Show Notes
Paul Dabbar and Mark Menezes join Jeanne Meserve on NatSec Tech to discuss the potential of fusion energy and a new report “Fusion Power: Enabling 21st Century American Dominance.”More on the Commission on the Scaling of Fusion Energy: https://fusion.scsp.ai/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit scsp222.substack.com
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What if space became a parking lot for munitions? Michael Hochberg, founder and president of Periplous LLC, joins the show to make the case for pre-positioning military supplies in low Earth orbit. Drawing on his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, he argues that reusable heavy-lift rockets like SpaceX’s Starship could let the U.S. deorbit munitions, drones, and other cargo anywhere on the globe within minutes to a couple of hours, without relying on foreign bases that host nations may close off at a critical moment.
AI's growth depends on data centers, but communities are increasingly pushing back over their land use, electricity and water demands, and noise. Host Jeanne Meserve is joined by Dr. Griffiths, chancellor of Dakota State University, and Stephen Timms, president of Thermo Bond Solutions, to look at how government, industry, and academia are tackling these problems. They discuss smaller, distributed, and rural data centers, more efficient chips and cooling, the future of nuclear power, and the race with China for power and compute. They also cover underwater and space-based options, and why transparency with local communities may be the key to winning public trust.
In this episode of NatSec Tech, Jeanne sits down with Dr. Nina Kottler, practicing radiologist and Chief Medical AI Officer at Mosaic Clinical Technologies, at the recent AI+ Health Summit. They discuss why AI hasn't yet transformed radiology despite the hype, how vision-language foundation models are changing that, and what it means for radiologists to shift from dictating reports to supervising them. Kottler also explains how AI could predict cancer years before a human can see it, and where data access, FDA rules, and a fee-for-service payment system stand in the way.
In this episode of NatSec Tech, Jeanne sits down with Dr. Charity Dean, founder and CEO of PHC Global and former public health officer for the State of California. They discuss why Dean calls COVID "a dry run," why she left government to build an AI-powered bio-threat intelligence platform, and how agentic AI and large language models are simultaneously lowering the bar for bad actors to engineer novel pathogens and giving defenders powerful new tools to detect and counter them.
As the U.S. marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, host Jeanne sits down with Dr. Philip Zelikow, executive director of the original 9/11 Commission and now the Botha-Chan Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. They explore whether America is truly safer today, how terrorist threats have evolved from centralized sanctuaries to online radicalization, and why conflicts in Gaza and Iran may not drive terrorism the way many assume.