Josh Steinman: ~100 foreign sabotage teams operating on US soil, DJI should be banned, and reindustrialization is underway

Summary

Josh Steinman, a former senior cybersecurity official in the Trump White House and co-founder of an industrial cybersecurity company, makes the case that the US is significantly underestimating how deep foreign adversaries have penetrated its critical infrastructure — and how little of it ever reaches the public.

Foreign sabotage teams on US soil

Steinman puts the number of active foreign sabotage teams operating inside the United States at roughly 100. Most of what those teams do never becomes public. During four years of receiving daily classified reports in his White House role, he says the breadth of activity was enough to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. His point: what shows up in headlines is a fraction of what's actually happening.

Espionage as preparation for sabotage

The distinction most people miss, Steinman argues, is that espionage and sabotage aren't separate tracks — they're sequential. Adversaries use espionage to map a network and identify target systems, then leave access in place for later activation. The volume of espionage currently hitting critical networks, he suggests, is best understood as pre-positioning.

His reference case is the destruction of Iran's steel industry. Someone — he says he doesn't know who — took remote control of multiple refinery systems in a single day and poured liquid metal across the floors of several facilities. Video of the incident is publicly available. His company's approach to preventing attacks like that is wider data collection: instead of monitoring only networking equipment inside a facility, it ingests signals from engineering workstations, applications, firewalls, and everything else, giving analysts a full narrative to work from.

Foreign infiltration of US tech companies

Beyond industrial targets, Steinman flags what he calls a major counter-intelligence problem inside US technology companies. He points to documents from the Twitter-to-X transition that, in his reading, confirmed foreign intelligence services had personnel operating inside the platform. He argues the same is likely true at other major companies, and that many of those firms lack the internal frameworks — or the political willingness — to address it. His specific concern: foreign nationals with direct ties to state intelligence services working on products where they could insert backdoors or manipulate content.

DJI and the drone precedent

On China's hardware strategy, Steinman is unambiguous: DJI should be banned from doing business in the United States, full stop. His reasoning is that Chinese companies are legally required to make their data available to the Chinese Communist Party, which means CCP intelligence officials almost certainly have access to everything DJI drones have ever transmitted — including topographic data on the United States gathered flight by flight. He believes China is now running the same playbook with Unitree and humanoid robotics, and that the US has not learned the lesson from the drone market.

On the new Intel CEO, disclosed earlier in the show as someone who invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Chinese semiconductor companies over the past two decades before exiting in 2022, Steinman is more measured. He says he doesn't know the specific situation and has no reason to think anything is wrong, but frames Chinese-connected investments as a category he watches closely given that Chinese companies are structurally required to serve CCP interests.

TikTok

Steinman's view on TikTok is that the algorithm is the real prize — the ability to shape what American youth sees and believes. He expects that to remain the central sticking point in any sale negotiation. He also notes that the deal is being handled by a president simultaneously negotiating a trade relationship with Xi Jinping worth trillions of dollars, which makes the outcome hard to predict in isolation.

Reindustrialization

On rebuilding US industrial capacity, Steinman is broadly optimistic but sees the market, not government subsidy, as the primary engine. He argues the US has structural advantages China can't replicate with zero-interest loans: a deep pool of people who want to make money, and a global talent base that comes to the US to do it. He endorses the demand-side approach to chips policy — the government committing to buy American-made chips rather than subsidizing supply — which he says his team pushed during his White House tenure. He flags the Defense Production Act and DOD procurement as tools the current administration is actively considering.

California wildfires

On wildfires, Steinman's position is that forestry management is a solved problem being blocked by regulatory process. He says it took years of applications across 15 different state boards for forestry teams in the Altadena area to get approval for controlled burns and brush clearing — and they were still denied. European countries, he notes, don't experience the same scale of catastrophic fires because they allow professional forestry management to operate.