11/10/25: Data Center Backlash, Sam Altman Freaks On Bubble, Biden War Crime Coverup, Hegseth Says US On War Footing

25:09So just on that first part, right, he's saying, oh, no, we totally like if companies fail, they should go under. We totally don't want the federal government backstopping our data centers. But we do think here's some ways that government should actually backstop data centers. and, you know, it may be more for their benefit. But of course it would benefit OpenAI as well if, you know, the government is getting involved in the business of building this strategic national reserve. In theory, it's not a horrible idea. It's that in practice, what it would be done is a way for OpenAI to offset its huge capital expenditure onto the taxpayer while they get to benefit from it.

25:46Now, in theory, if we were to build or own some stake in it, I mean, this is one reason I was very pro the Intel deal. The whole reason that I thought we should have taken 10 % in Intel, it's like, yeah, at the end of the day, this company basically destroyed itself on the back of shareholder capitalism. And you do need some impetus in terms of a national strategy to say, absolutely not. No, we're going to take a stake in this company. We're going to guide you in direction of the nation. The issue with just having that and then basically privatizing, or no, what is it? Socializing the biggest cost center for these people is it would actually be a boon to their stock price while also not getting anything from them in return.

26:23What are the public things that we would all want from OpenAI? For me, what it would be is this whole porn suicide thing. It's over. It's over. Like anything that subsidizes or encourages addictive or mental health behaviors which are detrimental to the user, absolutely not. I think that we should all have a real say in that. And as a result of us, let's say, taking some of that off, a huge amount of your compute power is going to go to stuff which we think is more beneficial. Why don't you actually solve cancer? Why don't you actually go and point at some of the directions that we think that you should do?

26:56That's what we, as a society, we should try to use this technology, especially if we're going to bail it out or provide some of a subsidy, then into the benefit of what we can agree as a democratic society for what we want from it. But instead, that's not what's going to happen. David Sachs said there will be no federal bailout of AI. He's the White House AI czar. We'll see. To be honest, I'm not sure they have a choice. Like, if you allow it to fail, we are in a full-blown recession. Full-blown. Like, we have no manufacturing. We have nothing. Yes, the interest rates would come down, but, I mean, stock portfolio will crater.

27:35Do people remember.com? I mean, at one point, stock went down by 99%. Like, we will see a full-blown meltdown in assets for the boomers. So they'll have nothing if you're trying to retire. I mean, you know, it could be worse. But for them, like their stock portfolios will melt. They will have nothing. Younger folks, of course, will bear the brunt because reduction in stock means no hiring. And then there'll be a huge mass layoff. And then what? Like at that point, no one's going to be buying many houses because a lot of people use margin accounts like the rich people who buy how they use margin accounts on their assets to buy.

28:13And there'll be no tax subsidy. Like it'll be bad. Not bad. I don't know if they have a choice but to bail it out. We don't have anything else. And that was the logic of the bank that was like, listen, we all know that this is not, but like, what if we let these institutions fail? We don't know what that looks like. Like, that could be a total, like, calamity. Yeah, it would have been a calamity. That you can't recover. So, yeah, it's going to be ugly, but we don't know. And so too big to fail means that they want to make it the logic such that the government has no choice or feels that they have no choice anyway, that the pain of allowing this organization to fail is so great that it's not like you need Sam in there advocating.

28:57The logic of the system is what makes it too big to fail. And yes, we're already there. I mean, these tech stocks are covering up so many glaring disasters in the American economy. If you put the tech stocks, the Magnificent Seven or whatever, aside, and you look at the rest of the performance of consumer stocks and banking stocks, etc., our stock market is actually underperforming even the European indexes. So the fact that we have, you know, NVIDIA primarily, but all these other tech stock, Tesla, which is completely overvalued, insanely overvalued, that these things keep going up and up and up creates the illusion of momentum and growth in the economy that, you know, that Trump can hang his hat on and that a bunch of rich people are benefiting from.

29:45Meanwhile, everything else is stagnating. And so if that goes away and you deal with the fallout of that, oh my God. So we are already really in a disaster. It can't go down. It can't. We don't have anything else. We don't have pensions in this country. We only have 401ks. We have no guaranteed cash. The number has to go up. If the number doesn't go up, we're fucked. The whole country is a bet on AI. The music will stop. 50 % of all consumer spending in the United States today is from the top 10 % who are doing so on the inflated value of their stock portfolio. What would happen? What was that term you said about NAFTA, the giant sucking sound?

30:22Yeah. That's what's good. For real. If there is a 99 % drop in the QQQ or the tech stocks or something like that, game over. Like air travel, done. Consumer spending, done. Housing market, done. Like everything will collapse. And if you're poor, you may root for that because you're like, oh, screw them. It's like, yeah, well, they control your destiny too, okay? So they're going to be – I don't want it to be this way. I'm just telling you. You're going to get fired. You're going to make it so that you can't get a job. Interest rates and all that will go down for them. It's not going to be to your benefit.

30:53So it's just, I don't know. It's very dark. If they don't radically change something soon, which of course they're not going to do, we will face this political question. And in my opinion, they absolutely will get a bailout because the alternative is so catastrophic. I mean, it genuinely be catastrophic, I think, to the U.S. economy. Put D4 up on the screen as the last element we'll throw to in this block just to show you the amount of debt that's already being taken on in order to finance the AI data center build-out. And you can see, you know, in 2024, it's like a, you know, very minimal amount.

31:30And now you just have this absolute explosion in debt-backed financing of these data centers. And, you know, so you've got nobody asked for this, right? Communities in uproar, political system already showing the signs of being roiled by this. and you have all this debt being taken on, these companies already too big to fail, and then these inklings from Altman, and he's just the only one dumb enough to say it out loud, apparently, that they're looking for the federal government to help them continue this build-out and to be there for them when, if they fail. So that's the landscape we're facing right now.

32:11Not looking very good. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated, and Black America was out of breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.

32:53The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Bowen Yang and I'm Matt Rogers during this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games we've been joined by some of our friends Hi Bowen, hi Matt Hey Elmo Hey Matt, hey Bowen Hi Cookie Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears Listen to Two Guys, Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

34:10And we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

34:49One more story here before we get to our guests that we wanted to make sure to highlight, because it just really is so illustrative of the twisted relationship this country has to Israel and the way the logic of it permeates every administration, whether it is Democrat or Republican. Let's put this up on the screen. This was a scoop from Reuters and Huffington Post fleshed out some of this reporting as well. So they say, scoop, the U.S. gathered intelligence last year. This was during the Biden administration that Israel's military lawyers, Israel's military lawyers warned there was evidence that could support war crimes charges against Israel for its military campaign in Gaza.

35:29That's according to five former U.S. officials. They say the previously unreported intelligence described by the former officials as among the most startling shared with top U.S. policymakers during the war pointed to doubts within the Israeli military about the legality of its own tactics that contrasted sharply with Israel's public stance. Two of the former U.S. officials said the material was not broadly circulated until late in the Biden administration when it was disseminated more widely ahead of a congressional briefing in December 2024. Even before then, lawyers at the State Department had repeatedly raised concerns with U.S.

36:04Secretary of State Tony Blinken that Israel might be committing war crimes, according to five former U.S. officials. As early as December 2023, lawyers from the State Department's Legal Bureau told Blinken in meetings they believed Israel's military conduct in Gaza likely amounted to violations of international humanitarian law and potentially war crimes. There's so much in here that is important. And I know none of this will be surprising to you guys. But again, I think it's important to dig into exactly how this all unfolded. So there were three different things going on. First of all, there was a State Department assessment that had been reported on previously, and at least one State Department official resigned over the watering down of this assessment.

36:47And the fact that once it went through the leadership, they changed the conclusions, they watered it down. Why? Because the minute that you say Israel is committing war crimes, it means by our own law we are not allowed to send them weapons. It also opens up the possibility of war crimes charges against our own officials, because if you are complicit and you know that their intent is criminal, then you yourself, if you are aiding and abetting that, then you open yourself up to charge. So you had that report internally that was basically like watered down and quashed. You had a refusal to actually engage in any sort of an in-depth assessment.

37:25So everyone is just sort of like covering their eyes and ears and pretending like they didn't know what was going on here. So if they can avoid making an assessment, then they can pretend, play dumb, and oh, we think they're the most moral army in the universe. They told us that there was Hamas under that school bus or under that church or under that mosque or under that hospital or whatever. And then you have this, which is Israel's own lawyers and military saying, we think we're committing war crimes. And the way they got out of this one is by saying, well, we didn't come to our own independent assessment.

38:00it. So the fact that the Israelis think they're committing war crimes and that it spoke specifically to intent, which is also the key way that they always dodge, oh, accidents happen, war is hell, blah, blah, blah. But they don't intend to murder all of these babies and women and innocents. So since it spoke to intent, that's what created a further difficulty for them. And so their dodge there, which was led by Brett McGurk, was the most aggressive advocate for Israel in the administration saying we can't do nothing. We were not going to change course. We're not going to, you know, we're not going to bring any of this to light whatsoever.

38:34In any case, the reason they were, their argument there was basically like, oh, well, we didn't come to our own assessment. So the, you know, the Israelis, they think that, but we haven't come to our own assessment. So we're just going to say and do nothing. I mean, it's just so incredibly disgusting. And then the Trump administration was briefed on all of this coming in. And of course, here's the difference between the two. In the Biden administration, there was some hand-wringing about it, and they did nothing. In the Trump administration, there was no hand-wringing about it, and they just continued to fully fund and support the genocide.

39:04Yeah, I mean, but this is why the Biden one, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I appreciate a little bit more honesty, because for them, they were always hemming and hawing. The fact is, December 2023 on, they got a briefing, and they said, hey, this is probably happening, and they decided to just cover it up as Secretary of State. And by the way, again, at the very same time, they were justifying U.S. support for Ukraine because they said that Russia was violating international norms and Putin is a war criminal who had to step down and Russia was committing a genocide in Ukraine at the very same time of what was happening in Israel.

39:36There was no consistency between the two. This is why the whole human rights thing is a farce. It always has been. And instead, they took it to the max conclusion, I think, with the way that they conducted themselves broadly. And so I don't know. For the Biden administration in particular, really what I think I'm shocked by is the same what happened with Cheney, where in all of his New York Times obituaries and everything, even the political reporters and others, they would say, oh, he was a patriot. He died a patriot because he stood up to Trump. Like, that's the only lens that they look at politics.

40:10Even right now, Jake Sullivan is launching a new podcast with Vox Media. Like, how can you, if you're Vox, right? Like, and Harvard also, the Harvard Kennedy School. I think Brett McGurk, who is a genuine demon. Yeah, he's on CNN. I think he got, he's on CNN. And I think he also got hired by Harvard. That's what I'm saying. Like, these people, they suffer no consequences. Like, the entire political elite is like, oh, you work for Biden? Good guy, checkmark, right? They never look at you. They don't analyze your actual actions and the consequences of what they mean, as long as you are opposed to the right side or if you speak in the right language.

40:51And that's basically what all current Democratic neolib politics is centered around. I just think it's so crazy that a guy like Sullivan can not only get the HKS deal, but launch a podcast with no shame, nothing. It's like acting like a victor. Like, sorry, dude, you actually presided over one of the worst foreign policy periods in American history. Period. End of story. Like, there's no question about it. Put E2 up on the screen because this is also very telling. I would recommend you read this whole Huffington Post piece because it gets into some of the details about who. It talks about the Brett McGurk piece more deeply.

41:27But here's what they said. They said Biden officials worried that attaching their names to a recommendation to limit American support for Tel Aviv would hinder their future career prospects, the former senior official said, which is in itself appalling. Yes, it is. It is appalling. And to Sagar's point, think about this, OK? Actually, like cutting off support for Israel's genocide, that would hurt their career prospects. But the fact that they were complicit in that and engaged in a multi-year cover-up, that has no problem for their career prospects. You know, they're getting podcasts, they're going to Harvard School, other Ivy League institutions, corporate boards, whatever.

42:06World is their oyster. No problem there. And so that is the sort of logic that pervades government. Now, I think on the Democratic side, there is a shifting for the politicians. There is a shifting political calculus that they are grappling with now. And you see it in primaries that are playing out across the country. Obviously, you saw the New York City mayoral race. You see it in terms of, you know, the members of Congress now who are having to look over their shoulder and worry about what did I do? What did I say? Where am I going to locate myself now? And are wildly at odds with the Democratic base on the issue of Israel specifically.

42:44So there is some changing political calculus that is happening right now as we speak. But up until this very moment, all of the costs and the consequences were on doing the right thing. We're on asserting an independent foreign policy. We're on checking the abuses of Israel, calling out their war crime. You know, Tony Blinken was running around the State Department talking about how this was ethnic cleansing. Like they knew, they knew, of course they knew. I mean, again, this is not going to be a surprise to you, but they played dumb and they covered for them. And they did it the whole time, right up until the end.

43:16There was a final debate about, okay, we've got this intelligence from Israel. Should we on our way out the door, do something that would be, you know, basically a virtue signaling because we know the Trump administration is going to come in and they're going to completely reverse course on whatever we do. But at least it would send a signal that, you know, this is unacceptable and kind of lay a marker down the way that Obama did when he let that settlement vote get through in the U.N. Security Council. Like this, this is something and Biden did it on some other things. He took Cuba off the like state sponsored terror list or something like that to sort of like, again, it's like it's a signal of the direction they think foreign policy should go in.

43:52And they said, no, even that, because we're worried about, you know, is the Harvard school going to hire us then? Is, you know, am I going to get my podcast? Am I, yeah, am I going to be able to go to SKDK as the chubby Indian guy ultimately? Who does not look like me, to be very, who does not look like me. He doesn't. He's just fat and wears a, it's not fair. It's not fair, okay? I think it's the, I actually think it's the glasses. That's what I think. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, he still has a job, so yeah. These guys, I don't know. Their calculus, I mean, their calculus was correct. No, of course it was correct.

44:24Because look at Cheney and all of the Iraq war people. They're all doing the exact same thing. I'm serious. I watch these people walk around town. Even today, take a stroll down K Street. You'll see Paul Wolfowitz. You'll see all these guys. They have no shame. They live completely normal life. Nothing happened to them. It's sick. And now the next generation, it's the same thing. And it happens over and over and over and over again. They'll be on CSIS panels till the day they die. And it's like, why does nobody pay a price for being bad in this country? That's one of the things I appreciate about what Ro Khanna said about Chuck Schumer today.

44:59He's like, not only did he help march us into Iraq war, but he gave Netanyahu a blank check. Like, it's not an accident that those two things are connected to, by the way. The people who tend to be for endless war are always for endless war. Like, they're always, and this will set us up well for the next block, talking about the trillion dollar war machine. But in any case, I am somewhat hopeful that the logic, the just cynical political calculus, when you see someone like Seth Moulton coming out and being like, I'm not going to take APAC dollars after he went to APAC and found out they weren't going to give him any money, by the way.

45:31But he sees the cynical political calculus now, if I'm going to win a Democratic primary, is to say no APAC money. That is an absolute sea change. So we'll see how that translates into future American foreign policy, how it translates into future position for the Democratic Party. But this is, you know, the cover up here, just disgraceful. No one, no one who was involved in this should ever be forgiven. That's right. All right. We got our guests standing by talking about the book Trillion Dollar War Machine. Let's get to it. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969.

46:05Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated, and Black America was out of breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest.

46:47It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Bowen Yang and I'm Matt Rogers during this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games we've been joined by some of our friends Hi Bowen, hi Matt Hey Elmo Hey Matt, hey Bowen Hi Cookie Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears Listen to Two Guys, Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

47:55And we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

48:35Joining us now is William Hertung. He is a senior researcher at the Quincy Institute and is the author of this excellent new book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home. A very apt time to be joining us. Thank you very much, sir. We appreciate it. Yes, thank you. And I should point out my co-author Ben Freeman did all the heavy lifting. Okay, all right. He just put me on there as a courtesy. All right, well, hopefully you can speak to the facts of the book as well. I thought it was good to go ahead and start with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth here saying that the United States is now currently to a wartime footing and how that fits a little bit potentially with your book.

49:16Let's take a listen to Pete Hegseth. We're not just buying something. We are solving life and death problems for our warfighters. We're not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing. Building for victory, should our adversaries, F-A-F-O. All right. How does a wartime fitting fit here with your book about the trillion-dollar war? Partly which war? Is it Venezuela? Is it China? It's pretty different. Well, what we point out is pretty much every president in the post-World War II period has made noises about streamlining the Pentagon, better strategy, keeping us out of war.

49:58They've pretty much all failed or gone back on those promises. Oh, sorry. Donald Trump is an interesting case because he said things on the campaign trail like, I'm going to drive the warmongers out of Washington. I haven't had any wars. I'm going to be a peacemaker. And yet, you know, we're attacking boats off of Venezuela. There's a lot of tough rhetoric. There's a nuclear buildup. So I think he's conflicted partly because some of his base is sick of war. He has to at least give a rhetorical, you know, bone to them. But, you know, we're at a trillion dollars. Actually, there was concern right in the book if it would get above a trillion while it was in production.

50:32So I said, well, we'll have stickers, you know, subscription. 1.2 trillion. 1.3 trillion. And I think, you know, it's such a we've invested so much in that tool that there's a tendency to lean towards it. And I think there's also strategies, not just about money. But if we want to have military primacy, fight wars all over the world, it's going to be hard to go below that trillion, especially when you've got the tech folks, Lockheed Martin, fighting over that pie. The way to solve that is just increase it. Give them both a piece of Golden Dome, fighter plane, and that's just going to be – it's like a sedimentary rock.

51:06You keep adding layers and you never make decisions, and that's not really going to lead you to a viable strategy. Can you talk a little bit more about that internal logic? Because you might think, okay, Cold War's over. Maybe we can reel back in some of the military spending. That doesn't happen. It just keeps going up and up and up. We have a war on terror. Okay, we're out of Afghanistan. Now maybe we can reduce military spending. Nope, just keeps going up and up and up, such that now, as you point out, it's over a trillion dollars. What is the internal logic that makes it so that we just continue to expand and expand and expand the military budget?

51:38Well, I think if we go back to the end of the Cold War, Colin Powell said, I'm paraphrasing, I'm running out of enemies here. Yes. I got Cuba. I got North Korea. So they came up with this two major contingencies strategy, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, to at least put a floor under the Pentagon budget. And that tends to happen. As the war on terror was winding down, lots of writing about China as the new pacing threat. Some of those reports are written by people with tight ties to the arms industry. I think for some of them, it's just a marketing technique. Say China, get money. Other than just believe it.

52:12But if you're in China, you can't tell the difference, of course. One of the things I always try to focus on is that money doesn't equal quality. In fact, that might be the central kind of element of it, is that we keep pouring money into this broken system. But the actual output of, let's say, the innovation of the ability to, let's say you end up in a conflict with China. Does anyone really believe that the trillion-dollar investment is going to materialize into something better? According to even the Pentagon cutouts like CSIS, they're like, no, we couldn't even win a war like this. So what's the logic?

52:42We keep pouring. Is it good money after bad? Is it just the corruption? Well, unfortunately, it's more of a money-making machine for contractors than a well-considered plan. The F-35 is not performing as advertised. Congress keeps adding more. Some people say aircraft carrier can be taken out by a modern missile. We're building them at$13 billion a pop. There was the littoral combat ship. Even the Navy didn't want it. They said it's not useful for China. It can't defend itself. And it wasn't even about production. The places that maintained it in Florida and Virginia kept those in the budget. So if you're putting things in there because it's built in my state or my district, that's not a plan.

53:18Right. And that's not going to build you the best weapons. So Silicon Valley is coming in and saying, well, we're different, and we're going to have that fight. But my feeling is, well, okay, if you want to give us tools that work, that's fine. but don't tell me what our strategy should be. Don't tell me what our priorities should be nationally. They're kind of, there's a bit of hubris and kind of, you know, we're the people that are going to save humanity. I'd rather they just were suppliers. Yes, right, exactly. Talk a little bit more about that dynamic between the legacy prime contractors, the Boeings, the Lockheeds of the world, and like the Palantirs and Palmer Luckeys outfit of the world and how they're selling themselves and, you know, what that could look like in terms of the budget, in terms of what it means for our national priorities?

54:02Yeah, well, the Lockheed Martins are giving them a good argument because it's almost a monopoly. Five big companies get a third of what the Pentagon spends and build most of the weapons. They put Boeing in charge of the new fighter plane, even though it's failed on every major project for decades, probably just to keep them in business. So Palmer Luckey has a chief strategy officer, Christian Brose, who's been talking about this for a long time. And basically, they have this, well, they put a, like a pamphlet out, rebooting the arsenal of democracy. It's quite a good critique of the big companies and the kind of sclerotic system, but they're overstating what they can do.

54:39They are competitive. And if they didn't have billionaires behind them, they never would have made it. It would have been bought up by the big companies. So in that sense, fine, shake it up. But the exchange is get rid of all regulation, trust us, you know, we're the wave of the future, technology will save us. That's never worked before. The electronic battlefield in Vietnam, the impervious Star Wars, the fact that we had precision-guided munitions didn't win us wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So it's got to be motivated people, the countries behind it, strategy makes sense. Otherwise, you can do damage, but you can't, technology itself is not going to win you a war.

55:14They seem to be kind of selling their technology as if it would. Yeah, if anything, technology is always the folly and the promise that leads to reality where you're like, wait, these guided munitions mean nothing when you can't have a bullet that rolls off of a factory. As you've looked at what's happening in Russia, it doesn't require all that much technology. As long as you have a decent industrial base, you can survive for quite a long time. And they have an advantage because our stuff takes a long time to build. Once we've got rid of stocks, their stuff isn't great. And our stuff takes a long time.

55:46So So Ukraine has a do-it-yourself drone program. They take Chinese commercial drones. They put a camera and some weapons. They're suicide drones anyway. They don't have to be perfect. So they're kind of falling back on low tech, even though Silicon Valley says their technology is winning the war, a closer look would say otherwise. Yeah, I totally agree. I heard my entire time here in Washington. The fifth generation warfare will be unlike anything you've ever seen. It will be about cyber. It will be about this. where the next major conflict in Europe looks more like World War I than it does like World War II.

56:18If anything, we've reverted backwards. And the cost for all the stuff we poured money into doesn't seem to have yielded basically anything except a lot of profit for people who live in Northern Virginia. Yeah. And then if you have a new situation, it's hard to address it. All that money is tied up. If you wanted to move towards more nimble, cheaper systems, first of all, the Pentagon wants the best, and that costs more. Second of all, all these members are like, not in my district. And then the guy here says, well, if you vote for my weapon, I'll vote for your weapon. Suddenly you can't budge and you can't be agile.

56:55And it's also ultimately, you know, Congress doesn't debate strategy anymore. They debate like, hey, isn't my weapon great, which is shameful. I mean, they had a whole report about what should our nuclear strategy be. And the Senate Armored Service Committee, you know, the questions were like, well, we have a hypersonic missile that can, you know, take out there. and don't we need more of those? Finally, Senator Warren said, what will this cost? The co-chair of the committee, who was former lobbyist for Northrop Grumman, the big nuclear group, said, oh, cost is not an object here. So they never discussed, do we have enough?

57:24It was just about money. And Congress is supposed to, well, okay, we know. It's supposed to be a deliberative body that's looking at the future of the country. They're tied up in this whole money game. So very few of them will speak out. And the ones who do, can't bring enough folks behind them to move the needle. How has this blocked down other potential priorities that perhaps the American people have? Well, it's certainly a significant component of the deficit, which is now close to being the interest on the debt is close to being the biggest item in the budget. So that's not available to us anymore.

57:58And then depending how you look at it, if you want to reduce the deficit, if you want to invest in other areas, medical research or environment, that's a shrinking window, especially with tax cuts. So some people would say, well, you know, we don't want the government to go big into public investment. But no matter how you look at it, we just have very little flexibility as a country for any kind of change. And so in a sense, we're lagging. And to the extent we keep throwing that trillion and more in. It's sort of like if you're a weightlifter, but you can't bring your arms below your shoulders.

58:31You're not really equipped to fight anybody. Somebody who knows how the box could take you out. Such a good point. So how do you get under control? I mean, you've got all these members of Congress who have their own individual incentives about this or that that effectively serves as a jobs program in their district. You have a bunch of people making tons of cash. How do you reshape this ecosystem? I think it's kind of a societal effort because it's the whole lobby is kind of embedded in our society. But there's certainly people on the right who are tired of this. They don't like corporate welfare.

58:59They don't feel like we should be throwing this kind of money at endless war. People on the left, centrists. You know, if you're a military reformer, which we used to have 100 people in that caucus, you know, build more reliable weapons, train the troops better. They can't work through this system anyway. So I think you need kind of a coalition that says, all right, we know this doesn't work. Let's start by fixing that. And then we're going to debate what our strategy should be. So that means more transparency, not letting people go straight to industry from government and lobby for them, or now to VC firms that invest in emerging tech.

59:33Or like if you have a government commission, have some people who aren't on the payroll. That would be novel. So I think it's a difficult process. And really, people have to say, OK, if defense is our top priority, let's do it right. So it's public education. People have to feel like they can make a difference. And there's a big deficit, obviously, in that now. Yeah. That's a problem across the board in terms of policy. So I think it's almost like a large cultural shift. We've had those before, but you never know when it's going to come. But you have to at least have the information, have the arguments.

1:00:09And people have to look a little more broadly about where they get their information. Because the mainstream media, whatever their framing might be, they're just reducing coverage of this stuff. I mean, some papers don't have a real Pentagon reporter. They just report when the budget comes out. Right. And, you know, we need a lot more than that. I totally agree. Everybody go buy the book, Trillion Dollar War Machine. We'll have a link down in the description. Thank you for joining us, sir. Yes, thank you. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you tomorrow.

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