Russell Kaplan, co-founder of Cognition — the company behind Devin — and previously at Scale AI and Tesla, joins the podcast to discuss what “software abundance” could mean for government.

Our conversation covers…

• Why government software is so broken — Despite spending over $100B annually on IT, critical systems at agencies like the Social Security Administration and U.S. Department of the Treasury still run on decades-old code that few engineers know how to modify.

• How two-year software projects become three-week ones — why AI agents are particularly good at the painful migration and modernization work engineers tend to avoid.

• What “software abundance” actually means — AI agents can handle the tedious work of switching systems 24/7, collapsing the switching costs, and forcing software vendors to compete on value rather than locking customers into outdated systems.

• AI for cybersecurity — From triaging massive vulnerability backlogs to automatically fixing CVEs, AI will be essential for defending critical infrastructure as attackers gain the same tools.

• The coming “post-coding” world — As models converge in capability, the key bottleneck shifts from writing code to understanding problems, reviewing systems, and deciding what should be built in the first place.

Plus, the future of procurement in an AI world, fraud detection in government datasets, the DMV as a software problem, and why Kaplan thinks the real skill of the future is knowing which problems matter.

Thanks so much to Cognition for sponsoring this episode.

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Frank Kendall served as the 26th Secretary of the Air Force from 2021 to 2025. Before that he was Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics under Obama. His new book, Lethal Autonomy: The Future of Warfare, comes out in June.

Cohosting today is Bryan Clark of Hudson, JustinMc and Eric Robinson.

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Mike Horowitz, Penn Professor and Biden DoD official who wrote 3000.09, clears up some autonomous weapons misconceptions!

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An all-star cast today with:

Emmy Probasco, a fellow at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) and former Navy officer with deep expertise in autonomous weapons and military AI adoption;

Michael Horowitz, a University of Pennsylvania professor who previously ran the Pentagon office that rewrote U.S. policy on autonomy in weapons systems;

Bryan Clark, a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute and retired Navy officer specializing in naval warfare and military technology; and

Henry Farrell, a political scientist and writer focused on the intersection of technology, geopolitics, and economic coercion.

[00:00] America's First Precise Mass Campaign Against Iran The U.S. debuts the Lucas drone — a sub-$100K system reverse-engineered from Iran's own Shahed 136 — alongside legacy Tomahawk strikes in a campaign of unprecedented scale and velocity.

[10:00] Regime Change Without a Plan The panel debates the theory of victory when you decapitate leadership but have nobody to pick up the pieces, with implications for nuclear proliferation, Gulf stability, and the Strait of Hormuz.

[18:00] Weapons Stockpiles, Air Defense, and What China Is Learning Burning through expensive interceptors against cheap drones risks drawing down Pacific stockpiles, while China gets a front-row seat to how American air defenses operate at scale.

[25:00] Claude Enters the Chat: AI in Military Operations Claude's integration into CENTCOM's Maven Smart System prompts a discussion on what military AI actually does — mostly boring bureaucratic tasks — and why the Terminator narrative misses the point.

[46:00] The Anthropic–Pentagon Fight Mike argues the dispute is about personality and politics, not policy — Anthropic never refused a government request, and the real clash is over who gets to decide future use cases.

[56:00] Treating a U.S. Company Like Huawei Threatening Anthropic with supply chain risk designations — tools built for foreign adversaries — could chill the entire tech sector's willingness to work with the Pentagon and poison allied trust in American tech.

If we're doing emergency pods once a week now should I stop calling them emergency pods?

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what a mess!

Wario Amodei's slow jam vibe: https://suno.com/s/cf3KDdVQ5F0KCjow

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Lawrence Freedman is the dean of strategic studies. He’s written books about the Falklands War, nuclear strategy, political-military relations, Kennedy’s foreign policy, the revolution of military affairs, and (my personal favorite) the history of strategy.  

Freedman is now part of the father-son writing duo samf.substack.com.

Note: we recorded this in the summer of 2023. Thanks to the Hudson Institute for sponsoring this conversation.

In this far-reaching conversation, we discuss:

• How the Falklands saved Thatcher’s premiership, making her the Iron Lady,
• Why the great strategic decisions of history rarely have clear, pivotal moments,
• Parallels between Putin, Xi, and the Argentine junta — what the Falklands campaign tells us about Ukraine, Taiwan, and the future of war,
• How nuclear war went from being a “winnable” geopolitical contest to the apocalyptic dog that didn’t bark,
• What Cold War arms control treaties can and can’t tell us about AI,
• The best strategists not covered by last week's interview with Hal Brands,
• Lawrence Freedman's recipe for wide reading and prolific writing.

Outro music: Oh! It's a Lovely War (1918) · Courtland & Jeffries (Youtube Link)

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Peter Harrell drops in, attorney who served in the Obama and Biden admins and submitted a brief in this case

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Bryan Clark opens the show talking Iran. Recurring cohosts include Justin Mc, Tony Stark and Eric Robinson.

Eric Slesinger of 201 Ventures drops in https://ericslesinger.com/

outtro music: rubio's speech https://suno.com/s/KnIpTyZIU7iJSeIf

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We’re here for a CHIPS Act megapod, in person with Mike Schmidt and Todd Fisher, the director and founding CIO of the CHIPS Program Office, respectively.

We discuss…

• The mechanisms behind the success of the CHIPS Act,

• What CHIPS can teach us about other industrial policy challenges, like APIs and rare earths,

• What it takes to build a successful industrial policy implementation team,

• How the fear of “another Solyndra” is holding back US industrial policy,

• Chris Miller’s recent interest in revitalizing America’s chemical industry.

This post is a collaboration with the Factory Settings Substack: https://www.factorysettings.org/. Subscribe for more insights from former CHIPS Program Office leaders!

Suno song link: https://suno.com/s/wwVYK10LfrAD5zK2

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We're trying out a different format to explore "Chinese peptides." We talk to biohackers using compounds like BPC-157 to heal extreme injuries, go undercover as peptide buyers, and discuss the challenges of reporting on the Chinese pharmaceutical ecosystem with the legendary Hamilton Morris.

Special thanks to guests Jasmine Sun, Hamilton Morris, Aaron Kesselheim, Marcus, and David. This episode was produced by Lily Ottinger with additional reporting from Irene Zhang and Nick Corvino.

Check out Jasmine's NYT article here.

ChinaTalk merch available now at https://chinatalk.printful.me/. Your purchase helps us make more content like this!

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Admiral Rickover — America’s most famous, perhaps most influential admiral of the second half of the 20th century. To discuss his unbelievable life story, dramatic impact on the Cold War, and implications for the future of what the U.S. government should do when it tries to build hard things, we have two guests — Charles Yang, founder of the Center for Industrial Strategy, who also does AI science work at Renaissance Philanthropy, and Emmett Penney of FAI.

We discuss:

• Rickover’s immigrant origin story from Polish village to almost being deported at Ellis Island and his improbable path into the Naval Academy.

• Drive, discipline, expertise, and how Rickover bent Washington to his will.

• Rickover as tyrant, teacher, technocrat — what his contradictions reveal about leadership, power, and effectiveness.

• Why Rickover matters now — nuclear revival, defense procurement reform, engineers vs. lawyers, and a major archival digitization effort.

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