04

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• 17:20Speaker 02

  Did you know that mosquitoes have killed almost half of all people who have ever lived? Today, people are fighting back. With support from the Gates Foundation, American scientists and partners around the world have developed a new generation of bed nets that can kill up to 90% of mosquitoes exposed to them, helping cut malaria rates in half. The result? A safer, healthier future for everyone. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.

• 17:50Speaker 05

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• 18:07Speaker 05

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• 18:10George Hahn?

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