Inside the Iran War and the Pentagon's Feud with Anthropic with Under Secretary of War Emil Michael

(0:00) The Besties welcome Under Secretary of War Emil Michael (2:30) US war with Iran: Bigger picture and why now? (13:16) Trump's new approach to warfare, AI, drones, rules of engagement (28:39) Israel's role in the conflict, relationship with the US, Iron Beam (37:24) Oil prices, Trump's maritime insurance play (41:19) Pentagon vs Anthropic: Why Anthropic was labeled a supply-chain risk (1:02:03) How to value Anthropic after its supply chain risk designation (1:11:14) State of the US defense supply chain, the defense tech industry, DARPA, and China's military Follow Emil Michael: https://x.com/USWREMichael https://x.com/emilmichael Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://x.com/chamath/status/2029584905831891069 https://polymarket.com/event/us-forces-enter-iran-by https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-iranian-regime-fall-by-the-end-of-2026 https://x.com/chamath/status/2029416079781736844 https://x.com/USWREMichael/status/2029539950962626734 https://x.com/addyosmani/status/2029372736267805081 https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli https://x.com/chamath/status/2029634071966666964 https://www.lloyds.com/about-lloyds/history/lloyds-buildings https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-05/pentagon-says-it-s-told-anthropic-the-firm-is-supply-chain-risk https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-03/anthropic-nears-20-billion-revenue-run-rate-amid-pentagon-feud

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, emergency podcast time, episode 263 of All In. We have Emile Michael, the Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering, working directly for Pete Hegseth. We had to get this out to you on Thursday night because it is an emergency pod. One of my old besties, Emile Michael is here. Emile and I were part of Team Uber back in the day. He was Travis's right-hand man. Some might say fixer. And Emile Michael is now the Undersecretary for War here in the United States, serving his country like our bestie, David Sacks. Welcome to the program for the first time, Emile Michael. How you doing, brother?

• 0:41Speaker 01

  I'm doing good. I hope it was more than the fixer, but you know.

• 0:46Jason Calacanis?

  Deal maker, fixer. I mean, you got it done. You got it done. The hardest, he would give you the hardest things. Yeah, just.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  That's right. Fair enough.

• 0:53Jason Calacanis?

  If it was hard, and that's what a fixer is. An operational axe. That's what they call him. All right, sure. In Brooklyn, we call them fixers. With us again. A rainmaker. There's that too. There's that too. Making it happen. With us again, Chamath Palihapitiya. How are you, brother?

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, look at that smile. What do you got going? You got some pokers in the fire.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:19Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not gonna say. In the coming weeks, I think some news is gonna drop. That's my prediction. I don't have.

• 1:23David Friedberg?

  Are you loving Chamath's tweet-mogging that's been going on this week?

• 1:26Speaker 02

  So good.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  So good.

• 1:28Jason Calacanis?

  So good. He's look-maxing by default, but he's been mogging the gooners.

• 1:34David Friedberg?

  Yeah, so funny.

• 1:36Jason Calacanis?

  What was your favorite?

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Favorite?

• 1:38David Friedberg?

  The one I sent you this morning that you said, what did you say? It's so funny. You're collecting your losses by tax harvesting.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  What did you say? Chamath said, oh my God.

• 1:49Jason Calacanis?

  It was spicy out there, folks. Yes, I did. Yes, I did.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Yes, I did. Someone said something to Chamath. He's like, drops in. Why is everyone so mad at Chamath? All he did was lose billions in retail investors' money by promoting one-page Sacks. It's not like he then told them to enjoy their capital losses or anything. Give the man a break. Chamath's response, yes, I did.

• 2:08Jason Calacanis?

  All right, piling on is your Sultan of Science. Everybody's favorite, had a great.

• 2:14David Friedberg?

  So good.

• 2:15Jason Calacanis?

  Some great science that he brought to the show last week. Friedberg, how are you doing? Oh, yeah, I've been traveling this week back at home. All right, Saks is out today. He's very busy on Capitol Hill. We'll talk about what he's up to next week. Let's go, come on, let's go, let's go.

• 2:29David Friedberg?

  Let's go, go, Jason.

• 2:30Jason Calacanis?

  All right, the US and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran on Saturday. Today is day six of Operation Epic Fury. Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed within hours of the operation. Forty senior officials have also been killed. Death toll so far, about a thousand people, according to reports. Tragically, six US Army Reserve soldiers were killed following a drone strike on a base in Kuwait. A US submarine sank an Iranian ship off the coast of Sri Lanka. This is the first torpedo kill since World War II. Why we're at war? Been a bit of a moving target in a debate. First explanation from Rubio. He said Israel was going to attack and the US had no choice but to participate. Later walked that back.

• 3:15Jason Calacanis?

  Trump made it clear this is not a regime change effort, but we're doing this to stop terrorism and the development of ICBMs by, obviously, a pretty crazy group of individuals. And obviously, nuclear bombs, which we blew up a couple of weeks ago. Trump also mentioned the people of Iran should seize the moment, quote, and take their country back. Hegseth, who believe is your boss, Emile, 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 Polly Market right now. US forces enter Iran. This is boots on the ground. By the end of March, 40% chance.

• 3:59Jason Calacanis?

  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 Polly Market believe we will. Will the Iranian regime fall? By June 30th, 39% chance, according to Polly Market. And by the end of the year, 51% chance. So, Emile, 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. But how long is this going to take is the one question? And are we going to have to have boots on the ground? Maybe what is success here?

• 4:35Speaker 01

  I think the president talked about this is a weeks, not months kind of operation. And it's aimed at essentially disarming the regime or the country from in such a way that they can't supply Hezbollah, Hamas, 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 why you see from the reporting, they're going after the depots, 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 hundreds

• 5:19Speaker 01

  and hundreds of miles. Lots of ballistic missiles 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, Afghanistan, Iraq II-like scenario.

• 5:39Jason Calacanis?

  Freeburg, your thoughts on this war? Obviously, a lot of people 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 one of those two have been killed. Your thoughts, Friedberg?

• 6:03David Friedberg?

  I think the president and the administration have probably the biggest meetings of the term coming up in China in April. My estimation, based 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 US going to wade into a giant global conflict led by a US-China rift, or is the US 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

• 6:45David Friedberg?

  the actions in Iran as creating maximal leverage going into those negotiations.

• 6:50Jason Calacanis?

  The reason for that, Friedberg?

• 6:52David Friedberg?

  Ninety percent of the oil that comes out of Iran goes to China.

• 6:57David Friedberg?

  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 US on a strong footing where American businesses

• 7:39David Friedberg?

  can sell into China, which is very challenging as everyone knows today, and there's parity, regulatory parity, economic and trade parity between the US 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 motivation here.

• 8:07Jason Calacanis?

  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 ICPMs and nuclear bombs from being developed, and we want to stop terrorism. Additionally, Friedberg says, hey, we're framing this great, you know, discussion we're going to have with Xi and China, and oil is part of that. Where do you think you stand on all this?

• 8:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll build on both what Emile said and what Friedberg 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 did in the last three months was by taking out Maduro and by taking out the Iranian leadership, we have created enormous leverage, as Friedberg said, with China. Now, why is that important? Because I think all of this centers around that geopolitical discussion.

• 9:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 4.5% to 5%, 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 8%, 9%, and 10%, start to grow at half that rate, yet have double the number of people and double the GDP, what happens?

• 10:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 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 build on what Emile said, the president saw that, and I think what they did can be summarized in this chart, which I sent to Nick.

• 10:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 they are enormously dependent on imported oil. So about 20% of their economy, but it's not 20% of their economy, because it's 100% of these critical things that create GDP: logistics, transportation, aviation, feedstock inputs.

• 11:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And of that 19%, 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 Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Josh Greenbaum 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 redollarize, 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 at the end of March, beginning of April, where as Friedberg said, really astutely, there

• 12:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  is the potential for a grand bargain. And I think that secures global safety in that. That is a huge thing for America.

• 12:20Jason Calacanis?

  Emil, how much does this have to do with China?

• 12:24Speaker 01

  I think, you know, my instinct is, and I'm not speaking for the administration on this, is that's a second order benefit to some of these things like the, you know, and you said eight conflicts have not been eight conflicts. There is like, we inherited Gaza, we inherited Russia, Ukraine. 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. And then the Houthis, it 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, that's something any president should be doing

• 13:08Speaker 01

  generally, I think. Iran being the one, you know, material conflict outside of Venezuela. So it's not, it's not that many. And, and how long did Venezuela last? It was one raid, one night.

• 13:21Jason Calacanis?

  I guess that's a really important.

• 13:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Few hours.

• 13:24Jason Calacanis?

  This is an important note, I think, for you, Emil, to sort of.

• 13:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I've made love for longer than that.

• 13:29Jason Calacanis?

  There's a new approach here with regard to these actions, which is no boots on the ground. And we seem to. And you, of course, have 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've got a long way to go with Iran, this has gone very well as well. So, explain to us what you know, and what you, the president, and HECSEV know that we don't, that makes these two operations go so smoothly. What is it? And then there's obviously some new technology here, in the case of what happened in Venezuela.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, besides the discombobulator, what we've got is a very well-trained military, like, the global war on terror was disaster in so many respects. But, the people now who are fighting that are generals now. And so, they've learned a lot of lessons. And you compare that to the Chinese military, they don't have a lot of experience. In fact, the decapitation they did in the Chinese military, the one guy they took out was the one guy who had experience in Vietnam. So, they don't have conflict experience. And that matters, because you understand, going in, what are the things that could go wrong?

• 14:48Speaker 01

  And then you have incredible technology, space, air, land, sea, cyber, all kinds of effects that you could bring together. And so, you imagine, 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 KIA's.

• 15:11Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  I mean, it's incredible, right?

• 15:13Jason Calacanis?

  Stunning.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, and they, these things, these war games have been on the shelf for a long time. Every scenario has been planned for years ahead of time. Midnight Hammer in Iran was planned years ahead of time, in terms of, how would you do it if you were going to do it? 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 doing these things to minimize loss of life and maximize success.

• 15:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I ask a question?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 15:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't want to, I don't want to derail this conversation, but is the discombobulator real? Like, what can you say about the discombobulator?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  I can't say. It's real.

• 15:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 push a button and all these, my kids.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  And that's just for when Helmut shows up.

• 16:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, my God.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Not meant for your kids. I don't know if they're behaving badly. No, it's, can't talk about it.

• 16:06David Friedberg?

  Emil, do you think we would have been able to pull off that mission as successfully as we did five years ago? 10 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 and the face of war for the next couple of years?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  I'd say, no, it wasn't only a technology maturation from five years ago. It's the rules of engagement. The rules of engagement that we used to have, uh, there were, 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 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 it to be unfair. So the rules of engagement were relaxed to be.

• 16:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who writes those, Emil? Who sits in an office and says, you can't shoot back if a combatant is shooting at you? If you aren't matched gun for gun?

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean.

• 17:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who writes that?

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Crazy policies that are written into military departments. And that's why when Secretary Hegseth talks about, um, this kind of thing and what was 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. Cause you had to have like a legal understanding of 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 red line. And then like in the middle of that go use your judgment. Your commanding officer, use your judgment on how to win. And we've kind of gone back to that. Use your judgment. Push responsibility field, still have your red lines.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  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. And we were not doing that for the last four years.

• 18:05David Friedberg?

  And then going back to the face of war going 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 really change things going forward here?

• 18:21Speaker 01

  It changes a big, well, so, so the Predator drone was the first big drone program like 10, 15 years ago, it was this big honking drone. And then if you remember Obama would take out some of these Al Qaeda leaders with drones on their balcony and things like that. I think we, President Trump took out Soleimani with the drone near his car. That was the beginning. And then Iraq, sorry, the Russia, Ukraine war happened where it's like drone on drone. 70% of the casualties are for drone, but because of drones. So drone on drone warfare, robot on robot warfare, those things are the future for sure. Right? And that's why companies like Andorol, our companies like Andorol is because they're making unmanned systems.

• 19:04Jason Calacanis?

  And this has been something you've specifically been very focused on. And you tweeted today a little bit about a competition. We'll play a little video here. And this Lucas low cost 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 program you're running here. It feels like the DARPA self-driving challenge all over again. And what these drones cost? I know there's a company making them for, I think, $35,000. Am I correct?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  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 big warhead. Those are like fifty, eighty thousand dollars, depending on what kind of equipment you put on it. But the, we have a drone dominance program and the real, and we basically have to build an arsenal for drones. Now, are we likely to have a territorial conflict like Russia, Ukraine with Canada and Mexico? No, but, 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.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  But also to protect military bases for American two fifty, World Cup, uh, Olympics in twenty eight. Like there's other, there's a lot more uses of drones for surveillance, not just for, you know, for combat.

• 20:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 mission. How much of it is one versus the other?

• 20:53Speaker 01

  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 could 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.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  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 for, you know, the person that they're trying to get. And they're trying, they're starting to use AI to do that.

• 21:50Jason Calacanis?

  And China has this ability already, probably times some magnitude, yeah?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  They have drone swarms because they can, they can force the companies that make them, not just DJI, to interoperate. So, 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 pretty complex thing that they're definitely working on.

• 22:21Jason Calacanis?

  And let's talk about the fidelity of these. Obviously, AI is a new technology. 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 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, defined as much better, and I guess this dovetails with the self-driving,

• 23:02Jason Calacanis?

  you know, thoughts, it has to be a magnitude better than a human. So, when will this be a magnitude more accurate than, you know, when we have, make a mistake as a military and we kill a civilian?

• 23:12Speaker 01

  No, it's a good question. And I don't know when that moment hits, that FSD moment where it kind of gets better. Certainly not there. And you wouldn't want to take huge risk with that. You know, there's a gradation of when you would use that and what kind of risk you were trying to take or not. If you were trying to take out a drone using AI, using like a laser or something, you'd be pretty like, okay, making mistakes because you just missed the drone, you know, whatever with the laser and laser goes off, it's all over. If you were doing something more sophisticated in a population area, have a densely populated area, you'd take less risk. So, we're developing procedures, tactics for each scenario.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  And this is part of the debate I had with Anthropic, which is we need AI for things like Golden Dome. Chinese hypersonic missile 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 mistakes.

• 24:35Jason Calacanis?

  Before we get on to the anthropic discussion, and we really appreciate you coming here. My Lord, this has been so informative. So thank you, Emile, 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.

• 24:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What I would say just very quickly, Emile, 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 rulebook and say, do your best. And it's like, oh, wait, you violated 19 rules trying to protect America, do your job. That's insane.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Let's just. It's really insane in some 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. It was the broader frustration, like, what are we doing here? And then the secondary frustration is, well, I'm here, why can't I do my job?

• 25:46David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Is there, is there much of a debate internally, Emile? And sorry, Jacob, before we move forward on this. Regarding this idea of 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 that what goes on?

• 26:22Speaker 01

  I mean, we're not even close to there yet, right? We're like this, the systems are not, we wouldn't feel that a system 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 jet craft so that it has more firepower, but it's still tethered to what the jet does. So

• 26:54Jason Calacanis?

  That's incredible. Yeah.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we're just at the very beginning of this stuff. But for Golden Dome is a good example of like, yeah, who can oppose that? Like, it's the only way to get out a threat like that. 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 I'd tell any company, your models are getting stolen by the Chinese. They're going to unguardrail them and use them against us. And then you want our models to be less capable against your models. It's sort of

• 27:41Jason Calacanis?

  They're not going to be thoughtful, in other words. They're going to go for it.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:44Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, if we just benchmark this against Where we were at, you know, but 10, 15 years ago, there was the WikiLeaks of collateral murder, I think they called it, where we tragically had an 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 with an Apache, this would have probably avoided that.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, or, you know, the Kuwaiti aircraft hitting, you know, an American aircraft making a mistake because it doesn't have the identification. 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 than the alternative.

• 28:39Jason Calacanis?

  All right, before we move on to the Dario thing and Anthropic and that, there was one piece that we haven't addressed with this interaction, Friedberg, Chamath, which is the Israeli government and their desire to take out this regime. And us, according to Tucker Carlson and a large contingent of the MAGA base, they feel that we are captured by this group. Does Israel have too much influence over the United States with regard 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, is Israel driving this thing to the point of Rubio's quotes that, hey,

• 29:23Jason Calacanis?

  we're doing this because Israel's going anyway? I think we should address it here. Not that I have a personal stake in this, I'll give my personal opinion at the end.

• 29:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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...

• 29:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Israel can be a part of that, 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 Mossad, what you're seeing today in this Operation Epic Fury, we're four days in, Iran has been 90% 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?

• 30:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why was Europe taking the weekend off before they could even issue a statement? Why don't you ask that question?

• 30:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, it's an equally valid question, you know. And Freiburg, do you want to get in on this or no?

• 30:32David Friedberg?

  No. I'm a Jew, no one's 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 [bleep] Jew, we shouldn't listen to him. So like, let's move on. Go ahead.

• 30:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah. Emile, any thoughts on this?

• 30:46David Friedberg?

  I do, I do want to know from Emile, though, like, you know, is this Iron Dome working? This laser in Israel system, is this operational? And if so, is there any success metrics you can share around it?

• 30:56Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the gold, sorry, the golden, Iron Beam was the first generation of, of the Israeli air, 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...

• 31:23David Friedberg?

  Does it primarily work on rockets? And I guess, I just 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?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  I think I think the the harder but more valuable problem to solve would be the space based way of doing it because then 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 too so we called it 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 is that as they improve it gets more and more capable and I think all these defense systems are going to get more and more capable to get

• 32:37Speaker 01

  more and more of a variety of weapons that farther farther standoff which is what you want you wanted to you don't want to shoot it when it's right over Tel Aviv you want to shoot it you know when it's still over there their land ideally.

• 32:48Jason Calacanis?

  Are the laser interceptors in the field today there's reports that they are.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  I think there's some I think they've demonstrated some of them.

• 32:56Jason Calacanis?

  Got it and is this our technology or Israel's technology because President Trump said hey that's actually our technology is there any insight there?

• 33:04Speaker 01

  We have collaborations with Israel on some of this stuff they have their own we have our own 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 it's a quickly evolving part of of science right now how do you cohere beams of light like get distance how do you 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 and a lot of and some of it's there.

• 33:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah and uh to to the earlier question you know I I am pro regime change if it can be done 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 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 framed me on this program, which is completely inaccurate. I'm an independent.

• 34:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You are.

• 34:21Jason Calacanis?

  I actually am completely independent.

• 34:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're not.

• 34:23Jason Calacanis?

  And I am just based on my voting. And I'm not on either one of these sides. I am pro-President Trump and I trust his judgment. I think he has more information than us. 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.

• 34:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I say something on that?

• 34:43Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 34:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just to build on your point, Jason, the thing that Emile said before, which I think is important as well is we have an enormous amount of learnings about what happened in Iraq.

• 34:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 Mossad in the first, or at least fomented that and put the Shah. And then the Shah was booted out.

• 35:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 35:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 war 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.

• 35:43Jason Calacanis?

  And if President Trump succeeds here, I just want to also give him some flowers here. The people of Venezuela and the people of Iran being free represent about 5% 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, incredibly noble, incredibly just, and

• 36:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Would you and the Human Rights Center?

• 36:14Jason Calacanis?

  Want him to get the Nobel then? Absolutely. I'll give him all the Nobels. Like, literally, if you can free people, all of them. Give him every prize. Give him an Oscar, a Grammy.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Jake Howes is an independent. When's the last time you voted for a Republican presidential candidate? Just curious.

• 36:36Jason Calacanis?

  Um, yeah. Say it, 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, Clinton and Obama. Oh, we're playing the would have, should have, could have game? I would have voted for Reagan in this situation. I would have bought Nvidia at $4. Well, no, and I didn't vote for Kamala, so I'll leave it at that. But I voted probably 35%.

• 37:06David Friedberg?

  Why do you say that you voted for President Trump?

• 37:07Jason Calacanis?

  Just say you voted for President Trump. 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.

• 37:14David Friedberg?

  It's so weird that you'll say you're a moderate, but you won't say that you voted for President Trump.

• 37:18Jason Calacanis?

  I am supporting President Trump in about 60, 70% of what he does. Uh, let's leave it at that. Three, two. All right, let's talk economics. Impact of oil and insurance. Oil has rose to $84 a barrel Wednesday. Straight of Hormuz. Here's a video. Is basically a standstill at this point. Here's the clip. You can see the traffic. Slowing down and then, hey, some of the dots are even going away. That could be, uh, ships were taking out.

• 37:45Jason Calacanis?

  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% within the first 48 hours. Trump said the US would provide political risk insurance for all maritime trade through the Gulf. Especially energy. Freiburg, your thoughts on the economic second order effects that we're starting to experience here and over the next four weeks could be, you know, intense and acute.

• 38:21David Friedberg?

  The modern insurance market emerged specifically to solve the risks of maritime trade. So in the 17th century, Lloyds of London, which was a coffee shop in London, where all the maritime traders would get together and they'd 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 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. And these are kind of these pools of reinsurance that underwrite big, crazy

• 39:05David Friedberg?

  risks like maritime insurance for folks that are moving oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, which the IRGC just announced they're shutting down. When the IRGC announced that they were shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, 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 route 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

• 39:49David Friedberg?

  risk to energy prices globally, which drives inflation and puts US economic security at risk. And so this is a brilliant move. I would say the US government stepped in with the US 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 leveraging the credit capacity of this old USAID agent. 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.

• 40:29David Friedberg?

  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

• 41:08David Friedberg?

  for American insurance companies and American brokers to basically be the underwriters and the guarantors of this sort of insurance and create a new industry. So that's a super, super interesting kind of side story on what's going on here.

• 41:19Jason Calacanis?

  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 to an American company. It has happened to Russian companies and Chinese companies while late. And for background, the Department of War canceled Anthropic's $200 million 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 principals 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.

• 42:05Jason Calacanis?

  The second thing Anthropic said was they were concerned about mass surveillance of Americans because they believe this technology is uniquely powerful and it's can do things beyond what a series of webcams or a network of 7-Eleven cameras can do. Pentagon said they wanted all lawful use. Dario, you're welcome to come on the program next week or anytime to give your side of the story. But this week we have Emile. Emile, your thoughts and explain to us what happened here and how this broke down.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  It's worth a little history, short history. So.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  If you remember 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, 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. Anthropic was one of those winners. And then they were smart, actually it was a good sales strategy to sell into the most sensitive parts of the US government, like all of our combatant commands, CENTCOM, CENT, Central Command that's doing the Iran fight now. The Indo-Pacom Command, which is sort of responsible for China, several of the intelligence agencies.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  And they did forward deployed engineers, Palantir style. So they're very, got very sticky to the workflows and all that. And so I came in and I got the AI portfolio for a department in August. And I said, I just want to see the contracts, you know, the old lawyer in me. And I looked at 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-

• 43:58Jason Calacanis?

  You can't do a war game scenario with it?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  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 Department of War, this is what we do. And so I said, okay, well, I've got to, 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 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?

• 44:44Speaker 01

  We'll give you an exception for that. And I was like, the exception doesn't work. 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

• 45:28Speaker 01

  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 of War, we're not the FBI, we're not Homeland Security, we're not ICE.

• 45:43Jason Calacanis?

  You're not allowed to legally spy on Americans.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're not, you're not. So it's, 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 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, Shemot's LinkedIn, it's, 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

• 46:27Speaker 01

  execs called Palantir, who we buy theirselves through, and asked them, uh, was our software used in that raid? Which is, by the way, classified information. Anyway, so we're trying to get classified information and implying that if there was used in that raid, that that might violate their terms of service.

• 46:45Jason Calacanis?

  So they wanted to enforce, this is very important here.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:48Jason Calacanis?

  They wanted to enforce their terms of service. They went behind your back to try to collect information to then

• 46:56David Friedberg?

  Maybe pull your license for their technology.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  You know, it wasn't by my back. I don't want to accuse them of that. Palantir is the prime contractor of this up. But it raised enough alarm with Palantir, who's got a trusted relationship with the department to tell me. And I'm like, holy, what if this software went down, some guardrail kicked up, some refusal happened for the next fight like this one. And we left our people at risk. And I had so I went to Secretary Hegseth, I said, this would happen. And that was like a whoa moment for the whole leadership of 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

• 47:40Speaker 01

  model to make it not do what you want. At the time, or sort of trick you, because you have to trick it. I mean, all these things that we know, where we worry about models are 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 Hegseth and Secretary Hegseth and me and Dario, with the Friday deadline that that got blown. And I never thought they really wanted to make it.

• 48:09David Friedberg?

  Is the model entirely hosted by Anthropic? Or just explain to us technically, does this sit in a cloud that Palantir runs for you guys? Is there really technically a way that employees at Anthropic could kind of interfere intervene in the use of the model?

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they they put their model in AWS GovCloud.

• 48:31David Friedberg?

  Like GovCloud, yeah.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  And then Palantir serves it from there. And they refresh it. They held the control plane for the model. So, so yeah.

• 48:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They can change the model weights if they want. They can do whatever they want.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The insight into this thing is unbelievable, not just governments, but now if you're running a company, the reality is that what Anthropic showed, which by the way, is there right at some level, is that they're 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.

• 49:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 healthcare 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. Because it is just a matter of time

• 50:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 multimodal 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 deplatforming all over again. Remember what happened when you didn't like what was said? Now, all of a sudden, you were deplatformed? This is that times 1,000. Because this is not about posting on social media. This is about using fundamental technology to either advantage or disadvantage your business.

• 50:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Emile?

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think I described it the other way the other day. As these 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, whatever. So you're 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, 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

• 51:31Speaker 01

  has its own constitution. It has its own soul. It's not the US Constitution. So you're subject to that, plus whatever whims and how that changes. And that's a scary thought for for Americans generally. And I think that did come through a little bit today. And in the coming years, it's going to be a bigger and bigger deal.

• 51:50Jason Calacanis?

  So take us through OpenAI software, Gemini software, and Grok software. Have they pushed back on any use? Or are they like Dell or Apple? They sell you a computer and you have the computer and you can use it as you will? Have any of those given you any pushback?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  So Grok's all in for all lawful use cases across all classified and unclassified networks, as 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. But you don't want anyone to anything to be fake or tilted.

• 52:28Jason Calacanis?

  Where's Sergey and Google?

• 52:29Speaker 01

  We have them. We have Google for all lawful use cases on unclassified networks, and we're trying to move them to classified networks. They're just, they have to build out infrastructure because this stuff's complicated.

• 52:40Jason Calacanis?

  So they're in compliance in terms of what you're looking for as a partner. And then I guess the last one is OpenAI. And Sam seems to be just characteristically playing both sides a bit.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 52:52Jason Calacanis?

  Where is he at?

• 52:53Speaker 01

  To his credit, I called him and I 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? It's 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. But he's in the middle because they're, 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.

• 53:33Jason Calacanis?

  Moneyball, yeah.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  It's a very moneyballish sort of thing. And there's not that many of them. And you lose. 20% of them and all of a sudden, you know, they launched Claude Code before you launched Codex or something like that. And then the numbers changed pretty dramatically. So he was being a real patriot to his credit and trying to help Anthropic while they were trashing him and recruiting from his company. And I'm not biased. I want all of them. I want to give them all the same exact terms. Uh, cause I mean redundancy and 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.

• 54:11David Friedberg?

  But why, why keep them in the mix, Emile? So if there's clearly like a difference of operations and philosophy and how 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 or four other kind of alternatives here?

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Anthropic, you mean?

• 54:33David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Uh, well, because number, the, 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? And I was just way ahead on that.

• 54:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 54:59David Friedberg?

  But the models themselves, you don't think are uniquely advantaged? Or do you have a view on that at this point?

• 55:03Speaker 01

  I don't have a view on that. I don't, I don't think they're, you know, certainly Claude Code was, was innovative and ahead. That's true. Um, but I do, I believe in 12 months. Codex is not going to be close. I think it will be.

• 55:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you're right. There's an asymptoting that's happening. If you just look at 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 interval, 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, Emile, 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 AD90 and I asked the team, let's go look at our OpEx. I posted it because I was so shocked at these numbers.

• 56:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Our costs have more than tripled since November of 25. Between the inference costs that we pay, AWS, which is ginormous, between our costs with Cursor, between Anthropic, we are just spending millions.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  So now more per unit and more, more in aggregate?

• 56:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Both, but the problem is that my costs are going up 3X every three months. My revenues are not.

• 56:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Token use is very addicting. I, 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 Claude 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. They're phenomenal. 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 the Department of War.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  But it will be, it will, it will be for sure. As people find more and more use cases, the use cases get more sophisticated. So the next marginal thing you have it do is likely to be harder and therefore be more consumptive, right?

• 57:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right, right.

• 57:24David Friedberg?

  Let me just ask Emil, the important question that I think 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?

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I don't view it as punitive and I'll tell you why. It's if their model has this policy bias, let's call it.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Based on their constitution, their culture, their people and so on. I don't want Lockheed Martin using their model to design weapons for me. I don't want the people who are designing the things that go into the the componentry to come to me. Because if that poi- if you believe the risk of poisoning inside of a threat. 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 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.

• 58:29Jason Calacanis?

  I guess a dovetail to that is why couldn't this have been handled quietly? Is this Anthropic who made this a public spat? Or was it the administration that made it a public spat or two to ten?

• 58:42Speaker 01

  I mean, they have a very good sophisticated press operation and like really good. And painting us as doing mass surveillance where where where their issue 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 and the way they were able to characterize these two things, which are genuinely scary to people, but were not the real issues. It was really the you worry, I worried about them shutting off our system at a moment of need. Or them messing with our system in mode of need, those were we were scared.

• 59:27Jason Calacanis?

  Came to mind is if they 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 with that. So there's just seems to be, maybe this isn't the right partner for the Department of War.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you don't want your stuff to be used for Department of War stuff, you shouldn't be selling to the Department of War.

• 1:00:02Jason Calacanis?

  Pretty straightforward. It's in the name. It's in the name. Well, and then also, I have to say, you know, you said, hey, we don't know what, how we're going to use this thing. Like, it 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 it with them? Like, you, that's-

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  That was literally the comment. That was literally the comment when I was, yeah, so I was in a room of 20 people. So this is not undeniable. If everyone, Daria wants to deny it. And I was giving these scenarios, these Golden Dome scenarios and so on. And he's like, just call me 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 so that was another holy cow moment of like how they think about it.

• 1:00:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That just means that what he wants to be is the Secretary of War.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:01:03Jason Calacanis?

  He wants to be the God King there, I guess, yeah.

• 1:01:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You can't do that. The thing that shocks me, Emile, I don't know, maybe you can't say anything, but 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.

• 1:01:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting 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, Tom, off the just don't sell bullets. If you don't want to be in, but you can't call Smith and Wesson and say, can I?

• 1:02:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The other thing is, what the hell was the senior management and the board talking 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 sitting inside of the board of Anthropic?

• 1:02:25Jason Calacanis?

  Freiburg, 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 Emile and Hexeth how they use my tool and everybody else is just saying lawful use as the standard? What's your coaching advice?

• 1:02:39David Friedberg?

  Well, it's also a very unusual 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, 6 billion of ARR?

• 1:02:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51David Friedberg?

  In a month or something? I mean, that's absurd. Like,

• 1:02:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's absurd. It's absurd.

• 1:02:55David Friedberg?

  It's absurd.

• 1:02:56Jason Calacanis?

  It's a great product. Open Claw has driven a lot of this.

• 1:02:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's absurd.

• 1:02:59David Friedberg?

  If you're on the board,

• 1:03:00Jason Calacanis?

  You're closing your eyes.

• 1:03:01David Friedberg?

  You're shutting the [bleep] up. You're just shutting the [bleep] up because something's working.

• 1:03:05Jason Calacanis?

  You're selling a secondary?

• 1:03:07David Friedberg?

  I think he's off doing his thing and they're going to let him do it. And I don't think that company's worth 350 billion anymore. God knows what it's worth.

• 1:03:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, that's interesting. Where do you, if you get put a block of stock right now, where do you put a bid in? I'll tell you where I'd put it.

• 1:03:20David Friedberg?

  Oh, my God. I had, I had this conversation at dinner two nights ago. It's like you have to pick between OpenAI at their current mark, Anthropic at their current mark, or Google. And it's either multiple from here or net market value creation from here. Because those are actually two very different conversations.

• 1:03:38Jason Calacanis?

  Explain the difference.

• 1:03:39David Friedberg?

  I think the net market valuation, because Google's already worth 3 trillion. So if they double, they've added 3 trillion. But I think Google is the bet. I think Google is the market value creator bet. But I think Anthropic is the multiple bet. I think Anthropic is a trillion five market cap at the end of the day. Unless this blows them up.

• 1:03:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're still buying the 5X versus the 3X kind of thing.

• 1:04:01David Friedberg?

  You'd buy the 5X instead of the 2X.

• 1:04:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But if you get 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?

• 1:04:09David Friedberg?

  Anthropic is worth a lot more than 350. That's for sure.

• 1:04:12Jason Calacanis?

  I, I, it's undervalued compared to ChatGPT.

• 1:04:15David Friedberg?

  They just added 6 billion in the last month. And I will tell you, anecdotally, anecdotally, I am, everyone I talk to is on cowork. 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 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 cowork. And once Google like has this integrated with G Suite and you have a virtual hosted version of cowork. I think Google sweeps the market with this same competitor. But right now cowork is such an incredible product and everyone's saying the same thing. It's like giving, giving truth to AI.

• 1:04:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Elon said something with respect to Grok, which was that

• 1:04:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  he expects it to exceed all of these coding models, probably in the May spin, but for sure by June. So to your point, Freebrooke, like, what, like, I guess my question, guys, to you is like, what happens? Okay, what do you guys do? Emile, 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 going to build some governance layer around it? And now we're indifferent or?

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would love to be indifferent because 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. 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 scenario too, because they all, you know, except for Elon's is based in San Francisco and has that that vibe to hit. So 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,

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  they don't have the margin on top of the cloud that Anthropic will have to pass on. So it's an interesting economic proposition from them.

• 1:06:29Jason Calacanis?

  And just to build on your point, Friedberg, after you finish your 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. Emile, you've been great today, super honest. Dario's position, I'm going to give you some fastballs here. Dario says, "The real reason the Pentagon and Trump admin do not like us is that we haven't donated to Trump. While OpenAI, Greg, have donated a lot."

• 1:07:10Jason Calacanis?

  Here's Claude's answer to that claim. Here's nine companies and their activities with the 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,

• 1:07:30Jason Calacanis?

  Apple, Tim Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, they have all participated. There's one company that hasn't participated, and that's Anthropic. 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 companies have. What do you think here?

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  I mean, it's literally one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. I, I 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, and it's sort of, it's a criticism on me because it's not like Trump, President Trump dipped in and it's like, hey, Emile, by the way, those guys didn't get any money. You can't use them anymore.

• 1:08:23Jason Calacanis?

  Obviously.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  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 simple standard? If I would have just said, okay, guys, you're out. Bye. So I think it's just some internal psychosis. That's the only way I can explain that.

• 1:08:47Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:08:48David Friedberg?

  It could be on Dario that 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.

• 1:08:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have a different theory.

• 1:08:58David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that they have a massive instance of cowork 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.

• 1:09:12Jason Calacanis?

  Zig where they zag and get more press?

• 1:09:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so now there's some, some cloud bot telling them to basically tell the Department of War to pound sand. It's going to turn out to be the stupidest decision.

• 1:09:24Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, if I was chairman of the board of that company, I'd pull Dario aside and I'd say, listen, you're obviously a genius. We obviously have the 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 premier. Would it kill you to support the president? Would it kill you to show up? Look what happened when Biden, look what happened when Biden excluded Elon. That anchored him. Show up for the president.

• 1:09:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll tell you, I'll tell you.

• 1:09:52Jason Calacanis?

  Show up for America and be a patriot. You don't have to donate, but be a patriot and show up for the dinners.

• 1:09:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's terrible advice. Here's my advice.

• 1:09:59Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, here's your advice. Okay.

• 1:10:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hey, Dario, call Emile back right now and say, you know what? Sorry, we fucked up. We're going to own this and we're going to 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 a misstep.

• 1:10:29Jason Calacanis?

  Camille, how do you respond?

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  I mean, I would say that's what I've always wanted. I need a reliable, steady partner that gives me something that'll work 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 it's rational. But then, you know, you called President Trump in your 5,000 word essay on Friday, a wannabe dictator. You're going to have to apologize to more people than just me.

• 1:11:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, maybe time to re-underwrite the position here. Let's just say kumbaya, everybody, kumbaya. We solved the problem and look who's on the line, surprise guest, Dario's here. I thought I would surprise everybody. Nick, pull Dario up. No, he's not here.

• 1:11:14David Friedberg?

  What's your view on how the industrial supply chain for hardware components 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 US manufacturing supply chain?

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  We are early days. Critical minerals, you see, you've seen the action around that.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  You'll start to see, so I have the Office of Strategic Capital, which has 200 billion 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.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  And we've got a bunch of great people running it. So, but it's early days, it's going to take for the rest of the term. 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, uh, but from batteries is like the next problem I'm trying to solve. For example, batteries are totally outsourced, both technologically and 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, they're, it's, it's very important. I hope whatever administration

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  comes next continues it because I'm all free market, but, but we outsourced so much that, um, you know, it, it crippled sort of the, the kind of the assembly part of putting all these things together.

• 1:13:04David Friedberg?

  Do we have a munitions risk right now, given the conflicts that we're involved in?

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Well, 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 with 1980 Cold War weapons, right? And not modern weapons. And so we need to plus up those things that, uh, to, to regenerate them. I mean, our nuclear missiles are 50 years old. Some of the planes are 40 years old. So all that has to be renewed.

• 1:13:49David Friedberg?

  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 the companies. It's about funding some of the further upstream uh, issues that we're facing. What's, what's your view on where we are?

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  There's more defense tech venture capital than ever by, you know, three X more than last year. So, you know, the, it is growing. What I need to do and what the department needs to do is have some of these companies win big contracts quick, like whether, you know, and Sure, um, uh, Saronic, sure, like a bunch of these companies so that more money flows in, more entrepreneurs do it and I could buy more because generally I do think warfare is going from big carrier ships that cost twenty billion dollars and a decade and a half to build to massive credible, low cost, um, uh, things. And that's what these new, these new entrants can do.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  So we need those to succeed so that the flywheel goes with venture capital money entrepreneurs capabilities.

• 1:15:00David Friedberg?

  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 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 Anduril, Palantir, maybe three or four others? And that's where most of the value is going to accrue from a market perspective?

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  I mean, Anduril and Palantir 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 wholly owned company that, that makes these missiles called E-Rams that are, we really send to Ukraine and they do it with like thirty people and they could do a thousand a year because they've designed and manufactured. It's awesome. So I want companies like that to continue innovating. Maybe Anduril then buys them, but the, 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.

• 1:16:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's a really important point. How do you disassemble all that bureaucracy so that product innovation can actually get to you?

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we, we did a big, so part of it comes down to requirements reform. What used to happen is people are like, oh, we need a new fighter jet. So Army, Navy, Air Force put into the requirements and were, you know, it would, we needed to be stealthy, to hold a missile, to hold four 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, God, that was never engineered properly. It'll be a 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.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  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 should show good. 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.

• 1:17:20Jason Calacanis?

  It's very disruptive to the existing system, yeah?

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Super disruptive, but that's, that's what I'm, I'm like waking up every day trying to do.

• 1:17:27Jason Calacanis?

  So you could put out something saying, hey, the straight of Hormuz 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, you know, just trying to goose the profits. Yeah, it's really brilliant. Yeah.

• 1:17:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Emile, you also oversee DARPA, yeah?

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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?

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  I mean, there's so much, probably my favorite 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 in government service for a long time is sort of reduced in its stature since the Manhattan Project. Now, because now, now if you're a great, ask, you know, someone who wants to do rockets and stuff, you go to SpaceX. 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.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  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. So they're they're they're working on that's it's not a ton I can talk about kind of DARPA because it's so it's so classified, but those are a couple of examples for you.

• 1:19:18Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Speaking of classified, just two quick questions before we wrap here. Are there aliens and when are you going to tell us? As a number two, 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 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 realistically, are we competitive?

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  I fought well, and so your first question was I fought for the alien portfolio. I didn't get it.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  All the guys on my team were like, dude, you gotta get this for us. Please talk to the secretary.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  But I but I I was like, as long as I had 100% access to everything, I would do it because that would be that would be amazing, right?

• 1:20:15Jason Calacanis?

  Lifesavers would be a game changer.

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  But on the second one, it is true that Chinese have had the greatest military buildup 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, 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.

• 1:20:54Jason Calacanis?

  Right, we can't be complacent. We should sleep well at night knowing you're there.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:59Jason Calacanis?

  Knowing President Trump's allocating money towards this and he's decisive in his actions.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:03Jason Calacanis?

  But we cannot be complacent.

• 1:21:04David Friedberg?

  This time to confess. I feel like this week was a 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. And so I think it's an amazing institution, very valuable to the United States. Emile, thank you for what you do.

• 1:21:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, thank you, Emile. Really appreciate you coming on and being so candid and thoughtful and insightful.

• 1:21:53David Friedberg?

  That was a fun episode.

• 1:21:54Jason Calacanis?

  This has been an amazing episode. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.

• 1:21:57David Friedberg?

  Love you, boys.

• 1:21:58Jason Calacanis?

  Bye bye.