Trump's Cyber Czar on China's Infiltration of America - EP 41 Joshua Steinman

I have both been interrogated in training exercises and I have been the interrogator. And those training exercises were meant to train you to be an interrogator. Then I also went to a school where you— and people have talked about this a lot. The school is called SERE, Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape. S-E-R-E.

Okay.

And I've been to a SERE school where, you know, they sort of like drop— actually, it was here in Pretty sure it was here. It was definitely in California. It might've been like outside San Diego. I think it was outside San Diego.

Okay.

In like the mountains. And they like dropped us off and it's like a week later, you know, you like evade and they capture you at some point. And if you, and I was like one of the people that managed to not get captured and then like day 3 or whatever, they blow this enormous whistle and they're like, okay, now you need to, you know, we're going to the next phase of the training program. So show up at this place, at this X. You know, within the next 3 hours and we'll collect you and then we'll move and then we'll move to the like pretend you were captured section.

So I saw if you evade it, I saw MrBeast is maybe like trying to do the Hunger Games.

Yeah. Yeah.

You should, you should get into that, man. You, the, and is it scary or in the back of your head, you know, it's like a drill.

Um, it's both, right? Like this is part of the reason I think why they exhaust you in the training.

So you start to get a little loopy.

Yeah, basically. So I think, you know, the exhaustion confuses you as to like, is this real, is this not? And then there are definitely things that they do in the training that are meant to confuse you, right? And I, I probably shouldn't disclose more than that, um, but it's like they'll do things and you'll think like, oh, okay, everything's fine now. And then it's not. Um, and so it's definitely like, there's in some of the training programs I've been in, been at, there's like a game within the game. And then like at the most, at the highest end ones, there's a game within a game within a game. Wow. Yeah.

Can you say how you evaded capture or is that, is that, uh, those techniques?

Oh, I mean, you know, I think the, The meta answer is I followed the training and they teach you how to do it.

Okay.

And I'd grown up spending a lot of time in the outdoors. I'd been like an amateur mountaineer. I'd summited a few mountains in like Alaska and, and Baja California and a few other places where I'd done like, you know, pretty extensive outdoor kind of, you know, adventuring and done some navigation courses and been a, you know, scout. And a lot of it is like, if you were to apply your mind to like, how do I escape, it would just all make sense. And a lot of it is just, you know, you can sort of see like scouting programs are sort of backwards derived from like what you'd want out of a good operational member of the military.. And so having had all those experiences, you'd be like, ah, I see why I was taught how to read a map at age 7.

Yeah. Okay. I always, when I'm in a hotel, I always seem to get sucked into watching Naked and Afraid, which I never watch at home.

Oh geez.

But only, only when I'm traveling and then I can't sleep and I'm just watching.

Yeah.

This marathon. And it's always people that are like, I'm an ex, you know, expert wilderness survivalist. And then every single episode's the same. It's like day one comes. Sucks. It like rains. There's some bugs and they're just starving for like 20 days and they can't catch anything. They, the—

yeah, I mean, the reality is you just never want to be in those scenarios. Yeah, that's it. You never want to be in those scenarios. And the training is designed to acknowledge that, and then the training is designed to say, okay, even if I'm in the worst scenario ever, I know how to get out. It's not going to be pretty, it's not going to be nice, it's not going to be fun, but I know what it's like. Yeah, there's this amazing study that was done after the First World War by the Royal Navy and they wanted to know why certain sailors survived, um, their ships being sunk— merchant mariners, naval, you know, sailors— because they had a very strange statistical distribution where older sailors survived at a higher frequency than the younger sailors. And what they found was that it was the experience that gave those people resilience. And this is a theme in a lot of military training philosophy, which is that if you can give people real experience or even simulated experience, it makes them much more performant in the moment. And so this is actually where, if you've ever heard of this program, Outward Bound.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah.

This is actually the founding story of Outward Bound. So they run this study and they realize, oh, we should be giving our sailors the experience of having to be out in the middle of nowhere with no support architecture on their own. Um, you know, the simulation of like in a lifeboat, because if they can do that, their guys will survive if, you know, the battleship sinks and they're on the lifeboats. Are they going to be able to have the will? It's about the will.

Yeah.

Right. Will have the will to survive.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that's literally the founding story. That's how they started Outward Bound. That's how the founder of Outward Bound got started.

I mean, this all makes sense on some level. Yeah. This has nothing to do with what I wanted to talk to you about. I just got interested for a second. Let's go. It is fascinating.

It's good content.

It is good content, man. I like it. Josh Dimon, CEO of Galvanic. Now, do you pronounce that with like the American? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

Because you know, you could go different ways with that. Yeah. Yeah. It's a security company, which we'll get into. Usually I keep all this stuff in my head for my guests' background. Your background is complicated, so I'm going to cheat a little bit. Please. Yeah. You know, I know you went to the University of Chicago for undergrad. You went to Georgetown for a master's degree in— remind me.

I think I graduated in 2014.

2014, my notes say, with a— in security studies.

It was like part-time at night. Um, yeah, it took me like 3 and a half years because I had a deployment in between.

Right. So you also went to the US Navy. You end up— we're going to get into all this stuff.

Yeah.

I just want to give people some context. So you're in the Navy.

Yep.

You're an intelligence officer. You end up writing a paper that becomes a pretty seminal text in the creation of this thing called the Defense Innovation Unit, which we'll get into as well. But it's for people who don't know, this, this bridge between the military in Washington, DC and Silicon Valley, both from like a sort of investment and strategic angle. Then you go work at the White House with the president and you become like the, the cybersecurity everything. I mean, you're, you're running from 2017 to about 2021, like so many. This is why I had to cheat. I mean, you're running so much stuff from cyber policy across telecommunications, cryptocurrency, supply chain. Yeah. You were a deputy assistant to the president. And some of this was controversial, the— that you were so young, that you were running so many things that, that angered some, some people who, who had been in Washington for a while. You were a sock startup CEO at one point.

And then I was in the military while I was in grad school.

So you sold, sold socks and then, and then, and then left, left Washington and became CEO of Galvanic, which is a security company based in Los Angeles, which doesn't happen very often. And, and is like this— we'll get into this part of your focus when you were at the White House, but, but kind of securing the United States industrial base and some things that tend to get neglected on the security front.

Yeah.

Fair.

Probably the kindest introduction I've ever received.

Okay.

Just being the journalist when I was at the White House wouldn't even acknowledge that I had a military background. And like, you know, there are a lot of people that did a lot of amazing things during the GWAT. Um, to be frank, I was not one of them. Yeah, you know, like I was one of these guys who was just like on the line going out doing the work. Like, you know, my jobs in both deployments to Iraq were outside the wire, but you know, do I have a Bronze Star with a, with a V for Valor? No. You know, was I in active firefights shooting back with people? No. Did my team do some interesting things? Certainly. But like, you know, I've got friends who are like, you know, in Ramadi.

Yeah.

Who are in all these places. And so like, that's a different level. But you were, you were in the Navy for 8 years. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

But like when I was, when I was at the White House, the journalists would never even say that I was a former military officer. They would only say, Steinman, former SOC entrepreneur, now cybersecurity czar of the United States. I was just like, all right guys. Like, so the kindest introduction I've ever received.

As I was doing my research, It did seem you, you predated Doge, but it seemed like you got, you got summarized as this young kind of techie Silicon Valley type person who was suddenly put in charge of a lot of very important things. And I guess that seemed to be part of the tension. Yeah. Okay. So, and then we met at a Masters of the Universe type event, which I guess technically we're not supposed to I don't wanna say where it was, but a lot of very interesting, powerful people, a lot of tech people. And yeah, anyway, I felt like we got along well. Yeah. And we started talking about things that I and you—

Well, you're one of the, you know, luminaries of technology, science, journalism of the past 15, 20 years.

So that part I don't know about. I just know that I was, we were talking and I was like, oh, this guy actually speaks his mind. Yeah. And has interesting opinions on things. And so, and stuff that I'm interested in and care about. So, um, so we're going to get into it. Let's do it. All right, what do we do at Core Memory? We cover innovative, fast-moving, forward-thinking companies, which is why Core Memory is sponsored by Brex, because Brex is the intelligent finance platform for many of these companies. 30,000 companies from startups to the world's largest corporations rely on Brex's technology for their finances. They've got smart corporate cards, high-yield business banking and expense automation tools that are fantastic. I hate doing my expenses, and Brex's AI software runs right through those expenses, figure out where we're spending money, and takes care of so much stuff for you so you don't have to waste your time on it yourself. Go to brex.com/corememory to learn more and just, you know, get with the program. Let's get going. Let's get out of this Archaic finance software and move toward the future. Core memory and BRICS. This isn't where I intended to start, but it just jumped in my head. One of the things that you said that struck me was that Donald Trump was one of, if not the smartest person you've ever met. I think when I think about this as an outsider who's never met him, I, you know, my brain tends to go, well, he must be pretty smart to have, like, gotten this far in the world and manage all these things. On the other hand, he says some pretty dumb shit sometimes, which makes you think, think definitely not. And you said it with such conviction that I was, I was taken aback. So for, for somebody who has trouble, like, even processing this possibility that he might be among, you know, the very smartest people. Yeah. What evidence do you, do you have for that?

Oh, it's absolutely true. I mean, like, If it isn't true, I don't even know how I'd be able to process reality. Like, I worked for that man for 4 years, and I— when I was in the military, um, I worked for a lot of people, and many of them were good people. Some of them were not. Many of them were good people. Many of them were smart. I had a very hard time because I learned things from very few of them, right? And that was part of what convinced me to go out and just do my own thing. And, you know, the military trains you to follow orders. It's your obligation. You take an oath on it and you do that. And, you know, sometimes you have an opportunity to sort of raise concerns with people Um, but many times, you know, I'd raise concerns, we'd go in a different direction. And just like Amazon has this concept of disagree and commit, you know, when you're in the officer's mess or in a meeting with your commanding officers and senior officers, you know, you have that opportunity to disagree. And I just, you know, for 8 years it was very hard because after a certain point, especially in the final assignment that I had working for the Chief of Naval Operations. That's like the senior-most officer in the Navy. I was a Lieutenant 03, one of the junior-most ranks in the Navy. And you get into these rooms with very senior people and you start asking them questions like, hey, how are you thinking about— I asked a question of a senior officer in the Pacific about how he expected to, you know, wage certain types of engagements in the Pacific theater, and you ask them some very basic questions about, like, technologies that are just over the horizon. And, like, we would get emotional reactions from them. And it's just like, oh, I, you know, this— what is this guy doing? You know, he's, like, screaming at me because I'm asking about, like, missile capabilities that are coming online in the next 2 to 5 years. And it's like, bro, like, my boys are going to be on those ships that are going to get sunk by these missiles. How are you not thinking about this?

So this is not Trump related, but he—

this person was just like anti-technology, just leaned against us because we were just like, hey, I'm not going to go into details. But basically we're like, look, we don't think this conflict is going to play out the way that you think. A lot of these things that you're expecting to work may not work, may not be available, may not be useful. And this guy, one of the senior most officers in the Navy, just didn't want to hear that.

Okay.

And so the reason why I say that, that, you know, this is a framing about Trump, right? Is that Trump's the first and only person I've ever worked for where it was just like every time I interacted with him, I was learning things and impressed. And it's not to say that he's gonna come and like, you know, talk your ear off. It's like watching a master magician, right? Like you go see like, uh, and I, I don't even know if he's still performing, like David Copperfield Right? Or Ricky Jay. Yeah. Have you ever, you know?

Oh yes.

The card master.

I've rabbit holed Ricky Jay.

May he rest in peace. Yes. What an amazing American.

Yeah.

Ricky Jay is someone who, when he was alive, from the videos that I've seen, would absolutely take you down the rabbit hole. And it's not a demonstration of like, I'm smarter than you. It's like he's displaying his passion. He's like, oh, I've read every single text that's been written in like 7 different languages on the theory of sleight of hand. And let me explain it to you. Working with President Trump, it's much different. It's like you'll go into a meeting and you think, oh, these are the outcomes that I'd like from the meeting. Maybe there's planning that goes into that, etc. And then the meeting happens and we can talk about the meeting happening. But let me tell you, at the end of it, all the things that you wanted happen. And the thing is, that's so— it's so confusing to most people because Occidental culture teaches us that, like, methodical discussion leads to methodical action leads to expected outcomes. That's like the scientific method, right? Um, and those outcomes may be good or bad or what have you, but those outcomes happen. And, uh, President Trump is a magician. He's not a scientist. And so you plan for all these things that you want to happen. The meeting happens, and we'll just bracket that, and then all the things happen that you want. And the point is, everybody sees the meeting, and the meeting is like, we're talking about this, we're talking about that. Then there's like this other thing that happens, and everyone's just like sort of completely discombobulated, and yet at the end everything happens.

So he's just nudging, he's nudging it around to get the outcome he wants.

Here's what I actually think is going on. I think that he is probably smarter by a significant amount from most of the people that he interacts with, that he— it's like, it's like he's designing a conversation. He's not pushing a conversation, right? He sort of sees where things might go and creates sort of barriers for those conversational pathways. And it's so different from interacting, you know, even like the way that we're interacting right now. Um, it, it— like I said, he's a magician, he's not a scientist.

So, I mean, this is a question I always have, like with Elon as well, you know. So then why, why, okay, you know, they add all this extra baggage onto themselves unnecessarily, right? I mean, by, um, just being so kind of crude and crass and, and, uh, sometimes, like, I understand sometimes you're using this as like that tool, but then there's other times where it's just like, dude, you don't have to like alienate the whole world on the way to this, to this journey, you know. And, and clearly, like, sometimes Trump's up on stage and he's, he's kind of saying some goofy stuff.

Yeah, yeah, I love it all. I think that, um, you know, the, the rule by scientism, right, things that, that match that form of science and maybe aren't scientific, um, I just think it's done terrible things for our civilization. And his capacity to introduce uncertainty into environments and then shape that chaos in the right direction is not only refreshing, but I think it's actually the tool that is necessary for the moment, you know, for this decade, for this era, um, because things are so settled and encrusted with just like you know, calcium or something.

Okay. So when you see like the tariffs get announced and everybody's on the internet the next day and they're like, oh, ChatGPT wrote all these things and this was just thrown out in such a ham-fisted way. And then the weeks play out and it's like, we're rolling things back. And, and you know what I mean? And how, what was your interpretation of those events? And we, we have kind of hindsight No, so they worked.

Yeah, didn't they work?

I mean, did they work?

They absolutely worked. What are you talking about? We're bringing in like hundreds of billions of dollars a year now and no one's cutting prices, right? Because they all have been taking advantage of the country. Trump knows that. He knows it instinctively. You know, I can tell you he knows it directly, right? And what is he trying to do? He understands that if you wreck— if you wreck trade relationships, that, you know, Doesn't work out, right? So what's he doing? He like throws out a number, gets the reaction, pulls it back a little bit, this, that, or the other. It is, you know, it's like, it's like if you, you know, it's like jiu-jitsu or, you know, one of the wrestling martial arts, right? Where it's like you're in contact with the other side and you feel them pushing and you're like, oh nope, I'm gonna try something else.

And you're, you feel like, I think you said we haven't seen prices go up. Well, I mean, that would be the reaction, right? That the American consumer is gonna pay.

Yeah, there's like massive inflation. Yeah. It's just like, oh my God, this, this product that used to be a dollar, now there's a 35% tariff on it and now it's $1.35. And we're just not seeing that at scale.

Okay. What? Okay.

Oh, we're just not seeing it at scale. Yeah.

Yeah.

And at the same time, we are bringing in tariff revenue, which is buying down the debt in theory.

Yeah.

You know?

All right. This is my last Trump question.

Yeah.

And, and, and not entirely Trump here, but so, you know, what's your take on, on Doge?

Yeah, I think it's good. I mean, I'll say this much, I hope it continues because the things that they are going after are things that need to be addressed, but there are bigger things that also need to be addressed. And I think having a mechanism like DOJ that can go after medium-sized things and then, God willing, big-sized things is really important. I don't think we've gotten to the big size things yet, and I think we need to.

Yeah. So like philosophically, I was into this. It bugs the— makes my mind go numb when people, you know, just excuse the, like what's been going on in the government as if that's not just like some enormous mistake. And so, but you know, when you, when you look at the way Doge was ultimately executed, I mean, it, it certainly seems like, like kind of some bumbling, quite a bit of, of— it does not seem like a well-thought-out plan to me.

And, and look, I'll say that the media's irrational hostility towards anything done by President Trump, really done by anyone on the right, but especially Trump— and the reason why I think they are most hostile to him is because he operates on many levels, but he is very good at operating on the emotional level that the media have sort of honed in on over the past 20 years.

That part's true.

And so they're just absolutely, um, uh, triggered by the fact that he does it and he's better than them. They used to be very good at it. Now they're not so good at it, and he's much better than them. And so there were things that we would plan meticulously when I was in the White House working for him. I'll give you an example, um, and, you know, I'll be respectful in a way that was not respectful, you know, that was not— I'll extend a degree of respect that was not extended to me by the subject of the story. So, um, I initiated an effort, led an effort, executed an effort to rewrite the way in which we do all cyber operations in the United States government, aside from certain small area aspect of things that, you know, is not, not talked about, um, called NSPM-13. I architected it, me and my team executed it, and I utilized an obscure military Prussian philosophy called Auftragstaktik. Okay, which is called mission type orders, um, which we could go into— not probably not worth going into. Um, very well thought out, right? It took us a year plus to architect this complete rewrite. And we get a phone call from one of the top 3 national security reporters in the world who writes for one of the marquee um, blogs, you know, New York Times, Post, whatever. And, um, I guess they also have a print edition as well, but, uh, blogs. And he comes to the White House, and, you know, these people are all texting you when you're working at the White House trying to get you to talk at a school. I was very disciplined when I worked for the president. It was always just like, I'm not going to talk to the press. Go talk to the press office if they want 'Come have me talk to you,' then we'll do that.

Yeah, I hate people like that.

So we sit down with him for an official backgrounder, and this guy comes in and he's very pleasant. 'I've heard amazing things about you, you know, you're doing great,' etc., etc. His blog, his newspaper, by the way, has been trashing me for like 3 years. I was very nice. He like gives me a copy of his book. Signs it, the whole bit. And then we have like a 60-minute in-depth intellectual conversation about like what it is that we're doing, why I'm doing it, et cetera. And all that gets boiled down to former SOC entrepreneur Joshua Steinman had, you know, and then like basically kind of negative thing.

Yeah.

And so all that to say that there was almost nothing that we could do during the first admin no matter how well-constructed, well-intentioned, effective, useful, name it, that wouldn't get spun negatively. And so I just don't— I just can't trust these guys anymore. Yeah, because I don't take them to be honest brokers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially in the first term. I mean, it was like, uh, um, it's like mania. I mean, I mean, people, people lost, lost their minds on, on all sides. I do think you're 100% right. I mean, Trump has just played the press like a fiddle. For years and years and years and years. It's kind of—

and so on Doge, right? They're like, oh, Doge, this craziness, whatever. Um, they're executing the powers and authorities of the President of the United States as delegated to him in the Constitution, and they're freaking out about it. It's like, no, man, that's actually the job. Hire and fire people, you know, spend or cut. Yeah, or zero, or what— like, those are the authorities vested through an election in the president of the United States.

I know, I think I was just hopeful that there would be actual like mega reductions in, in spending. Maybe you're right, maybe this has to, uh, go on for a while.

I mean, Congress, you know, is ultimately the entity that has to choose to do that, and I think they need to. I know that there are things that are working on that. These— the recent, you know, package was not about that.— it has to be like a genuine spending bill to cut those numbers. So I think the president wants to. But yeah, you know, there's a give and take there in terms of who actually has the authority. He can stop spending on things, but the money actually gets appropriated by Congress. Okay.

Let's go back to something you were talking about in your experience in the Navy, which is like the stuff that's very top of mind for me. I mean, you were way ahead of the curve. Silicon Valley had this— we had two things going on, I think one, or probably a lot, but two major things going on. Silicon Valley had this major reaction against working with the defense industry for quite some time, which is funny. I don't know if funny is the right word, is comical if you're anything of a Valley historian. And we're sitting in a room in Palo Alto that's like not that far from where Fred Terman, coming out of World War II, created these, these bonds between Silicon Valley and Washington and the military that essentially created Silicon Valley and propelled it for the next like 30, 40 years. And then the tech companies decided they weren't going to work with the defense companies. And then you had a defense industry that it was like archaic, you know, and being run by primes who occasionally do fantastic things and then often, um, are stuck in their ways. And, and I don't know, I, I feel like movies are to blame for this in a huge way because I think they give people a very wrong impression of what military technology actually looks like. But every time I see a military system, I mean, they're sometimes literally running on like Windows 95, and, and it's like, we're not—

yeah, some of our best platforms have almost no one platform and specifically that I'm thinking of, almost no compute.

Right. And you have— so there's this— it becomes very clear that we had from like the rise of the consumer internet through to today, this massive, um, progress with consumer technology. And, and, you know, it's just like, it's almost like nonexistent in, in defense. And so that means we're like, in some cases, 25, 30 years behind just using tools that we take for granted, like in our day-to-day life. They're more sophisticated than what the military has. So this is a bad situation, right? And you were way ahead of this. I mean, even just looking at something like DIU, which is, for people who don't know, I mean, this was a massive deal. You have this office that's created in Mountain View, California, again, just down the road in the heart of Silicon Valley that actually creates these bonds between the Defense Department and all the startups working on things, creates this dialogue, this like ongoing conversation, puts people in the mix on, on what's going on. And then, okay, so you're way ahead of that because that's like 2015, and it's 2014. 2014.

Okay, yeah, it was created in '15. But so here's the story.

Yeah.

And there were— there's another side of this story that I was not exposed to that was happening inside the Pentagon. The version of the story that I was exposed to was working for the Chief of Naval Operations. Um, I was brought together on a task force led by a guy named Ben Coleman, who's about to be the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. Ben and I served in the Navy together. Ben wrote an essay called "The Military Needs More Disruptive Thinkers." It becomes the number one read, um, uh, sort of, uh, Post article on, um, War on the Rocks, which is one of these like insider, you know, military blogs. The chief of naval operations calls Ben in and says, okay, you want some disruptive thinkers? Go find me 10 of them and bring them to me. And Ben goes out and it's like, you know, a good heist movie. He recruits like 10 black sheep from across the Navy. I was one of them.

They call you guys the heretics.

Yeah, that's right. We were the heretics. And we get brought in, we meet with CNO, and he's like, okay, here's the deal. We need to go figure out what the asymmetric threats are to the Navy and what the asymmetric opportunities are for us in the future. You guys have a blank check from me. Please don't piss off the primes. He did say that, but go find those opportunities for us. And, and that was it. Those were the orders. Very Prussian, Auftragstaktik, mission-type orders. Here's the goal, here are the parameters, go execute, come back and see me when you're done. And so a bunch of us went off and did a— we each had our own little projects that we were working on. So the project that I was working on, I actually flew out here to Mountain View, went to go see Google X, and, you know, sort of off the record, they let us participate in the Google Glass Explorers program. I was like the PM for that. And so we get the little Google Glass Was that—

you take a picture in the shower?

That was like that thing. And we start programming apps for the Navy on it. I had a partner who was a programmer and a technical project manager who I was working with to do that. And the whole thing was we wanted to see if we could take augmented reality and just inject it into operations right away. So we were like, tested these things on the bridge of a ship. And could you just look, see another vessel out there and have it say, oh, that's the name of the vessel. This is where it's flagged. This is the name of the master. This is the cargo that it's carrying. Information that you'd have to actually ask someone for, and then they'd have to mentally process that and then provide it back just as a simple use case. So we're into that. Um, Google lets us participate in that. And then I get pulled aside at like the second or third meeting., and the person I'm working with is like, look, we have a problem here. All these people from the Department of Defense keep coming out and like meeting with us, but they never have an ask. They, and, and it's wasting, like we've totaled up the hours, you know, it's wasted like hundreds of hours of, of man hours for Google people. And we're thinking about just saying no more.

So it's just like show and tell with nothing literally coming out.

This is a standard thing that happens in the military. When you take over a unit, you go on a familiarization tour. Where you go meet all the other units that you might have to work with and you just take a capabilities brief.

Uh-huh.

This is what we do. We're your logistics battalion. You know, let me tell you about how many pallets we can move an hour. That's it. And that's considered success. And I realized that, you know, two things are going on. One, you had cutting-edge units that wanted to come out and just like take the brief. And then two, you know, some of these guys looking to retire and they're hoping to sort of make some contacts and maybe they get a job afterwards. So I went back to D.C., I was talking around with folks and I was like, ah, we need— and I'd worked at one at that point— we need an embassy in Silicon Valley that can be the actual interlocutor, can give people those briefings like, hey, here's what's going on, and then only actually exercise those relationships when there's something that is deliverable in it. So I wrote that paper up, then I wrote a public article, pitched it to the Chief of Naval Operations, pitched it to the staff at the National Security Agency and a few other places. Thought it was going nowhere. And then on my last day on active duty, last week on active duty, I got the call like, oh yeah, they're gonna spin this up. And so I left active duty, came out here, started working for a company that had just gotten through Y Combinator. I joined after, like the week after. And then yeah, I activated as a reservist and was what's called a plank holder at DIU until I went to the White House.

And, and, and so this sets things off on a different trajectory that has, has gained obviously tons of steam lately. I mean, When Anduril started, I think the first story— I think I was working at Businessweek at the time. I didn't write this story, but I think they were actually— I don't think we did this headline, but something that year they were like the most evil company in the world and then now are at the vanguard of like a wave of defense tech companies that people are quite excited about. Are you okay? And then going back to what I was saying before, you have these two trends pushing against innovation in the military. Now we have the startups that have— are accepted and kind of embraced. And then everyone I talk to says that there is like a will.

Yeah.

And a desire inside of the military, like people are cognizant that we're screwed. I think probably Ukraine and Israel to some extent have, or at least what's going on around the Middle East, have accentuated how bad we are at making missiles, how unprepared we were to deal with, with drone warfare, things like this. So, and, and so there's this obvious, um, in your interpretation, like, how, um, how top of mind is this throughout the ranks of the military that we are behind where we should be and actually need to find a way to fix this and like have the will to do it?

With the new team that's come in many of whom are my friends, many of whom have experienced some of these challenges as soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, even as civilians. I think people understand that things are going to have to change. Um, definitely at the lower levels, I think there's a lot of understanding around this. And then, I mean, what we're seeing is like, I have friends that are making '05, '06, you know, Lieutenant Colonel or, uh, Colonel. And then in the Navy, Commander or Captain. Um, I have friends that are coming up on their first look to be a flag officer, like a one-star. And those people were like '04s, you know, back when we were seeing a bunch of strange, novel, commercially available things happening to us in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I think that the awareness is percolating up. It's also percolating out. We have contracting officers that understand that there are new rapid acquisition tools that are available to them that they can use. Um, I think a lot of the building blocks are there. I think we just sort of have to assemble them into the right pieces. And I'm hoping that we're going to start seeing that at an increasing rate over the next 2, 3 years?

Because I get pretty skeptical. I mean, I see what Andrew's doing, and they're, they're racing forward. And but it seems like the, the breadth of change would have to be so dramatic. And, and if you believe that like China was actually going to try to move on Taiwan, even call it like in the next decade, I don't see, I don't see how the U.S. is—

our entire stockpiles will be completely you know, used in that conflict in the first week or something like that, and without the capability to regenerate them at any meaningful pace. And it's like, not only can you not, like, assemble, you know, the warhead, the missile, the bullet, whatever it is, but, like, look at the supply chain, the energetics, right? The little explosive stuff. There's chemicals in there. You know, where those chemicals come from, how are they refined, how quickly can we get, you know, 10x of them into the hands of— how are they assembled, right? Where does the steel come from to mill out the shell casing? You know, where do the electronics come from in order to, um, guide the missile, the guidance systems? You know, where do the optics come from? Where do the lenses come from? There's just so much that essentially that peace dividend, globalized economy from like, you know, the early 1990s through like really 2017— I think it was President Trump that really turned that ship of state. There were a lot of folks that worked on it as well. I'd call out, um, you know, my colleague Ezra Cohen who was at the White House, Matt Pottinger who was at the White House, Um, you know, National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien, like a bunch of— but really under President Trump's leadership, um, turn that ship of state around. Wilbur Ross, Commerce. I could go down the list. There's a lot of people I'm going to miss. Um, but you think about all those supply chain issues and it's like, what drove us there? Well, it was 30 years of just cost cutting and efficiency driving and people saying like, oh, We don't have to make everything in America. We can just make the super high-end stuff. Then like, oh, we don't have to make anything in America. We can just do the design stuff, right? You turn over an iPhone and it says designed in the USA.

Oof. California, baby.

Designed in California, right? But it's like, if you can't make that thing, if it's not an iPhone, but if it's like an SM-2 missile designed in the United States, you know, designed in wherever, it's probably designed in California, right down in LA. Um, but if you can't make that thing, like, you're out of the game in, in a week.

Okay, since day one, the Core Memory Podcast has been supported by the fine people at E1 Ventures. They are a young and ambitious VC firm in Silicon Valley investing in young and ambitious companies and people. Thank you so much to E1 Ventures for all your support. I, I don't even know what side of the political aisle I'm on anymore, but just to— for people who think that maybe you're fearmongering or something like that, I mean, there's a New York Times story from about 18 months ago where, you know, they go to— I believe it was like Lockheed and Raytheon— Ukraine kicks off, we would—

they—

we send them thousands of Stinger and Javelin missiles, I think. And, and, um, and then I believe it's Lockheed and Raytheon who report back that, uh, we have— we've, you know, it would take 3 years to replenish that stockpile. And, and said this on the record. This wasn't even like—

this isn't even You had, you had prime contractor CEOs saying that they did not see a way to decouple their manufacturing from China, right?

Right.

Which is like, I mean, that's, that's an admission that you can't win a conflict. Yeah.

Okay, so this is my question, is like, if this is the state of affairs, even if there's steps being made, um, and I guess it's because there is not like a, a war actually full-on happening between the US and China. But it strikes me that some of this is theater and there's not a sense of urgency. I don't mean theater in that, um, in that people aren't trying to do things. People are trying to do things, but theater in the sense of like we're placating ourselves and, and that this lacks like anything approaching the necessary sense of urgency.

I think there is some sense of urgency, at least in my social circle. I mean, I was the first check into a company building, uh, you know, a missile that can be used in a, in a Javelin-like scenario, um, with its own new launcher. And they're designing that thing to be able to be manufactured en masse. You know, I've invested in a bunch of these companies, just like super small checks, like literally off my W-2 income. Um, and, you know, so I'm friends with people building these types of companies, and I think they feel the urgency. I think some of the new leadership feels that urgency. Um, I think if I had one ask for, you know, reality, for God, for existence, it's I want the people that have built this country over the past 200 years, the like families that have done that, that have stewarded transportation, energy, manufacturing, et cetera, to, you know, I think a lot of them are sort of on the sidelines trying to figure out what are we gonna do here. And I think there's a huge opportunity for them to get involved in funneling capital and expertise into that, into that effort to drive actual genuine full-scale, full-stack reindustrialization here in the United States.

So you think this— you think— you think this does— you think it happens?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, no, no, I, I think it's a necessary precondition for the continued existence of the United States of America as we understand it today. And because I think that that's something that must happen, uh, I'm gonna put my entire life into it. Yeah. And, and I have friends, you know, I have 100 plus friends that feel the same way.

I'm going to ask a devil's advocate type question, and I'm certainly not the first person to stumble on this. So, but, you know, you look at China these days, I mean, people are being uplifted. The cities seem clean, people are healthy. There's a lot of ways that it's like looking better than our cities over here. They're pushing forward.

Sure.

On technology, um, we seem intent on having an antagonistic relationship with them. Obviously, okay, you know, there's a whole bucket of human rights things. If you're not into being run by, um, you know, a communist overlord, we're gonna have, we're gonna have problems with that. But same thing, U.S. has plenty of problems as well. Why, like, do we actually have to are they actually that nefarious? And do we have to, do we have to be making this so antagonistic and sort of pushing each other into a conflict?

Two things can be true at the same time. Um, one, China's a technology-enabled fascist totalitarian communist dictatorship. Two, um, If that's what they want, great. Uh, does it mean that we have to fight? No, not at all. Um, but America needs to be independent, needs to be able to defend itself, needs to be able to defend our citizens, our way of life. And so I think it is the height of statesmanship and political leadership for us as a nation, for the president as a leader, to make sure that we have that capacity. And frankly, I would expect no less from Xi Jinping, right? He wants his people to be happy. I hope one imagines, you know, if you're an orthodox Marxist, maybe not actually, but you know, let's mirror image for a minute and say, okay, He wants his people to be happy, healthy, wealthy, powerful, respected, etc. Okay, great. Well, those two things don't have to lead to conflict, and frankly, I think if it were up to President Trump, they wouldn't. But at the same time, like, you can't ignore the fact that conflict is a possibility, and therefore you can't ignore the fact that the obligation of a leader is to make sure that you are prepared for that potential. So that you don't get outmaneuvered, right? Because the worst thing that happens is, you know, the decisive moment comes and one side is prepared, the other side is not prepared, and the prepared side takes various steps and approaches the unprepared side and says, look, there's two ways this goes. One, we can kick this thing off tomorrow. Here's what's going to happen. It's already started happening. In my book, that's a lot of cyber stuff, maybe some economic stuff, but there's a hypothetical scenario. So on D-1, those two sides come together and like, hey, here's the deal, this is what is about to happen. Don't do it the hard way or the easy way. You never want to be in that position. And so we have to prepare for that potential. We have to be ready for that potential. In fact, we have to go through extensive planning to understand what it is that they expect to be able to do on those days, be able to counter those things and do our own things so that on that day they come to the table and they're like, hey, here's what's about to go down. And we're like, nope, we know, we've been watching. Guess what else we have in store? So you want to do that? We're going to do this. And now let's really talk. Maybe we shouldn't do this.

You know, on that question, you've written about and talked about how There's plenty of evidence that China has spent years going through US industrial networks. The idea is, is we know they're attacking Taiwan when we wake up and none of our power systems are on. You've even talked about how China has like told us this directly to our face, that that's what they've done. Yeah. Um, so what have we done to, uh, counteract that? Have we, have we done anything?

So for folks just coming to this conversation, you can go look up Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon. Um, that should take you down a good rabbit hole for folks to figure out like what's the current state of things. Those are acknowledged intrusion sets. When we say intrusion sets, we mean we have identified a group of people really in a foreign country, China in this case, who are doing things on the digital systems here in described. Salt Typhoon, Volt Typhoon, go look it up. So it's like, it could be 5 people, could be 10 people, could it be 1,000 people? But the whole point is like, what are they doing? They're going out and trying to compromise our critical infrastructure. They're trying to get access to and enable future malicious activity on sensitive networks. Just go down the list. I won't— can't legally talk about what happens on the inside when you have those types of situations. I can tell you it's the reason why I started Galvanic 4 years ago. So like, that's really what you should know, right? Like, there are many things that I could do with my time, my most precious commodity. And like, this is the thing that I'm doing. I'm like building a team and a software suite and a hardware suite that will allow us to defend against those types of things. So you can ask, like, did I, you know, what did I— evidence of this, that I know this, etc., etc., etc. It was very clear 4 years ago, it was very clear 8 years ago, it's very clear, um, you know, back in my time in the military that these things were coming. And so yeah, at the end of my White House time, that is what I decided to do. And so You know, I think in terms of what do you do to prepare, um, you have to have the right monitoring, you have to have the right capacity, you have to have the right people, you have to have the right intelligence.

You're the first, like, not Israeli security CEO I think I've, I've, I've run into in quite some time. What would you guys be doing that's different to a firewall than— that's different to a, um, what's meant to be a super sophisticated monitoring system that's been sold for 10, 20, 30 years?

Yeah, there's two types of security. There's the stuff that happens on what we call IT systems, you know, phones, laptops, databases. Oh, my email got hacked, they took all my emails. And then there's what we call OT systems, operational technology. That's like robot arm assembling car. Robot arm is controlled by computer connected to network. That network's in a big factory. That factory makes cars. That's OT. Most OT security today is about tapping the network, looking at the data moving over the wires, and it just creates thousands, tens of thousands. We talked to one customer, Fortune 50 company. They'd taken one of these network security monitoring tools, they'd instrumented their global infrastructure. They were literally getting 10 billion alerts a day. It's useless. Um, glad those companies are out there doing great. We like the founders. I'm glad they're in the industry. Check. Not useful. So what we do is we take not just networking data, we go down to the actual devices themselves. We pull data off of those. We go to the firewalls, we go to the computers, into the operating systems. We integrate with the applications. We just say there's all this data on an industrial system or network. At your car factory, at your water treatment plant, at your oil refinery, what have you. We're gonna look at all of it. We can do that inside our customers' environments, and then we correlate it in real time and we can say, oh look, these 3 things just happened. Oh, hey. And then we present it all in a very tight way to our users. And we're like, hey, out of the billion things that happened today on your network, here's the one thing that you should look at. Um, so that's what we do. And yeah, it's working so far.

So, you know, and I, for a while I did cover the security industry and the argument was always that the security guys trump up all the fear around all of this stuff in order to sell more technology. I mean, could somebody not look at, you know, your opinions on these things and be like, well, okay, you're just trying to, you're just trying to drum up some business, you know?

Yeah, they absolutely could. Um, here's what I would say. OT cyberattacks have real-world implications. They shut down water treatment facilities. They can destroy— kinetically destroy— oil refineries. There was an attempt to do that, you know, within the last decade. Um, a few years ago, they basically destroyed Iran's steel industry. Some hackers took control of the hardware that literally pours the molten metal into the molds. And instead of pouring it into the molds, they poured it on the floor of like multiple facilities in Iran, just completely destroying these things.

This is not the Stuxnet, this is outside of that, or part of that?

This, um, was called Predatory Sparrow. There's video on the internet of it. I think it was in like '22, '23. So like these types of attacks have incredible physical damages, uh, physical consequences. And if you look at how much people spend on securing those IT systems. You know, is that reasonable? Is that not? I hope it's reasonable. Maybe it's reasonable. I'm not an expert in that. It's like orders of magnitude less that we spend on securing the physical systems. So as a risk manager and military officers, that's how I started my career, are ultimately risk managers. I would just like, hey, maybe we should actually buy down those risks and spend some money to buy down on those risks. Um, and so, you know, we try not to sell fear. Like we deliver incredible granular visibility into everything that's happening on these networks in real time. Um, we're able to help the production security teams and the production engineering teams see when people get to those locations, see what they're doing when they plug in their laptop, plug in a thumb drive, authorized user, authorized credentials. What are they doing? What in, what applications are they installing? We give them incredible granularity. But yeah, I mean, look, that's the challenge of selling security is that you're, you know, it's, it's like the mob, right? Like, man, nice factory. It'd be terrible if someone were to, you know, do something to it. But no, from a risk manager's perspective, these assets are uninsurable. Like most of them are self-insured. So internally their risk management team should, and in many cases do have mechanisms where they can literally price the fact that like, well, we know what the downtime is per day, per hour, per minute for this facility, and we know what a catastrophic loss looks like. And, you know, frankly, it's up to them to figure out what they want to spend against to buy down that risk.

And we need— I mean, the securing the industrial systems, all of that makes a ton of sense to me when we talk about like this bigger picture of protecting intellectual property, um, kind of like countering espionage. A lot of that feels pointless to me. I mean, you know, I remember talking to like the chief security officer of at the time Facebook and a couple other companies, and they're like, oh, we run this, we just run this calculus, which is like we have 100,000 employees and this percentage of them are, are certainly, you know, spies for some nation-state. And, and, um, yeah, you do things to try cordoning off software code from different groups so that one person can't just kind of grab all the crown jewels in one go. But, um, I think we're only like so effective. And then you think about, I mean, I'm going to OpenAI, Anthropic all the time, and, and, you know, you just, every time I'm walking through the halls, I'm just like, oh, well, obviously like some group of people here are just, you know, kind of grabbing some interesting things. I mean, that part feels, feels sort of hopeless to me too, but maybe I think there are mechanisms for all these things, right?

There are mechanisms to buy down these risks. There are mechanisms to— that can be put in place. I've, I've tweeted about it. I've written on the internet. My thoughts are publicly available, especially when it comes to the AI companies. And I think there's a lot that can be done there. I think it comes down to the will, right? The will of these CEOs. Um, Yeah, we'll see.

When you go there today, I mean, they do have like, they've got like, this is the first group of companies I've ever run across in Silicon Valley where there's a surly dude at the door, you know, checking everyone who's coming in and these plainclothes security people. I never ran into that anywhere, like Intel, whatever, even pretty serious stuff back in the day. And then, yeah, you always wonder how we, I don't know. I don't know if that does anything or not, but I mean, it seems, it seems like the AI companies are at least cognizant of how important they are to some degree.

Yeah. I mean, I've met a bunch of those folks at many of those companies and I think that they are doing a lot in the right direction. My argument would be there's more they can do. Yeah. Um, and I don't just mean like secure, you know, like we, you know, securing their data centers against, you know, someone shutting down the building management systems, which is what we would do in those types of situations. I'm actually not talking talking about that. Like, okay, great, maybe we could do something like that. No, I mean from a personnel standpoint, from a like risk mitigation of like IP theft standpoint, you know, not talking my own book at all. It's like, I think there's a lot that could be done. Um, yeah, it's like a whole other conversation.

Okay.

I do think there's an opportunity for a counterintelligence company here in the Valley to help folks figure out who's working for them Who are those people talking to? You know, what's the risk of them going to some other country or lifting intellectual property and going out and starting a competitor or giving it to a, you know, peer, near-peer nation state?

Yeah, I'm always, always disappointed sometimes in how, um, the lack of cloak-and-dagger-ness, you know, that company doesn't exist. I remember I went to the FBI's field office in Palo Alto. It was kind of like 8 or 10 people, and, and, um, they were all very well-meaning, but it didn't feel like a force. And then the most disappointing thing for me was while I was doing my space book, and I just had this completely— I think it was like a once-in-a-lifetime sort of access where I had written the biography on Elon, and then everyone wanted to be like Elon. And so I was— I just got this like carte blanche access to from the Indian space program to Rocket Lab building rockets in New Zealand, every startup in the United States. I got to go to French Guiana. I went to Svalbard to see where all this data comes. Like everyone was letting me in everywhere. Sometimes I had a video camera with me. I had my camera. I went to Ukraine to the old like secret ICBM factories and rocket test sites. And yeah, like no one ever, I even almost got to go to a launch in China. This is— I was one day away and some general canceled it. But, but yeah, nobody ever tried to try to bring me in. I was like, I thought it was going to be my moment. But you think there are people who are like, yeah, sometimes you sort of want in your head, you want this to be like Hollywood or something like that. But You think not? Or I guess there is some degree of it. There must be.

Yeah, a little. I think that, um, it's just part of the nature of the American system. We're very open, kind of laissez-faire. Yeah, laissez-faire. You know, there are certainly opportunities for things like that, but, um, you know, it comes with a major downside if people start doing things like that. It has a you know, it has an impact.

Yeah.

How did you—

I'm gonna let you go in a second, but how did you, how did you become like this? What were you like as a kid? Where'd you grow up?

I grew up in Michigan.

Michigan. What would your parents do?

Um, my family had a small manufacturing company.

Okay.

Um, mostly sporting goods.

Okay.

Um, did some auto, very small, nothing serious. I mean, serious things, but like very small. For a while. But yeah, I grew up in, you know, what was the Silicon Valley of the 1920s and the 1930s and the 1940s, '50s in a family, industrial family. I learned to drive a forklift before I learned how to drive a car because our family business was seeing the impacts of globalization as like other markets started manufacturing things. So, you know, we had to like lay off a bunch of people and the company got down to like very small, very small numbers. And like on the weekends, you know, I was like 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Yeah, I'd go to our warehouse and help my dad and mom like pick, pack and ship orders and yeah, had good schooling. Went to some great schools, and I got into terrorism as a high school student.

This is where I was going, because you're this weird mix of like historian nerd, um, and like this obvious patriotic streak. And so yeah, I was trying to get to the roots of this.

Yeah, so I was, I was 17, I was, uh, gonna be a senior in high school, and I went to like summer program at Georgetown University, and I took a foreign policy class. And it was like, you know, I had to write a paper at the end of the summer, and I decided to write the paper on Al-Qaeda, which was very interesting to me. I'd read that End of History essay.

That worked out.

And I thought that guy was wrong. Like, literally, I read the essay and I was like, this doesn't seem right. And then, you know, it was like a 17-year-old, I was like, well, Second World War seems to have come out of the First World War. The Cold War seems to have come out of the Second World War. So what's going to come out of the Cold War? And then like, I read this article about the Cole bombing, I was like, that's interesting, who are these people? And then spent the summer reading. I, I mean, it probably wasn't everything, but I literally read every article I could find on LexisNexis using every permutation of Osama bin Laden's name and al-Qaeda. Um, I still have all the paper, printed everything out, highlighted, and then wrote this paper about like, oh, what's the U.S. strategy towards al-Qaeda? Came to this conclusion. I was like, we're not doing the right thing here.

You were how old, 17?

That was the summer of 2001.

Okay, okay, right. So, but you're, you're—

9/11 was about 90 days after.

Yeah, yeah. In your— but you're in high— you're in high school. Oh, so we should have Did you ever try?

I tried, I tried, I tried. I was in college and I did get, I did get sort of like a tap on the shoulder and, you know, I probably should have said yes. I think that would have been cool.

I wouldn't be here, but like, wait, like somebody basically saw your paper.

It's a long story, you know, but yeah, basically I was in, I was in school. I was in a class, I was like, came to a class early and someone like came in, one of my friends, and they were like, "Hey, you should go downstairs right now." We're on like the 4th story of a building. They were like, "Go down to this, go down to the faculty lounge downstairs." I like go down there, there's like a guy there, have a conversation. He's like, "Let's talk tomorrow." Go have a conversation there. Then he's like, "Bring me all your papers, come back tomorrow." Third day I go back, And then he starts grilling me. He's like, "Why'd you do this? Why'd you do this?" And I just ran him through everything. Because by that point, I'd written other papers as well that were prescient. I'd written this huge paper on Abdul Qadir Khan in late 2004, early 2005. He's the father of the Pakistani nuclear program. And I sort of started breaking apart his network just using open-source tooling. So he's grilling me about that, grilling me about some other stuff. And then yeah, ultimately that process led to people wanting to put me on a desk, on a regional desk. And I told them like, if I'm gonna do it, I want to go after the big dog. And there was like an office and like for people who, you know, and I was like 21 or something, I knew the name of the office. I was like, I'll come work with you guys, but I want to be in this shop. And they were like hemming and hawing and they were like, oh, it's a different different recruiting process. I was like, okay, fine, I'm just gonna go join the Navy. And then the Navy found me, and then the Navy was like, actually, we're gonna have you go do this weird stuff.

Crazy. That is a crazy hobby, man. Um, did you watch The Hunt for Osama Bin Laden on Netflix?

I can't watch any of that stuff. No, no. I mean, it was like, it was years of my life. I was super early. It's like, probably, you know, I should not have this attitude. You know, I should be grateful. But when, um, when The Looming Tower came out, and then what was the other one, the Steve Cole book, um, about bin Laden, like, those two books were preciously won knowledge in my mind. And I'm like reading these books and I'm just like, they just published it all, they just published all the stuff that I knew, you know, that was in like, I don't know, whatever years those books came out. What was the Steve Cole book? I can't remember. But it's like his famous bin Laden book. Um, and, uh, no, I can't watch that stuff. I can't watch the dramatizations of it all because, like, you know, I lived it. Like, on 9/11, I was high school senior. First plane hits, I'm in Shakespeare— I'm like in a class reading Shakespeare. I was like, only, only Shakespeare. Second plane hits, I'm like, yo, this is al-Qaeda. Everyone's like, a what? So they're like, it's a what? And I'm like, hold on. I had my laptop in the car. I run out to my car, I get the thing, I like, you know, thumb drive and print off 10 copies. Was well known. Operation Bajoinga, KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tries to like hijack 10, 11 planes, crash them into the West Coast. All this stuff going on. We could go down the rabbit hole on that right now. But al-Qaeda has this like operational attitude where they never not never, but like, if they want to hit something, they'll hit something, right? Like, the Cole was not the first ship that they had targeted out of Aden. They tried to run that op, I think, twice, at least once. And like, the boat had sunk, the skiff had sunk with the explosives on it. And they were like, ah, this weird thing happened, you know, like a month or two before. This weird thing happened. These guys had this boat, they were trying to come at this Navy ship. Um, so Al-Qaeda had this history of like, they fixate on targets and they go after them, and they go after them until they get actually, you know, good morale move for your team, right? Like, we're going to achieve an objective, we're not going to stop till it's done. And so it was just like airplanes, it was World Trade Center, right? The Blind Shake had tried to bring down the— you know, they, they tried to run that op previously with the car bombs in the basement. So I was just like, oh, you know, it's like the meme, right, with the—

with the—

I was just like, oh my God, it's all happening right now.

Yeah.

And this is within like 90 minutes of the second plane. I It was like, it was right away, I knew. And then, you know, it was off to college and I was like, ah, I need to find a way. I gotta like get into this thing. And so yeah, I just studied every language I could, studied all the history that I could. And then yeah, you know, when you're in that type of situation, like, you know, the right people do end up kind of finding you. And that's what happened. You know, that's how I got pulled into where I got pulled into in the military.

And not that your current work's not important, but isn't it like, don't you miss sort of the adrenaline rush of doing stuff like that? That, being in the Navy, working for the president, and now you got to go out and like sell stuff.

Yeah, it's a different type of adrenaline. Like, you know, the military adrenaline is like— that's a whole other thing. Um, it's a— it, it was a lot of fun, right? Everyone's like, oh, honor, duty, country, etc. Like, that's also a lot of fun. Um, and I had a lot of fun, and I was incredibly— I was incredibly lucky. So I I was so frustrated that these people didn't want to put me on that team hunting bin Laden right out of college. Fucking jackass kid, right? Like, you know, you're going to have to like do something before we're like going to trust you with, you know, going for the real hunt. But I was like, no, no, no, I've done it. Like, come on, put me on the team, coach. So I literally walked into a Naval recruiting station and I'm like, put me on a boat. You know, just like put me on a boat. And, and, you know, University of Chicago is on the South Side, not a great part of town. The recruiter's like, "White boy, what are you doing here?" And I'm just like, "I want to join the Navy." And he's like, "No, no, like, what are you doing here?" And I'm like, "I go to school." And he's like, "That school?" I'm like, "Yeah." He's like, "Huh." He's like, "We haven't seen anyone from that school in this recruiting station." In quite some time. And so I signed up. I was going to be a surface officer. I was going to be a surface warfare officer. And like, I did a bunch of outdoor stuff. So I like go on this like hiking trip, no cell phones. I mean, I had like a flip phone at the time, and I come back and, um, my phone's been blown up. It's been a week— not exploded, but you know, like, there's all these missed phone calls. Yeah, they called my parents. Like, this weird corner of the Navy called my parents, and they're like, we're gonna have you sign him— sign the legal documents to have him go to this other thing. We're not going to tell you what it is. My parents were like, he's 22, we can't do that legally speaking. And I get on the phone, these people are just like, hey, we know you have— I mean, you know, I'm not trying to— again, a lot of people did a lot more than I did.

You have a special set of skills.

Literally, they were like, we know that you have this very interesting background. Can you come to Washington next week? I'm like, in Chicago, you know, I just got beard, shagged out, the whole thing. And you know, I've got an ego on me. I was like a young kid. I'm like, all right, yeah, see you. Tuesday noon, you know, the dining hall or whatever for this facility. And I like get in my car, drive all the way to DC. I'm like, no. And I had an OCS date, but I was not in the Navy at the time. I'd signed up to be a surface officer, surface warfare officer we call it in the Navy. Show up to this weird office in Maryland and they're just like, so we can't tell what you're gonna do, but, um, we can get you very close to the things that you're very interested. And I was like, can you give me more? And they're like, you're just gonna have to trust us. And I was just like, all right, sure, you know, fuck it, sign on the dotted line. And then I like go through all the training pipeline to be like a normal naval officer, even in that specific area. And then like in the last week, some dude just showed up, straight up showed up and like completely re-interviewed me. And this does not exist anyway anymore. So it's like, You can't find this. The door doesn't exist. So what I'm describing to you just doesn't happen anymore. Yeah, dude showed up and did a whole other interview process. And then, yeah, they were just like, okay, yep, good enough, come with us. And that was it. And I was not in the regular Navy. And so like, I was very lucky, you know, I'm sort of like round peg, square hole type guy. Obviously I used to say I'm good for the Navy, not good. I was definitely not good in the Navy. I was like, very good for the United States Navy, but like, you know, um, why, why doesn't this happen anymore?

Why— we're not—

it used to happen. It used to—

why are you not flagging kind of our, our outliers?

Well, it's funny, this all comes back to the beginning. So Ben Coleman, God willing, he gets confirmed as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. Um, I think we should have these types of things. And I think that, and I had a lot of friends and a lot of respect and for a while I wanted to be just one of these guys who was just like, follow the order, go execute the order. There's pleasure in discipline, there's pleasure in all that stuff. And I'm not saying that I disobeyed orders. I don't think I ever disobeyed orders. I certainly interpreted them creatively, but there is a Zen pleasure that you can have and I experienced this in my early training, just like everyone does, where it's like the gunny screaming at you, get on your face and give me 20. You're just like, okay, I'm not even going to think about it. I'm on my face. I'm doing pushups, you know, go clean that passageway, P-way. Okay, great. I'm going to go do that. That's all I'm going to do. I'm not even thinking about it. I'm just like responding. And, and I, you know, for a while I wanted to do that and just sort of it's like a mental vacation. Almost. But like, after a while, again, it's just like the way that I'm built, it was just like, I, uh, we can do that better, that's not going to work, can we go to this other thing? And it's just like, it just grinds on you. And so I think we have an opportunity to sort of return to that, but like, the military still does need that like bulk of people, right?

But you're saying that they decided there was just a few too many of those kinds of people who were making the system difficult, or I I think the way to do it is to find a way to pull those people into something that is connected but non-responsive.

Yeah, in a certain way. The Marine Corps has actually done a very good job of this with their Marine Innovation Unit that they just stood up. And like, those guys are like absolute hitters. I've got a bunch of friends in those units. They have to do the PT exams, like they're studs. They're like CEOs of like multi-billion dollar companies or like hardcore AI engineers at like Anthropic or something like that. But the Marine Corps takes them and they're just like, look, you have to be Marines. You're Marines. You're in uniform. You got to do the pull-ups. You got to do the run. But we have some other tasks for you to think about.

Right. Israel seems to figure this out.

Yeah. They've got that. Uh, they've got that weird— there's 8200. Then there's that other program where they pick like 10 kids a year or something. It's got some, I don't know, some name I forgot.

Yeah.

Um, who knows? But yeah, like, they, they do that. The Singaporeans do this pretty well. Um, we used to do this. The Americans used to do this. Um, the British do it very well. Um, and so I, I hope for our country that we can get back there, and I think we, God willing, we will.

Yeah, I wrote a story. I mean, God bless Waxahachie State or whatever, but I saw, you know, the NSA— I was looking through their recruiting. Yeah, like where we're coming to campus and everything, and, you know, notably not on any of the list was like MIT, Caltech, um, anywhere you would, you would be expecting to find your exceptional nerd. You know, it was, it was, it was the— there was, it was mid to lower rung.

Look, I think there are a lot of great people that go to a range of schools.

Totally fair. But I will say, grossly generalizing—

but no, no, no, no, no, you're making a really important— you're making a really important point, which I, you know, again, we're bringing that— we started off with Trump, we'll come— we'll end with Trump. He's making a good point, which is that like those schools are now like 50-plus percent not American kids, right? And there is fraud that happens in those application processes. There is, you know, a whole bunch of bad stuff that happens there. And I think that we have to bring the American education system back to like educating our populace, our people, our nation.

Right?

Um, we have to educate those kids and give them those best opportunities. And I'm not saying don't have kids from Ireland or Germany or South Africa or Egypt or, you know, Vietnam or what have you. Like, sure, yeah, you can have some. But like, I think a part of what's going on is like there's been this just systemic, um, campaign to limit the number of like heritage Americans that go to the top schools in the United States. And that's And that's frankly, that's sort of what you're seeing in those recruiting things. Like I've met brilliant people that are going to, you know, land grant institutions who like 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago absolutely would've just been like Good Will Hunting'd.

Yeah. Well, my oldest son is gonna be a senior, so fuck those other kids. Exactly.

Let's get 'em in. Let's get 'em in.

Let 'em in. Yeah. Josh Diamond, it's always, it's like so fun to talk to you, man.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, dude.

Really appreciate you coming in and, and hopefully Hopefully we can— you'll come back again sometime.

Anytime.

All right. Thank you. The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. It is produced by David Nicholson and me. Our theme song is by James Mercer and Jon Sortland, and the show is edited by the Jon Sortland. Thanks as always to Brex and A1 Ventures for making this possible. Please visit our Substack, YouTube, and podcast channels to get more of what Core Memory makes. Thanks, y'all.