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- [00:00]
A
Department of Defense doesn't need a wake up call about AI. They're well aware of it. What they need to do is to get out of bed. And that's what I'm urging. They need to get going. There's a first mover advantage that's significant, but perishable. If you get there first and you defend your systems before others attack them, you're in a vastly better position if you get there first. The technology will shape things by its inherent logic and its capabilities, but the humans will also shape it in the way that the Europeans shape the New World, including bringing smallpox, et cetera, equivalent to malevolence in the AI world.
- [00:38]
B
Kicking off our powerful AI and National Security series, we have the great Richard Danzig. He was Clinton's Secretary of the Navy. He's on the board of rand, has done a great many other things, but he is also the author of the recent paper Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and National Security. The Fierce Urgency of Now. What will it take for America to, as Danzig puts it, get out of bed? Our co host today for this series is Teddy Collins, who spent a while at DeepMind before serving in the Biden White House and helping to write the 2024 AI National Security Memorandum. Thank you for the thanks to the Hudson Institute for sponsoring this episode and welcome to ChinaTalk, everyone. I think we should start off by talking about why to think seriously about AI and national security today. You've been in this game a long time and have read a lot about and lived through a number of different evolutionary and revolutionary changes in military affairs. So, you know, sitting here in 2025, how does this one feel for you, Richard?
- [01:41]
A
It feels close to existential. Our conventional military capabilities remain enormous, but what's happened over the course of the last 30 years, more or less, is that they've become properly integrated with software and dependent on it as a result. And that software system undergirds everything else. But I think national security leaders who've gone through, for example, 30 year careers in the military have remained disproportionately focused on the hardware and not on the underlying software. And the vulnerabilities of that system seem to me to be enormous, and the capabilities on the offensive side should be made more robust. So for me, that's pretty fundamental. Other revolutions, as, for example, stealth and the like, were additive to our advantages and didn't so much risk undermining the whole establishment. So for me, that's a very important difference.
- [02:46]
B
Okay, so representative and foundational is the way you're characterizing cybersecurity and AI.
- [02:54]
A
Oh, I'm not sure I know what you mean by representational.
- [02:59]
B
This is, I'm quoting you here, representative and foundational.
- [03:04]
A
Yeah, well, much as I like being quoted, I think I'll emphasize foundational.
- [03:09]
B
Okay, so let's start then with a brief. So you start out this paper with a 10 page section about the sorts of things that it is reasonable to expect AI to rapidly unlock when it comes to cybersecurity. Why don't you run through a few of those to give folks a sense of what's at stake here?
- [03:35]
A
Yeah, obviously, as everybody is noting, AI is a vastly transformative technology. Some people analogize it to the development of electricity. I think one analogy that appeals to me is that it's like the coming of the market. We're like people who in 1500 are sitting there and if we could perceive that suddenly the feudal system is about to be replaced by market capitalism and we tried to anticipate what the consequences of that change might be, we'd have an extraordinarily difficult job guessing what the next two centuries might unfold. Restructuring of family life because people are no longer apprenticing in the family. Movement to the cities, changes in public health, the rise of the nation state, et cetera, et cetera. We just couldn't predict it. And I don't think we can predict AI terribly confidently or challenges the greater. Because while the transformation that occurred in Europe between 1500 and 1700, as Polyani put it in the classic history, the great transformation occurred over two centuries, and the AI changes are likely to occur in a much more compressed time period, less than a decade, they'll have equivalent kinds or influences. So my proposition is in some respects, let's just take a small corner of that to understand it, and a small corner that I'm focused on is intrinsically important. But also, and now this is the context in which I mean it as representative. It's a representative case, although I wish you could have better defended my use of that term, Jordan. But it's suggestive, I think, and important. And the reason it's important or foundational is because the AI automates the capacity to both defend software and to attack it. And there's a lot of debate about which of those dominates over time. But my point is, whatever you think, whether you think our ability to patch exceeds our ability or others ability to attack or vice versa, the thing that fundamental is that there's a first mover advantage that's significant but perishable if you get there first and you Defend your systems before others attack them. You're in a vastly better position if you get there first and you can embed some exploits in the opponent's software systems so that you can deter them from attacking you in any number of ways, including through software, you have a huge advantage. So I want to place an emphasis, this is why I speak about the fierce urgency of now, an emphasis on getting there quickly because I think the existing establishment is quite content to be reactive and passive. And I can say more about that. But that may be an overview of my approach.
- [06:44]
B
Yeah, it's interesting because on the one hand you have the reactive and passive approach assuming that nothing is going to change, and then you have this reactive and passive approach assuming that AGI is going to solve all and every problem. I mean, there's an interesting parallel there going on.
- [07:04]
A
I think that's right. I think what happens is that the relatively passive stance at the moment gets rationalized in part by saying, well, everything, as you say, everything will change with AGI. And a thing I'm trying to emphasize is no, it's a continuous revolution and it's happening now, as for example, in the capabilities to attack or defend software. And that's extremely fundamental. And then on top of that, I'm skeptical about the concept of AGI and even super intelligence and argue that AI is spiky. It occurs in some dimensions. Oh, this is a term that David Attil at OpenAI used. It occurs in some particulars quickly and in others more slowly. And the coming of AGI will be on or super intelligence will be uneven. And further, that not only is it likely to be uneven, but it's coming will not be like the coming of the Messiah where it sweeps away everything in front of it. It's a part of a larger ecosystem and the way in which it's assimilated in the other components of that ecosystem are extremely important. So for all those reasons, I would strongly urge, I do strongly urge attention to this now and vastly more effort on quickly assimilating where we are now without deferring to some uncertain future.
- [08:37]
C
Maybe sort of a question that's that's related to that. And you know, I think what you've outlined is certainly consistent with the way I see this stuff and Jordan and I have talked about it a fair amount. I can imagine that given the sort of finite bureaucratic capacity that can be dedicated at a place like DOD for sort of preparing for AI, there may be trade offs in terms of preparing for scalable near term automation of stuff that isn't too crazy and preparing for, let's set aside sort of the term AGI, but preparing for really transformative capabilities that some people think could emerge in the relatively near future. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about what those trade offs look like and under the uncertainty of the present day, how we should allocate resources accordingly.
- [09:22]
A
Yeah, well, Jordan rightly points to the last lines of my paper in which I say DoD, US Department of Defense doesn't need a wake up call about AI. They're well aware of it. What they need to do is to get out of bed. And that's what I'm urging. They need to get going. And so my urging in that regard is put more emphasis on the present. There's always the inclination to defer. The future has high degrees of unpredictability. And the best path towards that uncertain future is by developing your expertise, your assimilative capacity, your relationships with the frontier companies, etc. With the fierce urgency of now. And when you build that platform now, it leads you towards the longer term. So I, you know, there, there are these lines like Brazil is always the country of the future. DoD has always got capacities on the horizon that look wonderful. I'm, I'm. For now.
- [10:29]
B
Can you. Yeah. So what are some, I don't know, historical examples of the type of thinking that like AGI is going to solve all of this or sort of putting your eggs in the basic research like 10 plus years out basket, such that fast forward 10 years and you're actually, you know, it ends up being more of a crutch to make it easier to not do hard change than something that enables you to be more successful in the future.
- [10:59]
A
Yeah, well, I'd be interested in your answer to that because you're a keen student of military history. But the example that most immediately comes to mind is the thought that with the coming of nuclear weaponry, you didn't have to have such strong conventional capabilities and the realization that no, you need the particular capabilities in the short term and at lower levels of the escalatory ladder. So that's an example of an effort to kind of say, well, I can get by without attending to my near term conventional needs because I have this ace or trump card in my hand. I worry about that kind of thinking, but if the rules of Chinatalk permitted, I'd be interested in your answer, Jordan. Teddy, will you, will you maybe put the question to him so he'll answer it?
- [12:00]
C
Yeah, that's right. I invoke my co host privilege to transfer Rich's Question to you, Jordan.
- [12:08]
B
I have to get back to me. I mean, I think there's something about the sort of assumptions of primacy that the US had after the Cold War, where, and it, you know, comes back to the cyber stuff. It's like, sure, we can build all this stuff in the cloud and we can have everything run off satellites because we're going to assume that we're going to have the same ability to act over, over bombing Iran and bombing the Taliban as we do in any other conflict we might get into in the future. So I, I, I can't claim to be a deep student of sort of stealth or air defense in the 90s, in the 1990s and 2000s, but I imagine there was a lot of complacency and a lot of distraction, you know, of the sort of technological demands that you needed to sort of like, track Iman Al Zawahiri and, you know, try to do COIN stuff as opposed to the type of investments that you would make to really have a higher degree of confidence that you could beat off Russia or China in a conventional conflict.
- [13:22]
A
I think that's a good answer, Jordan. I'm glad that Teddy pressed the question upon you, but the I just would note that there's a certain irony in your saying at the outset, I subscribe vigorously to the fierce urgency of now, and I'll have to get back to you about what that means.
- [13:44]
B
Well, no, it's hard, right? Because like.
- [13:46]
A
Absolutely, yeah.
- [13:47]
B
Because, yeah. I mean, you want to win the war you're in. And I just, I imagine if you look at DARPA projects in the 2000s and 2010s, there was a lot more shifting to dealing with IEDs and, and, and jamming stuff then. Yeah, yeah, sorry.
- [14:04]
A
But staying with the, the interesting thing, I think, is that it's schizophrenic. There's a tendency, as your comment earlier suggested, there's a tendency on the one hand to emphasize the present. Above all, we're not going to invest in technology, et cetera. Readiness is what's most important. I've got this urgent need for more munitions to ship to Ukraine, et cetera. And those are real imperatives. I mean, I honor them. But then the other side of the schizophrenia is the tendency to put off the technology investments for the distant future, when you'll get everything that you need. And I think the technology demands something that isn't day to day now but isn't decade to decade in the future. It's month to month or year to year, and finding that Middle position is, as your question implies, challenging. I remember in the 1990s, as undersecretary of the Navy, I tried successfully actually, to push the Joint Staff towards more attention to biological warfare. And one manifestation of this was in vaccination against anthrax of some troops against anthrax. And some members of the Joint Staff thought, well, I don't want to do that because the vaccine against anthrax has these various burdens and disadvantages. I'll wait till I have a vaccine that manages to counter all possible biological threats. And fortunately, I had in hand Josh Letterberg, great figure, Nobel Prize winner, president of Rockefeller University. To say that's a fantasy. But the tendency to wait for the fantasies is very strong.
- [15:51]
B
All right, I got. I got one more for you. Maybe this is. This is close. I think so. Japan and the zeros, both from a sort of pilot training as well as a manufacturing perspective. So what Japan did in the late 1930s is optimize around the sort of most exquisite version of what a plane and a pilot could be. So they had these like, crazy, like, you know, like make Seal Team 6 look like some, you know, look like a walk in the park type hazing and training wish roles where, you know, 100 people walk in and like, you know, one. One pilot survives. And then you have really high crafted, like very high. Like very high risk. I would say jets where they couldn't tolerate a lot of, like, flak hitting them, but they were like the fastest and baddest planes on the planet. And that worked well for a while until you were in this, like, large industrial, you know, national mobilization type conflict where like, you really would have rather had, you know, 40 people pass that pilot program and have some tolerant, you know, have some decently good pilots and, you know, a jet that could be more easily mass produced and be able to. To sort of take more damage at the cost of the sort of exquisiteness of its, you know, speed and maneuverability and sort of not being able to conceptualize a war that was not number one on the priority list led you to not have more flexibility when it came to how you could use that force once things started not going entirely according.
- [17:33]
A
I think the general point is the technology change is continuous and you can't take a vacation from it. And you can't say, well, it's summertime. I'll wait till after Labor Day to come to grips with this and you don't ever win. Yeah, yes, definitely. And that's true. On the cybersecurity. My. I have a paragraph in the paper where I say, you know, it's not that cyber security, it's not that AI will end battles over cyber security. It's. This is just. It's not the end of history. It's not termination of warfare in this domain. It's just a new form of armament that will evolve itself over time. But I expect, Teddy, you have other questions for Jordan, so don't let me intrude.
- [18:22]
C
Well, first, I've won for you. Maybe it's a bit of a provocation, and it comes from sort of my experience with the nsm, which was sort of a third failure mode. If we think about these two failure modes that you outlined, one of really kicking the can down the road and the other of sort of being too focused on the really immediate problems. I found another failure mode was something sort of in between, which was a sort of limited incrementalist thinking, which is we would talk to a lot of people in different parts of DoD and EIC about AI, and we would get responses along the lines of, absolutely, we completely understand AI is going to be a really big deal. There is this discrete, well defined process, and we think that in the next 18 months, AI could speed that up by 30% or something. And we had this concern that that is important, it's necessary, but it's not sufficient. And you're sort of missing the forest for the trees. If we really do believe that this is going to be something on the order of, let's say, electricity or markets. And so there's this quote that I like from the paper. Policymakers must shed a tendency to see AGI or superintelligence as transforming everything upon its appearance. But actually, a lot of. I think that's true, but I actually found the opposite failure mode to be more common, that I kind of really wanted people to think much more expansively about how deep and systematic the changes could be. And I felt like people were maybe often blind to sort of like the long tail of really transformative possibilities. And so I wonder, in your view, is that at odds with what you're saying, or is this all part and parcel of we have to get out of bed? And these are just different flavors of getting out of bed.
- [20:17]
A
Yeah, the latter, I think you're observing correctly, a problem, and it's part and parcel of our difficulty. But if you step back and say, what is it we might agree on that we need most strongly. Square one, from my standpoint would be expertise. Way too little real expertise on AI at senior levels. I've just seen too Many examples of a lack of understanding about that in in depth, the kind of cutting edge ability. A second thing though would be general knowledge and awareness. That is to say it's a problem that many senior military officers don't have a working knowledge of this without deep expertise. A third problem is the distance from the companies. The companies and the government are doing better about this. And as I wrote the paper various things were occurring over the six months I wrote the paper that improved the situation, but only marginally. We it's sort of a very unusual circumstance that the center of this technology development is in the United States, but it is not substantially integrated with our national security. And when you look at the priorities of the companies and the like, national security isn't terribly high on that. They worry about things like jailbreaks and bio attacks derived from knowledge in AI and the like, but they don't really focus on the national security. So I want first, deep expertise in the government and growth in capacity. And we've talked about how to do that. Second, enrichment of the general appreciation of the technology amongst the non experts. Third, closer relationships with companies. And then fourth, I think I really do believe that the cyber transformations are the cutting edge case. And the general neglect of cyber as A domain within DoD is to me extremely troublesome. And then it's amplified by the coming of AI. And I suggest in the paper that one of the challenges is that just as we talk about the models decision making being shaped according to weights which are programmed in there bureaucracies which are analogous to the models, they mechanisms of group decision making and the like, bureaucracies are also weighted and their decisions are not logical consequences, simply they're consequences of the weights that they're pre programmed to give. So when you have an army focused on land warfare and a navy focused on sea and undersea and air, and an air force focused on air and a space force focused on space, and you don't have a cyber force focused on cyber, the tendency is to underweight in the decision making and the budgetary allocations and the promotional processes, et cetera, that factor and that for me is a big problem.
- [23:29]
C
Maybe following up on that, this touches on something that I found quite interesting which is in addition to this challenge of AI being a powerful dual use technology that emerged from the private sector and that being sort of historically unusual and as a result difficult for the government to grapple with. Another thing that seems distinct to me is that by virtue of its generality, not just the generality of the technology writ large, but you Know, under the current paradigm, it's like an individual model tends to be very, very general purpose. I think that sort of challenges the taxonomy of the way that we think about things in government and in the military, which tends to bucket things sort of in the way that you're describing. Like different capabilities go into different places. When we would talk to people at different components of the IC and different bits of DoD. Historically, if you wanted a really good system for thing X that involved building something that was very different from a really good system for thing buying. And so you had all of these bespoke very good at the time that they were created, narrow capabilities. And now having systems that are innately very general purpose and that require sort of a huge scale of resourcing in terms of compute, I think imposes a lot of bureaucratic difficulty because it necessitates pooling of resources. And I wonder what your thoughts are there in terms of sort of how to solve that problem.
- [24:57]
A
Well, I think that's largely right. I would just add one thing and qualify it in one respect. The qualification is that though there are certainly demands for large quantities of compute in the government, they are, as you know, largely involved in the work of inference and not in the work of creating the models and the compute. Demands for inference are notably lower. So there's something you probably know more about than I do, I expect. The other point though, that I would add is that the effort, what tends to happen is that the new technology is thought about in terms of the old techniques of. The question is how do I do what I've always been doing, but do it better with the new technology? And this occurs for all users of all technologies in all circumstances. When the computer, IBM introduced the personal computer and the like, I remember I was practicing law at the time and the attitude in my law firm was, this will be great for word processing. And it's very hard to see, oh, it's, it's going to be different and transform all kinds of things. So the military manifests this, I think, by saying, oh well, I'll use AI to assist the, the pilot or in target recognition or the analyst. And those are all attractive and meaningful things, but they don't come to grips with the power of the revolution. And I think that's part of your point.
- [26:40]
B
The sort of forcing function that you get in the private sector or in law firms, you write in your conclusion. Adapters eventually account for these effects, moderating some and amplifying others. Time eventually levels the field as those who do not adapt die. But the, you know, the feedback loops for militaries who fight big wars every, I don't know, 30 years maybe is very different. And the sort of peacetime versus wartime innovation dynamics are just a really tough nut to crack I think. You know, aside from writing papers, I mean we have like a, a big war that is happening right now and still, you know, you're unimpressed by what is been transpiring over the past few years with respect to the U. S. Defense community. I mean, yeah, what else can we do or what, how much can we even really expect?
- [27:41]
A
I, I put the emphasis elsewhere. It's true that they only fight the big wars after substantial intervals, but I think military are very aware of, oh my God, I'm deploying ships to the Red Sea and people are firing missiles at me and what's going on in the Ukraine and in Gaza and so on and is all very, they're very salient for them. I think the problem is that to me the engine of change in the private sector is the nature of competition and of startups. So the enterprises that are aged either change or they die because they have the internal competition. But in the Defense Department world you don't get that we're not generating alternative Navies. So the nine out of 10 they compete and nine out of 10 die and the 10th is better. We have to reform the existing established one. We don't have the Schumpeter creative destruction engine that we have in other arenas. The best substitute for it in our system is when you get civilian leaders who are intense on driving change and they pair with military leaders who are open minded and sophisticated and committed to change. But the military leaders themselves can't do it because of the institutional constraints. They can't strip money away from the Navy and move it to the army or whatever. Of course I would move it in the reverse direction, but that's. As a former Navy Secretary, there's such a strong institutional set of boundaries. You have to have that refreshment from strong civilian leadership. And that's part of what I'm preaching. The problem can only be lifted up by two hands. One is the internal military bureaucracy and the other is the civilian leadership. And I'm not seeing that and that's deeply, deeply troublesome to me.
- [29:53]
B
So, okay, so we need, we need the civilians to show up and also some stuff bubbling up from the, you know, the officer side to get excited about change. I mean, is like, to what extent is Congress irrelevant? You know, can Congress be like a, like a, is Congress always following can they be leading on this stuff? I mean, how. What, what are, what are the sort of other forces in the system that have impact on the way these developments play out besides folks working in the Pentagon?
- [30:34]
A
First off, I don't think it's just a question of bubbling up from the military. I mean, there are some senior military officers whose capabilities in this arena are considerable and who get it and are committed. It's just that the chain of command and the nature of the consensus process and the competition over resources makes them, in my view alone, unlikely to be able to drive this. Which is why you need the civilians who stand outside the system, and they have to together form a coalition for change. Congress is extremely relevant to that, but more as a brake or an accelerator than as a steering wheel. It's very difficult for Congress to lead the executive branch to dramatically better outcomes. What Congress can do is say, we're going to get behind this, that these civilian creative leaders or these remarkable military leaders are pressing and we're going to validate it and we're going to make it easier by providing additional resources for it, which makes it incomparably easier. Or they can retard it by saying, we don't like this, we're going to undercut resources, et cetera, et cetera. That, to me, is the greatest power of Congress in this arena. But I unfortunately, I just don't think Congress can actually have the sustained attention and the micromanagement touch that you need to have. Just take one example. Who gets foreboded? Congress confirms that it can oppose people, it can warmly embrace them, but it can't generate the choices. The executive branch, if it's left simply to the military. When you deal with three and four star appointments, those Secretaries of the services recommend to the Secretary of Defense who recommends to the President who nominates the Congress below that rank. You have promotion boards and the like, and it's something else we can talk about. But who you're promoting to three and four stars and the commitment you ask of them before you nominate them for promotion, that's something that only the Executive Branch can do, and that I think is imperative. So you begin to then populate the senior ranks of the military leadership with people who are adept at that, and then the message is transmitted through the ranks. If you really want to be promoted to the senior levels and you want to participate in what's happening, you need to get smart in this area and get behind it. And to me, that's how change happens. It's interesting, though, what's so Striking to me is, and this is another theme in the paper, we talk about AI and its impacts and the tendency for technologists is to think about it as a technology from people like me who live in a bureaucratic world and worry about those problems. The emphasis is on assimilation in the human context. And people like Jeff Ding and his admirable book have studied this and written about it and the like. For me, it's a phenomenon of co evolution. The technology develops and changes and the human adaptation adopts and changes and the two interact with each other. And how the technology will in fact evolve, what we use our models for, where we put our resources, how we invest in data and data centers, all that will be responsive, should be responsive to the human elements of this and the two intertwined. And on the risk side, I think it's also important to recognize that technology has some inherent risks which people talk about guardrails and so on, the AI safety institutes, but the human risks are really very substantial, of actually malevolence, but also of accidents and of gee, I develop an offensive capability with my AI system and some of our opponents develop that capability and suddenly there is a cyber attack using an AI system. And I don't know whether that's actually the machinery run awry or the equivalent of a lab escape in the biology arena or an actual attack. And how do humans respond to that and what do we do with the technology? So it's not just that the technology risks running away on its own, it risks running away because of that co evolution with the humans. So both on the positive side are actually getting the benefit of it. And on the risk side, for me, the tale needs to be told in two dimensions. And if you look at it one dimensionally, just the technology or just the assimilation, you're unfortunately going to arrive at the misunderstanding.
- [36:05]
B
Okay, so why don't you tie that to the dynamics? Why don't you tie that to how you hit really hard in this piece about having a first mover advantage and the importance of doing that adoption Right. And quickly as opposed to just sort of being comfortable that it will come to you.
- [36:27]
A
Yeah, well, if a model's just out there and announced to the world, or even if it's held private and for example, you get the equivalence of Deep Seek or the Kim model now in China coming out with much more with various their fast followers. When the model's announced, if everybody has equal access to it, you're going to very quickly find that whoever is the quickest to pick it up has a substantial advantage because they can, in my example, in the cyber patch or attack before the other side is really well armed. And it's astonishing to me that these are American companies at the cutting edge, but we haven't really forged that national security nexus and we'll see what the President says today. But the foreshadowing of his AI plan 180 days into his administration is one of emphasis on developing the AI systems and building data centers and the like. But it's not, so far as I know at the moment, a real integration with the national security establishment. And Teddy, I'm a fan of what the Biden administration did and what you did in those contexts, but I don't see, again, this strong national security part. I see an emphasis on AI safety and the development of the technology and concern, appropriate concern about its ramifications in a number of dimensions. But from my standpoint, maybe because I'm a national security guy, that's where I've spent my career. This seems pretty elemental and should be featured much more. Am I being unfair, Teddy, in my brief sketch?
- [38:25]
C
No, I think, I think I, I think I totally agree. I mean, well, let me say I, I completely agree in terms of the fact that a lot more needs to be done. Probably the, the document that, that foregrounded this the most during the Biden administration was the National Security Memorandum, which at least as of the time of this recording, remains alive, unlike some of the other documents that we put together. But I think that I, and anyone else sort of, I think everyone else who worked on that would say that that was the first of the baby steps that are needed in order to get in the direction that we want to go and that we are very, very, very far short of where we want to be. I mean, a huge piece of my job was just the most basic translation of taking things that people would say in Silicon Valley speak and explaining what it meant in national security spe of policymakers and vice versa. So, yeah, I couldn't agree more that we need these two worlds to be speaking to each other more extensively. We tried to lay a foundation for it in the nsm, but I think I totally endorse the idea that the government needs to get out of bed because we're maybe in a slightly better situation than we were a few years ago, but we are not in, I would say, objectively a good situation in terms of the engagement between these two spheres.
- [39:47]
A
Well, you're bilingual in that effort at translation between technospeak and national security speak, and. Right on. I think this, though, also Goes back to the dialogue with Jordan about Congress. I think national security memoranda are important and this is a real achievement. But the only way in my view you get there is to have a strong Pentagon leadership committed to it in a day to day way that makes promotion decisions, budgetary decisions, operational decisions over and over again with a sensitivity to this variable which has been lacking. And you can't put that on the back shelf in a way that in my view, Trump won. The Biden administration and Trump too are all doing, which is why I'm jumping up and down on the fierce urgency of now.
- [40:46]
C
Maybe one question that's sort of related to these topics around organizational structure and culture and how that relates to technological change is that if we do take seriously this proposition that AI is like electricity, fire, market, something that is very general purpose and that will probably be pretty diffuse in terms of its impact on any given area. Does that like what kind of organizational change is necessary at something that is as big and siloed as DoD in order to get that to propagate through fully? Because it seems unlike a lot of previous discrete capabilities?
- [41:29]
A
Yeah. So I resist recipes for organizational change generally. When I was Secretary of the Navy, it was a point of pride for me that I reorganized nothing. And one of the reasons for that is that any reorganization involves huge transaction costs and sets you back a year or two while people will work out memorandum of understanding, new assignments, find their way to the restrooms, et cetera, et cetera. It's just extremely difficult thing to do. But then more troublesome still is it tends to substitute for actually coming to grips with the real imperatives which are to change the culture, increase the expertise and improve the kinds of investments you're making and develop programs. And my view is generally you can do that in the existing organization more effectively than you can create the new organization. But over the six months in which I wrote this paper, I became, against my resistance, more and more persuaded that the argument for cyber force made by people like Mark Montgomery and others is, is an argument that has real force. I would, if I were, I would encourage a strong civilian leadership and military leadership to try and make the existing system work. But if I couldn't reorchestrate those priorities rapidly within a matter of months, I would move towards creating a cyber force. And the theory would be I can't generate in the existing system the protection of the people who have cyber expertise and the encouragement of them and the AI expertise even more. So what happens now in the military services? I'll take The Navy as an example, just because I know it best, is that when, if you're a young person who goes into the service as a lieutenant, you get extraordinary responsibility. If you have cyber and AI skills because you're a digital native and your seniors are digital immigrants and you know, you just have greater skills. And it's unbelievably worthwhile, I think, and exciting to those participants and they do important things and it just, it's so wonderful to see. And then the institution says to these people, congratulations, you've been hugely successful in the first four or six years of your career doing this AI stuff and the cider stuff and digital skills. And now we want you to stop doing it because if you want to get promoted, you have to go to sea, etc. Etc. And there are no billets at sea for people who do this kind of stuff. You have to be a general purpose officer and that's a big problem. So in the end, these people leave not because they want the stock options and more money, which are attractive, but because they can't keep doing what they want to do. And we're telling them you're an incredibly rich resource. I could populate an armed force or a company with an extraordinary array of talent just from those that I know personally. The Navy's lost over the last five years. It's just to me, causes gnashing of the teeth.
- [45:05]
B
So we do have this thing called the nsa and you sort of allude to it in your paper that a lot of times the kind of mid or senior level expertise that goes in, the kind of gone as like detailed over what does and doesn't work about having that organization as something that I assume folks can think like, oh, not to worry, like they got, they got a handle on it. We don't need to invest in this stuff at home.
- [45:33]
A
The NSA is just a terrific place. It has a huge pools of expertise. But it's got the same problem. I mean, the French call this la deformation professional. The the way in which the professional identity causes us to narrow our perceptions and or activities. So as you well know, after much discussion, a structural change was made. And Cybercom was created as a part of NSA and as a part of DOD and now has increasing degrees of independence and the like. But. And Cybercom in its civilian side is staffed in substantial measure by NSA people. But the NSA people tend to be hugely focused on intelligence. They're promoted, et cetera. They're trained in that realm, they're promoted in that realm. They go to Cybercom for two or three years and then they rotate back to nsa. So you don't create a career force that has extraordinary capability in that regard. And then on the military side you do the same thing. Military are rotated in for two or three years, their general purpose, then they go back to their mainstream careers. It doesn't work for building an institution. That work. We made it work with Special Operations Command, which is analogous, but that's because we had previously developed in the service of special operations operators and promoted them and developed that expertise, whereas we're not doing that with a digital world. And the cyber is a manifestation of it. And the AI is a sort of meta manifestation of it. It's as though we developed airplane flight with prop airplanes. That's the cyber. And now we've got jet engines behind it and it's just a different kind of competitive world. I haven't even begun to that analogy is not in my paper probably a good thing, but I've got many more analogies. My paper, in an effort to kind of bring home this. We haven't even got to my New World analogy. But I'll restrain.
- [47:47]
B
Yeah, let's, we got, let's, let's, let's do that one. We got, you know, British imperialism. Let's do, let's do some more, let's.
- [47:55]
A
Do a little tour. Well, the suggestion in the paper is that the really the national authorities globally now are like the Europe as they look at AI or like the European governments were in 1500 when they looked at the New World. They know it's extremely important that it's going to change things, that they have to be engaged with it, but they have fantasies about what it means. Nobody really knows. And so they think there's a Northwest Passage and there's a Fountain of youth and the people who live there all grew up in India, where understanding of AI is rather like that. And therefore my effort to chart a small square of that territory, the cyber security is an effort to try and say, hey, I can map this part of the new world and show you something about what it's like. But beyond that, other aspects of the analogy interest me. And two, just to mention, are the way in which the European powers project on the new World, their rivalries, et cetera. And this goes back to my point earlier about co evolution of the technology. The new world exercises a power of its own and the old world shapes the new. And that's the way in my view, it'll be with AI as a technology. The technology will shape things by its inherent logic. And its capabilities. But the humans will also shape it in the way that the Europeans shape the New World, including bringing smallpox, et cetera, the equivalent of malevolence in the AI world. But then the other thing is, and this is what I think you were referring to, Jordan, the role of private companies in developing the New World, the charters, et cetera, obviously the expeditions to the Americas. But the example I particularly point to in the paper is the British East India company founded in 1600, which winds up having an army twice as large as the British government. And I quote Dalrymple, the leading historian of the British East India Company, who says people think that the British conquered India. No, it was the East India Company. So we have this extraordinary complex of private enterprises now and then shaping the exploration and the development of the new territories and complicating and rendering more opaque the interactions of the governments. So the whole thing becomes more difficult to predict, more complex, more intricate. So those are some of the aspects of that metaphor that make it for me, instructive. No single metaphor captures AI. I've suggested three or four in this call. There are many others that others have advanced and I'm just contributing my ingredient to the pop.
- [50:59]
C
Maybe one question building on this.
- [51:03]
A
What?
- [51:04]
C
What should the relationship look like between the government and the companies? This is something that I think a lot of people have different thoughts on and I. I'd sort of love to hear your take.
- [51:12]
A
I think it should be closely collaborative and mutually supportive. I think the government should be investing more in the companies. There should be more exchange of personnel between the companies and the government. There needs to be more capacity inside the government, but there needs to be more acceptance in the priorities of the companies. That national security, US national security has a front ranking seat at the table in the discussion about what should be released, how guardrails should be constructed, where the directions of effort ought to be, etc. I'd like to see a lot more of that in the paper. I suggest if you can't get it collaboratively, you're going to get it through the regulatory mechanism. I'm not a fan of that, but I don't think you can. I can't imagine a future for AI in which the extraordinary power of a super intelligence was left in the private hands of leaders of OpenAI or XAI or Anthropic or Microsoft. If you give me a super intelligence, you know, all else aside, my impact on the political system can be huge. Through information and disinformation activities, my impact on the financial markets can be fundamentally disorienting. Because I can engage with way more skill and knowledge in high frequency trading or other activities that enable me to give myself an advantage in the market. And that's before I even come to the national security point. And my observation in the paper is it's elemental that we think governments should have more capable, should have more capability in the domain of violence than any private citizen. We do not want a private citizen to have an army so big that the US government can't control them. And internationally we want to be at least as capable as anybody else. See, AI is at least as powerful in its super intelligence mode as violence. So the same principle applies. I don't think the US government can be secondary to anybody. Now, that still generates a huge amount of problems. How do you make that work? And for that matter, who guards the Guardians? How do I feel about the US government having this capability and how do I constrain that? So I don't think I'm offering a satisfying suite of answers, but I'm pretty sure that I'm pointing in the right direction, which is you got to figure out how the government exercises control in this arena. And if you don't figure it out now, you're going to wind up being desperate to figure it out later when some crisis of one kind or another occurs because you don't have that government power, it's private power.
- [54:14]
C
Picking up on this question of who guards the Guardians, you mentioned that it's one reason that it's important to have government involvement is because there's an extreme public interest and we want to make sure that these systems are developed safely. I could also imagine to some extent some governance concerns going the other way, which is if we want to avoid something like Project Maven, is it possible that the, the companies that might have some ethical concerns about exactly how this stuff is used, if it does get used by the national security state, are there some requirements that they can, that they sort of have leverage to try and put in place as a precursor to any, like serious engagement with the national security community?
- [54:55]
A
Yeah, I think it's an argument for collaboration because if I'm working closely with DoD, they're arguing with them and saying, hey, if you want this, I need reassurance about this other thing, but if I'm at arm's length, I don't have that. And whatever DOD does with its models, when it acquires them on the market or is opaque to me and I lack that. So I want that. I also value the international aspects of this. It's tempting to thank God if only the US ruled the world without any opposition, the world would be better. Well, maybe it would be better, but you'd worry about the unconstrained power of the US Government. The fact that other countries, for example, allies like Britain and the AI Safety Institute there, are working on these issues is helpful. And the fact that we have competitors is, in the long term, probably good for humanity. Though I would not like those competitors to be able to prevail. But they represent some controls on. On what we do. The trouble is that, as with anything, you can skew too much in the other direction. And the competition may cause all kinds of bad acts because people are paranoid about what will happen in the competition. And paranoid may not be the right word, because they may be right.
- [56:25]
C
Yeah, yeah. Maybe a historical question. Actually, I'd be curious for both of your takes, can you think of previous instances where private sector actors had something that was so potentially valuable to the national security state, but where the business of selling to the national security state represented such a small fraction of the company's commercial interests?
- [56:53]
A
Yeah, but I think your question probably is primarily addressed to Jordan. So if you want to go first.
- [56:58]
C
Yeah, for both of you.
- [57:01]
B
I defer. I'll go second.
- [57:04]
A
I didn't know that was in your repertory, Jordan, but. I think health supplies, pharmaceuticals are exemplary of that. And if you think, for example, about the extraordinary achievements of the COVID time and the development of the government incentives for companies to develop a COVID vaccine, you see, though, that on their natural incentives, the companies pursue financial goals, et cetera, that are different, and only a fraction of what the companies do is responsive to the government as a government market. Now, the fact that we have regulation in that area changes some of that calculus. And above all, the fact that we have the Medicare insurance schemes and Medicaid or both are really important. But I think the health industry in general has that. That attribute. And when you think about it, I think it's true of most industries. I mean, the decisions that the energy companies are making about how to proceed show some deference to the government, either as a customer or as a regulator. But the bulk of their thinking is oriented towards the private market. So that's the way I think about this. There's nothing report I don't know if either of you have seen was just put out by a commission set up by the state of California, supported by some of the Berkeley people on AI. And I wasn't terribly taken with their executive summary or their statement of their principles, but if you actually Read the text of the report. It's a pretty richly textured assessment of what's going on. And one of the virtues of it is that it does what I think you were asking for, Teddy, which is it? It thinks about analogies to AI in other markets. Whenever it recommends something, it tries to think of an analog in, for example, the way in which EPA regulates carbon or et cetera. So I, I think it's. I'm absolutely delighted if this program generates some more readership for my piece. If both of you have read it. That in itself may double my readership. But the. I would recommend this as well.
- [59:47]
B
So, speaking of writing papers, I don't know, reading this, I felt like my brain had been rotten and I was very jealous of the sort of sustained thought and attention that you can give to something where you're both sort of. You're writing about developments that are happening in real time. But writing for an audience for today and also for five and ten years from now, and going back to some of your other kind of larger national security papers over the past decade, which we'll link to in the show notes, a lot of what it's clear you're doing is trying to look for what is enduring, even things You've written about 10 years ago with respect to cybersecurity and acquisitions, when it comes to the idea of modularity and driving in the dark and trying to really grapple with the fact that so much about the future is by definition unknown is a very different modality of thinking and writing than the vast majority of what I see coming out of the sort of think tank and policy community. So reflections on that lessons for folks who are trying to write stuff that reads as more enduring in a field which I think is unfortunately biased toward writing for the present moment only.
- [61:25]
A
Well, I appreciate those comments first, because I appreciate the compliment and the reinforcement and the extent it gets people to look back at things like my driving in the dark paper. It's, I think, called 10 Propositions about Prediction, which is people frequently still assign it or talk to me about it. That's great. Having said that, though, I appreciate also that there are just different functions. It's like some chorus that sings in different voices. There are tenors and there are basses, et cetera. What you're doing, for example, is to cover a very wide area and then have a particular focus on China and technology issues. And I think it's very valuable to have that as well. And you can't do both. You just, you, you're not going to take off six months to do the kind of work I did. And I'm not able to do this if I'm doing what you're doing. So I think that they all have a place. But third, and most fundamentally, an interesting thing happened to me at the end of this which made me reflect about AI in another dimension. And that was I stayed up late one night trying to finish this paper and was working on it till towards 1am When a colleague sent me a paper that another colleague had elicited from a deep research inquiry to an AI model. And it was on a related topic, in this case, offense, defense, balance in cyber. And I looked at it and I thought, this is. This is a very worthwhile paper. I didn't think it got what for me was central. I had problems with the paper. But if a colleague sent it to me, I would think this is a reasonable colleague I want to interact with. And in the closing hours of my writing my piece, which piece I wrote essentially without AI involvement, it wasn't an AI drafted piece in any way. I used AI a little bit for some of the research. But then my thought was, you know, maybe what I'm doing, which you just nicely praised, is anachronistic. And here it is. Some of this is just my getting older and reflecting on this. But what does it mean to have this capacity for AI? I've labored six months on this, and the AI labored six minutes on what it produced. And what it produced was in the ballpark, I'll say. Mine, I'll claim, is better, but it's not in a different league. And so then I thought, boy, if this is causing me to have this doubts, with all the advantages that I've had over the decades and the seniority I have with respect to doing projects like this, what is it like if you're 25 and you're thinking about doing projects like this? And so it's a sort of subtle aspect, maybe not so subtle, of AI and the kinds of issues it presents, transmitted in a very personal way for me around the kind of enterprise I'm engaged in. And for sure that enterprise will look different for people who are now undertaking it, and especially for people who are undertaking it in for the first time in less mature, developed ways. Sorry, Jordan, I just want to add one other thing, which is there's was a nice piece in the Times on Sunday by o', Rourke, a woman of a poet who very thoughtfully came to grips with her use of AI and to begin with, her skepticism and then her appreciation and then her reservations. And it touched to some extent, I think, on this. But I think what I'd add is just for me, writing is a way of figuring it out for myself. And her point, I think, and one that I also have arrived at, is the real sacrifice may be not so much in the product, but in the fact that the human who would learn a lot by developing the product doesn't have that depth of learning. And that's an extraordinarily important thing that I think we need to grapple with. Quite apart from the subject matter of this discussion about national security.
- [66:11]
B
The ability of computers in the summer of 2025 to do 85% of the work of a Richard Danzig, you know, 70 page think piece is a remarkable thing. And you know, fast forward three years, we'll maybe get to 97%, but the computers are going to be making all the decisions. Aren't going to be making all the decisions. I mean, you know, looking out over the. I have this whole riff about like an AI president or an AI CEO where you know, 20, 20 years from now, or even sooner, if you sort of have a president wear glasses and get all the data input inputs that someone would have, plus like presumably a lot more because there's more processing power that a computer can do, taking in stuff than, than a president or a chief executive, the sort of point decisions that that person will make almost certainly at some point in the future are just going to strictly dominate what a human can do on their own, at least on certain dimensions. So, you know, not all of what happens in the Pentagon or the national security establishment is like people thinking about, you know, can be like captured in writing, you know, thinking and writing and policy papers. But I'm curious, as you sort of meditate on this, where do you think the humans are still going to be useful and relevant? You know, where does it not matter that we didn't have someone doing the six months of thought around the, around the topic? And where could it end up being really dangerous if we end up trusting this stuff too much?
- [68:07]
A
Yeah, there's a lot here that I don't know, women come back to. You know, what's the impact of the market on, you know, human psychology in 1500, we're predicting the next 200 years. Oh my God, you can't do it. My view though, starts from a sense that we exaggerate the role of the humans. Now, if you take archetypal decision, President's decision to unleash nuclear weapons in response to an impending attack president, what happens Actually, oh, he's got 30 minutes for decision, say, but what is he doing? He's relying on machine inputs. The machines are telling him the missiles have launched. Does anybody actually see the missile launch? No. Satellites are detecting this, etc. Through a variety of technologies that the President is unlikely to understand. They transmit that information, it gets introduced into models, and people say, here are the results. And it's extremely unlikely that the underlying nature of the models is understood. And by the time he's got a very few minutes for decision making, his decisions may be largely shaped already by those machines. And we exaggerate the degree of human opportunity here. Now you can argue that, well, it's still important that he can have an intuition about is it reasonable to expect that somebody would be attacking me in this context, etc. But I think the degree to which we allow decisions to be made by bureaucracies and markets, those are impersonal enterprises, but we're all incredibly shaped by them. We delegate to them large numbers of decisions that affect our everyday lives and recognize that or don't recognize, but they still are occurring their extraordinary power to shape our judgments. If you ask how many people go into public school teaching as compared to into investment banking when they have an option? The market is shaping the weights that underlie their decisions. And we think of it as a wonderful individual human decision. And some human beings have the ability to say, I'll ignore the market signals, but the market signals shape most people much of the time. And that's. So I think we're just going further down this path. But what's that, what is that like? And where does that leave us as human beings? I. I just don't know. And I think it's one of the very important things to be figuring out now and discussing and debating amongst ourselves. I could say more about it, but I don't think my thoughts are worth any more than anybody else's on this subject.
- [71:04]
B
Okay, let's do some life hacks. Fiber one. I got that from you three months ago. Incredible. What else you got for me? I mean, there's, there's.
- [71:23]
A
Well, I'm a big advocate of reading fiction and when I was Navy Secretary of the Marine Corps traditionally asked the secretary to suggest books for Marine officers to read and traditionally their military histories, etc, and partly for the pleasure of throwing them a curveball and partly because I believe that I gave them a list of 10 novels. And my argument was, and is that if you really want to understand other human beings, the best way to do that is to Read creations by other people that get into other people's heads. And I'm just amazed at this capability so far exceeding anything I could do to envision what the world looks like from the standpoint of someone else so frequently encouraging people to read fiction and the like. I'm a big fan of parenting, and my general view about that is that people with our cultural predispositions are constantly trying to educate their kids and move them along and getting them to progress and be more like adults. And my view is do everything you can to retard their development. What you really want to do is raise, is to have pleasure in kids at the age that they're at, and they're not going to be at that age in the time ahead. They outgrow their childhood, so enjoy it while you have it and treasure the way they look at the world. So I suppose up there with Fiber one are these two recommendations.
- [73:08]
B
All right, so we're not taking sponsorship from Kellogg's all brand but General Mills. If you want to reach out, there's a conversation to be had.
- [73:19]
A
See the power of the market there? Here, I'm offering these highfalutin observations and you're reducing it to your quest for sponsors.
- [73:32]
C
Let's.
- [73:34]
B
Well, I had, I had a few points there. Okay. So the, the threshold for me of AI's writing compelling fiction was crossed really, only two weeks ago. I would really encourage folks to go to Kimmy.com. it's the latest Chinese model. I think there's. There's something about it that it's like it. It's English just feels a little foreign in a way that Chatbots and Claude, like, has kind of been like, honed to a T to like, not piss you off and just be kind of anodyne. And that works for some functions, but not when you tell it to write you a story in the style of Tolstoy or whatever. But yeah, let's close, Richard, with some book recommendations. I mean, should we spin around, should we have you walk around with your laptop and give us a little library tour, see what speaks to you, or I don't know what's right for cybersecurity and bureaucratic change for people to read.
- [74:40]
A
My recommendations might induce a certain amount of queasiness in general, but walking around with my laptop for sure would do that. So I'll restrain myself on that count. Well, some stuff I've read recently, you've been enthusiastic supporter of the Apple and China book, which I think is really, really worth, worth attention. I'm just very Impressed with it. I just finished re reading Robert Graves Goodbye to All that memoir essentially of World War I, which I'd never read before. And the first 90 pages or so are engaging about his life before World War I, but not particularly special. The descriptions of his experiences during the war, very matter of factly delivered, are really worth reading. And his post war tough efforts to adjust and difficulties with that, both physical and mental, or I think illuminating about Ukraine now and what people there are going through. So I very much recommend that. Of novels I've read in recent time, I caught up with Rachel Kusk Cusk Outline, which is I think remarkable book. It takes a narrative voice that everybody's fiddled with narrative voices for centuries in Western literature and finds a relatively new way of doing this. And the writing is frequently dazzling and the insight about human relations is terrific. And it's just a few hundred pages, et cetera. So those are three books that sort of immediately pop into my head sitting here at my desk. I see that I've got the Anil Ananthaswamy book why Machines Learn the Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, which I think is a masterpiece of exposition. With math, it's times beyond my patience or skills. But if you're mathematically inclined, it's a book I would definitely recommend on AI. Just impressed by it. So those are some diversity of things that come to mind.
- [77:10]
B
I want to press you on this one more time because you kind of pivoted to the AIs are going to be able to do the work. But I still want to know. I still want to get one more chance to get in your head. So the like, what are the questions you are asking yourself as you're trying to write things which are both relevant to today and relevant for years from now.
- [77:34]
A
I'm not sure I have a good answer for that. I just, I'm pretty incremental. And what amazed me in writing this paper is how maybe three things one, how much I kept changing my mind, how talking to other people. I cite a number of them in the acknowledgments. It's really helpful. I just. The driving force for me was trying to understand it better myself. And that took me a number of iterations. Just I look back on where I started and there were just a lot of things that I was naive about or didn't understand. The second thing was how difficult it was because the field was changing. So people kept producing stuff and you know, O3 comes out and starts doing achievements in math and on coding and. And just you Know, deep seek, you name it. So I was constantly having to say things, revise things where I said AI may be capable of this into AI already did this or whatever. And the third thing was people are also being very productive in their commentary. I mean, you guys in China talk. But Jack Clark and his put in his substack and various other things like this, or keeping track of, or trying to keep track of the field. And I would have some original idea, I thought, and somebody else would publish it and then I'd spend a while trying to develop the data on something and write it up over the course of three pages and somebody else would publish 15 pages that did it better. So you have this sense, it's like the, the tide is rushing in and you better scramble to find some high ground and eventually you just have to say, oh stop, I'll publish it. But the day I committed the manuscript to it's being done, the next day there were two things I thought, oh God, I wish I'd known about this. I should have. I didn't quite catch up with the developments in that etc. Just as a concrete example, I talk a little bit about formal methods in the paper and point to the DARPA Hackams experiment where they demonstrate their ability to use formal methods to make helicopters safe against Red Team cyber attack. And I described it briefly, but I hadn't realized they actually had now completed the experiment, etc. And then I wish I'd devoted more time to that and I'm quite interested in it as a potential additional thing, but it was just on my horizon and not in the center of my focus when I wrote the paper. There are all too many other examples of that. The world is moving so quickly and in my analogy to the market and 1500, I mean again, it took two centuries maybe for that to unfold and still is unfolding. But what happened in those two centuries I think will happen in single digit years with the AI in terms of magnitude of change. So we adjust to the speed of change in the same way as we adjust to routinely flying off to Europe in a way that would have been unimaginable to my grandparents, but it's still astonishing. And in a way we lose track of that astonishment, we lose track of the character of modernity. And anything we grew up with we take for granted. Anything we didn't grow up with frozes all kinds of challenges of assimilation.
- [81:36]
C
Can I throw in one final question? Just building on that? And I know that this kind of runs up against the caveat that you gave at the beginning, which is. It's very difficult to make predictions in these domains. But I wonder if you have any intuitions about what we expect to see in terms of the magnitude of capability gaps between key players. So let's say between two countries in terms of AI adoption, taking into account that these capabilities are, as you said, we may end up having technological change of the magnitude that previously took decades being compressed into a much shorter period of time.
- [82:21]
A
So you're asking Teddy, what I think is the likelihood that there are substantial gaps between for example the US and China or other competitive, for instance.
- [82:31]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [82:36]
A
I think that those gaps tend to be exaggerated and that the fast followers will follow fast. And so the gaps are short lived. But there are two important qualifications. One is that a short lived gap can be critical if the advantaged party knows how to use it.
- [83:02]
B
Yep.
- [83:03]
A
And the second is that it may be that there is the potential for takeoff through recursive self improvement so that if you're in an advantage position you can advantage. You can amplify that advantage over the time ahead. You're very familiar with these ideas. I don't know, it's hard for me to weigh them. You know, we've talked a little bit and Jordan rightly points out it's been a long standing concern of mine about prediction and the difficulties. I think it's difficult to predict trends and what's going to happen, but I think that's doable and way easier than predicting how much weight to give to the different variables and the timing of the evolution of the different variables. Timing is the most difficult thing to predict. I point out a little footnote in the paper that if you take the US stock market, it's so striking. This is extraordinarily regulated environment with rules and requirements for disgorgement of information and regulation of trading and the like. Nobody's figured out a way to actually time the market. Well, the two dominant variables of strategies are to get around that problem either by buying and holding and saying I'm indifferent to the timing fluctuations or at the opposite end by engaging in high frequency trading. So you trade so much every microsecond that as a practical matter you're not as exposed to the issues of timing. You're always trying to pair your trades, hedging them, et cetera. So it interests me that the conceptually I don't think we've come to as as thinkers to grips with these three propositions. One, how fast the followers are. Second, how difficult it is to give weight to the different variables we perceive. And third, the difficulties of predicting timing. And it seems to me those are a part of the great mystery that, well, I have spent time looking at over the course of my career and many others have grappled with as well, sometimes without realizing that it's what they're grappling with.
- [85:36]
B
Well, on our powerful AI and National Security series, which Teddy and I will be continuing throughout the rest of the year, I guess those. You know, that's a pretty good articulation of our thesis statement. Is that like.
- [85:51]
C
Indeed.
- [85:51]
B
Yeah. Like, we can't know anything. But it is a worthwhile effort to try to start from the technologies themselves and build out an understanding of what sort of potential futures of what the technology gives and potential gaps that could be developed between the US and its adversaries.
- [86:11]
A
Well, I'm grateful that the two of you are out there exploring this new world and applaud you're doing it. And my biggest encouragement is Teddy. Keep asking Jordan questions.
- [86:25]
C
Well, I enthusiastically embrace that mantle.
- [86:29]
B
Well, I want to pick up on the parenting thing because that's. That's a nicer. That's a nice place to close. So my wife, excuse me, my daughter is turning one in a week, and we are at this beautiful, like, interstitial phase of saying her first words, but, like, not entirely getting their meaning right or, like, understanding what they are all the time. So, yeah, like, the semantic connections are not totally there. So baby, I guess, is baby, but also it is a watch. Anytime someone gives her a watch to play with, that is baby, too. Wow. Is now associated with when she turns a light on and when she sees books and when she sees, like, the sunlight in the morning. So, yeah, it's a. It's a. You know, we're watching a model train in real time, and, like, yeah, it's fun to play with the finished model, but it's also fun to play with these weird artifacts that kind of get, you know, spit. Get spun up over the course of the training run.
- [87:43]
A
So, yeah, maybe that's you on two counts, Jordan. One is to continue that sense of wonder and don't teach her. Don't correct her when she sees light and says wow. Just say wow yourself. And the second thing is you might think about having her to keep sharing with the rest of us by having her on Chinatalk.
- [88:06]
B
We might have to sign some.
- [88:07]
C
That could be our next guest for the joint series.
- [88:09]
A
Jordan, you know, isn't that really your ambition that you would ask some question and your guest, in that case your daughter would say, wild.
- [88:19]
B
Once I had a kid, someone was like, jordan, you're building a dynasty now. It's like, you need to inculcate her into the rights of China Talk. And we need to come up with different eras, and they can have another sibling and then battle for the throne. I'm not sure this is quite like the generational business that the New York Times has turned out to be, but anything's possible in the world where, you know, a new printing press hits the planet.
- [88:54]
A
So, yeah, Great talking with you guys. I'm going to run off. Thank you so much for this opportunity.
- [88:59]
B
Okay, bye now.
- [89:01]
C
Great. Thanks so much, Richard.
- [89:02]
B
Be well.