Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…We undervalue the preventers. Churchill was very active. He both did things and prevented things. Maybe Khrushchev prevented World War III. We don’t quite ever see that in the data in any obvious way, but he might have been extraordinarily consequential. Yes, John Kennedy. What was probably the most important thing that John Kennedy did? It was the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember it very, very well. I was at a dinner when Kennedy made his speech announcing the crisis. For a week, it was touch and go whether the world would have ended up in nuclear war. In fact, after the crisis was over and the Russians and the Americans began to talk to each other, we realized how close we and they had come. There was a Russian submarine whose captain wanted to launch a nuclear missile. It was the other officers on the crew who prevented the captain, so it was a close call. Kennedy handled the discussions in the Cuban Missile Crisis brilliantly. We could say, yes, the most important thing that Kennedy did was to prevent nuclear war. With the onset of powerful artificial intelligence, will political leaders matter less or more?…

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