From Past to Future

Jeffrey Lewis 0:13

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the incoming William Perry Lecturer at Stanford University.

Aaron Stein 0:30

The cat is finally out of the bag. Meow. We can let the secret go. I'm Aaron Stein, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Jeffrey, tell people what you're up to.

Jeffrey 0:46

I mean, there are, you know, eyes to be dotted, T's to be crossed. But our long national nightmare is over. We have so many moving parts, but the open source team in Monterey has moved to FPRI, where I will remain a distinguished research fellow and a consultant. And so we get to keep the band together. Yep. Maybe add a horn player.

I don't know. We'll see. We've got to raise more money. Go ahead. So I resigned my position at CNS. That left me as a part-time faculty member at Middlebury, which was a wonderful home for many, many years. But Vermont's just too damn cold, Aaron.

Aaron 1:39

You know, you're not a skier. I'm not a skier. You're not a skier. Vermont and Jeffrey Lewis actually has a good ring to it, except for the weather.

Jeffrey 1:47

Yeah. So this fall, you will find me in Palo Alto.

Aaron 1:54

That's more your speed. Palo Alto and Jeffrey Lewis go together like milk and coffee.

Jeffrey 2:01

What am I looking for? Like me and Camper, my favorite restaurant down in, I think it's in Menlo Park. It's got this lovely cocktail that I adore. They laugh at me because anytime I'm in the area by myself, I make a reservation for one and I walk in and they just see me and they're like, let me guess, you want to sit at the bar?

And I'm like, yeah, but you know, sometimes you're booked and they're like, yeah, we know you. You can go sit at the bar.

Aaron 2:27

I think, you know, typically we talk about something, but we're going to talk about ourselves. We're going to do this podcast for ourselves. When did we hatch this idea for... You know, this all to come together, because it happened pretty quickly.

Jeffrey 2:44

Well, I mean, it happened in just such a incredible, like, set of circumstances. I mean, I think, you know, we knew The writing was on the wall for the Institute in Monterey closing for some time, even, even if, even if some of my colleagues did not want to read writing on wall.

Aaron 3:08

Even I, as an alum that I could put two and two together, but go ahead.

Jeffrey 3:11

Yeah. So, you know, we were trying to think about what would come next whether that would be Some kind of arrangement with FPRI and Middlebury whether I would want to go to Vermont or not you know, it was just there were like a lot of moving parts and then you know, a few things happened in order. I mean, one is that I think you know, I don't want to go into too much of the sort of internal details, but I think The future relationship of CNS and Middlebury, while it is settled, is unclear to me.

And, you know, I think it's just, it's an interesting challenge where Middlebury is going to try to keep a research center in Monterey, while a different university, Soka University of America, looks like it's going to buy the rest of Miss. And I am sure that every single person involved is trying to make the best of that arrangement.

I just don't see how that works. And so then we started to think about like, well, maybe it's time for the OSINT team to strike out on its own. And I don't, you know, no offense, I also don't want to move to Philadelphia.

Aaron 4:44

You know what? Not even LeBron James, who just signed with the Sixers, is actually going to live here. He's going to live in New York City. We're encouraging both telecommuting and commuting when possible.

Jeffrey 4:56

I like Philadelphia. Let me be clear. It's a great place. It is a great place. I'm a Bay Area guy. And so, you know, just really lucky. I mean, just the timing worked out that, you know, Stanford is going to have a spot for me, which, you know, I didn't know until not so long ago. So, you know, it was a big question, like, where the hell do I end up in all of this?

But, you know, now the answer is here.

Aaron 5:29

Yeah, for listeners. Where I've been all along.

Jeffrey 5:31

In the Bay Area.

Aaron 5:33

You found home. I'm happy we could help facilitate that.

Jeffrey 5:38

You know, at CNS, I ran the East Asia program, and I sort of managed to turn that a little bit into an open source program.

Aaron 5:45

Not managed, you did. But it wasn't really my job. Kim Jong-un helped, by the way. Kim Jong-un helped.

Jeffrey 5:52

Yeah, that's true. That's true. He was an important bridge figure. Yeah, it's like several, several program officers and Kim Jong-un who get Christmas cards so yeah, we wanted to do more deterrence work and CNS just not really a natural home for that For a bunch of reasons. I mean, it was already, you know, it was already a little stretch for the OSINT work.

And I think a lot of the deterrence, escalation control, all that work you know, it just, it, it fit better and like, you're my friend. Yeah. Like this, this, this field does not pay well enough to not work with your friends.

Aaron 6:43

So we've had this debate. Do you remember? Because the audience, I don't think, knows this story, the origins of the podcast.

Jeffrey 6:50

I mean, they probably have forgotten because certainly I had forgotten as I had a very inaccurate memory of the origins of this particular audio endeavor. What was your original memory? Because my original memory was it was my idea, like that I'm somehow the great, the great empresario and genius of this whole thing, and you were like, well, there's actually documentary evidence that suggests the opposite genius, and it's like, oh That's right.

So you, for the longest time, thought you came up with the idea for the podcast. I did. I did. I still think I did. I mean, it's permanently, like, I've seen the, you know, that appears to be my email signature. Like, I clearly was emailed these documents, but yes.

Aaron 7:46

I actually am to thank Josh Pollack. So Josh Pollack, friend of the pod, invited me to contribute to the Arms Control Blog. And to be honest with you, I don't remember why. Like, I don't remember the circumstances. I mean, it must have been Turkey. Gobble, gobble. It was Turkey or Syria. Gobble, gobble. I think it was Syria chemical weapons around 2013.

Okay. And so I wrote something, and I was like, why are we writing this? I think I was DMing on the old Twitter with Josh and Josh is like, reach out to Jeffrey. And I was like, Jeffrey, do you want to do a podcast? And you were like, I want to do a podcast on rock and roll.

Did I remember this? No. See why? Why? I mean, I could have been Andrew Hickey. I could have been much more famous. You wanted to do a podcast, like on like weird things.

Jeffrey 8:37

Your taste in music and our love of this dumb thing that we do every single day, which is how we got the theme song. Yeah, that, that, that checks out. I mean, that was probably one of those periods in life where I was like, what the, am I doing with my life? 2013, I think it was. I mean, I definitely was wondering what the, am I doing with my life

Aaron 9:01

And I think you wanted to actually do a much cooler podcast, but we ended up with this thing.

Jeffrey 9:06

Well, you know, in the end, I got to do the kind of documentary podcasts that I was interested in doing through CNS, right? So, you know, those are ways in which CNS was a great home. We ended up with a grant from the Martin family, of James Martin. To make some narrative podcasts. One of which I will tell you, there are more shoes to drop in all of this, but one of which is a narrative description of my theory of change in this field.

Aaron 9:43

Wait, what? You're doing another one that haven't told me?

Jeffrey 9:45

No, no, I did that one. The reason we're all still here. You just ignored it because it was boring. No, I didn't ignore it because it was boring.

Aaron 9:52

I was probably listening to some dumb podcast about flying a jet.

Jeffrey 9:56

But the reason we're all still here is a podcast that looked at when individuals, civil society, a.k.a. People like us, Acted when governments wouldn't, and like, what, what are the advantages of doing that? Is it that you do a demonstration and so you might shame a government, or you might show a government that something is possible, or you might generally create awareness? Like, what are all the ways those of us on the outside can move things forward? So like, I love that I got to do that, but you know, we're middle-aged white men, so we also, we have to have the, the, the, the two white guys talking podcast. Do you remember our first recording?

I know it is lost to me.

Aaron 10:42

So one of the things I regret is we lost a lot of our early episodes.

Jeffrey 10:46

When Super Producer Carl decided to disappear. I still have no idea what happened to that guy.

Aaron 10:51

Nobody does. But the first episode we ever did, and there's somebody on this podcast who listened to it, we sounded like we were in a submarine.

Jeffrey 11:00

We might sound like that today because I did not bring my microphone.

Aaron 11:04

No, no. This is a sort of last minute thing because you had some time. I was recording the podcast on GarageBand out of an external speaker on my personal laptop, and I was living in Geneva, Switzerland. That one I remember very vividly. And the first three or four episodes of this podcast were like that. I had a speaker, I'm using my hands, pointing it at the microphone on my MacBook to record it.

We were big dumb.

Jeffrey 11:39

I do remember you living in Geneva. Yeah, I was in Geneva. Because the time issue was like not so easy to work out. And, you know, one of us would be a little bit lit up.

Aaron 11:53

But we used to script the podcast. Do you remember that?

Jeffrey 11:56

Well, I mean, I feel like script is very strong. Script is strong. We used to make an effort.

Aaron 12:02

We had a lot of talking points. There were multiple podcasts way in the beginning where we would get like 30 minutes into it and we would scrub it.

Jeffrey 12:10

Yeah, I remember that. I do remember that. This just isn't good. We're going to redo it.

Aaron 12:14

But we had no idea what the fuck we were doing. No, we had no idea. Do you remember what the big change was? I remember what the big change was.

Jeffrey 12:21

No, I'm apparently like Chance the Gardener just stumbling through life.

Aaron 12:26

Maybe you've been drinking too many of those drinks down at, what's it called in Menlo Park? Camper. Maybe too many drinks at Camper. No, it's one that JCPOA dropped. We had to do like an emergency pod and you're just like, screw it. I'm sitting in my car in the parking lot of CNS and I have to record this on my phone.

This is after... I do remember that. You're just like, I'm just going to go. And we got to the end of this and we realized it was a much bigger episode when we were just talking rather than trying to script it.

Jeffrey 12:58

I mean, I noticed this now and again. When we when we have guests or, you know, we had other podcasters. Remember when Anne Pellegrino was.

Aaron 13:11

We're going to see we're going to see it in September.

Jeffrey 13:13

I know.

Aaron 13:14

So, yes, I remember. And then we had Andrea Berger, who now has a job with the Canadian government.

Jeffrey 13:19

Well, I mean, I don't even know whether to include Andrea because like she like joined the podcast for a little bit and then she just like set up her own much better podcast in our feed. She was so good. I forgot about that. I used to listen to that and be like, wow, that was really good. Yeah, I know.

Hard dribble. I know. I know.

Aaron 13:39

And then she gets hired by the government. She's great. Just sort of blowing me around. Yeah.

Jeffrey 13:43

Yeah. Yeah. But I sometimes notice that, that there is a comfort that we earn by sucking for so long. And sometimes you watch new people come in and you're like, oh, I know this learning curve.

Aaron 14:02

Yeah, and then Carl, our first producer, like, approached me out of the blue because he took pity on us. He's like, your sound, he's like, the podcast is really good but your sound is terrible. He was right. Come back, Carl! I don't know why, Carl. Where are you, Carl? Then with Carl disappeared, but you totally ghosted us. He did ghost us. And now we have, we still have super producer Scott, we do, who you know should also be co-host, Scott, but he'd be too busy. He's too busy. He's a real job, unlike us And I still tell this story to people.

There was a time after I moved to Philadelphia where we were approached to do a television show.

Jeffrey 14:44

Yes, I will never forget that.

Aaron 14:50

That must have been 2017.

Jeffrey 14:53

Yeah, it was right around ... There was this glorious period when North Korea was absolutely just dominating the news. And Trump came in, and Trump, yes, and, and we had those two incredible experiences. One of This American Life doing a story about us. Oh my god, that's right, I forgot about that. That's amazing, I forgot about that. That's right. And, and then Vice, which had that contract with HBO. Yeah, I don't know what happened to the sizzle reel we did

Aaron 15:30

There is somewhere on somebody's hard drive advice a pilot that you and I shot for a potential series that was going to be on television, which is insane. Insane to talk about.

Jeffrey 15:43

Absolutely insane. I remember you took the train into New York City from Philly. I took it down from Albany.

Aaron 15:51

Yep, yep, yep, yep. We actually shot a segment for the HBO one. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's incredible. And then we had Chuck Schuchat afterwards. We're like, what the hell are we going to do with this?

Jeffrey 16:03

I know. Well, then our guy got fired or left or whatever. Whatever. Vice went through its own issues. And does Vice even exist anymore? I don't know.

Aaron 16:13

You know what? Sometimes you get over your own skis and you make bad financial decisions. Our podcast was... It would have been.

Jeffrey 16:22

It would have been. Can you imagine the two of us idiots on HBO? Hey. No. Hey.

Aaron 16:29

No, I cannot.

Jeffrey 16:31

Donald Trump has real small hands.

Aaron 16:36

I do remember it took all day. Oh, yeah. They sent a film crew to my house. They were in my... I have pictures of it somewhere.

Jeffrey 16:43

Yeah. Maybe they did one... No, they sent the film from your office.

Aaron 16:48

You were in the office at CNS and I was at my house.

Jeffrey 16:52

That's right. That's right. That is right. It was at CNS. But that's how serious it got. They spent a reasonable amount of money exploring the possibility of the arms control.

Aaron 17:09

Show, television show. They sent a crew, I know for me, from New York, or for you, they must have sent them from San Francisco. I think so, yeah. I'm looking at the pictures. All right. So then, you know, the history of our dumb show. And so maybe talk about when you founded your OSINT tape. Cause now they work for me.

I mean, you oversee them, but you're a contractor.

Jeffrey 17:35

I, I, oh, I know you can fire me at any time. But I like this. I like this. I mean, you know, people, the idea that I could have had a hand in building something that's durable and that will outlast me or could outlast me. That's very appealing to me. So I'm not the least bit unhappy about this.

You know, it all started when I went to the University of, well, okay, I guess the first thing to say is Melissa Hanham. Melissa Hanham and Dave Schmerler. Geolocation Jesus, one of the original OGs of this podcast. That's right. We were just doing a lot of North Korea work because we were the East Asia program. And we just, the three of us naturally navigated to doing that kind of work.

And so it became in the beginning, just a way of doing work on North Korea when data was otherwise hard to come by. And we were sort of like aware that we could apply it to other areas, but we were the East Asia program. So we were focused on North Korea. And we had we had some money from the nuclear threat initiative for these country profiles, which funded a lot, which is how I got my start.

Yep. Funded a lot of graduate students. Also it was one of the all time great circular research projects.

Aaron 19:18

Don't give away too many secrets.

Jeffrey 19:21

You would go look at the NTI page, and you'd see it was sourced to CNS, but then at CNS, we'd source it to NTI, and then that would be sourced back to CNS.

Aaron 19:29

Don't forget Global Security and a few others.

Jeffrey 19:31

Yeah, there was only Global Security Newswire, which was NTI through, but they were real reporters at Global Security. But yes, Global Security Newswire, they were real reporters. But yeah, it was an incredible self-licking ice cream cone.

Aaron 19:46

Giving away a lot of videos.

Jeffrey 19:48

Sometimes. I mean, we do have the underlying original data, the Dan Pinkston files. Or did, I guess. They're still at CNS. For North Korea, anyway. But so we had that contract with NTI to produce these profiles, which subsidized a lot of the graduate students. And then for us, a big breakthrough was Jim Stokes, who later was at NATO, but then was at DoD.

Made a pretty significant contract agreement with CNS that lasted for a little bit, a couple of years, and that really funded a lot of work that got off the ground.

Aaron 20:32

Yeah, we thank Jim Stokes for that. And But one of my favorite posts, because I talk about it on the podcast all the time, one of my favorite posts that you ever did was the Labasan Xi'an nuclear facility. Because, I mean, you formalized it with the need to do geolocation work with the North Koreans. But there was a nascent and budding field That was coming up that was leveraging these imagery.

And I remember Iran being sort of the case that we were all looking at. And then the first one, again, I think was Syria with the al-Kabar reactor. And it was sort of this mid-2000s to early 2000s Early work on these subjects, and I was a student because you are older than I am, you know, reading the Block, reading the Block, and this, and, and, and this coming up, and so it wasn't a totally new feel. No, no, but it, it, it did. It, it's that, that example hurts because it turns out we were wrong about Al-Kibar

Jeffrey 21:46

I, I, you know, I said that, and I wasn't like, should I cut that out of the podcast? No, no, you can handle it. No, I, you know, I think we were, we were wrong for the right reasons. I remember saying at the time that you wouldn't be able to convince me it was a reactor unless they had pictures from the ground It turns out they have them.

Which led to a really funny thing, because when I was skeptical, and I feel good about the methodology of being skeptical, because you could not tell, I think, from the satellite imagery what that thing was. It was a big box.

Aaron 22:19

It could look like an Amazon distribution hub.

Jeffrey 22:22

Even with the construction photographs, I think it would be pretty tough, which we did not have. And we now know that they themselves, before they got the pictures from the ground, they were not able to do it. So I think methodologically we were right to say not possible just from satellite imagery alone, because that was actually what the Israelis concluded, not possible with the satellite imagery alone.

But I remember Cy Hirsch, Was like very into my skepticism which we now know is because Bashar al-Assad was texting him that it wasn't a reactor. Jeffrey and Bashar, A History on the Earth. Well, there's an interesting documentary about Cy Hirsch where he basically gets confronted about whether he was as objective as he should have been. But then when the pictures got released, I was like, okay, well, that was my evidentiary standard.

It has been met. That's definitely a reactor. And then I feel like Cy got a little mad at me.

Aaron 23:26

Oh, that's okay. I mean, facts are facts. Facts are facts. You don't have to like a fact for it to be true. And OK. And so now that OK, so the OSINT team, it's John, Seth, Michael and Sam are now full time FPR fellows. And then the work that we're doing is we're looking at Golden Dome, trying to calculate the true cost.

Jeffrey 23:51

That's one project, yeah, which, which turns out just, just calculating the number of interceptors you're going to need that you have to cost is a an interesting endeavor. Yeah, it's an interesting endeavor. And then trying to come up with fun ways to overcome Golden Dome, that's, that's by the way my favorite work. Like, I love the just Cold War lunacy. Yeah, it's my tip. I mean, it's absurd And because we do the space work, our friends who own assets in space, they should be freaking terrified.

Aaron 24:25

So that's one of the second projects we're doing, and we could talk about it, is that we are bringing together people in the private industry to talk about their exposure to being destroyed in space by Russian space nukes.

Jeffrey 24:38

Yeah that's what we're talking about yeah and then the inability of insurance to cover this and how much they're at risk from what the russians are up to i i just i just think it is to me it is completely fascinating right we have this entire like san francisco for people who do not live in the bay area i used to live there not anymore i still wish i did space x going public plus The AI revolution and the anticipated wealth generation from space-based data centers, which I know it drives people crazy, and I understand all the technical problems with them, but that's the big bet people are making.

People are making that, yep. We are living at a renaissance Florence era of wealth creation. I think that's right. Like a potentially unheard of period of wealth creation buy your house in the Bay Area now because you will not be able to ever buy one again and that money is all made in space. Yeah, so like, when the entire economy is run From low Earth orbit.

Yeah, from AI systems that depend on data centers in orbit. Russia's interest in putting a small or maybe not even small number of nuclear weapons in space is... We're heading into really interesting times. And I think people, they don't connect all of these threads. It's like... Well, we did. We are about to completely reorganize modern industrial society.

In a way that makes space very central at a time in which we are making no effort to address the security and sustainability of those assets.

Aaron 26:47

No effort is too strong. Not we, not the collective way, because that was our bet. That was our bet a year ago. It's coming up on a year where we've been pushing on this and we've been getting people together and talking is what think tankers are doing. We hope to publish something on this. And we're going to run a war game.

Separate, different project. Well, what happens if it goes sideways? You know, like, whoa, you know, you know, and looking at that and. And, you know, one of the bets we're making is that the team that you created is really damn good because they are. They're good at what they do and they sort of sit in the shadows largely by choice because they're researchers in this sort of very true sense of the word.

Jeffrey 27:39

It's the only part I'm a little disappointed by, which is I used to be very good about pushing my researchers out into the limelight because I wanted them to go get other jobs. And now there's a certain selection bias there.

Aaron 27:56

Well, I don't want to get another job. They'd be working for me.

Jeffrey 27:59

I know, I know you don't. But yeah, I want everybody to grow and flourish. And they are like super, yes, for the most part, not all of them, but they are for the most part more media shy than others. And so, you know.

Aaron 28:16

Maybe we'll give them a podcast feed.

Jeffrey 28:18

I want everybody to, you know, grow and get rich and succeed. And look, this fall, I'll have a nice new crop of, Bright, young Stanford things. So we can continue the march of greatness.

Aaron 28:36

Yeah, and we'll keep talking about these issues and see where this takes us. Because we'll talk about the private space industry, risk from Russian space nukes, Golden Dome, we're flirting with. Off-the-shelf verification for what the Russians are up to, what the Chinese are up to, approximating NRO capabilities from the 70s and 80s. I think we can do that now.

Yeah.

Jeffrey 29:06

Oh, yeah. No, this is an incredibly exciting time, but there are just days when I am racked with anxiety and uncertainty. You know, like, I can't, I mean, we haven't talked about Thrusty, but. Oh, we should talk about Thrusty. Holy, holy shit. What if Cody were free?

Aaron 29:33

That's your fourth child, Thrusty. I have my fourth child. We did a kid together last time in Colorado Springs. That was the last time you and I saw each other in person. The most excited I've seen you in a very long time was to show everybody at the bar, at the Hyatt. Were we at the Hyatt? Yeah.

How Thrusty works.

Jeffrey 29:52

Yeah. Well, since then, the vibe coding has continued. For the listeners, I've vibe coded a rocket performance computer that was intended to replace. Since we were leaving CNS, we had to give up the $30,000 piece of AGI, not artificial jet, but AGI, the company. They have a thing called Missile Toolkit that we bought. I had to give it up.

It was export controlled. And so I had the question, like, could I vibe code something that was approximately as good? And I vibe coded something that's so much better. And it handles hypersonic gliders. They turn, they skip.

Aaron 30:32

And you created a little, you created a hype video for your own tool.

Jeffrey 30:36

I did. I did. He sings that. Thrusty, the mascot for Thrusty, sings Tom Lehrer's Werner Von Braun. In a really weird German accent. Yeah, well, AI now perfect. But I just think we really are living at this incredible moment at which the field that we're working in is changing, the society that we are living in is changing.

It has the potential to be incredibly transformative in good ways. But boy, we got some big consequential choices to make. And if we do not make them correctly, could be bad.

Aaron 31:14

Could be bad. Well, as we were, you know, coming to the end of this podcast, and we're just waxing nostalgic about our own history together, I did not realize that we had been podcasting for 14 years.

Jeffrey 31:29

Yeah, we should have done that on the 10th anniversary. I was... Yeah, that would require us to know when we recorded the first episode.

Aaron 31:36

I don't know.

Jeffrey 31:37

I also have never done... I've never done a 10th or 20th anniversary for the blog, which is, you know, mostly on hiatus these days, but still exists.

Aaron 31:47

You know, we should wrap this up, but... Why did you start the blog? Because none of this happens without the blog. I don't remember first reading the blog. I think I was in graduate school.

Jeffrey 31:58

It must have been 06. Yeah. I know why. Because I was pissed that I felt excluded. I was a graduate student. I was in graduate school. I... Felt that I had lots of useful things to say. And won things in their early 20s? Yes. My peers and my superiors took a dimmer view of my talents. Perhaps a view more in line with my actual talents, but dimmer than my own.

And I just wanted to say things I wanted to say. And I often said things that were not great. Not great. Linton Brooks, we were at dinner in Paris once. And Linton, I wish I could do Linton's just voice and affect. I love Linton so much. It was like, you ever write anything you regret on the blog?

I was like, oh my God.

Aaron 33:05

Everything. Have you seen those early papers? I regret it all. What's the podcast that you regret the most? The podcast? Yeah.

Jeffrey 33:18

I don't regret any of our podcasts. No, no. I mean, I regret letting Scott bully us into deleting the FOBS cast.

Aaron 33:27

Yeah, that's the biggest regret. That is like, what's the sort of like the director's cut that everybody talks about? There's some famous movie that has like the director's cut. That is the biggest regret for me in this history, and I blame Scott LaFoy. Scott LaFoy. Scott LaFoy. Scott LaFoy. Scott LaFoy.

Jeffrey 33:48

We love you, Scott. But you're never living this one down, man.

Aaron 33:55

And we recorded an entire episode about why Bob's made sense. And he's like, you guys sound like lunatics. I mean, you're probably right.

Jeffrey 34:03

You're probably right. We probably did sound like lunatics. We just happened to be right. That doesn't mean, you know, you're not crazy. And I have a vague memory that that was during COVID.

Aaron 34:16

Yeah, it could have been. And I remember recording that in my bathroom to hide from my kids. It was like 9 o'clock at night. So I could have been a lunatic, just to put it out there. Oh, yes. Yeah.

Jeffrey 34:28

Judgment was probably sound, but...

Aaron 34:30

Yes, but we were right. We were right. All right, I think we've done enough of sort of going down memory lane. Oh, it was great. We're going to keep the podcast going. It's not going anywhere. It's not turning into a television show. We're not selling out. We're staying on the indie label. It's just going to be us moving forward.

Jeffrey 34:49

No, I think this is just... It's just such a... It's a wonderful set of circumstances. There's other stuff that's going to happen. I mean, some stuff's already happened. I...

Aaron 34:58

I set the doomsday clock now. I'm on the board. The bulletin.

Jeffrey 35:01

I know you're going places. You know, we're going to we're going to chip a few seconds off, you know, every year for the next. No, I don't know. I have no idea what we're going to do. But, you know, like I think, you know, I just I think that Come this fall, the opportunity to set up a pipeline of Stanford students who might be interested in OSINT policy questions, plus the ability to grow the team at FPRI, this is a really, really big moment in Our field and in human history.

And I feel like we're really, really lucky to have reconfigured things so that we can do our teeny, tiny little part in making it a teeny, tiny bit safer.

Aaron 35:53

Yeah. And the full story, if anybody wants to know, it requires a couple of drinks at- You think a couple? Yeah.

Jeffrey 36:04

Getting this across the line nearly killed us, but I was very happy, but it all ended. Will dish for cocktails at Camper Menlo Park.

Aaron 36:15

Camper Menlo Park. I got to get back out to the Bay Area, hopefully in October. All right, Jeffrey, that's it. Patreon.com slash DCW podcast to support the show. It's been going for 14 years and it's not going anywhere, but we're not selling out. We need your help to keep it going. And as best as much as we we we we make fun of them scott's been a big part of this too and you know we got to keep scott around as well so yeah patreon.com cw podcast thank you everybody talk to you later