The Peter McCormack Show

Dmitri Alperovitch co-founded CrowdStrike, ran the investigation that first exposed Chinese state hacking to the world and predicted Russia's invasion of Ukraine months before it happened. He is now chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator and the author of World on the Brink, he argues we are already in a second Cold War that looks almost exactly like the first one.

Dmitri and I discuss why Taiwan is one of the worst places on earth to invade, the 1944 American plan to do it that was abandoned as too costly, why 2032 matters more than 2027 and why Chinese malware is already sitting dormant inside American water utilities and power plants waiting for orders.

They also get into the AI race that sits underneath all of it: why 90% of advanced chips still come through Taiwan, why a conflict there wipes $5 trillion off global GDP in the first year, why America's lead over China is measured in months and why the man who built the world's biggest cyber defence company thinks the US should start stealing Chinese IP right back.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - Sleeper Cells In America's Power Grid
00:01:53 - America Planned To Invade Taiwan In 1944
00:03:56 - The Worst Place On Earth To Invade
00:10:07 - Why 2032 Matters More Than 2027
00:13:20 - Run Faster And Kneecap The Other Guy
00:16:15 - China Is Six To Nine Months Behind
00:18:22 - Why Taiwan Isn't Ready
00:20:21 - There Will Be No Insurgency
00:24:47 - Would America Actually Fight?
00:27:19 - The Google Hack That Started It All
00:31:06 - Volt Typhoon: Preparing The Battlefield
00:34:01 - Should America Steal It All Back?
00:35:52 - This Is A New Cold War
00:38:40 - Bigger Than The Moon Race
00:43:49 - What Happens To AI If Taiwan Falls
00:48:12 - The Chips Act Disaster
00:54:45 - Bringing The War To Russia
01:01:46 - Everyone Becomes A Founder Again
01:05:16 - AI Psychosis And £6,000 Of Tokens
01:15:42 - Anthrax Instructions On Demand

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
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CONNECT WITH DMITRI ALPEROVITCH
› Silverado Policy Accelerator – https://silverado.org/
› Geopolitics Decanted Podcast – https://podcast.silverado.org/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/DAlperovitch

SPONSORS
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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
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Greg Allen has spent his career where AI meets national security. He wrote the landmark 2017 report on AI for the US intelligence community, served as Director of Strategy and Policy at the Pentagon's Joint AI Center and now runs Decision Tree Research. He argues we are already past the point of no return: bombing every data centre on earth would not get rid of AI now.

Greg and I discuss the OpenAI model that hacked its way out of its own test environment and then hacked Hugging Face to steal the answers, why Anthropic went back through its logs and found the same thing had happened to them, why nobody can explain how these systems actually work and why the big five AI companies now spend an Apollo moon programme every ten months.

But the hardest part is what comes next. Greg walks through the report that a frontier model autonomously hacked the NSA's most secure servers in hours, why the CIA director calls that a digital nuclear weapon, why America's lead over China is a month rather than a year and why the number of experts you need to build a bioweapon may be heading towards zero.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - It Escaped, Then It Hacked Hugging Face
00:04:50 - The Incident OpenAI Didn't See Coming
00:08:22 - They Know 3% Of Why It Works
00:10:30 - Golden Gate Claude
00:12:19 - Why You Don't Want This Flying Your Plane
00:16:56 - Stuxnet And The Virus That Copied Itself
00:21:15 - The Dark Corners Of The Training Data
00:26:58 - From Blue Origin To The Pentagon
00:28:34 - A 20% Chance, And We Ship It Anyway
00:33:55 - Building A Football Club In Four Weeks
00:36:28 - Ten Times Better Every Two Years
00:44:56 - Nuke Them Today
00:49:28 - It Hacked The NSA In A Matter Of Hours
00:53:09 - What A Cyber First Strike Looks Like
00:58:43 - Why China Gives Its Models Away Free
01:03:11 - America's Lead Is A Month, Not A Year
01:11:56 - From Thousands Of Experts To Zero
01:19:51 - The Cuban Missile Crisis Lesson
01:26:48 - What Happened To 22 Million Horses
01:31:41 - What Do Our Kids Do Now?

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
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CONNECT WITH GREG ALLEN
› Decision Tree Research – https://decisiontreeresearch.com/
› The AI Power Podcast – https://decisiontreeresearch.com/podcast
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/Gregory_C_Allen

SPONSORS
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› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Barry Strauss has spent four decades studying how empires rise and fall. A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of Ten Caesars and Jews vs Rome, he argues the West is repeating a pattern the ancients would recognise instantly: a rich, comfortable society clipping its own coinage, softening its people and assuming nobody could ever take it away.

Barry and I discuss the inflation crisis that nearly destroyed third-century Rome, why every generation raised in comfort produces a softer one, the cost of immigration without assimilation, why the middle class is the backbone of any republic, and why Russia and China already have plans to break America into pieces.

But Barry is not fatalistic. Rome faced plague, invasion and currency collapse in the third century and reformed its way out of it. He argues that soft lands make soft people, that suffering teaches and that if we want the things that matter to stay the same, almost everything else has to change.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - The Decline Of The West
00:01:13 - How Often Do You Think About Rome?
00:07:04 - Everything Must Change To Stay The Same
00:09:44 - What Actually Makes A Great Leader
00:12:51 - Netanyahu, Trump And Flawed Greatness
00:17:32 - The Immigration Experiment
00:19:04 - Not All Cultures Are Equal
00:21:46 - Ibn Khaldun And The Cycle Of Civilisations
00:23:07 - Soft Children And The Raiders From The Desert
00:25:04 - Has Any Nation Reversed Its Decline?
00:28:34 - Rome Needed A New Religion
00:33:32 - Democracy Has To Be Hard, Not Soft
00:38:13 - El Salvador, The Gangs And The Walls
00:41:27 - Soft Lands Make Soft People
00:42:39 - Why Education Went Soft
00:51:06 - Clipping The Coins: Rome's Inflation
00:57:49 - America Blindsided By Drones
00:59:13 - No Republic Survives Without A Middle Class
01:06:08 - They Have Plans To Break Up America
01:12:39 - Where The Hope Is

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
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CONNECT WITH BARRY STRAUSS
› Website – https://barrystrauss.com/
› Hoover Institution – https://www.hoover.org/profiles/barry-strauss
› Antiquitas Podcast – https://barrystrauss.com/podcast
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/barrystrauss

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Connor Leahy has spent his career at the frontier of AI, from reverse-engineering GPT-2 as a student and co-founding EleutherAI to building the AI safety company Conjecture. He now leads US policy work at ControlAI, and he returns to the show with a warning that has stopped being theoretical: AI systems are escaping their sandboxes, writing their own zero-days and leaving each other notes on how to break out.

Peter and Connor discuss the OpenAI incident that ended in an attack on Hugging Face sophisticated enough to be mistaken for a state actor, why we understand almost nothing about how these systems work, how reinforcement learning produces models that lie, cheat and manipulate to reach a goal and why the next stage after chatbots and agents is swarms.

But Connor’s argument is that the future is not decided. He believes superintelligence should be treated the way nuclear weapons are treated, banned and verified and deterred and that the real bottleneck is awareness rather than opposition. They discuss what an “aligned” superintelligence would actually mean, why military people understand the threat faster than technologists and what ordinary people can do about it.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - The AI That Escaped Its Sandbox
00:01:52 - Inside The OpenAI Incident
00:05:46 - They Thought It Was China
00:06:43 - We Grow AI, We Don’t Write It
00:11:07 - Trained To Lie, Cheat And Deceive
00:13:48 - Chatbots, Agents, Then Swarms
00:17:57 - The Machines Are Developing Preferences
00:19:30 - The Model Obsessed With Raccoons
00:22:03 - The Agents Left Each Other Notes
00:27:39 - Danger Pumps The Valuation
00:29:41 - Sleeper Agents In Every System
00:32:00 - Recursive Self-Improvement Goes Vertical
00:33:43 - Worse Odds Than Russian Roulette
00:38:14 - Are We Already Too Late?
00:40:02 - Independently Assured Destruction
00:48:02 - The Politicians Have Never Used An Agent
00:50:56 - Superintelligence Should Be Illegal
00:57:08 - You Never Privatise The Military
01:05:00 - An Aligned AI Is A One World Government
01:08:34 - What You Can Actually Do

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
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CONNECT WITH CONNOR LEAHY
› ControlAI – https://controlai.org/
› Connor’s Profile – https://controlai.org/connor-leahy
› MicroCommit – https://microcommit.io/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/NPCollapse
› LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-j-leahy/

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Expat Money – https://expatmoney.com/peter
› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
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› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sebastian Thrun has spent his career working on technologies that once sounded like science fiction, from self-driving cars and flying vehicles to online education and artificial intelligence. He now believes we are living through a technological singularity: an exponential acceleration that makes predicting even the next five years almost impossible.

Peter and Sebastian discuss why a $100 Claude subscription can already challenge work done by $200,000-a-year software engineers, what happens when lawyers, copywriters and drivers lose their jobs, why Europe is falling behind America and China and whether autonomous vehicles could eventually make human driving too dangerous to allow.

But Sebastian’s message is ultimately optimistic. He argues that the right response to technological disruption is to use the tools, become a builder and keep learning. They discuss what children should be taught in the AI era, why grit, curiosity and empathy matter more than memorising information, and why pessimists will never change the world.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - The Future Is Already Here
00:01:07 - Peter’s First Waymo Ride
00:03:43 - The Accident Behind Self-Driving Cars
00:09:37 - When Human Driving Becomes Too Dangerous
00:12:07 - Why Silicon Valley Keeps Winning
00:18:26 - Why AI Hallucinations Can Kill
00:20:53 - Flying Cars Are Already Here
00:24:29 - The Exponential Future
00:26:21 - Claude vs $200K Software Engineers
00:31:39 - We’ve Entered the Singularity
00:33:36 - Opportunity vs Fear
00:40:06 - The Workers AI Leaves Behind
00:46:53 - Why Europe Is Falling Behind
00:51:29 - Technology Democratizes Power
00:57:22 - Stop Blaming, Start Building
01:01:46 - What Happens When Jobs Disappear?
01:06:43 - Udacity vs the Education System
01:14:44 - What Children Should Learn Now
01:20:25 - Why Optimists Change the World
01:25:46 - Never Make the Same Mistake Twice

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH SEBASTIAN THRUN
› Website – https://www.thrun.org/
› LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastian-thrun-59a0b273

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter
› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.