I think it is worth questioning to what extent it is possible to reconcile a mission of benefiting all of humanity and a mission of benefiting the military of one individual country. I would, you know, I would suggest that it is not possible to reconcile those two things are irreconcilable. You have to sort of choose whether you're, you know, team world or team America.
SPEAKER_01Us made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Sam Biddle. Sam is a senior technology reporter at The Intercept. There are many stories dominating the growing relationship between Silicon Valley, the Trump administration, and you know, this extreme right wing more generally. We've talked about Doge, we've talked about the consequences for the American government. Obviously, there's a lot of talk about the trade war, but one aspect of this that probably isn't getting the attention that it deserves is the growing effort by a number of companies and influential people in the tech industry to remake the way that military contracting works in the United States. As you're probably aware, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year to support the American military, to make sure it has the hardware and the software that it needs. And the tech industry wants a bigger piece of that pie. So they are arguing that they would do this much more efficiently than the existing companies that tend to get those contracts, and that it's about time that the military get more innovative, more cutting edge, embrace these AI tools and these new ways of making weapons that the tech industry says it can deliver. Now, obviously, that is a big shift from the way the tech industry used to want to position itself. And previously there would be a bit of a clash as to which side of the tech industry might win out here. You know, these new right-wing folks or the more libertarian arguments that we might have heard in the past that wanted to present themselves as not so linked to the US government or supporting its priorities. But in actual fact, the tech industry has been moving in this direction for quite some time. And as we know, Silicon Valley itself basically owes its existence to a bunch of public and government funding in the Second World War and the Cold War to build up what has now become Silicon Valley as we know it today. And instead of rejecting that history, these people associated with companies like Palantir and Andorrill are saying that it needs to be embraced, that Silicon Valley needs to go back to thinking about that way again to embrace US national security and enhancing US power in the 21st century, especially in the face of a rising China. And they intend to profit fabulously from that. But of course, it also presents a lot of concerns about the way those technologies are going to be used, about the vision of the world that this tech industry is now promoting, not just to government, but to society more broadly, the people who are listening to them, a more warlike and aggressive world that creates many more customers for the types of products that they are producing and hoping governments and militaries are going to buy. So obviously, I think this is something we should be paying a lot more attention to. And that's why I was really happy to have Sam on the show so we could dig into this further, so we could understand it better. And I have no doubt this is going to be an issue that we'll be returning to on the show in the months to come. If you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making tech won't save us every single week, so we can keep having these in-depth critical conversations on the tech industry, especially at this moment where it is embracing the extreme right around the world. You can join supporters like Max from Berlin, Jean Frideep from Montreal, Malta from Montpellier in France, Vitor from Sao Paulo, Chad from Cowichi, and Ethan in Baltimore by going to patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Sam, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I am delighted to be here. Thank you. We have been trying to organize having you on the show for a little while, you know, finding the right topic and the right time. And so I'm really excited to have you on the show today. And I think that we have, you know, a concerning but really interesting set of issues to talk about. We're going to get to what basically these new defense tech companies are doing to try to remake military procurement and the bigger picture of that. But I wanted to start with something a bit more topical, something that, you know, is just kind of happening. And that's obviously Elon Musk saying that he is leaving the government and leaving Doge after several months of leading this agency, and of course, all of the consequences that we have seen of that, all of the cuts to not just staff, but of government departments wholesale and of funding of international programs and all these sorts of things. So I'm just wondering, you know, what you think the consequences of Musk's engagement in this are. And do you really buy that he's leaving this all behind now?
SPEAKER_00I mean, I think the most important thing to bear in mind whenever Musk says, I mean, literally anything, is he lies constantly, or at the very least, makes very, very unrealistic predictions that don't pan out. And these predictions tend to be self-beneficial in some way, right? It's like Tesla Cars will be capable of you know orbiting the moon by next summer. Whatever makes him look good and is forward-looking, I think should be treated with extreme skepticism. It's nothing personal, just his track record is very, very, very bad when it comes to factuality. And so, yeah, when he says he's leaving government, I don't think anyone should believe that. As far as the results, I I think that he's been very fortunate to have the sort of Doge legacy assessed like at its word, you know. It's so many of the articles about, you know, well, did Doge succeed or not, are looking at it in terms of did Doge find and eliminate federal waste? And like, no, the point of it was just to like wreck shit. And I think by that metric, it was a colossal success. It has really wrecked, it has wrecked a lot of uh offices of the federal government. And I think that was the point. So by those metrics, it was a huge success. But no, I don't think he's look, I I think he's leaving DC with the same as much as I believe that he's going to Mars, you know, maybe, but I will believe anything that he says when it happens. And so no, I don't think anyone should think he's gone.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, it's a really good point. And and I agree, of course, you know, even Donald Trump has said he's not really gone, right?
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00I mean, at his goodbye, at his farewell little ceremony in the Oval Office, he says he's not even leaving. So yeah. And you know, as long as he has underlings embedded in the government, whether he is personally present in Washington, DC is I think a trivial point. Whether he's able to still continue to wreck shit is I think what matters. And as far as it seems like as far as Trump is concerned, the work will go on. You know, the work of to the extent possible before judges halt it, they will continue to just try to wreck things.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's like Doge is just another one of the many companies in his orbit that he has his kind of fingers in, he has his underlings going to work in. Doesn't mean that he needs to be actually there all the time. He is still having influence. And I would say for someone like Elon Musk, on the one hand, there is the desire to present, in particular for Tesla investors, this notion that he is not always doing these doge things anymore, that he's going to be more focused on Tesla because of the difficulties that that company has had. But then, you know, he doesn't want to give up this influence in the US government that gives him a lot of authority and leverage to try to shape regulatory issues, to try to shape the types of things that are going to affect his companies and to make sure that the agencies that would be most likely to be doing some of that stuff are going to continue to be disempowered, going to be kind of struggling for their relevance, their autonomy. And he can keep doing that by still having some fingers in the doge pie, basically.
SPEAKER_00I mean, right, why would he walk away from that? If you are the richest man on the planet and you have found a way to bring the most powerful country on the planet to heal in accordance with your business interests, knowing what we know about Elon Musk, why would he, you know, lay that power down and walk away from it? I I think, as you point out, it would be a mistake to view this as anything other than Tesla shareholder damage control. And you know, maybe to calm, calm people down around uh SpaceX stuff too. But no, it's it's a test, this is a reaction to the Tesla share, to their last quarterly report and shareholder anxiety. Knowing what we know about Tesla shareholders, too, it'll probably work, I think, or at least for a while, that is such a personality-driven company. I mean, that their share price is really just like a reflection of what do people think about Elon Musk, what do shareholders, how much faith do they still have in the man? Uh, I think it is just a uh he knows that if he says that, it'll at least get people off his back for a little bit.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it feels like we're pivoting from stage one of Elon Musk and Doge to some sort of stage two, and we need to see what this is ultimately going to look like. But I think one of the key things is to ensure he is not allowed to rebrand himself, to act as though Doge is some great success, to walk away from the many consequences that have come of the decisions that he has made and that, you know, this kind of government department has made under his leadership that have actually caused a lot of harm, not just within the United States, but around the world, with people losing access to medications and food and all these other things, just so he can have this platform to say that he is improving the government and to make sure that these agencies are not going after his companies. Well, there has been a lot of damage that has been caused as a result of that, and he can't just be allowed to go back and pretend that he is the rocket man and the electric car guy and all that kind of stuff, you know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, I think all the time about during the first Trump term, maybe like right when he was first elected, I remember Steve Bannon talking about how the plan was or the ambition was to quote unquote dismantle the administrative state. And they didn't do it last time around, but I think Doge has given the MAGA movement its best shot at that Bannonite mission of dismantling the government just by throwing as many wrenches into the works as possible. And yeah, you know, like I said, by that metric, it's been very, very successful. I mean, I think it's pretty easy to wreck things, right? Like you just fire all the people, slash all the budgets, and wait for, you know, a lot of the stuff has already been either paused or reversed by judges, but you know, that takes time to shake out. You know, as we've said, there's no indication that the actual work on the ground of stomping on things will stop. I mean, you they don't need Elon Musk to do any of that, really. And you know, maybe it's gotten to the point where he's sort of a distraction from that govern that goal of dismantling the administrative state. Maybe it took him being in DC to get I don't know, to get buy-in from uh you know the rest of the party. Yeah, no, I mean it it the the work will continue in earnest, I think. And and and you know, Wired has had some good reporting about how so many of his underlings are still embedded in the offices where they were dispatched and continue to move around to different agencies. The foot soldiers are the ones who are uh accomplishing the smashing, not Elon himself. He just shows up to those strange cabinet meetings and you know stands there and receives the praise for it. I'd be very upset if I were one of the Doge goons, you know, that you don't get any of the uh the glory, right?
SPEAKER_01Like uh it's maybe maybe they hope it's like a down payment on a future job at like uh you know SpaceX or Tesla or something like that, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I have no doubt that they will all have very uh promising careers after this, after after their um their service in government.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Oh my. Well, yeah, you know, I I wanted to talk about it to get your view because this is something big that is happening. Obviously, we've been talking a lot about what Elon Musk has been doing in this role, and now it'll be interesting to see how this relationship continues, how it looks in this kind of slightly different form. I don't think that means that this relationship between the Trump administration and Silicon Valley is over. And, you know, that's part of the reason I wanted to have you on the show today, because there's this other aspect to this that I feel like as we've been paying attention to Doge and as we've been paying attention to tariffs, there's this other whole story that probably isn't getting the attention that it should be getting because it is actually going to be incredibly consequential. And this is this push by a number of tech companies and investors and tech billionaires to really remake how military procurement is happening in the United States. So, what is happening on that front? Give us give us the lay of the land, and then we'll kind of dig into uh the specifics.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it it really just goes to Peter Thiel and people who have been orbiting him for many years, largely alumni of Palantir, his data analysis firm. But people close to Thiel and his investment fund have radiated outwards into this new renaissance of military tech startups. And they all have a pretty common rhetorical refrain, which is that uh federal uh defense contracting is broken and wasteful and you know a national disgrace, right? That you know, we sink billions, trillions of dollars over the long run into weapons programs that don't work or aren't needed, or pad the pockets of uh lobbyists and executives and et cetera, et cetera. And it's basically a a stain on the United States that the country is so beholden to uh weapons interests, which is all true, which is all completely true. Their solution, however, is to say it should be us instead of Lockheed. It is a really fascinating, very kind of Trumpian approach to uh where you identify a very real problem and you pledge that you are the one to do it, right? It's it's an almost uh populist approach to defense contracting, where it's they're positioning it as the teal acolytes are you know, all say this is a waste of taxpayer money, right? Like this, you the little people are getting screwed and the country is being left in danger. But yeah, but their solution is completely self-serving. There was a a really fascinating interview with uh Trey Stevens, who is a central figure here, very close Peter Thiel ally, longtime player in defense tech, uh, who is an executive at Andoril, an armsmaker, co-founder and uh current executive at Andorrill. Anyway, he had a he had an interview with Wired maybe last year in which he he's asked about the old Eisenhower farewell speech about the military-industrial complex. And he says, Oh my god, I love that speech. I listen to it every year. It's so important. And you know, what Eisenhower was warning against was Lockheed, where you have this revolving door between military contracting and the state. We're so against that. And then late in the interview, he's asked if he would serve in the Trump administration. He says, basically, if called upon, I will serve. You know, it is it had to have been one of the least self-aware interviews I've I've read in my life. It was the first, I think, to hear a defense contractor rail against the military industrial complex without with zero detectable irony. And I think that sort of encapsulates the whole phenomenon that we're talking about here today.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's hilarious, right? Because they think that they're like somehow separate from the other traditional military industrial complex, even though they just want to do the exact same thing, have the same kind of relationships, but they'll say they'll do it better, right? And and they're not the problems. It's the old guard that is the problem.
SPEAKER_00That's exactly right. That that's a perfect way of putting it. It's it's it's not that the military industrial complex is bad, it's that we would do a better job as the complex. The incumbents are bloated and corrupt and can't deliver, but we can. So it is not at all a pitch to dismantle the military industrial complex or to decouple the national interest from national security considerations or you know, uh military industrial considerations. It's just we would do a better job running this machine. And and you know, and maybe they would, but that is a very different pitch than the one you see in marketing materials, where it seems like they're proposing like a total rethinking of how the military and the state and the private sector all interact. And you know, and to some extent they are, but I I've never seen so many people criticize Lockheed while also clearly very much wanting to be Lockheed. And you know, they they're making a lot of progress. So I think it is worth taking very seriously the ambitions of Palantir and Andoril, specifically those two. They're they're quite notable here, but there's also a constellation of smaller startups that share that thinking.
SPEAKER_01Definitely. Yeah, it's like, you know, don't get rid of the military-industrial complex. Just instead of relying on Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and Boeing and, you know, these other like traditional aerospace and defense companies, uh, you know, start swapping out the contracts that go to them with contracts to Andoril and Palantir and SpaceX and, you know, as you were saying, these other companies. I want to get to that framing that they use. I want to dig into that a little bit more, but before I want to understand a bit more about who these people are and the relationship that they have to the Trump administration. So, like, who are some of the key figures here beyond the ones that you just mentioned? And how are we seeing them like embed in the Trump administration and grow their relationships to try to make sure that this ambition that they have is realized?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, sure. So, I mean, Trey Stevens, who I mentioned before, major player here, Palmer Lucky, the founder of Andril, it has so much executive overlap with Palantir that it's almost an offshoot. Palmer Lucky is a major one. He is a longtime Trump supporter, Trump fundraiser. Sort of his origin story founding mythology is that he was fired from Facebook, as it was known at the time, for running like an anti-Hillary Clinton meme campaign, was very abruptly fired by Facebook over that back when such a thing could get you fired, which feels very quaint. Uh, that was like back in 2016.
SPEAKER_01It was really interesting to think about that the other day when Andrew and Meta and Palmer Lucky and Mark Zuckerberg announced this new partnership on Oh my god. Yeah. What is XR for military? I can't even remember what XR stands for.
SPEAKER_00It was like augmented reality goggles for soldiers. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I mean, that that like basically uh Andrew blowing up wasn't no pun intended, was in no small part. I mean, I I think I think the company owes a lot culturally to this origin story of, oh, I got canceled and silenced by Facebook for being a Trump supporter. And I'm not even saying that's incorrect. Like I think he was, you know, being a Trump supporter in Silicon Valley in 2016 was categorically different than it is today. I do believe what he says that he was fired for that. But I think that being, you know, it's sort of like a like uh if Barry Weiss were making missiles, right? Like it she got to leave the new, you know, so much of her shtick is like, oh, I left, I was forced out of the New York Times because they couldn't handle my truth. And, you know, I I think that doing the sort of like I was forced out of the liberal establishment thing gives you a ton of cred uh in that world. So anyway, yeah, Palantir CEO Alex Carp, who's fascinating because he is ostensibly a Democrat, describes himself as a lifelong Democrat, but then you know goes on these strange rants about the pagan woke cult that the country is uh he keeps describing he's described it as pagan in many in uh on multiple occasions. You know, he's the kind of carp is the kind of guy who during earnings calls will talk about you know the like the thrill of killing. I mean, just yeah, he's a lot of violent rhetoric in his uh investor uh calls, leaning into this kind of uh Italian futurist fascist warrior uh mindset kind of thing. Mark Andreessen, I think, is a very important player here, uh the mega legendary venture capitalist who has taken a uh hard right turn at the same time that his that Andreessen Horowitz has really become a full-throated uh as has had a very full-throated embrace of military contracting and has really embraced jingoism as a kind of corporate identity. But I mean again, I think it it really is a this influence radiates outward from Peter Thiel directly, and you know, so many of the investors, Joe Lonsdale, another investor who is again a close teal ally and has become a pretty significant defense tech VC, you know, in his own right through his fund. Yeah, but all all all roads lead back to Teal.
SPEAKER_01And do we actually see evidence that they are like successfully getting into the Trump administration and the government trying to reshape how the military thinks about contracting, what they're talking about, where some of these contracts are going?
SPEAKER_00Well, what we know for sure now is that in the early days of the administration and during the transition uh after the election, some of these figures that I've just mentioned have gone either on the record or or it was reported that they uh were um consulting with the incoming administration about Pentagon staffing choices. I remember there was an interview Palmer Lucky did with, I believe it was CNBC, where he says something like that, you know, he's heard uh that this was, I think this was before Trump was even inaugurated, um, you know, that he was aware of some of the people being floated for top DoD positions, and he was like, you know, I'm not gonna get into it, but I would be happy with any of them. So, you know, uh yes, it there are many indications that they have been able to exert their influence even this early in the administration. You know, also worth pointing out that the uh Trump's nominee for under secretary of the army, which is a very important position, uh, is an Android executive. And I reported a few weeks ago that in his federal ethics disclosure, he said. Bucking decades of uh ethical norms that he would not be divesting uh his Andorral stock and would retain his financial stake in a company that has many extensive, very expensive contracts with the army. So this is someone in a position to uh have a major hand in you know in the discussions about what the army purchases, who will hold stock in a company that sells things to the army. So yeah, I think that that that is self-explained, self-explanatory why that would be uh of of concern.
SPEAKER_01Totally. It's just another small example of how you know these kind of ethics expectations are just completely gone out the window with the Trump administration and and everything that they're doing. I I feel like for me, when I started to come across these ideas, was often reading things from Palantir executives, right? You know, there was this report or whatever you want to call it, called the Defense Reformation, put out by uh Shyam Sankar, the Palantir CEO, near the end of last year, October of 2024. And then, of course, there was this book that was co-written, I guess, by Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska called the Technological Republic. And effectively in these documents, they are laying out some of the vision that you described earlier, right? You know, positioning China as this threat and needing the United States to basically maintain its power into the 21st century and how Silicon Valley should be a key part of that agenda, right? How it needs to refocus away from consumer products and this sort of more libertarian, you know, semi-progressive politics that it used to espouse in the past to really embrace the military-industrial complex, to really embrace the US state and its role in the world. It was a bit startling to see how full-throated and how open they were about those things, but also then to see how much that view has grown. So, what have you made of what we've been seeing there and the argument that they have been making in order to justify this significant shift?
SPEAKER_00What's really interesting to me is trying to discern between who genuinely believes this stuff and where there is perhaps opportunism here. I mean, I think that Mark Zuckerberg has provided a really good example of just how malleable some of these people are. I mean, you've seen every couple months he has like a new personality and wardrobe and haircut to sort of, depending on what's happening that on any given week. That's just what real men do, right? Uh you know. I mean, do you remember when he was really into um like he went through a phase of raising and killing chickens in his backyard? He had like a big like backyard, horizontally integrated barbecue setup where he was like really into he thought it was like really manly to just be like, I ripped this chicken's head off today and made nuggets. I think that now Zuckerberg is defense contractor, same dynamic. But you know, it's I don't think it's to look cool as he has, or to try to look cool as he has so frequently attempted. You know, I think that Meta sees that the climate, the political uh winds are blowing in a very different direction, and now they can get into the defense contracting game without a ton of uh backlash. I see that as of a different kind than what you see coming out of Palantir. So it's so just to say I think it's worth distinguishing between who is jumping on this train and who is uh actually pushing it forward. So I you mentioned China, and I think that none of this is possible without China. All of these arguments of re-arming, of rebuilding the arsenal of democracy, as Andreil loves to say, um, you do not have this defense tech renaissance in terms of corporate culture, in terms of where VCs are putting money, uh, in terms of what's what Washington has embraced. None of that happens without China and without the specter of imminent war with China. The big manifesto in this world was the um Andreas and Horowitz American Dynamism Manifesto, which is just a fascinating and bizarre document. But these are all centered around countering Chinese and specifically communist Chinese uh aggression. You will always see these people whenever whenever you see someone uh saying CCP and PRC all the time, odds are you are in a defense tech friendly uh space. Uh I mean, yeah, it that's not completely true, but uh it is it is very unsubtle red scare shit um and just sort of uh reheating of uh very, very, very familiar Cold War rhetoric. And you know, and it worked last time, right? If you have a terrifying communist enemy on the other side of the planet with an, you know, and and we're warned they're building and building and building, and we need to build too to uh keep pace, that's you know, that's proven in history to be very effective, right? So that is a huge part of the pitch is if we don't do this stuff, China's going to and we can't lose, and everything's a race. A lot of the people that I've that we've been talking about so far are you know on the American part of the American political right, um, you know, if not openly uh supportive of Donald Trump, then at least friendly to his administration. But I will say, you know, the China hawk stuff is not exclusive by any means to the right. And I think that's a big place where you know the this big new wave of defense tech spending and investing um has made a lot of made a lot of progress, is in pitching itself to something apolitical, right? Like being afraid of China is not a Republican project, it's not a democratic project, it's an American bipartisan political project that I think maybe just the right is exploiting a little bit better right now and more fruitfully.
SPEAKER_01I feel like for me, you had this discourse about China now that really comes out of the fact that in part the tech industry recognized that when the antitrust investigations were wrapping up and the efforts for regulation that they needed a story in order to justify the size and power that they've accumulated and they landed on China because that was becoming a bigger concern in the United States. And they said, okay, if we position China as the big enemy as its tech industry, you know, being a big threat to the US tech industry, then this helps us to argue against regulation and against antitrust and breakups and all this sort of thing because we are necessary in order to defend the United States against China and China's growing geopolitical position. And I feel like making this a bipartisan argument for me really comes out of this like debate between Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt. I don't know if you remember, you know, in 2019, Peter Thiel wrote this op-ed in the New York Times, basically calling out Google for like being too close to China and betraying America, basically, all this kind of stuff. Yeah. It's wild, right? And then like early 2020, Eric Schmidt releases his own op-ed where he's kind of like, no, like we are defending America, you know, we believe in the importance of America. And then he really begins this transformation where now he is one of the biggest pushers of like AI in the military, has completely adopted this narrative. Like you see the bipartisanship, not just you know, with Democrats and Republicans, but also how it's been adopted through so much of the tech industry.
SPEAKER_00I'm glad you brought Schmidt up because I think that he is almost as central to all this as Teal and crucial for this project because as you point out, Eric Schmidt, as an ostensible liberal, is able to get buy-in from Democrats who might otherwise see the whole, you know, we need we need 20 billion drones to uh defend Taiwan thing as just a we might be more inclined to see it as a as a as a partisan project. But no, I mean Eric Schmidt has been beating this drum for a long, long, long time. There's a wrinkle there with all the Project Maven stuff. I think that, you know, we should talk about that too. But yeah, no, Schmidt is in the middle of this and has been, I mean, no, you wrote a book with Henry Kissinger. I mean, I, you know, his ideology on this stuff is as hawkish as any Republican China hawk is, I think.
SPEAKER_01Do you want to just briefly say what the Project Maven controversy was at Google and what that might have done to like shift Schmidt's thinking and whatnot?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. So, I mean, that I think is like a seminal event over the past, you know, 10 or so years of how Silicon Valley's embrace a relationship with the Pentagon has changed. So Project Maven was a an aborted Google project with the Department of Defense to provide basically machine learning augmented drone technologies targeting stuff. I mean, it never really got off the ground very much because when it was reported that Google was going to work on drone warfare, there was a large employee revolt. And, you know, there was internal outrage in addition to external press and you know, sort of public backlash to that. And the employee dissent was so acute that they actually got the company to ditch the project. They dropped that contract. And the, you know, Google was put Google was put on the defensive. They had to sort of sort of apologize to their employees and and engage with this in a very real way. That is long gone, that dynamic. I mean, that that feels almost unrecognizable now. I remember there were some internal emails from Google from I'm blanking on the name, but from a uh someone high up in their machine learning RD, you know, in the research arm, and and some emails got published, I think believe the New York Times published them, where she's talking about how, you know, if people found out that Google was working with the military, that would be a major problem. Just even that, the fact of that would would be a huge liability. You know, that feels so quaint today when you have Mark Zuckerberg proudly talking about making augmented reality goggles for the army. I mean, Google is not shy about military contracting, whether it's here or in Israel, very notably. It's just I guess my point is it's hard to imagine employee backlash getting those kinds of results today because the companies have lost their sense of uh whatever sense of shame or vulnerability they felt around this issue is gone.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I feel like now when we do see employees speaking up, interrupting keynotes and presentations and things like that, we often hear a day or two later about how they've been fired and basically just kicked out of the organization, whether it's at Microsoft or Google or wherever, you know, the the kind of fear of the worker that maybe we had in that moment in the 2010s or so when we started to see more of that worker organizing and advocacy at that those companies, it really feels like that leverage is not there in the way that it was when they were trying to project a different image.
SPEAKER_00Totally. Yeah. I mean, the worker-led opposition to military contracting continues at Google and Microsoft, but they've failed to get the companies to in question to drop any of the um contracts that they oppose, which, you know, I I think that it takes uh remarkable bravery to speak out and to put your neck on the line. Uh and yeah, and I think that the uh the employee protest groups have brought a lot more scrutiny to bear on this part of the business that uh than would have otherwise happened. But at the end of the day, the contracts are still going. And, you know, a big part of that, as you point out, is that these companies, you know, Google and Microsoft are not shy about just shit canning people who talk. They will not hesitate to fire you if you speak out. And, you know, there are quite a few uh engineers and and other employees of these companies uh who are here on perhaps work-related visas. And given everything else that's happening in the country, you know, if you are horrified by what your employer is doing and you speak out or you, you know, hold a sign or outside the office or something and you get fired, I mean, they would have major repercussions anyway in a country where you need your employer to have health insurance, but you know, you're you're facing some pretty dire stuff. So um, you know, I don't want to discount the the really incredible bravery it takes to put yourself in that position. But what we've seen is companies just sort of not caring. They are okay being branded as being in the business of war and in the business, you know, at least adjacent to the business of killing, that the stigma around that is has vanished.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, which I think is really well said, right? It takes a lot of bravery to continue doing this in an environment where the companies have become so much more hostile to any kind of worker advocacy. I I wanted to pick up on a couple more aspects of this kind of narrative that these companies are putting out there. The first is how when I read what say Alex Carp is writing and these Palantir folks, they're basically making this argument that Silicon Valley became too focused on consumer products, too focused on the consumer and not on defending America, uh, I guess is how they would put it today. And that that really needs to shift, that we need to have this like engineering mindset that is about developing these tools to project American power and to protect the place of the United States in this current, more, I don't know, geopolitically fractious world, I guess. And then the other piece of that is, of course, often pointing to SpaceX as the example, right? To justify what they want to do. They say, look, how SpaceX moved into rocketry and brought down the cost and made things more efficient. Now we want to do that with drones and targeting and guns and tanks and planes and like whatever else, right? If you listen to Palmer Lucky and these folks as well. I guess what do you make of this broader image they are trying to project in order to serve this project that we've been talking about them trying to uh implement here?
SPEAKER_00This is another area where this goes nowhere without China. You need the specter. I mean, it only makes sense to say stop making products for consumers and stop make and start making weapons if you're able to convince people that the world is as dangerous as you're saying it is, right? Like a world that needs constant armament and rearmament and developing of state-of-the-art weapons at all times is only a coherent vision of the world where there is a you know communist plot for global domination coming from China. It's obviously a little self-serving to say, you know, hey, we make defense and intelligence tools, and we think that the defense and intelligence sector should be bigger. I think also that there's a part of that that goes back to sort of the cultural, the office, I mean, I don't want to say it's not it's bigger than office politics, but the sort of corporate dissent issue that we get into with Project Maven stuff. They very much want to normalize people wanting to work for weapons makers. You know, so I think when they talk about, oh, you know, these companies are too consumer-oriented, Palantir and Andoril and Shield AI and and all these companies and and and venture firms, you know, want engineers to graduate from Stanford or, you know, Carnegie Mellon or wherever and be eager to help build uh lethal drones or missiles or you know, whatever it may be. So, you know, I you have to kind of prime the pump. And I I really think that the cultural shift around this stuff is as significant as anything else. You need engineers to be willing to do this stuff. And I think that that is a big utility of a document like that, like the uh the Palantir, the Reformation thing. God, they they really look they really do fancy themselves as like philosopher, philosopher warriors um of like an ancient Greek variety or something. That clearly comes from like teal and carp, right? They're both. Oh my god, yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, exactly exactly, exactly. So I I think that the exhortation to pivot from consumer to military and intelligence also is working. You over the past, you know, in over the past year, Google has formally dropped some of its harm-based prohibitions around AI development that allow for more military work. Meta has dropped its prohibition against military AI and has formally become a defense contractor by partnering with Andoril. OpenAI dropped its prohibition against military and intelligence work and immediately jumped into that world. So, you know, you've you have seen an actual shift uh away from being a purely consumer or enterprise business to the business of warfare. I mean, 20 years ago, when I first got my Gmail account, it would have been unfathomable that Google would be a major defense contractor. You know, when I first installed Windows XP when I was a teenager, you know, it would have been strange to think about Microsoft being as gargantuan a military contractor around the world as they are. And Facebook is maybe the I mean, this is one of the crazier ones. I mean, that for Meta to embrace military contracting is just so strange given how that company got started. But, you know, all these companies got started building software for people to use at home and at work. I think the truth is that you can only sell so many Instagram ads, you can only get people to buy so many meta AI ray bans or whatever, you know, you can only sell so many Google Cloud accounts to small businesses. There is a shitload of money if you can get that Pentagon spigot to open. And this gets back to the question of like, do these people really believe these things about the world, or do they recognize accurately that military defense contracting is super, super, super lucrative and you can make a ton of money that way. I think it depends. But either, you know, even it even the true believers have to recognize that they are they stand to profit immensely through this worldview.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and this industry does seem really good at convincing themselves of their own bullshit, right? To to make it seem like it's not just uh a business proposition or something, but that they're saving the world or whatever by doing whatever it is that they're doing. I I want to ask you a bit more about OpenAI, but I have one more question before that, which is really around this more aggressive rhetoric. You know, you mentioned how Alex Carp will be on these investor calls and will be talking about war and killing and all this sort of stuff. And I listened to this interview with Palmer Lucky recently. He's been talking about how we need a warrior class that's ready to sacrifice and go to war and all this kind of stuff, and you know, is basically positioning his vision of what the future is going to look like as one that is very much deterrence-based by having all of these Western allies of the United States becoming like porcupines because they're armed to the teeth with you know a bunch of AI and automated weapons and all this kind of stuff. I I just wonder what you make of you know the language that these people use and how how easily they talk about death and war and and these sorts of things.
SPEAKER_00So I just pulled up this quote. This was from February of this year, and this is from Alex Carp. Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and when it's necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. That is, I think, an unusual way for uh a chief executive of a company to talk. I mean, you don't hear even the CEOs of companies that are very directly in the business of slaughter, right? Like you don't uh speak that way. But it's a branding thing. It's like a you know, hyper masculine, unapologetically violent right-wing political and business project. Um, you know, I again I mentioned the uh constant reference to the CCP and the PRC as being sort of like wink-wink, anti-communist. I mean, you know, obviously it is it is the CCP and it is the PRC, but I think when you're saying CCP instead of China, you are sending a signal of sorts. You know, it is again like a political wink and nod. Constant invocations of Chinese communism and of the Communist Party. And also, I I think the the term national security is fascinating, especially when in the mouths of these executives, particularly someone like Mark Zuckerberg. Meta has billions of users around the world. Most of them, the overwhelming majority of them, are not Americans. And so to have a company like Meta, you know, an American company obviously, but one with a global presence and one that has the ability to, you know, police the speech of billions of non-Americans, when you have that company saying, we are in the business of American national security, there's a there's an antagonism there, right? Like most people who are using meta products, their security is not our national security. I'm saying that as an American, you know, I mean, that is not their interest. They might live in countries that are allied with the United States. They very well may live in countries that are not that are you know considered adversaries of the United States. And so I it's yeah, I think that is a really important dynamic to keep an eye on is companies with global user bases that are vast, that are throwing in with one particular country. And, you know, it's not strange for an American a company that's headquartered in California to say, hey, we believe in America and we support the United States, et cetera. But they it it's it goes beyond that. You know, it goes beyond that and into we want to advance American security interests, you know, foreign policy goals, and maintain American dominance of, you know, of the planet. That is, I think, a very different message than just yes, obviously, you know, we we love our country. You know, you you are aligning your technology company with the State Department and the Pentagon, and that's profound.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I remember even when Francis Haugen, you know, leaked all that stuff a few years ago, and she was in front of, I can't remember if it was the Senate or the House, you know, one of those committees. And, you know, obviously everyone was talking about the Instagram revelations and the bigger problems. But I remember one of the uh the Congress people there was basically asking her about the way that Meta or Facebook was working with the intelligence departments and whether they should be doing more of that. And, you know, despite all the criticism of Facebook, she kind of laid out how they were working with the intelligence agencies in the United States to identify Chinese use of the platform, Iranian use of the platform. Platform, things like that, and said that they should be doing more of it, right? So, like to a certain degree, some of these things have already been happening, but we're seeing a lot more of it come much more out in the open in a way like you were talking about in the past, where these companies would want to kind of hide the fact that they were working with the US government, with intelligence agencies, with the defense department. Now it's like we are going to put that out there right on the forefront. We might even exaggerate a bit what we're actually doing and the impact that it's going to have because things have shifted so much in the past few years.
SPEAKER_00Well, there's also yeah, absolutely. But there's also um a great irony, I think, of one of the specific threats that we are warned about vis-a-vis China by many of these same companies and executives is the extent to which Chinese companies work hand in hand hand in glove with the Chinese military and with Chinese military intelligence. You know, we there's always the invocation of uh civil-military fusion, right? Like the pri the Chinese private sector is a mirage, it's all just one big machine. You know, and for those reasons, we need tighter integration than ever between the Department of Defense and Silicon Valley. It doesn't seem like they ever recognize an issue there. And you know, it's it's funny to imagine what the rest of the world is supposed to make of that. You're basically saying when Chinese corporations collaborate directly with the Chinese military, that is cause for massive alarm. But when American companies do the very same thing, you know, that that should be reassuring. You know, I again I think that whether or not you believe that depends very much on where you live in this large world, you know, and if and if you were one of the uh non-American users of these uh of it. I mean, I'm talking like the about the big tech platforms, not about something like Palantir Andrew. But if you are a meta user or a Google user, odds are you probably have a very different view of American hegemony.
SPEAKER_01I feel like even a few years ago, even a lot of Western allies would have been broadly okay with that. But these days, that is really changing.
SPEAKER_00Even if you're in Canada, you you probably aren't uh, you know, that that that that that hits different now, you know. I mean, I and making American uh military hegemony a business priority, I think has incredible implications. But you know, that that's that's a huge part of the pitch. You know, I think that also getting back to the um you know patriotism versus cynicism question here, I think that it is very savvy from a business perspective. If you are perhaps worried about, oh, I don't know, antitrust scrutiny or regulatory scrutiny from Congress. Um, I mean, not that there's a huge threat of that right now, but um, if you are worried, you know, if if if you're one of these companies, you see getting uh, you know, getting with the team as being uh sort of insulating yourself from some of that. I think it stands to reason that you are much less likely to get dragged before Congress and yelled at again if you or if you are proudly declaring that American national security is a core meta value.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And I feel like on that point, maybe that's a good opportunity to talk briefly about OpenAI, right? Because this is not a company, you know, it's been around for a little while, but it's not one of these dominant firms like a like a Meta or a Google, but it has risen really quickly in the past few years. And it certainly had a very different narrative in its earlier days when it founded as a nonprofit versus now being a very dominant and influential company within Silicon Valley. How have you seen the narrative that that company is using shift over the past few years, given its own business interests, but also, you know, the larger changing political climate that has been happening at the same time?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I mean, OpenAI is a fascinating case study because um 10 years ago, it was founded as a explicitly globalist humanitarian nonprofit. The mission was, and still is, at least on their website, to ensure that AI benefits all of humanity. And that that term, that phrase all of human benefits all of humanity is key and is like the cornerstone of the company's ethos, at least it says. And so a lot of the the early rhetoric out of open AI is about this explicitly international mission. You know, AI is going to benefit the species that created it, not the country where open AI is headquartered. Ten years later, that is long gone, at least in terms of public messaging and in terms of internal hiring. But um, open AI, you know, rewind a little bit, they uh up until uh very recently have an explicit prohibition against military work in their acceptable use policy. You cannot use Chat GPT to augment your military operations. They delete that. At around the same time that that happens, they are uh continuing to staff up with alumni from the Department of Defense, from the intelligence community, and they start hiring with a lot of explicitly national security-oriented goals. Now, I have a piece coming out in the Intercept this week about you know the question of how is it possible to have a mission that seeks to benefit the entire species, the entire world, everyone on the planet, and then also say we believe in uh securing the future of the United States on the global on a global scale. We believe in ensuring American uh artificial intelligence dominance. We believe in America supporting American national security, we support the American military and intelligence community. They have made national security as a concept their byword. Like that is informing the mission right now. And you know, the thing about national security is that it's it's specific to one country, right? Like national security, when you when you're an American and you're talking about national security, you're talking about American national security. You're talking about American military and foreign policy interests. And you know, I I think it is worth questioning to what extent it is possible to reconcile a mission of benefiting all of humanity and a mission of benefiting the military of one individual country. I would, you know, I would suggest that it is not possible to reconcile that those two things are irreconcilable. You have to sort of choose whether you're you know, team world or team America.
SPEAKER_01It makes me think that the United States has often tried to thread that line a number of times. Like what immediately comes to mind is the moon landing, and you know, this is something that is for all of mankind, you know, at the moment, would have been what they were saying. But then you plant the American flag and it's about showing American dominance and that America was able to do this, and specifically not the Soviet Union, right?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. And it, you know, it's funny, there there are so many echoes of you know, so many things that are coming out of OpenAI and from Sam Altman individually, but also just from the company in terms of its public rhetoric, sounds exactly like something that would have come out of the State Department. They talk about basically how, in some cases, open AI's business interests and American national security interests are one and the same, right? And again, comes back to China. OpenAI is very keen to outpace Chinese competitors, and they argue that the corporate AI race and the great power competition between the US and China are one and the same. They're the same battle, and so it doesn't make sense for us to sort of dispense with all the formalities and and team up. And uh, you know, team up they have. Uh they are um, you know, again, they they have really rushed to embrace defense and intelligence contracting.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I guess on that point, like my final question would really be we're seeing these alignments happening. You know, we're obviously seeing the American government shift toward this relationship with the tech industry and the tech industry really trying to take advantage of this in order to ensure that they have much more access to all of this funding from, you know, the Pentagon, from the Defense Department are being prioritized for procurement more and more. But what do you see as the potential consequence of all of this and and the risks that this is setting up as we have the tech industry basically explicitly becoming defense contractors, seeing that as a primary revenue source for them? And you know, the the language that you were talking about, where they are using this kind of militaristic, warlike, aggressive language, what are your concerns about all of those developments?
SPEAKER_00There are many. Well, first, there's just a colossal potential for fraud and corruption here. And, you know, I I want to say, like, I think that these companies really, the the defense tech companies really want to be viewed as like a sea change and a total break from the prior history of American military contracting. Maybe in some ways that they they you know they are significantly different, but they I think it would be a big mistake to look at them as somehow like a paradigm shift or like this is a whole new world. No, they're gonna be subject to all of the same problems as arms makers have always been subject to, which is revolving door between government and private industry and all of the you know collusion that and corruption that can come with that, the massive conflicts of interest, you know, the advancing of uh defense spending programs that provide little benefit or utility, but are very lucrative. I mean, the the the the goggles that Meta is building with Androil, I think are a great example. It was originally a Microsoft project, and when they were being tested in in the field, they were causing incredible bouts of nausea among uh soldiers who are wearing them. Like they didn't work, they made people feel sick, and it was super expensive. You know, so I I think that you know, we need to look for all the same red flags that we've always, you know, people have always looked for is like, does this make sense? All these uh tech guys love to, you know, love to slag on the F-35, but it's like, to what extent are they just building an F-35 out of drone, out of out of like, out of, you know, it's drones now, and it's AI now, right? Like the potential for bullshit is significant. And, you know, from a colossal waste standpoint, I think that's something everyone should be concerned about. You know, of course, also having people who uh for whom violence in the name of American foreign policy is a good thing, is a virtue. Having those people be in positions of greater influence is obviously alarming, particularly if you're not an American. But you know, but even if you are, I mean, these are people who, for whom war, or at least the specter of war, are fantastic for business and they are very visible. You know, I think I doubt anyone knows, could name who the hell the you know the CEO of Raytheon is or Lockheed, but the people who run these companies are, if not household names, they're at least far more visible in the public eye. They're not afraid to be outspoken and to throw their weight around and to throw their influence around. And, you know, there are people who who want, if not a war with China, to get as close as possible, uh, because that's how you sell fleets of drones and you know, next generation machine learning uh platforms, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So to have people for whom war is excellent business be in a position of political influence is I think, you know, it's obvious why that's dangerous. I mean, that that is literally dangerous. The fraud, waste and abuse stuff is is awful and corrosive to a society, but the um, you know, the ray-ra, let's go to war, you know, we need to stockpile bombs and drones, et cetera, is I think, you know, dangerous in a far more literal sense.
SPEAKER_01You know, when you're thinking about those projects that are supposed to be much more efficient and much better, but actually turn out to be boondoggles, we might be in the process of seeing that with the starship rocket, even after SpaceX did so much better with the Falcon 9 and things like that, right? So just because they say they're better doesn't mean they necessarily uh are.
SPEAKER_00And I wish something that people kept in mind more often with SpaceX and the Starship Rocket specifically is like that, even you know, I think SpaceX somehow gets a pass as being like a we're gonna build Starfleet, we're bringing the species to Mars or whatever. No, I mean SpaceX is obviously a colossal defense contractor. And the starship, the Starship Rocket specifically, has been assessed within the Department of Defense as a potential cargo hauler or even troop carrier. So like this is a military platform as well. They've gotten away somehow with being like a SpaceX doesn't have the same connotation as Palantir or you know, Andoril, even.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because it's just making us multiplanetary, right? But maybe that changes now that uh Elon Musk's reputation is sullied by the doge work. We'll see. Anyway, Sam, it was really great to have you on the show to explore all of the scary realities of what's happening with this tech trump collaboration. Thanks so much for taking the time. Fantastic to be here. Thanks for having me on. Sam Biddle is a senior technology reporter at The Intercept. Tech Won's Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening. Make sure to come back next week.