Guest
Chatter: Intelligence Analysis, Intuition, and Precognition, with Carmen Medina Lawfare Dec 26, 2024 Chatter 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. Chapters (auto-generated): 00:00 - Introduction 01:20 - Welcome Carmen Medina 03:35 - Carmen CIA career 06:42 - Middle East and Africa 09:05 - Midpoint 10:40 - Coordination 14:10 - Hezbollah 17:50 - Feedback 19:59 - Management 23:07 - Gulf War 23:50 - British Military 25:00 - Cabinet Office 25:50 - Target 27:06 - Joint Intelligence Process 28:05 - The Perfect Job 30:13 - Global Issues 32:36 - How did you become fascinated by techology 34:02 - Thinking can be mechanical 36:17 - You should be lucky 37:31 - Digital technology 40:35 - Strategic assessments 43:14 - How to identify emerging issues 48:07 - Intelligence blogging and intellipedia 52:59 - Analysis has to be rigorous 56:30 - Lack of insight Original from here:
