You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense and foreign affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans, the founder of Worn the Rocks.

This is a special episode meant to mark our 10th anniversary.

July is our 10th anniversary month. We launched in July 2013 and in this episode I asked a very

good friend of mine Philip Zeliko to sit down and interview me and turn the mic back on me because I knew he would make me dig deeper.

Philip is well known for many reasons.

He's a former diplomat, academic, and author.

He was the executive director of the 9-11 Commission he was the

counselor to the Secretary of State during the Bush administration he's an author of

so many fascinating works including most recently a multi-author study on what went wrong during the COVID-19 epidemic.

But I mean, on subjects as diverse as World War I to the Philippines to the pandemic, it's remarkable. And I'm very grateful that Philip agreed to sit down and

interview me on this auspicious occasion.

So I hope you enjoy the show.

So War on the Rocks is now celebrating its 10th anniversary and has a wide readership.

But before someone invented something called War on the Rocks, it would have been very hard to imagine that there could be such

a thing with such a name.

What mad brainstorm occurred 10 plus years ago?

So I had gotten back from working in Afghanistan as a civil servant and I was

bored by what a lot of other people were writing these days at that time and this was in 2012 2013 on matters of war and peace.

This was in the middle of the click bait revolution online where a lot of money was going

to online advertising so even niche foreign policy and defense

publications went from publishing 50 articles a month to almost 600

...