Transcript: Cyber Loopholes, Rare Earth Metals and Cognitive Warfare – Robert Spalding

I think what he learned was not only is the world a bad place, Washington D.C. is a bad place. And more importantly, he has to be bold, he has to be aggressive, he has to make decisions.

And I think the other thing is he surrounded himself this time with people that rather than trying to control the president – a lot of the people that were around him saying “we need to control him, we need to constrain him” – they’re actually allowing him to do the things that he does best, which is, in essence, be the chief negotiator, the chief foreign policy strategist for the United States, the chief national security strategist for the United States.

He’s doing those things, and he’s being very successful at it in ways that are throwing off the rest of the world. And I think the reason is that he had that opportunity to go and see for himself how the world is working against us, how D.C. and in many respects, New York are working with the world to undermine the United States. And how do I begin to disassemble all this?

I think it’s very scary for the establishment because they have been very comfortable in the way things have been working. But I think he’s being very successful in slowly dismantling. And the biggest thing is really trade.

JAN JEKIELEK: So what is happening with this Trump trade policy and how much is it focused on the Chinese Communist Party?

Rethinking Free Trade Dogma

ROBERT SPALDING: Well, I think the truth is it’s focused on what is the right policy for the United States, irregardless of who the trade partner is. And I think that’s the piece that I believe people are shocked about. The biggest problem people have is with “oh, we shouldn’t punish our allies like the Europeans.” And there’s no recognition of how trade policy developed. What was the rationale for why we went the free trade route?

So it’s almost like free trade is an indisputable global good, and therefore it’s an indisputable national good. And therefore anything that goes away, strays away from free trade is bad. It’s gone from doctrine to dogma.

After the end of the Cold War, there was never a look at, okay, do these things that we did post-World War II, do they continue to make sense in a national sense for the United States, from a national security perspective, or even from an economic perspective?

And even the Fed economists – these are very smart people that spend a long time in their university programs creating an economic model. They all have their own economic model that their PhD was based on, but yet there’s this one universal, absolute truth that they all agree with, which is tariffs are bad.

And I think the president, not being an Ivy League trained economist with a PhD and a model, is just taking his kind of Brooklyn, New Jersey upbringing and saying everything that we do is transactional. And actually, when you go around the world and you meet with people that aren’t Americans, there is this understanding and belief that everything’s transactional and you do everything that’s in your own best interest.

And I think that works from a personal level, but it also works from a national level. And so the bottom line is, I think we strayed into this thing that was absolutely dogma that free trade is always an absolute good. And we stopped looking at the impacts that it had, both from a national security perspective in the United States and rare earth metals, perfect example, and from a prosperity advantage to the American people.

China’s Economic Warfare Strategy

So one of the big things that I think the Chinese did so well is attack the Gini coefficient in China. They attacked this idea of wealth disparity – super poor and the super rich. Is there economic opportunity? I’ve been on factory floors, factories that have shut down because of widespread competition from China, and there’s been no response from the federal government in protecting these people.

And that allowed China to say, “look what we’re doing with the Chinese people, we’re giving them jobs.” Now they don’t care about freedom, but that’s okay because we’re giving them jobs.

And I think this is a central problem of the 21st century for Western liberal democracy – what are the kind of things that the founding fathers were looking for? It wasn’t just freedom, it was also economic opportunity, the ability to pursue your interests.

And they knew at the time – they understood quite clearly the federal government had a role to play in protecting industry in the United States, that if they didn’t do that, some business owner is not going to be able to do that, and they’re not going to be able to do that collectively because they’re all going to be competing with each other.

So if there wasn’t some role of the federal government in protecting them, then it would be lost. And Alexander Hamilton, perfect example. “We have to have tariffs for national security. We have to have tariffs to protect our industry.” And I think D.C. just completely got out of that. And I think this idea that free trade is a universal good was the problem.

JAN JEKIELEK: I’m going to touch on a bunch of things that you talked about. One is the Gini coefficient. That of course, it’s a measure of how wealth is concentrated at the top or spread out. And so that’s actually something that Secretary Scott Bessent has been talking about, that that’s actually been shifting in America.

So maybe we can touch on that, but this was just as a commentary. I’m remembering “To be rich is glorious.” This was Deng Xiaoping’s motto, right? How the party, Chinese Communist Party, is going to maintain power. And that was the deal. Don’t touch politics, and we’ll let you basically increase your economic opportunity and your wealth. Just don’t touch politics or you’ll get destroyed. I mean, that was kind of the deal, right?

But then that’s also shifted, and that’s interesting too, because what we’re seeing in Communist China is that Gini coefficient is rapidly shifting in the opposite direction again, which is really interesting. So anyway, you touched on a bunch of things here and finally the rare earth species. But let’s take your pick. What would you like to jump in on here?

The Rare Earth Leverage Point

ROBERT SPALDING: Well, rare earths. The funny thing is I remember Hu Jintao going to Africa making all these deals for natural resources – cobalt, lithium, all of these different things that are being used for things like EV batteries and thinking, okay, this is not really good.

And then recently we had the Taiwan president. They were planning to transit through New York on the way to, I think, South America on a trip. And the president said no. Why? The president said no because the Chinese said no because of rare earth magnets that we need to produce F-35s. This is bad strategy. It’s bad policy on the part of the United States to leave ourselves open to blackmail. And it finds its way now directly in the things that we can do.

The other thing is, we reversed the Nvidia chips going – we basically banned Nvidia chips from going to China. Now we turn them back on. Why do we turn them back on? Because the Chinese said, “hey, we’re going to cut off rare earth magnets.”

So these are – this is a direct attack on our sovereignty. It’s not using any weapons. It’s not using – Mattis’s refrain of “it’s all about lethality.” Actually, no, it’s not all about lethality. National security is comprehensive, and it starts with your industrial security and starts with not having to depend on, in many ways, an enemy to supply things that are absolutely critical for your national security.

JAN JEKIELEK: We interviewed about six years ago in 2019 for the first time, and we were actually talking about rare earths. I went and looked. I was curious what we were talking about back then, but we were talking about rare earths specifically. And you were at the time, you advised the Chinese not to use that leverage point that you were just describing. By the way, do you know as a fact that these are the reasons that, or is this your interpretation of the…

ROBERT SPALDING: Not as a fact, but you can see as soon as they met, all of a sudden, the flow of rare earth magnets started to flow to the United States. So I think…

JAN JEKIELEK: And it’s these things. I mean, just for the benefit of the audience, these things are in everything.

Reading Between the Lines of Chinese Strategy

ROBERT SPALDING: Everything, right? Absolutely. And they’re certainly in everything that we do from a weapons perspective. I think what I learned in my time in China was to not try to do what an intelligence analyst does, and that is look for the smoking gun. Where is the Chinese Communist Party’s order that this won’t happen? Because, quite frankly, they have a lot of levers that they can pull to make sure that rare earth magnets don’t flow. It doesn’t have to be an obvious thing that you can see.

What you have to look at is what are their interests and what is happening in the world? And you can see a tie. So no, I don’t – do I know that Xi Jinping said, “we will not ship any rare earth magnets to the United States until they do these things?” Wouldn’t it be nice if Xi Jinping would tweet those things? Right. Because then we’d know we have the opposite situation here. The president is very clear, very transparent. If he wants something, he basically puts it out on X.

But the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t do that, and they will never do that. They have some of the most impeccable security policies I think that’s ever been devised. You can’t take a cell phone into a Communist Party meeting. They don’t do that.

What we can see is, okay, what is the outcome that’s happening now? We’ve reversed the Nvidia thing. Rare earth magnets are flowing. I don’t have some crystal ball where I can actually see what Xi Jinping is doing, but I can tell. I know what their interests are. I know what they want, and I can see what’s happening in the world, and I can put two and two together, and I would hope that other people could do that, too.

The Problem of Assuming Good Faith

JAN JEKIELEK: Well, so this is, I think quite important what you’re saying. I think one of the biggest mistakes that we made in the west in a lot of ways is assume good faith from the Chinese Communist Party when we have many decades of evidence that bad faith is the norm. In fact, it’s hard to find examples of good faith when you look at it in retrospect. Right. So why is it that we assume good faith? Why is it that we just don’t assume bad faith unless we have robust evidence to the contrary?

Rare Earth Metals and National Security Strategy

ROBERT SPALDING: Well, what’s the saying? I can’t remember who said it, but countries don’t have friends, they have interests. And I think good faith or bad faith, really, I think in some respects you could say is irrelevant. What is the interest of the United States and how do we pursue those interests?

And in the case of the United States, you know, we know we need rare earth magnets. We know that the Chinese have basically cornered the market on rare earth magnets. And that basically means that at any time, and we should have known this 10 years ago, some people did. That’s why I always said it, this is a problem for us. At any time they could say, “Okay, this is going to be the thing that I use to get the United States to do what I want when I want them to do it.”

JAN JEKIELEK: The reason I mention the bad faith is there’s people out there where you share some sort of moral commonality. There’s a trust that’s been developed over time. You have certain expectations of a person. Reasonable thing to factor into your decision making. What I’m saying is that we factored in a belief that there might be good faith in a trade deal, for example, when there’s never been any evidence there’s ever been good faith in a trade deal. Right. Makes me even wonder why we make trade deals.

ROBERT SPALDING: But my point is that sometimes you get drawn into this debate on whether or not there is good faith or bad faith. And I’m just saying just the problem is we get into these moral debates and then there’s no. Then we don’t make any headway on what we actually must do from a policy perspective because people have a problem with that.

Like here in D.C. people have a problem saying the Chinese Communist Party is bad. Some people would say, I wear a tinfoil hat. I absolutely loathe the Chinese Communist Party and think they absolutely seek the destruction of the United States. Okay, this is. This is tinfoil hat wearing Rob to a lot of people here in D.C.

Then, okay, don’t think about those. Just think, okay, what is the topic of rare earth magnets? Is it vital to the national security of the United States? Yes. Is it in our best interest that we don’t rely on one nation? Whether or not you agree that they’re bad or good, I think a reasonable person could say, yeah, that’s probably a bad policy. Okay, then what do we do to solve it then?

Trade policy, tariff policy, industrial policy, the Defense Production Act, Title 3. All of these tools that we have in the arsenal that we put into law for national security reasons, they’re there. They should be used where we have people here. And I would say a lot of economists of the Fed would say, “No, no, no, we don’t want to do industrial policy. Kind of like we don’t want to do. We don’t want to have tariffs. We don’t want to do industrial policy because we want to let the market work.”

Well, the market doesn’t care about the national security of the United States. Oftentimes the market only cares about one thing, and that’s profit. And if the profit is served because the Chinese have skewed the market in order to capture the supply of rare earth magnets, that’s what’s going to happen.

Methods of Modern Warfare

JAN JEKIELEK: I want to kind of look at the different methods of warfare that the Chinese Communist Party is using against the US and the west more broadly right now.

ROBERT SPALDING: This is.

JAN JEKIELEK: This has been a central theme of our discussions over the last six years. What do you see in play right now?

ROBERT SPALDING: The most.

JAN JEKIELEK: What are the most obvious routes other than, of course, this. You know, you could call it or warfare or something like that, or rare earths warfare.

ROBERT SPALDING: Yeah, I mean, I would say that that is an element of it, but in reality, let’s go back to the beginnings of the Communist Party. The Soviet Union had a method to their madness when it came to destroying societies from within so that this communist element could arise. And that’s exactly what happened in China.

You know, the Nationalist Party had better trained forces. They were supported by the United States. And you know, and the Chinese Communist Party basically turned the population against the Nationalist Party, you know, in some respects, for a lot of good reasons. If you look in Taiwan, you see the same elements of that. It is, how do you mobilize the people against their own government?

The iPhone Revolution and Cognitive Warfare

And I think the thing that’s different, the thing that’s new is the iPhone, right? The iPhone pops up in 2007. And even though these two PLA lieutenant colonels write about unrestricted warfare, in 1997, it really needed the iPhone and 4G networks to come together to create the beginnings of the mobile economy. This is where Apple came from. It’s where the FAANGs came from. Facebook, all of these social media platforms, these very large tech companies, they are all centered around this ability to take data about you from you and then coalesce it back into things that are attractive to you, but then also begin to change your perceptions, your behaviors, your attitudes, leading to TikTok.

But then beyond TikTok, it’s now incorporating AI. So now we’re getting to this world that not only the technology is there, but the economic consolidation when it comes to media platforms has occurred as well. And so while the Chinese Communist Party deliberately built these systems in China, they kind of organically formed in the same manner in the West.

So the Chinese Communist Party uses TikTok to basically propagandize the US population. But TikTok is also used in American politics. So now there’s this reticence to get rid of it. Right? Within the political system. It is endemic to who we are as a people. Now, these platforms and these platforms also the same platforms that our enemies are using to destroy support for, you know, our constitutional republic, that’s warfare, right?

That is, you know, if you go back to kind of, again, my thing about lethality, if you look at. There’s. There’s a good. I write about my book. Francois Julien wrote this treatise. He called it the Treatise on efficacy. Talked about it before. And he talks, he does strategy between the west and the east and the. And. And he says the west picks a goal and then musters their resources and goes for it. In the east and China, it’s all about where are the trends going? How do I align myself with those trends so I can be carried away by them?

This is what the Chinese Communist Party did, and it’s how they are using the trends. I started with the iPhone, 4G networks, now 5G networks. All the tech companies that are taking all of this data, the consolidation of media. Now we have five major corporations that control all of the legacy media in the United States for the most part.

And by the way, the legacy media basically takes other media that’s not legacy mainstream media and says, “Okay, they’re tinfoil hat wearing people like Epoch Times.” The same thing. They try to diminish the influence of these other media platforms because they want to be the one that provides the messages.

And then there’s alignment of messages from them and the tech companies and the Chinese Communist Party, right? There’s an agreement that what do we, we don’t want decoupling. Economic decoupling is bad. Economic coupling is how the Chinese Communist Party have the ability to influence our political process, our media, through, you know, Hollywood, through all of these messaging and, and enables them to slowly not. And it doesn’t happen overnight.

And I think this is the reason people don’t recognize it is because it’s a slow process of changing your attitudes about democracy, about freedom. I still remember a perfect example of this is Arnold Schwarzenegger. So here’s a guy that immigrated to the United States, had all the opportunity in the world, and then in the height of COVID he’s saying, he’s looking in the camera says, “Screw your freedom, screw your freedom.”

Like take that back to when he gets to. When he gets to Muscle beach and he’s able to become this bodybuilder movie star. And would that Arnold Schwarzenegger have felt that way? No. You can go back to interviews he’s had. He’s like so thankful that he came to the United States and had the ability to achieve his dreams. But in that moment, freedom to him was the worst thing in the world.

And you think about it, what does the Chinese Communist Party want you to believe? Freedom is bad. Like universally Chinese people believe this because that’s what they’re taught. But the power of warfare, and it’s cognitive warfare, the power in warfare in this day and age is the ability to get somebody who more or less thinks they live in a free system to say, “I don’t like living in a free system. I actually like that one better.” That that is magic.

Congressional Testimony on CCP Tactics

JAN JEKIELEK: I’m just reminded of this congressional testimony that you gave. I think it was about a year ago, I know because a number of people actually reached out to me about it and said, “Hey, Rob Spalding is doing this and that.” And the question really, I believe it was with Congressman Burchett.

ROBERT SPALDING: How does the CCP shut down criticism.

JAN JEKIELEK: Of its human rights abuses for warfare against America?

ROBERT SPALDING: It uses our own media. One good example is its attack on the Falun Gong, it’s basically convinced the entire academic university system in the United States that they are a brainwashed cult. They’ve done the same thing to our media institutions. And so, you know, that is the way they do it is by controlling our own narratives within the.

JAN JEKIELEK: And you’re saying that they’re not a brainwashed cult.

ROBERT SPALDING: I think they’re. They’re just a group of people that are dissidents of the Chinese Communist regime. Yeah, I agree with you, too.

JAN JEKIELEK: They put on a pretty cool dance.

ROBERT SPALDING: It’s pretty cool.

Faith-Based Resistance Movements in China

JAN JEKIELEK: What struck me here is there is there is a kind of a resistance movement in China. A lot of it has to do with faith. There’s underground Christian churches. There’s, of course, in the more isolated areas, the Uyghurs, who have their own faith, and Tibetans likewise. But then across the country, the resistance is basically Falun Gong practitioners actually, you know, actively encouraging people to consider freedom, to use that terminology. It’s a huge active civil disobedience movement. And I think in that moment, you spoke specifically to how they basically delegitimize. There’s this kind of very deliberate, active approach to basically demonize. Delegitimize.

Global Scale Political Warfare

ROBERT SPALDING: It’s standard communist tactic to basically not address the problems or the challenges that might be brought up by the fact that, you know, the Falun Gong existed in China, but rather demonize them because they’re actually concerned about them as a political movement in China. And I think this is going on all the time, not just with the Falun Gong, it’s going on with other groups.

And I think what’s happened in the 21st century, with the rise of the smartphone and the Internet and mobile networks and the cloud and all the tech companies, is there’s been a convergence in this capability to do this at scale. Right. The thing that the United States is very good at, as evidenced by the. By the missions in Iran, is we can operate on a global scale militarily.

And I think the Chinese Communist Party, when you look at them as even the People’s Liberation army, they’re the armed component of the Chinese Communist Party. But even when you talk to them individually, when you talk to their senior leaders, they are much more aware of the political warfare aspects of their mission and much more capable at that than I would say they are at the type of strike we did in Iran.

So while they’re global in their reach, meaning the Chinese Communist Party, the way that they operate is through political disinformation, through belittling their opponents, through. By creating doubt in the minds of people about, you know, people that they want to impugn. And they’re doing this everywhere. It’s not just the Falun Gong. They’re doing it in Taiwan, they’re doing it in the United States, they’re doing it in Europe. They’re doing it for their own benefits.

And they’re using these tools, these social media tools and legacy media in some regards, through their relationships, financially, through their relationships, in a technology sense, things like ByteDance and TikTok, their investments and things like they’re invested in Reddit, for example. You know, Tencent is invested in Reddit. They are literally, if you look throughout our media system, our information system, our technology system, they are invested there. So they’re plugged in, in a financial way, they’re plugged in an information flow way.

What the Chinese Communist Party, again, let’s trace it back to its roots, goes all the way back to Marx. But Soviet Union was the one that was sending out the Comintern to train that the Chinese Communist Party became then, you know, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of Berlin Wall, became the holders. Right. Of that mantle and now are the ones.

And by the way, they have a much more effective approach to doing it because it’s a much softer approach. Soviet Union was a little bit harder. Rido was much more military. China is much more. It’s kind of the panda approach to communist infiltration. Because it’s friendly. It hugs you, it doesn’t want to hurt you. It wants to make you. It wants to make you think it’s friendly.

And why can’t it be friendly? Because it lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And, you know, they never want to do war. They just want to, they just want to do trade. That’s in their own interests. This is the problem.

The Cognitive Warfare Challenge

JAN JEKIELEK: They forget to mention that they put them into cannibalism level poverty before they lifted.

ROBERT SPALDING: See, but no, you’re just saying that because you’re a cultist. See, that’s what they would say. And by the way, none of that stuff exists. In fact, we’ve had people come over and they will attest to it. Very important people will come over and attest that this is not happening.

This same thing is happening here in the United States. For me, when it started happening with COVID and I saw it, I’m like, “Oh, my God.”

JAN JEKIELEK: What is it that you saw?

The Convergence of Fear-Based Messaging

ROBERT SPALDING: It’s this convergence of this ability to create messaging in many cases based on fear that gets people to basically suspend their natural distrust of the government. Americans have always had a natural distrust of the government.

Then all of a sudden it’s like, “The government cannot lie to me. The government can do no wrong. I must do what the government says. And oh, by the way, you must do what the government says. And if you say that you distrust the government, you’re a bad person all of a sudden.”

The fourth estate became part of the establishment of the government. And now whatever the government says, they repeat.

What happened in China was deliberate. What happened in the United States was a result of economic consolidation tied with data and information, computing and communications. It’s all essentially aligned in the same type of centralized information control.

One is based on more or less monetary means, economic benefits, and the vast enormous wealth of the tech companies in the United States. And in China, it’s the Communist Party. But the net effect of both is a centralization of information.

The One-Way Information Flow

That centralization of information and the fact that we are tightly coupled with the Chinese Communist Party means that the messages, sometimes both messages get through, at least on our side. On their side, it’s blocked, because there’s no X in China. There’s no Facebook in China. So there’s a one way messaging flow.

So while we have our own things, “MAGA is bad,” then other things can come in. “Decoupling’s bad. This Cold War view is bad.” Anything that basically would sensitize you to being wary of the Chinese Communist Party, all of a sudden that’s a bad way of thinking. That’s a wrong way of thinking.

I tell people there’s three political parties in the United States. Trump or Elon said he’s going to make the third political party. There’s already three political parties in the United States. So he might make the fourth political party.

But the three political parties in the United States are the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the Chinese Communist Party. And the Chinese Communist Party is in there and it’s in this one is against the other two and the other two are against each other. So who do you think is going to win that?

These two are going to be fighting while the Chinese Communist Party is basically using that partisanship. We have entered into the era where this ability for our enemies to insert subtle messages that create partisanship, that destroy support for patriotism, that destroy faith and confidence in our system of government.

“Who are these crazy founders to come up with three branches of government? That’s just a bad idea. And we just need, like Trudeau would say, we just need a system like China.”

JAN JEKIELEK: Basic dictatorship.

America’s Military Blind Spot

ROBERT SPALDING: We need dictatorship because policy is so messy now because we have these three competing branches of government. I feel like there’s too much quiet prejudice in America about a bunch of things. But that quiet prejudice has been planted there. This is why we’re in such dire straits, I think, because there’s a lot of quiet prejudice that’s been placed in our psyches.

When you look at the United States in a military sense, when you talk about cognitive warfare, information warfare, that is actually in the Guard and it’s in civil affairs. That sounds strange, doesn’t it? Would you place psychological and political warfare in civil affairs? And it would be in the Guard? It’s not even a mainstream, active duty practice.

We’ve got so specialized militarily in the application of force, we’ve kind of lost sight of the more subtle tools of warfare. The fact that our national security establishment really has no concept of information warfare when it comes to what’s happening in the United States. It’s really related to how the intelligence community is not really, by law, allowed to work within the U.S.

So we have these enormous political warfare and psychological warfare campaigns happening in the United States. We have nobody that’s responsible for responding to them.

Taiwan’s Response Model

The country that does this well right now is Taiwan. They had to. In 2020, I met with Tsai Ing-wen, the president, and we talked about this, the psychological warfare, political warfare going on in Taiwan.

And they had created NGOs to go after it. They had created country policies in terms of how they do information management, but also they have created tools, algorithms, and other things to recognize first to recognize disinformation and then to counter it.

There is nothing else that I’ve encountered in the west that is similar to these tools and how they’re being used. So there is no recognition that cognitive warfare is kind of the name of the game today. And there’s this war raging that we have done nothing about.

The TikTok Question

JAN JEKIELEK: Basically, you’re saying that TikTok and possibly other platforms are being utilized, but TikTok, of course, because it’s under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, is being used actively to do this sort of thing. But people say, “Show me the evidence, Rob.”

ROBERT SPALDING: I guess it comes Laowai86, who is a handle on YouTube for a guy that lived in China 10 years, married a Chinese wife, came back to fled China because he was being sought out by the Chinese Communist Party. And now he makes content on YouTube and shows you how the Chinese Communist Party is inserting messages.

Now, that is a little bit more overt than I’m talking about. But if you take the science around how you manipulate people’s perceptions and beliefs, and then you take that and you distill it into kind of a rational way of organizing for conflict, it’s completely different than the way we do it.

Daniel Kahneman, noted behavioral psychologist that actually works in economics, noted in numerous studies that I can influence somebody to have a quiet prejudice that they’re not even aware that they have. And so what happens over time is these quiet prejudices become built up in you and tend to affect your decision making.

And so this is how these systems, these information systems are being manipulated by the Chinese to create outcomes in terms of the way people think in terms of the decisions they make here in the West.

Media Manipulation Through Economic Leverage

JAN JEKIELEK: One of the things that I was just looking at recently is how the New York Times has downplayed the various atrocities the Chinese Communist Party has affected against the Falun Gong, specifically. For example, the organ harvesting. It’s referred to as something that Falun Gong activists claim, as opposed to the voluminous independent evidence and studies that have been done this, notably the China Tribunal in 2020. The mechanism of that, how that happens, isn’t entirely clear to me.

ROBERT SPALDING: Well, look at who owns the New York Times. Look at who places advertisements in the New York Times. Look at how the New York Times runs. And then take a step back. What are those entities relationships to China? Because they absolutely affect how the New York Times behaves. It affects their editorial response. It affects the placement of ads or the not placement of ads. All of that is reflected in the bottom line.

These are enormously powerful levers that the Chinese Communist Party can pull. The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t have to do it themselves. They can go to one of the shareholders of the New York Times, or they can go to somebody that’s going to place an ad in the New York Times and say, “Hey, if you guys keep doing these types of stories, we will stop advertising.”

By the way, that’s what happened to X, formerly Twitter, all of these advertisers pulled. So it’s very easy for the Chinese Communist Party to manipulate the narrative in the United States just by talking to their corporate allies, talking to their financial allies, JP Morgan, Citibank. “You want to do business in China, guess what? You need to help us with these various entities if they’re not doing what we want.”

And it may be different levers for different things, but there are levers there all the same. It is the reason we would not allow the Soviet Union to do business in the United States because we knew they would use those linkages to undermine our political sovereignty. How we ever forgot that when it came to the Chinese Communist Party is beyond me.

The Challenge of Evidence and Inference

JAN JEKIELEK: So I just wanted to qualify something that I said. I asked you, “What evidence is there?” And this is actually something that’s very difficult to do sometimes because the Chinese Communist Party is so secretive in terms of what exactly it’s doing in terms of its strategy and tactics.

But something that I’ve come to realize watching them now for decades is that this is the reason that I was talking about this good faith, bad faith argument. This is the reason I was talking about it. Because, for example, Xi Jinping has elevated military civil fusion as a key priority of the Chinese Communist Party. What does that mean?

That means that everybody understands in the entire system, which is unbelievably hierarchical, that they better be implementing that. And the better they implement that, the better graces they’re in to the top, which is of course your goal.

And so let’s say, how would you know, even though for this there is ample evidence, how would you know that the Wuhan lab, there’s a military operation happening there? Well, in this case, we actually have a bunch of evidence that shows that. But you wouldn’t need to because obviously gain of function research has a military application.

And so if you weren’t doing that, heads would be rolling in this sort of perfect opportunity to basically build your bioweapons program, which you have a robust one. So we have to make a lot of this kind of inference. And when I see you talking about this, I hear you making the exact same sort of inference. But this type of thinking seems to be difficult for us here in the west for some reason.

The Chinese Communist Party’s Integrated System

ROBERT SPALDING: Well, it’s not difficult when we’re talking about the CIA, right. We acknowledge the CIA can do some things that, you know, are not acknowledged and actually, you know, aren’t in the interest of another society. So I don’t know why it’s so hard for us to recognize that this is something that the Chinese Communist Party does nationally.

And more importantly, their system is organized according to this way. And they have laws that are on the books that said Chinese citizens have to spy on behalf of the government. And I think this is the part that’s so powerful. We don’t use our companies to be those levers to pull those things. So we don’t use Intel to go to China to influence somebody to write an article counter to the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese Communist Party would shut it down in the first place. But we don’t even behave in that manner.

This is something that I think we, the United States has a hard time understanding. So when we say, “hey, this is a private sector initiative,” or “this company is talking to this company,” we always assume that it’s always on the basis of profit. In China, we’ve talked about this. There is a melding of the political and the informational and the economic and the financial. And those all come and manifest themselves in different ways.

So that while you may be dealing with what you think is a business partner, you’re actually dealing because they’re acting by law under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party. You’re also dealing with an element of what in the United States would be the intelligence community, the State Department, the Department of Defense. Right. The Department of Commerce, Department of Treasury. You don’t recognize that. You just think you’re working with a corporation.

That is not the way their system works. And unfortunately, we don’t teach our interagency people to think of China in that way. It’s integrated into the very fabric of their society. It’s not like if you go in the CIA, you’re in the CIA. If you’re a Chinese citizen, you’re in the Chinese version of the CIA by law, like everybody is.

Indoctrination from Kindergarten

And when you think about that, well, how is that implemented? It’s implemented as soon as you hit kindergarten. It goes through kindergarten, all the way up through university. You’re indoctrinated every single day. Young kid, how do you know you’re a good student in China? You get the red sash. Why do you get the red sash? Not because you got, you know, did all your math problems, right? It’s because you’re the best communist in that class. Right?

So they’re reinforcing what it is to be a good communist. And what it is to be a good communist is follow the laws, follow the party, and do the things that the party needs you to do, no matter what they are. And so this is something that is completely foreign to an American citizen. Like, how do you grasp such a society like you built it into the laws, you built it in the society, you built it in the education system, you built it into the political system to the point where a graduate of a four year degree cannot even tell you how the political system works, because unless they’re in it, they are encouraged not to even think about it or talk about it or consider what their leaders are doing.

Because it’s not your place, it’s a dystopian place. It’s peaceful and nice as long as you stay in your lane. As soon as you get out of your lane, meaning if you get involved in politics and you’re not in the party, that’s big problems for you.

The Social Credit System

Now it’s even worse because if you jaywalk, if you miss your rent payment, if you jump a turnstile at Metro, you know, all these things are bad things, sure. But what these things do is accumulate a score to the point now we have homeless people in China that have been completely canceled out of society. Can’t get a job, can’t rent a house, can’t go on public transportation, can’t get a bank account, can’t get an ID. They are completely on the outside and they’re basically living on the outskirts of society trying to get by.

Can you imagine trying to survive in that kind of environment? But what they’re guilty of is not being a good communist, not being a good Chinese citizen, at least in the way the Chinese Communist Party wants you to be. All of that is enabled by their digital society. What they’ve created, their cameras, WeChat on every device, you know, all this ability to track everything you do.

And we see manifestations of the same thing that we’re seeing in China here during COVID in the politics of our society. Debanking. Debanking is a good analogy to what’s going on in China. If they don’t like you, they’ll debank you. What are they doing here? They’re debanking people. It’s eerie how synonymous our society is today with what the Chinese Communist Party’s built in China, or at least has been heading in that direction.

JAN JEKIELEK: Right, because it’s not the same. Right?

ROBERT SPALDING: Well, the same in that we don’t have a single political party that is the overarching power in our society. No, what we have is a set of circumstances, and I alluded to them before, that have allowed for a concentration of economic power, a concentration of information power, if you will. And those have essentially aligned with an established narrative, established narratives that everybody basically agrees with because they’re all going through the same university system. So we’re in essence. Yeah, it’s not the same system necessary in terms of politics, but it’s having the same networked effect.

The CCP as America’s Third Party

JAN JEKIELEK: It just reminds me of this very long form piece by NS Lyons, “The China Convergence,” something I’ve actually interviewed him on the show about. Explain to me exactly how the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, is the third party in American politics. Flesh that out for me a little bit because I haven’t heard that before, but there’s definitely truth to it.

ROBERT SPALDING: Well, it’s funny because Elon Musk said he was going to make the third party. I already believe the third party exists. And that is because we’ve allowed them to enter into the political dialogue of the United States. What happens is the Democratic Party sees the Republican Party as the enemy, and the Republican Party sees the Democratic Party as the enemy, and the Chinese Communist Party sees them both as the enemy.

And their goal is to reinforce the behaviors and beliefs of those two parties. Right. So if I can get them to hate each other even more. Right. So we’re very aware of hyper partisanship today, but what we’re not aware of is the role of the Chinese Communist Party in influencing that, influencing economically, influencing it through their relationships, encouraging, you know, the slanders that each of them have towards each other.

And I think if the two parties understood that while they certainly can have disagreements between each other, they are both of American descent. What happens is the Chinese Communist Party is convincing them that no, they’re actually mortal enemies. And what the Chinese Communist Party wants them to do is to fight between themselves to the point of destruction of the United States. That is pure communism. How do I destroy a society? I destroy it from within. I create distrust. I create division. This is the Chinese Communist Party way.

And we built these information systems, we built the university systems, we built our corporate system and financial system in such a way that they were able to get their hooks into that and contribute. You know, politics is downstream of a lot of these things. Economics and culture and the Chinese Communist Party are basically, you know, lobbying things in there.

You know, Hollywood, we all acknowledge that the Chinese have an impact in Hollywood, but we don’t acknowledge kind of the other things that happen out of their being financially involved with those players. Like what are the things that are discussed around the dinner table when you have these principles together and the Chinese Communist Party is involved? Typically what you see is a discussion around the failure of the Western society and how it needs to be recast more along the lines of what China’s doing.

Harvard’s Partnership with the CCP

JAN JEKIELEK: You know, something that may be incredibly astonishing to people. I saw the CCP Select Committee recently published a little graphic that basically talks about how the Harvard University, the Kennedy School of Government, supposed to be training the leaders. The future leaders of America has a partnership with the Chinese Communist Party school that trains the top cadres. And you look at that and you think to yourself, how is that even possible? How did we get to that point?

ROBERT SPALDING: You know, I don’t talk about this much. I was a defense attaché in Beijing. And Mike Pillsbury, who wrote “The Hundred Year Marathon,” he would always go over and talk to the Chinese Communist Party, which I kind of thought was a little bit odd, but nevertheless, he took me to the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.

And I walk in and they’re like, “what’s he doing here?” And what I found out in that meeting is that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party had been having meetings with the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. And I’m like, “what’s going on?” And the Chinese Communist Party is like, “well, you know, after the fall of the Soviet Union, all these Communist Parties went away. So we felt we had to create outreach with these other parties.”

And I don’t know what happens when the Republican Party is sitting in the Chinese Communist Party headquarters in Beijing or the Democratic Party is sitting in the Communist Party headquarters of Beijing, but I don’t think that they’re telling the Democratic Party that the Republican Party is another American party and they should all be unified. Right. I mean, the fact that these things are going on horrified me. And this was 2017.

JAN JEKIELEK: Wow. I have not heard this before.

Document Number Nine and Fundamental Misunderstanding

ROBERT SPALDING: I hadn’t heard of it either. And I think it’s something that the American people aren’t aware of. And, you know, it’s kind of consistent with, you know, how America does foreign policy. It encourages these people, you know, Chinese would call them people to people conversations.

But when you look at it structurally, and you particularly so when you don’t understand that something like document number nine exists, which basically lays out how the Chinese Communist Party believes that the way we think of governing ourselves, our constitutional republic, the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, how we actually believe that society should be conducted, the Chinese Communist Party sees those as deliberately created for the purpose of destroying the Chinese Communist Party.

Like, not that we believe them because we believe them on their own merits. It is. They are part of a strategy for the United States to destroy the Chinese Communist Party. When you start to think that way and you start to believe that or start to understand that everything that we believe in terms of principles and values, the Chinese Communist Party actually sees as designed to destroy them.

Then you start to begin to understand the challenge of us having interactions at a political level, at a person to person level. Like when you say, “I believe in freedom of speech,” what they are hearing is “you want to destroy my political system.” That is the visceral response that happens because that’s the way they’ve been trained and it’s not the way we think as Americans.

And it’s very hard for you to come to grips with the fact that the way you think as an American is actually has implications in terms of what a person hears when you say those things. You don’t really mean you believe in free speech. You really mean that you want free speech to come to China so that you can destroy China.

The Manipulation of Well-Intentioned Americans

JAN JEKIELEK: It’s shocking to me that we don’t understand this because I can completely imagine people thinking, “hey, I have an opportunity to meet with the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. What a great opportunity.” You know, maybe I’ll be able to influence them, create some good deals for America. Let’s assume the best intentions here for a moment. You can imagine all that. But the reason that you’re shocked and horrified this is happening is because you know that they have this other agenda, right?

ROBERT SPALDING: Like they’ll come back to these people come back. These very senior, august people come back and then they go back to the government and they say, “I just had a meeting in China. Let me tell you what I learned. We could probably do a lot better in this trade policy or get this other thing that we want, but we just have to stop talking about the Uyghurs.”

Like, if we just stop talking about the genocide of the Uyghurs, the Chinese will be much more willing to deal with us, right? And so what the Chinese Communist Party is doing is they’re like saying, “oh, I’m taking the fact that you’re a well known, well respected person. I’m revealing something to you because of who you are.”

And you think, “okay, well, maybe we can have a breakthrough in our relationship in our country to country to relationship if we could just not talk about the genocide of the Uyghurs.” This is a type of thing that happens. And of course there is no intention on the part of the Chinese Communist Party to give a better trade deal or do anything else that might be beneficial to the interests of the United States. They just want us to stop talking about the genocide of the Uyghurs.

The B-2 Bomber Strike on Iran: Precision vs. Holistic Warfare

JAN JEKIELEK: I want to shift gears for a sec before we continue. You know, you were commander of the B-2 bomber group. And this, of course, was used. B-2s were used in this recent strike on the nuclear strikes on the nuclear facilities in Iran. And I just want to get you to kind of comment a little bit on the use of that technology. You know, how it worked, is it appropriate? I mean, there’s a lot of debate around this.

ROBERT SPALDING: If you look at kind of how Western and Eastern, and I’ll be very specific, Chinese doctrine with regard to warfare has diverged, actually, they were never converged. But how they’re different. And you kind of look at that in the modern context, I think what you find is the west has become very specialized and precise.

In fact, medicine is a good analogy for the military in that sense, right? In the west, we specialize in medicine. You have a heart surgeon, you have a brain surgeon, you have a pediatric doctor in the East. In China, you have, you know, Eastern medicine, which is much more holistic, right? They look at the whole body. They look at how you rest, they look at what you eat. They look at your, you know, what job you’re doing. That’s the same thing in the military.

And so that specialization led. I alluded to it, to that, you know, comment by Mattis about lethality. And so what do we try to do? We try to apply the least amount of force to the most precise location to minimize casualties. We want to do that in the most efficient and effective way. So we essentially, we want to get better at killing people and blowing things up to achieve some end.

And almost, when you look at it from a practitioner’s perspective, it becomes more about doing the thing than the thing that you’re supposed to. The outcome you’re supposed to achieve. That’s what’s happened throughout my career. That’s what I’ve seen. We’ve gotten better and better and better at killing things or killing people and breaking things, where in China, it’s much more about what is the outcome I’m trying to solve and what is the best tool to use that carries the least amount of risk.

I think that’s the strike in Iran, like the strike on General Soleimani is, I think, the right amount of force for the right outcome where there was actually strategic thought put into doing the strike. Right. What is the problem that we have? The problem we have is these centrifuges that are in Iran that are, you know, can allow the Iranians to create weapons grade material. Once you have weapons grade material, creating a bomb is pretty simple.

That industrial capability to, it’s not refining, right? It’s basically sifting out the elements out of literally mountains of ore to get to the pieces that create, you know, the ability to have weapons grade material. That industrial process needed to go away. And we had created within the military the ability to take it away.

And so if you look at Iran, were they ever voluntarily going to give it away? Did the North Koreans voluntarily give it away? No. The Libyans voluntarily gave it away and look what happened to them. So I think there was a, if you look at it kind of logically, the Iranians were never going to give that up and we had the tool to take it out.

And so I think the bottom line is it was a good use of things that we had become very good at to do something that absolutely had to be done. So I think in that sense it was expertly executed. I never doubted that it would be. But more importantly, and I think this is the part that. And one of the reasons I’ve become disillusioned with the military in the United States is because in this case it actually had the intended effect.

You know, of course, you know, everybody’s going to debate whether or not it actually destroyed those centrifuges. I think we have a good idea that the weapons acted as they were or they operated as we expected. The mission went off perfectly. And so, you know, I think that’s all the goodness of the military combined with using it for a right purpose.

I think where it goes astray is where we take a step back and we don’t actually think what am I going to achieve with this action? And is that the right tool to achieve it? In many cases it’s not. It’s the wrong tool. And this is where I think the Chinese are absolutely correct in that many cases, things like rare earth magnets are a much more appropriate national security tool than using weapons. And here is where I think we could take, we could learn a lesson from them.

Top Gun Maverick: Hollywood vs. Reality

JAN JEKIELEK: I have a note here that you have specific thoughts on Top Gun Maverick.

ROBERT SPALDING: Actually, it’s my wife that has specific thoughts on Top Gun Maverick. Because by the way, I love the movie. The, I thought second, second movie was even better than the first. So credit to Tom Cruise and actually telling a good story. I mean, I think his movies, he always ends up doing a good job at that. And that’s takes good focus. But we walk out of the movie and my, it’s a very exciting movie. And my wife goes, “Why did they just use a V-2?”

JAN JEKIELEK: What’s the answer to that?

ROBERT SPALDING: It wouldn’t have been a good movie. The guys like drinking coffee as the airplane flies over and the weapon comes out like it’s not, you know. Okay, I’m being a little bit facetious. It’s not that it’s not that easy, but it certainly didn’t require all the theatrics that went into the second Top Gun movie, let’s put it that way.

Building Resilient Digital Infrastructure: The Sempre Mission

JAN JEKIELEK: Okay, let’s shift gears again. We’ve been speaking with each other for the better part of six years now. And I remember something that was just kind of a dream at the beginning. You’ve actually taken quite a distance, which was a huge security vulnerability that not just the US but Canada and the west has in general is this kind of lack of hardened digital infrastructure, I mean, to put it very, very broadly, and communication systems and so forth. It’s very huge vulnerabilities, especially vis a vis a threat as large as the Chinese Communist Party. So you’ve. I still remember when you initiated Sempre, your company and started working on this, starting trying to figure out the technology, how to actually create EMP proof cellular networks and so forth. I want to get you to give me an update on how things are because I understand things have come across, things have come along quite a bit and I think for the benefit of many of us.

ROBERT SPALDING: Well, let’s go back to why I did was actually 2005 when Hurricane Katrina happened and I was a B-2 pilot at Whiteman and you know, as a captain in the Air Force. And if you remember at the time, we had a, basically a collapse of the governing structure in New Orleans at the time. And it was chaos, people were dying. And they actually redeployed troops from combat in Iraq to New Orleans because of what was going on.

And I remember them interviewing the troops when they landed in New Orleans. They’re like, “Oh my God, it seems like I didn’t leave Iraq. It’s the same kind of conditions.” And this is a modern city in America after just a couple of days of lack of communications, lack of power. And so, you know, as a captain at Whiteman Air Force base flying the B-2, I’m like, we’ve got all the communications in the world. We can communicate right through nuclear war. And yet this is happening in a major American city. And so it’s always been a passion of mine from that point.

And what happened from 2005. On 2007, the iPhone comes out. You could say that we had very resilient communications during the Cold War. We had things like we had loudspeakers that would, you know, have sirens and we had AM radio that. And the US government had these stations where they would broadcast information for the population. We still have those.

But here’s the problem. Do you have an AM radio? I don’t have an AM radio. I would venture to say most of the population doesn’t have an AM radio. There’s a few people that are like, they’re prepared, so they have an AM radio, but the rest of the population doesn’t have an AM radio. We have FEMA has these teams that go out to these AM radio stations, crank them up and they get ready to broadcast. Guess what? When you have something like an EMP, they have no way of receiving a message. So they’re essentially broadcasting God knows what to God knows whom. Right? Nobody has an AM radio. They don’t even know what message to broadcast.

What’s happened in conjunction with all the things we’ve been talking about with cognitive warfare, is we built this very fragile system for warning our population in the event of bad things happening. Maui fire, Louisiana fire, Hurricane Helene, all of these crises that take down communications. 9/11. We were supposed to make our communication system resilient and effective, and essentially we didn’t.

And so what I said is, I’m going to do this as a private sector initiative. We started the company. Actually. It’s a hard thing to do to take an entire national digital infrastructure and say, how do we make it resilient? How do we make it secure? So, yeah, that’s what we’ve been working on for the last six years. And we’ve cracked the code and we’re starting to deploy technology now that will actually make our networks, and not just our networks, because the thing that powered your phone is the cloud. And so we have to make the cloud resilient. So we have to make both the network and the cloud resilient.

So not only can you use your phone, but the apps that you need on your phone, the critical apps for health and safety and welfare, financial transactions, the things that you need to go about, the basic necessities from a living standpoint, you have the capacity to do. And we’re starting to build that into the fabric of our nation’s infrastructure.

To me, that is an American approach to how we solve a problem. It’s not the government doing it. It’s just somebody that has a passion and goes out with a group of people and raises money and tries to solve the problem. That’s what we’re doing, and I’m super excited about it. It’s going to transform. You know, you’ve already had your life transformed by the smartphone. You know, I would bet you probably use Uber or Lyft or Airbnb. I know you use it for media, social media. I mean, you probably use, like, Instacart or Uber Eats. You order food. When you come in to the country, there is an app that allows you to, you know, go fast through. It’s called Global Entry. Go fast through the customs line.

There are so many things that you’re able to do from a digital perspective today that go away right at the drop of a hat, because it hasn’t been built to be resilient. So I think it’s going to. That’s our mission. I’m super excited about it. We’re at a point now where it’s starting to deploy. And, you know, I want to share what we’ve done because I think it’s a huge American story. It’s about innovation, but it’s also about, you know, there’s this belief that America can’t build stuff. We’re the best builders in the world, but we’ve kind of lost the confidence to do that. So we build everything here in America.

I think when it comes to innovation, we’re probably one of the most innovative telecom companies in the world. And we’re forcing the industry to innovate alongside us in ways that, quite frankly, you know, when I was at the White House, I left, ended up leaving the White House because I said, we need to harden our networks. And number one, number two, we need to get Huawei out of our networks because of the security vulnerabilities. And the telecom industry is like, we don’t like that.

What’s interesting to note is that the reasons that the telecom industry wanted me not to be in the White House talking about these things, the things that I was saying that the telecom industry needed to do, were actually doing with the telecom industry now. So isn’t that interesting? Like, you go from government, where the government says you need to do this and the telecom industry is repelled by it, and then you turn around and say, well, actually, you can use it to make more money off your network. All of a sudden it becomes something that, oh, we need to go do this, because, again, it’s all about incentives.

JAN JEKIELEK: So just practically, for someone who I get a general sense of what you’re doing, but give me an example of what exactly are you doing right now. How does that manifest practically physically, and what benefit comes from it for, you know, the person on the street?

Resilient Infrastructure for Crisis Response

ROBERT SPALDING: Right. So practically, when you have a Maui fire, LA fire, Hurricane Helene, the system fails completely. You get no signal. Now we have satellite to cell capability. But when you’re talking about a massive infrastructure failure that is not going to sustain the police and fire and health and welfare, it’s good if you’re out hiking in the mountains.

But for us to establish the infrastructure that supports civil society, like I was talking about with Hurricane Katrina, of any of these crises, you actually need a terrestrial network that continues to operate. So we basically build ourselves into our technology, into the existing networks to enable those. So if those networks fail, if the grid fails, those networks fail. Our network continues to operate.

So it operates at a reduced capacity, but it continues to operate in a way that allows your phone to continue to work and give you those essential services. And the way we did that is just using a universal military precept, which is you don’t do centralized anything. America does centralized command, but decentralized execution.

In our infrastructure today, it is all about centralized execution. Why? Because the carriers and the clouds want to save money, so they’re all centralized. What that means to me as a B-2 guy is I only have a couple of targets I need to hit. I just got to hit the brain, I got to hit a couple of Amazon sites, I need to hit a couple of AT&T Verizon and T-Mobile sites, and I can take down communications and computing services for the entire United States.

And that’s what a B-2, that’s the way a B-2 pilot would think about how do we shut it down? Well, what do you think the Chinese are thinking about exactly? Same thing with the Russians. And so what we did is we took that centralized architecture and said, well, we need to put decentralized capability at each of our locations where you’re connecting to those cell sites.

That decentralized technology, basically, we took the cellular network and the cloud and we smashed it together in a little thing and we placed that at each of the locations where you want to have continued survival communication. We did it in a way that’s simple, fast, effective and secure and resilient.

JAN JEKIELEK: And hardened against something like an EMP attack, which a lot of things aren’t apparent as I understand it.

ROBERT SPALDING: Right.

JAN JEKIELEK: Well, but what about our phones?

EMP Hardening and Cost-Effective Solutions

ROBERT SPALDING: What’s interesting though is your phone is perfectly capable of surviving and even operating through an EMP. These are the things that we found out as we were doing our work. We’re like, “Hey wait, this phone continues to make a call. I can stream 4K video during an EMP,” but hold on a second, what it’s connecting to is down. So we need to solve the other side of that.

We can solve it actually quite cost effectively. The way we do EMP and have done traditionally EMP in the military is you create a system and then you EMP harden it. Well, if you build, if you design the system and then you harden it, that is very expensive. So that’s where you get the ten billion dollar satellite because we build it and then we got to try to harden it.

In fact, one of the carriers that we’re working with said, “Hey, we want you to harden our towers.” I’m like, “No, it’s going to be too expensive. We’ll never get it done and you’ll never pay for it anyway.” But what we can do is create this smaller thing that’s been designed from the ground up to survive an EMP, keep you going, keep your customers going in terms of essential capability and then allow you to provide that as a capability to your customers in a way that you don’t currently.

So guess what? The reason the military doesn’t use cellular and cloud to the capacity that the rest of the commercial sector does is because it’s not secure and number two, it’s not resilient. It won’t survive if there is an attack on those centralized facilities.

So we can turn around and say, “Hey, day to day, we’ll give you all the capacity of the cloud service providers and the carriers, but you don’t have to worry because if those things go away, we’ll still have things that operate so you can continue to operate for those mission critical things that you need.”

So it allows you to deploy infrastructure cheaply. So we’re talking about an order of magnitude less than what it costs to typically build an entire infrastructure for the United States in terms of cloud and carriers. We can do it at a fraction of the cost, pennies on the dollar. And we can do it because of the way we design the architecture.

The other thing to note is DoD does not buy digital infrastructure. They buy weapons systems and then they depend on the infrastructure, the SAIR to a small extent. And so when you’re trying to say, “Hey, I want…” The Secretary of Defense just said, “Hey, I want to have software applications going in with the same velocity that they go into the corporate sector.” And the reason you can’t is because they don’t have digital infrastructure.

And the reason they don’t build digital infrastructure is because it’s not resilient and secure. So they still are really much, are very much using push to talk radios and pen and paper. You would think like we are doing things at the level of the 50s and 60s because we don’t have the digital infrastructure to allow them to use the modern tools of today.

JAN JEKIELEK: I assume you’re talking with the DoD as well.

Nuclear Forces and Scalable Solutions

ROBERT SPALDING: That’s one of our big customers. So we basically said the nuclear forces need this capability and oh, by the way, they have the hardest requirements to meet. And so let’s build it for them first. Let’s build it in a way that’s fast, simple, cost effective, but resilient and secure. And then once we meet that threshold, everybody else is like, “If I can harden it for the nuclear bombers and ICBMs, I can harden it for your house.” This is the idea. And I can scale it.

And so now it’s built. So essentially the way we did it is we partnered with the Air Force to develop the technology. They said, “Hey, here’s our problems.” We designed it to meet their problems. This is the community I came from. And then now we’re turning around, we’re deploying it to factories, we want to deploy it to communities.

And so that’s what we’re working on now is really getting the word out there this technology exists. And quite frankly, I’ve always been of the opinion, I don’t care if it’s us or somebody else, we just need to protect the society from this kind of catastrophe. We don’t need Hurricane Katrina on the scale of the coast to coast of the United States because the Iranians or the North Koreans or the Russians or the Chinese lobbed a nuke into our upper atmosphere and fried all our communications. I mean, that would be devastating to our society. It’s a huge threat.

The thing that we’re working on right now though is what just happened between Ukraine and Russia. So once you deploy this infrastructure now, you have the capability really quickly of having the counter small drone protection that the Russians could have used when the Ukrainians did their long range strikes inside of Russia and destroyed their nuclear bombers. So this is a threat that exists that we’re currently not really fixing at scale. And we give the means to do that very quickly and very cost effectively.

JAN JEKIELEK: So you’re basically saying the same kind of, well, box, for lack of a better term, that facilitates this basic hardened communication in the event of all sorts of mayhem. Also works in the opposite direction. Can work as sort of preventing communications with these, of these drones.

Multi-Purpose Infrastructure Platform

ROBERT SPALDING: Well, not preventing communications, detecting and dealing with attacks of small drones. So think about it like when you first maybe saw an iPhone, you’re like, “Oh, this is interesting. I’ve got Safari and I can surf the Internet.” And then all of a sudden over the next ten years, all of these things like Uber and Airbnb started to manifest themselves.

What I’m saying is we’re not just fixing the communication issues, we’re creating an infrastructure that allows you to layer all of these capabilities on top. Because the infrastructure exists. Apple could not have an app store until the iPhone was in enough Americans or humans hands so that they could actually make that a possibility.

As we deploy this infrastructure, as soon as we deploy it, a base, a community has the ability like, “Oh, I need to solve this drone issue, that’s a problem. Or I need to solve this other community issue that I haven’t had the infrastructure to deal with in a mission critical sense.”

Because remember, if you build that application or use case and as soon as the network goes away or the cloud goes away and you no longer have it, how can you depend on it in a time of crisis? You can’t. So you need the infrastructure that no matter what happens, the end of the world, in your little portion of the world, you have the ability to deliver those services because you built your network to operate under those conditions.

That is not what we do today. So that’s why you see a Maui fire or an LA fire or Hurricane Helene or any like colonial pipeline, things shut down, things stop working because they’re not built to survive an attack. They’re not even built to survive a natural disaster. That’s what we wanted to do. And the problem that you had is how do you do it cost effectively fast and still enable that kind of resiliency and security.

JAN JEKIELEK: I’d love to see this in operation. I mean, presumably you have it operating somewhere already.

Global Deployment and AI Integration

ROBERT SPALDING: It is operating. I’d love to show it to you sometime. The American people need to know about it. Actually we’re working with foreign countries too, because again, it’s not just about America, it’s about western civilization. We built our society on the iPhone and Android and the cloud, like from Amazon, all of it. It is kind of the fabric of our being.

And not only is it being used as a vector of attack, which we’ve talked about quite a lot today, but it’s also something we’ve become dependent upon in such a way that civil society will collapse if it goes away at scale. And we want to make sure that civil society continues to operate at scale.

Along the way, we’re enabling things with artificial intelligence so that counter UAS, that counter drone system I’m talking about, it allows us to take the artificial intelligence that typically now runs in a big data center and deploy it in locations that it doesn’t typically run, and then be available to detect these things and stop them.

JAN JEKIELEK: I suppose it could also be used for some pretty high level surveillance of people.

Constitutional Values and Privacy Concerns

ROBERT SPALDING: So I think you hit the nail on the head. And so what we’re committed to doing is being that kind of company that is built according to the values and principles of our constitutional republic. And what we want to do is make sure that that infrastructure supports the critical needs of the society, whether it be from a national security perspective, like a drone attack, or whether it be you needing to get medical help during a disaster. That’s what we’re focused on.

I think what you… It’s definitely important to be concerned about how it could be used. But here’s the thing. It’s already being used, right? Our infrastructure is already being used. We know this Patriot Act. I think that was one of the biggest mistakes we’ve ever made as a society. The Patriot Act, spying on American citizens.

I think we should go back to the time when if somebody, if the government wanted to, had a suspicion that you were doing something, they had to go get a warrant and then do a tap. Not that they get a warrant without your knowledge, and then just start listening to you and not only what you’re doing now, but what you did six months ago.

I don’t think our founding fathers would like the fact that we put everybody’s life on DVR and then we can go in and we can rewind it and play it. I think that’s horrible for democracy. I think it’s horrible for our republic. And it’s something that I think that needs to be rectified.

JAN JEKIELEK: Well, I look forward to, sometime in the future we’ll have to visit some of your facilities and check this out.

ROBERT SPALDING: Great. We would love to host you.

JAN JEKIELEK: A final thought as we finish up.

Questioning Everything: Lessons from Military Service

ROBERT SPALDING: You know, I remember when I started my career as a military pilot and I would have these debates with the other pilots, and I always wanted to understand why we were doing the things that we did. What was it? What was the ultimate goal that we were trying to achieve if we did a mission?

And I remember my fellow pilot saying, “All you need to worry about is from IP or initial point to target. Just pay attention to that. Don’t worry about the other stuff.” And I’m like, I could never bring myself to do that.

The other thing I always thought at the time was, okay, well at what point do you start thinking about the other things? Is it all of a sudden you get to be a four star and you’re like, “Okay, now I better consider everything else that’s going on around me?”

Preserving Our Republic

And so I think that is a lesson for all of us, that we have to question everything that happens in our lives, economically, politically, informationally, technologically. How do we preserve what our founding fathers fought so hard to create?

You know, I constantly remember Benjamin Franklin when he’s asked, “What kind of government do we have?” And he said, “Well, it’s a Republic, if you can keep it.” And I think that’s something that I hope that I’ve instilled in the people that I’ve talked to.

And I think it’s an admonition for all of us that how are we going to preserve that? And there are so many things, quite frankly, that contribute to the erosion of that. And there’s not enough people thinking about how we prevent that, either from the Chinese Communist Party or ourselves.

JAN JEKIELEK: Well, Robert Spalding, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

ROBERT SPALDING: Thank you.

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