Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
40 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think the probability is certain. That is based on all the interviews that I conducted with individuals who literally had the power to make sure that happened.”
02 / belief
“I doubt many people imagined a pandemic was going to show up and shut down the whole world as it did.”
03 / belief
“I think the past 10 years have shown us that that is actually not true, yet you should strive to be.”
04 / belief
“I think the Defense Department made the mistake of believing that perhaps you could use it.”
05 / uncertainty
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know, but I’m almost certain that that program is still continuing.”
06 / belief
“” I’ve met a lot of experts in my day, and I’ve met many people whose wisdom outperforms — and again, just in my opinion — their expertise.”
07 / belief
“In a strange way, I think that the intelligence community and the military community work hand and glove.”
08 / belief
“I think sometimes, when you say that’s a conspiracy theory, it sounds so finger-pointing to me.”
09 / belief
“I’m interested and worried about mimetics in that kind of a situation, that you don’t have something like that happen, but if you did, it would suddenly involve mimicry. I think that is shocking, and dangerous, and terrifying.”
10 / uncertainty
“I would have to really put my mind on that scenario to discern what the outcome would be. I don’t know necessarily if America would get involved.”
11 / belief
“I think that I’m going to really insist on saying no human should have that power or have to make that decision.”
12 / belief
“A lot of people — and I think Uri among them — become like a figure, and then they work to hold up that figure.”
13 / belief
“I think my career has been such that I have a front row seat with the ground operators, if you will, the people, maybe even, you could say doing the dirty work.”
14 / belief
“The takeaway, I believe, is that more nuclear weapons make us less safe, and I think you might be saying the same thing.”
15 / belief
“I believe that would — well, witness what we just saw — would happen prior to the first launch.”
16 / evaluation
“I think we all know examples of that happening in real life, which is why the polls — although now we know you can’t even trust polls anymore — but many polls suggest that an extraordinary majority of Americans believe in psychic functioning.”
17 / disagreement
“I disagree with the nomenclature because I think of a conspiracy in legal terms.”
18 / evaluation
“He knows, even though he’s changed his policy recently — we can get into the fine points — we agree on this point, that the danger lies in the newcomers to the field that do not have decades of precedent, that did not grow up watching and fearing, like your point in the very opening of our discussion.”
19 / evaluation
“Because if you’re going to prejudge someone based on what you “read” or heard on a podcast, that is dangerous.”
20 / commitment
“Maybe just ask me specifically, and then I could answer earnestly what I think about a certain subject, because I have written about all of those subjects.”
21 / preference
“From my take, he, like so many others that I have interviewed, because, for some reason — call it fate and circumstance — I have spent my career interviewing men in their 80s and 90s, who are defense officials who spent their entire life making war or preventing war.”
22 / evaluation
“They come from either land-based systems, like the THAAD system, or they come from sea ships, the Aegis system, but they cannot shoot down ICBMs — intercontinental ballistic missiles — traveling, as I just mentioned, 500 miles above the earth’s surface. That is an extraordinary distinction, and people incorrectly mix them, because it sounds great and it’s quite fantasy hopeful to think, “Wow, I can just build a system, an Iron Dome or a golden dome over the United States, over my head, and I will be free from nuclear attack.”
23 / prediction
“Tyler, I take readers from nuclear launch to nuclear winter, and it happens in 72 minutes. That’s because the former commander of Stratcom, General Kehler — when I asked him what would happen in a full-scale nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States, he said to me, “Annie, the world could end in the next couple of hours.”
24 / evaluation
“If you’re me — because I wrote it — you come to the conclusion that this is madness.”
25 / belief
“I think that the conversation is well worth having among everyone that is in a power of position.”
26 / belief
“Henry Beecher, Harvard, I think he was also at MIT for a bit, he came up with that term.”
27 / belief
“After I learned from records at the National Archives that after the war, half of everything went to the Soviet Union, and I’m talking about the trove of Nazi documents from which the superpowers were then going to learn to fight future wars, and half of them went to the United States.”
28 / belief
“I think everybody wants to know about Area 51, because it’s like this American enigma.”
29 / belief
“When the military stepped in and got involved in the programs, that was a complete disaster, in my opinion, because the military needs to control everything in a mechanized, systematic way.”
30 / uncertainty
“Here’s another insightful thing Billy Waugh said to me, and I’m answering the question around because I don’t know, because again, I never had anyone say to me, “Here’s how it went down,” because you can’t.”
31 / observation
“The way it starts is in space, meaning the US Defense Department has a early warning system, and the system in space is called SBIRS. It’s a constellation of satellites that is keeping an eye on all of America’s enemies so that the moment an ICBM launches, the satellite in space… And I’m talking about 1/10 of the way to the moon, that’s how powerful these satellites are in geo-sync.”
32 / evaluation
“Because during COVID, when President Trump and the leader of North Korea were kind of locked in various relationships with one another, good, bad, threatening, non-threatening, friendly; just bananas, you might say, not presidential behavior.”
33 / evaluation
“Morsch’s description of coming upon this rumored to be site, there was something called a wishing tree on the site, which I just found so human and perfect, that it was this magical place, and it was Locatable because there was a wishing tree on a hill.”
34 / evaluation
“Long gone are the days where we had presidents who had advisors on both sides of the aisle. That’s really important, because you want to have differing opinions.”
35 / evaluation
“By the way, because I’ve reported on nuclear weapons for 12 years now, and Oppenheimer movie had a very, to me, positive impact on Los Alamos’ transparency with people like me.”
36 / commitment
“My experience in interviewing old timers who’ve spent decades working for the CIA or even NRO or NSA, I know the way they think from having spent hundreds of hours interviewing them.”
37 / evaluation
“You may think through this six-minute window, I may think through this six-minute window. But what I learned, for example, former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta was really helpful in explaining this to me because before he was SecDef, he served as the director of the CIA.”
38 / preference
“I think that’s why people love post-apocalyptic television shows and films because they see that.”
39 / recommendation
“I think you should have mixed feelings about anything that you cover as a reporter or as a human, and maybe change that from mixed to conflicting, because there are really positive elements of every organization within the federal government.”
40 / evaluation
“Imagine that job while trying to advise the president. And then there’s also a really interesting term which I learned about called jamming the president, which is often understood in Washington that the military advisors would, we don’t know if this is legit, we’ve never seen it put to the test, but jamming the president means the military advisors are going to push for a really aggressive counter attack immediately.”