Jonathan Berk
speaker
579 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 13 Aug
Jonathan Berk’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
We had ICBMs that we could fuel, that were fully fueled and could be launched at the push of a button.
Russia's ICBMs needed six hours of fueling before they could be launched, meaning we could easily do a first strike and knock them out.
Then we go to Iraq.
We assume they have weapons of mass destruction.
They don't.
We assumed more generally that the Soviet Union was this powerful country where we spent a huge amount of money to counter the threat of the Red Army.
They can't even invade Ukraine and successfully take over Ukraine.
So I began to think about this.
Here's what I think the all else mistake is.
When we read intelligence, I think we ignore the incentives of the people producing the intelligence.
Let me be specific.
If somebody producing the intelligence underestimates and we find ourselves in a situation where we are not prepared, they lose their job.
But if, on the other hand, they overestimate, and in the end we find, oh, well, you know, the enemy isn't as strong as we thought they were, nobody loses their job.
And that asymmetry, I think, makes them err on the side of overestimating.
Obviously, I mean, we invaded Iraq because we thought they had nuclear weapons.
I don't know how many lives were lost there.
Huge cost to overestimation.
But I don't think any intelligence person ever lost their job.
I don't think there was any real cost to why it was that the intelligence got that question so wrong.
Agreed that the intelligence community should understand that and they should take that into account.
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