Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
19 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“Hypersonic weapons, because of the way they maneuver, don’t necessarily have to follow a ballistic trajectory.”
02 / evaluation
“Now we see the full coming of the circle of the future that some people in the military saw then, which is that, just last month in Ukraine, the US military has had to ask the Ukrainians to remove from the front all 31 of the M1A1 Abrams battle tanks that we gave the Ukrainians because a quarter of them had been destroyed by Russian kamikaze drones.”
03 / observation
“The problem is that the entire defense procurement system and the Pentagon’s line of vision are tuned in to the military R&D labs and to the defense primes.”
04 / belief
“I think we need to be spending way less money on legacy systems that are demonstrably defeatable today.”
05 / belief
“I think drones are primarily offensive dominant in the sense that there are, right now, almost 300 companies in Ukraine that have faster innovation cycles at this moment than all of the Western military companies fielding drones.”
06 / belief
“I think that autonomous weapons are here to stay. This is how wars are likely going to be fought, and if you decide not to pursue autonomous weapons, you’re going to lose.”
07 / belief
“I think that’s one of many factors, including, frankly, the Civil Service Act, that is making the talent base of the US government erode.”
08 / belief
“I think anybody who is working against the grain institution to build something new should be given a lot of authority to prosecute that mission, to make that mission a success, and held accountable if they don’t.”
09 / belief
“By the time the book was published, I think we had caught something like 120 academic papers being published in the Chinese literature about the Ukraine war, very clearly seeing the decisive use of Starlink, calling for a Chinese version of Starlink, calling for Chinese kinetic and nonkinetic means of jamming low-earth-orbit space technology.”
10 / preference
“Having sat in both places, on the National Security Council and in the Pentagon, I am firmly in favor of dual use to the absolute extent we can because I think the net assessment of that is for the best.”
11 / evaluation
“I think we have to be very careful exerting government control over breakout technology, but that doesn’t mean that the law enforcement agencies like the FBI and our intelligence agencies can’t cooperate very closely to help protect certain private firms from the nation-state threats they are most certainly facing.”
12 / prediction
“It’s just too difficult. So, I think, had that group of people been successful in, for instance, pausing military development using AI, I think we would be even more imperiled in Ukraine today.”
13 / evaluation
“Those settled notions often kill people, and especially when they kill people, that’s a strong signal that it’s time to go back and take a fresh look at everything, to always be curious, always be skeptical, and always be as rigorous as you can because established ways of thinking don’t often evolve in ways fast enough to accommodate changing circumstances.”
14 / recommendation
“One of the charities I donated to was Human Rights Watch, which is wonderfully subversive for a Pentagon employee because they actually produce incredibly great research about what’s happening on the ground in conflict areas around the world that every national security official, I think, should be reading.”
15 / recommendation
“With an ICBM launch, you have 20 to 25 minutes or so. This is why the rule for a presidential nuclear decision conference is, you have to be able to get the president online with his national security advisers in, I think, five or seven minutes.”
16 / prediction
“It’s going to be much more shades of gray, I think, and gradations. That’s good because it means that we will have time among nations to find new equilibria without hopefully finding ourselves in sudden disequilibria that could create an incentive for one nation to start a war against another.”
17 / evaluation
“If you’re a start-up, that simply doesn’t work because you have to show profitability before your next round of venture investment, which you’re going to raise inside of that timeline.”
18 / evaluation
“I think the question is, that program is directionally right, but it certainly is not right in size or scale in comparison to the changes we’re seeing, not just in Ukraine, but in the Middle East and other places around the world with autonomous weapon systems.”
19 / evaluation
“Then, in northern Israel, perhaps most strikingly, Hezbollah has depopulated the first 10 miles of northern Israel using loitering munitions and cruise missiles because the IDF can’t effectively defend their northern border, and that has displaced 85,000 Israeli civilians.”