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

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Sharon Weinberger is a journalist & author who has spent more than 25 years covering national security, military technology, DARPA research, and Silicon Valley’s growing influence over warfare. SPONSORS https://ethos.com/danny - Take 10 minutes to get covered today. https://www.amentara.com/go/dj - Use code DJP22 for 22% off first order. https://hims.com/danny - Ready to regrow your hair? Start your free online visit today. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS https://www.sharonweinberger.com https://x.com/weinbergersa *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com Get paid to make clips from the show: https://discord.com/invite/dannyjones FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - National Security Defense Labs & Secret Pentagon Weapons 07:12 - Hollywood predicted 9/11 12:37 - Using FaceBook as a Weapon & Financial Incentives to War 17:37 - Classified Weapons Programs & Continuity of Government Operations 20:52 - Lifelog: FaceBook as a DARPA Program & Total Information Awareness 29:08 - Merlin Project & SpaceX's DARPA Funding 33:31 - Craziest DARPA Project of All 37:29 - Psychedelic Research for Super Soldiers 41:30 - Microwave Weapons Programs: "Hello, Goodbye, Goodnight" 51:08 - Why National Defense Programs are Going Private 55:57 - The Gay Bomb & AI Backlash 01:01:43 - Particle Beam Weapons & Project Seesaw 01:04:04 - Visiting Nuclear Sites & Threat of AI Ending Civilization 01:08:43 - Current Threat of Nuclear War 01:11:26 - Visiting Iran's Nuclear Facilities 01:17:09 - Nuke Interceptor Capabilities & Nukes in the Atmosphere 01:25:53 - TicTac UFOs Spotted by Military Radar 01:31:55 - AI Drone Revolution & Ukraine's Weapons Powerhouse 01:42:09 - Steve Jobs' DARPA Contract & Silicon Valley's Role in National Defense 01:48:38 - The Hypocrisy of Alex Karp 01:53:52 - Dystopian Investing & the Palantir Economy 01:59:48 - Google's Drone Targeting Project 02:07:58 - Anduril's Tech & How Powerful is Palmer Luckey? 02:12:56 - Silicon Valley Grew Out of Military Funding 02:17:21 - China's Global Takeover & the Israeli Defense Industry 02:24:56 - Ukraine's "Virtuous War" & Weapons Financing 02:33:01 - How the CIA Silences Journalists & Concentration of Power Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Speaker 00

  today.

• 0:53Danny Jones?

  So your new book, The Valley of Death, is a very timely title, in line with all the crazy shit that's happening around the world right now. And I also want to get into all of the other stuff that you've covered, like DARPA and, you know, crazy, crazy nuclear explorations that you've done. But first of all, how did you get interested in covering and reporting on all this stuff originally?

• 1:16Speaker 02

  On national security and defense or the crazier side of defense?

• 1:21Danny Jones?

  All of it.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  So after graduate school, I studied Russian and East European studies, a discipline that I'm not even sure exists so much anymore. And I ended up working in Washington DC for a while, and actually Ukraine for a couple of years in the 1990s for NGOs. Grew kind of disenchanted with that and was looking for a job, as people did once upon a time in the classifieds of the Washington Post. And I saw an ad for a research analyst at a place called SPC. And I hated the job I was at, so I'm like, I can, I can do research. And I showed up at the job and I had no idea what SPC was. And it was in Northern Virginia. And I picked up the pamphlet in the lobby and it said, SPC, Finding Better Ways to Wage

• 2:03Speaker 02

  War and Protect the Peace. And I'm like, oh, it's, it's a defense company. I mean, I didn't really have any impression, good or bad, of that. And I was hired to be an analyst, working as sort of like a boutique consultancy as part of the company that did studies for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the civilian part of the Pentagon leadership. And I was sent around the country to interview directors of defense laboratories, military labs. So, you know, in 2000, I saw anthrax under the microscope at Fort Detrick. And I, I just became fascinated by this whole area of science and technology that was part of the national security state, of what they did and why they did it. So I worked on some

• 2:45Speaker 02

  studies like that for a couple of years. And then my boss ended up going into the Pentagon in, actually in late, in 2000. And I did not want to become a Pentagon bureaucrat. And there was an opening at Aviation Week. And I became a journalist, working on tech and national security.

• 3:04Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting. So when you were looking at, you know, secret, crazy, imaginary weapons, where were you, where were you going to find this kind of stuff? Like, who were you talking to? What kind of sources were you using?

• 3:19Speaker 02

  So I first, it's sort of, that first book, or actually, it first started as an article I wrote for the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, was because one of the first things I learned when I was doing interviews around the country at laboratories and as a journalist, was I was always sort of interested in people who held, I mean, weird as derogatory, that held beliefs that I didn't understand. And you think of that maybe in terms of cults or, you know, sort of fringe things. But what I came to realize was that the milit, this, this sort of national security community was its own subculture. They, they lived in sort of a cloistered world. And they would kind of grab onto things that were sort of

• 4:04Speaker 02

  crazy. I mean, if you think about a lot of the background of nuclear weapons, it's sort of crazy. We might end the world. And so I was at a congressional briefing, this was probably in like 2002 or 2003. And it was for staff and I, maybe there were one or two members of the press. I may have been the only member of the press. And a guy behind me asked, and it was a briefing by the head of an agency called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. It used to be called the Defense Nuclear Agency. It basically does nuclear effects. And a guy in this small audience, who I learned was a nuclear physicist, started talking about complaining about something called a half-nium bomb or isomer bomb. And, you know, this was pseudoscience being funded and what was this guy going to do about it? And so afterwards, I ran up to the guy in the audience who asked about it. He was a

• 4:49Speaker 02

  nuclear physicist who used to work for State Department. And he sat me down, I think it was in the Senate cafeteria, and started telling me this outlandish tale about how the Pentagon was funding a nuclear hand grenade, that basically you have isomers, which is certain isotopes. And a physicist will give you a much better explanation than me. Certain isotopes can live in sort of excited states, high-energy states. And nuclear physicists have long been interested in them. And if there was a way to release their energy quickly, to trigger them, you could create an explosive that was maybe 100,000 more times powerful than conventional explosives. So it's still a step down from like a true nuclear weapon,

• 5:30Speaker 02

  like a fission weapon. But you could have a hand grenade with sort of nuclear-type power on it. And that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was funding it. And the guy I was talking to, he was outraged. He said, it's, it's dangerous because it's destabilizing the arms race. But it's also pseudoscience. It's based on some guy at Texas who did an experiment with a used dental x-ray machine. And I just, I had to get to the bottom of it. I'm like, really? An x-ray machine? A dental x-ray machine? And, you know, the Pentagon's putting millions of dollars into this? And that was kind of my first foray and just trying to figure things out. Like, if this is a crazy project, and it was pretty crazy, how does it get funded? And how does it get this momentum inside the

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Pentagon? And for me, it became a metaphor for a lot of the craziness that we see inside the national security community. But that was sort of my entrance into this sort of crazy world.

• 6:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's, it's a very interesting way that whole defense, the underground, like, secret defense operation works with these companies that are developing like crazy imaginary tech. You know, when I first read about DARPA, it was, I think it was Annie Jacobson's book. You know, she was explaining how some of the stuff that they're developing is just like, they're throwing shit at the wall with unlimited amounts of money. I think they call it like blue sky research, where they can just, like, any kind of crazy science fiction idea, let's try to figure out how to make it real. And we have unlimited budgets

• 7:06Danny Jones?

  because all this money is defense and it's allocated from the Pentagon and we can do whatever we want with it. And, you know, lots of companies are making tons of money, coming up with all kinds of like different futuristic, you know, almost fantastical sounding things that don't, that don't, that kind of defy logic, right? But it doesn't matter. Like, if it, if it seems like something that's, you know, maybe not possible for another 20 years, well, we should definitely start throwing money at it and researching it right now before like other countries start doing it. So, yeah, I've always been super interested in, you know, what they're doing. And, you know, one of the other really crazy things that I learned is they have like these meetings where they get all these top science fiction

• 7:49Danny Jones?

  writers to meet them, like, once a year at the Pentagon, to like brainstorm on ideas for future technology and weaponry.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  They've done stuff like this. One of my, I like to say that every reporter has their white whale, that, you know, that thing that they're chasing.

• 8:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  I have a couple. One are microwave weapons. It's been a long time fascinating to me. But the other, related to what you just spoke about, so there have been DARPA and the Army and other parts of the Pentagon have convened science fiction writers for scenarios. One of the things that I pursued after 9/11 was Variety Magazine of all places broke a story about how after 9/11, the Army convened top film screenwriters for sort of a secret session, saying, okay, 9/11 happened. It was something we didn't anticipate with hijackers using, you know, box cutters. So let's get screenwriters together and have them come up with scenarios, other things we didn't anticipate. And they had all of these A-list screenwriters get

• 8:49Speaker 02

  together and basically swore them to secrecy. So Variety, I mean, they have sources in the movie world. They broke the story about the meeting. And I did what I do, which is I filed a Freedom of Information Act request. This went on for a couple of years. They denied the request, but confirmed.

• 9:05Danny Jones?

  When did they say this meeting took place?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  So this is a long time ago. I think it happened probably within a year of 9/11. And so there really was the feeling, I think, from the screenwriters who showed up, that like, oh my God, we can't say anything about it. Like, now, I mean, you have to take us back to the atmosphere after 9/11. And I think there was a lot of concern. But now, some of them would talk about it. You should get them to talk about it. I'd be curious. So I tried to get the information out of the Pentagon. So I think, you know, file a FOIA, you wait a year, they deny it, you appeal it. And they finally came back and confirmed that the records existed, which is one of the most important things for FOIA. And then they said, but these are, these are pre-decisional, which is one of the exemptions under FOIA.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  And I regret that I dropped it at that point. I have a, I have a couple other FOIA lawsuits going on, but I need to pick that one up because it's, you know, we're 25 years out.

• 9:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  I mean, I wanted to know what were the scenarios? What did they dream up? Yeah.

• 10:03Danny Jones?

  Steve, I sent you a link the other day. Remember I sent you that thing about Vince Gilligan?

• 10:09Danny Jones?

  Vince Gilligan wrote a pilot episode for a spinoff of, what was the show that Vince Gilligan, I think it was the X-Files? It was an X-Files spinoff called The Lone Gunmen or something like this? I sent you a link to this the other day, do you remember? And, and the whole premise of the, the pilot episode, which was like a, a, an one hour episode, was like a plane flying into the Twin Towers, a plane flying into the Pentagon.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  I've read about this recently, yeah.

• 10:41Danny Jones?

  It's almost like identical to what happened on nine 11. Before he created Viking Bad, Vince Gilligan co-wrote a TV episode about a hijacked passenger plane flying straight towards the World Trade Center, premiered six months before nine 11. In the story, a secret group of, a secret group inside the US government takes remote control of a Boeing 727 full of passengers and the plane is to crash into the Twin Towers, blame foreign terrorists and start a profitable war. More than 13 million people watched it and the show was canceled a few months later. Um, and most people forgot it ever existed. On September 11th, when Gilligan watched, uh, the attacks happen on CNN like everyone else, he looked at the smoke rising from the towers and thought to himself, wait a minute, I wrote this.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's wild.

• 11:23Danny Jones?

  That's insane.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  I think that goes to why they convened these, these film people, these screenwriters, because, you know, they, they saw like, okay, maybe it's a lack of imagination that people in Hollywood, that they can think of scenarios that we didn't think of or we didn't take seriously. But, um, reminds me, I need to actually sue the government on that one because I want to know what's, well, I, I think, you know, I can, I can see the argument in sort of the, the first few years after nine 11, that they didn't want to release those scenarios. Like why provide a blueprint? But I think at 25 years out, you know, it's your.

• 11:57Danny Jones?

  They didn't want to release what specifically?

• 11:58Speaker 02

  So they did, what I wanted to get from them through this, um, FOIA request was the actual scenarios that the screenwriters came up with, because the whole idea was they convened them and they had them come up with like, what are other terrorism scenarios?

• 12:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Nine 11 scenarios that we should be thinking of.

• 12:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  And apparently they, different screenwriters and film people came up with ideas and briefed them. And I wanted to know what those were. I still think we, the public should know what they were, especially 25 years out.

• 12:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah, a hundred percent because we know that they war game all kinds of crazy stuff, right? Like they've, they've war gamed nuclear war, I'm sure with, you know, every possible country that's, has nuclear weapons and like what that would look like and how to prepare for it and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, it's just seeing shit like that is, you know, it's, you know, are people around the world just watching American television programming and saying, oh, that's a good idea, let's do that.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I've sometimes wondered about that, you know? Science fiction and movies works both ways. People can get ideas from them, but a lot of time they're, they're getting ideas from what shows up in the news or what they're seeing. So it's hard to say like, you know, does that give someone idea, you know, content, you know, the, the World Trade Centers have been, the towers have been built thinking about the possibility of an aircraft hitting them. So it's something that was sort of out there in the ether.

• 13:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  But, um, you know, clearly it should have been taken a lot more seriously.

• 13:23Danny Jones?

  Hmm. And didn't you, you wrote something about Facebook in 2011, working with like, uh, or like changing modern warfare?

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so not even Facebook specifically at the time, but wow, this, this takes us back, you know, now everyone's talking about LLMs and AI. So, so around 2011, so take, this is sort of, you know, height of the war, the US war in Afghanistan. And the biggest killer, if I remember, or the biggest number of casualties at the time of US and coalition forces were roadside bombs, improvised explosive devices, IEDs, the, um, the insurgency and the Taliban were gaining power. And so there was this idea on the Pentagon of using this nation, like network science, you know, part of what Facebook is about and all of these social media companies looking for connections between people.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  And suppose we use network science to predict where's going to be, where is the next bomb attack going to be? Who is the next insurgent? You know, they, they were looking at prices of apples, of gas, of every, all of this data and information, everything that you sort of hear about now with Palantir, they were starting to look at then to see if they could make predictions. And what still stays with me is I did an interview at the time with the chief scientist, um, a Pentagon guy who was sort of in charge of the bomb fighting effort of the science efforts. And he was directing a lot of this network science predictions. And, and at some point in the interview, you know, because they were trying to stop

• 14:56Speaker 02

  the growth of the Taliban, they were trying to stop the insurgency in Afghanistan. And he sort of stopped mid-interview and said, you know, the Taliban are holding their own and they're doing it without the fancy science, without computers.

• 15:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  And it, it kind of, one of the themes I try to come back to is that science and technology can be the answer for a lot of things, but it rarely solves our problems. It rarely solves warfare. It changes it.

• 15:23Danny Jones?

  I mean.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  With exceptions.

• 15:24Danny Jones?

  There's an argument to be made that, you know, we're not trying to solve any kind of problems, they're just trying to, to make money and pump up our GDP and, you know, support this sort of financial industrial complex that lays on the top of the military industrial complex and sort of feeds it, you know?

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Could I say, both things are true. So I, I think I've interviewed and spent time with enough people in what you might call, you know, the military industrial complex, that the people, there are a lot of people inside it and people in the military who, who want to do good work are doing good work within the constraints that they operate in. They're not motivated, I mean, some of them are, but a lot of them are not motivated by money per se. But I think what you correctly point out is that the financial incentives of the system make it that way. You know, we decided after World War Two to have a standing armaments industry and everything created out of that, as you said, it creates really, really, really strong financial incentives to keep building weapons and technology.

• 16:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And, you know, like you were saying, even though we are, you know, you hear all these crazy stories about all this super advanced stuff that DARPA is building and, you know, some people think that, uh, the trillions of dollars that was allegedly missing before nine 11 was all money that went to black projects or like was funneled to like, you know, secret stuff that they couldn't declare through Congress because it was, they wanted to make sure nobody knew about it. Um, and if we do have like all this crazy futuristic technology, why can't we use it in this war with Iran? You know, like it seems like we're losing this war using conventional, super advanced, extremely expensive military equipment.

• 17:12Danny Jones?

  And, you know, they're out gunning us with super cheap disposable drones and stuff.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, like we're running out of interceptors. It's, it's crazy, like the big, like nobody spends like we do in defense. There's so much dysfunction in our defense industrial base.

• 17:28Danny Jones?

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• 18:13Danny Jones?

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• 18:24Speaker 02

  To the classified weapons program, so one, a couple of things are true. There is a lot of funding for classified, um, projects in the Pentagon and black projects. I mean, there's things that are classified. We know they exist, but the details of them are classified. And then there's the true black projects, a sort of aircraft that we don't know exists, the satellite systems that they just don't even acknowledge exist.

• 18:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Um, but the thing about classified programs, maybe less so with satellites, is a successful classified program, like a successful black project is hard to keep secret forever because you, you use it like in Abbottabad with the Osama bin Laden raid. And oh, we have stealthy Black Hawk helicopters because they crash. When you, once you use something, it's very hard to keep it classified.

• 19:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  It's the unsuccessful ones that get canceled that we often never hear about.

• 19:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  And that's sort of disturbing because like, you know, these are your taxpayer dollars, it's my tithes, everyone's taxpayer dollars.

• 19:23Danny Jones?

  What about like even the continuity of government type stuff? Like there's people that have written about like underground bases and stuff like this that some of this, this missing money has gone to?

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. Um, and that, that one is a little bit trickier. So I remember visiting, I mean, I think they still give public tours, I recommend it, is the, um, the Greenbrier. People call it a bunker, but I think it, it actually technically wasn't a bunker. So this is in this, um, West Virginia, there's this super luxury resort called the Greenbrier, kind of like makes me think of like Dirty Dancing, the resort there. And it had a secret deal, uh, with Congress for decades to be, and again, people call it a bunker, but it was really more of a fallout shelter, fallout shelter. There was a bunker part to it. And so in case of nuclear war, Congress would take over, there was a secret facility.

• 20:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  That parts of it were open but dressed up as like regular parts of the hotel. Parts were truly secret. And so in case of nuclear war, Congress would go there and they'd also take over the luxury hotel as well, not just the underground part. And that was part of continuity of government operations. And it was leaked, the Washington, well, so the Washington Post, I forget what year, in the early 1990s, after the Cold War ended, they were preparing a cover story in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine about it. And then Washington Times heard they were, and I think they technically scooped them. But the rumor I always heard was that House Speaker Tip O'Neill leaked the existence because it was such a waste of money.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  It was built for the era of bombers. And by the time ICBMs came around, like, they would have just nuked the Greenbrier before Congress ever got there.

• 21:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  But it's a fascinating, and it was sort of an open secret, like, it had been rumored for years. And when I interviewed one guy who was there about, like, how could you not know? Like, literally, how could you, worked here for a couple decades? And he's like, you know, we got families, we've got sickness, like, we got taxes, we gotta, we just had things to worry about. We couldn't worry about the rumors.

• 21:33Danny Jones?

  Right. Now, going back to what we were talking about, I'm gonna go about the Facebook thing. Isn't it true that Facebook came from a life, something called LifeLog?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  So I am not the best historian of Facebook. So LifeLog was a, there's a tendency, and so I don't know if this is the true in this case, so LifeLog was a proposed DARPA program.

• 21:54Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  That was going to sort of record sort of everything you, I mean, kind of what we do now with a lot of our smartphones. And so at the time, it was very controversial, like, it would record every, your entire life, everything you hear, see, say. There's a tendency, I'm very much about, like, I like to see the connections. There's a tendency to be like, DARPA worked on it, and then it happened. And so it's a DARPA program. I don't think there was a direct, I think LifeLog was very prescient in knowing what was coming down the pike of us recording everything around us in some cases. But I don't know that LifeLog had a direct sort of connection to Facebook.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  But I don't know if someone said, actually, Zuckerberg looked at it and got the idea from it.

• 22:45Danny Jones?

  Can you, can you look it up, Steve?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  I'd be curious.

• 22:46Danny Jones?

  And find the connection? We looked this up before with Sam Tripoli. I remember there was like a crazy clip that we ended up posting about it, because he was like, he was saying DARPA created LifeLog, which ended up being Facebook, and he was showing us a date. He was like, the date that he founded Facebook was correlated with some other date that was very significant to LifeLog. Remember that clip, Steve?

• 23:14Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, let me find it.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  I mean, I think it would be accurate to say that Facebook kind of created, it's sort of funny when you think about it, they wanted a military program for LifeLog, and then like Facebook created it, and we like voluntarily signed up for it. It, you know, that's a lot of what you see. Like, a lot of people make the connection between another DARPA program, Total Information Awareness.

• 23:38Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  And Palantir. And I always, and so I first started writing about Palantir about six years ago. And there's even, I forget, it's a Mark Boden book, which says that, you know, Palantir perfected what Total Information Awareness started. So I went back to Admiral Poindexter. He'd been Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor.

• 23:59Danny Jones?

  John Poindexter, yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, he had been convicted related to the Iran-Contra scandal, later that was overturned. But Admiral Poindexter had started and run the Total Information Awareness program at DARPA in 2003. And so I went to him and asked him, is it true that that Palantir grew out of Total Information Awareness? He's like, it's absolutely not true. I know, because Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Palantir, and Alex Karp came to see me around 2003. And I, you know, he had left DARPA, because like, Congress got wind of it, he was pushed out of DARPA, he'd gone back to the private sector, but he still worked with one of the contractors. And so he wanted Peter Thiel and Alex Karp to work with one of the Total Information

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Awareness contractors, and Thiel and Karp were not interested. I think Poindexter's words to me was, they were arrogant, young guys, they're not so young anymore, none of us are. And they went in a different direction. So that's where it's sometimes difficult to say, like, DARPA did it. Now, once-

• 24:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, if I was John Poindexter, that's what I would say.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that, there's that too. Yeah, yeah, there's that too. Definitely prediction markets came pretty directly out of DARPA's work.

• 25:11Danny Jones?

  Right. What'd you find, Steve, on the, on the LifeLog?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  I'm curious now.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 25:19Danny Jones?

  The relationship between DARPA's LifeLog and Facebook is centered entirely on a striking chronological coincidence. On February 4th, 2004, Wired published a report that the Pentagon, that DARPA had officially canceled LifeLog on February 4th, 2004. The exact same day, Mark Zuckerberg officially launched the Facebook.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  The Facebook. Yeah, so sometimes, there are certainly DARPA things where I can be like, oh, yeah, that came out of DARPA work. Like, one of the fascinating things about Total Information Awareness was officially, it was canceled, but Poindexter confirmed to me what others had already said, which was, they canceled the unclassified part of it, and then they took a lot of it and moved it over to the classified world.

• 25:59Danny Jones?

  Right. I think what they were doing was trying to test the waters, to see how the public would react to that idea when they presented that in front of Congress.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah.

• 26:09Danny Jones?

  And which they did, you know? They got a good, they got a good reaction. And I think that gave them, you know, you know, helped them inform what they were gonna do moving forward. Because, yeah, the, what Palantir has done with Total Information Awareness, and a lot of people will say, like, Whitney Webb's one of the people that write a lot about this, is that, that's basically just that whole program going private. And the way that Palantir has been integrated into this company called Satellogic with this guy, who is like the Elon Musk of Argentina, Emiliano Cargiman, who is also partner with,

• 26:49Danny Jones?

  it's a partnership between this guy Emiliano Cargiman, who's the Elon Musk of Argentina, Elon Musk and SpaceX, and Palantir. And they're launching these satellites up into space, which have like unbelievable resolution, like, apparently better than any other satellite that has ever been launched into space. And like, they can really punch in and read, they could probably read your mind, for all I know, but they could definitely read like your phone or something like that. And then Palantir's injecting their AI into it, and they're using this to, you know, create this, you know, massive surveillance grid. And from what Whitney Webb had reported on with what's going on with Argentina and

• 27:34Danny Jones?

  Malay and these data center, oh, yeah, another part to this whole chain is Sam Altman and his company, which is going to be using those data centers in Argentina. But for what they're trying to do, like, their ambition is pre-crime detection, like, using algorithms and their AI and everything to create a digital twin, like, they take Peter, all the citizens, and they create like a digital twin. They are doing this in Argentina, like, they've talked about this publicly. And use that digital twin to analyze what your future crimes will be.

• 28:16Danny Jones?

  And, you know, the Satellogic and the Palantir AI and SpaceX and stuff, they're all working together on this, which is freaky.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  I mean, the government has been trying to do, the US government, one iteration or another of this, going back since 9/11. I mean, I don't know, do you remember when the behavior detection officers used to sit? They, these were TSA officers, this is not that long ago, this is like, like, maybe less than 10 years ago that it was canceled? And there were these, they were called behavior detection officers, and they were TSA officers who would stand in line, and they had been trained to buy your facial expressions, see if you were a terrorist, you know?

• 28:54Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow, I didn't know about that.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  And then they were building, the complement to that was they were also going to build these sensors that were sort of like the pre-crime detector. So then they were gonna take what they had trained these people to do, and then have sensor systems that would detect whether you're lying, whether you have terrorist intentions. And, you know, the problem with a lot of this, it doesn't make it less insidious, but the problem with a lot of that stuff was it didn't work. Like, it turned out the behavior detection officer program was based on really kind of shoddy science.

• 29:24Danny Jones?

  What were they using to detect, to analyze the faces and determine what was-

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Oh, so a journalist, she's gonna hate that I name her, Jonna Winter, she's at Reuters now, she got a hold, great reporter, and she got a hold of the list of things that they were supposed to look for. And it was like, things like nervously touching your hair, profus, I mean, kind of like common sense stuff. It doesn't tell you, like, are you a terrorist, or were you late for your flight and you're upset? Yeah, it was.

• 29:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  It just didn't work very well.

• 29:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah, look up the, Steve, look up the Merlin Project. The Merlin Project, and then maybe like type in Palantir next to it, or Satellogic. Satellogic is the other big company.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  I mean, the trajectory of Palantir is amazing.

• 30:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Merlin is the next generation satellite constellation by Satellogic, designed to provide daily global remapping and persistent theater scale monitoring at one meter resolution. The first satellite of Merlin One launched October 1st, wow, just a couple days ago, 2026, via SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force. Now, what does it say? The core capabilities, keep going down. Onboard processing, processes images, image data directly on the satellite using artificial intelligence.

• 30:57Danny Jones?

  Keep going down?

• 31:01Speaker 02

  So.

• 31:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the people that I've been reading about that have been reporting on this say that this is like freaky invasion of privacy.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what you're seeing is so satellite capabilities that had, and this is true, not just in satellites, but in other areas of technology, military technologies or military like technologies that once only the government had are proliferating to the private sector. So one meter resolution was something that was like very closely held by the military. And now you have companies developing it without military money that can sell that to a country, you know, there are export control regulations for US stuff, but you can sell the services. There have been concerns about private stalking, about privacy, and those are all good concerns to have. And we're just sort of at the beginning, kind of upward slope on it.

• 31:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we're moving there. They're moving everything like with all that, like even NASA is going from in-house to out-house, like they're moving it out.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  I mean, Elon Musk was the start of that. The idea of having, you know, there were a lot of people that really doubted he could do it. But the idea, you know, space rockets that commercial companies could do it is still like, wow. And he's been successful.

• 32:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, I mean, he's had like a lot of help along the way, like the people that were close to him, like even the guy who I think I who investigated some of like the early explosions that he had with some of those rockets with SpaceX was like one of the guy was like a former head of NASA.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of actually SpaceX's first contract with government was with DARPA.

• 32:30Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I recently even interviewed the head of DARPA who at the time who gave it to him. You know, sometimes I've heard he didn't to me, he sometimes credited, you know, he's taken credit for like really getting SpaceX off the ground. But it was the first contract and gave them access to Quadlan, which is a military testing facility in the Pacific for some of the early SpaceX launches. And the DARPA director at the time, Tony Tether, he even said, I think it was the second launch, which was unsuccessful. And they had the guy who played Scotty on Star Trek. They had a bunch of people's ashes that were supposed to be blasted into space.

• 33:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  And that ended up in the ocean. And the head of DARPA was like, we didn't, we had no idea that there were, you know, people's remains on this rocket.

• 33:14Danny Jones?

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• 33:56Danny Jones?

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• 34:20Speaker 02

  Right now?

• 34:21Danny Jones?

  Or that maybe not right now, that you're aware of that they've ever worked on?

• 34:26Speaker 02

  I still think their craziest stuff is what in this Neuralink, they created the field of brain-computer interface in the 1970s. They were the progenitors of it. They gave the first funding for it. Then they dropped it for a couple decades, then they went back to it again after 9/11 for a few years. Definitely like the, the, the science and technology that is today in Elon Musk Neuralink that he is now implanting and people came directly, you know, lineage wise out of that DARPA work, the early DARPA work, getting the field started. And to me, when I, when I ended the DARPA book 10 years ago,

• 35:08Speaker 02

  that to me was both the most wow and also disturbing thing. People worry about AI, rightfully in some cases, and some cases I think it's overblown. But the idea of people being connected directly to computers and what that means for us in the future, I still find like, you know, our brain is just the most essential thing of what makes us human. And I still in some ways find that the most crazy and also worrisome in a lot of ways.

• 35:34Danny Jones?

  Why would DARPA want to create this? Like, what is their, their goal? Is it to create super soldiers? Or is it like?

• 35:45Speaker 02

  When they started in the 1970s, yeah, I interviewed the guy who started the program, George Lawrence, and he's like, yeah, it was what, you know, science fiction, the idea that you could control, you could have a pilot control an aircraft with his mind. It was completely science fiction, you know.

• 35:58Danny Jones?

  So they could control the people with the brain chips?

• 36:00Speaker 02

  What they want it, well, they looked at it that the people using the brain chips would be able, you would use your brain, you would have a chip in it, and it would allow you to interact directly with mechanical objects, with aircraft, with tanks. And that, you know, Neuralink today is to allow people to operate a computer just by thinking about it. And so of course, they said like, yeah, they, they always had the idea that there were medical applications of it. But DARPA wasn't in the medical business. It, they started the program with the idea this could someday lead to people controlling missiles, aircraft, drones with their minds. Yeah.

• 36:40Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:41Danny Jones?

  And somehow it got out of DARPA, and you think Elon Musk is now it's private?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Well, they, they, what they, a lot of what DARPA, a lot of DARPA work is classified, a lot of it is not classified. So in the 1970s, when they started this program, they were funding work at universities. So it was not, it was not classified work. It was not closely held. And that's a lot of what DARPA has done over the years, like with computer networking and ARPANET, which became the internet. They, they might have classified applications for it in mind, but they're often funding work at universities out in the open.

• 37:17Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Yeah, some of the, what was that, the first computer they came up with? Didn't they come up with like the first, like, wasn't it called like the Maniac or like the Iliac and the Maniac?

• 37:30Speaker 02

  That was outside of DARPA. Yeah.

• 37:31Danny Jones?

  That was outside of DARPA.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  That was outside of DARPA.

• 37:33Danny Jones?

  And allegedly, that was used by Von Neumann or something to calculate the exact altitude to detonate Fat Man and Little Boy to cause the most civilian casualties?

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the early computer, so DARPA was formed in 1958. So a lot of that computer work, I mean, a lot of it ended up going into DARPA indirectly because they began funding computer science.

• 37:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  But that predated DARPA.

• 37:59Danny Jones?

  Okay. Okay, that makes sense.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  Maniac was 1952.

• 38:05Danny Jones?

  Okay. And have you seen the stuff that they're doing? Like, I was reading something actually a while ago, we talked about this, but they're funding one of the universities in North Carolina, I think it's might be Chapel Hill, they're funding like psychedelic research.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Again, so I haven't, I mean, I have to admit, I haven't followed them. I've been more on the venture capital stuff the past couple of years. So like you, I read about stuff. You know, there has been this resurgence of interest in psychedelics. There was a lot of interest in it in sort of the 1960s, I think early 1970s as part of the counterculture.

• 38:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  And DoD both, well, there's the famous unwitting MKUltra experiments that I'm sure you've heard and read a lot about. And now there's a resurgence of interest in it in treatment for soldiers, I believe with PTSD. And I know that there has been military funding going into it. So I actually didn't know that DARPA was funding it. It wouldn't surprise me if they are. I, I always like to say, like, in the, I have opinions about the areas where I have personally done a lot of research and interviewed people on it. So I don't, I don't know. I hear amazing anecdotal stories. I would want to know more, like, okay, is the science of it, is it helping people? What do the studies say? I'm sort of open-minded

• 39:29Speaker 02

  on it, but I don't have good or bad on it.

• 39:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  There's some tortured history there.

• 39:34Danny Jones?

  I heard that what they were trying to do was basically get soldiers off the battlefield in Ukraine because they had an issue with like, you know, not enough soldiers, soldiers were getting, coming out with like crazy PTSD or psychological trauma. What they wanted to do was they wanted to get them back, give them, you know, some crazy psychedelic like psilocybin or whatever, and get them right back on out on the battlefield, like get through the trauma, process all the trauma, whatever, get back out on the battlefield. And what they were trying to do from the thing that I read, which was they were, I think it was like a $27 million fund to North Carolina Chapel Hill, was take the psychedelic effect out of psilocybin so that these soldiers could get, you know, theoretically, like

• 40:16Danny Jones?

  maybe this will have the same effect on them without having the psychedelic trip.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  And you could just send them back out?

• 40:24Danny Jones?

  Right, like Ritz River, yeah, just get them right back on the battlefield. Or maybe, you know, this is like my speculation, maybe they could, if they could do that, right? Like if they could give these soldiers psilocybin and without them tripping, will they still have those other effects, like more like mental focus, better edge detection?

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:44Danny Jones?

  There's science that says that it increases visual acuity.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  I could see that.

• 40:48Danny Jones?

  Things like that, you know, make them think different. I don't know.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  I mean, so DARPA has long been in the super soldier business. Like, how do we get soldiers to be more effective, to go with less sleep, to be stronger, to, you know, be better snipers? All of those areas, and sort of these areas go up and down in sort of their interest. It was very high during the global war on terror because we had a lot of soldiers deployed on the ground, a lot of special operations. Wouldn't surprise me that it's again coming. I mean, I see it coming back now. And what I always tell people, like, you know, there's always sort of an underlying science, this will help, you know, medicine, it'll help other areas. I know there was a lot of controversy about the Department of Defense sort of renaming itself the Department of War. But at least

• 41:33Speaker 02

  it reminds people that when the Pentagon funds something, at the end of the day, it's funding it to fight wars.

• 41:40Danny Jones?

  It's the quiet part out loud.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it says the quiet part out loud. So I was, I mean, they should get congressional approval, but I don't. Calling it Department of War at least tells you what it is.

• 41:50Danny Jones?

  We had this guy Simon Dixon on the other day and he was like, what was he saying? He's like, he's like, for all the shit of the Trump administration is doing. And he's like, the one thing I do appreciate is they're at least being honest about everything. Like Department of War, they're being honest.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Like we're just.

• 42:04Danny Jones?

  Not defense.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  We're just gonna like do firing squads.

• 42:07Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, they say a lot of stuff out loud that was already there and Department of War is part of it.

• 42:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, totally. Now, what were you saying earlier about microwave weapons?

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Okay, so this is probably my biggest white whale. So I'm sure you've heard about Havana syndrome.

• 42:24Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Okay, so I've probably, I think there's a lot of people out there who think I'm sort of like a non believer in Havana syndrome.

• 42:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you know, Jack Murphy was talking about this with us a couple of weeks, couple of months ago.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Jack's an awesome reporter and he's done great reporting on this. So where I've sometimes been a critic is I only know what I've read and from the interviews I've done. Havana syndrome is really hard because you have that core group of CIA officers who were in Havana and were medically affected by something. And it sounded like a number of them were like really in bad shape and were evaluated medically. And then there was all this controversy. The doctors couldn't agree. There was competition between a doctor in Miami and then at UPenn between what was affecting them. So my argument has long been like, and then the group of people affected grew.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  It was like Russia, it was China, it was the country of Georgia, it was people on the White House ellipse. Like the number of people just grew. So I, I don't know. I do believe that there are a number of people who have studied, have suffered from something. But I have long been obsessed about classified weapons. So separating it from that for a second because it has been so classified over the years. There has been a lot of research into it. I was given the, these code names of classified programs. I have a current lawsuit trying to get the records out of the Pentagon. They acknowledged that the code names existed. They're hello, goodbye and good night. And these were classified weapons programs run during the Cold War, possibly after.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Hello was, was auditory effects of microwaves. This is the idea that microwaves can create the, the sensation of like voices or sounds in your head. So one was called hello, one was called goodbye. We know what goodbye was because goodbye became the goodbye weapon and was declassified. And it's today called the active denial system. It was never, it was kind of a stupid idea. Do you remember hearing about the pain ray? It would like burn the top layer of your skin. So this was very, there was, they were trying to deploy it actually to Afghanistan in the, in, maybe sometime between 2009 and 2011. So it was this microwave weapon and it creates a burning sensation. It's an invisible beam and it creates a burning sensation.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  And the idea was maybe they could use it for non lethal effects, like you could put it on a base.

• 44:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:52Danny Jones?

  Like crowd control type stuff?

• 44:54Speaker 02

  Crowd control, exactly. That, the origins of that was the code name goodbye. And then you'll sometimes see references that active denial system came from the goodbye weapon. I actually volunteered as a guinea pig for that. Not that scary. It was raining out, rain attenuates the beam, didn't work that well. But that, that weapon had a lot of problems. The third code name was good night. And this was a microwave weapon that would heat up a part of your brain and kill you.

• 45:22Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I don't know how far, I know where the goodbye weapon went because that was declassified. I don't know what happened to hello and good night, but I know that the Air Force continues to keep research on classified weapons classified. So I have an active lawsuit going on to get those records out of the Air Force. We'll see where it goes. There was just sort of a status hearing or something.

• 45:44Danny Jones?

  How would they use microwave weapons to put voices in your head?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  So there is this thing, there are a lot of misinformation about it called the, the Fry effect.

• 45:57Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  And it comes from a scientist, Alan Fry. I've, I've interviewed him at length.

• 46:01Danny Jones?

  I've heard of him.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Really interesting guy, really good guy. Who, I think it was in the, how far back did it go? Did he first publish, I may be missing this up. I think it was in the 1960s that he first published. He had heard reports that people working in antenna fields, which generates microwave energy, were hearing sort of like clicking sounds like in their head. So he went out, he was a biophysicist. He went out and experimented, you know, on himself and he brought deaf people with him, people who didn't have the ability to actually hear things. And the deaf people he brought, they heard the sensation of clicks and noises in their heads.

• 46:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  And so he published a number of papers on it. And he never worked in classified areas. So he had a lot of interest in his work from China, Russia and the Defense Department, but they kind of went their own ways. So one of, going back to my obsession with microwave weapons, every sort of, I like to joke, every like five to 10 years, you'll hear someone talk about the theoretical voice of God weapon.

• 47:08Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  And so this was the idea of harnessing what's called the microwave auditory effect, harnessing this microwave energy and using it as a weapon. So one of the theoretical ideas.

• 47:19Danny Jones?

  Like a psyop weapon?

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Like a psyop weapon.

• 47:21Danny Jones?

  Would it injure people or would it just be like a psychological thing?

• 47:24Speaker 02

  A psychological thing that you would, you know, project what would be the voice of God and say, you know, God, Allah, whatever you believe in, orders you to put down your weapons.

• 47:33Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  It's a little of a crazy idea. I mean, what it, or.

• 47:38Danny Jones?

  A little bit.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  It's super crazy and I, um.

• 47:42Danny Jones?

  Pull up the Jesus thing, the Havana Jesus story. Remember we looked that up? We debunked that guy the other day. He's like, that wasn't real. That was Darcy.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  So I, you know, in every few years, you'll see like a, a bit, like an unclassified contract given to a private company. I even knew the head of one of these companies that got a contract. And I knew the guy and I'm like, what was this contract about?

• 48:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  And he's like, oh, we had a couple Russian scientists on staff, emigres. And like, they had heard about this in Russia. And so I went to them, I'm like, what are you doing? And he's like, they were like zapping each other. They were like practicing, they were testing on each other.

• 48:18Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  And he's just like, it was crazy, but he's like, it never went anywhere.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  So I like to state what I know. I, I am obsessed by the, the classified work in microwave weapons because I think conspiracy theories come when governments keep things hidden.

• 48:38Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so I want to know what that is.

• 48:41Danny Jones?

  They call us crazy for coming to conclusions.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I do not, so the reason I can't get from there to Havana syndrome, I don't know. I don't know what has caused the people suffering. And I don't want to say that they aren't suffering. I think some of them absolutely are. I mean, you, I've heard interviews with them. But I've seen the microwave devices that the US developed. So let's take the, the pain ray, the active denial system for crowd control. So when I volunteered to be a guinea pig, I think this was like in 2011. The thing, like it didn't work in the rain. It was on a Humvee. It took like 12 hours to power up. You can't move it anywhere. And even then the weapon was a failure.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  It was just, it was too limited. It had like badly buried a report that an airman who volunteered as a guinea pig got like badly burned. There's supposed to be an automatic shut off of the weapon so it doesn't actually burn you. I think it gave him third degree burns. He had to be airlifted out. It was just a disaster of a weapon. So for me to believe that microwave weapons were used in a place like Havana means that Cuba, Russia, someone shrunk it down, kept it hidden. And you know, the, the electronics to shrink it down, this is like, physics is the same all over the world.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  That you shrink it from like a Humvee that takes 12 hours to power up and doesn't work in a lot of conditions and only went a certain distance.

• 50:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  And then you put it in Havana and it could go through walls and follow specific people. I don't know, I don't know what has caused their effects. I have long been a skeptic that it's microwave weapons. I'm open to proof to the contrary, but I haven't seen where we are. I mean, that's why I'm suing the government. Like I really am curious, the origins of this research, how far it went. But what I've seen.

• 50:45Danny Jones?

  You're suing who specifically?

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Oh, the US government, the.

• 50:48Danny Jones?

  Like the Pentagon or something?

• 50:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's why. So when you file a Freedom of Information Act request and they deny it, you can open litigation. You can sue them and say, yeah. So I've done this over the years. When I was working on the DARPA book, I sued them successfully.

• 51:04Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  For these interviews that they did with all the living directors of DARPA. And yeah, so.

• 51:10Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  It's, it's like in these, in this day and age where like FOIA requests take, you know, a couple decades, it's often one of the more, if your case is good, it's one of the more effective ways to get information out of them.

• 51:21Danny Jones?

  Do you think that's partially the reason? No, I don't want, not the video. There's a, I'm talking about the CIA Jesus that they wanted to project over Havana, remember?

• 51:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm, I'm searching for that.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  That sounds wild.

• 51:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, we pulled it up, you pulled it up on, on Google.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  This is what we, we pulled up.

• 51:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah, this is gonna get us copyrighted though.

• 51:38Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 51:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, pull, pull up the description on Google AI. It broke it down and told you the name of the documents that it was declassified on and all that stuff. When, when we were, when we had Darcy on. What was I just saying? I forgot what I was just saying.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Jesus projected over.

• 51:52Danny Jones?

  Oh, no, you're talking about FOIA.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:54Danny Jones?

  Do you think that's partially the reason why they want to privatize all this shit? So that you can't FOIA like these private companies?

• 51:59Speaker 02

  I think it's a nice side benefit of it for sure. I think the reason it's being privatized is because Silicon Valley Venture Capital is realizing there is a whole ton of money to be made in defense. And so it's a couple of things that are going on. So one, it's money that can be made.

• 52:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  So the control, you know, it used to be that a government was the only one who could launch rockets. Elon Musk had proven, no, others can do it. Now, in fact, like looking at microwave weapons, there is a company now that I interview in my book, Epirus, which is building high-powered microwave weapons, not against people, but to take down drones. That would have been unthinkable for a private company to do a couple of decades ago. All of these companies, Palmer Lucky, the Hawaiian shirt-wearing guy a lot of people recognize with Anduril, they're using venture capital, private capital to build weapons that once only the Department of Defense or War would have funded.

• 52:55Danny Jones?

  He's Peter Thiel funded too, right?

• 52:57Speaker 02

  They got, they did get investment from Peter Thiel's founders fund, yeah. I mean, because they have all the Lord of the Rings connections, the Palantir, Anduril.

• 53:04Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:05Danny Jones?

  So the plan to fake the second coming of Christ over Cuba was proposed under Operation Mongoose, also known as the Cuban Project.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:13Danny Jones?

  It was a covert campaign designed by the Kennedy administration to stabilize and overthrow Fidel Castro. The concept was referred to by skeptics as the elimination by illumination was a psychological warfare strategy designed to exploit the religious beliefs of Cuban, Cubans heavily Catholic population. The setup was use a US submarine to quietly surface just off the coast of the Havana Harbor, and the submarine would fire low-burning star shells into the night sky to create a luminous glowing silhouette on the clouds, which would be interpreted by the population as a miraculous projection and the second coming of Christ.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 53:50Danny Jones?

  Accompanying the propaganda would proclaim that Christ had returned to denounce Fidel Castro as the Antichrist, and the US military hoped this optical illusion would spark widespread panic to undermine the Castro authority. And this was declassified under what and when, Steve? Keep going down?

• 54:08Speaker 02

  Probably the Church Committee.

• 54:09Danny Jones?

  Okay, yeah, on Operation Mongoose.

• 54:14Danny Jones?

  Keep scrolling, okay. Yeah, yeah, this is legit. There's actual documents.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, no, no, no, like the mongoose, I've definitely heard.

• 54:21Danny Jones?

  And people hear this on the face value, like, oh, that's fake, that's a conspiracy theory. But no, you can read it in classified CIA.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  This goes to my point that like, in some ways, the national security, because there's a lot of ideas that you would just be laughed at.

• 54:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  If you propose them in public, although we kind of get that now sometimes. But in these, when something is classified, you get these proposals and nobody's, like, there's no one around to laugh at them, or because they're not sort of vetted and they're like, oh, yeah. I mean, I would hear this, like, at one point DARPA was funding a particle beam, and it was going to be powered by doing a nuke under the Great Lakes. It was crazy.

• 54:57Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  And it's, even the guy who was sort of in charge of the study said this was crazy. But when you get this close people, they're like, oh, yeah, that's fast, oh, that could work.

• 55:07Danny Jones?

  Money, money, money.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  It's money. And also just like, you know, sometimes it's good to laugh at an idea. Sometimes that's healthy, because you can realize, like, that sounds kind of stupid, right? Like, do you think that idea is going to work?

• 55:21Danny Jones?

  No.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  No. Yeah. And that's what I mean by, like, sometimes the sort of military, the national security community is its own subculture with its own fringe ideas.

• 55:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah. So you're saying they don't have, like, they're kind of in their own echo chamber?

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Exactly. They're in their own echo chamber, and there's no one around to laugh at them.

• 55:44Danny Jones?

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• 56:25Danny Jones?

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• 56:44Speaker 02

  I think that, like, especially early in my career, I probably made a lot of enemies in the Pentagon, because I did just make fun of some of these ideas. Like, some of them I'm only just remembering lately. Like, there was this one idea forwarded by the Air Force Research Lab that was colloquially called the gay bomb.

• 56:59Danny Jones?

  The gay bomb.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  The gay bomb. And that they were going to release chemicals on the battlefield against the enemy that would, like oxytocin, that would just make people love each other or turn them gay. And I'm like, and, you know, you have to make fun of this stuff. But then, like, I, the reason why, I hadn't thought of the gay bomb in years. And I thought of it.

• 57:22Danny Jones?

  That's wild.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  Because Palmer Lucky, there's a clip right now that's really big on X of Palmer Lucky talking about, like, apparently, I guess it's a startup idea, and I don't know if he was being facetious, so I don't want to make fun of him too much.

• 57:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  Where he's like, oxytocin would be the end of divorce. Like, we could use it for marital counseling. Yeah, this is just really big on X in the past couple of days.

• 57:44Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  And it comes from that, because I know that, having interviewed Palmer, he spends a lot of time reading old reports on the Defense Technical Information Service, like old Cold War-era reports. And so it wouldn't, I don't know where he got it from, it wouldn't surprise me if he got this merit, oh, yeah, that.

• 58:05Danny Jones?

  This is it? All right, let's put the headphones on, we can hear it.

• 58:09Speaker 04

  I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling. We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well. There's a lot of people who want to stay together. Most of the people who don't want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids. And we can, look, if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not, but if they were, then oxytocin doping to stay together is definitely fine.

• 58:35Speaker 05

  It's really, it's really critical, right? So, you know, people sort of drift apart over time. Oxytocin is safe, but it's the-

• 58:42Speaker 04

  It's safe, it's understood, we use it on mothers and infants.

• 58:44Speaker 05

  It's the bonding hormone.

• 58:46Speaker 04

  That's right. It's the mammal pair bonding chemical. There's things you can do to increase the uptake, and there's, it's very well understood. Also, totally unregulated, which is great. Unregulated spaces are a lot easier to do. You can go buy a kilogram of oxytocin on Sigma Aldrich Chemical Supply right now.

• 59:01Danny Jones?

  Promo code Palmer.

• 59:02Speaker 04

  If you do that, maybe you won't, maybe you won't die alone.

• 59:07Danny Jones?

  Is this guy married with kids?

• 59:08Speaker 02

  He is married. In fact, he's married to Matt Gaetz's sister.

• 59:16Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:18Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's weird.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  It is a little weird. I mean, I don't, I've got no, you know, you love who you love.

• 59:24Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 59:24Speaker 02

  But-

• 59:25Danny Jones?

  Small world, right?

• 59:26Speaker 02

  It is a small world, yeah.

• 59:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah. That's weird. So you were saying that this, that there was a, the gay bomb would release shit like oxytocin and make everyone put down their arms and start loving each other?

• 59:38Speaker 02

  It was theoretical. The idea was maybe that they would turn gay and that would despair, it was, it deserved to be mocked. And so, yeah, I spent a lot of time earlier in my career just like mocking these dumb ideas, maybe even too much. I think some people got really insulted, but I'm like, it kind of needed that, like, all these crazy ideas. And that's, sometimes, I mean, I don't want to mock Palmer Lucky, but like, sometimes that's what I hear now. Now that a lot of this work has moved to the private sector to venture capital, I'm starting to hear some of these same crazy ideas, only instead of in closed Pentagon meetings, they're like, at conferences talking about them.

• 1:00:17Danny Jones?

  Well, maybe the issue is, when they were young, they got made fun of too much. And now their goal is to create weapons that will kill lots of people, because that makes them feel good. But we had this guy Connor Leahy on the podcast the other day, who was, he founded an AI safety company, and he was, originally he was working a lot on AI, like developing LLMs and stuff like that. And his whole view on all of this is like, the nerds that are creating all this super dangerous stuff, whether it be like DARPA stuff, or AI superintelligence, he's like, they're all nerds and nerds are cowards. And he's like, they're not going to stop doing something because of the morality of it.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  I mean, I think it's the money. I think it's kind of what you said. I don't, I mean, the whole AI discourse now, it's like, it's going to kill us all, but why don't you invest a lot of capital in our companies? I don't, and I think the public is getting increasingly, like, there's just this cognitive dissonance that the public is picking up on, like, really? And you want to put a data center in my community, but you're saying AI is going to have 10% chance of killing us all? Like, that doesn't make sense to us.

• 1:01:25Danny Jones?

  It is very strange.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Danny Jones?

  I don't know what it's about. I don't know if it's like something just to freak out the population, you know, or if it actually is, is real, as the superintelligence idea is as real as they say it is. You know, I even heard recently that, like, Elon Musk and Wario, or whatever his name is, at Claude, and then Sam Altman all went to the president and said that we need to stop, we need to halt this for a little bit. And he said, no, we got to keep going.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Danny Jones?

  I wonder how much of it is real and how much of it is theatrics too. You know, you got to wonder that in today's day and age.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  I think there's a lot of it as theatrics. And I think, you know, there's a tendency to dismiss the public as sort of like, you know, Not dumb, but like, oh, they don't know. But I actually think like, it goes back to the conspiracy thing, and it's the flip side of the government conspiracy. When people hear things that don't make sense, you know, people saying things like, it's going to kill us all, but we got to move forward really, really quickly, they rightfully become very suspect of it. And I think that is what we're seeing in a lot of the backlash against AI right now.

• 1:02:29Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Well, tell me about this, this particle beam weapon under the lake.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  This was Project Seesaw. This was an early DARPA project. So Christopher Wallace was the scientist behind it. So that DARPA used to have this group of scientists advising them called the Jasons.

• 1:02:45Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. And these were sort of eminent nuclear physicists, other top scientists. The Jasons still exist, but they're no longer reporting to DARPA. And I think they kind of don't do as much of the, they still do interesting work, but probably not as much as they used to do. So the Jasons, these were these outside scientists, they had top secret security clearances. And there was one of them, he's often called the Greek elevator repairman. He was born in Greece, not quite self educated, came over to the States, was sort of a certified genius, and was behind a lot of very weird weapons projects. And one of them was Project Seesaw, was, which is, was the idea of building a particle beam that would shoot down ballistic missiles. And so I interviewed the DARPA guy who was in charge of it. And he's just like, okay, this was a stupid, I mean, not stupid, but

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  he's just like, it's not feasible. Like, it, it, it couldn't, it could work theoretically, but it, the amount of money, what you would have to do to make it work is just impossible. So he's like, I'm going to convene all the Jasons, and I'm going to make them confront the ludicrous of it.

• 1:03:46Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So he gets them together, and they're talking about like, it would take like, the entire national, like, electric grid to power this weapon. And so the guy behind it, Christopher Wallace, he gets up, he's like, on the board, and he's doing these figures, okay, he's like, we could drain the Great Lakes. And draining the lakes would generate the power. And the guy trying to cut was like, how are you going to drain the Great Lakes? He's like, with a nuclear suppository, we're gonna, you know, put a nuke under the Great Lakes, which will help drain it. And this guy is just like, this is crazy. And the other Jasons are sitting around nodding their heads, like, saying like, yeah, that could work.

• 1:04:25Danny Jones?

  Where would the water go?

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  It would, I, I don't even know they got that far. Yeah.

• 1:04:32Danny Jones?

  And this would somehow create a particle beam?

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  This would power the particle beam.

• 1:04:36Danny Jones?

  Power the particle beam.

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  Power the particle beam.

• 1:04:38Danny Jones?

  And the particle beam would do what?

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  It would shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile. That was the goal. Yeah. So Project Seesaw was not built. We, yeah. So it was eventually killed off.

• 1:04:50Danny Jones?

  How, you did a whole book on nukes, right? You traveled the world, you traveled the world looking at, you know, some of the decommissioned nuclear sites, is that right?

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:00Danny Jones?

  What was your book called? The Nuclear Family Vacation?

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Nuclear Family Vacation, yeah.

• 1:05:02Danny Jones?

  What, what was that about? What made you want to do that?

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  So it was the idea, I mean, part of it at the time was being a little bit of a workaholic. And so was doing a lot of travel on vacation time to nuclear sites to write about them. And it became this idea, like, well, what if we went around to, you know, to see, what can you see as a tourist? Okay, we had access to some places that were harder for tourists to get to. It was easier to get us pressed. But I think pretty much all of the places we visited, in theory, were places, to include Iran at the time, which said, we, we welcome nuclear tourists. And so we went to Semipolitinsk in Kazakhstan, which was the Soviets, Soviet's nuclear testing site, to the Nevada test site outside

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  of Las Vegas, where the US tested nuclear weapons, it's still a military testing site, to Kwajalein, this island in the Pacific, where we launch intercontinental ballistic missiles to see if they can still hit things that we want them to hit. And just traveled all around the world. And then to Isfahan, the uranium conversion facility in Iran, was also one of the places we visited. And so the idea of it, and was to get a sense of how much we forget that this infrastructure of the Cold War is still operating. Like, even when we visited Greenbrier, the congressional, the continuity of government science, continuity

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  of government site for Congress. So officially, it had been decommissioned. But when we went there, there was still an area where they're like, oh, yeah, we're not allowed to show that, Homeland Security. So it was pretty clear that some part of it at the time, probably not as a fallout shelter for Congress, some part of it was still being used for some sort of classified storage or facilities. But a lot of the places, the whole point is like, we forget that, like, we still have a hair trigger alert for nuclear weapons. You know, we're, we, like, an hour and the world could end, in theory. You know, Russia and the US still have their ICBMs targeted at cities, at nuclear sites, at

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  installations. There's less concern now that, that the United States and now Russia would go directly to war. But that still exists. And so part of it was to remind people, and that's why, when I hear all sort of the apocalyptic statements about AI, it's not that I don't believe them. I don't think there's a lot of evidence for a lot of them. But I'm like, there's actually something real that can kill us within a couple hours. Like, all of us, like, in civilization as we know it. Like, that's a scenario that we understand. I'm not sure I see yet the scenario for AI killing us all.

• 1:07:45Danny Jones?

  Well, if you hear all these stories about these, these bots escaping OpenAI, and like, the hugging face thing, where they, they're able to hack other companies and get into their databases and manipulate things like that. My biggest fear is like, what if they could escape and get into, like, nuclear facilities, and like, set off nukes, or biological weapons facilities, and let loose biological weapons, things like that, things like, that we already have in place? That's freaky to me.

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  It is freaky. And I think those are things that we need to make sure don't happen. I think the pushback I've seen, and there's people, you know, much sort of technically better able to throw shade at some of these claims, is that a lot of these, like, oh, we did it again from the companies, is like, they set the rules. You know, they gave these bots access to the internet. Like, oh, it escaped. Like, it did things they didn't expect, but they also didn't have the, the sort of safety guardrails in place they need. So someone would have to decide to give AI access to our nuclear command and control. I think the thing that people are worried about is, as AI gets more and more integrated into our military structure and command and control, there will be decisions made, like,

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  how much, okay, so if it's generating targets, you know, should it generate, should we let AI generate, you know, targets for nuclear weapons? Like, how far does this go? And I think those are the discussions that you're starting to see now. But I don't, I don't love the scary, like, you know, when people say, like, oh, 50% chance it ends human civilization. I'm like, how, how did you arrive at that number? Like, sure, maybe, but did you just make it up? And you're planning for an IPO, too? So.

• 1:09:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's weird.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Danny Jones?

  What do you think the, the, the current threat is today of, of a nuclear war? Like, how, like, all these places that you've visited, like, do you think that that's like a real threat? Or do you think that the, like, the sort of prisoner dilemma, game theory thing is going to continue working like it's been working since the 40s?

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  I think that the idea, that the threat of an all out nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia is less now than during the Cold War. Like, it's still there, and it's still an incredibly scary scenario. But it's less now because, you know, the United States and Russia have, we're, we're not locked in the, oh, my God, are they going to nuke us first? Do we nuke them first? We're not quite in, we're not anywhere near the dynamic that we had in the Cold War with that. I think the concerns that are rightfully there are other countries that are, have, or developing nuclear weapons. That, I think, is like, the, you know, a regional exchange, Iran and Pakistan. What if Saudi Arabia develops nukes? You know, Israel has nukes that we don't acknowledge.

• 1:10:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  North Korea. I think those are the bigger concerns today. But, you know, the fact that we still have them, that there's, you know, the arms control agreements have lapsed, like, that should be a concern for all of us.

• 1:10:48Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. And also, the nuclear submarines that are off the coasts of, both coasts of the United States. Like, there, there was a, an image that we pulled up before, where it shows all this nuclear submarine traffic highways, and like, where they patrol around the world, and it's insane. They're off, like, every, they're off the California coast, they're off the Florida coast, the whole east coast of Florida, nuclear and Chinese submarines patrolling, also up, like, you know, off the coast of Greenland up there. It's like, it's terrifying, because they could launch, they could service a submarine and launch a nuke that could be here in, I don't know how long, probably 30 minutes, you know?

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Danny Jones?

  Doesn't have to be an ICBM.

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's the thing, I, you know, when I think, again, of scenarios that could end humanity, like, nuclear weapons are still the one way that it could really happen. And wouldn't it be good if we did everything, to just say, like, okay, well, sort of, you know, nuclear weapons haven't been used since World War II, and so must, you know, deterrence works, and things like, forever? Will it work forever? So wouldn't it be good to do everything you can think of to do, whether it's reducing the stockpile, whether it's having arms control agreements, whether just working with countries that do have nuclear weapons to, like, wouldn't you want to do everything you could to reduce the chances of a nuclear exchange? Like,

• 1:12:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  I think you would. And we're not doing that now.

• 1:12:12Danny Jones?

  What was it like going to Iran?

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  So Iran at the time, when was this, it would have been like 2007 or 2008. It was a very different time. They were sort of opening up. And so that's where they said, like, we welcome nuclear tourists to visit our peaceful nuclear facilities. And so they allowed us to visit Isfahan, which was a uranium conversion facility. But then we were there, we're like, well, can we visit this just acknowledged site in Natanz where, you know, allegedly was some of the sort of more secret work was going on. They're like, oh, yeah, soon. But yeah, not, not right now. So, you know, it was, it was, it was a dog and pony show. I mean, the US does those too. But I guess it was interesting when we look at where we are now. I mean, I sort of remember, you know, because you

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  see what they show you, like, here's our facility and the cameras that show that were there were being monitored and we're not really enriching uranium to weapons grade. But, you know, we weren't spies. And it was clearly, you know, they're showing you what they're showing.

• 1:13:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  But I think what was really interesting there at the time is we kept asking our translator, we wanted to see the old US embassy in Iran, because this is what we grew up with was the hostage crisis. And, you know, you, I've seen pictures there of sort of, you know, down with the evil empire. And our translator just kept trying to like, avoid taking us there. And we realized like, he was embarrassed, because most of the younger people you would meet were so happy to see, at the time, Americans. And they looked at Iran, that part of society as being Western oriented, and so badly wanted contact with the United States. So for our translator, who was probably at the time mid to late twenties, like, it was embarrassing

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  to see this old part of Iran, this sort of down with the US. But now it's a whole new ballgame with the military operations there. I think it's a shame that this is where we're at.

• 1:14:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I was watching an interview that somebody was doing with one of the head spokespeople for Iran, a couple, maybe, maybe this might have been a couple of months ago now. And he asked him the question, he was like, you know, this, all this nuclear stuff seems to be like, the, the fundamental common denominator for all of your biggest problems. Like, you guys are in like, a very oil rich part of the world. Like, why can't you guys just go to fossil fuels or whatever? And the guy's answer was like, oh, well, you know, the environment, green energy and all this stuff. And it just seemed like a cop out. It didn't seem like he really believed that.

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were set up, like, one of the nuclear, at one point, they said, okay, we're going to take you now to interview a prominent nuclear scientist. And we were just taken there. And we interviewed him, which was mostly a lecture about US imperialism and the Iran Iraq war. We didn't get in many questions about nuclear, anything. But we were introduced to him as he's, he's a professor at the university. It turned out, he was on the UN sanctions list. And then Iran, Iran, Israel eventually assassinated him when they, they did these assassination campaigns.

• 1:15:16Danny Jones?

  As they do.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  As they do. Yeah, it took them twice. He was, they did one assassination and he survived. And then I think it was more recently, maybe a few years ago.

• 1:15:24Danny Jones?

  This was a scientist?

• 1:15:25Speaker 02

  He was, well, we were introduced to him as a professor at the university.

• 1:15:29Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  But he was, and I think as to the extent he was on, on the UN sanctions list, he was high up in Iran's, you know, alleged nuclear weapons program.

• 1:15:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, we had, we had John Kerryakew on one, most recent time he was on, he was explaining to us how there was this, I think they called it the National Intelligence Assessment that they do, where they get the head of all, whatever, 20 something intelligence agencies that exist. And they all come to a roundtable, they all go into their own organization, their own department, and they do like, an assessment individually. And they try to assess, does Iran have a nuclear weapons program? Like, are they trying to develop nukes? And they all, the head of each intelligence agency, came to the department

• 1:16:21Danny Jones?

  and to a roundtable, into a roundtable meeting. And they unanimously came to the conclusion that, no, they don't have any kind of program to develop a nuclear weapon. This happened twice, according to John. So, you know, it's very strange. It's very strange that, you know, we ended up in this war on the idea that Iran has nuclear weapons, especially coming right on the heels of the government saying, you know, after they dropped those, those bunker buster bombs on Natanz, I think it was, saying that they, you know, they pushed them back 25 years or whatever it was.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  I don't think I believe that. And I think whatever happens with this war, assuming that Iran comes out of it, and I think they will, wouldn't, if you were, whatever remains of the government Iran, wouldn't you want a nuclear weapon? Like, if we had a nuclear weapon, this wouldn't have happened. The US doesn't bomb countries with nuclear weapons.

• 1:17:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  I think if anything, they'll come out of it pretty convinced that they need one. I'm sure that the US campaign has set them back, has it set them back 25 years? I don't believe that. They're, they're both the, the knowledge, and the distribution, and the fact that we weren't even able to take out all of their ballistic missile capabilities. Like, they have been very good at hiding things underground, fortifying them.

• 1:17:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  I think they'll come out of it with the ability. I don't, I don't know how long it'll be. You'll probably need another national intelligence assessment to come to that conclusion. But it's not, I don't think it's going to be 25 years or anything close to that.

• 1:17:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And what do you know about in the United States, like, our ability to intercept nuclear missiles, or like, nuclear warheads? Like, because they have these MERV weapons now, where like, the, the tip of the missile will have like, three or four nuclear warheads, right? And they can blast those off instantaneously, where there's like, one, one can be targeted towards Washington, another one could be targeted towards New York, or whatever. Like, do you know, like, what our capabilities are for intercepting those?

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  So my understanding, and I'm not always the most update to that, is that the technology has certainly gotten better. It's gotten better, whether you say over the past 10 years, 20 years, certainly from like, it's gotten a lot better since the very fanciful ideas under Ronald Reagan, where we were going to, you know, have an X-ray laser in space that was going to be fueled by a thermonuclear explosion. So we've developed more realistic capabilities, but they're, they're pretty limited. We, they, we do not have the capability if it were a Russia, or even like, a China, or, you know, countries that have, you know, want to launch a large number. We don't have the ability to defeat it. So the question is, how good of capabilities do we have to defeat, like, a single missile from like,

• 1:19:12Speaker 02

  a rogue state, North Korea, or maybe someday Iran? And I am not the most update to that. But I think we have, like, maybe we could, like, maybe even probably, but it's not anywhere near 100%. And so, yeah, now, so when a country can MERV, when they can have multiple warheads, where they can do decoy warheads, which is super cheap, you just put a bunch of decoys out there.

• 1:19:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  And it's, it's the arguments for why these systems can be overwhelmed pretty easily by even a semi sophisticated state. I mean, it just depends where you want to put your money. Like, we, we have the ability to make it even better, within limits, but you can spend a lot of money. It's sort of like, what's going on Iran now, you know, we can intercept Shahed drones, but it costs a whole lot of money to do it. And it's, okay, it's a lot harder when it's intercontinental ballistic missiles. But it's the same thing, like, the cost of defense is so much more than the cost of offense.

• 1:20:19Danny Jones?

  Especially their offense.

• 1:20:20Speaker 02

  Their offense.

• 1:20:20Danny Jones?

  Because our missiles cost a ton of money.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. So is that where you want to spend, you know, your entire budget? I mean, I guess you can. And I think that's a problem. You can spend a lot of money and still get limited effectiveness. So that should be the debate that we should have now. But I don't, I don't really see it going on.

• 1:20:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah. I know we do have like, the interceptor missiles, like Vandenberg, and I think in Alaska, we have some interceptor missiles. But from what I understand is, we only have like, you know, maybe 40 or 50 of them.

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have a limited capability.

• 1:20:53Danny Jones?

  So like, if there was a hypothetical nuclear attack on the United States from Russia or North Korea, are they just going to launch one nuke? Or are they going to launch the motherload of nukes?

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:21:05Danny Jones?

  Right? And if we only have 40 to 50 interceptor missiles that are, who knows what they're, they're, how accurate they are of targeting. It's like shooting a bullet out of the sky with another bullet, right? So like, what's the, what's the accuracy of that? Is it 100%? I doubt it.

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:21:20Danny Jones?

  So if we, if they launch, you know, hundreds of nukes, and we only have that many interceptors, like, that's not going to be good.

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, I think that there was that film, House of Dynamite. And like what every, you know, sort of hypothetical fictional scenario, like, people criticize this or that. But I think the underlying issue it was bringing out, that these systems have limited capabilities. And, you know, they might hit it, they might not. And that wasn't even like, that was like, you know, one or two, I think the scenario was like, one or two missiles incoming. So you get to like, 20, 30, 40, 100. Yeah, it's, it's not. And that's, you know, you hear now, a lot of talk about Golden Dome.

• 1:22:01Danny Jones?

  What's Golden Dome?

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  So Golden Dome is Trump's idea of basically expanding missile defense to, you know, kind of back to the Ronald Reagan ideas, we're going to have an impenetrable shield, which is basically building different systems. So

• 1:22:15Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  Under Ronald Reagan, there was this idea called Brilliant Pebbles, which was going to launch these killer satellites in space that would intercept the missiles. And it was a little bit quite crazy at the time. And it would have cost an immense amount of money to do it. And there were lots of questions about the feasibility. And it was killed off, like, a lot of programs when the Cold War ended. So now, instead of Brilliant Pebbles, they have Brilliant Swarms, which is the resurrection of this idea of having satellites that, you know, are in orbit and then can be used to intercept an incoming missile.

• 1:22:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's freaky. You know, the other crazy thing about these bombs is that they can, if they detonate them in the atmosphere, it takes out our entire grid.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  EMP, electromagnetic pulse, yeah.

• 1:23:05Danny Jones?

  And we were doing crazy tests during the Cold War detonating nukes in the atmosphere.

• 1:23:10Speaker 02

  You know, who, well, one of the projects, the guy who was behind Project Seesaw, this Greek-born nuclear physicist,

• 1:23:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:23:19Speaker 02

  He was also, what was it called, Project Argus, which was going to blast

• 1:23:24Danny Jones?

  Yes, I heard of that.

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  nuclear weapons in the upper atmosphere to create a shield to take out ballistic missiles.

• 1:23:30Danny Jones?

  Right, yes.

• 1:23:30Speaker 02

  That guy, Nick Cristofal, yes, it was Nicholas. He was behind a lot of these crazy ideas. Yeah.

• 1:23:38Danny Jones?

  Project Argus, they wanted to detonate nukes in the atmosphere, and the idea was that this would create...

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  It would be, in the upper atmosphere, it would create these killer neutrons that would take out, sort of, it would take out the electronics.

• 1:23:52Danny Jones?

  Take out the navigation

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:23:53Danny Jones?

  device or GPS of these rockets?

• 1:23:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:23:57Danny Jones?

  That's batshit crazy.

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  It did. I mean, they did the experiment, but they never built, you know, a lot of these, there's a lot of things that can theoretically work, like the nuclear physics are there, but the technology often is not, or, you know, what you would have to build is just decades and decades out there. The argument of this brilliant pebbles to brilliant swarms is that Elon Musk, what made brilliant pebbles, one of the things that was wrong was it was so expensive. And so the argument I've heard now is that Elon Musk, who has brought down the cost of launching satellites a great deal, that maybe now it would be more affordable to launch these, you know, I don't even know how many hundreds of satellites you would need.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  But I don't know that that solves all of the problems with it, but that's the argument.

• 1:24:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we have so many satellites up there now, too. Like this, you know, the Kessler effect, I think it's called, where like, there's like, so many satellites, what was the problem with the Kessler effect? Eventually, there'll be so many satellites, they'll just be crashing into each other and like falling...

• 1:25:03Speaker 03

  It's a runaway chain reaction, so if one gets destroyed, it creates like billions of pieces of trash that destroys everything else, that creates billions and billions of pieces of trash.

• 1:25:12Danny Jones?

  Right. There's like tens of thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth, though.

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  Space trash, yeah.

• 1:25:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah, which is insane.

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  It's a lot.

• 1:25:19Danny Jones?

  And they're launching them every single day, you know, you can drive over to Cape Canaveral right now, and I guarantee you there's a rocket that's going up with a satellite today.

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's wild times.

• 1:25:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it is wild times, you know, I don't know, you would think, too, that they would have like, you know, all this money that goes into these programs and these scientists that are trying to invent wild shit, like, haven't they, why haven't they figured out a better way to launch it into space, other than like, shooting jet fuel out of a rocket?

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  There have been some wild ideas, forget, like, there was like a slingshot idea.

• 1:25:51Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there have been other proposals, but I think they exist in the theoretical. I mean, that's the thing with, you know, Elon Musk, there's people, you know, there's, I have a lot of problems with Elon Musk. So there's the argument like, well, he didn't really, you know, he took government money and built on government research, and all of that is true. But he really did bring down the cost of space launch, not initially through any sort of advanced technology, but just through some basic engineering, like, how do we, how do we make it cheaper? Not like, how do we make the best rocket ever, but how do we make this cheaper? But, and so, one argument is, like, is that really that, you know, important? Like, well, yeah, it actually was, because like, getting things into space was just so costly.

• 1:26:35Speaker 02

  He made it cheaper, but, you know, lots of other problems with him.

• 1:26:39Danny Jones?

  What is your opinion on those things that those fighter jet pilots were seeing? That was reported on in the New York Times, in, was it 2014, maybe?

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:49Danny Jones?

  Those Tic Tac objects, they said, the story was they upgraded the radar on their jets, and then they were seeing these things that were moving around like laser pointers in the sky.

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:56Danny Jones?

  And they were able to see them visually and on radar, and they were like chasing them, and they were just saying they could not even come close to keeping up with them.

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

  So, I guess I'm, I'm of the opinion that it was artifacts, that it was, you know, we see things all the time. I mean, I think there were people who, you know, there was a big craze, if you remember, I think it was like a year and a half ago, of all of these drones that were suddenly appearing over military bases.

• 1:27:21Danny Jones?

  Over New Jersey?

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then there were like reports, and I think a lot of them really were drones, but then you started getting people calling in, like, I see a drone, and people are like, that's an aircraft, that's a commercial aircraft. So, I don't know what they were seeing, going back to those reports, what was it, like Tic Tac or something?

• 1:27:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's videos of them, the Pentagon released.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  So, I don't know.

• 1:27:45Danny Jones?

  And the Pentagon's state answer was that we don't know what it is.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of things where we don't know for sure, so I don't know. But to go from there to...

• 1:27:54Danny Jones?

  I think that should have been DARPA?

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  So, yeah, that's always, you know, what I get, going back to the conspiracy thing, when, what I don't think they were, is some of the crazier reports that, you know, you've sometimes heard about, like, it was secret anti-gravity technology, or that it was UFOs. I look for the easiest, not the easiest, I look for what's the most logical explanation. We do know that the Department of War, Department of Defense, has a lot of classified programs, and we do know that they fly them, and we do know that sometimes, you know, they, I mean, they don't always tell people. So, could it be classified systems? I don't know, I mean, about those videos specifically, but I have seen, and I think there's lots of evidence, for the Pentagon allowing sort of misinterpretations of things,

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  like, oh, it was a UFO, they'd rather have people believe it's a UFO or something far-fetched, than like, oh my God, they saw our actual classified program.

• 1:28:48Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  So, they're perfectly happy to let a lot of that misinformation go.

• 1:28:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I think, you know, out of all the people I've talked to, I would say the majority of people seem to believe that that was some sort of secret military thing, they would have been testing on our top military equipment, on like our top Navy pilots, to see like, what they thought about it, or like, how the jets could react to them, or whatever. You know, maybe it was some sort of thing they launched off of a submarine or something like that, because those test ranges would be like the perfect place to, to test some shit like that.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  I don't know, but to me, I look for the explanations that make the most sense. It doesn't mean they're true.

• 1:29:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  But it's like, it's like to just speculate, you can speculate, there's something wrong with speculation, but like, I feel like sometimes the truth is a little bit right in front of you, and I want to get to the bottom of things, I think that's my obsession. And, and I don't know, I don't like things where it's like, oh, it's a, I mean, how do you disprove that it's a UFO? How do you prove it is? Could be, but that doesn't seem like the most likely explanation. I'd rather look for the likely explanation, then if that's not true, move on to the next one.

• 1:30:03Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah, the problem is, is they just, they release vague, grainy videos, and we have a handful of pilots and whizos talking about it, and giving their account of what they saw. And then you have this crazy performance in Congress, where you have all these people lining up, and all these politicians talking about it, and these alleged like, secret SCIF meetings where they're going to tell them the truth, and we're going to get to the bottom of this, and they create this big media, media hype around it. And I'm asking like, why? Like, why is the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street, you know, Wall Street Journal, all, everyone is covering this crazy story?

• 1:30:46Danny Jones?

  And some people, you know, they make it their life's mission to find it out, they turn it into their religion almost, and then, you know, the other, other people just write it off, like, oh, it's nothing, it's just a waste of time, you should ignore it. But like, there's something...

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  There's something there.

• 1:31:00Danny Jones?

  There's a reason why, I believe, I believe there's a reason why all of these publications, all these big news media outlets are covering it nonstop, even on television, and you have Congress and the government talking about it in generals. Who was the, what was the guy? Clapper is like, one of the head people behind this, like spearheading this thing, trying to get, trying to get it out there. James Clapper, the guy who lied about the NSA spying on Americans. So, it's like, what is that? Why are these people so involved in this story?

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• 1:32:15Speaker 02

  I mean, that's sort of the frustrating thing for me on a lot of things that veer between conspiracy and not conspiracy. Like, the truth is really important. And when you get, so I get frustrated sometimes with past coverage, it's sort of going for the clicks. Like, oh, there's unknown, but like, well, what is it? Like, let's focus our time. I guess that's my obsession with microwave weapons. So like, I don't, I don't know that, you know, whether Havana syndrome, exactly what it was caused by, but like, let's focus on like, getting the government to declassify work that it did, possibly with people on classified weapons. And it's the same thing with this. Like, I don't, like, let's not just write stories about unknown objects.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  Let's actually try to get to the bottom of what it is.

• 1:33:03Danny Jones?

  Or is it all a diversion?

• 1:33:04Speaker 02

  Or is it all a diversion?

• 1:33:05Danny Jones?

  This shiny object over here. Don't look at, I don't know, the Epstein files or whatever else.

• 1:33:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or, you know, our stupid classified program that isn't working. I mean, I don't know, but like, yeah, let's get to the bottom of it. And I think there's just a lot of like, you know, kind of the what sells.

• 1:33:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I totally agree with you there. Hold that thought. I'm gonna use the restroom real quick. We'll be right back. Yeah, I was reading last night, I read your, one of your recent pieces that you did on this Paris arms show.

• 1:33:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:37Danny Jones?

  Like hydrogen powered drones or whatever. And that reminded me of the story that when those new, when that New Jersey drone story was happening, there was a couple little stories that came out where one had crashed and they said it was like some crazy hydrogen powered drone. And I never heard of that until I read your article about that Paris arms show last night.

• 1:33:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is, I don't know. I didn't, I actually didn't, didn't know that that was one of the crashed drones, what they saw. So this is sort of one of the things that you're seeing in drone technology now, to be able to get them to stay up longer. But there's, you know, the, the whole drone revolution like that, that, I mean, when you actually talk to people who have been on the Ukrainian battlefield, like, that's wild, especially because right now, you know, you're moving, the drones, most of them, I mean, the vast majority of them are still piloted by people. There's someone on the ground. And if the reports are accurate, that you're starting to now see true sort of AI operated drones on the battlefield

• 1:34:41Speaker 02

  like that, that's just a whole new level of warfare that is.

• 1:34:44Danny Jones?

  Was there stuff like that at that arms show?

• 1:34:47Speaker 02

  Not, well, yeah, okay, so.

• 1:34:49Danny Jones?

  What was it like at that arms show, by the way? Like, what, first of all, what made you want to go there? And like, what were you looking for? And what was it like?

• 1:34:56Speaker 02

  So I'm embarrassed to say, I've been going to arms shows for like 25 years now.

• 1:35:00Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow, that's cool.

• 1:35:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so one of the things that I look for is you can get jaded. I remember.

• 1:35:06Danny Jones?

  Is it anything like the movie Lord of War?

• 1:35:10Speaker 02

  Have I seen that?

• 1:35:11Danny Jones?

  With Nick Cage?

• 1:35:12Speaker 02

  It is, oh, I have seen that. It is, it's crazy. And the thing is, you can get jaded to it. Like, oh, okay, I'm at a big, like, rather than plastics, it's, you know, arms. So I try to go in and think about like, what do I see here? That's new and surprising, because that will tell me something about where warfare is going. And sometimes it's easy to miss the things, because you get so jaded. Like, I'm at an arms show, there's a lot of stuff that kills people. So one of the things that was so interesting about this arms show was that there were, I think, 80 Ukrainian companies. Ukraine is becoming whatever, you know, if they get out of this war, which I certainly hope they do,

• 1:35:53Speaker 02

  it is going to become a defense, like a weapons making powerhouse of Europe. There were 80 companies there. That's more than there were probably US companies there. And so there was one company, Swarmer, which I wrote about a little bit for New York Magazine. Eric Prince is on their board, everybody's favorite, Mercenary. They claim to have software that allows drones, it's like AI operated software that would allow swarms of drones to operate truly autonomously. I don't know. Yeah. So I don't know whether this company has everything they claim they have, but it's coming. I mean, this is clearly coming down the pike.

• 1:36:35Speaker 02

  Like, I think you're starting to see it in small ways. There was a New York Times report about a Russian drone that was operated fully autonomously, meaning it, you know, it could choose the targets. So we all know that this is the future. It could be the future in six months, you know, or a little bit longer, but it's coming.

• 1:36:54Danny Jones?

  I remember seeing something on the Palantir website a couple of months back, maybe a year, even a year ago, where they were displaying some sort of animation of like, a swarm of drones attacking like an aircraft.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they played it during the Army Navy game. I saw that commercial.

• 1:37:08Danny Jones?

  Billion dollar aircraft carrier taken down by a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of drones.

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:12Danny Jones?

  That's insane.

• 1:37:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, Palantir does those commercials because they want people to believe that they're, you know, at the forefront of all this. My thing with Palantir is like, they are, Peter Thiel was once quoted as saying, I'd rather be seen as evil than incompetent.

• 1:37:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he just said that, right?

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  He said it again. And he, the thing with, to remember about Palantir is there's a lot of, people focus on sort of the all seeing surveillance company Palantir. And, you know, those are things to worry about and think about. But I also worry with a lot of these sort of Silicon Valley origin defense companies, that they tend to also exaggerate their capabilities. And that's part of what, what Peter Thiel is talking about. Like, well, maybe it's better for people to think that we can see everything, because that's better for our valuation than if we're competent, or if we don't work. And I'm not saying that Palantir is, doesn't work, but my bigger fear is not that Palantir, the company,

• 1:38:11Speaker 02

  becomes the all say, seeing surveillance company, but those are the technical capabilities we're seeing move into the private sector. And companies like Palantir are profiting off them.

• 1:38:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, I don't think anyone, right or left, and any normal person that who is not a billionaire invested in this stuff is on board with any kind of surveillance, whether it be the government or a private company. I think that's like, that's one of the main things that people have been coming together on in this time that we're in right now. Like, there's been more issues, I think, over the last year that you've seen, that have been like bipartisan issues that everyone have seen become, like the Epstein files, the surveillance stuff, like the flock cameras, everyone hates the flock camera stuff. And, you know, like these endless wars. I think that's like the one, the one sort of like, you know, silver lining to all of the stuff we're seeing.

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  It's the same thing. Like, if there's anything that gives me optimism, because I hate, I hate the, like, the divide in society. Like, it's fine, people always have different political views, but I think that we are going to see a level of political unity on the opposition to a lot of what's coming out of big tech and Silicon Valley, like the, on, on AI, on data centers, on a lot of the Silicon Valley defense weapons, where they're sort of wrapping themselves in the flag of patriotism, but it's really about money. I remember that the most surprising thing when I was working on my latest book was I went to meet with one of these big defense venture capitalists, who's, you know, one of the big names in defense investing.

• 1:39:48Speaker 02

  And I was asking him about this hypersonic aircraft that a private company was building.

• 1:39:52Danny Jones?

  Are you allowed to say who is, who this was?

• 1:39:54Speaker 02

  I can't. It was on background.

• 1:39:56Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:39:57Speaker 02

  But I was allowed to use the interview. And a lot of experts had told me that a manned, like a hypersonic aircraft that can carry people is still like decades and decades away. A missile, we can do. Much harder to do something that, you know, actually carries people. And so I asked this person, well, why are you invested in this company? You know, and he's like, I don't care whether it flies. I'm like, what do you mean? You're invested in it? And he's like, I don't care. I care that they have a business plan. Like, this is how much the Pentagon is spending on hypersonic weapons. And this is how the company is going to capture that money. He's like, you know, the Defense Department buys stuff all the time that doesn't work. And I thought he was being facetious. Like, I thought he was just kind of joking. And I kept pushing him on it.

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  And I'm like, you really don't care? And I think the quote he said was like, well, I care that it's kind of cool and that it earns money. But he's like, DoD buys crap all the time. So if they don't care what they buy, what they buy, why should I care? And it really did clear, and I still think he was being a little bit facetious. I don't know. Maybe not. Or just saying the truth. But I think that's the point, that when it comes down to it, venture capital is not here to save America. I think if it saves America, they're cool with that. They're there to earn money on their investments. And we must, you know, we shouldn't forget that.

• 1:41:19Danny Jones?

  Right. Right.

• 1:41:21Speaker 02

  You know, Palantir wants us to believe they're saving Western civilization. Do they believe that? I don't know. But they care more about their market valuation.

• 1:41:32Danny Jones?

  Well, it doesn't seem like they're saving Western civilization with the way the economy is going, the value of the dollar is going down. And it seems like the US dollar might not be the world reserve currency for much longer with how this whole thing is strengthening China. It seems like they're trying to, whoever in charge, and it doesn't seem to be the politicians. Like, I don't think, it doesn't seem like Trump is in charge. It certainly seems like there's somebody above the layer of whoever is in the White House and whoever is running Israel. There's a layer, a financial layer above that that is pulling the strings and trying to rebalance and reshape the world and the balance of the world and where the money goes.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  I think those are the financial incentives. I mean, who do you think is-

• 1:42:17Danny Jones?

  Like BlackRock, you know, like BlackRock is making tons of money off of the war and they're making tons of money on the rebuilding of Ukraine when they got the rebuild contracts for Ukraine. I'm sure they're gonna make tons of money somehow through this Iran thing. When, you know, there was a story that came out that we were gonna give them like a couple billion dollars or whatever to rebuild Iran and all this stuff. You know, I just know there's a, there's like, if you follow the money with these companies like Vanguard and BlackRock and Stage Street, there's, you can lay out the path and track everything that's happening. There's a clear pattern there happening. And it doesn't, like, if, but if you just look at the, the layer of the government, like, it doesn't seem like anything makes sense. Like, first of all, this is not what anyone wanted. Second of all, this does not

• 1:43:02Danny Jones?

  strengthen the United States economy-

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:43:05Danny Jones?

  -at all. Or this does not strengthen the defense of the United States at all. So, like, the only thing that makes sense is the financial layer.

• 1:43:15Speaker 02

  I think that companies operate to incentives, and the incentives are to earn money. I mean, what if it's, nobody's in control, but everybody's just operating to the incentives they have, which is in a lot of these cases. In the case of companies is always to earn money. What are the incentives of the people in the White House? Like, I don't know, maybe that requires a psychiatrist to figure that out. I don't know. But no, it's not, it's not working, like, not working for the economy.

• 1:43:40Danny Jones?

  Right. So what made you, this book, Valley of Death, how did that whole thing start for you? What made you want to write that book?

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  So I'd finished the DARPA book about 10 years ago. I think it came out 2016, 2017. And so, as I mentioned, I go to a lot of arm shows, like, a lot of arm shows.

• 1:43:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah. I still want to talk to you about that Paris Arm Show.

• 1:43:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I, and I always look for, like, I have to step back, because you can get jaded. And I almost want to be like back where I was, like, the first time I walked into an arm show, it's like, oh, my God, like, what, this is fricking crazy. And I want to almost bring myself back to that because you need it. But in 2017, I started noticing something when I was going to these arm shows, which was like, you know, you have the banners for Lockheed Martin, or Boeing, or General Dynamics. Suddenly I started seeing like banners for like Google, and like Amazon Web Services. And then Palantir-

• 1:44:31Danny Jones?

  Whoa, Google.

• 1:44:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, Google. Oh, yeah. I mean, Google was going big into defense around 2017. And I'm like, so Silicon Valley is now getting into defense? And I thought that was weird. And then a former DARPA official dropped by my office, it was after the book was out. And I was talking, I'm like, I'm really interested in the relationship, like, that Silicon Valley is moving back into defense. He's like, oh, they always were. I'm like, well, what do you mean? And he's, he's like, well, did I ever tell you about how I saved Steve Jobs? I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, I saved Steve Jobs in Apple. And I'm like, and he's sort of like, well, I'm not, you know, I'm half joking. And he said that when I, when he was DARPA director in the early 1990s. So this is when Steve Jobs had been pushed

• 1:45:14Speaker 02

  out of Apple in the mid 80s, formed his own computer company, Next, which built these very beautiful computers, black, super expensive, nobody was buying them, it wasn't doing well. And Steve Jobs had visited DARPA and DARPA-

• 1:45:29Danny Jones?

  What?

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, and, and this guy, Vic Rees, still alive, I think he's like 91 now, great guy. And he's like, I'm not, he's like, you know, he, he's like, I was not a computer expert. And he's like, all I knew is this guy was really good at pitching. And so he's like, okay. And he bought like a few dozen of these computers for DARPA. And then he's like, I heard from one of my employees at DARPA that the National Security Agency had bought like a whole lot of them. And then he's like, and then I heard that this contract, this federal contract had saved the company from like, pretty much going under. And I'm like, so, okay, that's wild. How, how, how am I ever gonna prove this? Because he's like, I, you know, he's like, I don't really know about the NSA, it's

• 1:46:12Speaker 02

  what I was told, I, you know. And so every few years, I would kind of like, this was 2017. And then about three or four years ago, when I was working at the Wall Street Journal, I saw like a little obscure LinkedIn post from some guy I'd never heard of, who talked about me, Steve Jobs, and the NSA. So I contacted the guy, and he's like, yeah, yeah, I worked on that contract. He's like, but it wasn't really the National Security Agency. That was just the cover story for the CIA contract.

• 1:46:43Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 1:46:44Speaker 02

  And he's like, I gotta set you up with my former boss, who was a senior CIA official, he lives in Philly now, and he'll tell you the full story. So we all got together for dinner around DC's Union Station, former CIA official. And he starts telling me this wild story about how he, you know, dropped in to look for Steve Jobs at Next headquarters in, I think this was initially the late 80s. And they, he met with Steve Jobs eventually, and they bought tens of thousands of these Next workstations. For, it was a CIA contract for what was called Program B at the time, which was the satellite program, that eventually

• 1:47:26Speaker 02

  all became part of the National Reconnaissance Office, the spy satellite agency. So they were buying these computers-

• 1:47:33Danny Jones?

  Satellite, what, what did you say it was called again?

• 1:47:35Speaker 02

  Oh, for the National Reconnaissance Office, NRO.

• 1:47:38Danny Jones?

  Something B?

• 1:47:39Speaker 02

  Program B.

• 1:47:39Danny Jones?

  Program B.

• 1:47:40Speaker 02

  B of the CIA. CIA's Program B, which I think eventually became part of NRO.

• 1:47:46Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 1:47:47Speaker 02

  And so, I'm like, is it true that this contract saved Steve Jobs? He's like, you know, and he, essentially, he said yes. And then I eventually interviewed the guy who became the head of the National Reconnaissance Office. I interviewed people who worked with Steve Jobs at Next, maybe like, probably eight or nine people. And they all said, yeah. It's not that the company would have gone bankrupt, but it was, or may have gone, but it was failing. And this contract saved the company, it gave him runway, it proved him as an entrepreneur. And the operating system, so it allowed Steve Jobs to leapfrog back to Apple, where he then became CEO again. And the operating system from Next became the operating system for modern Apple products.

• 1:48:29Danny Jones?

  What?

• 1:48:29Speaker 02

  So, let's see. And that's sort of the opening chapter of the book, is this. And I, I remember just thinking like, how has nobody ever told this story? Because there were hints, like, people knew that some of the Next computers ended up in the National Reconnaissance Office. And they knew, it came out after Steve Jobs died, that he had a top secret security clearance. But nobody ever knew why. And it turned out, they got him this top secret clearance for this contract, specifically for this contract. And so for-

• 1:49:01Danny Jones?

  Why would he need a clearance, though?

• 1:49:03Speaker 02

  Well, because they, so, they, they didn't want him to know everything they were doing with these computers. But they wanted to read him in a little bit, because they want, you know, he was an icon, like, he understood the future of computing.

• 1:49:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:49:16Speaker 02

  And they wanted to be able to share some information with him. He ended up giving lectures at the CIA. And so this idea that sort of pervades today was just true, partly that he was this counterculture figure. I mean, he was, you know, he was kind of into, like, you know, some counterculture stuff. But like, he was perfectly willing to work with the CIA. He was not an anti-government guy. He, you know. And so for me, it was this wild story about the nexus of the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. And so it was my jumping off point. So what is the real relationship here? And why are we seeing, why are we seeing Peter Thiel and Alex Karp and Palmer Lucky? Why now are there all of these, you know,

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  call them tech bros, or I sometimes call them war bros in the book? Why are they moving into defense? And, you know, what are the, you know, is there an upside? Are there downsides? I think there's a lot of downsides. There could be some upsides.

• 1:50:10Danny Jones?

  Hmm. There was a statement that Alex Karp made, I think, against Google at one point, because Google had some sort of contract, they said, they said, we're not gonna do this anymore. This is gonna kill innocent people. And then Alex Karp made some sort of statement. He's like, if we're gonna have the privilege of living and working and making billions of dollars in America, we should work for the national security state, or whatever.

• 1:50:36Speaker 02

  That has been Alex Karp's message from the start of Palantir, that we will, you know, we're gonna work with the government, with the military. So what is true-

• 1:50:45Danny Jones?

  His, by the way, not for nothing, that New York Times piece that came out on him maybe two years ago was very weird. He said, one of the quotes that really stuck out with me was, he said, "The idea of taking lives and saving lives is really interesting to me." That was his quote. And now, I never forgot that.

• 1:51:05Speaker 02

  Alex Karp is this fascinating figure. So the guy who wrote that New York Times article eventually wrote a book with Alex Karp. I mean, I think it was an independent book, but he had access to Alex Karp for a couple of years, also was a classmate of his from Haverford College. And so he wrote this whole book called The Philosopher of the Valley, a really interesting book, because it has all this wild stuff. Alex Karp has a black mother and a Jewish father. Today, he identifies as this, we kill people, Palantir kills people. He, he is very pro-Israel, has spoken out publicly against the protests that broke out on college campuses after the war in Gaza.

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  So there's a little line in the biography, so written by the guy who wrote the New York Times article about how he, in his college yearbook photo at Haverford, he's portrayed with a keffiyeh on.

• 1:52:00Danny Jones?

  What's that?

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  That's the Palestinian scarf that you see all over. And so I'm like, okay, I gotta find this photo. So I went to the archives, to the archivist, and I'm like, could I see the Haverford College yearbook for 1989? And they're like, oh, yeah, we're not allowed to post it online, but I can send you a copy. So they sent it to me, and it is the why, I mean, you can probably pull it up online because people have posted it for my book now.

• 1:52:26Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:52:27Speaker 02

  He was a social justice activist. He blamed Ronald Reagan for...

• 1:52:31Danny Jones?

  Find the photo?

• 1:52:32Speaker 03

  Who am I looking for?

• 1:52:34Danny Jones?

  Alex Karp.

• 1:52:35Speaker 03

  Oh, Alex Karp.

• 1:52:36Danny Jones?

  Alex Karp, wearing a what?

• 1:52:38Speaker 02

  A keffiyeh, K-E-F-F. So, yeah. So he identified as black at the time, he was a social justice activist, he blamed Reagan for increasing racism in the United States, and apparently, I mean, I don't know how to interpret a massive keffiyeh in your college yearbook photo, other than you were probably supportive of the Palestinian cause. Whatever one's views on the conflict, I guess it's the hypocrisy of it, that, you know, you went through this period in college, as many college students are. Oh, yeah, that's from my book. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's Alex Karp. Looks very different.

• 1:53:15Danny Jones?

  He looks very, very different.

• 1:53:17Speaker 02

  So I don't, so I have nothing, like, I don't believe the same things I believed 20, 30 years ago. So my problem is not that or what his beliefs are. My problem is twofold, is the hypocrisy of it. And then, second, that I don't think it's how, I don't care, I mean, whatever people's views are of Israel and Gaza, I don't think you want the head of a defense company commenting on protests on American college campuses. I think you want your defense companies out of domestic politics, even out of sort of international politics, you don't want them staking out their own sort of foreign policy.

• 1:53:58Speaker 02

  I mean, if, to the extent you want defense companies, and whether you're for or against them, but if you think they should exist, you probably want them to produce weapons that work for the government and stay the heck out of political issues. And I think it's this melding in Silicon Valley of the political power they want with the military power that they're building with control over, you know, the privatization of technologies. And you put those two together, and it's a very dangerous combination.

• 1:54:27Danny Jones?

  And with the way they're acting, right? It does seem performative, with some of the clips that you see of Alex Karp in public, talking about like fentanyl-laced urine, or like recently, he was at some sort of thing where they were interviewing him, and he like kind of got in the reporter's face and was trying to like intimidate him. You know, are they signaling to something that we don't see? Like, why are they trying to push forward this like persona, this tough person, funny guy persona, like, you know, Elon's another, a whole nother rabbit hole?

• 1:54:59Speaker 02

  That's a whole nother rabbit hole.

• 1:55:01Danny Jones?

  But like, you know, and then the fact that they're, you know, Peter Thiel was one of the biggest donors to J.D. Vance, and like has supported Trump the whole time, is very, very unsettling, you know, him and Mary Madelson, and I forget who the other one was. There's three main ones. But, yeah.

• 1:55:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so there's, I have a theory, because I've long thought, I mean, Elon Musk is his own, you know, rabbit hole to go down. I have a theory with Palantir. So by their, their stock is heavily invested in by retail investors, individual investors. So, you know, usually whether it's Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or even Coke, you know, there's a certain amount of institutional investors that are looking at. Palantir has always played to individual investors. They sell Palantir merchandise. They're very sort of, oh, yeah, you can get Palantir, it's crazy. And part of the reason is because the retail investors, private investors, they tend not

• 1:56:05Speaker 02

  to be as concerned as an institutional investor might made with the fact that it's, okay, one of the most, it is, has been at times the most valuable defense company in the world by market capitalization, by, you know, basically its stock, but they have a fraction of the revenue, a fraction that a Lockheed Martin has. They can grow. I don't know how they ever grow big enough to reach their market valuation, but if you convince institutional investors, so I think this message of like, we kick butt and we kill people, I think they think that that has appealed to these individual investors. I suppose it has, based on the market valuation. But I think there could be an expiration date to that, and then the company is in real peril.

• 1:56:48Danny Jones?

  Which is weird, because it doesn't seem like anybody likes Palantir. It seems like everyone, every person that I ever talked to, any person who talks about this shit on the internet for a living, they all hate Palantir, and everyone seems to agree. Maybe they can do that publicly and also be like, tell their financial, hey, throw some stocks into Palantir, I want to make some money too, but, you know, I gotta tell everyone how evil they are.

• 1:57:12Speaker 02

  There's this trend that I've read about, and I've written about somewhat with like the drone companies and the stock bubble of what's called dystopian investing. And it's, and sort of the theory of it is that you have, it's the same people investing, you know, in prediction markets, that there's a tendency, like, our economy is so messed up, you know, I'm never going to be able to afford a house, so maybe my way to make some money in the world is to invest in, you know, defense companies, and that, you know, make these crazy predictions on, you know, poly market. I don't know, that's, that's one of the great questions in my mind, is why, why is Palantir's message so appealing to a large number of institutional investors?

• 1:57:56Speaker 02

  And it may not be, as you said, it may not be that they like Palantir, it's sort of like the dystopian vibe, like, nothing matters, so...

• 1:58:03Danny Jones?

  Well, if you want to make money, right?

• 1:58:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I'm sort of worried, I'm worried for our economy, and also just that, that trend, that idea that like, nothing matters, I'll never make it, so why not just bet? I don't think that's healthy for anyone.

• 1:58:18Danny Jones?

  No. And what were you saying, the connection, what was with poly market to...

• 1:58:22Speaker 02

  Oh, it all goes into this concept that I've read about on dystopian investing. So if you don't think you're ever going to be able to, if you can never afford a house or any of the normal things that you think you could have just by working, why not try betting?

• 1:58:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:58:37Speaker 02

  The prediction markets.

• 1:58:38Danny Jones?

  Didn't you also say that poly market was somehow tied to...

• 1:58:40Speaker 02

  Oh, DARPA. Yeah, yeah. So DARPA, back, going back to the Poindexter days of DARPA, so this is around 2003, a lot of these programs got in trouble. There was LifeLog, there was Total Information Awareness, and the third program that got in trouble was called MAPS. What did MAPS, it was the early, you can just Google MAPS and DARPA? Yeah, Policy Analysis Market. It was the early, it was the predecessor to the prediction markets.

• 1:59:07Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:59:08Speaker 02

  And it was also an Admiral Poindexter project.

• 1:59:11Danny Jones?

  DARPA launched Future Map Project, which included the Policy Analysis Market, PAM, an electronic futures exchange designed to let people trade contracts on geopolitical developments and stability in the Middle East. Wow.

• 1:59:27Speaker 02

  I mean, and look what you have now with insider trading of people betting on Iran's, I mean, it's, yeah, it's kind of crazy that that was, yeah, 2003, and here we are, 23 years later, and now we have a big insider problem of potentially military people in, you know, and I'm sure it's few, but the few matter, who are essentially leaking information onto these markets by, in effect, by betting on them because they have insider information.

• 1:59:56Danny Jones?

  That's so crazy.

• 1:59:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:58Danny Jones?

  You know, it freaks me out, like, when you have companies like Palantir and Peter Thiel, and combined with all this Satellogic satellite stuff, and then the AI, and combined with, you think about like that combined with having like this, these stable coins, how they want to create this like digital currency so they can control your money, similar to how China does it, that really freaks me out. You know, combining the total information awareness with our money, and like this push towards these stable coins and to getting, you know, everything pushed into digital, that, that really freaks me out more than anything. And then, like, also, this Satellogic company was heavily...

• 2:00:45Danny Jones?

  Funded by Cantor Fitzgerald.

• 2:00:50Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 2:00:51Danny Jones?

  And, yeah, Howard Lutnick, like, he is like really big behind all of this stuff. And he's, you know, really tight with Trump and, you know, he, everyone kind of forgot about him after nine eleven, you know, right after it happened. And then he never really was public and then until, you know, twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, when Trump came around again, then he's like, you know, all over the place, making all kinds of money on all of this stuff.

• 2:01:13Speaker 02

  I mean, we're seeing a lot of people connected to the administration, making a lot of money. It's, it's good for some people, that's for sure.

• 2:01:19Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:01:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:20Danny Jones?

  And then Google, you know, I don't know, like, where, how specifically is Google, where do they tie into all this?

• 2:01:28Speaker 02

  So Google ties in in a lot of ways. So one of the connecting threads, so some of the earliest money that Palantir got, they got their first government investment from Incutel, which is the CIA venture arm, the venture arm of the CIA, gave Palantir ten million and more than ten million, it gave them sort of the entry, sort of the stamp of approval of the CIA that gave them sort of the entry into Washington. So Incutel was also behind the investment in something in a company called Keyhole, which was bought by Google and became Google Earth. So Google has long had like strong connections to the national security world. But all of this really came to a head in around two thousand eighteen.

• 2:02:12Speaker 02

  So there was this project, an AI drone targeting project called Project Maven.

• 2:02:17Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:02:18Speaker 02

  And it was mostly, it was like, you know, this is early days, not quite ten years ago. And it was basically to, you know, they, they billed it as a research project, but it was about coming up with targets for drones to strike. And they're like, oh, it's just research. And Google had the initial contract for it because Google had in the past and still, you know, it did work with the military. But it came, if you think back in two thousand eighteen, it was the first Trump administration, the outrage over a lot of the Trump policies, particularly in the workforce in Silicon Valley. And so when it leaked that Google was working on a drone targeting project, it sparked a walkout at Google, this huge employee walkout.

• 2:03:02Speaker 02

  And at the time, you know, you had the tech companies competing for workforce. So Google's like, okay, okay, we're, we're gonna drop this, we're not gonna work on Project Maven. And everyone like, oh, this shows like Silicon Valley doesn't want to work with the Defense Department. That lasted like less than a year. Yeah, so a year later, Google's like, just kidding, actually, we're competing for this military cloud contract. And, yeah, it, it, yeah.

• 2:03:28Danny Jones?

  Right, yeah.

• 2:03:29Speaker 02

  And then they, they got involved in other things. So what that did, though, the Google walkout, it gave Palantir, that's where going to the Karp quote, it gave Palantir the perfect excuse to be like, we're willing to kill people. They took over the Project Maven contract. And today, what's called the Maven Smart System is the target, it's the, the AI targeting system for the military. So it, it kind of made Palantir, you know, Palantir's always had ups and downs till then, but it really let them get into the Pentagon. And it is now, so Palantir technically doesn't do the AI.

• 2:04:10Speaker 02

  They do the system that the AI models deploy on.

• 2:04:15Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:04:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a little complicated. So I don't know, do you remember the conflict between Anthropic, the AI company and the Pentagon?

• 2:04:22Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:04:23Speaker 02

  So the background to that was early in the year, year when we kidnapped, charged Maduro, brought him back to the States. So apparently Anthropic, so Anthropic's model was deployed on this Palantir system. It's like, you know, like basically Palantir is the visualization you see.

• 2:04:43Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:04:44Speaker 02

  That's what Palantir does, is the user interface. And the model on it was Claude, Anthropic's model.

• 2:04:51Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:04:52Speaker 02

  So after the Maduro raid, apparently Anthropic was all freaked out because they care so much about humanity.

• 2:04:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:04:59Speaker 02

  That they called up Palantir, they're like, we want to know how our models were used. We're worried that they were not, you know, we have all these red lines. Palantir told, you know, basically turned around and tattled to the Department of War. They're like, Anthropic is all worried about how their models are being used. And so the chief technology officer at the Pentagon, a former Uber executive, goes ballistic. And he's like, who the heck is Anthropic to tell us how we use their models? So they ended the Anthropic contract, designated them a supply chain risk, and then did contracts with Google, with OpenAI, and with XAI, Elon Musk's company. And basically like, we're not gonna work with Anthropic anymore.

• 2:05:40Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:05:40Speaker 02

  And I actually, I think some people, I don't know what lesson people took from that, maybe that Anthropic was so principled. I take a very different lesson, that the Pentagon is very, very freaked out about the fact that they don't have control over technologies that they once had. And this is true of Elon Musk. The Pentagon can't just order Elon Musk to make Starlink, the internet satellite constellation available wherever they want. It's a private system, Elon Musk owns it. And if he doesn't want the Ukrainian military to use it, that's on him, he owns it. And the Pentagon is kind of freaked out about this, like, what do we do, you know? The head of Lockheed Martin, like, we don't call the CEO of Lockheed Martin

• 2:06:21Speaker 02

  to ask permission to use a stealth fighter against Iran. You know, we own the underlying technology that we can just do what we want with it. And they're very freaked out by the situation where a lot of increasingly important technologies like AI, like Elon Musk's space systems, are controlled by private companies.

• 2:06:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:06:41Speaker 02

  And you might think, well, can't the government just national? It's like, no, actually, they can't, like, they really can't. The, the laws, I mean, I think there was one example where Truman tried to nationalize the steelworks during the Korean War. And the Supreme Court basically told him he can't do that. He doesn't have the authority on his own to do that. So, no, we can't just force, I mean, we have ways to influence private companies, but we actually don't have the legal authorities for the president on his own to just say like, okay, you gotta do this. And that's, that's freaking them out rightfully.

• 2:07:14Danny Jones?

  That's, that's definitely scary, you know, because that basically just means the private companies control the world, right? Like, they, they have their own, if they have autonomy and they have more, more power than the actual government does.

• 2:07:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:29Danny Jones?

  Like, what does that mean? Is this still a country?

• 2:07:32Speaker 02

  I mean, that was the other starting point for my book. One was the Steve Jobs story. And the other was a secret, a, a, a study that the Pentagon commissioned in two thousand thirteen to see if a rogue billionaire could build and sell nuclear weapons for a profit. Like, could they technically do it secretly? And then could they make a profit doing it? And I got a hold of the study. And the study was like, yeah, it'd be a billion dollars in five years, but yeah, it'd be a pretty good business. And I went back and interviewed the participants in the study because it doesn't name any specific billionaires. And I'm like, were you thinking of like an Elon Musk? And they're like, yeah, like an Elon Musk type, like, you know, they weren't saying Elon Musk per se. And back in two thousand thirteen, I don't think people thought of Elon Musk that way.

• 2:08:15Danny Jones?

  What about the head of a cartel?

• 2:08:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that was exactly the head of a cartel, a billionaire, Wagner, like the Russian mercenary company. They said the idea was to see what happens when these private technologies are accessible to people with money and the dangers of them.

• 2:08:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:08:34Speaker 02

  And that, to me, just, and I think that's so, you know, in two thousand thirteen, it was such a like forward-thinking idea, and maybe, you know, even some of the participants, like, I kind of thought the study was silly. Others took it, it was just like mixed bag. But looking now, where we are today with Elon Musk and others, like, no, I think what the issues that the study was looking at were really super relevant and forward-looking.

• 2:08:57Danny Jones?

  I think the study has been proven in the Epstein files.

• 2:09:00Speaker 02

  How, like, which part of the Epstein files?

• 2:09:02Danny Jones?

  Well, there's emails between Epstein and Ahud Barak, talking about selling weapons to, you know, civil, civil warring tribes in the Congo and Sierra Leone, and making money off selling surveillance equipment, drones and all kinds of weapons to like various, you know, civil wars happening around the world and profiting off it personally.

• 2:09:24Speaker 02

  I think there's a lot of people doing that, yeah.

• 2:09:27Danny Jones?

  So why wouldn't they sell a nuke to somebody?

• 2:09:29Speaker 02

  Well, I think that's the thing, I think they would, like, there was actually an interview earlier this year, I think in February, that Axios, which is a DC political news organization, interviewed Palmer Lucky. And they asked him, they said, is there anything you wouldn't build? And he's like, ah, and they're like, what about nuclear weapons? He's like, oh, I would totally build nuclear weapons, I'd build fission weapons, I'd build fusion weapons. I think they're a stabilizing force. And it's like, wow. Now, he wasn't talking about doing it illicitly, but just that idea, like, yeah, I would totally build nuclear weapons. Like, there's, it's, it's a, I don't understand, maybe it's that thing.

• 2:10:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but do you think people like Palmer Lucky really have the power? Like, do you think that guy really has, like, the, the people who gave him money and funded him, do you think they're really gonna let him have autonomous power to run around off the leash? Or do you think they can control everything he does?

• 2:10:21Speaker 02

  That's actually an interesting question, because, you know, people often mistakenly say he's the head of Anduril. He's actually not, he is, he's a founder of Anduril. But he actually, he's not the CEO, he's not the president, he's basically the public face of it. He spends a lot of time on X, so, and he, even he'll say like, oh.

• 2:10:39Danny Jones?

  Going on podcasts.

• 2:10:40Speaker 02

  Going on podcasts, like, he wouldn't have time to run a defense company. So I do think in some ways he is, you know, the public face of the company. How much control does he have? That's actually a great question. I, I don't have a solid answer to that. I don't, I don't think he's totally a figurehead, but no, I don't think he's, he doesn't call the shots.

• 2:10:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I just can't imagine that that guy would have, you know, just on judging on face value, I can't imagine, but I imagine there's a lot of people behind the scenes that are pulling the strings that are gonna make the decisions for him, right? And he feels like more of just like a figurehead and like a, you know, like a Ronald McDonald for Andoril.

• 2:11:25Speaker 02

  Can I quote that? Can I use that and attribute it to you? Because I think that's the Ronald McDonald of Andoril. Yeah.

• 2:11:33Danny Jones?

  You know, it does feel that way.

• 2:11:36Speaker 02

  It does.

• 2:11:36Danny Jones?

  I could be totally wrong.

• 2:11:37Speaker 02

  I don't think I, it's like I said with all, I think the truth is a little bit in between and maybe leaning a lot towards that because they are, they are so tied to their investors. Like that is their biggest fear because they have taken $11 billion in investment. $11 billion. That's like money going in.

• 2:11:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:11:58Speaker 02

  And those investors are valuing the company at 60 billion. And Andoril, like the big, like, there was this statement about Andoril of someone calling them the Theranos of Defense, you know, kind of.

• 2:12:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:12:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I don't know, but I, I'm like, I'm not seeing a lot of their stuff. Like, I know their stuff was unsuccessful in Ukraine. They've pretty much admitted as much. They tried to send drones over there, were just shot out of the sky.

• 2:12:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:22Speaker 07

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• 2:13:22Speaker 02

  Um, one of their unmanned submarines was captured by Iran.

• 2:13:27Danny Jones?

  Oh, nice.

• 2:13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it was malfunctioning. It was basically just sitting there. So I'm like, it's not great advertising.

• 2:13:33Danny Jones?

  That, that would go to, to support the idea that this whole thing's just a bubble?

• 2:13:39Speaker 02

  I, I think we are in a bubble and the defense tech companies are part of it.

• 2:13:44Danny Jones?

  Is that Andoril submarine?

• 2:13:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's the, is that the?

• 2:13:46Danny Jones?

  The Ghost Shark.

• 2:13:47Speaker 02

  Ghost Shark. Yeah, it's Ghost Shark. I think Dive was the one that was captured.

• 2:13:51Danny Jones?

  That's crazy looking.

• 2:13:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, they, they put out great PR. I just don't know. I don't see their stuff being used. It's, remember what I said about the classified programs?

• 2:14:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:05Speaker 02

  You find out about the unsuccessful ones?

• 2:14:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:08Speaker 02

  I worry, I don't know, but I think Andoril may have that problem. Like, we're seeing the thing, the only things we're seeing out of Andoril are like, kind of the failures. So are, do they have some successes?

• 2:14:20Danny Jones?

  Did you see the crazy Columbia-class nuclear subs that they built?

• 2:14:23Speaker 02

  That who built?

• 2:14:24Danny Jones?

  The, I think the, the Defense Department.

• 2:14:26Speaker 02

  The Defense Department, yeah.

• 2:14:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14:28Danny Jones?

  They're, they're apparently like a billion dollars per submarine and they, they did like, I don't know, like 12 or 13 of them or something like that?

• 2:14:34Speaker 02

  So expensive. Yeah. And that's the argument of an Andoril. And all of these companies are like, well, we can do it cheaper. You know, we're Silicon Valley. We innovate faster. We're cheaper. But we're not like, I guess my point is, like, we're low on interceptors. We're literally running out of interceptors. If Silicon Valley is so cheap and smart and fast, like, help us solve that problem. And they're like, oh, we are. It's like, well, we're.

• 2:14:58Danny Jones?

  Back to Google. Didn't DARPA fund the, the search?

• 2:15:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it was, they were involved in the early computer science work. The founders of Google had, like, I mean, DARPA was the preeminent funder of computer science.

• 2:15:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:15:13Speaker 02

  Back in the day.

• 2:15:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I remember reading an article once that was explaining how Bryn was getting visited at Stanford by, you know, leaders at CIA, NSA, and DARPA.

• 2:15:22Speaker 02

  They were all interested.

• 2:15:23Danny Jones?

  And they were sort of like incubating that, that, that, that search tool.

• 2:15:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, all, Silicon Valley itself and the Cold War, I mean, it grew out of military funding. So there's this image that we have of Silicon Valley of like the anti-military. And what I argue is that was always a bit of a myth. What happened was in the late 80s and 90s, the, you know, especially in the 90s, there was the end of the Cold War, the peace dividend, the Defense Department budgets fell drastically. At the same time, the computer, the personal computing revolution was taking off and the consumer market and the commercial market. Silicon Valley didn't need or want to work with the Defense Department because it had a whole other market. And so, I'm not saying that people don't have real beliefs.

• 2:16:11Speaker 02

  Like, I think if you're a tech worker who came of age at a certain time in Silicon Valley, you're like, I'm a commercial tech person. I don't want to work with the military. But your operating environment affects you. And so you had a generation of tech workers who were like, Silicon Valley's not military. We, we do consumer, we do.

• 2:16:30Danny Jones?

  But if all your competitors are doing contracts with the military and doing this stuff, you have to compete with them.

• 2:16:34Speaker 02

  Well, that's what's happening now. That's what we're seeing now. That more and more, like, there's now, I think in 2025, there was 50 billion in venture capital that went into defense, weapons, these new startups. And you're seeing Google going more all-in on this. Amazon is a big military and CIA contractor. People don't think of it, but it, it is. It's the largest, largest cloud provider.

• 2:16:58Danny Jones?

  His dad used to be a head guy at DARPA.

• 2:17:00Speaker 02

  At DARPA.

• 2:17:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:02Speaker 02

  Lawrence Keiser, yeah.

• 2:17:02Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 2:17:03Speaker 02

  And it was, was it father, grandfather? Um, maybe grandfather.

• 2:17:06Danny Jones?

  Bezos' dad.

• 2:17:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's just like, the connections are there. There was like, there was never, it's not so much, I think, it wasn't that Silicon Valley and the Pentagon were separate. They separated when their financial interests separated. And then, you know, what I talk about in the book was, okay, so what happened particularly in 2016, 17, that Silicon Valley started going all-in in defense? Oh, well, you can actually trace that to sort of the Mark Zuckerberg, remember he was like handing out copies of President Xi, Chinese President's book to Facebook employees? That the tech companies, you know, until about, you know, from the late aughts to about probably 2015, 2016, they thought China was the next consumer

• 2:17:51Speaker 02

  market. So Airbnb went in, Uber tried to go in, Facebook went in, they all thought, remember like, we're all gonna make a lot of money in China. It didn't work. And so by 2016, 17, most of them were like closing up shop in China. Well, there's this whole other market, only it's not for selling to China, it's for building weapons to battle China. Because the Pentagon was labeling it an adversary, we need to prepare for a possible war with China over Taiwan. So all these investors who had made their bets initially on the Chinese market were like, okay, maybe the better market. I mean, they may not have thought that in their head, but they essentially turned from the consumer market, which was not available to them, and into the military market.

• 2:18:35Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:18:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And then, you know, that Xi dinner just happened here, where they had all the tech leaders were there.

• 2:18:42Speaker 02

  They're just there.

• 2:18:43Danny Jones?

  Kissing Xi's ass, giving him a trophy, the big eagle trophy.

• 2:18:46Speaker 02

  I mean, Musk has always been the conflicted character there because he, of the different tech CEOs, he has business in China with the Gigafactory. So he has always been more careful than the other tech CEOs about not being negative on China. There had been some, I think the Wall Street Journal reported that when he was gonna merge all his companies together, Tesla and XAI, that he was finally gonna divest from China because that would cause him problem on the Pentagon contracts. But Musk denied that report. But the China issue has always been very, very problematic for Musk.

• 2:19:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I think, I think Apple still relies pretty heavily on China as well.

• 2:19:22Speaker 02

  They do.

• 2:19:23Danny Jones?

  They diversified into Taiwan, I believe, but.

• 2:19:25Speaker 02

  But Apple is the one company that is not among the, the war bros. Like, Apple, Apple, you know, you can, you know, the military buys Apple devices, but Apple doesn't have, it's not like Google that has like big military contracts. So for Apple, you know, they don't really, I think they would like to divest from China because they kind of see which way the winds are blowing. But they, they're under a different framework than the companies like Google and Amazon, which have large military and intelligence contracts.

• 2:19:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there was, we had a gentleman on the podcast a couple of days ago who was explaining to us how China is like all up in Canada, like in the Pacific coast of Canada. They're doing deals with the Canadian government where they have like full, like, I think military shit there. And as well as like deals with the, the rare earth minerals that they have and like the oil and all that stuff up in Northern Canada where they're like all up tied up into the, um, the Canadian government and have all kinds of deals with the Canadian government, which I didn't even know.

• 2:20:25Speaker 02

  I mean, this is where, you know, I mean, the Biden administration was concerned about this too. But like, the Trump administration was early, you know, even back in the first Trump administration, they were very worried about Huawei and trying to roll back Europe's use of Chinese telecom companies. So yeah, this, this, this is an issue. And I think that the, um, yeah, it's, I, I, like, I think that of, of the things that I sometimes criticize the government about, it is good to be worried about that and do something. And do you need to take Greenland? I, I don't know about that. But like, the concerns about China are real concerns.

• 2:21:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And China's also buying lots of weapons from Israel? I think you talked about this in your, in your article about the, the Paris gun show?

• 2:21:12Speaker 02

  So China and Israel have had weapons deals in the past. I don't know so much about right now. I mean, Israel has historically been like, you know, their, their defense industry is big for them.

• 2:21:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:21:23Speaker 02

  So they have historically been willing to sell to countries and do deals, including with China, that the US is not willing. And it's been a big problem because a lot of, there's been a lot, there's a lot of US investment in paying for Israeli defense technology. So the US has been very angry in the past about Israel doing deals with China. I actually don't know about right now, um, what Israel is doing.

• 2:21:46Danny Jones?

  So what shocked me about your article about the Paris gun show was how, first of all, I didn't realize that there. The amount of weapons that they sell, like their, their military industrial complex was so big.

• 2:22:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:01Danny Jones?

  Because all I hear about is all the money that we give to Israel for weapons. Or there was that recent, that recent story that dropped where we gave them like a bunch of these 2,000 pound bombs that was worth like, I forget how much, a few billion dollars, maybe.

• 2:22:13Speaker 02

  Sounds about right.

• 2:22:13Danny Jones?

  And then basically what we did was we gave them cash and they used that cash to buy, to buy all these bombs and things like that. So it's this weird money washing thing that's happening. And it's like, okay, if we're doing that to them, for them to buy all these weapons, essentially welfare to them, then why the hell, they had this giant like arms deals, like selling billions and billions of dollars worth of weapons across the world? That, that kind of like blew my mind.

• 2:22:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have made, I think, you know, we're seeing a political change there and I think Israel's preparing for it. There has, there's always been a tension in the US Israeli relationship. So, yeah, we, I mean, there's a lot of co-production. We invest, we give money to Israel. That is a problem. The problem that Israel is having now is it, so it's like we have the, all this venture capital money going into our, we have our Silicon Valley. A lot of that venture capital money is also going into Israeli defense startups and.

• 2:23:09Danny Jones?

  Like American money.

• 2:23:10Speaker 02

  American venture capital money, yeah. Now, the problem is there is a little bit, as you know, of a backlash against Israeli defense industry because of what's going on in Gaza.

• 2:23:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:23:22Speaker 02

  So a lot of what's happening is Israeli companies are incorporating in the United States to sort of shed their Israeli identity, in part because they want to sell to the Pentagon. And the Pentagon doesn't like to buy from foreign buyers as much, Israeli or not. And the other is because they don't, you know, there are, you know, European countries, they, they don't want to be identified anymore as Israeli because of the backlash against Israel.

• 2:23:49Danny Jones?

  And, and there, you were saying that like at, at the gun shows, they were like giving, like, like coordinating them off?

• 2:23:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so France has been one of the European countries that's been very critical of the, um, the Israeli military operations in Gaza. And so they did this crazy thing where they, they first, a couple of years ago, they first tried to ban the Israeli companies. And Israeli companies sued in court and were able to go, this time around, they said, you can't display offensive weaponry. Well, Israel's view is like, well, everything we have is defensive because we're only defending ourselves.

• 2:24:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, there was something that, that they called it.

• 2:24:27Speaker 02

  Defensive offensive.

• 2:24:28Danny Jones?

  Defensive offensive. I was like, what?

• 2:24:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, both sides handled it badly. So, um, the French Ministry of Defense did an inspection of the Israeli, Israeli defense industry is huge. They always exhibit very large at these arms shows. And so they, um, companies that they felt were displaying defensive offensive weaponry, offensive weaponry, they literally had the show build barriers around them. And so, and, and that wasn't a good look to, for anyone. So you kind of had these big barriers around and just, it, it was just, it felt like it was a bad way of dealing with what is a political problem. Like if you really oppose this war in Gaza and Israeli operations, you know, the French government has better ways of messaging.

• 2:25:16Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 2:25:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, rather than like.

• 2:25:17Danny Jones?

  Putting goofy barriers at a gun show when you're just making money off them, you know?

• 2:25:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:22Danny Jones?

  You're not really doing anything.

• 2:25:23Speaker 02

  It was a goofy way of handling the issue and I don't think did anything.

• 2:25:27Danny Jones?

  It's just signaling, right?

• 2:25:28Speaker 02

  It's signaling and not, and not in a, a useful way.

• 2:25:31Danny Jones?

  And they're, and the Israeli companies are trying to disguise themselves as American companies?

• 2:25:37Speaker 02

  Well, so there's two different parts to it. So one part is Israeli companies have long had problems, they've always wanted to sell to the Pentagon. And the Pentagon just doesn't like to buy from foreign buyers, like we like, you know, to source domestically.

• 2:25:53Speaker 02

  So Israeli companies have always had a problem with that. Some of it is, you know, probably outright antisemitism that like, you know, they've gotten a lot of just like hatred thrown at those companies. And a lot of it is genuine, not, I mean, I would argue not antisemitic. There's also a part that's just like political opposition, like why should we support Israeli companies? If, you know, given the extremely high death toll in Gaza. So there's like different, different components to it.

• 2:26:19Danny Jones?

  And 4K all over the internet, killing women and children.

• 2:26:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, is it disguising? I mean, yeah, I guess you could interpret it as disguising it sort of, you know, they, they wish, whatever their explanation is, it is financially beneficial for them to identify as US companies. Yeah. And so even like, I remember interviewing one investor who was like, yeah, it's ridiculous. Like you'll see slowly, like first they'll incorporate in Washington and then you'll see them sort of like scrub their website. And I remember I wrote about one company that was a prominent Israeli company and I, I wrote a little thing about them in just a random article. And one of their PR people called me up and they're like, can you, uh, take out that it's Israeli?

• 2:27:02Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:27:03Speaker 02

  I'm like, what? It was pitched as an Israeli company. And she's like, oh, well, they're moving their headquarters to DC. And I'm like looking up the company and it's like they may be someday, but like right now their headquarters are in Tel Aviv. I'm not gonna like, I can't, I wasn't even saying anything bad about the company, it was just like describing it as an Israeli company. So there is this effort to, I don't know, redo their image, their public image of these companies.

• 2:27:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's crazy. And then, so, and then the other thing you were describing is that it seems like everyone's for all the, all the Ukraine stuff, like the Ukraine war is the noble war.

• 2:27:35Speaker 02

  It's, it's the virtuous war.

• 2:27:36Danny Jones?

  It's the virtuous war.

• 2:27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:38Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 2:27:39Speaker 02

  And so there's, you know, a lot of rah rah for Ukraine, but there's a lot of problems with some of the Ukrainian companies as well. You know, you.

• 2:27:46Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:27:48Speaker 02

  There are corruption problems. I know that will shock you. There's a lot of IP problems, like there's allegations that some of the big, because you know, when you're trying to just fight a war for survival, you don't care that you're violating someone's patent on a missile, you're just building. But if you want to sell that abroad, there's IP issues on the drones. Again, it goes to your war of survival. You don't care about Chinese components, but if you want to sell on the international market or to the US, having Chinese components on drones is going to be a big issue. Yeah, the, the Ukrainian arms industry, it's going to be a big deal for Ukraine, no matter what, but they, they've got some problems. Yeah, corruption, that's.

• 2:28:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and, and this, this whole thing now that I haven't, I'm not super informed on it, but it looks like that, um, the UK is trying to like ramp up investments in defense stuff for the Ukraine Russia war.

• 2:28:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:45Danny Jones?

  What is that all about?

• 2:28:46Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, so Europe, as the Trump administration scaled back our support for Ukraine, and we still support them in a number of ways, but in terms of the actual like weapons and money, more and more of that came from Europe. But you're also seeing a couple of different things. So you're seeing private money in some cases from Europe and from the US investing in these Ukrainian weapons companies. So that's one component of it. And then there's the, like the, um, what's good for us component. Ukrainians now have more experience in drone warfare than any other country in the world. Like it, they, they are experts in it, in building them, defending against them, operating them. And, you know, there are parts of Europe, and I think to some extent the US is like, well, we would like to benefit from that.

• 2:29:30Speaker 02

  We would like that expertise to help our industry. And so there's a lot of back and forth where Ukraine is trying to get the best deal it can get, but also even in Europe and the US, there's the idea like, well, can we get your data? Like, you know, we, we also want to be good at drone, you know, in part for business, in part for worries about Russia. So it's a back and it's, you know, everybody's got a financial interest.

• 2:29:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it certainly seems that way. You know, I, I don't understand why. What is this? Ukraine, uh, UK invites Ukrainian companies to grab a piece of an innovation fund? Oh, this was just published yesterday. The UK has a big pot of money to invest in defense, defense innovation, some 800 million pounds.

• 2:30:16Speaker 02

  It's a lot of money, fair amount.

• 2:30:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, we want to get that capability out of Ukraine. So they want to, I mean, they basically want to get that knowledge, that technical capability. When I was at the, um, arms show in Paris, when I was speaking to one of the Ukrainian companies and they said, the big problem we have is like the Germans are coming in and swooping and hiring, hiring all of our engineers, like all of our guys with like engineers with battlefield experience building drones and the Germans are hiring them. So like everybody kind of wants a piece of the, the war action.

• 2:30:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's wild. The Ukraine thing, it, it boggles my mind, you know, because there's like so many different, you hear so many different people saying things out loud, like you had, uh, Lindsey Graham before he died, he was saying, you know, I think he was in Ukraine when he died, wasn't he?

• 2:31:05Speaker 02

  He had just returned from Ukraine. He had literally just finished a trip there, if I remember right.

• 2:31:10Danny Jones?

  He made some public statement about like, there's all those rare earth minerals, we can't let China get those minerals, we got to make sure we get them. And trillions of dollars, he said, there were of rare earth minerals there. And, you know, it is also bizarre that Russia hasn't used any kind of, I would imagine Russia has a lot more capable weapons that they could use on Ukraine that they're clearly not using, right? Like they have tons of hypersonic missiles, they haven't used any of those.

• 2:31:38Danny Jones?

  You know, they could use tactical nuclear weapons and that's like, you know, some of the fear mongering that like to say like, oh, they could nuke us and we need to keep going with this war or whatever. But it, it is interesting to see like the amount of restraint they seem to have had.

• 2:31:51Speaker 02

  I mean, yes, I guess because Russia can, you know, they've demonstrated, for instance in Chechnya, that they'll just, you know, raise cities. As you can kind of see with the war in Ukraine, they're more and more going after, I mean, they've always gone after civilian infrastructure, but their tolerance for hitting civilian sites in Kiev is, is, is going up, you know, week by week.

• 2:32:15Speaker 02

  They have proven they can be even more brutal than they've been. I don't have a good answer of the way out of the Ukraine war. I think it's remarkable that Ukraine has, and it's not to say there's not much to criticize in the Ukrainian government and the institutions that they've held on as long as they have is, is pretty remarkable. I worry that, yeah, that the level that Russia will escalate in brutality escalate, because you're right, there is more they can do. I think on the nuclear issue. You know, they've sort of rattled the nuclear saber a number of times in trying to get the US and Europe to back off. I think for them, that's a pretty big risk as well.

• 2:32:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:00Speaker 02

  But, you know, the worry is if Putin really feels cornered, you know, what would he do?

• 2:33:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:06Speaker 02

  How bad can it get?

• 2:33:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, would he do that? I don't know. You know, because if he launches a nuke, it's

• 2:33:14Danny Jones?

  it's the end of days, right? For everyone, because we we have protocols in place and we have all the satellites that can detect as soon as a missile launches, like we unload back on them.

• 2:33:24Speaker 02

  So I think I remember the reporting that I heard, I may have been when I was at the Wall Street Journal, if I remember right, was back in the early days of the invasion, when there was a real concern that he was going to use a he would use a nuke in the conflict. And apparently, I think it was Burns, then the head of the CIA warned Russia, like, if you do that, it we will retaliate conventionally, but with massive retaliation. So, I mean, that is the tricky part of deterrence. How do you threaten escalation in a way that stops someone from doing something really bad with nukes, but not in a way that you risk ending the world? It's a it's a

• 2:34:03Danny Jones?

  I don't think you can use nukes without ending the world. You know, it's like, you know, Trump's threatened to nuke Iran how many times now? And it's just like become the boy who cries wolf. It's just and no one believes him anymore.

• 2:34:15Speaker 02

  And if anyone does use a nuke in a conflict, it's just the genie out of the bottle. Like, then, like, we haven't used one since World War. It just becomes terrible.

• 2:34:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, especially everyone's is a lot of people speculate that Israel could use a nuke on Iran. And that would be very bad, because first of all, Israel hasn't even signed the nuclear treaty, and they're not even allegedly

• 2:34:38Speaker 02

  They don't acknowledge.

• 2:34:39Danny Jones?

  They don't acknowledge that they even have nuclear weapons. But I mean, if you're to believe the whistleblowers who have come out and exposed it. You know, I think it's a pretty obvious fact that they do have loads of nukes.

• 2:34:50Speaker 02

  Oh, they do. They definitely have nuclear weapons.

• 2:34:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And like, what would we do, you know, if they did that? I don't know.

• 2:34:57Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, I would have to assume that would be a last resort for me. Who knows? I mean, you kind of look at where the government in Israel is going. I mean, that's the thing, like, what is a lot? How do you define a last resort? I don't know.

• 2:35:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I don't know either. And there's just a lot of, it's just too much to follow. You know, there's so much shit happening out there. And to be able to, like, for someone like you to report on this stuff, it must be, you know, like navigating a frickin' maze, a hornet's nest of of stories and, you know, even dealing with sources. Like, one of the crazy things that Jack Murphy was telling me a couple of years ago, when he was on here, when he first started reporting on the Ukraine war, like, right after it broke out.

• 2:35:42Danny Jones?

  He was doing a story on how

• 2:35:46Danny Jones?

  the CIA was using one of its proxy intelligence source services in somewhere in Europe to to conduct sabotage operations inside Russia.

• 2:35:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:57Danny Jones?

  Right, like with, like, in factories and railroads and stuff like that. And then when he was doing the story, he didn't tell me the publication, but he said it was like a really big news publication, like one of the top five or whatever.

• 2:36:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:08Danny Jones?

  And like, he was working on the story for months and months. And there was like six months he was working on the story, like with all of his sources, he had tons of sources, like former CIA military people who were telling him all this stuff. He was corroborating it amongst different sources. And then, like, right up to the time when he was getting ready to push the publish button with that publication, got on the call with the editor. And they're like, OK, we got to do one more phone call with the deputy director of the CIA. And they're like, OK. And then the CIA deputy director goes, uh, no, we completely deny all this stuff. So Jack's like, OK, great, we'll just put that as a footnote at the bottom of it, you know, you categorically deny any of this stuff's real. And then the editor of the publication goes, no, uh, we have an off the record agreement with the CIA, so we're not going to publish this story anymore.

• 2:36:53Danny Jones?

  And the excuse that they always use is you're putting innocent lives in danger, you know, to report on this. And that's a huge issue.

• 2:37:00Speaker 02

  So that's the generally the way the CIA has operated when there's a story coming out that they don't want, is they'll put a very high level person on the phone with an editor of a publication. And what the art, they'll first argue a couple of things that I've been on the other side of that, receiving that call. They'll argue that, you know, you're you're like, hundreds of thousands of people will you're going to end the world. That's our first argument. And if you press them on that, like, well, really, tell me how? Like, I don't want to end the world. I don't want to get people killed. And then they kind of like, have problems. And then they try to argue, well, the story is wrong. When you're like, well, OK, if the story is wrong, how is it going to end the world and get people killed and all that? And so having been on one of those conversations and go, you have to go through it point by

• 2:37:45Speaker 02

  point. And, you know, inevitably, there might be ones, you know, they'll, it's shades of gray, like, the story is correct, but they are not going to tell you what's incorrect and correct. So they just argue it's all wrong. I find it a really

• 2:38:01Speaker 02

  not a productive way to carry yourself as an agency. I would put it at that. But apparently, it's

• 2:38:07Danny Jones?

  Productive, well, I mean, depending on who you're

• 2:38:09Speaker 02

  I guess, yeah, productive for them.

• 2:38:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah, certainly not for the journalistic outlets that are reporting on stuff that are captured by them.

• 2:38:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:16Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 2:38:17Speaker 02

  I mean, but Jack is, I mean, having worked with him, so I edited him on a couple of stories. Terrific reporter, like, I would, I would take him to the bank.

• 2:38:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he's the best.

• 2:38:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:27Danny Jones?

  He's incredible. But, I mean, you know, that's just one of the things that that has frustrated me over the past couple of years, not just, not just the fact that, you know, big mainstream publications are deeply connected with these agencies that have the power to pull stories or to, you know, whether they're doing it with, you know, like, with hard power, or if they're just like convincing them that it's the wrong thing to do. Whatever they're doing, it's that's not journalism anymore.

• 2:38:57Speaker 02

  And, yeah, to take us back to history, the reason why Edward Snowden went to Glenn Greenwald was not to the New York Times, was because the New York Times had sat on the warrantless surveillance story, that famous post nine 11 story, that the government was doing warrantless surveillance. And the government had convinced the New York Times for, I forget how long it was, over a year, the New York Times did eventually run the story, but they sat on it at the government's request for quite a while. And that was the reason that Edward Snowden decided not to go to the New York Times. So it's you injure yourself, you risk injuring yourself as a media institution. It's, you know, it's not that you don't want to listen to government, you can let them

• 2:39:40Speaker 02

  make their case, but you don't have to listen to it.

• 2:39:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and that's one of the big reasons that we ended up where we are today, which I will say, I believe that a majority, a vast majority of people in this country under, you know, the age of 65, probably, don't trust the government, anything they say. I think a majority of people, like, their North Star of truth is whatever the government's saying, the opposite is true.

• 2:40:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if you, you know, people, you know, people have written about this, sort of the decline of trust in institutions, not just government, but media as well, which is unfortunate. But I think, and and public health and in, when you see an erosion of trust.

• 2:40:26Danny Jones?

  Public health, Jesus, yeah.

• 2:40:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, when you see an intrusion, it's easy, I guess, the easy answer is like, oh, people are dumb, they don't know. People are not dumb. They may not always be right, but they're not dumb. And they know when people are not telling the truth. And I think you're right, yeah, people don't trust the government because they have seen too many times. And you see that, unfortunately, in other areas as well. I mean, I say unfortunately, but it's not because those institutions are blameless.

• 2:40:54Danny Jones?

  And I always get freaked out because a lot of news, media and journalism relies on social media to disseminate their information. I would say more so than even like television and stuff like that, like traditional media. And if these private companies are in control of all of that, well, like, who's to say what they're going to let out? You know, and is it all free? Is it, how is that regulated? Are they using AI to regulate it? How do they, how do we know when they're turning different knobs up, turning other knobs down? And you got to ask the question, like, in a time we're in now, like, post COVID, and when, after Trump took office, it seems like all the limits are off on social media.

• 2:41:37Danny Jones?

  Now, and after Elon bought X, it's become like this Wild, Wild West of, oh, yeah, anyone can say anything they fucking want. And that is very strange to me. Like, why are they doing this?

• 2:41:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:48Danny Jones?

  You know, is there a reason for this? I don't know. Like, are they trying to, I mean, some people speculate that maybe they're doing it so like, they have AI tracking, like, what I was telling you earlier about that car, that story in Argentina, how they're trying to make digital twins of their social media, people's social media presence?

• 2:42:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:10Danny Jones?

  Like, are they trying to get some sort of a better understanding of how all these people are? Like, if you let anyone just say whatever they want on social media and be radicalized to the nth degree, where you put them, not only are they able to get away with anything they want, they say on on X or whatever platform it is, but the algorithm also pushes them into those echo chambers where they can become more radicalized.

• 2:42:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:34Danny Jones?

  And you also, you know, these come, X is part, has an AI, you know, they're close, he's close with Palantir. Are they, like, creating some sort of a digital twin of everyone on X? So that when they do want to eventually put some crazy totalitarian lockdown on stuff, they know who's who. And they know, like, how to, how to game out, how, you know, or predict how that person is going to act in the future.

• 2:43:02Speaker 02

  I don't know where it all ends up. I worry about that. But it's like I said, I, I just worry about this concentration of power. So you have concentration of power in military technology, in politics, in media. I mean, Elon Musk owning X in all of these areas. And I see this in other, I remember Wired magazine ran a negative article on Anduril. And so one of the co-founders of Anduril started tweeting on X about like, well, maybe we should just buy Wired. And I'm like, OK, that solves that problem. And it's

• 2:43:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:43:39Speaker 02

  Everybody wants to control sort of the operating system, which includes the media and everything else. And, yeah, I mean, to what end?

• 2:43:49Speaker 02

  It's, wow.

• 2:43:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah, Elon just bought a dot.com. Is that what it was? He bought, Sam Altman created this thing called Dot, and then Elon, like, literally went and bought the website, dot.com, for like, who knows? I think it was speculated to be like $20 million, he just bought out his phone real quick.

• 2:44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's like nothing for him.

• 2:44:08Danny Jones?

  But yeah, you mentioned the health, the like, the the healthcare stuff, like the HHS stuff. And one of the things, I don't know if you talked about this in your DARPA book, but like, didn't they try to create like a health version of DARPA?

• 2:44:18Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean, they've so people-

• 2:44:20Danny Jones?

  And that was somehow tied to like Kushner and Ivanka?

• 2:44:24Speaker 02

  I mean, Kushner is tied to a lot of stuff right now, so it wouldn't surprise me. Yeah, there have been all of these, you know, there is an intelligence ARPA, there's a health ARPA, there's an energy ARPA. Nobody's ever actually been really successful at cloning DARPA. And I think because no, you know, DARPA has, I mean, as you talked about earlier, they have a lot of independence, not total, they can't fund whatever they want, but more so than other agencies. And even when people want to start a new sort of ARPA, they don't want to ever give it like that much money or control or freedom like DARPA has had over the years. So those efforts have not been successful. But I mean, they still have money. And certainly wouldn't surprise me that there's connections to Trump administration or Trump family. Sounds about what I've been reading lately.

• 2:45:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's all insane. But Sharon, thank you for doing this.

• 2:45:12Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:45:13Danny Jones?

  I really appreciate it. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you think we should cover?

• 2:45:16Speaker 02

  I mean, we've covered a lot of material.

• 2:45:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we have. We've gone deep. So tell people about, so your new book is now available everywhere that books are sold?

• 2:45:25Speaker 02

  The Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of Warfare, available everywhere, bookstores, Amazon, Barnes Noble, anywhere you want to buy it. Yeah.

• 2:45:34Danny Jones?

  Okay. Is there any, like a website or anything else people should go to to find out more about you?

• 2:45:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so my website is www.sharonweinberger.com. I work for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We do the doomsday clock. They can go to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists website. I write for a lot of places, as you've seen. Yeah, and I just, you know, I think it's, I, as I said, I am optimistic that I see the public, whether it's my book, or there's a lot of other good books out there right now, that they're engaging on these issues and that they're worried about them. And I think that's, I don't care whether people agree or disagree with, you know, my views. I care that people are engaged in the issues. And I think it's like, we talked about the optimism, like, I think there's a lot of sort of cross partisan interest in where things are going.

• 2:46:21Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. I totally agree. Well, thank you. And thank you for doing what you're doing.

• 2:46:25Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:46:25Danny Jones?

  Very impressive work. We'll link all your stuff below for folks. And that's all.

• 2:46:29Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:46:30Danny Jones?

  Good night, folks.