Episódios
-
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, UFO investigators, seeing lights around Area 51, SETI salvationalism, extraterrestrial-visitation belief as a religious movement, and more.
Works mentioned in this episode:
The book Contact by Carl Sagan
The movie Contact
The book Making Contact by Sarah Scoles
The book They Are Already Here by Sarah Scoles
The book Countdown by Sarah Scoles
The event "UAP: The Search for Clarity," at the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security, November 15, 2023
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Jay Venables of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
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 optimism, his pragmatism, his influence on pop culture in the 1980s, his role in ending the Cold War peacefully, his movies, and more.
Works mentioned in this episode:
The book Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot
The movie Kings Row
The movie Bedtime for Bonzo
The movie Knute Rockne All American
The book The Unwinding by George Packer
The book Desert Star by Michael Connelly
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Jay Venables and Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
Estão a faltar episódios?
-
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 soft power of media productions.
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Isabelle Kerby-McGowan and Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
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 images of himself Putin projects to the West and within Russia, why FDR would be great to have around right now, and more.
Works mentioned in this episode:
The book First Person by Vladimir Putin
The essay "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" by Vladimir Putin
The article "Putin's Risk Spiral," Foreign Affairs (October 26, 2022), by Peter Clement
The book Present at the Creation by Dean Acheson
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.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
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 retired military officers--play the roles of government decision-makers. Over the course of the game, they are surprised with new and increasingly perilous complications, from the spread of online propaganda to a renegade general who exhorts military service members to take up arms against their commander-in-chief. All the while, they grapple with whether the president should invoke the Insurrection Act, a fateful decision that risks undermining the government’s legitimacy at the very moment the president is trying to preserve it.
Shane Harris spoke with the film’s producer and co-director, Jesse Moss, about what inspired him to make this real-life thriller and what it tells us about the state of the union as we head into the home stretch of an election.
Articles, organizations, and television shows discussed in this episode include:
The Washington Post op-ed that inspired the war game: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/17/eaton-taguba-anderson-generals-military/
Vet Voice Foundation: https://vvfnd.org/campaigns/war-game-film/
Trailer for the film: https://wargamefilm.com/
“The Bureau”: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4063800/
More about Moss and his work: https://www.jessemoss.com/Jesse-Moss-1
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
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 community, the evolution of counterterrorism analysis since the late 1980s, motherhood and work pressures, the value of teaching, how security studies ignores lessons from more than 99 percent of human history, why a hunter-gatherer perspective illuminates security challenges better than traditional views, the limits of bumper sticker takeaways from 9/11 like "failure of imagination" and "didn't connect the dots," and more.
Works mentioned in this episode:
The book National Security Mom by Gina Bennett
The TV miniseries Catch me a Killer
The article "Of Lice and Men: America Needs to Rethink Its National Security Paradigm," Georgetown Security Studies Review (February 2024), by Gina Bennett
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.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
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 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.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
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 new book If Confirmed, knows the Senate confirmation process as well as or better than anyone alive. For half a century, he has been central to the confirmation process for military-related nominees--including more than two decades in the US Senate (as SASC Staff Director and in other roles) and more than 25 years since then as an official or unofficial confirmation adviser for the Executive Branch. He joined David Priess to talk about the Constitutional foundations of confirmation, the overall process as it has evolved from nomination through confirmation to appointment, recess appointments and their limits, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and its quirks, how a presumption of confirmation can get nominees in trouble, why senatorial holds on nominees are getting out of control, which aspects of the confirmation process need to change, and more.
Works mentioned in this episode:
The book If Confirmed by Arnold Punaro
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.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
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 that led to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump while two wars grind on with no clear sign of stopping.
Shane Harris sat down with his colleagues Courtney Kube of NBC News and Gordon Lubold of The Wall Street Journal to talk about the highlights of the conference and what people discussed on the sidelines, where the real action often happens.
Watch recordings of the security forum panels. https://www.aspensecurityforum.org/
Read more from our guests.
Courtney Kube: https://www.nbcnews.com/author/courtney-kube-ncpn3621
Gordon Lubold: https://www.wsj.com/news/author/gordon-lubold
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
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 Galactic Empire, an examination of the Empire from the perspective of an in-universe historian. Chris joined David Priess to discuss World War I-themed video games, how Star Wars creator George Lucas used history, how to get one's hands around the ever-expanded lore of Star Wars, why the movie sequels differed from published books about the aftermath of the Empire's fall, the structure and operations of the Empire, the problematic politics of the Republic, the treatment of non-human species and droids in Star Wars canonical works, controversy over the redemption of Anakin Skywalker, fan theories about the extent of Emperor Palpatine's manipulation of events and about the evidence that Jar Jar Binks was a Sith, and much more.
Works mentioned in this episode:
The Star Wars canon, across all media
Works in Star Wars Legends (formerly the Star Wars Expanded Universe)
The Chatter episode National Security Insights from Board Games, with Volko Ruhnke
The book British, French and American Relations on the Western Front, 1914-1918 by Chris Kempshall
The book The First World War in Computer Games by Chris Kempshall
The book The History and Politics of Star Wars by Chris Kempshall
The book Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire by Chris Kempshall
The Sharpe Series of books by Bernard Cornwell
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.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
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 privacy and opt-out information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
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 and hidden during the war.
Professor Kathy Peiss, who teached in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, joined host David Priess to discuss this, and more, including many stories from her compelling book Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe. They talked about the field of American Studies, her family connection that led her to study librarians and spies in World War II, the World War I-era connections between librarians and national security matters, the cooperation in the early 1940s between America's emerging intelligence efforts and the Library of Congress, extraordinary women who worked to gather materials in war-torn Europe, advances in microfilm technology and use as a result of their efforts, tensions between the US and UK in open source collection, the vital role Lisbon played in information hunting during the war, unique aspects of the material acquisition and preservation effort as the war ended, the heated debate over the destruction of Nazi books, challenges involved in the return of recovered materials, and more. Including zoot suits. Yes, really.
Works mentioned in this episode:
The book Information Hunters by Kathy Peiss
The movie The Monuments Men
The book The Monuments Men by Robert Edsel and Bret Witter
The book The Hunter by Tana French
The book Dr. No by Percival Everett
The book World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence by Mark Stout
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 privacy and opt-out information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
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 libertarianism and the Libertarian Party. Mangu-Ward is the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, the leading publication on libertarian thought and ideas. She started her journalism career in 2000 as an intern at Reason and later worked at The Weekly Standard and The New York Times. Her writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other publications.
Political philosophers, publications, and novel state concepts discussed in this episode include:
Ayn Rand https://aynrand.org/
Fusionism https://reason.com/2021/02/10/is-there-a-future-for-fusionism/
Friedrich Hayek https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friedrich-hayek/
The Yale Free Press
Students for a Democratic Society https://www.pbs.org/opb/thesixties/topics/politics/newsmakers_1.html
Prospera https://www.prospera.co/
Read and listen to more of Mangu-Ward’s work:
https://reason.com/people/katherine-mangu-ward/
https://reason.com/podcasts/the-reason-roundtable/
https://twitter.com/kmanguward?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
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 about how she came to study online information flows, how they work, and how she and her work came to be the subject of one herself.
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
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 president, the America First movement, Roosevelt's chaotic approach to intelligence, FDR's popular legacy, and more.
Works mentioned in this episode:
The book Awakening the Spirit of America by Paul Sparrow
The book The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
The book K is for Killing by Daniel Easterman
The book Those Angry Days by Lynne Olson
The podcast Ultra
The book Prequel by Rachel Maddow
The book The Wave of the Future by Anne Lindbergh
The book An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The book The Killing Shore by K. A. Nelson
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
In the wake of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union set off on the great space race, competing to see which super power could put the first human in space and eventually land them on the Moon. As historian John Strausbaugh writes, that race should have been over before it even started.
Strausbaugh’s new book, The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, is a harrowing and frequently hilarious account of how political leaders and engineers slapped together a space program with little apparent concern for the lives of the cosmonauts they hurled into Earth’s orbit. Moscow blustered about the size of its rockets and the triumph of its space pioneers. But that patriotic rhetoric hid the true nature of a program that was harried and haphazard, and whose leaders weren’t quite sure how to return their pilots to Earth after launching them into space.
The Soviet space program stands in stark contrast, Strausbaugh told Shane Harris, to the methodical and comparatively risk-averse NASA program, which eventually overtook its rival.
Books, historical figures, and near-death space walks discussed in this episode include:
The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-strausbaugh/the-wrong-stuff/9781541703346/?lens=publicaffairs
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312427566/therightstuff
Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir by Jerry Linenger https://www.amazon.com/Off-Planet-Surviving-Perilous-Station/dp/007136112X
Sergei Korolev https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/sergei-korolev-life-history-timeline
Yuri Gagarin https://www.pbs.org/redfiles/rao/gallery/gagarin/index.html
Alexi Leonov https://time.com/5802128/alexei-leonov-spacewalk-obstacles/
More about John Strausbaugh:
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/contributor/john-strausbaugh/?lens=twelve
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
Raised in Mā’ohi Nui (French Polynesia), Dr. Anaïs Maurer is assistant professor of literature at Rutgers University and author of The Ocean on Fire. Her research and writing, including this book, have explored the intersection of the legacy of colonial powers' massive nuclear detonations in Oceania, critical threats from climate change, and the stories the people of Oceania tell about it all.
David Priess chatted with Maurer about her experience growing up in Oceania, the scope of the nuclear detonations in the region, how the people of Oceania have addressed radiation effects through stories, why cultural resilience has remained a greater theme than individualism or victimhood, how these narratives inform our current era of climate change, and more.
Works mentioned in this episode:
The book The Ocean on Fire by Anaïs Maurer
The book Quand le cannibale ricane by Paul Tavo
The short story "Eden" in the collection Vai: La Rivière au ciel sans nuages by Ra'i Chaze
The book The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera
The visual art French Apocalypse Now by Cronos
The Coconut poetry series by Teresa Teaiwa
The book Pensées insolentes et inutiles by Chantal Spitz
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
Tim Alberta is an American journalist and author, and son of an evangelical pastor. Following his father’s death in 2019, Alberta began a four year journey, talking to American evangelicals ranging from megachurch pastors who preach to thousands to pastors at churches with a few dozen congregants to understand the schism occurring in the American evangelical community. His book “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” puts American evangelicalism under a microscope as Alberta grapples with how the community he grew up in has changed.
Lawfare Associate Editor Anna Hickey spoke to Alberta about what led him to write this book, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the evangelical community, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, what Croatian theologist Miroslav Volf warns about creeping totalitarianism that results from religion, how evangelicals talk about Christian nationalism, and more.
Among the works mentioned in this episode:
The book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” by Tim AlbertaReporting in The Atlantic by Jennifer SeniorChatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was recorded by Noam Osband and produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
Migration has always been a part of humanity's story. It will continue to be so long after any of us now living are gone. Population shifts in the coming century, spurred by climate change, are on track to become more extreme than at any point in our history--with hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people on the move.
For this episode, David Priess spoke with Gaia Vince, self-described former scientists and author of the book Nomad Century (among other works), about various aspects of climate change-driven mass migration, including perceptions of borders across history, attitudes toward climate change mitigation vs. adaptation, why the "Dubai model" isn't a global solution, demographic shifts in the global north, migration as a cause of evolutionary and cultural development, myths about migrants and jobs and wages, nurses from the Philippines as a case study, how enlightened leadership can guide the most productive migration outcomes, and much more.
Works mentioned in this episode:
The book Transcendence by Gaia Vince
The book Nomad Century by Gaia Vince
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
David Ignatius has worked at the Washington Post for more than 35 years in various roles and won many awards. He has written a column on foreign affairs for 25 years and reported some of the most significant national security stories over the last couple of decades. And he has done it while pumping out best-selling spy thrillers.
Lawfare Research fellow Matt Gluck spoke with Ignatius about his newest spy thriller, Phantom Orbit, which is a story of intelligence and the advance of space technology in the age of intensified geopolitical competition between the U.S., China, and Russia. They spoke about Ignatius’s character development in the book, what the book reveals about the new strategic space race, gender in the Central Intelligence Agency, and scientific discovery, among other things.
For more about David:
His book “Phantom Orbit”David’s Twitter PageChatter 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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Mostrar mais
