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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Sean, welcome back, man. Thanks for having me, Sean. It's great to be back. I owe you a huge thank you. So the last time you were here, you wore a hooded blazer. So I saw it and I was like, what the fuck is that thing? It's amazing. So now I got a whole wardrobe of them. I love it. Yeah, man. So thank you. But yeah, it's good to have you back. I'm pumped about our conversation today.
And I know you got the new book coming out and everything. But what have you been up to? Oh man, a lot's gone on in the world since we last met, and a lot's gone on for us. I think trying to be a positive advocate for what I think is the future of AI for the American worker, I think essentially the American people are being lied to there.
And I've earned an opinion working with American workers on the front line, whether it's the factory floor or the ICU ward, trying to bring back the bonds between our industrial base, like the private sector, and government again. And I think the work that we've done with Detachment 201 and commissioning is part of that.
And then, of course, this moment that we've had over the last year to really fix the Department of War, fix how we buy things, how we prepare for war so that we can preserve peace, you know, really empowering the heretics, the crazy ideas. So it's been a full out last 12 months. Sounds like it. Are you looking for real estate in Miami now? Well, I already have a spot in South Florida, so I'm set.
Right on, right on. What prompted that? Headquarters is moving to Miami. It just came out a couple days ago, right? Yeah, so I think it's important to be in a state where your reps are actually going to rep you. And I think that's part of it that matters. And then you can think about, okay, well, what are the places we could go from Denver?
And Miami, or really Florida, had the best both combination of legal and positioning perspectives for us. It's the right place. We don't want to be like the 50th company to go to Austin or something. Austin's great.
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Chapter 2: What insights does Shyam Sankar share about the future of AI and the American workforce?
We have an office there. We love Austin. We love Texas. But Miami felt like the right home for us. Right on, man. Congratulations on all that. That's awesome. And speaking of AI, did you see this new, this China robot thing?
ai video have you seen that i haven't seen the latest catch me up i don't i mean i don't even know what to say but it's like the latest everybody's wondering if this is a huge advancement damn i gotta i don't have my phone on me otherwise i'd pull it up and show you but they basically choreographed all these robots doing like some kind of uh choreographed i don't know dance display thing and everybody's kind of going on about it
And then there was, what, that stuff with Claude that came out about the Claude bots going and trying to figure out how to get long-term memory. Do you have any insight on that? I think it's very hard to separate fact from fiction with these things, you know? Because you can kind of egg the agents on to doing very specific things to tell a dystopic story.
Like, what's going on in the prompting with, like, the Malt Book bots? My lived experience using these things operationally is that nothing crazy like this is happening. You know, that actually it's much more contained, it's much more sane. It really is more like an Iron Man suit for the American worker than it is a headless, godless machine that's just roving around doing...
You know, this is, maybe we should just start here. It's like the ways in which I think the American people are really being lied to about AI is that you have, on one hand, incredible doomerism. Like, hey, this thing, it's gonna lead to like mass unemployment, 50% of entry-level jobs are gonna be destroyed inside of a year or two. And on the other end, you have like essentially this fantasism
It's gonna lead to a utopia, like untold abundance. I think neither of these things are right. They're wrong for the same reason, which is they assume there's no human agency. You know, AI doesn't do anything. Humans use AI to do something. And the... Reality is that the future of AI has not been determined. It is being determined every single day based on the decisions we're making.
We can choose to use it to build AI slop or new forms of addiction and gambling. We can choose it to re-industrialize the country and bring prosperity to the American worker. Those decisions are being made every single day. We should use our agency as humans to decide what we value. And it's very clear what we ought to value. Then there's another part of this, which is age old.
Who are we listening to in AI? We're committing the same fallacy we have in the past, which is we're listening to the people who invented the technology, not the people who are using the technology. And by the way, these inventors are geniuses. We need them in America. They are my heretics and hero archetypes that I talk about.
But just because they have the genius to invent the technology doesn't also imply they have the genius to think about how to apply that technology, how to govern it, what are the consequences of it? The example I like to give people is the telescope. Galileo did not invent the telescope. Galileo used the telescope to discover planetary motion.
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Chapter 3: How does Shyam Sankar view the narratives of AI 'doomerism'?
Like then you look at it and you're like, man, it's hopeless, we should give up, let's burn it all to the ground, it doesn't really matter. And that's horrible, because actually, if you burn it to the ground, things will get worse. Like, yeah, everyone acknowledges it's not working right now. The answer is not burning it to the ground, it's fixing it. How are we gonna fix it?
What's our theory of change here? And the theory of change has to start both at the bottom, and at the top. At the top, it starts with people who care, people who want to get things, high-agency leaders who care about the outcome. Then they need the tools. Everyone needs the tools to do this.
And so then, how do you empower the people at the bottom, closest to the problems, to actually go solve these tools? That, I think, is a quintessential American characteristic. Like, we think about it as Mission Command, Give the intent, let these people run, let them cook. Don't, like, over-manage them. Don't drain the creativity out of their souls.
You think of every innovation on the battlefront, it was like the E4 rolling tanks across Europe in World War II discovered additional ways of getting through equipment, right? And the generals would let the soldiers cook. This is a powerful moment for the government. When you're talking about, you know, that it's gonna replace the middle managerial class and bureaucrats, I mean,
my mind went straight to doge at the beginning of the administration and all that went into that and all the all the fraud and all the that they uncovered and that i don't i just don't feel like much happened so you know that was kind of the first run but i mean how how is it going to work itself out have you thought about that how's it going to replace them where are they going to go i mean it's going to be
I think it's very apparent it's going to be a fight. In terms of the workforce? Yes. Yeah. So there's this concept called Jevons Paradox. When we started inventing more efficient coal-burning steam engines, everyone thought that the consumption of coal would go down. But the consumption of coal skyrocketed.
Now that the engines were more efficient, the cost to transport goods per mile was actually dropping. And so then the number of engines we wanted went way up. And... the number of trains we wanted went way up.
There's something like that that's going to happen here, where if you look at something that is fundamentally demand-constrained, like, actually, if we made more, no one would want it, yeah, that's a problem. Like, getting more efficient is going to result in more jobs. But I don't think most things in the economy look like that. Most things in the economy, you look at healthcare, it's exploding.
It's like 20% of our GDP. Healthcare might be, healthcare costs might be our greatest national security risk. Like the solvency of our country depends on being able to deliver care to the American people at a better price, and we're only gonna need more care over time. So we know we're gonna need more care over time. For the same amount of money, how can we deliver more care?
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Chapter 4: What role does human agency play in the development of AI technology?
And then organically, the company's like, well, I have more work than I have workers. I need to go hire people. And that's the bounty, the American prosperity that we can see out of this. Now, I don't want to be too Pollyannish. I think there are things we need to make sure of. The most important thing I care about is reestablishing the connection between GDP growth and wage growth.
Somewhere in the 70s, something broke fundamentally where our GDP kept growing and wages stagnated. You know, this has got to be, this is the fundamental promise to the American people, that the prosperity will be shared. And the way in which that happens, I call this the productivity dividend.
The American worker at the front line who is using these tools to make their companies better, they need to participate in the economic upside of doing that. That's critical to not only the social stability of the country, but the prosperity of the nation, seizing this initiative. As a husband and a dad, I think a lot about responsibility.
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Explain to you why it matters, and then aim to leave you feeling better informed than you were before you hit play. Terrorists, hostile intelligence agencies, organized crime, not everything is urgent. But this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know. What do you think about how close are we to CGI? To AGI. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. Excuse me.
Um, I've always felt, and I think the present moment kind of shows it, that it's like this continuous journey you're on. That maybe it's a frog boil, not in a negative sense, where every version of the model is more capable than it was before. The models still have what they call jagged intelligence. Like, they're savants at some things. They're not good at other things.
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Chapter 5: How can education adapt to prepare children for a future with AI?
This is how we become a prosperous nation. Probably the part that I think the American people should feel most gaslit about over the last 30, 40 years with globalization is this idea that somehow you're not smart enough, that there are people elsewhere who are gonna work harder, work for less, and they're better than you. And that's just not true.
You know, and I think part of this comes down to a belief in oneself and what is the message that we're giving them. And if you let these guys cook, it's eye water. I'm learning from them, not the other way around. Wow. How do you... How do we know we can trust it? I mean, just... I see all kinds of things that are coming out of AI that I know for a fact is not correct. Trust is earned.
One, I mean, just an example I saw this morning, I saw a clip of myself on X or something. Yeah, it was X. And somebody said, hey, Grok, what's this from? And I said, it's a Joe Rogan experience. You know what I mean? And I'm like...
shit i mean that's pretty basic stuff how you know and so it makes me wonder you know shit what else is this stuff getting wrong because we rely on this for a lot of things here but so when i see like a simple mistake like that i'm it just makes me wonder what other mistakes are we getting out of this yeah especially when it comes to defense it i would think about it as um
do we trust the humans? If you ask the human, hey, what is this from? In that particular case, we'd expect them to be a lot better. But there's an element of what is this person uniquely credible at? And you develop priors on it. Where are they able to help me? Where are they not? Maybe I'm not asking the question in the right way. Maybe I'm not providing enough context to doing it.
So this is why I think the specifics. So if you think about trust in the general, Like any given human, you ask them a bunch of questions, they're going to get some of this stuff wrong. They're going to be pretty convinced they're even right about some of the stuff they get wrong. I think AI, it's the same thing. So it's about us having enough.
This is the point of rolling up your sleeves and playing with it is like, hey, where do you believe this thing? Where have you seen it being good or not? And then you develop, the technical term for this is evals, but you develop a set of tests that you're constantly running it through to understand like when they release a new model, is this model at least as good as the old model? Is it better?
How much better is it? Where can I, is there new trust that can extend to it? Again, to the point that that trust has to be earned. So you're not going to get any of this stuff for free, where it's just like YOLO, ask a question, blindly trust it. It's going to be like, hey, this is a new teammate. This is a fresh second lieutenant. I don't trust them with anything.
We're going to build a relationship together, solving problems together, and we're going to see where you're really a rock star and where you can help me be more effective. And working backwards from the problems we have, that's a much narrower scope. It's like, hey, I make wires. I'm a potato farmer. This is my problem. How do I develop trust in this domain with you?
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of AI on the American industrial base?
took the back seat a little bit, but I don't see, I don't understand why, but we've got stuff going on in China, Russia and Ukraine still kicking off, Venezuela, the Mexico-U.S. border, Gaza. What are you most concerned about? Well, I mean, if you think about it, so I was on in April, Operation Spiders Web, 12 Day War, Midnight Hammer, the skirmish between India and Pakistan, Maduro.
You know, there's a lot going on in the world. Yes. So, and I think, are these skirmishes kind of like the Spanish Civil War? Are they the prelude to potentially something much bigger? Sure feels like it. All of these things are happening against the backdrop of China still. So even though, in some sense, China's taking a back seat, it is the driving force here.
You know, who's buying the Iranian oil that keeps the regime going? What is the industrial base that's supporting Russia's war machine? These pieces are interconnected here.
And so the radical pace at which these things are happening, I think, underlines the precept of the book and a lot of what I've been talking about, which is to really prevent World War III, we need to have a strong enough deterrence posture to make sure our adversaries don't wanna mess with us.
And I'd say things like Midnight Hammer and Maduro are really the first things we've done that have restored deterrence. This sense of, oh man, I have been underestimating the US. And we have to continue that trend where the kind of missing part is, I think if you thought about it as a spear, the pointy end of the spear is really good. Look no further than Midnight Hammer or Maduro to see that.
The shaft of the spear needs work. That's the industrial base. That's our ability to link the factory floor to the foxhole. And just like we learned in World War II, it is like large-scale conflict is these protracted conflicts are about your industrial capacity. We outproduced our adversaries in World War II. Even Stalin was shocked at our productive capability and powers.
And we have to recognize in the present moment, through a series of bad policies, really, since the end of the Cold War, an unfettered belief in globalization, we have put a lot of our capability in the hands of our adversary. And it's not just weapons. That's the easiest place to focus. You could say, okay, we have roughly eight days of weapons on hand for a major conflict.
We obviously need something closer to 800 days. Look at pharmaceuticals. You know, you look at rare earths and yeah, those rare earths go into weapons, they also go into cars. And our entire global Western auto industry will be brought to its knees if we don't have sovereignty over these things. With pharmaceuticals, 80% of our generics come from China.
And if in a conflict, obviously we're not gonna be getting those things. And the American people are not gonna have an appetite to have their five-year-old suffer or potentially die from an ear infection that we basically think of as a trivial sickness today, common ailment that goes away. We need to have our own sovereignty over these capabilities. That itself is deterrence.
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Chapter 7: How is the U.S. military adapting to modern technological challenges?
I don't know how much they're manufacturing. A lot of this stuff is prototypes, you know, or it seems to be not on mass scale yet. Am I wrong on that? We're capable of it though. I mean, I think that's just the going through it. Like they're in that, first of all, you know, huge credit to the department because if you went back even 10 years, right? none of these people existed.
And it's not because we didn't have them in America. It's because there was no way the department was going to do... Like, the case didn't... The business case didn't meet. No one was going to buy that. Now you have the department leaning in, recognizing that a maverick like Dino is not a problem. He's the solution. You know, how do we make more bets? I fucking love what I'm seeing.
I mean, Driscoll, at the... I can't remember what the event was, but, I mean, they had, like, a Y Combinator of just whoever coming up and pitching their ideas. I was... It's cool to see them get away from the big five, the big primes, you know? And I just, I think that's amazing that they're doing that. One of the things I spend time in the book is understanding how did we get here?
How do we go from having the most amazing industrial base in World War II and the early Cold War to one today that is capable of building a small number of truly exquisite things? And they are exquisite, you know? Probably my colleagues who are innovators would get a little upset at me at giving the Prime some credit in some sense, but they're not boneheads, right?
They actually do a number of things incredibly well. I think they are a victim of the system. And that system has been pushing cost plus contracting. It's been pushing risk onto the taxpayer instead of these companies. It's been reducing the reward for taking risk. It almost doesn't even make sense to take risk.
And the way I like to encapsulate this is like, every country, including Russia and China, have turned their back on communism, except for Cuba and the old DoD. And I think what you're seeing with the new DoW is recognizing like, that shit doesn't work. Uh, let's go back to winning again. Like, winning matters. And what does winning look like? You know, it looks like innovation.
It looks like something that powers the rest of the American economy. This is not some muscle that's atrophied in America. It's really a victim. It's a consequence of being the sole superpower since the end of the Cold War that we didn't have to tolerate the crazies anymore. You know, you go back to figures like Hyman Rickover, John Boyd. These are famously difficult people.
And even, I would say, the most talented engineers I have, they are difficult humans. And you tolerate them because that's what winning requires of you. So reattaching yourself. Like, I talked about Theodore Hall and how he was a traitor in the Manhattan Project. His brother, Edward Hall, was the inventor of the Minuteman missile.
And Edward Hall was a famously, and it's kind of this kind of interesting dichotomy there, which we can talk about in a second. But Edward Hall was famously, he was a pain in the ass. I mean, Schriever protected him because he recognized, yeah, this guy's a pain, but he's a genius. Like we are gonna build an ICBM because of Edward Hull.
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