Josh Steinman: ~100 foreign sabotage teams operating on US soil, DJI should be banned, and reindustrialization is underway

doing good good welcome to the show we got Josh Steinman in the building in the temple of Technology uh give us an update is it a good morning and are we going to win uh all signs point to yes oh fantastic fantastic uh how's how's it going it's good it's good how are you guys we're we're you want to know you want a little uh show l I I I definitely like put one of of your initial good morning we were going to win posts into the into the stack in the early days and then I put another one in about a week later and John was like wait you put this back in I'm like yeah we're we're still we're still winning it's still a good important to remember so we've done those tweets like three times already and i' and I've talked about it on the show before I think there's this you know Founders will say something once and and feel like they've said it and not realizing that you know a lot of the long the the return is in the sort of long taale of drilling this idea and I I really feel like it's become a movement the David CRA thing you're not advertising to a standing army you're advertising to a marching parade yeah yeah it's interesting because you know part of it is selft talk right and this goes into like the Deep like how do we program ourselves yeah like human as computer um Scott Adams talks about this uh the moist robot hypothesis but other people as well and like his his School of persuasion is the same school that Bill Clinton and Tony Robbins come from like Norman Vincent Peele like there's a lineage here um so it's like how do we talk to ourselves as people how do we talk to ourselves as as agents free agents like in the world so part of it is just like I'm telling myself every day like you have to wake up and you have to like want it every day um and then the other part is just like obviously you know with the with with the public Persona that I have you know having come from you know both the military but then also politics like man it was dark for a while you know like super dark and I just wanted something where I just could say to myself every day like look things can turn around and I actually think they're going to and certainly they have um but like every day just wake up and be willing to just like offer yourself up to the universe like yeah it's going to happen like we're going to win like you're never more than one one day away from like catastrophic success uh going back catastrophic success back to uh going back to your your dark days do you feel like you got a lot of like were were people turning down meetings with your company early on just because of your sort of political leanings uh should we do some backstory on the company can you break down what you're building who you are little career highlights I mean yeah I'm sure a lot of people know but give us the basics yeah so um I started off my career in like this weird corner of operational counterterrorism in the US military um that sort of branched into high technology and high technology strategy um again when I was still in uniform and got a lot of exposure to just how much um you know the world is a very interconnected place and there are things that we can do in the digital world that absolutely affect the physical world people talk about stuck net they talk about you know these these attacks that have happened against uh oil facilities so um I get out of the military I go to Silicon Valley and then two years later just like a strange series of coincidences I get asked to come back to Washington and essentially be like the most senior cyber security person in the US government not like I'm GNA reset your password but like I'm gonna remake our entire practice of running cyber operations for like the dod and the intelligence community and Homeland Security and all that stuff so I did that job for four years and then afterwards um pulled together two buddies of mine including Brandon Park who helped stand up Amazon's Global what we call operational technology OT cyber security program at Amazon and then Felix plinski who had recruited to come join me in the admin who was a hedge fund Trader and we started looking at this problem it's a huge problem you know we've digitized the industrial world and yet there's has created these huge vulnerabilities that have been exploited and some of that stuff makes its way out into the public so yeah we just wanted to start a company to to solve that what percentage actually gets public versus is sort of known among uh the industry but not necessarily in headlines yeah are there foreign agents operating on American [Laughter] soil because I I I hear some people say the number is zero but I think you had a different point on that right it's a different meme of mine yeah no there's absolutely foreign foreign sabotage teams operating on us soil 100% my actual number is somewhere around 100 teams my guess is that um and the question is like you could break that down into you know what types um anyway yeah most of it doesn't get public and you know sitting in that chair for four years I had to get the classified reports every day of like oh this thing happened that thing happened and it just it didn't drive me nuts but it was like man it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up are there any cyber security stories in history that are public now that you like to point to is like that could have been prevented that's the one we're learning from and here's how my company would prevent that essentially or here's how I would have stopped that yeah too easy so um I think two three years ago uh someone I don't know who I don't know who um literally destroyed the Iranian steel industry in like one day really there's video out yeah there's video out there like they literally took over you know the refineries and just started pouring liquid metal all over the floor on a bunch of these bunch of these facilities um yeah there's a bunch of incidents like that that have happened so walk me through how you would prevent that I mean I I imagine what you're describing as like remote takeover of a machine that is connected to the internet or maybe air gapped and they didn't have the right security there how do you actually step in and prevent that for for our steel industry air gapping I mean a lot of people will say that stuff because they've heard it on like TV or whatever that's that's me or yeah exactly um but these operations take days weeks months sometimes years to sort of like get into a network and then find your way to the systems that you want to take over and the whole point is like every step of the way of those types of operations leaves breadcrumbs um and so currently the way in which people try and protect these networks is by looking at only one area of Technology inside the four walls of the facility and that's like the networking equipment so what we do is we look at everything and so by looking at everything you just have a a bigger picture and you can assemble a narrative you can try and understand when malicious things are happening at that super high level because you're seeing what's going on with the engineering workstations you're seeing we are seeing what happens with the network we're seeing what's being done on the applications um we're seeing what's happening you know with the firewalls yeah so we just take it all in and you know it's not it's not um it's not new to like oh do something with a much bigger data set that's really what we're doing here can you break down uh some of the difference between Espionage projects and sabotage projects are there any differences are there any risks uh you know State actors that are prioritizing one over the other right now yeah this is like the thing that most people don't understand they'll say like oh you know things that are happening right now it's just Espionage the thing is like in the course of an operation like you do the Espionage first it allows you to map the network map the systems and then sometimes people will like just leave a little leave a little something there in case they want to do sabotage later they want yep pop it okay so like yeah there's like lots of Espionage happening on critical networks like gee what's that preparation for sure that makes sense uh what What's been your read on our response to deep seek broadly do you think that us companies have been taking it seriously enough there's this you know General lens from some some some of the tech community that says it's you know it's open source you know it's not sort of the the same type of risk as Tik Tock uh what's your read on it yeah look a major frustration that I have is that we get a bunch of these Cutting Edge companies and then you know almost certainly you have foreign foreign actors not just the Chinese like many other foreign actors come in I mean you can read the papers that came out of like the Twitter yeah buyout you know transition to X and they basically are like yeah we had foreign we had foreign Intel Services foreign governments like operating inside you know X forly known as Twitter um I think that's happening at a bunch of our companies I think it's a huge problem huge Counter Intelligence problem because the question is like what are they manipulating like are they putting back doors in there are they changing content are they changing uh you don't know and a lot of the companies many of which my friends have worked at um they don't even have a way to think about this and also obviously like it's not politically correct to talk about this like hey maybe we shouldn't hire that foreign National that went to the like you know Military College of their respective nation and whose uncle is like the deputy chief of their Intel service do that yeah so so speaking uh the the new CEO of Intel that got announced today you know we covered this earlier on the show you may not have seen it has invested over the last you know 20 years hundreds of millions of dollars into you know Chinese tech companies do you foresee any sort of like push back into bring somebody like that on to run um you know he's not a Chinese National but born in Malaysia grew up in Singapore but invested in the Chinese Semiconductor Company exited the position in 2022 I believe and now running Intel look you know I don't know the situation specifically uh obviously Chinese companies are legally required to be dual use like they've architected their entire economy to serve the Chinese Communist party it just means that I'm super wary whenever you see folks that have been allowed to make profit out of that system I don't know his scenario specifically running Intel I certainly hope that um you know I certainly hope that everything's on the up and up I have no reason to think that it's not but whenever I look at you know those types of interactions between you know what I think the the United States and and Western allies would call like the free market and the Chinese Communist party I'm just super wary as a whole staying on the topic of China do you think we've learned at all from the sort of uh DJI just sort of blitzing and taking the entire us drone Market do you think there's a real risk that they're able to run that same Playbook back with unit tree in the sort of humanid space or are we going to be smart enough to not let them put a robot in every American's home they are absolutely taking that they're absolutely taking that Playbook and trying to replicate it as broadly as possible for years I've been telling screaming to anyone that'll listen on X or wherever else like we we should ban DJI from doing business in United States full stop full stop everyone's like oh all the alternatives are like more expensive or this that or the other well yeah supply and demand will allow the market to correct over time but it's a huge problem like they exactly know by the way like if you don't think that senior CCP Intel officials have the ability to just walk into DJI headquarters and be like give me everything you know about the Topography of the United States like you're smoking crack they probably have access to it right now so every time these things fly anything that get transmitted into the cloud whose cloud is it where is that cloud located you know what access do uh you know the Chinese Intel Services have to it military have to it like yeah all that stuff's like in the wild what about personal cyber security uh what what do you recommend to the average listener just to kind of beef up your own uh opsac yeah it's tough um so for normal folks I just say use the big cloud use the big providers that's like the the Google the microsofts ETC enable two Factor authentication I think probably the biggest thing that I don't hear a lot is whenever you get a message like an email saying like hey like your bank says this or that delete the email and then go straight to log into the service sure sure sure right and that's like the Mind space that you want to be in because like these guys are social engineers they know the language to get you to click the link and that's what they're trying to do they're going to put malicious software onto your laptop onto your phone whatever tons of fishing attacks at X right now uh and those are getting more and more convincing you've seen some people uh leak it out usually just for meme coins launches basically but can imagine being uh famed investor Kleiner per launched a meme coin um I wanna I wanna there's a couple topics I want to get through one uh you know I'm sure you uh can only make sort of General predictions here but do you think this whole Tik Tock thing gets resolved in the next month you know there's sort of uh there there was an initial date for early April that it was supposed to you know sort of change hands but you just we haven't been seeing that much new news about it at this point there's plenty of people that want to buy it you know oracle Microsoft Alexis soan and like there's so many different Capital groups like chomping at the bit to you know be the be the buy side on this deal it's just a question of can you twist their arm enough to get the sale done I think but what do you think Josh yeah they absolutely want to retain control of the algorithm because that's like the prize is the ability to like inject ideas into the Youth of the United States or elsewhere in the world um and so I think that's going to be I hope that's a major sticking point with the way in which it resolves out at the same time you have to remember that this deal has the attention of the president of the United St States who is at the same time negotiating with his counterparty XI Jin Pang over a trade relationship that you know there are TW trillions of dollars in the offing around it and so I learned this over four years of working for him like you just have to trust the boss he's playing a game that like very few humans have ever been able to play which is like the most high-risk the most you know impactful game of like one nation in the world and so look I hope he's able to negotiate it in a way in which uh you know preserves cognitive uh sovereignty um there's a lot going on and I'm sort of taking my foot off the gas on it it's not a focus let's let's kind of uh pivot to a topic that's you know definitely I'm sure top of mind for you guys uh uh reindustrialization uh The Vibes are good the work is you know maybe starting feels like it's starting certainly ongoing job's not finished are we doing enough uh it seems like there's a you know sort of top there there obviously is a top down uh directive to invest in America but uh you know there there's been you know on the topic of China China will give you know companies you know very very low or zero interest rate loans to do development we're not quite there yet I think deep seek has taken one of those yeah yeah deep seek turned down all their Venture Capital interest and said H yeah we're just going to take a 0% loan from the Bank of China I love it um so yeah what what like it it doesn't it's almost like it's not an impossible task but it's a very difficult one are we doing enough do we need to do more uh what's your take yeah so in my four years at the White House I ended up taking over this port not or not even taking over but owning this port folio of like technology Supply chains and it's it it's hard you know the Chinese are liter just like you guys said they're out there giving these Z percent loans to these companies to try and build what they call national champions and so and so how do we compete I think the answer is just the market you know and I don't mean that in a sort of like lame kind of way like oh the free market will take care of it but like there is an incred in amount of dynamism in the American system and in the American markets so like the Chinese can certainly go out and try and drive attention or Monopoly towards their chosen you know national champions but we've got a bunch of people that want to make a ton of money here in the United States a bunch of people from around the world that come here because they want to make a ton of money here in the United States I think that presents us with different advantages and so I think that you know when it comes to financing there are lots of tools in the toolbx there's the defense production act there's you know DOD procurement there's a whole bunch of things I do know that the team right now is thinking about all of them uh again having sat in the seat you know I'm not going to take shots at anyone uh not that I have any shots to take just that like I'm confident that they're thinking about it I'm confident that they know you know what's available and I think we're seeing great stuff already what do you think about the debate between supply side and demand side stimulus and these projects like uh the chips obviously $50 billion I think eight billion was going to go to Intel uh provided some Milestones but Ben Thompson has been uh advocating for flipping that around and instead just saying hey let's have the US government say we're buying chips that are made in America yeah if you show up with chips that are made in America we are the buyer and then maybe someone else will buy them maybe Google will buy them maybe Apple will buy them but we but you can guarantee that there's demand but we don't care about what's happening on the supply side as long as it's happening in America do you like that change do you like that V2 thinking yeah I love it I love it I think you know right now um I've heard a lot of strange things about how chips act has played out I haven't followed it as closely as if I was you know some analyst covering the stuff for the banks but I mean it was one of the approaches that we pushed was this like look you just have to have it made in America that's it show again show up and we buy yep I think that's one of the things on the table and I hope they that's cool uh what's uh just pivoting back uh I don't know if you're in California right now or up at the northern office but uh how do we solve the Wildfire crisis uh in the in in California right it's the sort of uh very complicated issue you've worked in government you know you're very in tune with with what's happening in hard tech it feels like yeah there's a public role you know to play there's a private markets role to play there's obviously the whole Insurance side uh but you're sticking it out here in in California I hope so what what do you what's your position on you know what we need to do as a state I me we got to let the forestry guys like actually operate you know it's insane to hear them talk about like what was going on in Altadena where like years it took them to file these crazy applications with like 15 different state boards letting them do controlled Burns um and brush clearing and they get said no to like we just got to let these guys do their job like forestry management is a solved problem right let these guys get out there the Europeans laugh at us the president talks about this all the time but is literally true they don't have these types of catastrophic forest fires because they have good forestry management there's an amazing account um man MN made films on Twitter you've seen this guy he did he did a film he took a red camera and he became one of these um uh what are the what are the fire the um smoke jumpers oh wow a smoke jumper and he he did this amazing film follow him on X um but he talks about it it's like look yeah these places are prone to fire but if you let the forestry management folks do their job like you know you could manage it uh and the same thing with the water stuffs like the solutions are known like there's weird block in the way in which water comes into California and the President's trying to deal with some of that St stuff like the state of California like people know what the answer is they're just not being allowed to do it because crazy weird bureaucracies that's right the movie was called Hot Shot I remember seeing a trailer for this and being blown away by the visuals I need to watch this movie this looks fantastic available on Amazon Prime Apple Google Play go check it out folks uh anything else I think that's all I got thanks for stopping by I'd love to you know we'd love to have you on when you know there's there's a bunch of these topics cyber security correspondent you're our new cyber cyber security correspondent or brother depending on or just uh morning PumpUp speech yeah just hop on just tell us good morning we're going to win then you can hop off get get to the rest of your day we've been starting the show with by singing a little bit so if you ever want to like you know create like an Anthem or anything we sing We need good mantras we need good mantras we have a few Temple of Technology Fortress of Finance capital of capital but good morning we're going to win works too see guys thanks for coming on thanks for coming on it's great cool we have five minutes until let's hit a couple posts let's hit a couple posts what do we have in the queue uh we went oh so this is a crazy story from this account Rob so he says this is a tiny Niche story but it may actually be the most catastrophic thing to happen globally yesterday bold start bold start I'm not going to go out uh on that with him but judge of that we will desperately need politicians okay so the headline here is that um the this uh Media Company New Scientist has used the Freedom of Information laws to obtain the chat GPT records of Peter Kyle the UK's technology secretary and what is believed to be a first world first use of such legislation interesting so uh Rob here says we will desperately need politicians to be able to use AI advisers to keep up with the intense pace of events that recursively self improving AI agents will bring AI advice will improve in scale proportionately to the social impact AI is having given giving governments some shot at keeping up but if any conversation with AI can be extracted using uh Freedom of Information laws while advice from humans given verbally cannot politicians and civil servants will be hugely biased towards worse and slower human advice and Analysis they'll fear looking stupid for asking clarifying question or outrage if the AI advises some UNC course of action just as we need humans in government to be able to have some private conversations we need humans to be able to get AI advice without journalists being able to publish the transcript these conversations M uh must urgently be carbed out of foi legislation um so anyways interesting interesting point yeah you know you want a pol politicians uh have a lot of pressure they have hard jobs you want them to be able to like you know have their their little friend companion like uh maybe they're using obious it's like sometimes they might just say you got this you know but other times they might ask you know hey uh hey you need to brush up on your linear algebra yeah like what what is uh when what's this maximum speed limit in like he didn't know he didn't know that Ma he should have known that yeah interesting uh I wonder I mean there are ways to use llms in more secure and less uh Foya uh ways I mean certainly you can run your own llama or deep seek instance a computer George Hots has a project Tiny Box uh but I mean even if you just have a you know a new generation Mac uh it's now big enough that you can run and powerful enough and the models have been condensed enough that you can run them locally that obviously makes it harder for them to be uh seized uh without your permission also you could see a an llm or an AI Service uh you know basically built on top of something like signal where there's end to-end encryption where you know if you're using an unencrypted Network the government can go and and ask the tech company to they have the keys so they can unlock the servers and and pass over the records um but that that's not the way it works on Signal and other uh end to ending crypted communication app so you could imagine a world that where someone is vending an llm through a an endtoend encrypted service not saving the records and uh and offering a different service feels like a niche but potentially important use case uh but it'll be interesting to see where it goes I mean this is actually maybe the bull case for Apple because Apple's whole thing has been endtoend encryption everywhere uh including the the messages app if I'm talking to you on on iMessage Apple cannot see those and even if the FBI shows up and says we have a warrant unlock Jordy John and jordy's uh latest memes we want to read them they've been posting uh bangers back and forth uh we want to access them Apple doesn't have the keys and apple if they're running the llm locally on your device it's locked behind your pass for if a if a government employee has a government phone shouldn't if the government be able to like see that itself right I mean if you have if you have the passcode to get into the phone you have full access so it needs to be on a on a personal device that can't be monitored in order to truly but then of course the flip side is that then you know uh Bad actors can use the encrypted and this has been the the Privacy debate forever yeah yeah and open AI has historically just been uh very careful around anything um anything political right they don't want to be positioned as you know open AI influence the election or things like that but these are some of the big problems that they're going to have to let's go to Blake Robbins he has some random thoughts we love these posts from Blake uh he says there might be an entirely New Generation that now thinks of Nokia as a Drake song that's funny uh two so sort of insane how much mobile games like Candy Crush Leverage haptics so as you're using the game it's vibrating uh kind of an underrated way to increase engagement and I guess decrease regretted user seconds or just keep people addicted uh and then number three whoever runs Stakes clipping strategy network is on a different level playing for D chess I'm sure you've seen those stake ads all over yeah so the thing that that that's been relevant to X is they've taken over or they're partnering with these accounts that post these these uh like viral videos viral videos and or just posts images things like that and if you look at the bottom it'll say like this post is presented by Stak so it's like very kind tiny logo it's just Ste logo and and and every time one of those goes viral there's a community note this is against the terms of service you can't proot this this is undisclosed ad but this still goes viral still gets a ton of Impressions yeah uh I had a fourth random thought funny well so he's bringing up Stak stake has like this massive partnership with Drake and so oh yeah they do they keep doing like stunts and Drake St and Drake and Drake No but I mean the the the very uh the funny thing is in this one post you have him calling out that a whole new generation doesn't realize no Nokia is a Drake song which implies that and Drake partnering with stake means that Drake is just marketing you know basically gambling products to the youth um and uh he should clean it up should look in the mirror clean it up well I have a fourth random thought here you should get an eight sleep nights that fuel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience go to eight sleep.

com tvpn and get $350 off the Pod uh I slept very well last night uh which I'm glad I got a 98 because this debate is about to be tense it's going be difficult um it all could come crashing I got a 94 you beat me I slept a lot good night for you um n n hours first 21 minutes how is that even possible that's a long time I mean you I put up some crazy numbers you put up some crazy numbers um and uh and but you got to be well rested for these debates they're hot they're aggressive it I wouldn't be surprised if so leson is not in the waiting room yet I guess Seth is but uh I wouldn't be surprised if Sam was just taking a power nap on his be surprised yeah uh you know to to just sort of get really into that sort of we bring in Seth do some pregame strategy I want to hear strategy I want to hear how he's thinking about uh going Toe to