Michael: US must scale affordable hypersonics to deter China
Emil Michael · Pentagon Chief: 6 Weapons That Will Prevent WW3 · Joe Lonsdale · Jan 9, 2026 · at 14:29
Emil Michael, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, explains why scaling domestic hypersonic weapons production is necessary for strategic deterrence against China.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So we know how to build our own, But we have to do it more cheaply. We have to do it at scale. We have to do it, and it's a deterrent effect, right? It's just like we had nuclear missiles, and the Russians did, or Soviets did. If China, the China has them, we have to have them to make sure there's balance there, and we can secure peace.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Emil Michael
Emil Michael: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky could not have built Uber
“And now I would argue that Brian Chesky could not have built Uber.”
Uber would be worth $600 billion today without leadership disruption, says Michael
“Six hundred million? Five X. Yeah, six hundred billion. We would have been Instacart. We would have had a payment system because we'd have so much share of wallet. There was so much more we would have done.”
Michael: Uber beat Lyft by 20x despite Lyft launching ridesharing first
“What's the difference between Lyft and Uber? We started at the same time. Lyft is worth six billion dollars today. That's a 20 x difference. The single difference was leadership and ambition, right? The only thing you could attribute it to, because they starte…”
Pentagon pays Google 47 cents annually for Gemini deployment
“They were the first of the big frontier AI companies to say, we want to work at Department of Defense. They were easy to work with on the contract. We're paying 47 cents For the whole year for all of this. So they're like taking, taking a loss to make sure tha…”
Michael: Elite university students fear speaking and lack critical thinking skills
“What you know it is now is a place where people are walking around with fear to not say what they think. They're not challenging their ideas. That means they're not coming out as fully formed adults with the ability to critically think through problems and sol…”