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Bill Thompson joined the Army at 17 and spent 22 years there, most of it on the technical and communications side of a special missions unit. He now runs Spartan Forge, an AI-driven hunting app with over 100,000 users, advises high-profile clients on communications security, and is building his own compute network to run AI without feeding anyone else's system.
His core argument is that AI as it exists today is training data, matrix math, and human correction. It produces novel output, not novel thought. He argues the companies promising AGI know they cannot deliver it, and that calling for regulation lets them blame the government, guarantee investors a captive market, and shut out the open-weight models anyone can run at home. He is moving his own companies off the closed systems now.
Spartan Forge: https://www.spartanforge.ai
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Traditional Q and A to round out this week: 
A high school senior sent five questions about American culture for a class assignment, so I answered all of them. The smartphone posture you'll see everywhere the second you look up. Political division and why your neighbor isn't your enemy. Whether Americans can still stand on their own or just push a button and wait. What the toilet paper shortage actually revealed. Being capable of violence and choosing not to use it. Independence as a core American value and what convenience has done to it. Why people born here won the lottery and forgot.
A new father who cut off contact with his own dad asks whether there's any benefit to his daughter knowing that story someday. How my parents handled it with my grandfather. The difference between trauma and hardship, and why only one of them builds anything.
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Mike LeBlanc spent 13 years in the Marine Corps as an infantry officer. He deployed to Afghanistan in 2011 and went on to 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. After getting out he studied his way into Harvard Business School and co-founded Cobalt Robotics, a Sequoia-backed security robot company that put close to a thousand robots into offices on four continents before it sold. He now runs Foundation, which builds full-size humanoid robots for heavy industry and for the battlefield. His book, What If Anger Is the Answer, comes out November 3.
We start in Ukraine, where he has walked the front lines. Fiber-optic drones, isolated strongpoints, and a scoring system that awards points per kill. He argues most deaths on both sides now come from drones, and we work through what happens to a generation that kills through a screen.
What if anger is the answer:  https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/What-If-Anger-Is-the-Answer/Mike-LeBlanc/9781637749227
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A last-minute Friday episode, because I forgot we didn't have one. Michael worked under pressure.
We open with the Roberts Ridge series. The criticism online was valid: I should have asked Mitch and Brian whether they believe John Chapman earned the Medal of Honor, and I should have pushed on why the members of MAKO 30 supported the Navy Cross narrative and then would not sign statements for the Medal of Honor. That gap has to be addressed directly. I also explain where I actually land on the medal, why Pat Tillman is the example of what happens when you lie to protect a legacy, and why I am not a protector of the SEAL brand. The other side of the table is coming on in mid-October.
From there, a report that an AI chatbot hallucinated nuclear components on a Chinese cargo ship and had aircraft scrambled before someone caught it. Michael and I argue about whether AI art is art. A judge blocks the White House from pulling press credentials, and I explain why censorship never works and what I would do as press secretary. Lincoln shut down hundreds of newspapers during the Civil War. The last U.S. troops leave Iraq, and we talk contractors, Title 10 versus Title 50, and why Afghanistan still stings. A pilot stabbed his co-pilot on a flight to Tel Aviv and the plane dropped 14,000 feet before passengers got into the cockpit.

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Matt Brown spent his career inside the national security world without ever wearing a uniform. He came up through grad school and think tank work in DC, earned a TS/SCI clearance, and landed in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy working the counter-WMD mission. From there he moved to the State Department. In August 2023 he walked into a Senate committee, signed his real name, and became a whistleblower on UAP. His report on a program called Immaculate Constellation was later entered into the congressional record. Today he co-runs Vanguard Enterprise, a nonprofit built to support the people who came forward after him.
This conversation covers what pushed him over the edge. He says he saw transcripts showing the director of the Pentagon's UAP office was not telling senators the truth. He explains how the counter-WMD mission gave him a legitimate reason to see collection on objects around nuclear assets, and what he saw on those systems, from small orbs going in and out of water to a large triangle and a boomerang that disappeared behind its own light.  We cover the reality of blowing the whistle inside the IC, the retaliation he describes, and the questions he thinks Congress should be asking now. 
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