Jason Willick on the Solvency Risk of Funding Ukraine
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Welcome to another fantastic episode of Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. Our first guest up today and someone we are very pleased to have on the line with us, Jason Willick, opinion columnist for The Washington Post and author of some pretty important pieces that I don't think people are paying enough attention to considering what's going on around the world. Jason, thank you for joining us and welcome to the program.

Great to be with you guys. Thanks. Jason, let's talk about the article you had out recently this week, why the U.S. must calculate a solvency risk as it arms Ukraine. Tell our audience a little bit about what is that solvency risk and how dangerous is it?

Sure. So the term solvency, I'm borrowing from Walter Lippmann, who was the famous American journalist. And in 1943, during World War II, he wrote a book about U.S. foreign policy. And I would say his thesis was basically that the goal of U.S. foreign policy is to remain solvent, by which he means having command

commitments that match its resources, that what it says it's going to do, it has enough power to back it up. And so he was sort of proposing the idea that we think of this sort of almost in financial terms where, you know, if there's a bank account, the bank needs to have enough money to pay the person to withdraw from the account. So if we have, if we say we're going to protect X country and Y country and maintain security in this region and that region, then

It can't just be something we say. It has to be something that we have the ability to do. And if we end up having obligations that exceed our resources, the same way that if a person has debts that exceed their own financial position, there's a risk of them going bankrupt, sort of there being a run on the bank and them losing money.

the ability to pay back all their debtors. So, you know, the U S right now has a lot of commitments. We have in the middle East, in Europe, in Asia. And my point was, we're drawing down some of that power in Europe and with sending weapons to Ukraine. And so there's, there's a risk. We've got to attention to our, to our balance sheet there and make sure there isn't a,

insolvency where we run out, where we spend too much money on one commitment and run out on some of the others. Well, it's our supply chain doesn't have the ability...

to recover from what we're sending to Ukraine. And we're not here arguing, should we not be in Ukraine? But there was an interesting piece, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, talking about this supply shortage. And you had one person say, well, look, we're in serious danger if this goes more than six months. Does anybody here talking believe this doesn't go more than six months? Right, right. That was, yeah, the Navy Secretary, Carlos del Toro, said if this goes more than six months or a year, it's going to get even more difficult with the supply chain.

You know, there's certain weapons that we're sending to Ukraine, you know, 150 millimeter ammunition, javelin, stingers. You know, they all have a different supply chain and different uses. But I think especially, you know, the supply chains, the companies sort of need to focus on one thing. If they're using all their energy and all their factories and so on, building, you

ammunition for Ukraine or javelins for Ukraine, they might not have the ability to fill orders to Taiwan, for example, as quickly. And there's going to be a growing backlog. So I think, you know, that is a worry. And I think the administration is worried about it to some extent. And I'd say the best case scenario is we use this as like a

Right. So the Wall Street Journal article I was referring to, they had Admiral Darrell Cottle. He's the head of the U.S. Fleet Forces Command, and he just called out the defense industry. And his quote was, I'm not forgiving of the fact they're not delivering the ordinance we need.

He asked about balancing the U.S. military readiness and U.S. shipments of billions of dollars of assistance to Ukraine. All this stuff about COVID, this, parts, supply chain, I just don't really care. We've all got tough jobs. So I am sure this is not the first time the U.S. has dealt with it. How did they deal with it during World War II? I mean, they had to amp up production of planes and trucks and Jeeps and tanks. How did they do it then?

Yeah, well, you know, there's a lot of things. It's not just with the military. People will point out that, you know, the Golden Gate Bridge could be built in such a fast, fast period compared to the regulatory approval process now with.

environmental permissions and zoning and blah, blah, blah. So a lot of things, really, it does seem like we have more red tape that makes it take longer to build. I think the most recent Pentagon budget does sort of try to provide some waivers on some of these procurement requirements that could slow it down. I think also,

you know, people have pointed out that the number of companies supplying stuff has shrunk. It used to be that there was a, a bigger group of companies that would make bids, uh, to build these things for the government. But now there's sort of a smaller number, uh,

of companies. So I think there's a variety of things. And I think Jake Sullivan said that he wants to look into this with the National Security Advisor because I think it's a structural thing. I mean, we haven't had, have for a while, you know, since the end of the Cold War at least, a defense industry that was geared to really

supply us, you know, the equipment for real great power wars and especially ammunition. I mean, that's that's the biggest thing in this war in Ukraine. It's like they're you know, they're burning through more artillery shells in, you know, X number of days than we can make in a whole month. Jason, is there an argument to be made there? Because we've seen a lot of consolidations in the defense industry. There's a lot of talk in Washington, obviously, about breaking up big tech.

Is there some consideration for trying to, whether via opportunities for startups or that sort of thing, to expand the number of companies that are now involved in defense procurement? Because that actually seems like a major issue. The larger a company gets, the more focused on efficiencies they're going to be, which limits their ability to quickly scale up production.

I think people are going to start looking at that. And I mean, you mentioned big tech. I mean, there's increasingly less of a difference between big tech and military because, you know, these companies, the kinds of computer programs that are in these precision missiles, you know, Palantir, you know, this Silicon Valley firm has been

involved in some of that. So there's increasingly sort of a merger between those two fields where the arms industry has to be synced up with the latest high-tech stuff and information age. So I think

People are going to look at that. Yeah, I honestly don't know enough as to as to whether breaking up is the right solution. I do think, you know, you want the Pentagon to certainly create incentives for new kinds of players to make make bids for new kinds of technologies and weapons. But I think, you know, it's something we have to look at the procurement process, the budget, the regulatory environment, maybe antitrust. Although, you know, I tend to think that would be kind of a blunt tool.

The procurement process that you hit on, one of the big deficits for a startup company is that the procurement process is so complicated, right, that simply making a procurement that will meet the standards takes a huge amount of time and effort. Big companies have a lot of experience, hence an advantage in that area already baked in.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, there's new players in the space, though, that you sometimes hear about. And real. You hear about this company, Sail Drone, that is making boats that the Iranians seized in the Persian Gulf. So you hear about sort of some new companies coming up. It's a question of, you know, and I think...

It's something where, you know, it's a huge bureaucracy. It's a huge budget. There's, you know, so many departments. And, you know, it's partly about people creating relationships to know what the government wants and what it's going to ask for and what Congress is going to

sign off on but i'm hopeful you know that american you know tradition of innovation which is still on the cutting edge and we've seen in ukraine you know one thing we've seen is that the technology that we have available to us is superior to the russian technology that was also

you know, visible during the first Gulf War, just the level of precision that's available is higher. I think, you know, it's probably less a problem of like having a technological edge, at least for now, at least against Russia, maybe not against China, but just about quantity. So I think that's really something people are going to have to deal with. And I think, you know, we're just starting. I think it's something people are just starting to think about in Washington.

As the Soviets said, quantity has a quality all its own. Right. Right. So the U.S. defense industrial base, it just lacks right now an adequate ability for surge capacity. So say we have to go defend Taiwan, which Joe Biden keeps saying we will do.

Is there something we can learn? And I don't want to, dear listeners, we don't want to get involved in the validity of the COVID vaccine. But it seems like Trump dropped some things that that could come to the market quick. Do we have to do something like that to produce what we need for our military in case we have to use it for another conflict?

I think, I mean, I think like you said, with the project Warp Speed and the vaccines, that was the kind of government-led process that you would have to see in an emergency where they, you know, they basically told the pharmaceutical companies, look, whether it works or not, we're buying, you know, such as we're going to cover all your costs. We're going to buy all this stuff. We're going to waive every regulation we can find to make it as fast as possible.

And, yeah, I think that, you know, that probably is the kind of wartime footing that the U.S. was on in World War II. I don't think that there's sort of the political will right now to start doing that because there are problems that come with it, right? You know, if you have less regulation, then you're going to have more maybe corruption or more stuff that doesn't work. You know, it's going to create some problems, but it is the emergency posture that's

I think, you know, we have to think about what weapons do we need with regard to Taiwan and how many do we need? I think we want to arm the Taiwanese with things like javelins, like which the Ukrainians used against tanks. Right.

I think, you know, we want long range weapons. Trump exited the INS treaty, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which banned us from having not just nuclear missiles, but all sorts of ground launch missiles that we can put in the Pacific. So I think now that that that constraint is gone, you know, there's more missiles that could be ordered and put in places like Guam and Philippines and Australia. I mean, if we were serious about increasing deterrence fast, these were the kinds of things that we would do.

We have one minute left until we go to break. Why don't you tell folks how they could read what you write and how they get in contact with you, etc.? Well, I'm a columnist at the Washington Post, so you can look me up at Jason Willick, and you can get an email when my columns come out if you sign up for it. And I'm also on Twitter at J.A. Willick.

Fantastic. We're going to be coming right back here with more from Jason Willick, opinion columnist for The Washington Post. In just a moment, we want to talk a little bit more. We were starting to lead into talking about some of the things that are going on in the Far East right now, which frankly should be pretty concerning, Chuck, to most of the world. If they knew about it. And they don't. Jason's doing fantastic work informing people and breaking battlegrounds. We'll be coming back with more from Jason in just a moment.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. I'm your host, Chuck Warren, and my co-host, Sam Stone, is with us. Today we have with us Jason Willick. He is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post, formerly of The Wall Street Journal. And we talked originally about his piece about the U.S. capacity for reproducing military hardware and equipment. And now we want to talk this segment about an opinion piece he had come out in late December called The Grand Strategy Behind Japan's Defense Buildup. And basically what's happened is Japan announced in December that

that it will surge defense spending by more than 50% over the next five years and acquire advanced missiles that can strike Eurasian mainland.

Jason, what does this mean for the world? And because they're doing this, is this a failure of U.S. leadership? It means that Japan is very concerned about things in its neighborhood in Northeast Asia, where its neighbors with Russia and North Korea and China especially. And it means that it wants, you know, it thinks that if there's a war with China,

over Taiwan, it may very well get involved or have to be involved because of the American bases there and that it wants the ability to defend itself. So it's both, you know, it's kind of a paradox. Like you said, it's both good for us, good for us that there's going to be more of our allies spending on their defense

It also shows, you know, just how nervous and just how bad things are in Northeast Asia. Jason, post-World War II, Japan's defense force was very, you know, known for building up defensive weaponry only. But the U.S., particularly through the Gulf War, showed that a doctrine of deep strike can be the most effective deterrent. Is that the direction Japan is going with their weaponry right now? And does that change the...

the dynamics with China and with some of those other countries if they're acquiring weapons that can strike into the mainland? Yeah, I think, you know, these days, especially China has very advanced rocket force, the PLA rocket force. Missiles are kind of the name of the game in East Asia right now. So Japan wants to make sure that China or whoever else thinks twice before they

strike Japan because they know that they would get hit back, especially in a war over Taiwan when there's a lot of uncertainty. What's the U.S. doing? Is it sending all of its forces into Taiwan straight? Is it going to, you know, defend Japan, have enough resources to defend Japan? So, yes, it's about building deterrent and, you know, defensive, you

And like you said, offense, the ability to have an offensive strike is a good deterrent and therefore defensive in its own way.

So you quoted in your opinion piece a professor on Japanese politics, and he compared Japanese politics to a plate of peas. It never moves, he recalled. But if you tilt the plate a little bit, they all roll to one side. Is that what's happening now to the Japanese public, that they're saying, look, we need to be able to defend ourselves and take more of an offensive posture? Yeah. I mean, you know, I visited Japan for the first time shortly before this policy was announced.

and, you know, spoke to some government officials and they're very committed to this. They've clearly thought it through very deliberately and carefully and decided that this is the best path forward in the interest of their people. And I think, you know,

You know, I'm not an expert on Japanese history, but I do think if you look at it, it can have these fairly rapid changes in opinion. And then those are executed on. I mean, I think in America, you know, we elect one person, we elect another person, we go in one direction, we go in another direction. I think in Japan, one quality of their political system is it's more consensus based. And so when they decide they go in one direction, they really do it.

How much are people in D.C., people you talk to, congressional staff, how worried are they about, A, the solvency risk, and, B, what's going over in Asia? Are people paying attention to this? Are they focusing on these matters? The rest of the country certainly isn't. Is there an adult in the room? I guess I'm asking. Is there an adult in the room saying, hey, we need to pay attention?

Well, my sense on the solvency thing is that for the first year, I mean, the Ukraine war has been going on 11 months now, I suppose. You know, for the first few months of it, first, you know, until a couple months ago, you know, it was nobody was talking about the,

the trade-off between sending weapons to Europe and making preparedness in East Asia. I think all of a sudden in the last few weeks, couple months, you have started to see a real attention to this, like, hold on,

we are running low. We are not making munitions fast enough. We do not have enough munitions to have a war with China that lasts a long time and continue to produce them. If the Ukraine war is any guide, we really need to look at this. So I think there has been a real shift in the last couple of weeks to pay attention to that trade-off. And I think that's a heartening sign because hopefully we can, we can learn from this. I think in Asia, I would say, you know,

you know there's some partisan debate over ukraine um there's there's differences i think in asia there has been a consensus really started by trump um you know even though even though it was a trump idea and what most of which were highly polarizing i think that the idea that we need to focus on asia has really carried over to the to the biden staff and uh you know people can argue the extent that they're really delivering on it but at least in theory i think everybody agrees

Asia is the priority. Jason, this is just speculation on my part. We only have about a minute here before I have to let you go. But how much is there a relationship between the escalation bringing, giving Ukraine tanks and perhaps the idea that we need to do things to try to end this war more quickly to avoid the solvency issue?

I think, I mean, I think one way of dealing with the solvency issue, right, and avoiding having, you know, too many commitments in both places is to beat Russia really fast. So that part of the, that demand on our attention goes away and we can focus on Asia. I think instead, you know, we're just seeing a grinding, long, slow war. But I think the tanks are part of the idea that, you know, if we defeat Russia, then we can focus on Asia. Whether that's going to work, I tend to think it's going to be a,

I'm more, you know, that this is not going to be a clear victory. Yeah, but there's nothing quick. I mean, how fast can they get 31 tanks over there and train them? I mean, that's the whole problem with this. I just see this grinding on. And again, I don't think as a hopeful, peaceful world, you can allow Russia to just say, oh, I want this country. I think that's a horribly bad trend. But how fast can you go shipping 31 tanks over and training these folks? I mean, six months at best.

I agree. I think I do not think we're going to see a quick resolution to this war. The one thing I would say about tanks, and I mentioned this in the piece, is tanks are not a weapon that the U.S. is primarily going to be using in East Asia because that's that's right. We're talking about air and sea, not not land. So I don't think there's really a cost directly, at least politically.

from tanks. But look, I agree with you. I don't think anybody really has a good idea of how this war is going to end or when. Right. Fantastic. Jason Willick, opinion columnist for The Washington Post. Folks, make sure you subscribe to The Washington Post, follow his work there. Jason, thank you so much for joining us this morning. Yeah, thank you guys. Have a good weekend. Thank you.

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your hosts Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. In studio with us now, and thank you for joining us, Mark Joseph Monglitz, Scottsdale-based content manager for a financial newsletter, The Haymaker, which I was introduced to via Chuck, and I've enjoyed reading. Oh, great. So thank you so much. You have written quite a bit about...

the impossibly negative implications of an AI-driven world? Well, a lot in one piece. I don't know about quite a bit yet, but I'm getting started. What is artificial... Okay, so...

A lot of our audience has heard this term, AI. They may have seen it on a Netflix limited series. They know there's ominous music playing when you mention it. And then there's technologists who think this is the best thing since sliced bread or fire, whatever it's due. What is artificial intelligence, better known as AI? Yeah, I think people hear AI and they think AI.

almost reflexively of an anthropomorphic, you know, humanoid robot sitting alongside them, engaging in human-like behaviors and whatnot. But, you know, that's the stuff really more of Black Mirror or whatever other programming out there is dealing with robotics and the like. AI is really a, it is a means by which to, through software and various models, to replicate what

up until pretty recently has been the domain of the human mind. Things from language generation to object recognition to pattern recognition and prediction. It's a tool that's meant to map and replicate what the human mind does using software.

You know, at its very best, it's a lot better than us in certain ways, but it's also very limited. You know, as far as we know, it's not self-aware. That, you know, crossing that threshold might be impossible for all we know. But in certain aspects, it is demonstrably superior. You know, from the example people like to use is chess. You know, the best chess master will never beat whatever used to be deep blue. I think it's, you know, probably bright red now or whatever the...

Deep blue version 73.4. Sure, yeah. And I was speaking with an engineer friend of mine who was saying, apparently if you take away one pawn from the AI side, that some of the Grandmasters can play to a stalemate. I didn't know that. And if you take away two, some can actually win. Now, that's actually huge because if you take away one or two pawns, you're limiting obviously what the AI can do by...

several orders of magnitude and whatnot. So it is significant, but it means maybe not as far behind as I once thought. Well, in your piece, you had this great analogy about the movie Jurassic Park. Now, in your best storytelling voice, share with us that scene. I'd love to. And then tell us what the pros and cons are of AI. Yeah, so this came to mind almost immediately last month when the chat GPT kind of reveal made itself known. And...

And it's one I've used previously, especially in this era where I think there's kind of a dual orbit of scientism and tech fetishism that are kind of consuming our collective psyche. And, you know, we tend to get very excited about whatever's next without necessarily stopping to think about what it could mean, you know, negatively and maybe not even all that realistically positively. Right.

um the scene is is where dr ian malcolm is the jeff goldblum character is um he's responding to what he's just learned about about jurassic park the science behind the the cloning of dinosaurs and he's not impressed he says you know you your scientists got so caught up with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think about whether or not they should

And I think that that's the story of AI right now. We are so consumed by the idea of what's what's possible, what we can do that we're not stopping to think about what it means for the human species. And I shouldn't say none of us. I mean, I think there are concerned parties, but there's also there's a lot of excitement surrounding it that doesn't seem to make room for realistic caution or for useful caution.

And so I think Malcolm's words are, you know, I guess Michael Crichton's words technically are more relevant now than even they were. But that is a question that needs to be asked by numerous people. And right now, you know, we sort of feel like this is sort of what a techie nerd puts together or some engineering professor. Right. And people need to be aware of what's going on with this. And again, we're not opposed to it.

But there has to be limits. We have to be good guardians of it. Exactly. And that's one thing. We were talking about this before the show. I'm not anti-tech. I use technology quite abundantly in my career. Sam uses a rotary phone, so he's old school. Chuck, I upgraded to a brick.

I got one of a Nokia brick. Well, and the fact is that even if the four of us in this room were to become Luddites, it wouldn't matter. This is happening. Technology is happening. AI is out of the bag. So I think my appeal really with this piece and with my newfound project of thinking about this is that we as a species need to modify how we think about AI and maybe start evaluating closely what aspects of our careers are –

definitively replaceable by AI and what aspects are definitively human rather than letting that gray area confuse everything. I think that's a fantastic point. We're going to be coming back in just a moment with more from Mark Joseph Monglitz talking about AI, the future potentially of humanity being tied to it, and tie in Elon Musk also breaking battlegrounds back in just a moment.

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So what countries are leaders in artificial intelligence? Yeah, so the leaders at the moment are really the U.S., the U.K.,

China, and then Russia, Australia are also expanding their spending. I think in the U.S., you know, a number of companies are engaging with it, Oracle, Intel, Salesforce, Amazon, but the two I think we need to watch most closely would be OpenAI, which we can talk about, you know, obviously in the chat GPT context, and then Google's DeepMind, which is actually headquartered in London, but it really...

it rolls up to Alphabet, which is Google's parent company. Mark, I'm sorry. I want to back you up just a sec for folks out there who may not know what chat GTP

Correct. What is jet? And how does that affect businesses? So I asked the CEO today what it is, and that was the question he wanted me to ask. How do you think it will affect businesses? Yeah, okay. So we can get into that now. That's really what prompted me to write the piece. Actually, kind of a loose colleague of mine, he works for my boss's wealth management firm, had written a piece on ChatGPT, and my piece was sort of a response to that. But

So, ChatGPT is sort of the current apex of what language modeling is able to achieve. And describe what, for our audience. Yes. Language modeling. What is language modeling? We're dummies in here, Mark. No, no, no, not at all. No. Look, I'm catching up with all this as well. We all are. Everyone is kind of, you know. Well, that's the thing. You're sort of a pioneer teaching. Well, sure. So, we have people say, okay, what's language modeling? Yeah. We're all kind of marching to ChatGPT's tune at the moment, or OpenAI's tune, but we're

So basically what this means is that their software is – OpenAI software is harvesting written content by the metric ton, right? I mean they're just – as much as is out there, more than any human being will ever read in their lifetime, more than any thousand human beings. Every library in the world is downloading it all.

And from this large aggregate of material, they were able to churn out what they describe as I think what we can all perceive as being very believable human-like text. You ask ChatGPT to produce an essay on –

Charlemagne and have a student do the same, put them side by side. And even if it's a very skilled student, you know, the two will probably be indistinguishable, at least in terms of if it's a very skilled student. I mean, it's an advantage. Yeah. If you're not right. Well, so, yeah. And I wanted to back up really quick on that because the other thing worth noting is that

Chat GPT will probably be more knowledgeable than the student because it can just simply it can access more, can retain more, can summon more to the fore more quickly than a human mind can replicate. That doesn't necessarily mean the writing quality will be better.

I've seen at least one other – There's been a lot of things about it. It's not better quality a lot of times. Yeah, yet. And yet is always the word people toss in right at that point, right where you stopped. They always say yet because the expectation is that soon enough it will be Shakespeare, Shakespeare GPT.

And we do have that kind of mindset that things are always getting better. That's part of the tech fetishism I was talking about. It's just no matter what's happening, it's better, it's good. It's a very American way of viewing the world. Sure, yeah. It is pioneering, to use your word, in different contexts. It is, you know, we like the idea of this kind of, well, small letter here, brave new world of what tech and AI can yield. I think the reason ChatGPT

What struck a lot of people as being kind of a red flag is that when you look at other tools, like in the piece that you referenced earlier, I write about the first humans made a knife like odd job because they wanted to cut something. There was a need and they produced it and there was no question as to why they did it. They needed to cut something. With chat GBT, the question is what are they trying to replace and why?

We have this tool that can amaze at once, but it can also concern because, as I noted, the least surprising aspect of ChatGPT was that within a couple days of its announcement, the questions were circulating, how are students going to use this to cheat? Well, so I mean, Google and obviously Alphabet, I guess it's not Google now. Alphabet is so concerned that they bought Larry and Sergei back.

Because they're concerned about this. Is that correct? Yeah, I'd seen something maybe a couple weeks after the reveal that Google had – and I don't know what the sourcing was on this. I don't know if this was their exact internal wording, but that Google had adopted a code red status essentially that they saw –

Really, just as far as I understand, only their search function was really being cut out. Right. And so if they're freaking out about it, and we're all going to agree in this room, they have some pretty smart people there. This is a concern. And folks, for you who don't know, Sergey and Larry are the founders of Google. Just FYI on that. Yes, Sergey Brin and Larry Ellison. Larry Page. Larry Page. Larry Page, yes. So...

I mean, so that's the point you're talking about again. Who's managing the shop? Right. And to what end? It's not just... So OpenAI, the last time I looked, they have something like 400 employees, right? So it's fewer than there are people in Congress. And these people are... They're working in... It's not... I'm not trying to make a Soviet analogy, but they're working in secrecy. I mean, certainly like trade secret sort of level of secrecy. And they're producing software and tools and whatnot that could change the world. And...

And we hope for the better, but we don't know. And I was thinking...

The very nature of innovation is that it's undemocratic, right? Is hoping for the better enough? I mean, it seems like this is a time when we really need to be looking at guardrails on this, on looking at the implications. You got to treat this like a bowling alley where the guardrails come out for bad boys like you and I. I mean, something has to be there. So I would caution on this a little bit because I think that when you start talking about guardrails and any sort of oversight, I think you also make things like this a martyr, right? Then it becomes...

Especially if Congress starts to weigh in, then it's anyone who wants to be cool will be on the open AI side. I'm actually thinking more in a societal sense. So who are the guardrails? So for example, I mean we all know polling shows while America is still a religious country in many ways, it doesn't have the influence it once did. So are there –

who deal with the moral issues, ethics, part of these guardrails. I don't see that because a lot of people dismiss them. Elon Musk talks about this a lot, but I don't think enough people pay attention. No, because they're too busy about Twitter memes. And we should know Elon Musk was, of course, one of the founders of OpenAI. Yeah.

Right. So – Which is concerning. He was one of the founders and now he's a little skitty. He's freaked out about it. Well, it would be interesting to know what he thinks of it. I don't know if he's said anything on this. I haven't seen anything publicly on it. But I'd be curious to know if he feels it got away from him in some way or if it's – I haven't seen anything about that. I've just read through part of the recommended reading list on AI that he's in the past published. And it's clear from that list –

considering the moral and societal implications. And what I like about Elon Musk's take on it without knowing the details of his opening eye thoughts is that he does seem to lean towards humanism, right? And that's, you know, that I think there's a few things we need to do on the guardrail side to answer your question, Chuck. I think one is we all need to

Be mindful of what it is that makes us human. You know, so the red flag for me really predates any of this. And it goes back a few years, more of seven or eight years where I noticed that people when they were speaking about big tech, they would use this term and not not always negatively. It almost seemed almost, I guess, like a fetish. Again, they would say, you know, big techs can know you better than you know yourself.

With a shrug of the shoulder. Right. Or, yeah, with a kind of a smugness, right? Like a human being is just reducible to their Amazon shopping cart, their Netflix streaming history, and their – It's a data set. Which would be news to God probably. And to the human species as a whole because we're not the sum of those things, right? Like we are more than that. And the idea that we are reducible to –

some, you know, search engine entries and whatever we watched, you know, on a streaming service is just not, that's very, I think, dehumanizing. It's very limiting. It's very unfair to what it is to be human. But I've noticed that a lot of people like the, in the kind of the tech fetish

side of things almost have like a, and I mentioned this in my piece, almost like a contempt for physical experience, like as if a digital version is perfect. Right. I mean, you wrote a great, great analogy that get outside, see the mountains, see the sky. And a lot of these people put these idiotic glasses on and helmets. Which just strikes me as, you know,

utterly backwards. You know, I had seen... They want a matrix world. There are some people that literally want this matrix world. And one irony I've noticed with this too is that a lot of the people who... I might be unfairly overlapping these groups to some degree, but it seems like a lot of people who do eschew the idea of embodied experience, of living in the physical world in a human body...

when they're gaming, they always play these hyper-powered warrior-like characters who are themselves muscular and physical. They still want to escape into something like that. They just maybe don't want to do the hard work of it. Yeah, go to the gym. That's a really fantastic point. Again, there might be some unfair overlap there. I don't want to associate the whole gaming community with the kind of tech utopian crowd, but I think there's some overlap in that the

There are a lot of gamers who do sort of fetishize tech and will get the newest whatever just because it's available. The other red flag for me was there's kind of a line going on amongst those who do have some concerns about this that Orwell got it wrong, that 1984 isn't our future. It's actually going to be capital letters now, Brave New World.

Because when you take the authoritarian route, you know, people inherently resist. But if you entertain people into submission, well, you know, that's an easier sell. And when you add convenience to that, well, that's a very easy sell, right? And so I remember, I guess it was 2017, I was at a friend's house, a guy I was in the military with. We're talking and I kind of cut myself off mid-sentence because I realized that I was sitting next to an Alexa.

And this guy, he's kind of a gearhead, gets the newest whatever. But we were talking about politics like we always do. And I kind of stopped. I was like, is that – do you have an Alexa? And he said, yeah. And I said, okay, why would you welcome a surveillance item into your home? This is the kind of thing that the East Germans would have loved everyone to have had. But they'd have to sneak it in, right? They would have to be subtle about it. Yeah, people didn't buy it. But that's also a very American –

train of thought we don't believe government is capable of doing that because we're a country of the free and the brave boy i don't know how you carry that belief past covid i know but i do think but i do think there's a lot of people that believe that right and that's why you have that versus someone in east germany who knew we we are we are i think by virtue of our prosperity we are very trusting very naive in a lot of ways and we also like convenience so if even if someone knows that you know

Alexa has to be listening at all times because it has to know what Alexa isn't in order to know what Alexa is, right? So it has to be on at all times. We know it's surveilling. But convenience was just enough to kind of win out on that. Even if you have a 49% concern about the surveillance, the 51% convenience is enough for you to pick it up. Well, it's funny you speak about AI. So like Netflix. I do this a lot, even on Google searches. I will just look up things they have nothing, no desire to know about just to screw up their –

Algorithms on me. So, for example, Netflix, right? I mean, I like comedies, but one day I'll just order for two minutes Bob Kills 85 People, right? Just to screw them up. If you're wondering why the public data you just bought shows that Chuck Warren loves anime. Well, so, and Chuck, that's actually kind of what I was getting at with the idea of reducing a person to their internet. Right.

activity is because what if, you know, by chance you mean to type in, you know, whatever it is, blue skies, Hawaii, but you end up, you know, inadvertently typing in something else. And that one

somehow throws off their entire picture of you, but it was a mistake. So, for example, we're talking about they collect this information, they just make you an algorithm. So are there good websites, say like DuckDuckGo, who supposedly don't collect that? I use DuckDuckGo. A plug for DuckDuckGo. Jamie, we need to get them as a sponsor. Yeah, I use them for my sub stack. I email it as well, but DuckDuckGo.

A friend of mine had asked, a colleague of mine actually at my former job had asked me about that, kind of amused by the fact that I was using a tech code. And I said, look, Google can know a lot about me. They can know 80%. But, like, they don't have to know everything about me. Hey, you got to keep a little mystery in the romance, don't you? You got to keep a little mystery in the romance. That's how you keep the love going. I think the example I use is like –

I was like, if I want to look up, you know, Godzilla weight compared to Empire State Building. Mark, real quick, but we're going to bring you back for our podcast only segment, folks. So make sure you go to BreakingBattlegrounds.vote. You can download that there on all your favorite podcast sites. Mark, how do folks follow you and your work? Sure. Yeah. So the full time gig, as I think I mentioned earlier, you might have mentioned earlier, is I work as a content manager for the Haymaker Substack. It's a finance newsletter company.

primarily working in editing capacity there. And I just launched my own sub stack. It's going to be part time thing. It's called Opinions Impending. Good stuff. We're going to be coming back on the podcast only segment with more from Mark in just a moment. Breaking Battlegrounds back on the air next week. Welcome back to the podcast portion of Breaking Battlegrounds. I'm your host, Chuck Warren, my co-host, Sam Stone. Today we're with Mark Mongiutz, who is a writer,

I pronounced his last name probably wrong, but let me talk about this. You mentioned you were in the military. A long time ago, yes, sir. So tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get into being a writer? Yeah, so long, long ago, the faraway land of the 90s and 80s, I was very much enamored with the written word.

Always? I mean, were you a proficient reader as a child? Yeah, very much so. And I took to it far more than I did mathematics and science. And so I was oftentimes...

Found reading, you know, whatever wasn't on the curriculum because I had my own interest. I think we're all – I think you're in a room full of people like that. Yeah, there's nobody in this room who is the mathematics expert in their high school. Right, yeah. So I – in any event, I graduated from high school in Washington, from Western Washington, about 40 minutes north of Seattle. Okay.

And on something of a whim, I think I caught everyone in my family off guard. I joined the military. Was it a whim decision or something you'd always thought about? No, not really. No, I think I was putty in the hands of the recruiter because not long before, I might have seen, I don't know, I must have seen a film or something, but I saw some guys in a show wearing a DEA jacket. So that would be kind of a cool career, I think, not knowing anything about it.

And so when the recruiter called me, I guess this would have been March or April of 2000, you know, he asked me what I want to do after high school and all. And I, you know, maybe foolishly said, oh, maybe DEA. And he's like, hey, perfect. Come on down. And so we trained up. And then when you go to the DEA, you know, you'll be the best of all of them kind of a thing. Yeah.

It's a good pitch. That was a smart play on his part. He was a good salesman. And so I went from not really knowing what was next in April of 2000 to being in Fort Benning on June 20th.

So what did you take away from the military? What life lesson did you take from that? A lot of humility. You know, I remember right before I went in, or not right before I went in, I spoke with a customer who worked at a store there called Fred Meyer, who had been in the Marines. And he was telling me about how before he went to the Marines, he thought he was the baddest guy on the block. And he learned within about five minutes that

um, of joining up. That wasn't the case. Well, I didn't even go in with that. You know, I didn't even think I was going to block. You were more humble. Yeah. And, and even with that, I was still, you know, very humbled that it, um, you know, it has a way of exposing you to a lot of your weaknesses, a lot of your, your vulnerabilities. And, um,

I think, you know, first of all, an appreciation for what goes into the defense of the country is something I walked away with. Engaging with people from obviously all walks of life. That's kind of the old saying about the military. It plunges you into an experience with people.

Which seems to be something we're missing today. Today we go and huddle with our tribes. Exactly. Thanks to social media and AI, we are picking sides and we don't get outside of our bubble. The military forces you to get to know other people. And Chuck, you don't even have really the option of maintaining whatever prejudices or misgivings you might have had. You very quickly become just a fellow soldier with these people. And that's how you view them. It's how you view them.

race, religion, creed, so on and so forth. It's not that they don't matter. It's that they're in some ways they're sort of marginalized necessarily. And I think for the better in terms of, you know, human interaction,

So that's obviously one thing. I was also in the Old Guard in an interesting time. So I got there right around the time the Bush v. Gore nonsense was going on. Again, I'm going to back you up real quick. What is the Old Guard? Oh, okay. Far afield of AI now, but the Old Guard is the Army's oldest active infantry regiment right at the station of Fort Myer, Virginia.

And they are charged. We at the time, we were charged with laying veterans to rest in our international cemetery with handling all manner of of ceremonies in and around the D.C. area. Are the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier part of the same unit? Yeah. If you've ever seen the army drill team. Yeah, that's the same unit. Is that a pretty solemn moment?

Yeah. You mean being part of the old guard as a whole? Yeah. I mean, it was unexpected as well. I mean, I hadn't known knowing that would happen. It turned out my drill sergeant had come from that unit and he was pretty good friends with the old guard. So the old guard has a permanent recruiter stationed down at Fort Bennington to get guys in.

into the unit. And because they were coming up on an inauguration, they didn't know if it was any Bush or Gore. I know who you guys, you're happy that it was, it was Bush. But the world is happy. They were, they were trying to ramp up. And so they, I think they, they recruited some X number of people more than they would normally recruit it. And myself and three or four guys in the platoon pretty late in the cycle, actually, it was like three or four, maybe like actually,

Two or three weeks from graduation, I think we got pulled up. And so they rip up your old contract, tell you where you're going next. They let me keep my airborne school, so I didn't do that right after. Came home. I was home for Thanksgiving and then arrived Thanksgiving night in Fort Myers. So the interesting timing should be clear because I was there when the Pentagon got hit.

Oh, my goodness.

Maybe I think they made it more interesting than it actually was in their minds, but I would regale them with stories. I had been in operations for a while, so I saw the old guard from kind of a bird's eye view and just had a lot to share with them. Oh, the Alexa guy, the same guy. He was the one I met my second time when I went to Afghanistan. He had been urging me for years to write a book on the subject, and I don't know that I ever would have if not for the Pentagon story because it struck me as being unique enough, kind of important enough.

to merit a text.

And then on top of that, we were activated for deployment. What is the Pentagon story you're referring to? The Pentagon being struck on 9-11. Okay. And then you've written a little bit about the rebuild also? Not the rebuild. No, the recovery effort. The recovery effort. We were there. There's some dispute on this. In fact, a lot of the guys who contributed to my second book, we weren't sure exactly, but I think it was about 24 hours after is when we arrived. And our...

the whole unit was taking shifts in the recovery. So that aspect of my time in the military struck me as being worthy of a book. And then on top of that, the unit which hadn't deployed since Vietnam was activated in 2003 and sent one company over. And it was actually my former company. I was a Bravo company. I went to operations. And then when I learned they were deploying, I volunteered to go back and

And went overseas to the Horn of Africa. So we were in Djibouti and Ethiopia primarily. Some other squads went elsewhere. AFRICOM. Yeah, the CENTCOM. Yeah. Yeah. And...

So that was between those two aspects, there's being there. And then I guess to some degree, the inauguration struck me as being, you know, there was enough kind of meat on the bone narratively to warrant a book. And I spent the better part of the fall of 2016 writing it and then the better part of the winter and early spring of 2017 trying to find a publisher. Yeah.

Which eventually I did, and they actually liked my idea for the second one, which was I compiled essays from a bunch of guys who had been with me during the Pentagon recovery. And so I was the editor for that one. And how do folks find those books? Actually, Amazon. So big tech. So, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

yell out to your Alexa. Yes, let Alexa know. I would like to order. Two books from a guy who doesn't like Alexa. No, you can also go directly to the publisher. It's McFarland with a D at the end. They

They obviously sell books directly. I would be curious to know how many books they sell directly versus how many of their titles are sold on Amazon. But if I can convince any listeners now to go directly to the publisher, I think they'd appreciate it too. That's fantastic. Absolutely. What an amazing background. Well, since this is the podcast portion, a couple of items we'll talk about, and then we'd love to have you back to talk more about

about your writings on artificial intelligence. I think there's just so much to be done on it, and we need to talk more about these guardrails that people need to start thinking about.

Well, it's like unwise decision would be just saying we're doing these guardrails. There needs to be some discussion on it. You're kind of you're mapping out my my own content path for the next couple of months because I've got the one piece now is the one. You do love the word. Indeed. And you are dating a chatty woman. So you love the word a lot. I know this. I know this. Yes. I'll be producing more on AI. You'll be paying for that comment for the weekend. But that's fine. That's fine. A couple of things. So.

near and dear to your heart. They're running out of space in the morgue now because of people dying of fentanyl. Yeah. Did you know that? I did.

I did not know that there was a – They're like literally running out of space because of overdose fentanyl deaths. And what's worse about that, Chuck, people don't realize Narcan has prevented a mass wave of deaths among the fentanyl-using population. But after you've used Narcan a few times, it becomes less and less effective. They're reaching the point that they're not able to revive people who have been revived with Narcan previously multiple times. And so now you're reaching that point.

where that's delayed a wave of death that's now hitting across this country. Yeah, Washington as a whole, I actually took my girlfriend there a couple times last year. And in a lot of ways, certainly, you know, downtown, you can see some of the deterioration, you know, certainly with respect to the homeless encampments and whatnot. And the state just seems, at least Seattle itself...

seems unwilling to have tough conversations on these things. And it's difficult to know why that is. I think sensitivity is a big part of it. I think it's one of the reasons, you know, talking about immigration honestly is difficult. I think people are worried about seeming too nativist or whatnot. And so real problems go unchecked because we just can't even find... Well, there's also a huge industry underlying it. Yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, the math of the situation is what it is. And I don't...

I think we can probably talk about that plenty. But I think narratively, just getting the population to recognize these problems is difficult because, again, I think we were kind of – in one sense, we are desensitized because it's also so much. What do you do?

I had it's a great point because I had someone here in Phoenix who was a new arrival and I was talking about the homeless problem here that's growing very rapidly. And their response was, oh, well, just ignore them. That's what we do. And they had just moved here from Los Angeles. Right. Where it's such a major factor. Right. Six digits of homeless people there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think with, you know, on the immigration side, I think the – I first started paying attention to this probably in 2004. I know there were the Minutemen, right? Yeah. Volunteering to go down. Yeah, that was kind of my awakening, so to speak, from like to the border issue. And I think what's gone on since that time and maybe, you know, preceding it is –

is that the immigration hawks, you might call them for lack of a more precise term, maybe some of their language or some of their earlier positions did lean more towards the kind of nativist side. But now it's really just a matter of actual humanitarian issues.

I mean, you have slave trafficking. It's what they're doing to these women and these young people is evil. Yeah, it's one of the things I talk about all the time. You do not cross that border now on your own. If you don't pay off a cartel, they'll kill you. No, you have paid. You cross that border, have paid a price. Yes.

And a lot of you paid a price if you're sold. And you're likely to be paying a price for years to come as an effective indenture. Well, talking about the fentanyl, so DeSantis signed a bill yesterday that will increase sentences for distributing fentanyl, which the dealers could face either death sentence or life in prison.

And frankly, there is no different from any of us distributing fentanyl than pointing a gun at somebody's head that's loaded. Well, it's Russian roulette. Yeah, it's the same thing. It's Russian roulette, and that's illegal too. And it needs to be treated as such. Yeah. It's hard to talk about, though. I mean, people are – a lot of those who should be –

of this on a policy level are so insulated from its realities that they just can't seem to make themselves care. That's kind of my impression is it's just not pressing enough

for them. And I think you see this in a lot of areas. The people who opine most ardently on any number of topics are actually pretty comfortably insulated from whatever policies they're recommending or whatever policy measures they're not implementing. I've seen a lot of that, weirdly enough, from a lot of left-wing publications on Ukraine. And it's like, there's a lot of people who themselves never see or experience war, but they're very hungry for this war.

This is a strange war. You're absolutely right. And at the same time, we can all admit we can't allow Russia just to say, you know, this week I want Ukraine, next week I want Estonia. I've told this message many times, and we're about out of time here on the podcast, but years ago I was in Estonia and met with a university professor who had served in the Soviet military. And he

I asked him, was he ever concerned about the Russians coming back over? And he literally turned around and pointed to the bay and there was a U.S. destroyer there. And he said simply, as long as that's there, they're never coming. And it was just it really struck me just what America means to just world order. I mean, and I don't think Americans realize that is a heavy responsibility for a country.

But there is no one else that can do it. Russia waited until we showed weakness. Yes. I mean, but that's the point. And Americans have to come to this realization that.

World order happens because of what we do, foreign policy, militarily, economically. You are sort of this beacon to making sure the lights go on and off. And I know people don't view it that way, but just watch if America retracts and steps back, what happens to the world? No, you're right there, Chuck. And I think these days it's not fashionable to speak favorably of America's stabilizing influence on the world stage. But I think...

The concern, the good faith concern that I've heard with respect to our Ukraine policy and the concerns I myself harbor is that the –

The story surrounding it has been simplified. Very much so. And a lot of what was going on in Ukraine and in the Donbass and whatnot prior to last winter are not being characterized accurately or at all. Look, you can admit that Ukraine is corrupt in many ways. No doubt.

You can also say it's not good for Russia to say, I just want to take this country. They're not mutually exclusive. No, not at all. No, they're not. And I think it's too bad we have kind of a – we do have a zero-sum thinking on it. We like simple stories. I view it as – Life is great. As you know, writing it, being artificial talents, it's great. There's a lot of great – there's a lot of good artificial talents you can do, and there's a lot of bad that could come about without the proper guardrails. I wanted to give your audience one more thing to –

to kind of meditate on before we, you know, reconvene whenever you want to have me back. Um, you had asked me early on to talk about what, what can people do? And, and, and I think what I would really emphasize in addition to, as I said, you're going to figure out where you're replaceable and where you're not, because we need to be honest with ourselves. A lot of what we do, I can do and, and more effectively, um,

or cost-effectively, as a lot of businesses are going to be realizing or maybe already have. But I think we also need to remember that in almost every other context, we use the term artificial negatively. Artificial food covering, artificial anything, right? So if that's the case, you know, if we do see this essentially as something false almost, right? That's kind of what we're seeing with artificial often. You know, what are we getting into bed with?

And it just, I'm not anti-tech, I'm not anti-AI. But we do need to be cognizant of what's befallen. We can't be lumps on the log. Folks, this is Breaking Battlegrounds. This is the end of our podcast portion. We hope you have a great week and we'll look forward to you next week. The political field is all about reputation. So don't let someone squash yours online. Secure your name and political future with a yourname.vote web address from godaddy.com. Your political career depends on it.