From AI and Defense Tech, to Tariffs and the New Streaming Wars: The Best of Bold Names

0:00Mims. Tim. Can you believe we've done 23 episodes of Bold Names. I genuinely cannot. But I do know that we've covered a lot of ground in that time. AI, robots, defense tech, EVs, the end of the global economic system as we know it, the online sports betting industry, Tubi. And we're not finished. We're coming back September 12th with new episodes on Fridays, and we'll be on YouTube, so our fans and my mom will be able to see us. Shout out to moms. Tim, how are we going to celebrate? Well, how else but a clip show. And we went through the Bold Names archives and picked some favorite moments, the most memorable conversations with guests who really surprised us, really excited us.

0:50And we put it all together. Think of it as, now that's what I call Bold Names Volume 1. We're going to start with Palmer Luckey, the founder and CEO of defense tech company Anderle. That's next.

1:09First stop on our trip into the Bold Names archives, Palmer Luckey, founder and CEO of weapons manufacturer Andro. We talk about how Luckey, a longtime supporter, President Trump, is using his influence in both Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. to secure U.S. military contracts while trying to remake the government's approach to national security. Yeah, this conversation took a few surprising turns. Lucky quoted iconic singer Patti LaBelle. He read us his latest text messages from Elon Musk, and he shared his thoughts on the Black Eyed Peas. Definitely worth checking out the whole interview.

1:47But here's one of our favorite clips. Let's get into it. So while we're talking about these autonomous, you know, flying drones, essentially, obviously those have been hugely important in Ukraine. I mean, a lot of these still are built in China. The U.S. has had trouble maintaining market share there. The Pentagon's trying to encourage U.S. manufacturing of these really low-cost, autonomous munitions in a way. Where are we at? Why can't we maintain any market share there in the U.S.? there's about a half dozen small drone makers in the U S that are building really powerful tools in, in, in that category.

2:32Uh, I think that the problem is that the United States has not really made it part of a procurement strategy to actually use tools like that yet. Like the reason you see Ukraine using small quadcopters is because they're in a war. They're using whatever they can get their hands on, whatever they can build in country, whatever they can buy from China. And they're strapping grenades to, to drones and flying them around and blowing them up. The United States, like we don't have a program of record for armed quadcopters. There's earlier research and development going on. There are early prototypes of things going on.

3:01We're building a larger attack quadcopter that is fitting into a Marine Corps program for organic precision fires. But again, that's early stages. They're basically at the stage where they're buying hundreds of them to try out with the intent of getting into it later. So I'm actually not too worried on the small quadcopter side. I think the United States is actually doing fine there. Where we really get screwed is on munitions that are a bit harder to build, things like cruise missiles, things like surface-to-air interceptors. In that case, I mean, you've probably read all the stories, U.S. wargaming results.

3:41We run out in two weeks in a fight with China. Yeah, it depends on who you ask. There's people who say a day, there's people who say eight days, people who say two weeks. But you can see the tenor of it is all the same. And let's say that it is two weeks. Two weeks of pain doesn't mean much to a dictator who thinks in terms of centuries, right? If China believes that we can put up a good fight for a week or two, and then it's going to take us years to rebuild our industrial capacity on the weapons side, I mean, that's an easy trade for someone like him to make. Just get through the pain and come out the other side with the world's largest military by far standing unopposed and a U.S.

4:23arsenal that is empty. OK, but and we have a new secretary of defense and Pete Hegseth. He recently said, I'm quoting here, we have some really fast moving newer contractors that are willing to work that have already put a lot of money into R &D that want to help us rapidly field these new systems that we're going to need for fights in the future. defense spending is you know at this point given the push toward efficiency a zero-sum game um that feels like he's talking about you some of these other drone makers you just mentioned um i mean do you see this as as a good sign for andrel number one and number two how can we realize the dream that you just articulated in a world where we're trying to shrink budgets even the defense budget it sounds like or they're looking for efficiencies So to be honest, it's not that hard.

5:14We spend so much on so little. We spend so much money on capabilities that are of very little consequence to deterring a conflict with China. Legacy things that made sense when we were investing very heavily in counterterrorism, made a lot of sense when we were imagining that we were going to get into a large-scale land war in Europe. I actually think that in a lot of ways, Andrel will do better in a world where defense budgets are going down, because that's when you have to tighten your belt. When your budget is stable or going up, it's easier for people to just keep spending on everything they're already spending on, because nobody will complain, and then add even more on top of that.

5:55When you're forced to tighten your belt, that's when you start to make trade-offs and say, you know, do I really need to keep, for like, what example is the Marine Corps getting rid of their tanks? And they said, you That's not the future of the Marine Corps island hopping in the Pacific. Tanks are not going to be part of that. So you know what? We're going to get rid of them. That's at a shockwave through the DOD to have the commandant make that decision. We probably need to make 100 decisions that are just like that, fundamentally recomposing the force, their mission, how we think about deterrence.

6:24My ideological view is that the United States should not be the world police. We should be the world gun store. We need to stop sending our people overseas to die for other people's sovereignty. and we need to be willing to sell them the weapons they need to make themselves into prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on, nobody wants to bite, nobody wants to take a bite of them. That's how I think we're going to help our allies, not just like Ukraine or Israel, but looking at other places that China has on their roadmap, like the Philippines, like South Korea, like Japan. We need to sell them the tools that they need to defend themselves.

6:56When you rethink things that way, you say, well, wait, maybe we don't need to budget to have hundreds of thousands of troops that are ready to go fight for this particular country. Maybe we can actually put that money into advanced munitions production of things that are 90 % fewer parts, much easier to make, where we can make large quantities of them sufficient to deter a conflict. Maybe we actually can cut defense spending and also get more capability. I'll finish this rant by saying this, which is I'm actually probably a little bit at odds with some of my Republican colleagues where they're saying, hey, we're at 2.9 % of GDP on defense spending.

7:32If we're telling the rest of the world that we need to, they need to be at 5%, you know, shouldn't we be at 5 % too? I lean more towards, I think we can do it with what we're already spending or less. That's Anderle's CEO, Palmer Luckey. One of the lines here that really stood out to me. At one point he said, the U.S. should not be the world police, we should be the world gun store. Tim, we're going to continue along this windy path of geopolitics. And here's some of our conversation with Evan Smith, the CEO of a company called Altana. Altana is kind of like LinkedIn, but instead of resumes and grinds at posts, it gives its customers insight into the details of their supply chains.

8:16Yeah, and we did this interview at like the perfect time during the peak of the tariff turmoil back in May. At one point, he even told us that a board member at a Fortune 50 company told him that President Trump's Liberation Day was an economic Pearl Harbor. Let's listen. So now it seems like we're getting a little break from the Liberation Day tariffs. Break, I'm putting in scare quotes. So they've been paused on nearly 100 nations. Are things back to normal? Can we all go home now? Can we end this podcast right here? Look, even if we got to a place tomorrow where it was like, okay, we're done.

8:58Let's go back to the way it was, which that won't happen, but let's just imagine the scenario. We're going to live through what's called a bullwhip effect in the world economy, in the global supply chain for the next nine or 12 months. It was such a big shock to the system. So the logistics providers themselves, where do the containers go? Where are the ships? The distortion to inventories, the distortion to orders, it's this massive shock to the system that's going to reverberate for the rest of the year easily. So even if we just magically kind of went back to the way things were, we'd still be living through that shock.

9:38I think the other thing that this did, back to my comment about economic Pearl Harbor, was this really rubbed every board and C-suite nose in the fact that geopolitics are now primary in governing and steering global businesses. So it's not just like Like the market rationale, who's growing what, where, what products do I need to get where, at what cost, with what distribution networks and supply chain. It's geopolitics front and center. And that's not going to change, right? Like the rules of the game just changed. And what we saw China do in response is they put this gun to our head and said, you know, if you're going to cut off our trade, we're going to cut off your ability to access these critical minerals and magnets.

10:31We're going to shut down the most important production chains in your country. Because those magnets are in motors and all sorts of high value production. Weapons, motors, semiconductors, advanced electronics, autonomous systems, all of our information, telecommunication infrastructure. Short of selling our bonds, that was the biggest lever they could pull. And what do you hear? Half of your business comes from government, presuming a lot of it is the federal government, presuming you're talking with the Trump administration. What are you hearing from the Trump administration? Yeah, I don't want to be super specific, but yeah.

11:09We like specific here. Sure. Please relay your last conversation with Scott Bessent. I will not. So I'm very confident that the effort to refact, factor in the entire global trading system is in the first or second inning, not the ninth. First or second inning. So it just escalates here, more chaos ahead? It's going to be more of this big swing here, big announcement there, maybe a precision strike here. And we're in a big negotiation phase where I think the administration is hopeful that enough countries are going to come to the table, willing to make enough sweeping changes that, you know, it starts to snowball.

11:56Like that's the hopeful scenario. And then you can see it going in other ways too, potentially. To put a fine point on it, you think there's going to be more big swings as these negotiations play out? I am, I'm a hundred percent convicted.

12:14let's go back to where we almost began this conversation the golden arches diplomacy that you kind of referenced it's almost 30 years ago globalization was very in vogue and thomas friedman had his big mac diplomacy theory the idea that no two countries that both have a mcdonald's have ever fought a war against each other the kind of the idea that free trade would interconnect the world in a way that would prevent armed conflict. Well, in hindsight, that seems maybe idealistic. Why was Thomas Friedman wrong? Why were so many people wrong about this idea that free trade was this kind of ushering in kind of a utopia for the world?

12:55They got it exactly wrong, meaning they confused the causality. Look, the point is that we really came out with this very triumphalist, optimistic, cheerful view that globalization, free trade was the end state. And then what I've unlearned since then, what I've come to realize is that it's literally the opposite. Free trade does not create peace. Peace creates free trade. Peace gives rise to free trade. And we all sort of came of age in an era where we had a unipolar security umbrella provided by the United States policing all of the waters, right? Maritime security, free trade. That era is over.

13:53And now you have Russia asserting itself, Iran asserting itself, and most of all, China asserting itself. And guess what? But now you're seeing the breakdown of the free trading system as those geopolitical interests become primary over the economic interests. You call it the end of globalization 1.0, I believe. I do. That you have a date even. That was Thursday, February 24th, 2022. That was the day that Russia invaded Ukraine. And then I think the debate was over. That was a McDonald's having nation invading another McDonald's having nation, right? Evan Smith, CEO of Altana I think this conversation really stood out to us for a couple of reasons First, it's his conviction that our global economic system as we know it will never be the same Also the fact that he said Thomas Friedman got it exactly wrong About his golden arches theory of diplomacy We're going to take a quick break When we come back, one of the hottest areas in tech right now is humanoid robots We'll look back on our conversation with Ayanna Howard, a roboticist and the dean at The Ohio State University College of Engineering.

15:07And then, coming up later in the show, we'll hear highlights from our interview with Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleiman, who told us why he's skeptical of visions of superhuman AI showing up anytime soon. I think there's obviously a lot of motivated reasoning if you're fundraising and so on. And look, there are very smart people who I respect deeply, who think it is literally imminent. Stay with us.

15:46Now we're going to hear from Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleiman in a bit. But first, we're going to touch on another buzzy industry, humanoid robots. Way back in February, we spoke with Ayanna Howard. She's a roboticist and the dean at the Ohio State University College of Engineering. She has been working on humanoid robots and the software brains that power them for decades. Humanoid robots and AI are two of the hottest fields in tech right now. We try to bring a healthy skepticism to these overhyped industries when we cover them on the show. We talked about what it would take for the many humanoid robot startups out there now to actually succeed.

16:29Let's take a listen. So suddenly humanoids are the hottest thing in tech other than AI. There are, by my count, more than a dozen startups worldwide that have racked up significant investment to work on these. Some of these startups, it's in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So as in my estimation, the world expert on humanoid robots, who's not already employed by a humanoid robot company, I have to ask, why is this happening now? What is going on? There's a couple of things. One is that humanoid robots is the next shiny penny that's out there that tech folks and VCs, venture capitalists can invest in.

17:09But I think it's also this logical for those who aren't in robotics. It seems like the next logical step around artificial intelligence and generative AI is, oh, let's think about generative AI with the physical embodiment. And so if I'm thinking about the technology lineage, it's going to be humanoids because generative AI is about human knowledge, human knowledge in a body, human body must be a humanoid. So it's just a natural progression for a non-roboticist to think that way. shiny penny uh there's clearly a lot of hype in this space right now and probably no one's bigger at the hype than tesla's own techno king elon musk and he's recently saying that he thinks his car company uh can build 10 000 humanoid robots by the year's end a goal that he even he seems to concede they won't meet but if they get to thousands uh he'll be happy and then there's a a company called Figure, which is out recently talking about how it's going to deploy 100 ,000 robots in the next four years.

18:16So generally speaking, where is the technology currently? What are these kinds of humanoid robots capable of doing in reality in your estimation? If you think about the abilities of humanoids and what you would like them to do in theory, you'd like them to go from point A to point B, so navigation. They can do that pretty well, given that you can model the environment. Once they get to another location, you want them to be able to manipulate. So move objects, pick up things, build things, and then go back from B to A or B to C, the last mile, as an example. Now what they're really - The last feat.

18:54The last feat, at least in our human environments. The reality though, is that just like with self-driving cars is that they can be very, very, very effective in limited situations, limited environments, limited tasks with humans not rampant around them. They can be positive, but that's not going to give you a billion dollar valuation of a company. It feels like these robots are where autonomous cars were, I want to say 10 years ago, but maybe it's more like 20 or 30 years ago. Is that a fair analogy? I would say that they are at the point when all of the investment incurred, which I would say that was about 10 years ago, where startups were just popping up.

19:47They were talking about self-driving cars are going to be rampant within the next 24 months, including well-established car companies. And as roboticists, we're always like, do you remember that car that drove across America about 40 years ago? That's where we are with humanoid robotics. We've seen humanoid robotics 40, 50 years ago. Clunky, not well designed necessarily. And just like with self-driving cars, I always like to think about Hunger Games. There will be a winner at some point. We just don't know, one, who the winner is, and two, what is that application that is going to really set it apart from everyone else?

20:30So the battle for supremacy in humanoid robots is going to be like the Hunger Games, Tim, at least according to roboticist Ayanna Howard. But what do you think? Well, I'm definitely excited to watch that movie play out. It's been super exciting to see how something very similar occurred in the autonomous car space. We had a number of companies duking it out. And in recent years, a narrowing of the field, those who are really viable at this point, the likes of Waymo and Tesla and Zoox. So I would imagine we're early days right now with humanoid robots, and eventually we're going to start seeing those punches fly.

21:14Or at least that would be great for the movie. Now, MIMS, let's change gears just a little bit from humanoid robots to something closely related, artificial intelligence. And, you know, few people developing AI have as much experience in the field as Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleiman. He co-founded DeepMind, helped Google develop its large language models, and designed AI chatbots at his former startup, Inflection AI. And now he's leading Microsoft's efforts on its consumer AI products, like Copilot. He's also navigating the company's complicated relationship with OpenAI, one of the biggest dramas in tech right now.

21:59Popcorn emoji. We also wanted to know, in a world in which AI will be capable of doing pretty much everything we do, what's left for the humans? We got into all of that in our chat with Microsoft AI chief, Mustafa Suleiman. In Silicon Valley and in San Francisco, where I'm talking to you from, the big term is artificial general intelligence. AGI is the hot buzzword. Of all the chiefs of AI who are well-known, you seem the most skeptical that it's arriving anytime soon. The least interested in it in a way. Why is that? I don't think I'm skeptical that it's arriving anytime soon. soon to me is sometime in the next 10 years.

22:44I think some people are saying maybe tomorrow, right? Well, I think there's obviously a lot of motivated reasoning if you're fundraising and so on. And look, there are very smart people who I respect deeply who think it is literally imminent. So look, I guess, like I said earlier, to me, the goal isn't super intelligence for its own sake. You know, super intelligence is framed as, you know, the moment when an AI is as good as all humans at all tasks, not just like one human at one task, but like all of us collectively put together. controlling and containing something as powerful as that, you know, just seems like unfathomably complex and aligning it to our interests and making it really want to care about us enough not to step on us and, you know, squish us.

23:41I think the reason I started off in technology and what I'm passionate about is solving hard social problems. I care about healthcare. I care about energy, I care about food systems, I care about education. And these tools are going to transform those industries and genuinely deliver a world of abundance. That is coming. In the next 10 or 20 years, I really believe we're going to reduce the cost of energy production to near zero marginal cost, which underpins the cost of everything. I really believe that we are going to have medical superintelligence sometime in the next two to five years, which means a domain specific, contained, aligned medical expert that can diagnose any condition and can orchestrate care in real live clinical settings.

24:31And that to me is true prize. That's why we're working on this. That's what I call humanist superintelligence. And that's probably why you find me more focused on those things rather than on sort of AGI or superintelligence for its own sake. That reminds me a lot of one of your colleagues and how he likes to talk about the immediate future. And that's, of course, Sam Altman. Our colleagues at the Journal have reported on what feels like a healthy rivalry at Microsoft. Some of your teams involving the partnership with open AI. You know, there's a lot of big personalities involved. There's very high stakes.

25:20Are we seeing kind of the same kind of creative friction that we've seen in other partnerships in the past? Or, you know, what's going on there where you have this partnership with the leading AI lab, but you're building AI and you're using their tools at the same time? It seems very complicated. I mean, look, first of all, this partnership is going to go down as one of the most successful for both sides in technology history. Over the last six years, both companies have blossomed and it's going to continue for many years to come, at least until 2030 and hopefully way beyond that. Look, we are a$3 trillion company.

26:00And at one level, AI is unquestionably the future of the technology industry that Microsoft has formed and shaped over the last 50 is. So, you know, as much as we are a partnership based company that is a platform of platforms, we also have to be AI self-sufficient in many ways, too. So, look, it's a great partnership. It's going to continue. There's always going to be creative friction. They build and sell APIs, you know, as well as obviously chatbots. And we do the same. So there's some tension. But But fundamentally, we're really all trying to compete against Google and against Meta and all of the others.

26:43Does that mean building your own Frontier Foundation models? I don't know about Frontier, but we've definitely been developing our own models for many years. They tend to be SLMs, midsize models, so small language models and midsize models. But just having the know-how to be able to build models for our products, for our use cases, this is a big priority for us. I'm so fascinated with the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft. I'm curious, how often do you talk to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI? Pretty frequently, all the time. I mean, you know, he's a big part of the Microsoft ecosystem. And, you know, we're all in constant contact, including with Satya and the rest of the team.

27:29What's most impressed you by him or what's most frustrated you by him? I think he's a brilliant visionary. And, you know, ChatGPT has been an incredible success. I think he's very good at letting lots of flowers bloom and then making sure that he bets on the right ones. In the years running up to 2020, they were betting on games and simulations and robotics and lots of different methods. And they let those die quickly and at the right pace in order to make the bet on GPT-2 and GPT-3. And I think they did that incredibly well. Yeah, you know, I read the other day the information. I recently had a report that said OpenAI is working to develop its own workplace programs like Word to allow users to collaborate.

28:16And that kind of feels like that's getting into Microsoft space. What do you think of such moves by your partner? I think it's great. Like they are an independent company. We happen to own a large chunk of them. But we compete with them. They compete with us when they're successful. We're successful because we own a big chunk of them. So we have no influence on what products they do or don't make. They are entirely independent and they're free to build whatever they want. That said, you know, there is this just really fascinating contract that OpenAI has with you, which I've never understood this.