Intelligence Analysis, Intuition, and Precognition, with Carmen Medina

Welcome to Chatter. I'm David Priest. This week, former senior intelligence officer and author, Carmen Medina, on intelligence analysis, intuition and precognition. If Han Solo, when he says I have a bad feeling about this, is correct eight times out of ten, you want to pay attention to that. And we treat all these hard to quantify mental thinking, cognition qualities. We treat all of them with indifference. You know, I believe that inevitably, if organizations study intuition, they will stumble onto people that appear to have some ability that we might call precognition. Analysis is writing great history in real time. You learn exactly why something happened. What were the causality loops? What were the odd, little quirky personality moments that led to this happening rather than that? Carmen, welcome to Chatter. David, thanks for having me. I think I mentioned this when I texted you about doing this. When Shane and I started this podcast going back three years ago now, we were designing it as something that wouldn't be looking just at the core issues of national security, but looking at what we thought of as the frontiers of national security. So where national security intersects with culture and arts and science and history and a bunch of things that weren't being covered in depth with interesting people. Our tagline was weekly long form conversations with fascinating people at the creative edges of national security. And I had in mind you literally I can show you the page we did where we started thinking of good guests to start with. And Carmen Medina was at the top of my list. And then I just held on to it ever since. And I found that, you know, it's always been on my mind because you're a fascinating person who has been working at the creative edges of national security or your peak chatter personally. So that puts a lot of pressure on you. This conversation will be our last with a guest because we are wrapping up chatter after it's three year run. And I wanted to have you as the final guest because of that initial feeling I had, but also because I knew any chat with you has always been personally enriching and informative for me. And I want to share that with others. So that's a long preamble, but it's my way of saying thank you so much for agreeing to do that. You would have ruined my plan if you would have said no for any reason. Yeah. But let's talk a little bit foundationally about your experiences inside intelligence and then beyond as a way to get to some core issues that I think we can really hit some interesting points about analysis, about intuition and creativity and even pre-cognition. So let's start with your CIA career. You worked on several different analytic accounts as an analyst and as a manager in your first 10 years or so. Can you just walk through that so people geographically get a sense of the issues you look at? Right. I mean, I can't help but mention or note that thinking about national security primarily in geographic terms is an interesting bias in and of itself, right? But I ended up at CIA when I realized I didn't want to be a lawyer. And even though as a college debater, that seemed to be where the momentum was taking me. And I was really interested in the world. And I started CIA as a graduate intern which many people do. And I got hired into the Ops Center, which is the 24 hour, 24 by 7 watch office. And I got put on the Middle East Africa desk. And this is before, well, it's 1978, so it's well before the internet. And well before analysts had computers on their desks. And so the person manning the watch office was usually the first person to see some piece of cable traffic or some used bulletin. You know, we had to ticker tape machines, you know, the little thing, thing, ding, ding, some news alert was coming in. But it's not just the wire services, right? You're also getting, you know, human reporting cable. Of course, no, we're getting all the classified information. Okay. And it's coming first into this place. So I was working on Middle East and Africa. So I think we had a Soviet Union and Europe desk and probably an Asia and Latin America desk. Because as you know, because you had an agency career, oddly, Asia and Latin America kept getting paired up. No, no, why? Really? And Africa kept getting passed around between different offices. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of sent a year sent there. Yeah. There's no Saturday, then we're Sudan ended up because it would end up in Africa. It would end up in the Middle East. You know, no one knew what to do with it. Anyway, because of that background after about, I don't know, 15 months in the up center, I end up getting pitched by the Africa division of the directorate of analysis to come work there. And so I did. And I worked my first to count was Botswana, Swaziland and Lesutu. And soon I moved on to South Africa, which was a blessing. Because this was South Africa in the 1980s during the apartheid era. And this was, it was like a fundamental issue where you really were having to analyze sort of the fundamental motivations of humans. Yeah. You know, their racism, their receptivity to change, their willingness to take risk, their willingness to engage in violence. Right. Those are really primeval kind of things. And it's a very different center and a very different focus point for analysis than counting tanks. Right. And I'm not diminishing that. Exactly. And that's the point I'm trying to make. So different. Yeah. It's so different. And so I did that for about three years or so. And then, you know, typical bureaucratic stupid stuff goes on. And, you know, I don't know, I don't like my manager anymore, you know, all this stupid stuff goes on in the Middle East people come calling. And there you go, Carmen, we think you're smart. Why don't you come work for us instead? And it didn't strike me. And it clearly didn't strike them as odd that why would someone working on Sub-Saharan Africa be fungible to go work on, on like Lebanon? And the Palestinians, but off I went and I ended up there working Lebanon the year everybody was killed. So the year the marine barracks before the marine barracks our embassy was attacked, bombed, and we lost one of the great legendary CIA case officers of all time Bob Ames. And so I did that for a couple of years. And I will say yet again that these issues, the kind of dynamics that were driving the Middle East at that time were sort of prime evils, sort of fundamental. But there was more tank counting and stuff like that going on because they actually fought wars. And then I returned to Sub-Saharan Africa and I was asked to take on a project so it's 1984. Okay. And so I started in 78, so I've covered about six years. And the people working on Africa I think forever frustrated that Africa did not get the policymakers attention. Asked me and another analyst to write like a capstone paper on Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s. So we were just being asked to look like six years ahead really, maybe 10. Let's say our target was the midpoint. Which for context is a long term analytic product for our inflation that's got a daily book going to the president. Yes, it was such a new project. So we got six months to do it in. And we decided we needed to write two papers because South Africa was just such a dominant topic. So we did South Africa and then we did the rest of Africa. And I remember at the time us trying to think of how could Sub-Saharan Africa become important? Was there some rare mineral that was going to be found? At the time the internet didn't exist because now this idea of rare earth minerals is you know, we sort of had the idea but we just you know we didn't we didn't know where the future was taking us in terms of what would become important. And and then the the big thing that we got basically right was on the paper on South Africa when we wrote that by 1990 the transition to black majority rule will be well underway if not complete. I that is the men might as well memory of the opening sentence or the key judgment of of that paper. And oh man we had such a hell of a time getting it coordinated because this was clearly a minority. Describe a describe coordination for people not familiar with the the process there? Well you know one of the problems with collaboration is that we conflate collaboration with deconfliction. And so coordination means that you share your draft with everybody else who's working on that project that legitimately you should be considering their perspective. So that would be all the other analysts working on South Africa. It might be your colleagues in the directorative operations probably not sharing it with anybody outside a CIA for no real good reason other than that it was just just a CIA product. And and back then again before the internet coordinating on a real-time basis with other agencies was kind of almost impossible right. When did you start? Yeah I started in the late 90s and by then we had we did have connectivity but even then yes we still had some of the legacies of non-coordination that technology allowed but there were always excuses not to do it right right exactly and you know there were no rules about coordination. I mean there were rules about coordination when you're dealing with a product like an official national intelligence estimate. And you had coordinating body the national intelligence officer whose role was to kind of spread magic dust on the coordination process and reconcile different views. But here it was mostly a courtesy. And very personal right. Yes and very personal. I don't know if it was true when the time frame you're talking about but some you know 10 years later it was very personal. It was oh on this account that I'm working on there is this woman at NSA or you know this guy at INR at state and you know we we coordinated with with them on almost everything because they we just got it we got each other right right that wasn't because there was some rule from on high saying you must coordinate with these are exactly there were some people who legitimately you wanted to hear what they thought because you knew they're going to have an interesting perspective they're going to improve what I've done. It made our thinking better. But there are other people that you thought were less than useful and you would play games you know they would get the paper several days later closer to the deadline the idea. So please provide comments on this 40-pig paper by 30 minutes from now. Yeah exactly. Yeah. And so that was what coordination was. So we had a heck of a time coordinating that judgment. I think it's fair to say that no other analyst working on South Africa. They weren't there yet. Believe that. And I know the paper had some kind of disclaimer. This was back in the 80s when your your names were actually you know you had author credit. Yep. And I should say so I am very proud of that project and I should go back to the Middle East thing and say another project that I'm very proud of is I wrote the first national intelligence daily feature. So it was like 10 paragraphs on his bala and I actually called the piece what is his bala what is it. And so we started to see this term you know show up referred to and we just didn't know what it was. What is it? Is it you know just we literally is it just a term that people are using like my lovely comrades or is it actually an organ is it you know what is it. And I think at the time it was his bala didn't know what it was. It was in the process of becoming. Okay. So I wrote that. I wrote that. I'm going to take this opportunity to do something that is inherently unkind but I'll ask your forgiveness. I'm going to put you on the spot to answer a question that's been on my mind. In most of the media and some parts of government adjacent work think tanks and all that. Hezbollah is spelled with the Persian transliteration of H-E-Z-B-O-L-L-A-H. My experience that I recall and maybe I'm wrong but I seem to remember at CIA and I think the official US government name is spelled with the Arabic transliteration because it's taking part in you know Lebanon primarily and originally and it's H-I-Z-B-A-L-L-A-H. Are you the one who is actually responsible for doing the latter spelling in intelligence production. I did the latter spelling in that piece. Yes. And I remember spending you know you know how flawed our memories can be but I actually remember a sentence or two in my feature trying to figure out if it was one word or or or you know party of God you know what you know grammatically what was it right and that actually is what contributed to the confusion as to what it was because you would you would get it spelled in the traffic all sorts of different ways you know and you'd go right party of God do they mean that literally what is that you know yeah so kind of a fun analytic memory that was a probably good exercise to do do you know anything about the readership because my experience has often been that most busy policymakers will take time to read the one pager and if it's anything longer than a one page like if it's a long paper first of all it's a rare policymakers who will read it and even the ones who want to might not get to it right away but they usually will read the one page summary so what feedback did you get if any on 10 long paragraphs. I don't remember any I don't remember any feedback on that piece. What a shame. I was I remember being very proud of it I read you know I had a lot of authorship pride it was my idea to write it I knew it had to be written you know we had to start somewhere trying to figure out what it was but I don't remember any feedback. I do remember feedback on that South Africa piece which I was told by INR was sent you know directly to George Schultz in his to be red folder and and that at least he read the key judgments and he said that is correct I believe this is correct so that that feedback I got but I don't I don't know whatever happened to my and this is before the era when it really was the mid and especially late 90s and you know because you were a huge part of that effort which we'll get to about getting more feedback from policymakers having more briefers more interaction publishing products when ready to meet them where they are instead of forcing them into our 24 hour cycle and tick-tock of the day this this is before that so getting direct feedback from a secretary of state was not as common as it would become later. No I'm not it I mean it was so unusual and I got to tell you in addition to writing for the daily publications and then writing this long paper that I described we also had like a magazine format called the Africa Review and I think various geographic components had similar magazine kind of things and I remember someone once reporting that they saw somebody obviously a policymakers reading the Africa Review on the Metro. Oh no that's what and I was like oh that's a different kind of feedback and I remember thinking on the feedback question well at least we know it was being read and that's good positive from it right yeah do I um do I recall correctly that not long after this that you did a tour in London I actually after the Middle East yes after the Middle East I returned to do that big paper on South Africa and then I became the South Africa team chief how did you like management when you started because that's a that's a different ballgame yes and it was tremendous fun and we had incredibly talented people and uh I just briefly for like six months was a deputy division chief on Central America oh what a horrible horrible I will never I mean after working on two fantastic compelling sets of issues to work on Central America it just didn't work basically you couldn't root for anybody I mean that sounds wrong but we're analysts are human beings right yeah I mean you're doing objective analysis but you're still spending you know eight nine ten twelve hours a day soaking in this stuff and you can't help but absorb something from that something about this right yeah in Central America and and both well definitely in South Africa you could identify a solution space much less so in the Middle East no solution space but even even more hopeless in Central America yeah seem where people were fighting over literally nothing I mean there you know none of those countries have enough economy because you know it was it was just a mess anyway then I get to go to London got it and I spent three fantastic years there and at that point there I'm covering the entire world right so the areas that I did the most on was the collapse of Yugoslavia the first Iraq war and the demise of the Soviet Union yeah so this is late 80s into the early 90s yeah so I actually started in July of 1993 July of 1993 so Gennemann had already happened and what was left to occur was the first Gulf War the coup against corpuchof and the collapse of Yugoslavia but especially that first Gulf War what a time to be in London because of the the policy coordination at all levels from heads of state down through bureaucracies and you you were organizing coordinating taking part in all of that in a no-kitting shooting war yes I was at the kind of mid working level level so we had we had a senior rep and I worked under Mike Barry who of blessed memory he just passed and John Allen and who I think is still hopefully with us and healthy yeah good team yes well Mike and then John replaced him and the Gulf War began I think about 20 days well so them invaded Kuwait about 20 days after I arrived yeah August sure so people always look at these tours in London at these this is going to be great you're going to get to live it up it's a great reward for being a fantastic officer and we basically pulled six 12-hour shifts a week from that point until March you know when the hostilities ended yeah they finally sent an officer out to bulk us up maybe in the January February timeframe but I remember we you know nobody got to travel nobody got any leave we were just constantly feeding information to the the brits yeah at that time the brits had much more of a military than they do now they sort of don't really have much of a military anymore I mean the you know the functioning parts of the British military are not what they used to be they know that but so they were you know act that they had active role and significant roles and I remember once I would my routine when the shooting war first the air war began so I don't know I'm trying to remember when the air war began I kind of I kind of think it went on for like six weeks or so before yes the ground war began but the um I look at the six 15 or so I would go to the cabinet office you know and it was my turn which is usually like twice a week I go to the cabinet office to be part of their daily coordination session of their sit-wrap to their government the prime minister etc and then at seven I would just basically walk across the street to the Ministry of Defense and sit in at the seven o'clock the brief for the Ministry of Defense and whoever was there and I'm not going to name him but I still remember the story they're talking about whatever target decks had been hit the overnight and so so the guy goes such and such a place was hit you know such and such a target in Basra was hit and the the person being brief goes well who you know which country hit them who were the aviators and the briefer said the French sir and die goes that's hopeless and then and then another thing oh who was there the Italians oh the Italians which who have a tremendous reputation as aviators who knew right but they are quite well respected so that that amused me to know and I mean I just love that stuff now this this job though is different than your previous ones because you weren't creating analysis as a as a line officer and you weren't a supervisor who is editing empowering resources for analysts editing products things of that sort you're you're doing a like a liaison function to help the two governments work together right right and that's what made it such a fantastic job because I would you know the there is always an initial meeting on the draft so the way the for those of your listeners interested in the joint intelligence process every week there's a meeting of the five eyes and a series of assessments on problems in the world are delivered well before that final product is created there are working-level coordination sessions and those are the ones that I would have done and so it could be on almost anything but never about northern Ireland and I so I loved it because I would read the draft if we got it ahead of time we would send it to Washington so that our analyst could comment and then I would just sit at the table offer suggestions either because our analysts had suggested them or because I had you know as an experienced officer I had a point of view or we can fix this paper by doing this but then I would walk away and have no responsibility for doing any of the hard work and I thought this is like the most perfect job in the world you had the ideas and someone else could implement them exactly you could pontificate you could be the smartest person in the room yeah or at least think you were and walk away I think it says something really interesting about how the US UK relationship had evolved decades before you got there to create that culture where US officer is sitting in on the chick and sitting in on the Ministry of Defense meetings offering a analytic takes being part of the process and that was considered natural it wasn't a weird thing but it wasn't just us it was five eyes right New Zealand was a little compromised then so sometimes it would just be four eyes but it would be New Zealand Australia Canada US obviously the UK and the US and I developed very good friendships with all of my Commonwealth both professionally and in some cases personally my my counterparts yeah I remember you saying that when when you came back to headquarters from that job you took one of the jobs you liked least in your career you spent about what five years working on the was it called the daily economic intelligence brief well I didn't spend five years doing on that so basically I did about I don't know four jobs in 18 months okay two years and none of them were any good and you know a classic problem for people then who served away from the mothership was that reentry was very difficult and you might have been on a brilliant trajectory before you left but when you got back you know it was like nobody remembered you you're right back in it yeah and so I I mean I I served as the CIA liaison to the Department of Transportation why you may ask because Lockerbie had happened and the explosion over transportation set up an intelligence unit yeah I worked on God what was that called global issues okay where they created a new national intelligence officer for global issues I mean they were just beginning to recognize that not every issue of concern for national security conveniently broke down into what geographic region of the world certainly not by nation state borders and not exactly so you're talking truly transnational issues national issues climate pandemics all those things perhaps climate had not yet been identified but yeah we were we were deep into the age crisis so that had definitely been identified terrorism okay had been identified but yeah those were was one unhappy job after another yeah well I know you did find a happy job and what I think I remember working with you on was when you were put in charge of helping to revamp what had been the national intelligence daily the nid and by the end of the 90s it was called the the C but the senior executives intelligence brief if memory serves and there there were some issues related to it it was we're trying to get it to more policy makers trying to do it in a way that was useful to them including electronically which raised some security issues and related matters right and you were in the thick of it and again not doing core analytic work right but making sure that the analytic work that the many many many fine analysts and managers were doing was actually getting to where it needed to get to because analysis in a vacuum is useless it has to be right it has to be presented in a way policy makers can use and you were at that part describe that job and what you really took away from that in terms of how communicating analysis to policy makers matters so much yeah well yeah it's it's interesting that you frame it that way I mean I think it's it's the correct framing but it makes me wonder how exactly did that happen to me because I I somehow when I get back from London and after a series of disappointing jobs I end up becoming fascinated by technology so I knew by 96 97 I knew the internet was going to change everything for all knowledge organizations and I just became an evangelical about that for the CIA and this was a view I mean that was not only a minority view but it was a despised view by most of the organization they hated it they hated the concept of the internet and so I fell into that and then I and I'm not really sure how I fell into this but I I just became much more interested in how we think what is a good idea what is good analysis how are we persuasive what makes us persuasive and much less interested in any part of the world so I just became a well not quite a methodologist because I actually distrust reliance on methods I think that's like a false prop yeah it can be a fallback in a you know to create a thinking like this idea I you know this idea that thinking can be mechanical I find largely untrue and so the the thing that I was able to do first was to work on introducing these different ideas about how to do analysis you know using the internet you know how we didn't have to do newspaper format you know I used to love to tell my great colleague Peter Clemens who loved newspapers and this is you know 2003 I'm telling Peter newspapers are dying they're soon going to be dead and you need to stop you know you need to move away from this concept he hated it right just I mean I was I was like the antique for I think for not an insignificant number of people I was the Annie Christ on on all these ideas you were you were challenging and it's obviously it's been a theme for you over the years but you were you were challenging the orthodoxy not to be trouble but to to help the organization and what we'll get to later the book you wrote with Lois Kelly about this not directly but the themes that that you lived by called Rebels at Work where you talked about wanting to improve things that aren't working and put the organizations at risk you want to lower that risk you want to make things work better by being kind of the the person who speaks up being the person who says you need to talk about it's so hard because most of us want to please want to achieve and at some point well you should be lucky if at some point in your career your desire to keep climbing and succeeding you question it because you don't believe it's no longer the right thing to do right right that there's something more right than you getting ahead it's like a revelation when that is like a revelation right and but it's a really difficult revelation and you fight it you you you keep thinking there's a way for me to advance these ideas without hurting my career and that doesn't happen it doesn't happen and it happens to some really lucky people but it doesn't happen well I know you you can't talk about all the technology stuff but in a nutshell what changed from the mid-90s to the early 2000s in terms of using technology not not really an analysis so much but in terms of communicating it to policymakers how how did you stiff that system so we had this you know that's so what I was trying to do was use digital technology which was really an at-infancy then in the year 2000 but to use digital technology to break out of the once in the morning newspaper and to deliver our analysis as soon as it was ready to the people that needed to receive it and at that point and this is still the case today at that point most policymakers did not have the ability to receive secret information at their desk but we did have and we were growing out a series of rep jobs we would have a rep at commerce we would have a rep at the DOD we would have reps at the NSE and these people did have secure terminals and so all we were trying to do was push out as soon as it was ready the information that they needed and then they could they could then you know in a bespoke kind of way provide it to the policymakers and this wasn't that hard to do but it just seemed you know again now I can't imagine you know anyone who's below the age of 40 is going to think this sounds ridiculous but people just thought that analysis should only be done once a day as a result of a of a authoritative, carefully reviewed process and I was like well you know maybe speed is more important than 100% accuracy and of course the events of 9/11 really brought that home but it you know it is for me yes we talked about this it's like I can't I don't really even understand anymore why this was so controversial and yet it was yeah yeah but it did change the culture that is the the benefits of doing it became so clear that I mean I certainly recall within years it was just a normal course of business and it was aided by non technology in some ways it was aided by having a physical person who could be a liaison to not just look one CIA rep to the State Department but reps to different bureaus or reps to different parts of the National Security Council staff so that it also was a human endeavor of creating the relationships you know gaining the trust learning what they needed and when they needed it which analysts in cubes in the 1950s and 60s they were guessing what policymakers wanted because there was more of an institutional bias against direct communication with policymakers at the working level by the early 2000s you had a lot of interaction going on exactly so the people knew yeah and then you know I remember people making arguments like well you know you'll let the the the briefers show the piece to the secretary of commerce who knows what the briefer will say we're not in control of that process and yeah and my reaction was you know get over it you were never in control of the process the way you thought you were so just get over it yeah so you end up on the seventh floor I think you did the the the SAG group well first talk through that assessment group yeah yeah talk through strategic assessments and how at least at that time that was seen as distinct from other work you know I think that's probably what really started my serious thinking about what is good analysis and I remember going in there and their job was to scan the horizon and really look many years ahead to try to identify what were the emerging issues that were going to affect national security and I remember asking the analysts and they were all I think there was one woman maybe I remember they were all guys and why is that important they were okay I'm gonna say things that people will happily be able to criticize but there was like this thing about strategy and playing war games and playing diplomacy that seemed to attract men masculine energy more than it attracted feminine energy why is that do you have a theory David I I I'm not exactly sure I my only suspicion because now in more recent times I see much more balance on all sides of that in terms of who likes the war gaming and plays the games and also on the strategic in different types of thinking I think that's I don't know if improved is the right word but it's it's it's changed right I think where that came from back then is generally in at least the culture and the milieu I was in growing up I could play dungeons and dragons I could play risk I could play uh war games about World War II a little desktop game um none of the girls I knew did that yeah the culturally the attitude was that's kind of a boy thing to do and that kind of creates if not a path dependency at least a trend line that then affects the workplace right right so anyway all these guys so I remember asking them I um you know and since I'm really into the internet and really on top of it more so than most of my colleagues I was aware of things like the blogosphere and you know that all sorts of people were posting really interesting perspectives on what was going on in the world and what was important and that you know if you really wanted to be on the cutting edge of thinking reading the New York Times every day and foreign affairs every month was not gonna cut it and uh so I asked him well what's how tell me what your process is for for identifying emerging issues and and they had nothing good to say they just had nothing good to say uh and so I spent that 18 months I was there just just really trying to totally shake their world up and make them do different kinds of stuff you know I emphasize graphics a lot more pictures uh you know I think there's a lot of interesting stuff we can say about what our reliance on words does to our thinking you know during this recent election cycle uh I mean the Trump did not win because of the elegance and and logic of his speeches there's something else going on that we ignore at our own peril we saw that in the in the intel business in the dissemination side I certainly saw it when I was a briefer we briefed a lot of people who were disproportionately lawyers or people who did things with words and logic and all that so you already have a crowd that is bias towards wanting that kind of presentation of analysis and yet even in that crowd when you had a compelling visual when you had something that could show the evolution or the growth or the variables something having to do with a world situation and it was it was hitting a different part of their brain um you could actually see the excitement in some cases but you could you could you could hear the questions they came out you could see the physical reaction to wait a minute I don't have to read the 900th document that I'm going to read today I'm actually working at this and it's conveying meaning to me now that takes some graphic designers who are really freaking good at their jobs to take complicated ideas and express them visually but we had those people in some of those products were our best products exactly right so anyway so you know for me working with the strategic assessments group made me fundamentally question a lot of our assumptions about what is good analysis yeah and you got to take those lessons to a leadership role in the directorate of analysis I think it still was at the time um it's been you know renamed and shuffled and things but directorate of intelligence directorate of analysis same thing yeah um now you were unusual in that role for for a couple of reasons that's what people say but you know it's hard for me to judge because I'm just me I'm going to say it um it was and you look at the history of people who are running the directorate of analysis on the seventh floor not exclusively because at once in a while there will be a you know a gates but usually it's somebody who has progressed through each layer of management maybe with a policy rotation or an overseas assignment but they've gone through three four layers of management to grow into the strategic leadership role um you bounced a bit more than the average person on that track you also happen to be a Puerto Rican woman and you know you you brought change just in terms of what you represented whether you wanted to do that or not that did happen people recognize that there was change most importantly though by far the most important was you brought a sense of creativity of challenging the system from within into the leadership itself which is mind blowing for most bureaucracies and probably hair pulling frustration for you in some sense having to deal with that so talk about that experience what does it like to lead an analytic directorate that is so focused on you know producing the products following trade craft doing things so that we can't be wrong and suddenly you're in there trying to in a sense challenge the model of how people think and produce intelligence well it's such a you know that's such a hard question uh to answer in an economic way uh I was always conscious of wanting to push but not get ahead of whatever I perceive to be the consensus you know of what what the system would tolerate I think I was very lucky that I came on during a period of rapid growth after 9/11 where we hired you know boatloads of analysts and those new analysts were very sympathetic toward my energy that's you know they they wanted they this is the analytic directorate that they wanted to be part of um I was you know I was very committed to making sure that the new analyst had a voice I was so so committed to that and right around that time 2004 the blogging technologies come into the uh agency and so I decided to model a personal but at the same time professional blog so I started blogging two or three times a week and as a result well not just of me because there were you know there were other people that were trying to create this sort of continuous exchange on analytic issues this brings us all the way back to coordination where we began the conversation and um as a result I I think I believe that the blogging environment still exists in the intelligence community and I think I was I was a real contributor to that and I also said yes to intelopedia I you know I had these two guys come to me and say hey we we need to bring in the media wiki software and and create our own classified intelopedia and and I said that just sounds like the best idea ever let's do it you know but I said but we can't we have to do it surreptitiously at the start we have to not not draw too much attention to ourselves because those were the days when people were arguing that you know wikipedia was a bad idea and was going to corrupt western civilization like this when you think back on those arguments or just they're just so ridiculous and especially because a few years after that I remember I can't remember the the source of this I apologize but someone did a limited study of wikipedia and looked at a certain number of entries in wikipedia compared to and I want to say it was the encyclopedia Britannica but it was something that was curated the entries were written by experts and they found that essentially the error rate between the two was roughly the same which has a lot so I you know I so I think what did I do well I think I emphasized giving other people their voice as much as I possibly could I we know I spent a lot of time talking to the Kent school and trying to explain sort of how I saw analysis I remember using the phrase all the time we have to unpack our analysis all the time I would say we can't I remember one's Donald Rumsfeld criticized us for speaking with an inappropriate air of authority he's talking about CIA analyst 98 out of 100 people who heard that just got angry how dare he say that and I remember thinking hmm that's a really interesting point right right it's a real observation and it's a real observation it's a real observation you just had to get angry about it or you can think about where it comes from and yes and then I said you know we we sometimes don't really explain we just assert things without truly explaining or making transparent or logic and so I I was a big advocate of that yeah showing our work show our work exactly yeah that does I want to set up for some some discussion that we'll have a little bit later about intuition right and that there is a double edged sword there right if if you're unpacking your analysis and you're getting policy makers used to seeing the logical progression right we have fact X fact Y fact Z if you connect X and Y causally I'm showing my work of logic and argumentation and evidence to back up this product well that's starting to look like a mathematical proof right it's not exactly it's got caveats it's got uncertainties it's intelligence we're not talking about the known we're talking about what isn't knowable or known in full but it does create this mindset that analysis has to be rigorous to be useful when in fact sometimes if you're trying to increase understanding you're not trying to prove something but you're trying to help policymakers understand the scope of a problem right sometimes the analytic rigor isn't the most important part no it's not and you know there's just so many issues there by quantifying or documenting using language all of the points that lead up to our conclusion some factors or variables lend themselves to more documentation than others so how people are feeling is way harder to document than the number of tanks that are on the ground and yet if a particular situation is going to blow up this sort of intangible thing of how people are feeling is really critical to that and so that was attention because I thought we needed to unpack our work but we also needed to avoid only caring about the things that we could document and measure because that was limiting so back then a lot of people would talk about structured analytic techniques yes and I I greeted dislike that phrase and I would often say you know my favorite structured analytic technique is taking a walk with one of my favorite thought partners and talk about the issue the act we actually know from research that our brain our brains evolved to work well while we're in motion that you know that's what we were Savannah hunters and so this idea that we have to sit in a cubicle and write and that's what we'll lead to good analysis is inherently a flawed idea yeah but like all bureaucracies they were you know bureaucracies are into execution and so they always will favor that which they can execute consistently so the things that are harder to do the creation of great art the revelation of a really fantastic insight bureaucracies will always avoid that because they can't easily do them and and there and that's where all your problems develop yeah so did I'm gonna I think I know the answer to this but did you find it frustrating that even at the time you were there in the leadership position there were those around you and some of those in subordinate management positions who who later would take on senior roles who had the mentality of you know we can just keep pushing the analyst harder and harder to get the trade craft better and better and we will beat better analysis out of them by being so rigorous with eight layers of review of the analysis so that yes you know in a place and perfect but frankly sometimes lacking insight does a result it's just I mean I remember some of my experiences as the PDB senior reviewer so usually I would do that twice a week you know and just mention what that what that entails so the PDB has introduced the platinum product of the directorate now the DNI but it was you know the few pages of content that would be delivered to the president every morning by the presidential reefer and so there would you know it varies depending upon the president but there might be anywhere from five to ten pieces of content and you have to have a very senior person be the last reviewer frankly because we never figured out how to do quality control at scale we just I mean it's not a kind of a funny thing to say because that was the problem we were constantly working but we never figured it out yeah so the ultimate quality depended upon the biases preferences of the senior reviewer that night so and I remember you know do nothing more dreadful nothing more frightening than being there at 11.30 pm waiting for the last piece to emerge from the editorial process and the last piece might be about you know al-Qaeda or Pakistan I mean or Putin I mean it's really important piece and the piece finally arrives at your desk and it's a piece of shit it's incoherent you don't know what the heck you don't you have no idea you don't know how this happened you don't have the time to figure it out the analysts were always told to stay until your piece is done particularly a very important piece yeah and I remember on more than one occasion bringing the analyst into my office sometimes they they they were just so frightened you could tell and I said look this this isn't working I don't really know what you want to say so let's just put it aside let's take out a piece of paper this is the question tell me what you want to say yeah and we would have maybe 30 minutes and I'd say okay type it out let's go now is that is that how the the process is supposed to work you've just taken multiple layers of review and thrown them out the window I know but but my experiences those multiple layers of review did not fix yep and probably did not start with asking the analyst okay what does the president need to know about this topic yeah tell me the three things yeah yeah well is that so broken me is it still broken I don't I imagine it still is broken I'm going to guess that at least some of the time Carmen you did that and what what the analyst told you when she walked through the topic out loud and you wrote it down probably some of the time they would tell you sometimes they wouldn't but that's probably closer to the original draft they had right before the layers of review which of course raises that question well is there a role for you know more straight line publishing to policymakers you lose accountability as an organization to some degree you lose a little bit of control whatever that means but you do get better insights from some analysts and the hard part is it's not true of everyone you know you you sometimes need those layers to catch certain things from people who don't communicate the insights well so I don't know of a system that can capture both now I was a big proponent that we needed to figure out a way to provide our insights less formally you know we don't the less formal less hierarchical but still authoritative not exactly sure if that's the formula I use but I was trying to to create a distinction that we can be authoritative without hierarchy and without formal it you know we got to some of that during your time on the seventh floor when president bush this is bush junior you know it's 43 when he was starting to bring in deep dive briefers it's clearly that's what he was craving real discussions with senior analyst which yes we're guided by coordinated views but if the president of the states asks you for your insights on a related topic and you are the person who is expert on that you're not going to go back and coordinate it with a team you're going to answer the president and he seemed to get a lot out of that according to him he told me all of his advisors said everybody said that briefing process was golden for them yeah so I don't know there's just something there's something about the institutionalization of analysis and insight that just has never worked yeah and people that like to control processes keep wanting to believe that you can make that perfect I my experience is yeah and even if you can make it closer to perfect and I don't think I know there have been studies maybe you were you were in charge of some of these at one point to try to get at this I think methodologically it's almost impossible to but let's say you know what the perfect analytic piece would be and you look at each layer of review and you go back and compare it to all others you might find I'll at least say it's possible you might find that the average piece from this particular office is at 60% of where it should be when the analyst first writes it and gets it through coordination then after the team chief the first layer looks at it it gets it to 75% and then the next layer of management reviews it and typically it gets it to 85% and then the next three layers get it you know to 88 and then they get it to 90 and then they get it to 91 that logic can push you both directions that logic can push you where some people went well we need nine layers of review because we got to get it to 100 or at least 99 or it can be what's wrong with you you're spending hours and hours and the taxpayer resources going to all of these people looking at the same three paragraphs all day long is only getting you from say 85% after a couple of layers to 95% what are we doing here right that there's no quick answer to that but that even that assumes that you can measure something in terms of what is the platonic ideal of a finished intelligence product and I'm not sure we ever got there no and one of the ways I like to describe what is analysis one of the formulations I would use is analysis is writing great history in real time if you look at great histories often written decades if not centuries after the event you learn exactly why something happened what were the causality loops what were the odd little quirky personality moments that led to this happening rather than that ideally that's what you want that is what great analysis is is writing great history yeah in real time that is rarely achieved it it's rare but I saw it when I was briefing the PDB there were days I mean there were many days when I would open up the book look at the drafts of the pieces I would be briefing once they got printed and I would shake my head and say this is the best we can do right yes but there were probably just as many days where one of the pieces in the book I would read it and I would say oh that's why we do this like this this is why we invest billions of dollars as a country in this because this is delivering insight to the president in an actionable way on a topic that needs addressing and it I'm not going to say it totally made up for the the feeling of the the first batch but it did it in many ways it said okay you're going to have some of those you're going to have somewhere it's a status report where it's kind of a a gistening of what's known and doesn't really deliver impactful insight but the experience of doing that and working those muscles can get you to jump that high bar once in a while right yes and that is that's that's a tricky part because a lot of what analysis or intelligence does can seem really rather mundane and it is in fact the form of practice yeah to try to get better and better until you more can more reliably deliver stuff that is not ordinary yeah we we hinted earlier Carmen and I want to make it more explicit now at this tension between you know very systematic rigorous analytic thinking that is presented almost like a legal brief compared to intuition and the role of intuition in the analytic process and how can you have a rigorous tradecraft that eliminates or reduces many you know pathological biases to good analysis while still keeping the intuitive spark you've thought about this and written some of it I would love for you to write even more but you've you've thought about this more than anyone else I know for many years how do you start thinking through that issue of capturing intuition without losing some of what decades have taught us leads to good analysis with logic and argumentation as well then you can't amine wrote a great book make close to 15 years ago now there's this thinking that's the flow yeah and the book for me had a tremendous impact because for the first time he described something that when I read it I intuitively knew that was true that we have you know we have like these heuristic things that allow us to do things very quickly and then sometimes we have the time in luxury and the necessity to break it down and really understand it the now I've grown now I've come to learn that the book was mistaken in a way and I think he admitted it in that or it was misunderstood in that our intuition which is our system one our immediate way or brain reacts to something that our intuition is inferior to our analytic thinking habits if anything the reverse is true but I think the healthier way to think about it is that both are important and both contribute you know I've had any any any number of moments in my analytic career when I when I had an insight that I could not explain at the time how I had it or even why I thought it was important and yet it proved to be important so when I was working on South Africa I remember you know the whole thing was you know will the whites ever compromise will the blacks ever be able to bring effective pressure to bear and I remember a garbage worker strike in a town that it was called at the time portalsmith there's no one has a different name now and the strike got so horrible that the white city government finally sat down to negotiate with the uh black and colored those are their terms garbage workers to negotiate an end to the strike and I remember when I read that unlike all my other colleagues when I read that I went this is very significant and I would try to tell them this is very significant and they would go why it doesn't mean anything they got a couple of concessions who cares I struggled to tell the why it was significant I couldn't articulate it but I knew my little brain was tickling and going this matters in retrospect now I know now I can articulate what I was noticing my intuition was noticing oh if these white people are willing to sit down with blacks to negotiate about this when they've never been willing to sit down with blacks to negotiate about anything maybe the sky's the limit maybe maybe this is the thing that will break through the barrier and there's a lot of like physics I mean this literally involved in this so for example the idea from complexity theory that change is not linear but in fact change tends to go through steps yeah you know sideways up sideways up sideways down then up you know and we tended to assume an analytic thinking tends to assume a nice clean linear thing you know we love those two by two quadrants that we use an analysis and one of my pet peeves about these two by two quadrants is who says the four squares are even in size right yeah who you know who says the lines are free I mean why don't they baggain all our curvy right yeah so you have to be open you have to listen when a thought enters your mind you have to ask yourself why did it come in and how did it get there and did my intuitive much more powerful part of my brain make connections that I myself am not yet able to articulate but it's like annoying you know it refuses to be ignored right let me push you on that you just said and I agree with so much of what you say there but you just said when you have the thought you have to know where it comes from and how you got there and I want to push back on it a little bit and say maybe right it's certainly nice it satisfies my intellectual curiosity to know why when I'm trying to write something and I'm struggling all the sudden I get this idea this analogy and and it actually makes it work I'm curious about how I got there but I'm not sure I need to know if I got there if it actually does create insight if it generates a way of telling the story or moving my thinking forward I could spend the rest of my life self-reflecting and maybe not figure out how that intuition came about so is there value to doing that perhaps maybe it hones your intuition skills it makes you more open to doing it if you understand there's a cause I get that but that sounds like you would say you might reject some insights that come from intuition that you can't find the origin of no I think I think that's a fair point and I didn't and I did not intend to express myself that way so what I mean is when a thought enters your mind you need to pay attention to it capture it right don't let it go huh yeah this thought entered my mind and we all have experiences where a thought enters my mind and we don't actually know where the heck it came from yeah and it's your brain which is a much more powerful pattern recognition device than anything that that has been created by an artificial intelligence lab still your brain connects ideas without you physically having those rational thoughts yeah and your analytic process has to honor that mental activity because it can be very powerful yeah sometimes it can be misleading but so can so can make a mistake and a lot of thinking be misleading yeah you've written somewhat about this a couple of years ago in the cypher brief you you wrote an article about the potential of integrating intelligence and intuition and it's funny when I when I first saw the article my reaction was about the title which is you know might not even be your title but I thought I always thought intelligence incorporated into it I never had the idea that intelligence was an opposition to intuition that we had to integrate the two I always thought that it was an ever ending struggle between I need to find the sources I need to line them up I have to tell a coherent story so that we can defend to the policymakers why we added up x y and z and got to this conclusion but at the same time delivering some insight which doesn't always come from that process and maybe it was because I was gifted with amazing managers and colleagues that I worked with that more often than not wanted creativity wanted to find that new way of seeing something but it it occurred to me intelligence was in part about intuition but you wrote about it and really pointed out the main issue which is how is it that we actually create an analytic trade craft and structure to make sure we don't lose that right exactly and you know so interesting about that article is I wrote it because my I had an ulterior motive I really wanted to write about precognition but I didn't I thought I'd be laughed out of the room if I kind of led with that so I thought I sort of used intuition as a way to enter the discussion about the potential for precognition right and right much to my surprise I got a lot of negative comments about intuition I got all sorts of on LinkedIn and other places people arguing with me about how you know basically devaluing the potential of intuition in the analytic process and so the points I made about precognition were totally ignored and the point that I was making was that if you actually create a serious intent to capture your intuitions one of the things that will likely happen is that you will identify recognized people who have more interesting vibrant reliable intuitions than others I mean these people become the great artists in our culture right right and I remember talking to somebody at NASA about this and they were very receptive to this idea that if you're like on Mars you would like to know you've got 10 people on your Mars team which of these 10 people reliably has more interesting intuitions you know like Han Solo I have a bad feeling about this if Han Solo when he says I have a bad feeling about this is correct eight times out of ten you want to pay attention to that and we treat all we treat all these hard to quantify mental and mental thinking cognition qualities we treat all of them with indifference right we don't study them we don't figure out okay underwater circumstances is intuition heightened you know who's better at it who's worse at it and I think you know I believe that inevitably if organizations study intuition they will stumble on to people that appear to have some super intuitive ability that we might call precognition okay I do want to break that down the intuition and precognition thing but I I want to want to ask something first why don't we train on that in intelligence because there is research being done on that there are some colleges there are organizational people who are looking at intuition and the interplay of of intuitive and organizational constructs that the research is out there but it may be my history parallels yours which is I found that when I left the agency it surprised me how insular we were as an organization and how rarely we incorporated insights from relevant tangential research that's correct and why is that because as a learning organization and it is a learning organization you mentioned the Kent School the training academy for analysts which does a remarkable amount of work on really trying to incorporate new ideas and introduce people to different ways of thinking different ways of expressing analysis that is the organization and yet for some reason institutionally it's hard to bring in new cutting edge research at the frontiers of technology it's whatever social science literacy you have when you join the agencies pretty much the social science literacy you'll end up using your entire career you know why is that I think everything in academia like to get a PhD or a master's is based on studying already published material existing literature yeah existing literature and you know riffing off of that perhaps arguing persuasively against it but with your own evidence right yeah and uh the in the intelligence business the existing academic literature is the intelligence you know and so we you know one of my great insights I feel personal insights is that we treat the intelligence that we get those reports as if they accurately represent reality when we actually do not know the delta between the reports that we get and reality in other words the gap and the gap in my opinion is humongous and I when I was working with the analyst I would I would ask them you know imagine that this room represents everything that an omniscient god would know about al-Qaeda you know all available information what article in this room represents what we actually know well one they've never been asked that question before and then they would say things like the coffee cup I'm holding out of the entire room out of the entire room or maybe they'd say well the back wall yeah you know but what they always said something very small and yeah we we don't we have no way of quantifying the information that we have in terms of how accurately it represents reality right and so we reduced our trade craft simply to accurately studying that bit of reality that we can observe and extracting whatever insight is available from from that and so because of that yeah we constantly have intelligence failures right okay so with all this in mind I want to try to separate out a little bit the intuition and the precognition because I I think of them differently and I want I want you to explain to me the linkage in a way that I can better understand so when I read your article I was not hung up on the intuition part I was with you I think that intuition is an example of advanced linking and we just don't know how we got there but it's still it's based on experiences it's based on information it's based on connections and linkages that just might not be I might not be able to write it out but I just have a feeling that this is going to lead to this but that feeling could come from the fast thinking right I get that opening up to more of that I think is I'm sure there are some arguments against it just in terms of error rates until people get a grasp on their own intuition and when it's just creative fantasy I get that but I think we can get there precognition to me is different because when you talk about precognition you're not talking about somebody who is operating at the speed of a computer it's not in the Isaac Asimov Foundation series the the discipline of psycho history where mathematics were so evolved that you could figure out across generations what human groups were going to do based on certain social and economic inputs that's like super computer that's the weather computer taking into account every bit of data to predict exactly what it's going to be doing on my street at 4 p.m. tomorrow that's that's still the thinking stuff that's not getting a message from the future right which is not about thinking it's not about analysis it's an input that is outside the analytic process and I define that different than intuition so help me understand how the two are linked in a way that doesn't lead people just to reject precognition because frankly I didn't I read your article and I fell prey to the bias of looking at the communicator because honestly if I would have read that from some people I probably would not have ever thought about it again but I've talked to you enough and heard enough creative ideas from you over the years that I said I've got to take this seriously but I still don't get how the intuition to precognition link works that way well I think I'm not sure that it is a link but as I understand the work that is being done on precognition I think it kind of it depends upon physics so there are various theories about what consciousness is and I'm not going to be able to represent them all but one one view is and and what consciousness is a hotly debated topic in physics in metaphilosophical circles there's one view that consciousness is just basically an artifact of our physiology you know it's like the cart I think therefore I am kind of thing so that's that's one view and then another view is that the universe exists because of consciousness that consciousness is actually what creates the universe I don't understand it anymore clearly than that so I can't explain it anymore clearly than that but if if consciousness exists outside of us so that consciousness is like a force in the universe in the same way that gravity is a force in the universe then the second thing you believe or you posit is that consciousness is not governed by time and then if you accept that point of view then an idea from the future can leak into the present so yeah if you relax some assumptions based on the way that we operate in linear time the way that we perceive reality if you relax those assumptions yeah you could talk about and there's a great book which I read called American Cosmic it's a fantastic book where she was first used looking at the UFOs but then she eventually which of course is very topical right now and then she started talking to like many scientists including Nobel Prize winners many of whom remained anonymous in the book but she's now written her second book where they are named I think one of them is Gary Nolan from Stanford okay anyway when they talk about their idea process when a thought enters their mind when a moment of insight occurs they often say I feel like it's the future speaking to me many Nobel Prize winning physicist or in other scientific fields will often say the idea came to me in a dream and this is I think where you were the line between intuition and precognition starts to get a little fuzzy because was it really just your mind working in the background creating connections and then presenting it to you at the opportune moment or was it some idea from the universal consciousness leaking into your head everything you described right it coming to me in a dream or I feel like it's from the future it's it's not diagnostic that could be described by the fast thinking process exactly or it could be from another cause that we don't have firm evidence for yet but your point isn't you're not declaring something is or isn't you're saying we need to explore this if it's a way of getting better intuition exactly my point is that if indeed precognition is a reality or whatever reason probably the likeliest way that we will observe it is by learning as much as we possibly can about intuition so in the process of really understanding intuition attempting to replicate it understanding the circumstances under which it appears yeah more often than not by doing all of those things we will also be capturing information if precognition is real about precognition and at the same time by studying intuition more extensively you might actually disprove precognition you might find no we find exactly you might find that it is it's all it's all a a function of incredibly sophisticated cognitive abilities yeah you know I mean we all know that there are things that exist in reality that we cannot physically observe parts of the light spectrum the way dogs can hear sounds that we can't hear we all know that this this is all physically accepted fact right and there just might be ways that ideas manifest themselves that we cannot observe yeah nor can we measure them I think a big push for all of this from some of the best science fiction writers of the last 50 years to no kidding scientists like Julia Mossbridge who you've done some presentations with a lot of this comes from the mind altering experience of this thing called quantum physics which is almost inherently ununderstandable right but yet it's it's solid scientific practice finding yep there's stuff happening that we just can't get our heads around because it does not comport with our reality right that should open us up to researching a lot of things that just seem laugh for lack of a better word a little crazy according to our way of looking at things right right unfortunately I find it also people will just throw the word quantum on something and say it explains it well you know why is it this this is happening oh well it's it's quantum agriculture or it's quantum epidemiology or it's right and they use it as a shorthand for what they don't understand and as a way of making something that is in some cases conspiracy theory yes muddled thinking they try to give legitimacy to it by saying well you know this thing could be happening because well you know quantum and that's a real danger because how can you explore something that is inherently at odds with our everyday lived experience in terms of linear time right how can you seriously study that honoring the possibility without falling prey to the very human tendency of falling in love with what you work and wanting to find a solution that that you now believe in at a level beyond the scientific method that has served our species very well in the most important ways of life that's that's a really tough one to get right yeah I mean humans are like explanation sinking animals and you know I'm not as well read in the theory of human cognition as I could be but the fact that we we are driven to expect causality all the time is what for example inspires our religious beliefs yep yeah we're not we're not just we're just not not inclined to accept that this is all there is there's got to be a reason why and so humans when they when when no other explanation is apparent that's when they'll just create conspiracy theories yeah because they just cannot stand the they cannot abide causality vacuums so you mentioned Julia and and one of the things that we've been collaborating with just in the last few weeks is trying to get public support for you know an effort to explore edge science so you know trying to understand what intuition and precognition is is an edge scientific activity so we have a petition out on change.org a couple of other people are supporting it and we're just trying to get people you know that it would it would be a good thing for us to have a dedicated government effort to look at edge science and existing scientific foundations because that's this is just the way academia and bureaucracy works tend to devalue the importance of studying edge science yeah you don't get tenure if you're studying an edge science right you have to be pursuing the thing that academia has already agreed is important yeah just as you you say and I think this will be true for both of us the rest of our lives I'm not as up on all the things I want to read and and study like ever will be forever years ago I did dive deep into some of the the scientific studies into things like prec cognition and I know that Dr. Mossbridge has done some and found that some of the CIA experimentation with I think it was remote viewing but it might have been a different form of precognition because remote viewing could be very different right that that could not be a time it might not but it it's got some sort of spatial right you can think of time as base time there you go so acknowledging that you know the that she reports that a couple of researchers looked at all of that data from those experiments and found a statistically significant effect right related to the remote viewing or precognition whatever it was while acknowledging that there have also been many many other studies done that have shown no effect greater than chance or have shown that people who understand human psychology and perception well enough can easily manipulate people magicians they do this all the time in terms of creating the sense of precognition or remote viewing and sometimes it's mentalist activity which is thoroughly logical and explainable with the inputs of of knowing your audience and all of that my concern is like in a lot of edge fields you find a hit and the hit in this case you know the the look at the CIA studies showed yeah there's some effect here so you get the hit and it's human nature to discount the 100 misses right of course just like Nostradamus you can find some rhyme that Nostradamus had that really creepily does look like something that happened a few years later and you forget the 990 other lines of absolute gibberish that have tortured explanations to predict something but don't and so this is I think a real struggle and I don't know how the scientific method combined with human psychology gets around this fundamental issue either you stick to replicable studies and if you can't do it over and over again then you can't say with certainty that it's there or you just acknowledge hey some things that we want to explore we're going to have to have a different standard to at least get started I'm not sure where to come down on that I mean Julia would argue and this is not my area of expertise but Julia would make the argument that there have been replicable studies okay that have shown that there's something going on that is not explained by our current theories of cognition that's what she would argue yeah I think the people who are proponents of a lot of these ideas do in fact hurt their own cause by doing exactly what you describe by taking a spectacular hit and running with it taking it out of proportion and not including the caveats so you know and I've given that given how bureaucracies are I don't know how you prevent that from occurring yeah well we may not be able to prevent that from occurring but you know we can be open to exploring edge issues because issues that were once considered fantastical and beyond the edge like quantum mechanics right our mainstream while at the same time acknowledging that over time most of the things that were unexplainable and attributed to Zeus hurling thunderbolts are now explained by very rational scientific knowable things that don't involve time loops and things of that sort so keeping both of those firmly in mind I think is really hard but it doesn't mean it's not worth trying and so the thing is where are you in that continuum so I agree many things that we thought were magic we now know how they work so is precognition one of those things is precognition something that we clearly think is magic or a fraud but in 50 years we'll go oh now we know how that works if I were a betting person I would bet that in 50 years you know don't hold me to the increment but with the passage of time yeah we will learn that this is not magic that this is in fact right and then we expand this is a physical reality that's that's interesting because then it ends up being it is quantum mechanics in the same it's just like quantum mechanics it's just something else you but you but in the same way that quantum mechanics created explanations for things similarly this would create an explanation that that just ends what is possible in our reality yeah I mean you know all this talk about we're living in multiple or existence consists of multiple universes I mean I'm like befuddled by it all I'm befuddled by it all but I'm open to research and explanations and the mathematicians say it's it's virtually certain based on some advanced math that I can't even understand the cliffs in this version of but I think you're right which is exploring it isn't a way of getting to the solution well it's outside science and it's just magic it is a way of saying no but now our understanding of what what science includes is wider because we can explain it we just have to change some of the assumptions the way that quantum mechanics have yeah but all of that none of I think none of that on the exploration of pre-cognition at its extreme invalidates anything we've said just about being more open to intuition in general that insight can come in ways whether you know thoughts from the future or whether it's just really quick thinking that we can't comprehend right but those insights are often more compelling than a well-reasoned legal brief right I think limiting our analytic process to rational methods is flawed and leads us to misunderstand like our own society frankly I mean I think the election results indicate the limits of analytic thinking analytic thinking is just no longer persuasive to apparently a significant portion of the American public so I'm going to put you on the spot again Carmen are you going to write a book about this intuition or some some other long essays because there's so many ideas here that I would love to see people together you know I feel like I'm just too old to write a book because the book you have out rebels at work uh-huh yeah you co-wrote with Lois Kelly uh was mind-opening in ways that there's only one other book that I thought of when reading it 10 years ago yeah there's a book called orbiting the giant hairball by Gordon McKenzie that's a wonderful book about how to operate in a rules-based bureaucracy and still you know get crazy things done and I think those two books pair really well together but they're they're not really about the these issues of intuition and analytic tradecraft and all that and I just think the world needs more from you on this well that thank you very much for saying that but I don't know it just takes a lot it takes a lot of energy to do these things well yeah yeah well I hope that comes to pass uh in the meantime we'll close our conversation by reaching into our cheddar box and pulling out to share with you put you on the spot again Carmen what book or books are on your nightstand or on your kindle or audible list but what are you taking in right now okay I can tell you that because I do use a reading app okay this will this will be a very odd one that makes it more interesting but I just I'm currently looking at how to be a Renaissance woman oh by the author is Jill Burke and it's the untold story history of beauty and female creativity and it's it's a it talks about reticence Italy mostly okay and how these concepts of beauty and expectations of women evolved and I found that to be super interesting so it's not really a how-to book or a self-healing it's it's it's it's an intellectual history of the concept of feminine beauty amazing I uh just finished reading 1177 BC the year civilization collapsed yeah are you familiar with this book I am I am and I'm I was I hesitated to pick it up because I wasn't convinced it would actually answer the questions then it would it would explore it and I want the answers I don't know if this is a contemporary influence or not but talks a lot about climate change okay as an causal factor okay both climate I mean in this case this is no climate change caused by humans this is like mother nature understand climate change like a volcano erupts right and you have lots of earthquakes yeah the the last one I will recommend is oh well I got to I just finished reading the infidel in the professor by Dennis Rasmussen which is just a joint biography of David Hume and Adam Smith they were fantastic friends during the Scottish Enlightenment and then the last one is the ministry of time oh a year of it yes I have I think it's on my shelf I haven't read it yet though story about time travel I'll give you one as payback if you're interested in the concept of time travel yeah messages from the future science fiction story called the chrono lits the chrono chrono lits so like a combination of chrono for time and megalith or something so I want to say the author is Wilson but I'll put that in the show notes as well but that's another one that is an interesting take I'm not completely convinced of the plot I'm not completely convinced of the characters but the conceit about how something from the future happens and creates a feeling of inevitability because it has happened so therefore it has to happen when there's no indication of what's happening to get you there yet is an interesting exploration yeah now I usually read non-fiction but I will occasionally read a compelling fiction well that fits our theme right because the non-fiction me wanting an answer for what happened in 1177 BC or me wanting to understand how the concept of feminine beauty evolved in the renaissance that's like that's track two that's type two that's me doing that fiction music art yes can be intellectual but can it also just be that feeling well I think I think music is just a fascinating thing how it can have such resonant impact on you absolutely yeah Carmen as as expected this has been fascinating and fun and informative I'm regretting that it took me this long to do this but I'm also very proud that you've agreed to be the the book end if you will for these chatter conversations thanks for spending so much time with me thank you so much for reaching out David take care that was chatter a production of law fair and goat rodeo please subscribe to the podcast and find us on twitter at that was chatter