The confidence game | Walter's War Ep 4

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Speaker 42 Tortoise.

Speaker 43 So the original term confidence artist comes from confidence, but not in confidence as in, I'm feeling so confident, that you know, that inner feeling of being prepared for anything, but rather confidence in the sense of trust.

Speaker 42 The phrase confidence man comes from a particular court case in 1849 in New York.

Speaker 43 So William Thompson, who was the subject of this original confidence man trial, he used the gentlemanly code of conduct.

Speaker 42 For a few months, a man of genteel appearance traveled around the city.

Speaker 43 And he would approach people and say, excuse me, have you the confidence in me to lend me your watch until tomorrow?

Speaker 42 And many of the gentlemen he asked did in fact give him their watches. They put their confidence in the honesty and credibility of this stranger.

Speaker 43 And so he was taking advantage of this code of gentlemanly conduct, right? Are we the types of people who would betray each other? No, no, absolutely we're not. So I can trust you.

Speaker 43 Have you the confidence in me?

Speaker 42 And by the time William Thompson ended up with an impressive collection of watches before he was eventually caught and arrested.

Speaker 42 And for Maria Konikova, a writer, journalist, poker player and a doctor of psychology, William Thompson's story reveals an important part of our social bias.

Speaker 42 That here before them was a man of a similar class and social standing who surely wouldn't borrow the watch unless it was for some good reason.

Speaker 42 And I think it's an interesting case because as I peel back the layers of stories and fantasy from Star Wars to simulations to killer robots, I feel like I'm coming to understand something about the confidence game of investing, of trying to land big contracts with the government, of trying to build a hot new startup, and of presenting a story about yourself that, if you're lucky, few people will question.

Speaker 43 We don't want to ask the hard questions. Oftentimes it feels like we're betraying the trust upon which the fabric of society is built.
It is about storytelling.

Speaker 43 What they do is figure out how you see the world, what the story you're telling about the world is, and they mirror it back to you. They tell you what you want to hear.

Speaker 43 They tell you what you already believe. They give you the version of the world that you think is true.

Speaker 42 I'm Basha Cummings, and from Tortoise, this is Walter's War, episode 4, the Confidence Game.

Speaker 46 Breaking news, Sam Altman is out.

Speaker 42 This is a good idea. As I was finishing this investigation, the mother of all news stories in the world of AI broke.

Speaker 42 Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, the company that had launched ChatGPT and had transformed how we think about artificial intelligence had been sacked as CEO of the company.

Speaker 47 Is it a shock? I think, absolutely.

Speaker 36 I think even.

Speaker 42 The board of directors issued a statement claiming that Sam Altman, aged 38, was not, quote, consistently candid in his communications with the board.

Speaker 42 It continued: the board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

Speaker 3 The reasons behind his departure are not entirely clear, but the board said he was found he was, quote,

Speaker 48 not consistently candid in his

Speaker 42 Later, they cited a lack of transparency.

Speaker 42 So, had the man described as a modern-day Oppenheimer been moving too fast, or was this a catastrophic miscalculation from the people who were supposed to be overseeing the world's most successful AI company?

Speaker 42 As the news filtered through, it was clear how little we knew about the operations of this company, its internal dynamics, the tech it was working on, and it turned out that even Microsoft, which had invested 13 billion in the company, hadn't known about what the OpenAI board was about to do.

Speaker 49 It was a total bombshell on Friday afternoon.

Speaker 42 And so, the thread that weaves through this story is artifice. Yes, from a park bench to Silicon Valley and the Pentagon.
But that other thread is just as important to understand:

Speaker 42 confidence.

Speaker 50 The stakes are about as high as they get, not only in terms of cash, billions of dollars of it in investment, but also the future of the world itself and the way we all live, if you believe the extraordinary promises made about the power of artificial intelligence.

Speaker 42 After being founded in 2019, rebellion was the next big thing in defense technology.

Speaker 42 So much so that just a year later, as newly elected President Joe Biden was preparing to take office, two people from the company were on Biden's transition team.

Speaker 42 These were the people who were brought in to prepare for the transfer of power when Biden took office from Donald Trump in January 2021. The other companies that were represented?

Speaker 42 Big hitters from the RAND Corporation, JPMorgan and the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Speaker 42 It was a sign of confidence, and as the COVID pandemic eased, and as people began to return to the company's Star Wars-themed office in DC, its outpost in Seattle, and in its London office in Fitzrovia, there were other reasons to celebrate too.

Speaker 42 In September of 2021, Rebellion announced that it had gained that near-mythic status, the unicorn, meaning a company that hasn't yet floated on the stock market, but was already privately valued at a billion dollars or more.

Speaker 42 After attracting more than $150 million in new funding, the company said in a press release that it was now valued at $1.15 billion.

Speaker 42 New, impressive investors had joined that second phase of fundraising. Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, reinvested after initially backing Rebellion in 2019, and he had a seat on its board.

Speaker 42 And James Murdoch also invested and also had a seat on the board. Chris Lynch said that he wanted to grow the company of 160 employees by a couple hundred more, mainly engineers.

Speaker 42 He said, there's a new wave of people coming into venture capital who have the courage and tenacity to support our nation's defense.

Speaker 42 And soon there were new contracts to celebrate, too, with the US Army, the Nuclear Security Administration, and the Ministry of Defence in the UK.

Speaker 42 But a lot of the power of Rebellion's rise hinges on one very powerful man. And so it's all the more remarkable that, despite his backing, things still seem to have fallen apart.

Speaker 48 First off, with Rebellion Defence, I'd like to point out the Eric Schmidt connection.

Speaker 46 It's a lot of people who are spinning itself out

Speaker 51 Every time I see Eric Schmidt appear in public and talk about military AI,

Speaker 46 my hairs go up. Telling a good story, but maybe not backing it up.

Speaker 42 Eric Schmidt, the most famous investor in the company, is a giant in the world of technology and, in recent years, in Washington, too.

Speaker 42 And in so many of the conversations I had about rebellion and about artificial intelligence in warfare, his name came up.

Speaker 38 Eric Schmidt, chairman, ex-CEO of Google, a many times over billionaire, one of the most influential and powerful people in Silicon Valley.

Speaker 38 And he has made it his mission for the last 15 years or so to get deep into the U.S. state, first the State Department, and then the Department of Defense and the Pentagon.

Speaker 42 Eric Schmidt had for years been critical of the Pentagon's tech failings. You absolutely suck at machine learning, he once reportedly told a U.S.
general.

Speaker 42 If I got under your tent for a day, I could solve most of your problems, he said. And he wasn't alone in his criticism.
The author of that book, The Kill Chain, was sounding the same alarm.

Speaker 42 As was Palmer Lucky, the founder of Angeril, a competitor of Rebellions, who talked forcefully about the dire situation that the Pentagon had now found itself in.

Speaker 52 Despite Despite spending more money than ever on defense, our military technology stays the same. There's more AI in a Tesla than in any U.S.
military vehicle.

Speaker 52 Better computer vision in your Snapchat app than any system the Department of Defense owns. And until 2019, the United States' nuclear arsenal operated off of floppy disks.

Speaker 42 The absence of floppy dispersed. It was a horror story that captivated Washington and the Pentagon.

Speaker 42 And in its main proponent, Rebellion Defense couldn't have hoped for a bigger and better vote of confidence than from Eric Schmidt.

Speaker 42 After stepping down as Google's chairman in 2017 and with a $20 billion fortune, Eric Schmidt was seeking a new chapter.

Speaker 42 He was already heading the Defense Innovation Board, tasked with bringing new tech to the Pentagon so that they could catch up with companies like Google Google and Facebook in software and AI.

Speaker 42 He was beginning to invest in defense startups, too, through his venture capital fund, Innovation Endeavors.

Speaker 42 And he'd been appointed to the U.S. government's National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

Speaker 42 By 2021, the New York Times was describing Eric Schmidt as, quote, the prime liaison between Silicon Valley and the national security community.

Speaker 42 But so powerful was his influence in Washington that it began to raise some serious questions.

Speaker 45 And now, this new CNBC investigation finds the former head of Google, Eric Schmidt, made investments in AI companies while chairing the AI Commission, raising concerns among ethics experts about a fundamental conflict of interest.

Speaker 45 Here's Eamon Javers.

Speaker 38 He has had such high positions and so much access that there have been people in the Pentagon questioning: should we be giving a civilian so much just blanket access to military bases around the world, to top committees and decision makers in the military?

Speaker 42 Questions about a conflict of interest.

Speaker 42 Was it right that someone with his power and influence, but unelected and a businessman, was simultaneously shaping government policy on AI while being a major investor in that very industry?

Speaker 42 Work that Eric Schmidt had carried out at the National Security Commission on AI had even influenced legislation.

Speaker 38 Yeah, absolutely. As direct conflicts of interest.

Speaker 42 It's something that I discussed with Jathan Sadowski, an academic, author, and the host of This Machine Kills, a podcast on tech and politics.

Speaker 38 And he's working with other people. You know, he has written a book with Henry Kissinger.

Speaker 38 Henry Kissinger is also someone who obviously has political interest and a lot of political influence, but also famously will not release his list of clients for his private consultancy.

Speaker 38 To quote the famous philosopher Donald Rumsfeld, there are known knowns and there are known unknowns among the conflicts of interest that we see here.

Speaker 42 Eric Schmidt was brought closer to the government because of his expertise and his vision for what was going wrong and how to fix it.

Speaker 42 His judgment, his confidence in companies and in people, like in Chris Lynch, could help solve the very things that he was warning about: that the U.S. wasn't developing the tech fast enough.

Speaker 42 And the Pentagon was relying on his confidence because, after all, what they were now looking for was different.

Speaker 42 They knew that they needed more hoodies, more Star Wars, if things were going to change.

Speaker 42 So, with Eric Schmidt's backing, Rebellion's vision of bringing together former government employees and Silicon Valley whiz kids seemed like a good bet.

Speaker 42 But all along, some venture capitalists in Silicon Valley were sceptical about Rebellion Defense. They could sense the hype, despite the big names attached.

Speaker 42 One who asked to remain anonymous told me that, quote, Rebellion was an example of a broader pathology, that just because some people have an exciting resume, doesn't mean that they have the actual experience.

Speaker 42 Their assessment on rebellion defense, zero qualifications other than the ability to tell a good yarn. They told me the tech proposition was so hollow.

Speaker 38 This is an unremarkable story in Silicon Valley because, I mean, the valuations are always massively overinflated and they are based not on product but on promise, right? Or potential.

Speaker 38 Not even promise, potential.

Speaker 38 And so, you know, you have

Speaker 38 a startup that gets like Rebellion gets $100 million in investment, you know, or raises $150 million in funding with a valuation of

Speaker 38 over $1.1 billion. That's a huge gap.
And the idea is that somewhere along the way, their innovation or their technology will be so amazing,

Speaker 38 it will make up that gap. That's the kind of hot potato of venture capital.
It's about getting in early,

Speaker 38 telling a story so other people get in, and then you get out before the whole thing explodes. And so that's kind of the story of Silicon Valley.

Speaker 38 But then when you bring that into the military as well, you have all these overblown expectations of like, well, this company is worth $3 billion, which means they must be a $3 billion company, or this company has the valuation of this, or they have the promise of this, or their pitch tech says they can do or hope they can do this.

Speaker 38 It's a real like Tinkerbell effect that takes hold in Silicon Valley, where you know, Tinkerbell exists as long as you believe hard enough and clap loud enough.

Speaker 38 But as soon as you stop believing and stop clapping, Tinkerbell starts fading away.

Speaker 42 But given the context, given the stakes, we're not talking fun word games or celebrity rating sites anymore. The VC investor I spoke to thought that Rebellion was something of a cautionary tale.

Speaker 42 They said, the toxic dynamics are the same fast money hucksters that hyped things like FTX do companies like Rebellion, to the detriment of funding and visibility for companies actually solving critical problems.

Speaker 42 It's something that Jonathan Geyer had heard too, the journalist who wrote that article that first got me interested in how Oliver's story connects to rebellions.

Speaker 54 Rebellion's just one interesting example of dozens of companies that are working in this space.

Speaker 24 And before we got on the horn here, I was

Speaker 54 talking to a defense contractor who said, companies like Rebellion make us all look bad.

Speaker 24 There are

Speaker 54 many, many defense contractors and technologists who work for military and intelligence agencies who care about ethics, who care about their employees' well-being, who want to create the best products for spies and soldiers.

Speaker 54 But when you have a company that, you know, by all accounts is sort of imploding, it is a real stain for a much larger industry that has some real problems to solve.

Speaker 42 So what was really happening inside this unicorn? Well, beyond the confidence and the press releases, the picture wasn't quite as starry.

Speaker 42 I had contacted the co-founders, the company, and the investors, and apart from the press office for the company itself, no one replied to my emails or messages.

Speaker 42 Others in that world were cautious to speak to me too. They warned me that this is a small community and that I should be careful.
So I turned to former staffers, some of whom were willing to speak.

Speaker 42 And they told me the company had for a while been struggling to deliver on its mission. Remember that data fusion project?

Speaker 45 For instance, one tool would use security cameras to track a quad-cab toy at a pickup, which is the favorite pickup of terrorists.

Speaker 42 Well, another engineer was rather frank when I asked him if he had knowledge of that being developed.

Speaker 44 Rebellion was a thousand miles from that idea. Like, not because they didn't want it, but because they didn't have the discipline to actually connect dots.
Part of it was the infighting.

Speaker 44 One group was doing some of those fusion things that certainly would tie to what you're talking about, right?

Speaker 44 But then another team, because they had different managers that wouldn't get along, they weren't really allowed to collaborate. They were light years from getting anything like that.

Speaker 42 And there were questions about just how much AI was really going into the products, how much the company was really able to build.

Speaker 42 Another engineer talked to me about Nova, Rebellion's most commercially viable product.

Speaker 55 Their Nova product is pretty good from what I understand of it. People really like it, and that's really the only product that they're able to sell.

Speaker 55 So it's basically like an automated red team team of secure sites. And it's interesting because, you know, Rebellion touts itself as kind of like, oh, you're in AI, but that's not really...

Speaker 55 it doesn't really have anything to do with AI, you know? That's just good computer engineering.

Speaker 42 There were questions among staffers about how viable the other products that they were developing really were.

Speaker 40 There are several products I worked on that work.

Speaker 40 They display display data.

Speaker 40 What I can't say is that the data was real. You know, where the data came from, I have no idea.
Maybe someone invented it internally. I don't know.
But the actual products, you know,

Speaker 40 you could do searches on certain types of information. You could change parameters.
The tools I saw were functioning tools. But what I can't verify is that the data was real data.

Speaker 42 Other things also weren't clear. One former staffer said that they thought they had joined a software and defense company, only to be told that the company was actually focused on consulting.

Speaker 42 They told me you would ask different people the same questions about what Rebellion did and get different answers as far as what we were selling. It was, quote, a bad identity crisis.

Speaker 42 And then there was the infighting. All the former staffers I spoke to mentioned a culture clash, that the dream of bringing together Silicon Valley types and former government types just didn't work.

Speaker 40 You can't build products in a hierarchy, you know? And you need people challenging people.

Speaker 40 People being able to talk to people, complete openness of information, drop the egos.

Speaker 40 And what they say at Amazon is, disagree, but commit.

Speaker 40 You go to a meeting and you have a strong opinion that this is not the right thing to do. But if you get overruled, you drop the ego and you commit 100%.

Speaker 40 That was not the culture of the Department of Defense people, fundamentally. There's a reason they don't create great software in totalitarian regimes.
You can't innovate in a hierarchy like that.

Speaker 40 And even the military should know that.

Speaker 42 These were all people who'd worked at Rebellion between 2021 and 2023 during its its stratospheric rise, and they were telling a different story.

Speaker 42 And then one of them said, look closer at the contracts.

Speaker 42 So I did. I turned to the website Tech Inquiry, which analyses public records for the surveillance and weapons industries.

Speaker 42 And in 2022, according to a freedom of information request obtained by Tech Inquiry, Rebellion landed a one-year contract with the US Air Force. The contract value, $625,000.

Speaker 42 And beyond that relatively low payout for Rebellion, it also showed a glimpse of something else, a rather casual, friendly tone of the people involved.

Speaker 42 In one exchange from a Rebellion employee to a contracting officer, they write, oh my god, you fucking rock.

Speaker 42 A second contract, at first glance, looked more impressive. a $46 billion ceiling contract with the Armament Division of the US Air Force, which handles advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles.

Speaker 42 But despite the upper contract amount, it appears that it's only paid out $1,000 to Rebellion so far. And there too, the exchanges seem quite jokey.

Speaker 42 Emails showed one staffer suggesting grabbing beer with the contracting officers and being stoked about the project.

Speaker 42 Of all the contracts that we could see, Rebellion was bringing in something in the low millions. The biggest and most impressive contract was relatively recent, worth $6 million with the US Army.

Speaker 42 It was quite the gap from sales in the low millions to a valuation of more than a billion. And one engineer told me that chasing contracts was part of Rebellion's problem.

Speaker 44 Solving government problems with tech and AI can be everything or nothing. Like, what does it mean to succeed in that? You have one contract and you've succeeded, but that's not scalable.

Speaker 44 They really don't have a clear plan.

Speaker 44 And they had interest and there were things that they were working at developing, but at the same time, even those things changed somewhat frequently, like, oh, this contract's going to save it.

Speaker 44 Oh, this contract. They're really reactive, which you kind of need to be.
But they were going after anything they might get a contract on, which meant that they didn't do any of them really well.

Speaker 44 And they didn't have a clear vision about how to roll that out.

Speaker 42 The big contracts just weren't, it seemed, coming in.

Speaker 42 Added to that, the huge expense on computation, the processing power that the company needed to sift through data, and by 2022, Rebellion was struggling.

Speaker 55 Well, you know, I think they struggled to gain traction in the Pentagon, right?

Speaker 55 Over the year that I was there, they had a lot of people talking to a lot of people within the Air Force, within the Pentagon, etc.

Speaker 55 They only got through a certain stage and didn't secure any contracts. Basically, they fired

Speaker 55 like 20% of the company. It seems like maybe Chris Lynch went through and just kind of axed people without consulting any of the managers.

Speaker 55 And they just, from what I understand, they just kind of made Swiss cheese of the engineering department, where they cut out people that were really important.

Speaker 55 And they left some of the, like, bumps on the log.

Speaker 55 And so, yeah, it was pretty bad and really demoralizing. And then, um, about two or three months later, they did another round of layoffs and laid off like another 20-15% of their engineering staff.

Speaker 42 There were layoffs in 2022 and in 2023. In a blog post, Chris Lynch explained the hard decision in rather oblique terms.

Speaker 42 Quote, these cuts will ensure our products have an order of magnitude impact on how they assist the warfighter.

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Speaker 42 At the end of the summer in 2023, as I was in the deep end of my reporting, rumors began circulating that the original founders of Rebellion Defense, Chris Lynch, Oliver Lewis, and Nicole Camarillo, had left the company.

Speaker 42 One former engineer told me that people would realize who had been cut only when their account on the internal messaging network was deactivated.

Speaker 42 And then over the summer, as journalist Jonathan Geyer and I stayed in touch about the company, he received news from a source. So interesting about Nicole and Chris.

Speaker 19 I mean, my sense is that they basically got pushed out of their executive roles sometime after that story came out, like early this year.

Speaker 42 It was confirmed a few weeks later. Chris Lynch had officially stepped away from the company that he'd helped to build after almost five years.

Speaker 42 And when I tried messaging her, Nicole Camarillo's email bounced back with the message that she had also left. As for Oliver, it was unclear.

Speaker 42 He had apparently left a few months before after most of the UK team was cut. And soon, all three co-founders had quietly been removed from the website.
A video from back in 2019 had also disappeared.

Speaker 56 Sat at this coffee shop and we just started to write down, what if we were to re-envision what it meant to build technology and software for defense and national security?

Speaker 42 And so it seems today that the once celebrated company, backed by the biggest name in tech, is fading. The story just didn't quite come true.

Speaker 38 Last year, a U.S.

Speaker 49 government contracting officer called me up and basically ranted for about 20 minutes that Rebellion Defense is the least competent, in their words,

Speaker 49 company that they've ever worked with.

Speaker 24 I have a quote for you here.

Speaker 49 I've been doing this for several years. Those guys, it's like Charlie Brown's in charge of the helm and Snoopy's doing whatever he wants to do.

Speaker 42 Jack Paulson, an investigative journalist and the director of Tech Inquiry, told me that inside the Pentagon, the confidence in the rebellion has faded.

Speaker 49 The defense unicorn, it became the R in a

Speaker 49 Those six companies are Shield AI, Hawkeye 360,

Speaker 49 Anderal, Rebellion Defense, Palantir, and a fairly obscure company called Epris. Honestly,

Speaker 49 Rebellion, even though it was valued at a billion dollars, it's questionable that it should still be in the acronym Sharp. I've reported that perhaps we should call it SHAPE now instead of Sharp.

Speaker 49 And so, yes, the investments into companies like Rebellion Matter.

Speaker 42 When I asked Rebellion directly about what was happening, they replied to say that they had more customers and contracts across the U.S. military than at any point in their history.

Speaker 42 And I asked specifically what was the reason for the almost complete change of senior leadership at Rebellion and for the cuts. And was it true that they were struggling to secure contracts?

Speaker 42 Their response, the current leadership is building a new rebellion, one that is resilient, focused, and outcome driven.

Speaker 42 So it feels like all we're really left with, all that's really visible, is the story. And maybe that's all it was meant to be.
For Eric Schmidt, maybe Rebellion was a relatively small venture.

Speaker 42 I don't know, he didn't respond to my request to speak. And for Chris Lynch, maybe this was just an exciting vision of a different future, one closer to his beloved intergalactic fairy tales.

Speaker 42 I also don't know for sure. He also didn't reply to me.
And so I was left with the sense that maybe it's the story, the hype, which is the weapon here.

Speaker 49 I would say a bigger question to grapple with is to what degree do they prefer that as a deterrent versus admitting like they don't want the curtain pulled back because

Speaker 49 if it looks like there's this giant functional ecosystem,

Speaker 49 that could be seen as a deterrent against, say, China.

Speaker 49 Whereas if you start to see that these companies like Rebellion and all these major efforts really just don't do anything and it's just a giant money pit, does a lot of this kind of discussion of AI being incorporated into the military kind of evaporate into just a giant piece of theater, a very expensive piece of theater?

Speaker 42 The consequences of this tech are too important to be kept secret, or hidden from view behind NDAs and denied FOI requests.

Speaker 42 Because if even OpenAI's Sam Altman is warning that this technology could destroy us all, I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.

Speaker 36 And we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with.

Speaker 42 If the warning is coming from our very own AI Oppenheimer, it's worth pushing to find out what's true.

Speaker 42 Which takes me back to that park bench in South London.

Speaker 42 Throughout this investigation, I've continued to try and sift truth from fiction in Oliver's own life, even as I read through pages and pages of military procurement contracts.

Speaker 42 That quintuple-barreled surname that he'd claimed. He'd appeared to have taken it from a friend of his grandfather's, a vicar, who was related to the Fiennes family.

Speaker 42 And he hadn't just told a couple of girlfriends about an invented military background.

Speaker 42 To someone else at Cambridge, he said that he'd been in the combined cadet force, Air Training Air Corps, the RAAF and the RAF Reserves, and that he'd served with the Special Forces as a support officer and that he'd then trained domestic and international special forces in South Africa.

Speaker 42 This person told me, he didn't just make up stories, he made up his entire self. But I could find no indication that Oliver had left Rebellion Defence because of misrepresentations or lying.

Speaker 42 In fact, all the former staffers I spoke to said he seemed like a nice guy, thoughtful, intelligent, one described him as loyally.

Speaker 42 When I put my questions to Rebellion about the company and about Oliver, they said that they would not participate in an exchange around employees who are no longer with the company, nor around unsubstantiated and otherwise discredited, specious and defamatory allegations.

Speaker 42 After his time at Rebellion, Oliver quickly found new work, joining Gallos Technologies, which invests in security and tech companies.

Speaker 42 The chair of its board, the former head of the UK's Intelligence and Cyber Security Agency, GCHQ.

Speaker 42 But it seemed that the bending of the truth continued. On his new job profile, he claimed to be, at 15, the youngest technologist employed by Oxford University.

Speaker 42 In another profile, it read that he'd been hired to bring in cutting-edge technology into academia.

Speaker 42 From what I could confirm, he had worked there, but first as work experience, and then not long after, it appeared that he'd been hired as a design assistant.

Speaker 42 And in a video, one of the achievements that he was being celebrated for was setting up a blog.

Speaker 42 So the new job profile is sort of correct, but the reality is a bit less impressive.

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Speaker 42 Oliver didn't in the end wish to comment for this investigation, but a few weeks after I contacted him, I saw a pamphlet for an event where he was listed as the founder of two unicorns, Improbable and Rebellion Defense.

Speaker 42 So I asked Improbable, is that true? Is he a founder? And their response, quote, in no way would it be correct to describe Mr. Lewis as a founder of improbable or improbable defense.

Speaker 42 So I kept thinking about the exaggerations and the embellishments. I thought, how unnecessary they are.
The fact is, is that what he's done is impressive.

Speaker 42 He obviously is thoughtful, inquiring, and interested in what AI will do to the world. And yet, time and again, he's wanted to present himself as more than he is.

Speaker 42 It's a pattern, and it goes beyond him to the industry that he's in, AI and defense, where the capabilities are real and impressive, and depending on your view, terrifying too, but where there's a tendency to oversell in the storytelling.

Speaker 42 Which brings me back to confidence. How do we know? Who can we trust?

Speaker 42 The perfume still hangs in the air. Only now, perhaps, we're better able to smell it.

Speaker 42 Not just in one man's draw to stories, but in a whole industry.

Speaker 42 From a park bench in South London, this story has traced a thread all the way to a new era that we find ourselves in, where sci-fi stories mash up with nerds of Silicon Valley and the bureaucrats of the Pentagon, and where computers are becoming lethal and warfare unmanned.

Speaker 42 That's the future of conflict. That's Walter's War.

Speaker 42 Walter's War is reported by me, Basha Cummings. The producer is Gary Marshall.
Additional reporting is by Jack Paulson. Additional reporting and producing is by Xavier Greenwood and Imogen Harper.

Speaker 42 The sound design is by Carla Patella.

Speaker 42 Thank you for listening to this series. If you want to hear more from Tortoise's award-winning newsroom, you can search for Tortoise wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 42 You can get early access and ad-free listening by subscribing to Tortoise on our audio app.

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