Views Expressed Podcast

First things first: this newsletter is a labor of love and sometimes, producing the text, the audio, and the sketch is a lot to accomplish each week. This week, I almost didn’t get it done. So I did what any normal person would do in 2025, I turned to ChatGPT. I fed the model about a dozen of my sketches and then asked it to produce an image of an aircraft clock in the style of my own charcoal ske...

Pete Holmes has a great bit about how having Google on our phones is ruining our lives. “Having Google on your phone is like having a drunk know-it-all in your pocket.” You can watch the clip here (start at about a minute into the clip). I’ve literally been in bed in the morning alone, just like, “where’s Tom Petty from?” Then he mimes asking Google that question on his phone. This is a public epi...

I watched Blade Runner for the first time last weekend. (The movie came out before I was born, so I feel like I should get a little bit of a pass on not having seen it). The film plays with some of the themes we’ve seen in more recent sci fi, AI, and robot movies. I’m thinking specifically of Ex Machina . If forced to bin both films in the same category, I’d say these are two movies that take seri...

In the Venn diagram of TV shows that appeal to me and my wife and to our two kids, the middle overlapping part is pretty sparse. But The Amazing Race is one of those shows. American teams of two compete for $1,000,000 in a race around the world. Each episode consists of frantic travel, challenges to accomplish, communication in a language not one’s own, and lots of stress-induced relationship dram...

Plato, one of the world’s earliest (and still one of the world’s greatest) philosophers struggled with the question, “who is the philosopher.” He wrote a trio of dialogues (The Theaetetus, The Sophist, and The Statesman) that sought to distinguish the philosopher from the sophist and both from the statesman. It’s harder than you think! This is because, perhaps among other reasons, the subject matt...

“Magic doesn’t fool you because you’re stupid,” Penn Jillette said on the Jonathan Ross show in 2019. Magic fools you because it’s stupid. … The human brain wants to have beautiful, wonderful experiences. So, if you want to fool somebody, you come up with something really, really stupid. Jillette then brough comedian Rebel Wilson onto the stage and through misdirection and sleight of hand, managed...

Some time ago, I listened to Lulu Garcia Navarro interview Megyn Kelly on the New York Times “The Interview” podcast . If you’re not familiar with Megyn Kelly, she was a long-time Fox News host until she had a dust-up both with then-candidate Trump and ultimately with the Fox organization. Now she is an ardent supporter of the President—she even endorsed him on stage at a rally prior to the electi...

A friend recommended that I watch the Netflix documentary series, Live to 100: The Secrets of Blue Zones . Throughout the series, the host brings viewers to communities around the world that have a disproportionately high number of centenarians—people who have lived to be 100. Then he seeks to discover what it is about those people and their lifestyles that have enabled their longevity. In most pl...

I want to share something I read at work this week. There had been an email exchange about the degree to which AI will enable us to automate our work. I work at a professional military education institution, so our work includes both graduate level academic instruction and military professional education. Here’s what my colleague had to say in response to someone else. You are missing the human el...

In order to understand new things, sometimes we need to study old things. I never really understood what my Army and Marine Corps friends meant by “strategic terrain.” As an Air Force officer, I have studied battles that took place at thirty thousand feet and bombing campaigns that, several miles into the atmosphere, overflew hundreds or thousands of miles of terrain, strategic or otherwise. We ta...

Can large language models lie to us? This is a harder question to answer than it seems. So, let’s start in the most obvious place: Disney’s 2013 film, Frozen . Thirteen mid-career military officers, half of them US Marines, met in a classroom inside the National Museum of The Marine Corps in Quantico, VA. About an hour into the two hour class, we took a ten minute break. I said, “when we come back...

I know this isn’t the kind of content you originally signed up for, but I thought this story was strong enough to share anyway. As always, I’d love to hear what you think. Please consider leaving a note in the comments. The folk singer, Ellis Paul, took off his flat cap and, with a flick of his wrist, hung it from the boom of his mic stand. He told listeners in the intimate, Northern Virginia venu...

I’ve been trying to introduce my kids to classic movies that I don’t think they’ll get exposed to anywhere else. (And yes, at this point, I consider the movies of my own childhood to be “classic”). This week, we watched WarGames . It holds up! Views Expressed is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. If you’re not fami...

Somehow, back in 2017, I found myself at a small workshop on the ethics autonomous robotic systems at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. (If you are interested, that series of workshops culminated in this report on how to evaluate the risk of robots in the security context). At that early workshop, though, I was an AI novice. I had been invited because I had an operational background in remo...

This newsletter is a little different. I’m going to engage in some art criticism (the positive kind) even though I am not an artist. But I know there are some artists who read the newsletter. So, by all means, comment and let me know what I’ve gotten wrong or if there are better ways for us to think about this issue. I’d love to hear from you! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss thi...

Alex Risner reported in The Atlantic last week that Meta (and possibly OpenAI) have attempted to address this problem by going to the source of good writing: books. There are lots of reasons that the quality of writing in books might be higher than the quality of writing available on the internet (including, perhaps, this very newsletter ). Here are just a few... This is a public episode. If you'd...

My sister is opening a gym. She did what anyone might do in our age of generative AI, she asked Midjourney to generate marketing materials. The task was specific. She’s not trying to create a gym for professional athletes or for gym rats; her target market is made up of ordinary people, many of whom will never have been into a gym before. But getting generative AI to create images of normal people...

A reader recently asked me to recommend an intro to ethics book that covered the major ethical theories. That’s harder to do than it sounds. There are several books that engage the three major philosophical approaches to ethics, but few that do it in a way that’s approachable and accessible to those without an extensive philosophy background. Similarly, I recently had to find a chapter that introd...

Greetings from Oxford, where the spires are still just as dreamy as when I last left them. This really is a special place. (And a special shoutout to the buck of the famed Magdalen College deer herd who tried to eat my wife’s wedding ring). The Views Expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the US Governme...

I sat with my small AI team along the wall of the windowless conference room in the basement of the Pentagon. We looked on while a technical expert from the intelligence community brief a new classified capability to my boss and my boss’s boss and a hand full of other Air Force generals around the long conference table. When the briefing was done, the senior general in the room described what he t...

What can Aristotle teach us about whether large language models can understand our world? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chapainsights.substack.com/subscribe

" Most people don’t understand computers to even the slightest degree. Thus, they usually explain the computer’s intellectual feats to themselves with the single analogy available to them, the model of their own capacity to think. Consequently, they overrate those machines tremendously." The same MIT professor was asked whether machines can perform at least some tasks better than humans can. Surel...

Before we start, think about AI that is smart—I mean, really smart. Ok, hold that thought. Here we go… When I was at Air Force field training (our version of boot camp for officers), I made a mistake... As always, the Views Expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the US Government. This is a public episode. If you'd l...

I don’t know whether the wave of artificial superintelligence is cresting, about to break. But even if it is, I don’t think the lesson from the western canon is that it portends our doom. The recurring story throughout western literature is not really that the things we create sow the seeds of our destruction, but that they sow the seeds of our temporary despair. Despite the calamities we bring up...

As a person who has some expertise in some areas, I owe it to you to signal when I’m changing lanes. I owe it to you to make it clear when I’m speaking from my specific areas of expertise and when I’m engaging as a citizen, a father, a dog-owner, or a book-lover. In other words, you don’t have to stay in your lane. You just have to use your blinker. As always, the Views Expressed are those of the...