From April 9, 2016: This week on the podcast, we welcome Eric Schwartz, the Dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Schwartz previously served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration. In our conversation, he sketches the key aspects of U.S. refugee policy, explaining how it both protects the security of the United States and at times undermines its ability to accept refugees. Schwartz, who believes the United States has an interest in alleviating the Syrian refugee crisis, outlines what a coherent refugee policy would look like, and argues that the reforms must go beyond simply accepting more refugees.

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Carmen Medina defies simple description. She spent more than 30 years at the CIA, rising to the leadership team of the Directorate of Intelligence, despite her iconoclasticism and vociferous evangelism of new technologies. Since retiring more than a decade ago, she has co-written a book about rebelling within bureaucracy--and advocated the exploration of precognition for intelligence purposes.

She joined David Priess for a wide and deep conversation about her analytic and managerial career, the process and pitfalls of analytic coordination, cooperation between US and UK intelligence, the CIA's incorporation of publish-when-ready technology in the late 1990s, the downside of extensive editorial review of analytic products, the importance of including more intuition in intelligence analysis, why precognition should be taken seriously, and more.

Works mentioned in this episode:

The book Rebels At Work by Lois Kelly and Carmen Medina

The book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The article by Carmen Medina, "The Potential of Integrating Intelligence and Intuition," Cipher Brief, June 10, 2022.

The book American Cosmic by D. W. Pasulka

The book Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie

The book How To Be a Renaissance Woman by Jill Burke

The book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline

The book The Infidel and the Professor by Dennis Rasmussen

The book The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

The book The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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From July 31, 2023: This past week, the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs held a spirited hearing on an unusual topic: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, the more correct term for what are commonly called UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects. The witnesses included two military veterans who claimed to have borne eyewitness to UAPs, and an intelligence community whistleblower who claims to have heard secondhand from contacts about a range of government activity relating to extraterrestrials, including the recovery of alien remains and crashed aircraft. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the witnesses’ testimony has triggered an array of strong reactions, from outright scorn and disbelief to an array of boosters eager to tie it into their own worldviews and conspiracy theories.

To talk through the revelations at this hearing and the debate over UAPs more broadly, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with veteran Washington Post national security reporter Shane Harris, who has closely followed the debate over UAPs for many years. They talked about how the witnesses’ testimony fits into the broader universe of reports relating to UAPs, what parts reflect serious policy problems and which don't, and how to separate the wheat from the chaff in the broader UAP debate.

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