After more than three years, Chatter is ending its run. In this episode, Shane and David reflect on the diverse range of topics at the frontiers of national security that this podcast has explored—from spy fiction to lessons of history, from climate change to the visual and musical arts, and from sports and culture to the practice of intelligence. Along the way, they refer back to many of the podcast’s brilliant guests while lamenting conversations yet unrealized and specific issues yet unaddres...
Dec 31, 2024•1 hr 38 min•Season 1Ep. 167
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 ...
Dec 24, 2024•1 hr 48 min•Season 1Ep. 166
Shane Harris makes no secret about his love for the film version of this Cold War submarine thriller, based on the Tom Clancy novel. It’s his favorite movie. So he was delighted to welcome fellow obsessive Katherine Voyles to the podcast. A PhD in English, Voyles writes about national security in culture, as well as the culture of national security. She and Shane talked about why they love the movie, their favorite scenes and characters, and how the story influenced--maybe even created--an entir...
Dec 17, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 165
International politics and security expert Dr. Ben Tallis, who now directs the Berlin-based Democratic Strategy Initiative, joined David Priess to discuss the challenges of German grand strategy since 1945, the country's musical culture in the 1950s and 1960s, the origins and evolution of Kraftwerk and its members' effort to reconceptualize German identity, the band's influence on musicians globally, U2 and post-Cold War Europe, how Germany became the most respected country in the world by 2020,...
Dec 10, 2024•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 164
Sherri Goodman was the first Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Environmental Security and has worked on issues around climate change, the environment, and security for more than 35 years. She joined David Priess to discuss her work on the staff of the Senate Armed Service Committee starting in the 1980s, her impressions of Senator Sam Nunn, her duties as the first Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Environmental Security), the campaign to clean up the Defense Department's nuclear-related fac...
Dec 03, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 163
Rachel Shelden is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Richards Civil War Center at Penn State University. She joined David Priess to talk about the disputed presidential election of 1876 and how the political system found a way to avoid widespread violence and another civil war while resolving it in 1877. They discussed Abraham Lincoln's huge impact on kids growing up in Illinois, the status of Reconstruction by 1876, US political culture in the late 19th century, Rutherford Hayes...
Nov 26, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Season 1Ep. 162
Donald Trump is going back to the White House and is already busy stocking his future Cabinet. Shane Harris sat down with two of The Washington Post’s best political reporters to talk about Trump’s victory, some of his initial choices for top national security positions--which are drawing extraordinary controversy--and what we might expect in Trump’s second term. Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey covered Trump’s first term in office as White House correspondents. They also covered his latest campaig...
Nov 19, 2024•46 min•Season 1Ep. 161
As the US tries to come to grips with a resurgence of political violence in recent years, it's instructive to look at how the norm against political violence eroded during the late Roman Republic and contributed to ultimately autocratic rule. Catherine Steel, Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow, specializes in the political history of the Roman Republic and its institutional structures and has written books and articles about the period. She joined David Priess to discuss her path...
Nov 12, 2024•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 160
It’s Election Day, but we’re not talking about the campaign. Shane Harris welcomes Tim Naftali back to the show to talk about Americans’ fascination with the presidency. When did the “modern presidency” begin? When did voters and the press become fixated on presidents’ private lives? And what do we get wrong about the nation’s highest office? Naftali, a presidential historian, was last on Chatter in June 2022 to talk about Watergate, a subject on which he’s one of the country’s leading experts. ...
Nov 05, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 159
Mark Pomar served as assistant director of the Russian Service at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, director of the USSR Division at the Voice of America, executive director of the Board for International Broadcasting. He joined David Priess to talk about the origins of US government-funded international broadcasting, differences between RFE/RL and VOA, tensions between strategists and purists over the radios' content, the impacts of detente and of Reagan's more hawkish approach, KGB infiltration...
Oct 29, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 158
Professor Sanford Levinson has written extensively about the fragility of the Constitution. A likely contested election, AI, and ongoing gridlock makes his long-stemming concerns all the more relevant. In this episode of Chatter, Kevin Frazier, a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, sat down with Sandy, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law to explore how Sandy's thinking about the need for a wholesale revision of the Constitution has evolved, whether or not the Supreme Court is t...
Oct 22, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 157
The Earth's oceans differ from its land areas in many ways, including the historically powerful norm of "freedom of the seas." David Priess hosted David Bosco, Executive Associate Dean and Professor at Indiana University's Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, for a discussion about the origins and core principles of the freedom of the seas concept, Hugo Grotius, the practice of maritime commerce from ancient times until now, the three mile "cannon-shot" rule of territorial ...
Oct 15, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 156
Stoicism is having a moment.The ancient philosophy--which posits that you can’t control events, but you can control how you respond to them--has lately been embraced by self-help gurus and tech bros. But Nancy Sherman writes that the tenets of Stoicism have long found a receptive audience in “the military mind.” Whether they know it or not, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines are guided by many of the principles espoused by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Sherman, a professor at Georgetown Uni...
Oct 08, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 155
Conspiracy theories about supposed Jewish control of global finance and politics have been circulating and influencing popular culture for centuries, with the spotlight often falling on the Rothschild family. Author Mike Rothschild (no relation), who has researched and written about the phenomenon in his book Jewish Space Lasers , joined David Priess to discuss the appeal of conspiracy theories overall, the genesis of the Rothschilds' wealth, legends about the family's involvement in the Battle ...
Oct 01, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 154
The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in January 1986 riveted millions of Americans, who watched the horrific event live on television. What they didn’t know then was that the tragedy was largely preventable, a disastrous result of hubris and “magical thinking” as much as flawed engineering. Journalist Adam Higginbotham’s new book, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space,” is a definitive account of what went wrong, and how NASA failed to learn from its own...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 153
Science journalist Sarah Scoles has written extensively about astronomy and the UFO community, including in her 2021 book They Are Already Here . She joined David Priess to discuss how scientists look at ETs, pop cultural takes on first contact with extraterrestrials, the incredible influence of Carl Sagan's Contact , the Allan Hills meteorite, the evolution over time of beliefs about aliens contacting humans, how the Roswell myth emerged, the International UFO Congress, the Mutual UFO Network, ...
Sep 17, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 152
Council on Foreign Relations fellow, Washington Post columnist, and author of military history books Max Boot has just completed a definitive biography of Ronald Reagan, eleven years after starting his research and writing for it. He joined David Priess to talk all about Reagan, including his appeal as a biography subject, his World War II experience, his speech preparation, his turn from New Deal Democrat to right-wing Republican, his path to electoral politics, his management style, his optimi...
Sep 10, 2024•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 151
Walt Hickey is the Deputy Editor for Data and Analysis at Insider News, and the author of You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything . His book explores the power of entertainment to change our beliefs, how we see ourselves, and how nations gain power.He joined Eugenia Lostri, Lawfare 's Fellow in Technology Policy and Law, to talk about how we use media to express our societal apprehensions, the ways in which the military, NASA and the CIA collaborate with Hollywood, and the so...
Sep 03, 2024•1 hr 31 min•Season 1Ep. 150
For more than 40 years, Peter Clement has studied Russian political culture and leaders--serving for most of that time as an analyst, manager, and executive at the CIA before his retirement in 2018. He has PhD in Russian history, teaches at Columbia University, and has thought long and hard about what makes Vladimir Putin tick. He joined David Priess to discuss his road to studying Russia as a career, the art of Kremlinology, Putin's rise, Putin's feelings about Ukraine across the decades, the i...
Aug 27, 2024•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 149
It’s January 6, 2025. Congress has convened to certify electoral votes in the presidential election. But members of the U.S. military are in revolt, throwing their support behind the losing candidate. The legitimate president huddles in the Situation Room with his top advisers and Cabinet. They have six hours to prevent violent protests from exploding into civil war. That’s the dire scenario imagined in the new documentary “War Game.” Real-world experts--including former elected officials and re...
Aug 20, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 148
Gina Bennett had a remarkable intelligence career of more than three decades, focusing on counterterrorism even before the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and continuing to apply that expertise long after 9/11. She has written a book about how national security and parenting lessons reinforce each other, taught students at Georgetown University, and mentored women entering national security careers. She joined David Priess to talk about her path into and through the intelligence communi...
Aug 13, 2024•1 hr 34 min•Season 1Ep. 147
On this week’s show, Lawfare’s Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sits down with longtime Democratic lawyer Bob Bauer to discuss his mémoire of political lawyering, “The Unraveling Reflections on Politics Without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis.” Bauer, a longtime Lawfare contributing editor, discusses his career as a litigating street fighter on behalf of Democratic Party causes and some of the regrets he has about party lawyering in an era of rising polarization. Chatter is a production of Lawfare...
Aug 06, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 146
At the start of every presidential administration, the nominees for more than 1,000 civilian positions require Senate confirmation. A large number of those are in the Department of Defense, with confirmation responsibility going to the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC). And whether it's a new administration or not, the committee processes dozens of civilian nominations for typical turnover reasons and thousands of military promotions as part of regular order. Arnold Punaro, author of the ne...
Jul 30, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Season 1Ep. 145
This week, we’re at the Aspen Security Forum, the annual gathering of national security and foreign policy heavyweights. The conference regularly draws senior government and military officials from the United States and around the world to chew over the big issues of the day, and this time we had a full plate. It’s not exactly hardship duty escaping to a glamorous mountain paradise. But the real world hardly felt far away. Questions linger about the November elections and the security failure th...
Jul 23, 2024•50 min•Season 1Ep. 144
The Star Wars universe gets a lot of attention for its lightsabers, space battles, and witty droids. But over the decades, a rich lore has developed around its history and politics. Dr. Chris Kempshall researches and writes at the intersection of real-world history, with a focus on the First World War, and the Star Wars universe. His books include The History and Politics of Star Wars , which analyzes various aspects of Star Wars compared to our world, and Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Gal...
Jul 16, 2024•2 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 143
Joseph Cox is an award-winning investigative journalist and the co-founder of 404 Media. He is also the world’s leading reporter on the FBI's Anom sting operation, a topic he has written about in the new book, Dark Wire: The Incredbile True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever . Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad. See acast.com/privacy for...
Jul 09, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 143
As the Second World War started, an unsung cadre of US librarians and other information management professionals was making its way to Europe to acquire printed material that could help American analysts understand international threats. As the war went on, the mission of these experts expanded to also include an unprecedented effort to locate, preserve, and ultimately decide what to do with millions of printed items of Nazi propaganda--and with the books and documents that Germany had seized an...
Jul 02, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 142
Libertarianism doesn’t fit easily on the traditional left-right spectrum of American politics. The philosophy upholds personal liberty as a core value. What does it have to say about matters of foreign policy and national security, which encompass ideas about self-defense but also protection of the state? Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Shane Harris to discuss the libertarian view on war and diplomacy, how it approaches the question of nation-state conflicts, and the differences between liber...
Jun 25, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 141
Renée DiResta is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality . Until the other day, she was one of the brains behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she did pioneering work studying Internet information streams how they generate. The day before this podcast was recorded, news broke that Stanford was shutting down—or revamping—the SIO, and DiResta is no longer associated with it. In this conversation with Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes, DiResta talks ab...
Jun 18, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 140
Paul Sparrow, who served as Director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum from 2015 to 2022, has written the book Awakening the Spirit of America about the war of words between FDR and Charles Lindbergh in 1940-41. He joined host David Priess to discuss his path to the FDR Library, the history of presidential libraries, how the Roosevelt-Lindbergh war of words reveals much about the American experience before and during the Second World War, why Lindbergh never ran for pr...
Jun 11, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 139
