Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
30 published records
01 / belief
“Maybe the definition has gray areas, but there’re plenty of cases where you can point to it and say, “Yes, that would be a conspiracy theory.” I would say I believe in a very small number of them.”
02 / 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.”
03 / belief
“I doubt many people imagined a pandemic was going to show up and shut down the whole world as it did.”
04 / belief
“I think the past 10 years have shown us that that is actually not true, yet you should strive to be.”
05 / belief
“I think the Defense Department made the mistake of believing that perhaps you could use it.”
06 / uncertainty
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know, but I’m almost certain that that program is still continuing.”
07 / 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.”
08 / belief
“In a strange way, I think that the intelligence community and the military community work hand and glove.”
09 / belief
“I think sometimes, when you say that’s a conspiracy theory, it sounds so finger-pointing to me.”
10 / belief
“If I think about the experts in the immediate post-World War II period, there’s John von Neumann, there’s Herman Kahn.”
11 / 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.”
12 / belief
“I think of the Pentagon as being one of the worst run and parts of the deep state as being relatively well run.”
13 / 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.”
14 / commitment
“If anything, if enough people think it’s madness, we won’t get it, and it’s fine to have the nuclear weapons.”
15 / belief
“I think that I’m going to really insist on saying no human should have that power or have to make that decision.”
16 / belief
“A lot of people — and I think Uri among them — become like a figure, and then they work to hold up that figure.”
17 / 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.”
18 / belief
“The takeaway, I believe, is that more nuclear weapons make us less safe, and I think you might be saying the same thing.”
19 / belief
“The second- and third-order effects of nuclear weapons would mean the US and China and Russia would call up the two parties and read them the riot act. I think we actually would get it under some kind of partial control.”
20 / belief
“I believe that would — well, witness what we just saw — would happen prior to the first launch.”
21 / 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.”
22 / disagreement
“I disagree with the nomenclature because I think of a conspiracy in legal terms.”
23 / 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.”
24 / prediction
“I would say a 60 percent to 70 percent chance that we retaliate, not that we do nothing.”
25 / evaluation
“Because if you’re going to prejudge someone based on what you “read” or heard on a podcast, that is dangerous.”
26 / 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.”
27 / 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.”
28 / 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.”
29 / 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.”
30 / evaluation
“If you’re me — because I wrote it — you come to the conclusion that this is madness.”