Submit Podcast or Channel

10/1/26: Ro Khanna On AI Safety Bill, Bill Gates Dire Warning On Recursive AI, US Nearly Out Of Missiles

October 1, 20260 comments♥ 0
00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. The cost of living is high, and times are getting tougher. Edward Gong says Toronto families need immediate financial relief, while the current administration has fallen short. That's why he is calling for $1,000 in emergency relief for Torontoans, aged 18 and over. Bull numbers may change, but the bills you face won't wait,
00:22 and $1,000 in direct relief can make a real difference. Vote for Gong, number 22. Authorized by the official campaign, I'm Edward Gong. Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Youanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart.
00:45 And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcasts. The True Crime Comedy Podcasts, all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. Each week I bring on an amazing guest.
01:17 Ooh, I scammed them. What? I can talk to you for an hour. You're a generational yapper like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job. And now you can catch full episodes of my show on YouTube. Start listening to Scam Goddess on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
01:36 Hey guys. Ready or not? 2024 is here, and we, here at Breaking Points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, ad staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show. Silicon Valley Representative Rokane is introducing legislation that would put
02:06 New restrictions on superintelligence, particularly a banning recursive self-improvement. That's the ability of an AI basically to rewrite his own code to make it better. And also implementing other safeguards. Representative Kana is joining us here to discuss. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, sir. And so Representative Kana just wanted to outline for us what this legislation does. Let's take a step back on the bigger picture.
02:38 I represent Silicon Valley. I know these tech guys. I've been in the rooms. You cannot trust tech billionaires to write the rules to keep us safe. The idea that the president is saying that they can self-police themselves is absurd. We need regulations. First, we need to ban recursive, self-improving AI. All that means is we need to ban AI that can train itself.
03:05 where human beings lose control. Second, we need to have embedded in these companies auditors who can tell us what's going on. I'm all about enforcing liability laws, and I agree with Lena Khan enforce them and hold them civilly and criminally liable. But we can't have a world where, oops, 100 million people die because of a biological attack or AI loses control.
03:34 Let's sue them. And we actually need regulation to prevent that, just like we have aviation and nuclear regulation. And third is we've got to create that AI safety agency. And here's the most important point, Ryan. These tech leaders count on jargon to obfuscate. They use fancy words like sandbox, air gap. They go to Washington, and then people are, you know, stutter because they don't know the jargon. There are plenty of really, really smart people in AI safety who don't make profits.
04:05 They're all in this one building at Berkeley. They're the AI safety community. Start to appoint them into an independent agency that can regulate these folks. Sir, I am curious for your reaction. We could put D2 up here on the screen. I was a little surprised to see Jacob Coxon, who was the anthropic whistleblower, actually react positively to Donald Trump's, I guess, morally binding compact with these AI companies. I'm curious generally for your general, like you seem to put a lot of credibility in the AI safety community and into some of their warnings. You've spoken, obviously, with a variety of these folks. A lot of our viewers have deep skepticism that this is a bid for regulatory capture or marketing ploys for their IPO. I'm sure you've thought through these
04:53 questions, and I'm curious for your reaction. Well, first of all, nothing in terms of the safety would prevent open source. So if they were saying, let's just have close source models, I would argue, yes, it's a bid for regulatory capture because China is leading in open source, and I'm actually for more competition and open source. But saying that you should ban
05:20 recursive self-improving AI is not open source. Saying that you should have an FDA-like agency is not banning. open source. It's actually, you can do both. You can have antitrust enforcement, you can have competition, and you can have safety. Now, where the industry is asking for antitrust exemptions or things that would entrench their power, that I oppose. But what I am for is basic safety standards. We're going to talk in our next segment about the interview that Ezra Klein did recently with Bill Gates. And one of the points that Bill Gates kept hammering was focusing so much on recursive self-improvement
06:07 and the threat that AI will harm humanity misses the fact that the current AI already gifts to malign actors the ability to harm millions of people, to launch cyber attacks, to develop dangerous bioweapons. And that his argument was there needs to be this kind of, supervisory layer over top of these capacities in order to make sure that, you know, people that are trying, that want to like bring down the financial system or want to create a, you know, a worse version of smallpox can't actually do that. Does your, does your bill address that? And how do you do that without then having that supervisory layer also be some, you know, extraordinary sensor that is kind of manipulating the AI to the kind of benefit of whoever's in control?
07:06 Well, there are two different risks. One is the loss of human control, which is superintelligence or why we want to ban recursive self-AI. But then there's the risk that Gates is talking about, which is not that we lose control of these AI models, but that the AI models are modified in ways through distillation or when they're out on the open internet in ways they could be misused and abused by bad actors. In my view, to prevent that, one, you could have restrictions into the chips about restrictions on certain use of AI models for bad purposes. You could have international agreements that call for basic safety and inspection of these
07:54 models so that you know that models with high capacity have guardrails in them that mitigate and prevent the abuse. Those are two things that you could do. Now, obviously, in either case, you would need some regulatory agency making decisions about the limitation of the use of those models. We do that when it comes to aviation. We do that when it comes to drugs. I suppose you could make the argument, well, you know, when you have a political agency that is politically motivated, do we really want them making the rules about airlines and drugs? But ultimately, we need independent regulatory agencies and a political system to work for society to function. So I would argue the answer isn't don't have regulation. It's it don't have a private interest
08:44 capture of the regulation. Congressman, you just mentioned the chips there. We had Jensen Wang, the CEO of NVIDIA, actually specifically kind of talk about this issue of judgment. Why don't we take a listen and I'll get your reaction? I think it's important. These superintelligences, they're imbued with the values of their creators. And we do have, there are American values that we all share, the First Amendment, free speech, commitment to truth. Can you talk about what each of you are doing to imbue, I'll make sure that these superintelligences are imbued with the right values. Are we allowed to say anything controversial?
09:27 Say something controversial. Okay, so the sias are tools. And the challenge with an SI with values, meaning it has judgment. Depending on how you use that SI, it may decide. it may judge you, and its effectiveness would be affected by that judgment. And so it's a little bit like a steak knife where if you were served medium well, it cuts perfectly. But if you were served rare steak, and it looks awfully like live meat,
10:09 somehow it doesn't cut. And so I think there's a, you know, there's a question in my mind yet about how, much judgment you really want these tools to have. And so the intentions of the user, obviously I use the knife as an example, but you can think of a whole bunch of other examples. The intentions are a little bit different, whether you're a defender or an attacker, for example, in cybersecurity, the defender's actions could resemble an attacker. And you want the defender, you want this SI to actually.
10:47 activate on behalf of the defender, even though it appears to be an aggressive action. What do you make of that, Congressman, kind of a value-neutral presentation of AI, obviously in some cases, agree, but you're proposing legislation. How do you view that question around judgment in AI? Well, look, I mean, the first thing is you don't want AI to lose control, right? So if AI's training itself, then you have the challenge of misalignment that AI may not be aligned with human goals. Even if you don't lose control and recursive self-improving AI, just with reinforcement learning, you can have models lose control of basic human values. And that's why we do have human values in the safety standards.
11:40 What are those human values? It's not, let's have Medicare for all, it's let's make sure that you don't shut the lights out in New York. It's let's make sure you don't allow for a biological attack. So the human values that we're talking about are the very base level human values of safety, the very minimal function of the state. We're not talking about a robust conception of the good life. We're talking about the essence of liberalism, which is to protect human beings. And those should be in the regulatory framework.
12:17 Obviously, you need human values, at least of safety, to do that. You can't have something that's totally value neutral between destroying New York City and not. I wanted to ask you about the Senate vote yesterday. The Republicans had a bill from John Hustad who's facing a spirited challenge. could call it from Sherrod Brown. I think some polls have him losing. They understand they're underwater on the question of data centers. So they put together a kind of a very quick bill that curbs some data center abuses. It's not exactly clear exactly precisely what the bill would do. Democrats, though, blocked it. What's, would you have supported the bill that was in the
13:04 Senate there? And do Democrats risk like looking like they're on the wrong side of the, this issue. Where are we when it comes to kind of legislative intervention on data centers? So I followed the stock ban bill they did, which was a total gimmick, because they didn't really ban the president or vice president of trading stock. Didn't even ban senators really from trading stock, and it was linked to the Save Act, and they were doing that just to give a good vote to Republicans and blame Democrats. I didn't follow the details of their bill on data centers because it hasn't come to the house. I'll tell you what I believe, which is that we should be banning these data centers in residential communities in farmland
13:49 and giving communities the right to say no. If the bill was anything in that direction, then I would support it. But if it was just a gimmick, I wouldn't. So I honestly haven't seen the text and if they attach riders or other things to it. My last question for you, sir, is, I know originally you're obviously a strong proponent here of the Epstein files. I believe you coined the term Epstein class. I am curious, you know, you see a few or many, you know, prominent members of the Epstein class kind of engaging in this current debate. Dario Amadee's wife apparently solicited Jeffrey Epstein for an investment in a quote, luxury pornography company, Bill Gates, who we're about to talk about, goes without saying his own connections to Jeffrey
14:35 Epstein. I'm curious for, you know, you almost in a bizarre way, safetyism and all that kind of seems to align with the Epstein class. I'm just curious if you've thought about that at all. Well, I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more coverage. I mean, I've exposed a lot of these folks, as that Thomas Massey, or the rich and wealthy were living by their own standard of rules. I mean, Amade's wife solicited money from Jeffrey Epstein to start a lot. some porn site. And that hasn't gotten any press, and there hasn't been any explanation about why she was involved in that way with solicitation of financially of Epstein. And then Bill Gates, of course, has been totally tarnished, in my view, by his affiliations
15:28 with Epstein, by his lack of full remorse for that. And I don't think they can be held as as moral leaders of what we need to do in addressing this challenge, which is why I come back to the fundamental point that you can't trust the tech elite to be making the rules for AI. You need to be trusting the independent technologists and experts on these issues. And what I'm saying is the guy representing Silicon Valley is some of these folks were caught up with Epstein. Some of these folks have been making billions of dollars in not paying tax.
16:09 They are profit maximizers. You can't trust them. Trust people like Jeffrey Hinton, trust people at Meador and Medi and Palisades, who don't have a financial interest in this. And they don't have any interest, those safety groups and experts in regulatory capture or trying to entrench anthropic or open AI. They are concerned about human safety. They're concerned about jobs.
16:33 They're in circumstances about the society. And we need that. And the final point is we need some people who have tech literacy are willing to stand up against these folks who are consolidating wealth and power in our society. And interestingly, even though Epstein himself died in 2019, he was on the leading edge of kind of AI funding and research. So he was, he was this, it's not just the class-wise.
16:56 He was central in the orbit of all these players themselves. What I want to get your take real quickly, two on, we put up D6 here. Blue Cross Blue Shield. So take them with a grain of salt, but this is quite plausible stuff. They're saying that AI use by providers, hospitals is allowing them basically to find, you know, to basically code up what they're able to bill to insurers. I'm sure Medicare is getting blasted by this as well, you know, for people who don't know, like when you, when a provider is billing an insurance company or Medicare. There are all these different codes that they can use to say, we provided this medical
17:39 service, and so therefore we need to be reimbursed in this way. And the AI is going through it and saying, oh, hey, you actually can also throw in these four codes legitimately for something that you were doing anyway. And now you increase the amount of reimbursement that you're going to get from the insurance company or Medicare. what, you know, what, it, this isn't a problem that is automatically solved by single payer either. Because, you know, Medicare suffers from it too. What, have you, have you, is there any thinking going on about how to kind of combat this?
18:16 Well, in this case, AI is a tool. The problem is the broken health care system. I mean, you have Medicare advantage, for example, where people are billing the government for individuals who they're saying are sicker than they, are. So I do believe if you had Medicare for all, it would prevent some of the abuse of the private insurance companies. It would prevent AI being used to deny health care claims. It would allow Medicare to negotiate with hospitals so that they were charging a reasonable amount and for actual delivery and outcomes, not just for fees for every service. And you would have, as Alison Giovanni has said, almost a $1.2 trillion savings in the healthcare system for $5.2 trillion to $4 trillion. Are there uses of AI that could be constructive in the healthcare system?
19:11 Sure, if a doctor is using it as a tool to better diagnose or to scan things that they make sure that they're seeing everything, fine. If it's being used as a tool to have more efficient and comprehensive uses of records, fine. The problem in the health care system is not technology. The problem is that it's being used as a tool to deny claims, to have excessive billing, and to maximize profits. And that is a values issue and why we need single-payer health care. Congressman, we always appreciate your time at the bleeding edge of a lot of the things that are happening in our society. And you always are welcome back here anytime. Thank you, sir.
19:53 Always enjoyed. You always make me think here on breaking points. Not like one of these standard question answers. So I appreciate it. Good. Excellent. Got to keep making. Thank you, sir.
20:02 Property taxes keep going up and Toronto families are feeling the pressure. Mayoral candidate Edward Gong has a clear plan. Cut property taxes by 3% yearly. Cut waste. Stop unnecessary spending at City Hall. Property tax relief is Mr. Gong's top priority. Not tomorrow, not later, now. Toronto taxpayers deserve real relief.
20:24 Vote 22, Edward Gong. Authorized by the official campaign of Edward Gong. Lisa? We should tell them about our new show. Oh my God, Lexi. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Iwano.
20:42 We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa DiGulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. I'm not going to get anyone fighting. That is wild. I learned that about you today. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. And I've always got something to say.
21:09 If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser. We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how accommodating you are. Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me.
21:32 Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Liar. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I don't really care. A decade ago, the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil. So we met with a lot of larger farmers, went from Bahia to Tokatine's to Madagrosso. And he brought a team of executives.
21:57 They were going to help the country get in on a goldie. Rush. Carbon and its derivatives are going to be really the next great commodity that the globe's going to trade. But back home in Iowa, trouble was brewing. If you live in Iowa, your land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter. Now people are questioning if his climate solutions have anything to do with climate at all. You got to give Bruce and the guy's credit. They're Republicans. They don't give a shit of money. It's now. On this season of drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the story of how the ethanol Kingpin of Iowa, became the King of Corn in Brazil, and what it tells us about the limits of
22:36 technology and markets to solve the climate crisis. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of Bill Gates, member of the Epstein class, maybe perhaps one of the chief members of the Epstein class, one might even say, he's now emerged as an AI safety advocate and appeared in a new podcast with Ezra Klein. Actually, kind of interesting, Bill Gates, kind of sparring with Desra Klein over the notion of self-regulation. Let's take a listen. So why isn't it enough to just say, listen, there is product liability now. You release a product. It helps some terrorist group create a bio weapon. That's going to be very bad for your company. You're not going to do that, right? And they have categorizers and other
23:20 things meant to stop people from using bio weapons. We've begun to see the beginnings of control issues with things like the hugging face hack where, you know, at least experimental AIs are breaking out the sandboxes and coordinating to do things that are way outside the scope of what we would want them to do. But again, those are non-release systems, you know, anthropic, you know, withheld mythos trying to create more cybersecurity. So why is anything needed beyond, and is anything needed beyond the simply natural incentives under capitalism and normal corporate reputational management? Well, I almost can't believe you're asking that. This is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near.
24:00 In other areas, do we just say, hey, release your drugs? There's no FDA. There's no airline safety board. There's no requirements that cars use seatbelts. Do we just use the liability laws to try and keep humans safe? You know, oh, you're shipping opioids. Somebody should just sue you. I mean, we've created a society that tries to keep people safe, not by saying, oh, we can bankrupt the person who does that.
24:28 The harms here, and you say there's filtering, there's not filtering. You can take an open source model that can create bio-weapons and disable any monitoring of any kind. And this exists today. So, no, there is no filtering of any kind. And so, you know, say, you know, you kill 100 million. You want to use a lawsuit? I almost can't keep a straight face. What do you think, Ryan?
24:56 You know, I kind of agree with Bill Gates, which is making me self-question this entire thing. What do you think? Creeps can be right about things, too. It's okay. Yes, it's fine. And then Ezra, after that goes on to say, hey, hey, hey, hey, it's not me that's asking these questions. This is what Donald Trump says. It's what Elon Musk says.
25:17 It's what all of these guys are saying. So, and yes, I think he's absolutely correct about that. the idea that you're setting up a system whereby somebody could kill millions of people and you're going to kind of allow that to go forward just because you can sue the person for killing the millions of people. He's right. That's that is preposterous. Like that is not. And it also is, you know, Jensen, Jensen, Wong was talking like this in front of Ezra just a couple days ago. And he, he sounded like a 19-year-old libertarian in a college dorm. which those that's fine like those that's fine to like you know pass the bong and talk about the free market and uh well but not the bong part not the bong part continue yeah but to like at the top of society to be talking about it like this that like oh yeah we're it's okay like this 1890s level stuff is okay if uh you know if something goes wrong with you know the drug if the drug company makes a drug that kills people then people won't buy the next.
26:26 drug that the drug company makes. Like, no, that's not how we organize society. We have decided we're doing that. Yeah. And yeah, that's where the liability piece just is so stupid. It's like every consumer protection in the world exists because a company did something bad and thought they could get away with it and then got to the point where it was hurting or literally killing enough people that the government had to step in and be like, okay, you know, maybe we shouldn't do this. I mean, I made these comparisons before. Like, I bought the desk that I'm sitting at off of Amazon. Like, this desk is more regulated than the frontier clod model that I can use.
27:05 You might ask how. I actually said this previously. This is a bill. My wife got past. Desks and other piece of furniture have to include screws. And those screws are included so that you can mount them to prevent children, as you know, Ryan with small children, from pulling down furniture. Prior to that, a couple of kids had literally died.
27:24 and so they had to pass a law that the company at the very least has to include mounting screws for all types of furniture. That's it. It's a national law. And I mean, that has more consumer protection there baked in than this morally binding compact agreement or whatever that these guys signed. I think putting it in those absurd terms does make it kind of hit home for reality. I did also, though, want to talk to you about some of Bill Gates' other more outlandish claims. he says, AI are like aliens, E3. Let's take a listen. And we have the analogies with the past where people are saying, well, this is like the PC, not like evolutionary history. This is like evolutionary history. This is like the aliens really are here and, you know, have come. They
28:14 didn't happen to do spacecraft. They were created in laboratories. But that's the kind of thing we're dealing with. If we retain control, then eventually you do get, not to overuse the word that you've used, you do get to this superabundance period. And there you have deep, almost philosophical, religious issues of if you don't have the shortages that we've organized society around, you know, why you should learn and how you find purpose, then you have deep, philosophical religious problems. That last part, that's something our team, we've all been talking about a lot, especially our, you know, Matt Griffin, myself and Crystal, about this AI consciousness and philosophy.
29:05 It does seem to be, Ryan, a widely held belief, widely in fact, enough that, you know, to the extent that AI safety was the cutting edge of the discourse for the last, let's say, 10 years before it became, let's say, something, you know, in the popular for now. acionacular. AI consciousness and is now the latest one. In fact, there are some people who I even know who said that with the hugging face attack, you could argue that, you know, turning off or stopping the hugging face attack killed thousands of AI lives, you know, by the definition of consciousness, kind of that we look into. So it is not a surprise that Bill Gates is talking this way or bringing this up. And I actually think five years,
29:50 now, I think if Crystal said this, I'm stealing it from her, five years from now, this is going to be a real, no-shit part of our discourse about, you know, AI consciousness and whether these things are alive or not. Five years from now, yesterday on the everything app, there was this big dispute over a guy who allegedly built a torture chamber for an AI. And you had people saying that this was outrageous, the guy should be in trouble, that we need a serious conversation about what they were calling AI wellness. and that this deliberate production of pain, they were calling it pain, on the part of the AI, basically should be criminalized. Now, what happens when AIs are pretty good at hacking and stealing
30:43 and they're pretty rich themselves, and they organize together and have their own trade association, you know, AIs for AI wellness. And they're going to be able to co-opt significant numbers of the American public who are like literally in love with their own chatbots. So yeah, I don't think it's a five years from now phenomenon. I think it's here now. And whether you want to call them aliens or not, functionally speaking, that's how we're going to treat them. Yeah, I think you're right. It's kind of interesting to think about it.
31:20 You know, another thought I had that Roe brought up where he was talking about how they say AI sandboxes, how the sandbox is supposed to be. So, Ryan, I don't know about you. My kid only breaks out of sandboxes. I have not found the sandbox. The sand never stays in the sandbox. That's why schools are trying to ban all the sandboxes because, you know, for us.
31:42 Honestly, they should. They're paying the ass. And the rats, you know, pee in them. And then they bring the sand inside the school and it's disgusting. If you go to a playground and you see a sandbox, run away from that fucker. Okay. because your car and your child is about to be ruined. I just thought it was a very funny thing.
32:00 I'm like, oh, clearly a childless person said the term sandbox because anyone who was kids, there's no kid that doesn't break out of a sandbox. It's like part, it's like, yeah, exactly. Part of the whole playground. Yeah. Okay, last thing we want to talk about is job replacement. Bill Gates is very kind of buying into the jobs.
32:22 Apocalypse, let's take a listen, B-2. It's an argument from Alex, I miss, but I believe is now at one of the labs as an economist is that you will have this sort of explosion in the relational sector. That one thing that happens when people get wealthier, and you'd probably know about this, is that they all of a sudden get a lot more human help, right? They have personal trainers and chefs and there's a lot more, no, I don't know, I see a lot people around you. Royalty used to have a lot of human help.
32:49 You had upstairs, downstairs, you know, all those maids and people. and you used to have a human who helped you get dressed. Believe me, the labor intensity of wealth is down super dramatically. From what it used to be. And Jevin's Paradox. Name a blue-collar profession that's subject to Jevindler paradox. Do you not care about blue collar? I do care about blue collar.
33:08 So the question is you- Name anything in the blue-collar realm that's subject to that. So your answer to this, and it leads to a very concrete idea for you, which is that we should tax the use of AI. Why and how? Well, let's say, you know, workers pay, on a pay-as-you-go basis into the pension Social Security Fund, so active workers are supporting retired workers. If you've let go of a worker and hire a robot to do that job, why are you so
33:41 incenting the trade-off against the human labor that you don't ask the robot to also pay into the pension fund? What is it, you know, is it the pro-robot union? gotten the tax laws to say no, if you're not flesh, then let pensions go bankrupt, which they're on a path to do even without robot replacement. So how would we do that? You say you define a unit of labor and say independent of whether that's delivered by a human or robot, you are paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay. Now, that loan's not enough, but, you know, why should we be so favorable to taking away that job?
34:27 The current tax structures very much as though people who have capital are what really counts, and labor is the most disadvantage input to the economy. Society gets to decide just because the economic signals say that it'd be lower cost to use an AI, doesn't mean society has to do that. Interesting take there on joblessness and on taxing. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, sure, absolutely right about that. Obviously, we should be, you know, I think we should be taxing wealth not work anyway.
35:04 And so I would say let's drop as many of the taxes as we possibly can on workers and apply them to capital and to wealth. Because what he's talking about, he's cleverly kind of, he's referring to capital there as like a robot. worker and trying to like squeeze it into our understanding that we we tax work and we tax income when what he's really saying is we need to be taxing capital and of course you do because if if it does come about that you know you that robots are replacing people in the workplace then you know how are you going to have consumers to keep an economy going like there's there are these you know rather fundamental questions that that
35:49 we're still kind of grappling with, which he makes the point we need to, we need to get through the next 20 years to kind of get to those, what, you know, before somebody, you know, puts out a more lethal and more contagious smallpox, which is, yeah, can't argue with that. Yeah, it is, the taxation part is the one I have, I mean, it just seems so obvious if that's the way things are going to go. What I worry about, actually, we talked about this in our AMA, is this general push for the fully automated luxury communism. And my take, I wonder what you think, is that fully automated luxury communism would look like Wally and it would not look like the UBI art dream.
36:35 The reality is, is that in today's society, before our show, I was talking to you about this book, I finally read, I knew the thesis, but I actually hadn't read it, amusing ourselves to death. I think that's what a fully automated AI life will look like. It's just everybody just needs more time on their hands to spend more time scrolling short form video content and rotting their brain and lowering IQ. That is the reality of, I think, of what the automated luxury communist future actually would look like. You could redistribute, make sure all of your needs are taken care of, use your neuralink to order food so that you can use your eyes to scroll what is going on there. And by the way, I actually think that's a future that gates in them would like.
37:18 It keeps their profits. It keeps their usage numbers and all of that up. That's my take. Right. And we're going to have to figure out what the world looks like at that point. Going to need a lot more softball, field hockey, ultimate frisbee. I don't know. But like he said, that's getting to a place where we haven't allowed somebody to
37:43 wipe us out. We'll see. All right, we have Chris Leonard standing by. Let's get to it. Property taxes keep going up and Toronto families are feeling the pressure. Mioral candidate, Edward Gong, has a clear plan. Caught property taxes by 3% yearly. Cut waste. Stop unnecessary spending at City Hall. Property tax relief is Mr. Gong's top priority. Not tomorrow, not later, now. Toronto taxpayers deserve real relief. Vote 22, Edward Gong. Authorized by the official campaign, I'm Edward Gong. Lisa, we should tell them about our new show. Oh, my God, Lexi.
38:25 We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Youanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. I'm not going to get anywhere fighting. That is wild.
38:46 I learned that about you today. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. And I've always got something to say. If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser. We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how accommodating you are. Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight.
39:15 Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Liar. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I don't really care.
39:30 A decade ago, the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil. So we met with a lot of larger farmers, went from Bahia to Tokutins to Madagroso. And he brought a team of executives. They were going to help the country. get in on a gold rush. Carbon and its derivatives are going to be really the next great commodity that the globe's going to trade. But back home in Iowa, trouble was brewing.
39:55 If you live in Iowa, your land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk thanks to a man named Bruce Rasteader. Now, people are questioning if his climate solutions have anything to do with climate at all. You got to give Bruce and the guy's credit. They're Republicans. They don't give a shit about him. It's now. On this season of drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the source.
40:15 story of how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil and what it tells us about the limits of technology and markets to solve the climate crisis. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A new report into the ballistic missile industry here in the United States finds that it is bleak. It is looking really bad. Put this element up on the screen. A new article in the Atlantic by Christopher Leonard called The Thad Delusion. paints a very dark portrait of where the United States and its flailing military industrial complex has left itself after many months of war with Iran. Christopher Leonard, author of Coakland, the Lords of Easy Money. He's also at work. We hear on a book on Lockheed Martin. That will be
41:07 a broader look at the military industrial complex. Frankly, cannot wait for that one to come out. Chris, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So can you walk us through a little bit of what you found about the basically the numbers game here that is at work when it comes to the ability of the United States to produce ballistic missiles and the amount that they've been deploying because the portrait you painted, I think, put things in a really interesting and helpful way for people. Yeah, to me, you know, one great place to start is that in 10 months of conflict in the Middle East, the United States burned through a supply of THAAD interceptor missiles that took over nine years to accumulate. And so when you kind of go back from there, you see a couple things. First of all, the military industrial complex, as we would call it, or the Pentagon acquisition system
42:07 and the defense industrial base that supplies it has been. creeping along in a really slow manner over many, many years. That's a huge part of this story. And I wanted to look at the THAA interceptor missile, which is used to shoot down ballistic missiles because it's really illustrative of these problems. And the THAAD, you know, for example, in 2015, the United States only got delivery
42:30 of three THAAD interceptors. And so what you see is the system that was very slowly building these exquisite, sophisticated, extremely expensive, missiles to the point that by 2024, the United States had only 534 Thad interceptors in total. And what we've seen in Iran is an exorbitant expenditure of these missiles that took years to build up. Chris, one of the things you talk about in the piece is the first salvo assumption.
43:05 Can you go into that kind of the strategic infallibility or the strategic fallibility that belies that itself as to how it was supposed to be used this precise weapon first salvo and how it has morphed instead to this defensive maneuver by the United States, which is what drained the stockpile so quickly. It's really fascinating. You know, the thad itself was invented in the 1990s. And I do want to acknowledge it's extraordinary technology. This is a missile that you can fire.
43:38 And while it's traveling at 6,000 miles an hour, it's. can directly hit an incoming ballistic missile that's also traveling 6,000 miles an hour. It's incredible we got that done. But when it was invented in 1990s, the THAAD had a very specific mission. In fact, right now it's called the Terminal High Altitude Defense System. That's what Thad stands for. But in the beginning, it was called the theater high altitude defense system. And what that referred to was the theater of combat. When they invented the THAAD, the whole theory behind this missile was that you would not need to use that many interceptors, that Thad would be used in the earliest hours of combat to specifically protect U.S. troops against a salvo of ballistic missiles.
44:23 And it was never meant to be sort of a homeland defense system. It was never meant to be an impermeable shield to protect a country against attack, but merely, you know, sort of a tool that you could use in the first days or hours of course. combat. And interestingly, that whole theory of use kind of set the baseline for how many Thads the United States wanted to purchase. You know, you don't need that many interceptors if you're only going to use it in the first couple days of combat. And it was seen as a way, again, to only protect forward-deployed U.S. soldiers. But what was happening parallel to that is that the U.S. Department of State and the Pentagon was trying to sell the Thad system overseas,
45:07 to countries like the United Arab Emirates. And the State Department cables from that era show that when the Pentagon and the State Department went to countries like the UAE, like Saudi Arabia, they presented the THAA in a very different light. They didn't say, okay, this is a system you can use to protect your soldiers in combat for a couple of days. They said this system, the THAAD, can be kind of the cornerstone
45:31 or the zenith product in a missile homeland defense shield. And they actually created this kind of new system that combined the THAAD with the Patriot. And we sold this to our Gulf allies as a homeland missile defense shield, which was a purpose that it was never created for. Yeah, I found the whole trajectory of our development of this and then the sale of it to be utterly fascinating. And one thing that I was thinking about as I was reading your piece was that this product, if you want to call it that, kind of fit perfectly at the time with what was known as the Powell doctrine. Like this was the idea from Colin Powell coming out of the Vietnam War that these endless wars are, these quagmires are a complete debacle. And the U.S., if they're going to engage
46:23 militarily around the world, needs to have very clear, clearly defined goals and a clear exit strategy so that they are basically in and out immediately. And in that environment where the Powell Doctrine kind of dominates U.S. military engagement around the world, it would make sense to have a missile interceptor system like this that works for a week, fire everything off, and then by week two, we're out. Like, we've followed that doctrine. Obviously, everybody knows how the Pal Doctrine went. We've dropped that 25 years ago. it. Yet, we never kind of updated the systems that would go along with it. Instead, we just started selling them to people around the Gulf. And so were there people in the defense industrial base
47:18 in the military industrial complex who were like, hey, guys, this system was developed for a pre-forever war doctrine, or like, not pre, it was also. post-forever war. Like this brief period where the U.S. was claiming it wasn't going to get involved in forever wars. That's what it was developed for. We might need to do something a little bit differently because if we ever do get into a war that lasts more than a week, nine years to make 10 months' worth, the math isn't going to add up. There's an intellectually vibrant community inside the military industrial complex. How did they miss this, I guess, is what I would ask. I mean, that is such a great question. And you're exactly
47:59 right. And what's so fascinating to me about these weapon systems is, is you're right, this was developed in the era of the Powell Doctrine. And again, I want to point out the THAAD is a mobile system. It's based on trucks. And so it really does have this character of a combat, forward-deployed system. But these systems hang around for years and decades with billions of dollars' investments. So this system was born during the era of the Powell Doctrine. It came of age in the era of the global war on terror. And while war changed so much, the technology inside the system didn't change. And, you know, to get to your question about sort of internal dissent inside the Pentagon, it's really fascinating because you're exactly right. They're incredibly smart people, obviously,
48:45 within the Pentagon. And one of the guys I interviewed for this story is a U.S. Army General, now retired, named John Ferrari, who was over the thad and was in charge of buying the thad for years. And you know, what really strikes me about this process, which I think is really important, is the Pentagon weapons system can really feel like it's sleepwalking at times. You know, for example, with the THAAD, you had these theories of how it was going to be used that kind of got baked into the system. But then what you see is this year-over-year process of buying weapons. And, you know, I also got to talk to a former secretary, undersecretary in the Pentagon, Frank Kendall,
49:30 who described that yearly process of budgeting and buying weapons. And it's really like this seven-month-long horse trading process. And what you see in that is not a lot of deep strategic thinking about, hey, has the thad outlived its purpose? Should we be selling this to Gulf Allies as a home defense system? And what you see is this sort of annual argument over we need to buy tanks. We need to buy literally socks for millions of soldiers. How many THAAD missiles can we afford this year?
50:01 And, you know, this Army General, John Ferrari, would bring up the sort of strategic dislocation of the THAD. You know, he pointed out that this whole theory of a quick war was kind of irrelevant by the year 2015. having been in Afghanistan, having been in Iraq, this idea that you could just demolish an enemy in two days had kind of been thrown by the wayside. And yet, we kept procuring the systems that were developed in the 1990s, that were developed in the early 2000s. And what's fascinating to me is how, you know, the Pentagon is the largest bureaucracy in the United States. It's enormous. These budgeting and purchasing processes are super complex and time consuming. I mean, and I think it's fair to say that by the year 2022, by the year 2024, this system had kind of slept walked into an entire new world where Iran, for example, is attacking the United States and its allies with $20,000 drones, with cheap ballistic missiles.
51:08 And, you know, the system we have to confront that traces its roots all the way back to the 1990s. It's so crazy, Chris. And actually, you do such a good job, too, of high. highlighting the fragility of the industrial base. I really would love, because I've, you know, I've tried my amateur way to kind of explain it to people, but take people through the process of what does it take to produce a fad? Why does it take so long? And the lesson the United States seems to have learned from the war with Iran is, oh,
51:37 we actually just need to build more of these things, not we need to build something else entirely. You are hitting on such a crucial point. I mean, right now today, and you all have been covering this excellently, I mean, I really, I don't think it's overstating to say we are in a crisis. We have used 80% of the entire inventory of thads we had. That kind of picture traces across to all kinds of very important munitions that we and our allies use around the globe. And right now in Washington, there's this effort specifically under this thing called the Munitions Acceleration Council inside the Pentagon, where they're saying, hey, okay, we're going to, really throw all the money we can at this problem. We're going to rebuild our inventories. We're going to, for example, quadruple thad production by the year 2032. But as you point out,
52:27 you know, to do this, you can't just build a brand new thad factory. You've got to then turn around and look at what's behind that factory, which is a constellation of hundreds of subcontractors and suppliers. So, you know, a single missile like the THAAD is, again, extraordinary technology, infrared sensors, hyperfast, computer parts, rocket propellant, all of these components trace back into an enormous supply chain. And you can't build the THAAD without a vigorous precision industrial supply chain behind it. And, you know, as you know, the United States for the last 30 years,
53:12 has been sort of diligently dismantling its internal manufacturing sector. And the Pentagon has been raising alarms about this for years. There was a 2018 Pentagon study that said the defense industrial base are all these companies, all these factories that provide parts for the THAAD and the Tomahawk and the javelin. The Pentagon described it as an extraordinarily fragile system. For example, they're the solid rocket propellant, the solid rocket propellant fuel that goes into the fad, which seems like kind of a boring product. This rocket propellant is made by one company. There's one factory in the United States that makes this propellant that's used in all kinds of missiles.
53:59 That's extraordinary fragility. So to ramp up production, to restock our inventories, to give our allies the missiles that I can tell you, for sure they are clamoring for right now and are facing years-long weights for missiles. To ramp up production like that, you need to go back into the ecosystem. You need to fund all these small contractors, and you need to build a dizzingly complex defense industrial base, and we're nowhere near that at this point. One thing I don't quite understand, walk me through the economics for why the demand, the demand like you have so many companies countries around the world that as you said are demanding these
54:45 weapons and we just can't meet the supply why why not like why isn't that demand producing more companies i mean i particularly don't want us necessarily making more so i'm not sad about the fact that we can't you know meet the supply here uh your portrait in the in the article of uh this missile just sprawled out all over the floor with like these artisans you know working by hand to put the thads together was quite fascinating. And maybe that's the limiting factor. Just we don't have the manpower to do it. But what is it? Like if these countries are willing to overpay for this product, what makes us incapable of producing it and giving it to them? Literally the $1.5 trillion question, which is what they're aiming to make the Pentagon budget. And it seems really hard to
55:36 conceive that, you know, the United States military budget, you can hear all these extraordinary facts about how we spend more money on our military than the next 10 nations combined and so forth. And yet, we're in this position whereby our allies in Europe cannot get Patriot Interceptor missiles. And the wait times for even, you know, air-to-air missiles you've never heard of, like the Amram. If you watch into the Pentagon right now, is the Gulf Nations that, I want to buy the Amram, they'd say, okay, you know, delivery is set for 2034. There is a scramble going on among American allies right now because they cannot get the munitions. We've promised them.
56:19 The reasons for this, I think, have to do with that decades-long sleepwalking process I just talked about. You had a Pentagon that was purchasing weapons based on the sort of short-term making the budget worked. And then you had really only a handful of major corporations delivering the munitions to the Pentagon. One Pentagon report said over 90% of its missiles come from two companies. They don't name the companies, but the two largest are RTX, Erathion, and Lockheed Martin. And what you saw in these companies, which are publicly traded, they've got to meet the needs of Wall Street, they've got to do their quarterly earnings, those companies are, are caught in a cycle of sort of quarter to quarter Wall Street incentives of delivering steady contracts and profits to their shareholders.
57:16 And so it's not like these companies can go out and expand production, for example, without a years-long contract in place. And, you know, one of the people I interviewed for the story was an Army Colonel who worked for the staff of the Joint Chiefs Office. and the Joint Chief's Office in 2024 was looking at this emergency of a shortage of munitions. And what this young Colonel Sandra Thomas encountered was an industry that was, I just have to say, kind of walking in place or locked in place. You know, the Pentagon would come to these companies and say, hey, we need more missiles, we need them quickly. And the companies would reply with, well, okay, show us the seven-year contract, pay up front.
58:04 we'll start expanding our assembly lines, but until that happens, we effectively can't do it. So you saw a Pentagon and a set of contractors that were sort of locked in stasis for many years, and the result was that we had this pretty stagnant production system for munitions. Chris, what happens if we enter a big one by accident? That's kind of the biggest fear. My model for kind of looking at this has kind of been the Russo-Japanese War, kind of an extraordinary defeat that a Western imperialist power takes at the hands of seemingly like an inferior power, shocks the world. It doesn't dramatically change the world order, but kind of sets the stage for what a lot of things are going to look like in the First World War. And so, you know, it's one of these conflicts, which is tremendously important, but yet has not, we have not yet gotten into a,
59:00 full-blown crisis. I believe that is possible, considering much of what you have laid out. I'm sure you've thought about it. What do you think? Well, I mean, first of all, I think, you know, what I'm reporting now goes all the way back to 1932 and the U.S. effort to build up its sort of arsenal of democracy, if you will. And the thing you notice, these crises are never anticipated. Pearl Harbor, September 11th, the outbreak of World War I, they take. tend to come unexpected. And it's shocking to talk to people in the Pentagon at the higher mid-levels and down
59:43 who feel that we are tremendously under-prepared for that. I mean, at this moment, at this very moment, the United States, the Pentagon, the State Department are kind of operating a triage of providing, of providing the missiles that are being asked for by our allies in Europe and the Gulf, let alone our own forces around the world. And I can't help but think about this issue in terms of like a bank account. We had a limited savings account of munitions in 2024.
01:00:18 We have spent down that savings account to a very low level. And where it leaves us now is that, God forbid truly, if there was another major conflict that just came out, of the blue. There's no question at all that we do not have either the stockpile of munitions to engage in a war like that quickly. And we do not have the kind of defense industrial base that we had in the 1940s that famously, you know, helped us win World War II. And I would like to point out that in 1941, the United States was the global equivalent of China. We were the world's manufacturing powerhouse. And the U.S. government essentially co-opted that entire
01:01:03 manufacturing system to make airplanes, tanks, rifles, and bullets. Now we're in a very, very different position where the Pentagon is trying to spend billions of dollars to stand up more assembly lines and subcontractors at a very slow pace. And you've just got to say that that deep bench of production is not there right now. And don't take it from me. I'm saying there are people in Pentagon extremely worried about the fragility of the system. You know, there's that famous CSIS report by Seth Jones, I believe, that came out in 2024 that said we'd run out of mid-range missiles in a war in the Taiwan Strait. We'd run out in a couple of weeks.
01:01:48 This is reality, and it's a stark reality. And setting aside a future major conflict, I'm curious about the particular conflict that we're in now and what capacity we're remains. I was speaking with some service members recently for a separate article that I'm writing, and some described being on the base in Jordan that was hit on July 14th and saying that, you know, they're always told that they have five minutes from the time that they hear the siren until potential impact. You know, hopefully the missiles, you know, take it out of the sky, but you have at least five minutes is the expectation. This time they ran to their bunkers,
01:02:28 And within three minutes and 30 seconds, they had been hit. One of the bunkers, the door was blown off at Fireball comes inside the bunker. The explanation that went around the base, they said, was one of the Patriot batteries was going through a software update, another one. There was a part missing that hadn't arrived yet. and they said they were told basically everything missed. And that's with our current capacity. So what, what capacity remains? Why are, why are they, why don't they have their five minutes anymore? And how many more rounds of tit for tat, you know, can the U.S. go with Iran before Iran is left with 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 ballistic missiles? And the U.S. and Israel are left with, and we can actually put the third element. up on the screen here, F3, where the U.S. and Israel left with very few.
01:03:28 This was months ago, Maz and I reported over at drop site that Israel's own interceptor capacity had dwindled to double digits according to a Trump administration official with access to that data. So what do we have left for this particular war? Great question. And by the way, I'm extremely glad you're reporting on that. I really don't think the American people have yet gotten a clear picture of the intense damage to done to the U.S. bases in the region. You know, places I toured in the United Arab Emirates over a year and a half ago are gone now.
01:04:08 And a friend of mine who was there said that Iran was very, very precise in targeting U.S. facilities and avoiding U.A. facilities. The damage has been enormous. So, I mean, what's our capacity to even protect our troops and our bases at this very moment? You know, the United States doesn't release the number of stockpiles of missiles it has, citing national security. It doesn't release the numbers. But, you know, groups like CSIS have done a fantastic job. You can actually look through the acquisition documents and kind of get a rough number. And they estimate we have about 230 THAAD interceptors, right today at this moment. You know, there are similar numbers for the Patriot Interceptor, which you've mentioned,
01:04:54 which I need to point out that the THAAD is what you use for the big stuff, very high up in the atmosphere. The THAAD takes out the big ballistic missiles. The Patriot works lower down, and you kind of rely on that to take out missiles that the THAAD might missus or rockets. The Patriot supply is terribly diminished. We have been shooting off patriots to the tune of over 1,000 or 1,500, depending on the best estimates. To me, to me, there's this sort of iron and unavoidable fact. Iran can essentially hit almost anything it wants to hit right now. It's not invulnerable, of course, and we do have defenses.
01:05:40 But the very fact that the war stopped in June with the memo of the moment. understanding reflects the fact that at that time in June, Iran had the capability to strike essentially anywhere in the Gulf that it chose, and we did not have the capacity to defend our bases or our allies. You know, one anecdote that did not make it into the story had to do with the Iranian missile strikes in the Israeli towns of Iran and Damona. There's evidence that at that time, Israelis in the United States were essentially triaging their interceptors. They're trying to use the cheapest possible interceptors they could to get incoming missiles because they had to save what they had at the time.
01:06:21 Those are very difficult decisions to make when you have a matter of seconds. The reality is at this point, we do not have the stockpile to defend the bases or the allies. If we did, I don't think the war in Iran would have stopped. I don't think the U.S. attacks would have stopped. And as you know, from all the people you've interviewed, Iran still holds kind of a sword. over our policy in the sense that we know that if the United States attacks them heavily, going after civilian infrastructure as Trump is threatened, Iran can respond in kind. So while we don't know the exact number of missiles sitting in the stockpile right now,
01:07:01 the evidence seems totally clear that it's not sufficient to defend U.S. bases. It's not sufficient to defend U.S. allies in the region. And that leaves Iran with the capability to drive the kind of hard bargains it's driving right now. Yeah. Really well said, Chris. We're so excited for your book. We're going to have you definitely on the show to promote it when it does come out. But in the interim, I hope you stopped by anytime we have questions around this. Such an excellently reported piece. We'll have a link down in our description. Thank you for joining. Thanks for the time. Thank you guys so much for watching. Appreciate it. We will see you all, or a Friday show for everybody tomorrow. See you all then. Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's great. called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Youanu.
01:08:02 We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all.
01:08:14 Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Kylie Breakman, Angel Geratana,
01:08:29 Jeremy Colhain, Patrick McDonald. And we're the host of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artist on Artist Podcast. The Improvised Character Comedy Podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants. And we do a little Halloween sometimes.
01:08:46 Does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween. He gets right up next to the microphone. I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other. You never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcasts.
01:09:13 The True Crime Comedy Podcasts all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. Each week I bring on an amazing guest. Ooh, I scammed them. What? I can talk to you for an hour. You're a generational yapper like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job. And now you can catch full episodes of my show on YouTube.
01:09:29 Start listening to Scam Goddess on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.