195. How Silicon Valley Took Over National Security
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What is the premise of Sharon Weinberger’s book *Valley of Death*?
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Welcome to The Rest is Classified. David McCloskey here. We have a very special bonus episode today on an 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. 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. So Sharon, thank you so much for being with us today.
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
I want to start with the article because it's this absolutely fascinating story about the CIA saving Steve Jobs' bacon back in the 1980s. So I'm wondering if you could set that story up for those of us who maybe haven't read the article.
Sure. So I think like a lot of journalists, 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 Reese 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, 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 and 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 save Steve Jobs, maybe the NSA Steve Jobs, but we save Steve Jobs. And I'm like, that's fascinating.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the premise of Sharon Weinberger’s book *Valley of Death*?
0:03–8:06
2
How did the CIA‑NSA contract help keep Steve Jobs’s company NeXT alive?
8:06–14:23
3
Why did the intelligence community view the NeXT contract as essential for national security?
14:23–20:30
4
How did the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment imagine a billionaire‑run nuclear‑weapon market?
20:30–25:23
5
What does the term “billionaire’s bomb” mean for modern defense innovation?
25:23–31:42
6
Why is Silicon Valley’s current defense‑tech boom different from the Cold‑War era?
31:42–35:53
7
How are AI‑focused companies like Anthropic clashing with Pentagon procurement policies?
35:53–36:50
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Rest Is Classified
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