195. How Silicon Valley Took Over National Security

Why are Silicon Valley billionaires developing defence tech? Could Elon Musk build a nuclear bomb? And why did Steve Jobs owe his early success to the CIA? Listen as David is joined by national security journalist Sharon Weinberger to discuss her new book, Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fuelling the Future of War. ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: therestisclassified.com/newsletter ------------------- Buy Valley of Death: https://guardianbookshop.com/valley-of-death-9781399831673/ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  Welcome to The Rest Is Classified. David McCloskey here. We have a very special bonus episode today on a absolutely wild article that was recently published in The Wall Street Journal, all about the hidden debt that Apple owes the CIA, which immediately got my interest because I love any story about someone owing a debt to the CIA. It is a great story on its own, but it's also a great jumping off point for a much bigger conversation about the intersection of tech and espionage and national security. We are very lucky to have with us today the author of that article and a terrific new book on this topic.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  And we're also lucky that Gordon is still gone on vacation. So I am running the show here all by myself. We are joined today by Sharon Weinberger, who has covered the intersection of technology and national security for more than 25 years. She has been the National Security Editor at The Wall Street Journal and The Intercept. She's the author of wonderful books on DARPA, the Pentagon's very strange weapons program. She is now the editor in chief of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. And her new book is called Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War. And I have read it. It is absolutely essential reading for people who want to understand what is going on in national security today.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  So Sharon, thank you so much for being with us today.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Hey, thanks so much for having me.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  I want to start with the article because it's this absolutely fascinating story about the CIA saving Steve Jobs's bacon back in the 1980s. So I'm wondering if you could just, if you could set that, that story up for those of us who maybe haven't read the article.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  Sure. So I think, like a lot of journalists, you know, we, we hear stories, especially in national security, intelligence, you hear stories, sort of urban tales, apocryphal stories. Some of them are true, some of them are not true. And a lot of what we do is trying to run them down. So about 10 years ago, shortly after I had published my last book on DARPA, The Imagineers of War, a former DARPA director named Vic Rees had dropped in to see me at my office. And we were just chatting and catching up. And he starts telling me this story about meeting with Steve Jobs when he was the director of DARPA back in the early 1990s. And he said, sort of half jokingly, he's like,

• 5:58Speaker 04

  you know, I saved Steve Jobs. And I'm like, what? He's like, I bought a whole bunch of NeXT computers for DARPA, which of course makes perfect sense because DARPA had been behind ARPANET, early internet, computer networking. And then he's like, okay, I bought maybe a few dozen, but I heard from someone at DARPA who had come from the National Security Agency that the NSA had bought a whole lot of NeXT computers. And he's like, so, you know, maybe I saved Steve Jobs, maybe the NSA Steve Jobs, but we saved Steve Jobs. And I'm like, that's fascinating. I wonder how I tracked that down. And, you know, I've dealt with the NSA a lot from my days working at The Intercept when we were publishing on the Snowden archive

• 6:43Speaker 04

  and had, you know, a very good relationship with NSA Public Affairs as much as one can have.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  It's a very forthcoming organization, in my experience, right?

• 6:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I knew it wasn't going to be like, can I call up the NSA and like, did you really, you know, buy, you know, millions and millions of dollars worth? So I kind of put it on what I call an informal list of backpocket stories, you know, things that I, I kind of scratch away at. So when I have interviews with other people, this is 10 years ago, I asked people about it. Every once in a while, I Google, I look through FOIA archives, looking for any clues. Because like, where do you even start? Because even the DARPA director, he knew it was probably true, but, you know, he couldn't be a firsthand confirmation of the intelligence community part of it.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Did you think it was true at that time? Or did you think it was this kind of like apocryphal, sort of exaggerated, made up story?

• 7:32Speaker 04

  Both, meaning I thought it was certainly true. I mean, obviously it was true that DARPA had bought some. The, Vic Rees, the DARPA director, had heard about it. It was from an employee at DARPA who had come from the NSA. So it was definitely true that NSA had bought a larger number than DARPA had, but that it saved Steve Jobs, which was the whole point of the story, that it saved Steve Jobs and, and by extension, Apple, enabling Steve Jobs to go from NeXT back to Apple. So I, I didn't, that part I was a little bit dubious on. And then, I think it was about three, three or four years ago, I was, you know, on LinkedIn, and I see a random post from a guy I didn't know

• 8:16Speaker 04

  talking about the NSA and Steve Jobs and saving Western civilization. And I'm like, okay, that is a little too weird that some, you know, I mean, random in the sense that I didn't know this person and was not a person currently in the intelligence community. And so I immediately emailed the guy and I'm like, I'd love to talk to you about Steve Jobs and the NSA. And this, this gentleman was named Dane Arring. And so it turns out two things. A, he worked on the contract. And B, even more bizarre, the NSA was just a cover for the CIA. That, which for me was very sort of weird. Like, why would you, I mean, you know, NSA, no such agency.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  Why would you use that to cover for a CIA contract?

• 9:04Speaker 04

  It gets even more convoluted. But I called him up and he talked about, you know, he had worked at the time as a contractor for the National Reconnaissance Office. So it turns out the NRO, the, the agency that controls our strategic spy satellites, that they had been the end customer. But as you probably know better than me, there used to be Program B in the CIA, which managed reconnaissance programs. So the CIA was the buyer of these. But it was a CIA contract. The NSA was used as cover and the end user were spies in the NRO. And Dane opened the doors to his former boss, Joe Romello, who had worked at the CIA. And from there, you know, that was a real breakthrough.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  So that began to sort of unspool the threads of the story.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Jobs at this point, what is he doing? We think of the black turtleneck Jobs launching the iPhone, but he, at this point in time, he's, he's not at Apple, right? He's, he's preparing to return, but.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, so he, he had been exiled from Apple. And, you know, as often happens in these management disputes and sort of, in fact, there's another great book out called Steve Jobs in Exile, which covers little bits of this as well and is a great book for people very interested in next. So Steve Jobs had been thrown out of Apple and formed his own company called Next that was building, and people, even people who are not into computer history, will probably recognize these like very beautiful black boxes. And this was the company that was like, you let a genius loose with no controls. And this is what happens. He designs this beautiful, wonderful computer ahead of its time with built in networking capabilities before you have even the internet.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  And it's beautiful and functional and has beautiful graphics. And it is too expensive for anyone to buy. It was too expensive, you know, so we're in the 1980s now, mid 1980s. And so they were targeting universities. That was one of the major customers, never really caught on there. It had little bits of, you know, business here and there. You know, some talent agency bought it because they thought it looked really cool, which it did, but they weren't really using its full capabilities. And Joe Romello, this CIA official, who was sort of a CIA official ahead of his time. He was, you know, a technology enthusiast and was looking at, you know, how do we get into the hands of people looking at satellite imagery,

• 11:32Speaker 04

  computers that can allow them to, to interpret, share, basically do what they're doing a lot better and taking advantage of state of the art capabilities. So that's where Joe Romello and then also his colleague Jeff Harris, who goes on to become head of NRO, enter the picture.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  So what capability do those computers give the US intelligence community and military that, that they didn't have? I also understand from the article that once they were procured, there were some modifications made to them along, along the way.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  So there's a difference between what, as often happens with new technologies, between what people thought they would get out of them. And Joe Romello talks about how like, you know, his idea was that, okay, it has high speed processing, good graphics, but also that you could literally download onto an optical disc, that you could share briefings, you could share intelligence around town. And they did, they did what I think he called aftermarket modifications, where they use some of their own contractors in Silicon Valley to upgrade the computers that they didn't even necessarily tell Steve Jobs about originally.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  So the idea was that you could ship these to analysts at different places, different NRO analysts, and it would allow them to do things that they couldn't do with the old workstations in terms of graphics, in terms of interpretations and in terms of creating presentations and share those presentations, whether with the White House, senior military commanders or others.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  Interesting. And then from the other side, what does that contract do for Jobs? And why didn't Jobs ever thank, thank us for this, this amazing contract?

• 13:21Speaker 04

  I mean, it's, I think it would be too much to say, you know, Next was not going to go bankrupt per se. They had at that point, investment, I think one of their most significant outside investors was Ross Perot, as is well known, but the, the company was doing badly. And so if the idea was that either the company was going to succeed, it wasn't doing that, or become a springboard for Steve Jobs to do something else. So that, going back to what I thought was the most apocryphal part of the story, where I'm like, okay, so the intelligence community bought a bunch of computers. How much of a difference did that make? Now, there may be people associated with Next who disagree with this, but the people I spoke to, both on the intelligence side

• 14:06Speaker 04

  and who were senior within Next at the time, all agreed that that contract was absolutely essential for, you know, the health of the company, of keeping it going and more importantly, showing what it could do. In particular, Dean Arring, who worked on both sides. He had originally been a contractor with NRO, working directly to support Joe Romello at the CIA, and then later went on to work at Next. The argument he makes to me, which is similar to others, is that those years allowed Steve Jobs to mature as an entrepreneur, to, to realize perhaps some of his, you know, the limits of needing to listen to other people, to show that he could deliver. It, it gave him basically a runway that he wouldn't have had.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  And I am sure there are ways to nitpick at that argument. But when you look back at the other sales of Next, there really wasn't much else there. There were bits here and bits there, but that federal contract, that contract to work with the NRO and CIA was really the most significant thing around and made a huge difference to the company.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  Do you think Jobs, like, how did, how did he see it, I guess?

• 15:14Speaker 04

  I am not a jobs expert and I was mostly, so I, I've read, as other people have read about Jobs, fascinating, unique, sometimes volatile person, you know, iconic entrepreneur. So I think that there, there was this one moment, I remember a story that I tell in the book, where they're about to go to Washington. They're going out with their federal contractor partner that was helping on the contract ESL. And suddenly Steve Jobs is like, you know what? I don't want to do this. I don't want to work with the feds. And they're like, Steve, like the limousine is like idling outside. We got to go to the airport. And I think they basically have to get Ross Perot to intervene. And when I asked the person who told me the story, who had been a senior person at Apple and then at Next, like, well, why?

• 15:58Speaker 04

  What, what happened? He's like, and, and that, that incident triggered this guy's resignation, where he's like, I, I just couldn't take it anymore. Like, that was the last straw. And somehow, we, we don't know why he threw a fit. Like, suddenly I'm not going to work with the feds. And we don't know why he changed his mind, although I think it was probably Ross Perot's intervention. So he certainly had some frustrations. But at the end of the day, and the question of thanking the CIA or not, the only thing he cared about was his vision. And so he was going to take and did take CIA money, intelligence community money, if it was going to help him succeed. And the second, he didn't need that money to succeed and he had the consumer market.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  He wasn't going to turn back and be like, thank you very much. I mean, that is sort of the singular focus of visionaries. It can be fantastic or it can be frustrating.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  We're still waiting, Apple. We're still waiting for our, our, our thanks. I, so I want to, I want to widen the aperture a little bit and ask you about the dynamic that we're seeing today between Silicon Valley, defense tech and, and the government. Because I think one of the, one of the kind of themes of your book is tracking this relationship over time and how the power dynamics have, have shifted, how the innovation dynamics have shifted. I'm just kind of curious if you could give us, you know, as we fast forward from the eighties and early nineties of these government contracts helping to save jobs.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Where are we today in this, in this dynamic between the, the tech, the tech guys and, and the agencies?

• 17:36Speaker 04

  So the job story ends where there's a break in that partnership because both the, you know, Steve Jobs no longer, he has the consumer market. That's booming and, and government doesn't fully realize how important, you know, the computing revolution and software may be and just isn't used to operating that environment. So fast forward to today, we now are at, I mean, I would, I would have said like even six months ago, we were, you know, six months away from the beginning of a huge wave of Silicon Valley, you know, really going in on, on defense tech. Now we are like in the middle of it. Every day I'm hearing of new companies, and when I say Silicon Valley, I mean it metaphorically.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  Some of them are certainly Silicon Valley, but it's also, I mean, the, the sort of the Silicon Valley venture capital community. You know, we have tens of billions of dollars going from venture capital into defense startups. And there are now hundreds of new companies. And more than that, sort of this political alignment, this sort of like defense tech bro moment, which I mean both positively and negatively in some senses, where it's like, let's build, let's re-industrialize, let's help America. And it's interesting from a national security perspective. It's interesting from a political perspective. I think there are some uneasy divisions within this temporary alliance that we have.

• 19:00Speaker 04

  But we are really in what I would call a Silicon Valley, you know, defense tech moment. That's, that's a turning point.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Where do you think it's come from? Because, I mean, for, for a long time, I guess the, you know, the sort of generalization, which I think spoke to something that was true, is that. Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs in general wanted very little to do with the the national security state. I mean, obviously, there are exceptions, but there was kind of this arms length, you know, perspective. And it feels like the dynamic you're describing is, I mean, in some ways, a return to form of an earlier era of, you know, when the Pentagon was playing a significant role in kind of nurturing Silicon Valley. So, I mean, is it a cyclical thing where we're, we're, we're back to where we started? Or, yeah, where does this new dynamic come from?

• 19:51Speaker 04

  So it's cyclical, but it's a different dynamic. So I think at this point, a lot of people know that Silicon Valley was sort of founded on the backs of Pentagon funding, on semiconductors, on electronics, on all the early things that we needed in the Cold War, which created, really, really created, was responsible for the companies and the atmosphere that eventually became Silicon Valley as we know it today. So it's cyclical in the sense that now we have this return of Silicon Valley to defense. But there is a big difference between then and now. So in the Cold War, the Pentagon was the biggest funder around, whether it was for semiconductors, whether it was for other digital technology

• 20:33Speaker 04

  or electronics going into the military system. You know, DARPA created the underlying research for, for computer networking. They were the only ones funding computer networking at the beginning. Now, what venture capital, the dollars in the private sector and the capital markets can bring dwarfs what the Pentagon can spend on research and development. So once again, we have Silicon Valley working in defense. But now Silicon Valley has a lot more power than the Pentagon had back in the Cold War, because it's not relying on Pentagon dollars. It wants the Pentagon as a customer, but it doesn't need the Pentagon to develop new technology, which introduces this whole new dynamic that I look at in

• 21:17Speaker 04

  the book, which is what happens when sort of venture capitalists and billionaires have a lot of control over the underlying technology, or sort of what I call the billionaires bomb. And so you can see that, you know, love them or hate them, Elon Musk is, is incredible entrepreneur. He saw back over two decades ago, the potential of the military market, of the launch market, and really, really went into that before anyone else did in a successful way. But when he's had disputes with the government, you know, for example, during his break with Trump, and he threatened, well, you know, we just don't have to send people to the International Space Station, good luck to you. And he, he backed down

• 21:59Speaker 04

  and didn't do that. But it raises this fascinating question. I mean, you wouldn't have had Lockheed Martin back in the day saying, well, you like your stealth aircraft, but we're mad at you. Maybe we're not going to give it. It is just a completely different dynamic. And we have to deal with that and not pretend it doesn't exist.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think when we talk about the defense industry, there's a tendency to think about the big primes here. You know, you think about Raytheon, you think about Lockheed. The dynamic you're describing is one where, I mean, that's still true. But now we're sort of, we have to think about SpaceX, and we have to think about Palantir, and we have to think about, you know, Microsoft and Anthropic and all of these big tech players that are, are now involved in the defense ecosystem. I mean, what do you think this dynamic will do to the way that the Pentagon or the intelligence community sort of arms itself and prepares for future conflicts? Like, what are going to be the political implications of this?

• 22:58Speaker 04

  It's going to be a real problem. So let's take the, the Anthropic dispute with the Pentagon. So a number of months ago, shortly after the, the Maduro raid, Anthropic, which was the AI provider on classified networks for the Pentagon, raised questions about how their models were used in the raid. They were concerned about two of their red lines, which were that they don't want AI to be used for lethal targeting without sort of human in the loop. They, they want human decision makers. And their second red line is on having their AI used for mass surveillance of Americans. And so it was obviously the

• 23:40Speaker 04

  first that they were, you know, probably concerned about both for the Maduro raid and in other areas. The Pentagon, and particularly the chief technology officer, Emile Michael, who comes from the world of Silicon Valley, was sort of outraged, like, how, how, how dare you ask the Pentagon, tell the Pentagon how your model should be used? And so he, in true Silicon Valley fashion, went all in and said, we're not only going to end your contract, we're going to deem you a supply chain risk, so that no other federal client. So it kind of became this, it was like, it was the, the, the, you know, Battle of the Titans, Silicon Valley versus Silicon Valley only played out in the Pentagon.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Which is like what we do for like Chinese manufacturers of like intermediate components. You're like, you're a supply chain risk. Yeah, that's wild.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  I think there were problems on both sides of this dispute. So I think there's a tendency among some people to be like, oh, Anthropic was fighting for, for all that is good and right in this world and like stopping Terminator robots. And I'm not saying that they were or weren't. But I think that there was a very legitimate Pentagon concern about like, who, who is this, you know, why are they dictating how we use their technology? And so even if you agree with Anthropic's red lines, and there are arguments that those red lines already existed inside the Pentagon, but even if you agree with them, suppose it was a CEO that you didn't agree with, and they were doing red lines you didn't agree with. So that, that, that sort of conflict has to be addressed. And

• 25:12Speaker 04

  it's not being addressed, I think, in the most productive way. Because this is the real problem. Like, I think it is legitimate to be like, we don't want CEOs to dictate to government how things should be used. On the other hand, they can, because Anthropic is a private company. SpaceX is a private company. And so that is the problem, you know, when Elon Musk gets mad about something and said, oh, I'm not going to let you do that. We, you know, you can just think, oh, the government can wave a magic wand and make companies do things. It, it, it's not that easy. And there actually are laws that dictate what the government can or can't do. And it's kind of hard, which is why I think the Pentagon went overboard on the supply chain. You know, there are sort of,

• 25:54Speaker 04

  what levers of government can we use to pressure them? And it's because they don't own the technology the company does.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  You mentioned earlier the, the phrase, the billionaires bomb. And in the book, you walk into this incredibly interesting war game that the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment runs. I thought it was a wonderful illustration of the essence of the problem here. Could you, could you describe that?

• 26:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the, the two stories that really got me thinking about this as a book, one was the Apple and Steve Jobs story. And the other, which came from a different former DARPA director, was about a Office of Net Assessment. This is this sort of strategic think tank in the Pentagon that does sort of long range thought studies, war games, et cetera. And I'd been told that the Office of Net Assessment commissioned a study back, and I think it was about 2013, looking at, could a rogue entrepreneur company, maybe a billionaire, and they did mention billionaires, could they create a company that would surreptitiously build and sell nuclear weapons as a commodity? Like, you

• 27:03Speaker 04

  know, countries want nukes, and we want to build them. And they did this very detailed analysis of like, where they would get uranium, how much it would cost, how much would it cost to enrich, where would you base the assembly, where would you base the salespeople, how would you evade detection? And then I eventually got a hold of the study itself, and then spoke to all of the living people who worked on it. And what they told me, and you think this is back in 2013, so it's kind of amazing. Like, they're like, yeah, we were thinking of an Elon Musk. We were thinking-

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Did they say his name when you interviewed him?

• 27:35Speaker 04

  No. So the study specifically says that we are not going to name any Americans in the study. And they actually don't name any billionaires, but they specifically talk about it. And the people who worked on the study did tell me that they were thinking of, and not that they thought Elon, I want to be very clear, they weren't saying that Elon Musk was going to go build a, you know, a nuclear bomb. But that was the type of person or company they were thinking of. And what they came to the conclusion is that, yeah, that you could start such a company, and for maybe a billion dollars in, in five years, you could build nuclear bombs, sell them, and be pretty profitable. But the point that, that people said wasn't just nuclear weapons. It was the idea, and this is sort

• 28:19Speaker 04

  of the underlying theme of the book, is that as technology has left the monopoly of government, that government is no longer in control, you know, it no longer controls space travel. It no longer controls a lot of the underlying technology like AI. And as that moves to the private sector, what can companies and investors and billionaires do that they control that could represent a potential threat to, whether it's the US or other countries?

• 28:48Speaker 00

  It's interesting, because we have, I think, the same dynamic going on in the intelligence world, where, you know, a friend of mine who did some very interesting things inside the Directorate of Operations, looking at how you'd have to adapt the human intelligence game to the world of like ubiquitous technical surveillance and all these kind of, you know, biometrics, all these dynamics. Well, he says, the intelligence game has jumped the tracks to the point where a lot of, a, a, a very sort of focused visionary pool of capital and resources in the private sector can do- Most of the things that an intelligence agency does, not all of them, but but most of them.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  And I think the dynamic you're describing in with with the billionaires bomb here is very is very similar, where these things that these domains of kind of warfare and geopolitical competition that used to be sequestered inside government agencies are now spread across the private sector. And the power dynamic, as a result, between Silicon Valley and the government is is changing.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  We're seeing this in sort of what you might call the lower tech areas like drones, but in many ways, those are high tech. We're seeing it in in satellites, in spy imagery. You know, we're seeing it in surveillance. We're seeing it across the board. And that's something that the intelligence community have has to grapple with, that the Pentagon, that other governments do. And in a way, that was a little bit of the moment that the Steve Jobs story comes in in a very different time period, where the intelligence community was was asking the right questions. They're like, things are going on in the commercial market for computing that we're not taking advantage of it. And how do we take advantage of it? And so I think you I'm sure inside government, you have same some of those same, you know,

• 30:40Speaker 04

  visionary people thinking about what do we do about it? But the solutions are not going to be easy. And I think it, you know, I don't want, I never like to get overly dramatic about things in my books. But I do think that we really need to think about the power dynamic involved and in how much power Silicon Valley could have, does have over our national security. And by extension, over our democratic institutions. I think you're seeing that in our political moment right now. And I think that will play out in the elections ahead of us, because I think there's a lot of growing concern.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  How do you think our current model of the sort of power dynamic and the flow of, you know, capital and and IP and all that between Silicon Valley and government? How do you think that compares, for example, to the Chinese model? As you stack them up against one another, they obviously have their sort of pros and cons. But do you think this sort of chaotic dynamic we've been describing is actually well primed to deal with a massive, you know, geopolitical competition that we'll have with the Chinese for most of the rest of this century? Or what's your thought? It's a big question.

• 31:50Speaker 04

  I don't think it's working very well now. And I and I think you can see that with what's going on with military operations in Iran. You know, even setting aside the questionable decision to do that, just putting that aside. The entire argument of Silicon Valley getting involved in defense was we can move quickly, we can innovate, we can do X, we can, you know, we can make cakes and bombs and all of this stuff. And I don't mean to degrade. I think there's lots of interesting new companies out there doing good work. But it's like, we're running out of interceptors, what, you know, and you can point the finger that's the fault of the Pentagon, of the prime contractors. But all I can say is like Silicon Valley has not solved that problem. And, you know, if that's not their problem to solve, like, what are they doing for us?

• 32:35Speaker 04

  I think that you bring up the Chinese model, which is really interesting, because in the years leading up to this sort of this wave of defense tech spending, a lot of the people who were in favor, I mean, rightfully, of Silicon Valley's involvement, I think there is a role for Silicon Valley, were saying, well, look what China is doing with, you know, billions and billions of dollars into these like government guided investment funds, where the government would guide this money into industries that will help defend. And we need to be doing the same. And so we've sort of followed that model, except it's not so much the government guiding it, it's Silicon Valley. And here's the question I raise. The argument of Silicon Valley, which is 100% correct, which is the military requirement system is broken.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  You know, it takes us, you know, decades and decades to develop new weapons, and we have doodads and doohickeys and requirements that just add on and just make things over cost and then are late and aren't needed by the time we build them. But then the flip side I ask is so what you have now is Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, they're deciding what the military needs, and they're building weapons that they plan to market sort of commercially, like you go to Walmart and you buy a TV and they're gonna like, you know, build missiles and sell them. And in the book, I tour the factory floor of one company that had been founded by a teenager and had over, I think, like 160 million in VC investment.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  He was 21 by the time I interviewed him. And and he's just developing weapons that he thinks the military will want. And I don't mean, I mean, very smart young man. And maybe he's doing it all right. But I have questions about a teenager now 21. Like, I ask, like, where do you come up with your ideas for weapons? He's like, well, I, you know, I've been reading about this since I was a teenager, and I speak to generals and and I speak to Ukrainians on the battlefield. And I I don't know, maybe he's building the right things. But I really wonder if that is the best way to equip our military. If it is, I'm not seeing the results yet. And if we're not seeing them yet when we need them, when are we going to see them?

• 34:44Speaker 04

  There are some notable examples of Silicon Valley helping, so I don't mean to degrade all of that. But I think there's, when you see how things are going, where literally we don't have the weapons we need, then I think we have to ask ourselves, not who is messing up, but like, how can we do this enterprise better?

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Do you think there's a 2026 version of the Jobs, Apple, next story? Like, is there, is there a company out there who's sort of being quietly kept alive by a secretive customer? Or do you think it's, is it all just out of the open these days?

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Oh, I still think there's, there's always secret stories out there. And I am sure with, you know, you still have IQT, previously called Incutel, the CIA's venture capital arm out there. You still have a lot of classified funding going into things. I am, if anything, given the amount of money flowing into this space, both from venture capital, from the military and intelligence community, I am sure in 10 years, you know, maybe sooner, maybe later, you are going to get some wild stories. I love the Steve Jobs, I mean, I was so happy, I didn't, so happy it ended up being true. But I think the funniest thing was I wrote just last week to the former DARPA director who first told me about this.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  And I'm like, Vic, like, I showed, I proved it was true. And his answer was, I mean, I think he was joking, he's like, you mean, I didn't save Steve Jobs? It was the intelligence community.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  It's like, everyone, everyone wants credit for it. And I think it's, I mean, it's just, it's such a wonderful story that encapsulates, I think, somebody of that dynamics in your in your terrific book, Sharon.

• 36:24Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  And we should say, Apple, you know, we're still waiting for our thank you note. Maybe that's the

• 36:30Speaker 04

  You may have to wait a while, because that that is the most interesting thing, is the trajectory of Apple, which it, you know, Apple can be what it is today because it never needed the federal government as a major customer. You know, it is still the business of iPhones and Macs.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. Well, Sharon, the book, again, is Valley of Death: How Big Tech is Fueling the Future of War. It's out in late September, both the US and the UK. And the article about the hidden debt Apple, it was the CIA, which I would again recommend to everyone, is with the Wall Street Journal. So Sharon, thank you so much for being

• 37:06Speaker 04

  Thank you so much, David. This was fun.

• 37:12Speaker 05

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