EverydaySpy Podcast - Starlink EXPOSED: The Truth Behind Elon Musk's SpaceX | EverydaySpy Podcast Ep. 11

Episode Date: September 9, 2023

Check out AURA digital security for yourself for 2-weeks absolutely FREE by clicking on my sponsor link here 👉 https://aura.com/everydayspy Sometimes you have to learn something all over again before you see it clearly. That's how I felt after spending two days studying space with my son at the Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL and learning how the US Rocket Program was built off of stolen Nazi technology! When you consider the global impact of technology for both war and peace, you can't help but wonder what the future holds. Tech leaders like Elon Musk may not be as crazy or as evil as people say they are… Find your Spy Superpower: https://everydayspy.com/spyquiz Learn more from Andy: https://everydayspy.com/ Join the SpyTribe: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EverydaySpy/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everydayspy/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/EverydaySpy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All of the technology that we've developed was born on the back of a former Nazi scientist that we stole from Nazi Germany. That means our entire rocket program is based on stolen technology from an advanced country. China is literally stealing technology from the United States. What are we? The technologically superior race. What are they stealing from us to develop their own technology? And what are we doing publicly? lambasting and criticizing. I learned so much at space camp with Sina. And he's like 10 years old. So I was like blown away that I went to a 10 year old two-day camp.

And I learned a ton. It was awesome. That's awesome. That's not what I expected. I actually, you know, we had to decide which parent was going to go. And one of the reasons, you know, I asked you to go instead of me because I'm a huge space camp nerd was because I thought, well, Andy has all this knowledge, right? I mean, he was a misalier. He's going to have all this knowledge that he'll be able to explain things to Sina.

So when you came back and you're like, I learned so much, I was like, what? What do you mean? Well, you know, this is what I've really learned to appreciate about being a parent is that your children become your second chance at childhood. That's true. And it's been so magical. Like, I don't know why I'm constantly surprised by this, but it's does seem to keep happening. I was shocked at two when he discovered how to walk, and I was shocked at five when he started learning how to read. And there's been a thousand examples of this. But yeah, so Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama was example 1001. That's awesome. And I've loved hearing, like, the trickle of stories come out of the two of you. And it's funny because I've

learned you've pointed out to me that, well, I think it was you that pointed this out to me. I suck at stories. Oh, yeah. Right? Because you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, Your dad is a natural storyteller. And he tells these ridiculously inaccurate, completely biased. They're so great. But they're great. And the kids love them. And you hear Sina and Eli repeating those stories week after week, month after month, year after year.

And I just don't tell them. Like I have these awesome experiences. Yeah. And I internalize them. And I come to you with like my lessons learned from the stories. And you're like, well, what's the story? Yeah. You'll be gone for like a week.

I'll be like, how to go. You were like, yeah, it went really well. Silence. There's no story about like a weird guy you met or like, you know, something you learned about a coworker or, you know, some like even a random experience of like, hey, I went to Sprout and they had this new kind of kombucha named after your sister. You know, nothing. None of that comes out of your mouth.

It's so funny. So I've been trying to get you to come with the stories because our kids love it. And it really is. I mean, it's funny you talk about how inaccurate my dad's. stories are, which I'm sure is true, right? They're all, you know, what's the word for it? They're yarns. Yeah. They're fabrication. They're so great. They're based in truth, but he just, you know, makes up all these extra things. But the kids love them and they remember them and that's, you know, part of his legacy, honestly. And I know that you can tell good stories, right? I know that you can share

experiences, but you really have to be prompted. It's not natural for you to come home and be like, babe, you won't believe what happened on my trip. Well, and I'll also say that your stories are not really so much stories as they are just repetitions of mundane facts that happen throughout the day. I love it. How else can I connect with you? But that's what I'm saying. This is just an area where you and I are different.

That's true. Right? I will tell you stories. But in order for something to meet the threshold of a story, it has to be significant. Like something really significant has to happen. And then I'm like, oh, let me tell you. this thing of significance from my week. But if my week was not significant, I'm not going to dull you with the details of the new cambucha that's sitting on the shelf at sprouts.

But such an interesting story. To you. To you. Do you know what I mean? So it's just so interesting to see, you know, after all these years that we've been married and all these years that we've been parents, we still haven't figured this thing out. Yeah. So I'm going to try. I'm going to practice this new skill. Awesome. With space camp because in Huntsville, Alabama, We went to the Space and Rocket Center, which I think is different than what they're called everywhere else. Like I think the one in Kennedy is called something different. And I think the one in Cape Canaveral is something different. Yeah.

So there's like... Oh, yeah, Kennedy Space Center is Cape Canaveral. No. Yeah, Kennedy Space Center is in Cape Canaveral and it is the mission center, I believe. And then Houston... Oh, no, Houston's the mission center. And Cape Canaveral is where they actually launch from. And then Houston is called something different still, right?

Yeah. So there's like... They have their own different names. Because they all have their own mission. Right. So I'm talking about the one in Huntsville, which I think is located on a former army base called Redstone. Or maybe it's the same. When I say that I learned something, what I mean is I learned enough to be even more confused than I was before.

I'll take it. But either way, the thing that was so interesting to me is that it's basically these three large buildings. One large building is like an administrative building. Another large building is the actual museum. And then there's a third building where I think the entire purpose of the building is just for campers. Yeah. Like it's called there's two habitats. That's so cool.

And they're these mock-up buildings of almost like what a Mars habitat would look like. Yeah. Except that they're also like high school or middle school camp building. So instead of staying in a cabin outside in the woods for camp, you stay in a habitat for camp. That's so cool. Well, because they have different camps. Space camp isn't the only camp they have, and they have all different kinds there. So it makes sense.

And we went to what was known as family space camp, which is where parents get to be with their kids. Right. But then there's also like space camp for just kids and space camp for just teens. I think there's like an advanced space camp. There's an aviation camp. There's a robotics camp. I mean, I looked at all of them. But I knew that, you know, our son didn't want to be by himself.

So family space camp it was. Yeah. And it's like if you are a nerd or if your children are nerds or if you are a nerd and you want to live vicariously through your children, by making them do nerdy things. Because you can afford it now because you're an adult. Yes. My parents could not afford this when I was a kid. No, my parents could either.

Yeah. So anyways, we went to, I took him into one of the large museum buildings. Yeah. And suspended above your head throughout the entirety of this huge building is a Saturn 5 rocket. So cool. It's insane. I mean, it's a rocket on its side, suspended up, and then it's suspended by each of its three stages. Now, you are correct that I'm.

was a missileeer. And missileers in the military learn about multi-stage solid rockets because that's what an ICBM is. It's a rocket with a nuclear warhead or several nuclear warheads on the end. So I came into the whole like learning about rockets from a very operational perspective with the military, learning how solid rocket fuel works and how nuclear warhead maintenance works and how the whole thing works together and how you carry a yield and how it fits within the treaties of space war and everything else, right? Yeah. I never actually learned the science of what makes a rocket work. Oh, that's interesting. I guess you don't have to.

Correct. I mean, outside of like there's a gyroscope and there's solid rocket fuel and there's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that's pretty much all I had to learn. You have to know, push a button, tourniquet. I mean, for lack of a better explanation, yeah, that's exactly what we had to learn. So as I'm going through this museum, it's all about how the rocket works. Yeah. And it was shocking because so much of that was not interesting to me.

Really? So much of it. I mean, I'm looking at it and it's like, it's showing me the inside cross-cut sections of these rockets. And I'm like, this is super interesting to somebody. But it's completely beyond my scope of being able to like, I don't understand. Pressure, fuel temperatures, you know, inversions, rockets. Yeah, it was way outside of what I could understand. Yeah.

However, I did discover that the father of the American rocket science, whatever, the whole expansion of our technology into rockets and space, the father of that program was a guy named Werner von Braun, who was a former Nazi scientist, who did not defect from Nazi Germany, but was captured as a prisoner of war during World War II. My mind exploded. Yeah. The entirety of our space and missile program, all of the technology that we've developed was born on the back of a former Nazi scientist that we stole from Nazi Germany. Yeah. Think about that.

Yeah. That means our entire rocket program is based on stolen technology from an advanced country in what was that? Like 1935 or something? Shocking. It blew my mind. It was literally like a jaw-dropping, aha, moment of significance. So I'm telling you a story about a moment of significance. still. Still. But honestly, like, look at the world we live in right now in 2023. China is

literally stealing technology from the United States. What are we? The technologically superior race. What are they stealing from us to develop their own technology? And what are we doing publicly? Lambasting and criticizing them. What did we do in World War II? We stole from the Germans who were the technologically technologically superior culture. And we adopted their technology to make it our own, advance it quicker and turn it around and use it against them. Well, even, I'm fairly certain, even the scientists who developed the atomic bomb weren't Americans. They were also from overseas. So it's not a surprise.

And I do remember, you know, reading about the Nazi scientists that came over. And Van Braun was one of the most prominent ones, right? Because he was the founding father. And from what I remember reading about him, he was. was actually a pure rocket scientist. Like that's what he wanted to do. And it's not that he like had some kind of ideological shift and wanted to, you know, betray his company and, you know, his country and, you know, help America. It was that he just wanted to build rockets. And once the, you know, once the Germans start, you know, we're starting to lose. And I do believe there's a

story of like he, he said something at some point, like at a party, he made some kind of, he made some kind of drunk in common about how he didn't think Germany was going to win the war. And then he was arrested a week later by the Nazis. And so, you know, he was kept on the team because you, you know, he, you couldn't get rid of him. He was too big of an asset. But at that point, you know, in his mind, he's a liability also. Yeah, he's a liability. And in his own mind, he's like, oh, well, you know, maybe I should go elsewhere with my rocket science. And America wanted to fund him, right? So, you know, for him, like his motivator, like it had nothing to do with ideology or helping the Nazis or helping America. It had to do with the reward and his own ego of like he just wanted to build rockets.

He wanted to be on the forefront of space. You are absolutely going where my mind was going to, right? There's a spy lesson here. Yeah. And there's a fantastic lesson for us to understand current geopolitics also from this exact story. But before we get into that, I want to start by thanking. our sponsor for today's podcast. Our sponsor for this podcast is ORA.

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all you have to do is go to aura.com forward slash everyday spy or open the link in the description below and sign up for your 14-day trial offer. Thank you, ORA. Thank you for what you do for our family. And of course, thank you for giving us the chance to make this awesome podcast today. Now, jumping back into what we were just talking about, there are four core motivations that CIA teaches us to look for in every human asset. Right. And we use the moniker, the acronym, Rice, to describe those four motivations, right?

R stands for reward. I stands for ideology. C stands for coercion and E stands for ego. So you've got reward ideology, coercion, and ego. They make their acronym Rice. These four are fairly obvious to understand, right? A reward is anything that makes somebody work for you, whether it's money or whether it's praise

or whether it's a free cruise, whatever it might be. Ideology, I for ideology, is what people believe in. C is coercion. Coercion is when you force somebody through blackmail or through guilt or through, you know, debt, whatever it might be, and then E-Stands for ego. And ego is the one that I find people most misunderstand. Ego is not egotistical people.

Ego is about doing things a certain way because you want to be perceived a certain way. Right. So these four motivations basically define all human behavior everywhere at all times, R-I-C-E. When we talk about the father of the nuclear missile, the father of the space program, right, Werner von Braun, he was not ideologically driven. No, he wasn't. He was barely paying attention to politics. He belonged to the Nazi party.

Right. But not because he was a Nazi. No, it's because he was German. And he lived there, and that's what you did. So he actually, when Hitler took power in 33, he was in his Ph.D. program. And then the next year, he, we finished his dissertation, and immediately the military took it. The military was like, this is a, important for, you know, the homeland, right, for the homeland. And he was like, sure. He's like,

you're going to fund me. Great. I'm going to build rockets. And so for him, he was like, you know, I was just being a German citizen. Yeah. You know, and then he, even when there's stories where, you know, the, the German rockets were built by prisoners. And, you know, there's, they say that he, he had a tour by the SS of the factory where the rockets were being built. And there's all this, you know, there's this speculation of did he really know what was going on? Did he know and he just justified it some way? Did he care? But he wasn't ideologically driven.

So it makes sense that for him, you know, it was a little bit easier. I mean, maybe he felt bad about it, but it was a little bit easier for him to look the other way because his dream was coming true. His rocket was being built. Right. Yeah. So here you have a guy who is essentially just a rocket nerd. A giant rocket nerd. So great.

And the fastest path to him getting funding to develop the rockets he wanted to develop, where he lived at the time, which was Germany, was essentially military funding by the Nazi party in 1935. Right. What else was he going to do? And if he were to ideologically stand up and say, I do not agree with you. Yeah. He would have helped build the rocket with the other prisoners. I mean, honestly. Or maybe those rockets never would have been built because... Or maybe not. Who knows? But I think you're right. Right? Because one thing that we know about Nazi Germany is you were either a compliant asset

or you were a forced labor asset. So it's possible that even though his own personal motivation would have been reward and ego, it's possible that had he ideologically resisted, they would have just used coercion. Oh, there you go. Way to bring it all together. There you go. That's true. That's true.

But instead, what we find with Werner von Braun is that he was. ego driven right and this i think is really important for us to understand if you want to understand what drives people you can't just assume that people are driven by blind ideology right you can't assume that people are driven by money and greed and it's funny because those are the two things those are two of the strongest motivations out there but they're also two of the most over-assigned over generalized motivations out there people see a wealthy business person yeah and they accuse that wealthy businessmen of being greedy and money driven. They may not be. They may be driven by something completely different like ego or like ideology. People look at a religious leader and they

just assume that religious leader is blindly focused on religion. They may not be. They may be driven forward by money and ego. They may be coerced. They may not have an option. Right. Right. We were just talking to somebody recently about the growing sense of like anti-Chinaism inside the United States. Yeah. And I forget. what they said specifically, but it was something like, you know, is it safe to just assume that every Chinese person in America is a spy? And we're like, no, you can't just assume that every Chinese person in America is a spy. You cannot assume that. But you also can't assume that just because someone has Chinese ethnicity, they are being left alone by the government of

China. Right. Instead, you have to land somewhere in between. Because every member, every person who has Chinese, every American with Chinese ethnicity is absolutely on the radar of the Chinese. Right. So you have to see it for what it really is without going so far as to assume that they're all ideologically communist. Right. And I think, you know, something that, that maybe, I don't know if people understand that about espionage is, you know, espionage is a business of relationships, right? Relationships and transactions within those relationships. But a big part of espionage is getting to know who you are developing or who you are trying to get information from. So in espionage, there is no judging a book by its cover.

Yeah. You just can't do it. So. You can, but you have to be willing to be very wrong. Yeah. I mean, it's a super risky game if you're going to play it that way. So, you know, espionage really, the reason that Rice exists is because you have to get to know the other person, right?

The person who's your target. And you have to be able to understand them well enough. to understand what their motivations are, any cultural things that come into play, and culture completely comes into play. You know, so there's all these things you have to learn about the other person before you can, you know, to make an assessment,

before you can approach them, before you can use them, before you can work with them. Yeah. So fast forward now to when the allied powers are able to capture Werner von Braun and make him a POW and make his team, a group of POWs, when they take the actual facility where the Germans have created the B2 rocket and where they've expanded their rocket science and industry, the Americans, the allied powers,

come in and take him away and they relocate him to the United States. Now here is a rocket nerd turned Nazi in order to secure funding to continue playing with his rockets. That is a person driven on ego and reward. Right. I want to play with rockets. Right. Just let me play with rockets. So what do the Allies do?

So they say, we'll fund you to build some rockets. We'll fund you to build rockets for us now. Yeah. And he was like, okay. He became like the head. He retired as the number one person in charge of Huntsville, Alabama's space and rocket center. Yeah. Like that's insane.

The guy was a Nazi war P-O-W. Yeah. he became not just the head of a program, but the head of an actual space facility inside the United States. Right. That's just mind-boggling to me. And my guess is that, you know, when they, so I believe that he and his team surrendered to the American forces in the end.

But when that happened, you know, from our, from the first, you know, first look at it, you're like, they're POWs, right? Prisoners of war. They surrendered. And they were. But then he must have, I can only imagine, like going back in time, like he must have sat with people who got to know him, who made the assessment that he has no ideological connection to the Nazi party. Right. He was technically part of the party because he was German and he was there and that's who funded him.

So it was really a safe bet for America to be like, you know what? We're going to give you all the things you want, right? Somebody made the assessment of what's the motivation? And somebody was like, we're going to fund you. That's, you know, the reward. You know, you're going to, they, he was, I believe in the beginning, like, nobody knew he had been part of the Nazi party. You know, so he was a big ego boost because he was known, like, he, his reputation,

he had a great reputation, you know, and he got to do all the things that he wanted to do. So it's, I just find that fascinating, like somebody, some, you know, American government official back in the day, I mean, probably. There was an army interrogator. Right. Yeah. Yeah. This is exactly why it happens.

Yeah. When a prisoner is captured, surrendered or captured, right? When they're captured, they go through an interrogation process. The reason they go through that interrogation process is for intelligence purposes. What intelligence can we gather from the individual that we just captured? Right. Right. Part of that assessment process is also defining what is this person's ability to either be used,

one, as a double agent. Can we turn them around and send them back against their own? Right. Or two, can we turn them around and put them in? service for us, right? FBI still does this today. CIA still does this today. Every time they capture a spy or a foreign asset or some sort of some person who's sensitive towards another side, the first thing they do is they put them through a light form of interrogation, right? A questioning, if you will. And that's an assessment process to see. Can we turn them back? Can we use them or do we

just suck up whatever intel they have and put them behind bars? Right. So the same thing would have happened to Von Braun when he was captured. And those interrogators were skilled enough to land on exactly what you just said. This guy's not, he's not ideologically connected with the Nazi party. He doesn't really care about Germany. He cares about rockets. Yeah, he cares about rockets. And that's it. And it's really hard for me to comprehend having that kind of focused mind, but we have people like that that exist even now today. And the first person that comes to my mind is Elon Musk. Here's this guy that the world loves to love and hate. Yeah. And nobody can figure him out because we keep trying to think. We keep trying to assign, trying to project on him some sort of ideological

foundation. Right. There may not be any ideological foundation to him at all. Right. He might just be a giant, fill in the blank nerd. Technology nerd. Right. That's why he is so difficult for anyone to get their mind around because he is not neurologically typical to the rest of us. He's not ideologically driven. He's not wealth driven. If he was wealth driven, he could have retired a long time ago. That's a very wealthy guy. It takes a certain kind of strangeness to launch a Tesla into space. It takes a certain amount of strangeness to think that you're going to send people to Mars in your lifetime. Right? Even NASA isn't planning on going to Mars anytime soon. Their big ambition is to create a base on the moon that simulates what it would be like to live on Mars.

Elon Musk is trying to go directly to Mars. When I learned about Werner von Braun and the father of our rocket program, I could not help but draw a parallel to Elon Musk, who has essentially become the father of electric vehicles in the United States, the father of commercial space enterprise in the United States, the father of rockets that return back to. base instead of rockets that we just let go and then they crash. Now there are other businesses, there's whole other industries that have created, that have been created just to mimic what that guy created. And I think Musk is so interesting because if you think about people, people get all up in arms about things that he says, you know, and his influence on geopolitics. And you know, you have to remember that governments talk to governments. And people who work and work. governments are generally ideologically driven, right? At least with... Because there's no reward there.

There's no money in your pocket when you work for the government. And within their profession, even if they are, you know, driven by something like ego, within their profession, they're, you know, the profession is driving them ideologically, right? But Elon Musk is not ideologically driven. He's driven most likely by reward and ego. So, and because if he wasn't, then he would probably be in politics, but the man has never entered politics. He, he, wants, he has visions, he has things to say about things, you know, but how much influence should that actually have? Honestly, what people should, when they think about the influence that Elon Musk has, it really has to be filtered through the power he has through his businesses,

right? Because he has control over certain things that can make an impact on geopolitical situations. But that's the filter we need to see him through. It's not that he's going to be like, oh, you know, Taiwan should get half of his land to China. Like, who cares if he says that? But if he's allowed to have an opinion like anybody else. Just like anybody else, right? But that doesn't mean he can impact geopolitics that way. Exactly. Like he's not going to be at the negotiating table. He's not the general who's going to command troops to go into any country, right? He doesn't have that level of power. And a great example of this is what happened with Starlink, right? So Elon Musk, the father of Starlink.

This guy's got a lot of kids. You know what I'm saying? It's great. So I mean, I think it's safe to say Ukraine's existence still today is largely based on the fact that their internet infrastructure, which is their command and control infrastructure, their communication structure with outside allies, a big part of the network that they have to fly their drones. They exist.

They're fighting still today. in large part because Starlink was there for them. Right. Starlink, a commercial platform that Elon Musk chose to donate to the conflict after the Russians invaded, that has become a foundation to how Ukraine has been able to stand up to Russia. And Russia's command and control has not had the same advantage. So they've had to rely on UHF and VHF radio transmissions and whatever they can scrounge up with their own satellite network, which is obviously dated versus Starlink, which is.

is very modern. However, there was a time when Musk shut down Starlink from the Ukrainians. Right. And it wasn't for geopolitical reasons. No. What happened there? Do you remember what happened there? So from what I understand, you know, he, I believe, you know, I believe governments paid for part of Starlink, but then he donated a lot of, you know, the Starlink services that he was providing them. And then he got to a point where he was like, I can't keep doing this forever because he is a businessman. Right. Right. He's not like, he's, like, he's, he's. He's not, maybe he's, maybe he feels a certain way about helping Ukraine. But honestly, in his mind, he's looking at dollars and cents.

And he's like, this isn't a practical decision for me or my company. You know, I'm sorry about what's happening, but that's not my driving force. Right. I can't do this for free. Yeah. And I'm pretty sure he also proposed a peace deal. Yeah. Didn't he propose a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine where Russia would get to annex and

own part of Ukrainian territory? Right. And then, of course, the whole world exploded at that too because they were like, like, he must be aligned with the Russians. Yeah, but he's, you know, he, you have to just remember who he is and what his motivations are. And he has no say in that. Yeah. You know, everybody blows up at the suggestion, but he has no say in negotiating a peace deal.

Right. Like it's, it's like you or I. We could write something on a letter and send it to Putin too. Right. I don't know that the USPS would like that very much, but we could do it. Yeah. So it's really interesting to me because, you know, whether we're talking about what happened, in World War II with a Nazi scientist being captured and then becoming the father of a program

in the United States that gave us a technological advantage or whether you're talking about current day technological or technology tycoons like Elon Musk. In both cases, you can't really assign an ideology to these guys. When it comes to the four core motivations, as much as you want to, you want to believe that Werner von Braun is a bad guy because he's a Nazi. And you want to believe that Elon Musk is really secretly a Russian sympathizer, that's not what they are. Right. When you look at them through the eyes of a spy and you look at them and assess them based on their motivations, you see a lot of ego.

Yeah. And you see a lot of reward tendency. I think people have to remember that having an opinion is not the same as being motivated by an ideology. That's true. Right? Because people who are motivated by an ideology are the people who, you know, the American American revolutionaries, right?

They were motivated by an ideology, right? They didn't have just an opinion about, wow, I really wish we weren't taxed so much. Britain sucks. They were motivated by ideology to go into the field and die for their cause. So there was another kind of aha moment that I had at the Space Center in Alabama.

And it was, as I'm walking under the Saturn 5 rocket, and I'm reading about this former Nazi POW who became the founder of our space and rocket program. there was a warning that he gave about technology. And he was like, you know, technology is the greatest tool to prevent conflict. Right? So technology is this great tool to prevent conflict. And as you go through the Huntsville, Alabama airport, you kind of see that von Braunism being used in advertisements by the Army and by some of the different contractors for the military.

Because you see these high, these fancy pictures of experimental drones and helicopters and all sorts of stuff. in the Huntsville Airport, one of the coolest airports I've ever been in. Yeah. And you can see them saying, technology secures the future of America. Technology prevents, you know, soldiers from dying. Technology is the ultimate deterrent from conflict. And it got me thinking, and I was like, oh, you know what? That's why we need to focus so much on technology.

And now I understand why Biden is signing all these executive orders that are basically forcing this divide between American funding and Chinese technology, and American funding and foreign technology that could find its way into the hands of the Iranians or the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans. But then it made me reflect on, is that really true? Like, is technology really what prevents conflict? So I went back in my memory as far as I could. And the first conflict that I can remember, not being in,

but the first conflict that I can remember really studying was the American Revolution. Who was the most technologically advanced civilization during the American Revolution? Oh, it was, well, I mean, between the two warring parties? Yeah, Britain. Who won? We did. Well, yeah. I would say Americans, instead of saying America did.

Who was the most technologically advanced civilization during World War II? Germany. Who lost? Germany. So here we are now, right, after seeing what we did in World War II, after seeing what we did in the American Revolution, I haven't studied the World War I enough to be able to speak intelligently to that, right? But we are examples. America is an example of an underdog that defeated the technologically superior culture at the time twice.

Why do we think now that if we are the technologically superior culture, then somehow we're going to win every war in the future? Right. So it was kind of a humbling moment for me. But nevertheless, it was a bit of an aha that I wanted to share with you because I was like, oh my gosh, are we doing this wrong? Right? We have a shrinking military and a growing level of technology, which really just makes it so everybody wants to steal our technology. And they already have a large military. Yeah. So I don't know. It's, it was one of those things where I'm sitting here with my 10-year-old son and we're both wearing matching space camp flight suits. And we're both deep in the geeked out details of Project Artemis and traveling to the moon. I'm also sitting here very realistically thinking like, oh, shit, like, what if my 10-year-old becomes? an 18-year-old that has to go to war, thinking that technology is going to save us. Yeah, and what's interesting about that, so I'm a big fan of diplomacy. I always have been, maybe it's just my hippie, peace-loving, you know, Buddhist upbringing, right?

But I'm a big fan of diplomacy, and I think that, you know, people are the best asset, right? Diplomacy is the best way to prevent war and to end war. I mean, that's my personal view. So, you know, it's interesting what you're saying because, you know, it's interesting. it kind of the more technological wars become, I feel like the more, I mean, and technically it saves lives, but wars are still, you know, what's the point? Like, are you having machines fight each other and then whatever machines win? Like, there will always be human loss of life. And you just kind of dehumanize war when you're like, technology is the way to win. Right.

What does that mean? It also makes me reflect on the conflicts that we've been in, right? Like, in Vietnam, we were technologically superior over the Viet Cong, but we didn't win Vietnam. Yeah. Right? In Afghanistan, we were technologically superior over the Taliban. We didn't win that. Funny enough to very ideological wars right there. Exactly right.

Yeah. Right? And it's just, it's fascinating to me, because I'm not understanding, as I reflect on it more and more, where our government seems to get the confidence that we're going to, to like perpetually be the superior country. At the same time, I also start to understand the very pragmatic approach they must have to take to creating policy that divides the world. As much as a president has to get up and say, and President Biden says it all the time,

we are an international community, right? Democracy is the right way and is the only way. And we must learn to accept this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, it's just a narrative. It's a narrative because what we really know is that we have to maintain a competitive advantage over everybody else in order for us to be the superpower of the planet. Yeah. And if we ever lose that opportunity, if we ever lose that advantage, somebody else will take it and then we will no longer be the superpower. We will have to scrounge and scrap and fight for every bit just like everybody else in the world is doing right now.

Yeah. Yeah, what do you think, you know, it's interesting because, you know, I feel like at the government, just like I was saying, at the government level, ideology is the powerful motivator. So I'm wondering, what do you think is the most powerful motivator out of the four? You know, what we were taught is that ideology is the most powerful. That's what CIA taught us. And what I've seen in my own experience is that ideology is basically unshatterable, right? because if you've, whether you're sitting across the table from a terrorist or a criminal or, you know, a religious extremist, it's very hard to break someone's ideology when you go head to head with them.

You can outreward them, right? You can coerce them. Which we have also, you know, the agency teaches is the least reliable. Right. Coercion is the least reliable. And then we've also seen how you can manipulate someone because they have a flawed ego. But it's very hard to manipulate somebody when they have a flawed ideology because their ideology also makes them really adept at determining whether or not you share their ideology. And if you don't share their ideology, it's a no-win situation. Right. So without a doubt, I would say in my experience in between what we were taught, ideology is the strongest. But that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody's driven by a strong ideology. Some people change their ideology. Yeah.

12, 15 times in their life, right? They're very religious, and then they're not so religious. And then they're very anti-religion. And then maybe they come back to religion again later on, or maybe they change their religion altogether. So that's just one simple example of it, not to mention the fact that our ideology has changed, I don't know how many times,

just in relations to being American citizens, right? How we felt as kids versus how we felt as teens, versus how we felt when we joined the military or the CIA, and then what made us leave CIA, and then where we are now, talking about geopolitics and where America is going in the future. There's so much that changes about your ideology as you learn more and get more experience. Yeah, I was going to say that. As you have life experiences, big events can change your ideology along the way, where what you want is a reward or maybe your own personal ego, those are less changing, right?

So we also owe an answer to a question. Do we have a question lined up for today? The question that I actually kind of spawned some of the conversation that we were having today was somebody asked, what do we think are the geopolitical consequences of, or geopolitical considerations of Starlink and Elon Musk. Way to sneak that in there. Being in charge of everything. Which I think we've discussed, you know, quite a bit. Yeah, but I think it's a great question.

And I think this really kind of speaks to, for me at least, it speaks to, how intelligent the audience is that listens to us and who watches this show, this conversation with us. Because I love getting these kinds of questions. So the question on the table, if I can kind of repeat it back to you, what are the geopolitical consequences of technology like Starlink, which is commercial in nature and essentially in the control of one man, one CEO? Did I say that right? Do I think, am I getting a gist? Consequences, considerations, right? Yeah. So I know for sure one of the first things that comes to my mind is that you, it levels the geopolitical playing field because it's not state funded.

So what we've, what we've always known, every war that we've ever known, whether it's from the history books or in real life, is a state funded conflict. Right. And even though we've moved from what we call interstate conflict, which is conflict between two states, towards proxy conflict or intrastate conflict, which is, towards proxy conflict or intrastate conflict, which, which is when the conflict is confined to one country. Right. What we've learned in both of those examples is that state-funded aid, state funding for support, state funding through alliances, like what we see with NATO or what we see right now with the bricks.

This is the way war is done. Now all of a sudden we're kind of on the precipice of something very new. Where what happens when commercial technology is more advanced than military technology, right? When Starlink can provide internet access, but military GPS cannot. Or it can provide more widespread access because it's not classified technology.

Right. And there is plenty of military and intelligence classified technology out there that does amazing things to give you internet and remote places, but they can't just give that away. Starlink is literally something that's going to be on a shelf someday

that you can give away. Yeah. So when you bake into the whole conflict resolution, combative conflict equation, when you look at it through the lens of commercial business, I mean, everything's different. Everything's unpredictable. Right.

Now a small country like Ukraine can mount a realistic defense against a big, a large country like Russia. What can Taiwan do against China? Right? What is it that any country could do waging conflict on any other country if they have the opportunity to have superior technology that's commercially based?

Because, I mean, also going back to the rights conversation think about you know the motivation of the company providing the service providing the technology vice government right so America might not provide some technology to another country because you know maybe it'll piss off country number three right but a company doesn't have to take those things into consideration if they are legally allowed to provide a service outside of you know they're the country that they're based in and they're going to get paid to do so or it's in their best interest to do so they're going to do it well so you know a

company has a lot more flexibility they move faster, they are probably ahead of what governments have been able to do. You know, so they're just, you know, much more, you know, much more, I don't know what word I'm looking for. They're just, they have so much more flexibility for to engage in the geopolitical realm, but they are not tied ideologically, which can cause some issues. They're insulated, they're insulated from consequences. Right. Right. To an extent, yeah. Yeah, I think about, you know, the drones right now that are being used by the Ukrainians to bomb targets inside of Russia, at least one of those technologies, is Turkish drones.

Turkey is a country within NATO. Right. But Turkey is also an ally with the Russians. So, like, this is complicated. And the reason that nobody can necessarily blame Turkey for this, the Ukrainian's ability to reach targets inside Moscow, is because it's a commercial company. Right. And, you know, people can make a stink about it all they want.

NATO can make a stink. Russia can make a stink. But it's not sanctioned Turkey, Turkish military, giving these drones to the Ukrainians. It's a commercial transaction. Right. It's not that different from Starlink, right? Only now you're talking about a weapon system instead of a communication system.

Yeah. So it'll be really interesting to watch the unfolding of more commercial technology and, you know, it's implications on, you know, geopolitical conflicts and negotiations and, you know, what will that look like? Yeah, it's a fascinating topic. What a great question. And I love that it just kind of organically came out as we started talking about ideology and the four core motivations for CIA. Yeah. Folks, thank you so much for joining us.

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