Acquired / 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
54 published records
01 / recommendation
“I also highly recommend a book called Beyond the Horizons, which is hard to find that most people don't know about, by Walter Boyne.”
02 / belief
“Here's what's interesting about this contract and Lockheed and Skunk Works losing it. This is an example (I think) to that first tenet from LMSC of threat-based need and real market need, maybe you want to adapt that to.”
03 / belief
“I think Kelly and the Skunk Works team were really advocating to build a tactical aircraft that was based on this, or bomber, and that never happened.”
04 / evaluation
“There are exceptions to all these things, but it doesn't solve for making sure that America stays globally competitive.”
05 / belief
“I think what the CIA and the National Reconnaissance Office does is they write these stories, maybe quasi in real time so that there's documentation of all this stuff, and then they stamp it secret, and then it never gets out until it gets declassified.”
06 / belief
“I think a lot of this work was done out of Sandia, which we talked about on the Amazon episode.”
07 / belief
“I do generally feel that there is a disconnect between people who enjoy the way of life that we have, but are unwilling to acknowledge why we have it. I think that is extremely different today than it was 60 years ago.”
08 / belief
“I think that's a little bit of a counter narrative to people that like to complain about how much money we spend on the military.”
09 / belief
“I think Lockheed has become world class in understanding where their bread is buttered.”
10 / belief
“I think people really believed, and I think there's a good chance this was reality.”
11 / commitment
“You might know that eventually, after the U-2, Skunk Works would create the next great spy plane, the SR-71, which we will get to, but that wasn't for a little while.”
12 / belief
“In fact, its codename or I would say probably not its codename, but its nickname internally was the Hopeless Diamond.”
13 / uncertainty
“Yup. I don't know the details of stealth with the Blackbird. I imagine a big part of that was the height, the altitude, and the speed of it.”
14 / belief
“LMSC—listeners, you be the judge—the stories that we've just told are more impactful to America and the world than what Skunk Works was doing. Personally, I think yes, but maybe you can debate.”
15 / observation
“The only way you can do this in a jet-powered plane is to essentially design something that can run with afterburners on all the time.”
16 / uncertainty
“I don't know that there's really a market here, and power comes only in markets.”
17 / belief
“I think you're right. I think we're quickly teasing out. There are two different things here.”
18 / belief
“I'm going to design you an airplane that I think meets the needs of how this will be used in the field, rather than what these technical specifications say here.”
19 / belief
“I guess Anduril is doing it. But these I think are still pretty small scale compared to the big primes.”
20 / belief
“The process power, which I think probably is really legitimate—and we talked to some folks in preparation for this—they are incredible systems integrators at what they do.”
21 / belief
“I believe, actually, they weren't even able to get the J5 in the first A-12s, and then only later in the Blackbirds did they put it in.”
22 / belief
“"We learned the first night of the Gulf War and for many nights after that, that stealth combined with precision weapons constituted a quantum advance in air warfare.”
23 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you remember this, Ben, but I vividly remember when this happened.”
24 / belief
“One, I think that was maybe in part from observing what was happening in the Soviet Union, where the military and military spending overran the whole rest of the economy.”
25 / belief
“When I get back from Berkshire, I think we'll do an LP call here in the next month or so.”
26 / belief
“I think traditional materials like aluminum would lose their strength around 300 degrees.”
27 / belief
“I think you're right that we should think about it as the primes versus everyone else.”
28 / belief
“The engines, I think, inside the engines get too close to 3000 degrees, I believe.”
29 / belief
“The Gulf conflict, I think, ends in 1991, I believe. It becomes really obvious that the Cold War–era of arms buildup in the US is over.”
30 / belief
“Perhaps, even more timelessly, this is the plane at the very, very famous scene at the end of the movie Casablanca went and Rick puts Ilsa on the plane with Victor to escape the Nazis and says, here's looking at you kid. That plane is an Electra, I believe an Electra junior.”
31 / belief
“You really, I think, nailed it at the beginning when you said this isn't a market.”
32 / belief
“I think, for a lot of people, the stakes, the pressure, and the worry about the Cold War was greater than World War II.”
33 / belief
“We presume that if this plane was shot down, as we think, probably the pilot was killed, having you shoot down a plane from 70,000 feet.”
34 / observation
“For me, at least, and I hope for many people listening of this episode, and it's really the heyday, glory days, whatever you want to call it, of Lockheed, both with Skunk Works and LMSC, of how these small skunk works–type organizations achieved unbelievable, unfathomable things, with a small number of people, in an unrealistically tight timeframe, with very constrained resources. That mindset is certainly not the only way that you can achieve great things, but it's a really damn good way to do it.”
35 / uncertainty
“We need the U-2. We don't know what the cost is going to be, but we need it to happen.”
36 / belief
“Not only were there recent nuclear tests happening right nearby, I believe that nuclear testing continued right nearby while they're using this site, Groom Lake, to test the U-2.”
37 / belief
“Yup, which we had no idea, so we learned this as part of it. Here's what's funny.”
38 / prediction
“Now they can position this as like, hey, we're so strong that we can keep people out. We expect them to say something right away.”
39 / belief
“The F-35, I believe, is the largest program generating 20% of all net sales across all segments.”
40 / uncertainty
“Yeah, and I don't know the technical details, but I think even the cabin pressurization technology that existed then was not going to cut it at 70,000 feet.”
41 / evaluation
“Now, there are a couple of problems with that. One is that normal jet fuel doesn't work at that altitude.”
42 / belief
“There are famous stories about detecting where people's radar transmitters are by bouncing them off the moon, and figuring out the patterns of bouncing off the moon. It's more, I think, that the SR-71's bottom was one of the first airplanes with a flat bottom rather than a rounded fuselage.”
43 / belief
“I think you could make an analogy to the Louisiana Purchase in terms of the best deals that the United States government ever got relative to the benefit to America.”
44 / belief
“When the Americans entered World War II, we had reason to believe that we could come in and win. The Cold War, I think to the American psyche, felt very different.”
45 / evaluation
“I think a lot of people in the military who did know about this stuff, this is heretical to say because it's so beloved, but I think the Blackbird was a decoy.”
46 / evaluation
“The Kennen satellites are like what we think about, like Google Maps, it's real time, digital photography beamed down via ground link to stations in real time.”
47 / evaluation
“What LMSC (Lockheed Missiles and Space Company) did, I honestly think it is bigger impact to the country, to the world, and certainly on business to Lockheed and to Silicon Valley than Skunk Works. This story is of a scale I don't know that we've ever really told on Acquired.”
48 / prediction
“In the same timeframe as the initial NASA missions, the initial Mercury (I think) were the first missions, basically concurrently with that, they got a fully operational observational spy satellite system up into space and functioning at the same time.”
49 / prediction
“The reason that it was worth trying was that if you could create a naval based intercontinental nuclear strike capability, it completely changes the strategic landscape of deterrence, first strike versus second strike, and retaliation.”
50 / evaluation
“They have the expertise from the F-117A, Nighthawk. This is the Lockheed side of the story, but they beat the B-2 in a lot of early competitions, but the government still gave the award to Northrop Grumman because there was some particular plane that the government said Northrop could manufacture a bunch of it, then sell internationally, and then change their mind, so then Northrop was left holding the bag, with the Department of Defense being like, all right, you can win this competition.”
51 / evaluation
“The government has to guarantee a $250 million loan to Lockheed to keep them afloat, mostly because of the L-1011 disaster.”
52 / evaluation
“Hexagon was the "See it all program." This is starting to eclipse my technical knowledge a little bit, and I think there's also just less known about this because a lot of this is still classified, too.”
53 / evaluation
“People probably know and learn about mutually assured destruction and deterrence. This really was the policy of the military in the American government that we need to have capabilities to deter the Soviet Union from launching a first nuclear strike against us by being able to guarantee and have them know that we guarantee that if they do so, we will destroy them.”
54 / preference
“We can decide to prioritize other things, have passions, and say, yeah, other people can take care of the national good because we'll be fine either way.”