In this episode of The Burn Bag, A’ndre sits down with retired CIA analyst Gina Bennett, who famously authored the first classified warning about Osama bin Laden in 1993. A key voice in the fight against al-Qaeda — and featured in the Netflix documentary Manhunt — Gina reflects on her decades in intelligence and how the U.S. national security system has long understood the nature of threats.
Now, she’s pushing for a paradigm shift with her Hunter-Gatherer National Security theory — a bold framework that challenges the traditional, militarized view of power and argues that skills like emotional intelligence, civic engagement, and social cohesion are just as vital to national security as military might. Together, A’ndre and Gina explore the deep historical biases embedded in how we define “security,” the concept of evolutionary power, the dangers of neglecting civic education in a democracy, and what a more holistic, evolved security strategy could look like.
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UNKNOWN (00:00):
you
SPEAKER_00 (00:10):
Hi, my name is Andre Gonowalla.
Welcome back to the Burn BagPodcast.
Today's guest is Gina Bennett, avery famous CIA analyst who
spent over 30 years in theintelligence community and was
one of the first to warn thecountry about Osama bin Laden
back in 1993.
You might recognize her from theNetflix documentary Manhunt, The
(00:30):
Search for Bin Laden, as well asmany other documentaries.
She's also written a great bookcalled The National Security
Mom.
I heard she has a greathistorical fiction book coming
out very soon.
But Gina is not only known forwhat she saw coming, but she's
also pushing us to rethink howwe can define national security
(00:51):
in the first place.
I want to bring Gina on becausecurrently in 2025 in the United
States, we're having a lot ofdebates about what national
security means, what the U.S.
role in foreign policy is.
And Gina has been talking a lotabout her hunter-gatherer
national security theory, whichis challenging the traditional
(01:11):
military-heavy approach andargues that we've ignored the
skills and instincts oftenshaped in the domestic sphere
that actually keep democraciesresilient and bolster our
national security.
So Gina, thanks for coming backon The Burn Bag.
I think the last time we had youon as a guest was about four
years ago, but we were able todo some great work with another
organization you're involvedwith, Girl Security, about two
(01:34):
years ago, I believe.
SPEAKER_01 (01:35):
Yeah, no, it was wonderful.
And thank you for having meagain.
I'm thrilled to be here.
SPEAKER_00 (01:39):
Thank you.
So Gina, you were one of thefirst US analysts to flag Osama
bin Laden as a national securitythreat back in the 1990s, the
early 1990s.
What did you see then thatothers in the system didn't?
SPEAKER_01 (01:53):
Yeah, no, it's a great question.
And, you know, I'm not sure thatI saw anything that others
didn't see as much as I didn'thave preconceived notions about
what terrorism was.
look like or should look like orwould look like because I was so
young and new.
And that's one of the reasonswhy I always tell like I tell my
(02:15):
students, When you first go intothe job, this is one of the
times that you actually willcontribute the most because you
are new.
And that's when you have to havethe courage to ask a lot of
questions and be very curiousabout why the experts think what
they think.
So what I mean by that is when Ifirst started seeing these
(02:36):
individuals leaving Afghanistan,as early as 1989, 1990, when the
Soviet troops started pullingout, And they were from all
different countries, mostnotably at the time North Africa
and Kashmir and even eastwardstowards the Philippines.
They were starting to be aproblem in their home countries,
(03:00):
kind of going back and engagingin violence against regime
targets or police, things likethat.
And I didn't really know thatmuch about terrorism at the
time.
I was so new to the discipline,new to intelligence, new to the
workplace, new to everything.
(03:22):
And we were still...
arguably at the end of the ColdWar.
We didn't know we were at theend of the Cold War, but we
were.
We know that now in hindsight.
But the Soviet Union was still athing.
And most all of my mentors andteachers and people that I look
to for learning and reading andtrying to get up to speed in the
(03:45):
world of terrorism andcounterterrorism were very much
focused on leftist Marxistterrorist groups, you know, Red
Army factions, even a lot ofseparatist groups that were
trying to, you know, peel awayfrom the once colonial states,
you know, that kind of thing.
And this form of terrorism, thisglobal jihadist notion that was
(04:07):
to come was not known and ithadn't been anybody's
experience.
So everyone who I was looking toto learn from, you know, had a
pretty hardened sense of whatterrorist trends, you know, how
to read terrorist trends andwhat to look at and, you know,
be vigilant over, and this wasnot it, right?
(04:31):
So without having that expertmindset, because I wasn't an
expert, I think I was morecurious and more I don't know,
eager to see if there wassomething in all of this that
others were just dismissing asnot really all that important.
(04:52):
And people really didn't see itas important for many years
because, again, because we wereso used to terrorism being a
state-sponsored construct, youknow, something that states use
as an asymmetric tool with theirenemies and often used, you
know, as a secret tool of theirforeign policy and to have a
(05:13):
bunch of what looked like randommen from many, many different
countries engaged in acts ofviolence be something that was
cohesive was just too hard forimaginations at that time.
So yeah, I think I saw whateverybody saw.
I just took it more seriouslymaybe.
SPEAKER_00 (05:34):
Yeah.
So, I mean, within that nationalsecurity bureaucracy, I guess,
like Al-Qaeda was sort of viewedthen as a sort of band of men,
these sort of random guys.
Is that sort of the sense?
SPEAKER_01 (05:47):
Well, I mean, we didn't even know it was Al-Qaeda
until well into the 90s.
It just looked like the outflowof people who had volunteered to
help the Afghan Mujahideen andpushing the Soviet troops out of
Afghanistan from differentnationalities, from different
countries, because volunteersflowed into Afghanistan from
(06:08):
over 50 countries around theworld, including the United
States.
And to be fair, only a smallpercentage of those individuals
ended up becoming radicalizedand engaged in extremist and
terrorist activity later.
But I think everyone wasprobably expecting them to go
(06:28):
and just come back and go backto whatever their job used to
be.
But for a lot of men, they werereally moved and changed and
transformed by the experienceand were easily motivated to
engage in insurgency or terrorcampaigns against their own home
(06:51):
government.
when they got back because theysaw it as alien and not Islamic
enough.
So not necessarily the SovietUnion having invaded in every
single country, but it was closeenough.
So that sense of fervor of if wecan kick out the Soviet Union,
which was, of course, one of thesuperpowers at the time, and we
can defeat them and force themout of Afghanistan, then we can
(07:16):
defeat these infidel countries.
regimes in our own homecountries.
And so that's the kind of fervorand belief system that was
growing out of Afghanistan thatjust wasn't there really before.
SPEAKER_00 (07:29):
So in elevating the threat internally within CIA,
did you ever face resistance?
I mean, you said you took thisthreat way more seriously than a
lot of others.
Was there resistance in actuallyelevating the threat, elevating
it to another height ofseriousness?
SPEAKER_01 (07:48):
You have to understand, too, at the time,
again, with the fall of theSoviet Union, you know, the fall
of the wall in East, well,between the Germanys, 91, 92, 93
timeframe, you're really lookingat a world that's transitioning
unbeknownst to it, you know,from a Cold War, decades of a
(08:09):
Cold War to something completelynew and different.
And there's a lot of theintelligence community being
targeted by Congress fordownsizing and, you know, we
don't need it anymore.
We've won.
There's this whole, like, wewon, you know, peace is breaking
out all over the world.
Democracies are growing likeflowers.
There's this whole, you know,world that was fabulous, the
(08:32):
peace dividend for a few years.
And so the focus was, it's notthat people didn't want to
believe it.
It's just, it wasn't the focus.
You know what I mean?
It's just, We had just surviveddecades of the fear of mutually
assured mass destruction with anuclear war, nuclear holocaust.
(08:55):
And so to be talking about, hey,this group of guys who at the
time didn't appear to be subjectto any coordinating body, it
seemed very organic anddisorganized, that they could
Potentially become a threat.
(09:16):
And it was only, you know, withtime beginning to see this
reference to this same couple ofindividuals, including the
person who turned out to beOsama bin Laden, but we only
knew as Abu Abdullah at thetime.
Maybe there was an organizationbehind it, or there was an
ambition, a coordinationoccurring.
(09:38):
That was a little harder forfolks to believe within the
intelligence community, as wellas, of course, outside the
intelligence community.
That being said, theCounterterrorist Center was
always...
It's extremely small at thetime, extremely small.
But it was really on top of itfrom the very beginning because
(09:59):
its mission is you got to bevigilant.
You have to think worst casescenarios in order to Position
yourself to have theinformation, to be able to
collect the information, todisprove or prove one way or the
other to get to the truth.
And so it's not so much from thehandful of counterterrorism
people.
It was more the whole nationalsecurity apparatus didn't want
(10:23):
to hear about this.
It wasn't important.
And then when you get into theintelligence community, it's got
a lot of other strugglesoccurring at that time.
And so it just...
you know, maybe seemed like toomuch warning too early.
Yeah, I don't know.
(10:43):
I never really, again, I wasstill pretty young throughout
the 90s, and I never thought itwas because people were being
stubborn or dismissive at thetime i thought it's just well
this is different and probablyi'm wrong you know i'm talking
(11:04):
about something that's verydifferent from what everyone is
used to and i don't knowanything so maybe i'm just wrong
it took it took a few years forme to realize okay um and you
know meeting some othercolleagues and There would be
one person at the DefenseIntelligence Agency and one
person at the FBI and one personhere and one person there.
(11:24):
We see what you're seeing.
And creating a very smallinteragency group of people who
were really seeing the same kindof development and having the
same level of concern about itand that we could validate each
other's concerns and try toelevate more as a group.
(11:46):
representing multiple agencies,that this was a growing threat.
SPEAKER_00 (11:50):
So looking back at that era, I mean, the early 90s,
after the fall of the SovietUnion, many referred to that as
the end of history.
Mistakenly, it's just the end ofone type of threat and the
beginning, perhaps, of another.
What did that experience in thebeginning of your career sort of
teach you about how our nationalsecurity institutions, one,
(12:11):
define, and then two, prioritizethreats?
I mean, you already alluded tothis in your answers, but sort
of more in a holistic sort ofsense, like how does the
apparatus actually think throughthese things?
SPEAKER_01 (12:24):
Yeah.
I mean, for one thing, it becamevery clear that It's like the
system needs an enemy.
It doesn't know how to anchoritself without a foreign threat
of some sort.
But really, even before thatparticular set of events
occurred, as a child, my fatherwas in the Navy, so I grew up in
(12:46):
Virginia Beach, Norfolk,Virginia Beach, Little Creek
Base.
And I was used to as a kid stilldoing duck and cover drills.
And I remember thinking as I wasunder the desk, this is really
kind of silly because if anuclear warhead ends up here,
this desk is not going to helpme at all.
(13:06):
I mean, even as a child, Ithought this is really
illogical.
It just makes no sense becausewe're going to be evaporated.
But The Cold War was a verypervasive set of fears and
environment.
And so even as a young kid, Iused to think about it a lot.
(13:27):
It was just part of the culture.
And I always wondered, alsobeing a big fan of the
Revolutionary War and having hadancestors who fought in the
Revolutionary War, I was justreally fascinated with
Revolutionary War history.
And I thought, you know, iflet's just say we have this
(13:51):
nuclear holocaust and threequarters of the American
population is wiped out in a setof attacks with the Soviet
Union.
I didn't think that the next dayAmericans were going to say, OK,
we'll be communists.
Sounds good.
We got it now.
I mean, I figured we would justfight back.
Right.
I mean, yeah, we would survivethe event.
(14:13):
But there's no way we were goingto give in to a form of
government that wasn't what wefreely chose.
That's just not what ourfounders had in mind.
It's not what we thought of asAmerica.
And 1976, with the centennial, Iwas 10.
And I was really bought intowhat it meant, celebrating 200
(14:38):
years of our country's history.
I guess even as a kid, I neverthought of our security as a
nation being related ordependent upon a lack of a
foreign threat.
Even a foreign invasion, just tome, wasn't the end of our
(15:03):
national security because itwasn't the end of our choice,
our free choice of choice.
a representative democracy.
Our desire to have a democracyin this country as our form of
government, our constitution asour founding and supreme body of
(15:23):
law, those were our choices.
And even if somebody else, evenif an alien nation came down and
tried to take over our land, wewere still going to fight back
for what we believed in andwanted.
So When the Soviet Uniondisappeared, I guess, I mean, I
(15:44):
thought, well, there's going tobe a lot of other things that
are going to threaten us.
So it didn't occur to me thatthat was the end of history or
that there was going to be nomore war or conflict.
I figured, in fact, maybe morepeople are going to be jealous
and want to bring us down.
I don't know.
I think in terms of likebaseball.
(16:05):
You know, if you've won a numberof World Series in a row, then
everybody really wants you tolose.
So here we had just won the ColdWar.
So there was no question in mymind there were going to be
different kinds of threats, ifnot even the same kinds of
threats from other states.
Remember, China was still acommunist country.
(16:27):
So I don't know.
I just...
I think since I was a kid, justnever equated this idea of in
order for us to be secure as anation, we have to have no
threats, no external enemies.
I think then that just ensuresyou will never be secure.
(16:50):
It's like.
It's guaranteeing permanentinsecurity.
SPEAKER_00 (16:54):
Yeah, no, and I really appreciate sort of you
going back to your childhood tosort of share your thinking on
this.
And I mean, you know, I'm verycurious about at what point in
your career, you know, did yousort of realize that the
traditional security paradigmsweren't really enough?
Like, when do you start to feelthose models change?
were starting to fail, and didthe events of 9-11, the global
(17:16):
war on terror, sort of reinforceor challenge your thinking
around that, your thinkingaround national security and
what it means?
SPEAKER_01 (17:25):
Yeah, no, definitely 9-11 was an evolutionary moment,
I suppose.
Because while I had thought thatin the background, I think our
response to 9-11, not the eventitself, but our response to it
(17:45):
made it more stark to me howtied our sense of national
security was to, or still is, toa sense of physical safety and
how little we talked about theideals of democracy and the role
(18:09):
of citizenship in securing ournation.
And I do think one of the bigelements from prior to the end
of the Cold War to 9-11, becausewe had that feeling of we won
this ideological conflictbetween communism and democracy,
(18:29):
between Marxism and capitalism,like we won, we stopped
competing and the realm ofideals.
We stopped competing as a nationin the debate and discussion of
what are the best forms ofgovernance and our belief in
self-determination as a way ofproducing a stable world, you
(18:56):
know, post-World War II.
and one for that matter, theidea that when populations get
to decide for themselves thetype of government structure
that rules over them and youcreate that social contract,
then we are going to see morestable nation states.
(19:17):
We gave up competing in thatspace because we won.
And so without competing in it,I think we weren't even
reminding ourselves of theimportance of it.
And we really disconnected, Ithink, our sense of what does it
mean to be an engaged citizen ina democracy?
(19:38):
You know, what does it mean tobe capable of being the
government?
Not just...
voting, but, you know, ofactually being the government
of, by, for the people.
What does that mean?
And how do we do it?
And why is it important to us?
And so when we responded the waywe did to 9-11, which is like a
(20:01):
whole other set of, I would loveto talk about the responses as
like a hunter response versus agatherer response.
The way we responded to 9-11 asif it were an existential threat
to the United States, I thoughtwas outrageous um and it really
bothered me because al-qaeda wasnever going terrorism is never
(20:26):
going to be an existentialthreat to the united states of
america yes it's going to be athreat yes it's going to be
painful it's traumatic it'stragic i understand all of that
i'm not dismissing the traumabut again we didn't become a
caliphate because we because of9 11 right It did not destroy
(20:49):
the United States as ademocracy.
It didn't make us abandon ourConstitution, at least.
I mean, I know some people willargue that we abandoned pieces
of it, and that's fine.
I'm all for debate.
But, I mean, we didn't abandonit wholesale as our governance
structure.
And so, from my perspective, wewent so far as to elevate the
(21:14):
individuals who caused 9-11 tobeing as great a threat to the
United States as communism wasor the Soviet Union was or the
Eastern Bloc.
And I just thought that wasreally a bad set of decisions
because they weren't and theynever would be.
And you give power to the bullywhen you do that and you weaken
(21:41):
yourself.
So that was when it became evenclearer to me that we have
equated our nation's securitywith the physical aspects of
safety, with the tangible andphysical set of priorities,
which are important.
(22:01):
defense of our borders, theintegrity of our sovereignty,
the safety of ourinfrastructure, our feeling like
we can get on an airplane andfly and be safe and can get on a
train or car and drive and besafe, safety in our buildings.
All of those things are hugelyimportant for a stable,
functioning, happy population.
(22:23):
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying that it isn't.
But We can have all of thesethings and have a caliphate or a
theocracy ruling us.
We could have all that safetyand stability and have a
dictator or a communist regime.
Is that U.S.
(22:44):
national security?
Would we feel like the UnitedStates is secure if we are no
longer using our Constitution?
Or would we be a completelydifferent country and therefore
there is no more United States?
Do you see what I mean?
If our national security issomething that's supposed to
come out of our defense and ourmilitary and our power
(23:04):
projection, then it doesn'treally matter what kind of
government we have.
But I don't think we feel thatway.
I think it does matter to us.
And I think Americans do wantour Constitution to continue to
endure and our democracy tocontinue to function.
And if that's the case, then theonly people who really threaten
(23:27):
that security are us you know wedo and no number of aircraft
carriers or drones or you knowanything else are going to to
make us secure as um as apopulation believing in our
constitution and ideals ofdemocracy and our democratic
institutions i mean that comesfrom somewhere else entirely so
(23:51):
i think it was it was more likei said it was more that the
response seems so clearly to bea response of fear of feeling
vulnerable like someone coulddestroy who we are even though
the soviet union didn't succeedsome you know group of not even
co-nationalists who live inafghanistan which was arguably
(24:12):
not a very modern uminfrastructure for anything and
and threaten our nation that wasjust so impossible to believe
and such a blow to our pride ithink that our fear response was
very telling to me that we haddefined our security as a nation
(24:36):
as a lack of threats to ourcountry.
And I thought that that was abig mistake.
SPEAKER_00 (24:42):
Now, this is a good segue into the theory of a
hunter-gatherer nationalsecurity.
You mentioned earlier, right,that after 9-11, the U.S.
took a, quote, hunter approachto to that threat, what they
perceived the threat was.
Can you define what the overalltheory is in sort of plain terms
(25:03):
and more?
SPEAKER_01 (25:04):
Yeah.
I mean, you know, in thesimplest terms, it's common
sense, right?
You will respond to a threatbased on the threat itself and
the environment you're in.
You know, if you are exposed tosomeone with a communicable
disease, You're not going toshoot them.
That's not going to really bethe way to deal with it.
(25:28):
And if you're exposed to someonetrying to mug you, you're not
going to put a mask on yourface.
That doesn't make any sense,right?
We have common sense.
We understand that not allthreats are the same.
And therefore, the approaches tothreats have to be different.
You have to match the solutionto the threat, the tools to the
(25:52):
environment.
And that's like the simplest,that's the easiest thing to
understand.
So when we're facing right nowwhere the majority of Americans
are dissatisfied with democracyand they don't think democracy
is working, that is a threat toour government.
That's a threat because people,if you don't believe that
(26:15):
democracy is working, And youare the government.
You know, people, every personis the government.
It's not just some alien thingin Washington, D.C.
If you don't believe it's goingto work, then it's not going to
work.
And there's no, again, there'sno amount of physical safety
that's going to change people'sminds about that.
So we have to have a differenttool.
(26:37):
And it really, you know, it goesback to, and I think it's as
clear as...
And as simple as hunters andgatherers, whether you believe
in the origin story and thefirst family was kicked out of
the Garden of Eden and we becamenomadic hunter-gatherers for
hundreds of thousands of years,or whether you're Darwinian and
(26:58):
you believe in it in a differentway, the point is we were
nomadic hunter-gatherersocieties for the vast majority
of human existence, hundreds ofthousands of years.
And as nomadic hunter-gatherers,everyone from you know toddlers
to the eldest person contributedin some way to the survival and
(27:22):
well-being of the small groupthat was hunting and gathering
so it's not about gender it isabout contributing roles to
survival and well-beingobviously matched for many years
based on physical capabilitieswith you know men taking most of
the protector-hunter roles andwomen taking the
(27:45):
gatherer-caretaker roles.
Although women gathered and...
I mean, women hunted and mengathered, but in general, right?
So in general, that's the case.
So all of that, thosecontributions between whether
it's protecting the small socialgroup from a predator or...
(28:07):
whether it's identifying apoisonous plant that could kill
everybody or recognizing thatone sick child can make
everybody sick or whatever,there's different types of
threats, physical threats, tothe small grouping of
(28:27):
hunter-gatherer community.
It's all being done verytransparently in the open
because you don't, You're not ina brick house.
You're moving.
You're moving constantly.
So it's very transparent.
But when we become farmingpeoples with the agrarian
revolution some 10, maybe 15,000years ago, so pretty recently
(28:51):
when it comes to the amount oftime we've been on Earth, but
when we...
we start to farm and settledown, and that's the great
luxury, right?
Okay, now we can stay put andmake food for ourselves, grow
food for ourselves.
And we see this as the beginningof civilization.
You know, we have, with farms,we then have surplus goods that
(29:12):
you can then trade with otherfarmers for their surplus goods,
and all of a sudden we havetrade, commerce, money becomes,
you know, a thing for us totrade.
We get communication andmythology explaining everything
and eventually rule and law andproperty ownership and just
(29:35):
science, math, everything comesout of all of this ability to
stay put.
But another thing that comes outof this is that we create this
very hard divide between publicspaces and private space.
In the public space where thetrading takes place, And in the
domicile, where the oncegatherer, sometimes hunter,
(29:59):
becomes very much the gatherer,caretaker, and planner inside
the domicile, and the hunterbecomes a protector, defender,
provider outside the domicile.
And this is generally, we'retalking men and women for the
most part at this point.
The men are in the tradingspaces.
(30:21):
They're collaborating with eachother.
They're advancing theirunderstanding by collaborating
with each other, and eventuallywe get writing and recording of
history and warfare, becauseproperty ownership immediately
breeds, I own this, you don'town it, and all conquest, desire
for conquest, all that stuff.
(30:41):
But inside the domicile, thegatherer caretakers are still
evolving and innovating andplanning and contributing to
both survival and well-being ofthe growing family.
It's just being done behindwalls and it's not being
recorded in the public space.
(31:05):
So we're missing 10, 15,000years of understanding of the
evolution inside the home andwhat those skills and survival
instincts and approaches werethat are still needed, but we
end up believing that whathappens in the domicile is
(31:26):
irrelevant to what happens inthe public space, although what
happens and is decided in thepublic space absolutely is
relevant to the private space,but not the other way around.
And that is completely, I think,wrong and also illogical.
I think one of the greatestexamples of this comes from a
(31:47):
couple of years ago whenarchaeologists discovered that a
little ivory comb, a littleartifact, only a couple inches
big, turned out to be a combthat was created to remove lice
from your hair and your beard.
Because lice from 4,000 yearsago could kill many, many
(32:08):
people, more people than asaber-toothed tiger anyway,
could kill a lot of people.
It just creates disease.
But when you think about howlong...
it took someone or some peoplesto realize that the sores that
were happening on their bodiesthat were causing disease and
death and infection came fromthese tiny little bugs that we
(32:30):
can barely see and then figureout, well, how do we get rid of
these tiny little bugs, come upwith the idea for a comb, make a
comb out of ivory, by the way,and then carve the instructions
on how to use the comb in theivory because the comb said, May
the tusk of this comb root outthe lice in hair and beard.
(32:51):
And it's actually now the firstknown example of alphabetic
writing.
So they bothered to put it onthe comb, right?
So that anybody who picks up thecomb would know how to use it.
If you use it enough, youactually prevent lice from
nesting.
So there they've observed theproblem, an existential threat
to humanity, long enough tofigure out the source, come up
(33:15):
with a solution.
that they then create, and thenthey actually put the
instruction label on thesolution so that they can share
it with anybody else, that is acompletely different approach to
security, right?
That's a completely differentapproach to survival and
wellbeing.
And a torch or a spear or anuclear weapon is not a good way
(33:39):
to solve lice in your household.
So it's really, that's, reallyall it is is common sense.
And it's not because these aresoft and feminine solutions.
These are just aslife-threatening on the physical
side and certainly just asexistential on the security
(34:01):
side.
They're just different types ofthreats and different types of
solutions.
Whereas the hunter side is stillvery much focused more on a
physical threat, one that'sobvious and dynamic, and one
from a hunter's perspective.
(34:21):
If you were a hunter and yourinstinct was to stop and observe
what you think might be asaber-toothed tiger and take
notes on it and exchange withother hunters, do you think
that's a saber-toothed tiger?
I don't know.
It doesn't look like the rightsize or it's not moving quickly
enough.
You're going to be dead by thetime you finish that
(34:42):
conversation, right?
So you develop a set ofinstincts of I see threat, I
kill threat.
Or I see threat, I smash threat.
I destroy threat withoutthinking because you can't.
You're not going to havesurvival of the fittest if you
don't kill the threat.
Whereas if you're a gatherer ora caretaker and you see a bug on
(35:05):
your child and you smash yourkid, that's not a good way of
saving your child from the bug.
So we're not going to havesurvival of the fittest if we
kill our own.
So when you think about that, itshould just, in a very common
sense and practical way, tellyou that you need a different
set of skills looking at earlywarning of some types of threats
(35:30):
and different approaches tosolving those than...
just the military, just theforce, just violence.
SPEAKER_00 (35:36):
So when a casual listener or a student of foreign
policy or national security, oreven many seasoned national
security folks will listen tothis, they may start to bend
this as hard power and softpower.
However, you deem it verydifferently.
You talk about it as beingevolutionary power.
And I think the example of, youknow, you don't smash the kid in
(35:58):
the head if you see lice, youknow, you want to You know, we
found these tools, these ivorytools to sort of get this slice
out, sort of observant,analytical, trying to figure out
how do we prevent this stuff.
SPEAKER_01 (36:11):
And I think of it as evolutionary.
You know, it's very cognitive.
Yes, you have to develop thediscernment to know the
difference between somethingthat is a saber-toothed tiger
and something that is not.
And as you...
As you watch our worldrevolutionize really since the
(36:33):
last century, not just becauseof weaponry and warfare and all,
but technology, we're in a placewhere increasingly we're not
going to know the differencebetween a real enemy and a deep
fake.
We're not going to know thedifference between whether or
not someone actually pushed thatbutton to fire that missile or
(36:56):
whether it was an agentic AIthat accidentally did because
that's what it thought youwanted to do.
We're not going to know when thecyber attack occurs or all the
banks in the United States fail.
Who did it?
And who do you go to war with ifyou don't know who is the enemy?
Do you go to war with the wrongperson just in order to do
(37:16):
something about it?
Possibly, if you're just ahunter, that's what you will do,
if that's the only way youapproach things.
So we're increasingly in anenvironment that requires
thinking.
It requires taking the time toobserve and say, wait a minute,
what don't we know about what'sgoing on here?
(37:38):
What do we know?
Who do we collaborate with?
How do we consider all thepossible alternative
explanations of what's happeninghere?
think before you act there's alot of threats now and moving
forward into our future thatrequire that kind of thinking
before we act because ouractions may end up being
(38:02):
irreversible and completely farmore harmful and existentially
dangerous to us in the long runSo that's why I consider it
evolutionary, because we haveevolved into modern society.
It's very different from ourhunter-gatherer ancestor days.
And to stop and think is notweak.
(38:26):
It's not soft.
It's not a fear of acting.
It's wanting to be smarter.
Yeah, that's why I disagree withthe idea of influence and
collaboration and discussion andresearch.
And using critical thinking is,to me, is not a soft approach.
(38:49):
It's a smart approach.
It's an evolutionary approach toevolutionary problems.
SPEAKER_00 (38:56):
Absolutely.
And, you know, how would USstrategy look different if we...
put those values much higher upon the priority scale.
Values, for example, like theones you outlined in caretaking,
values that we don't really talkmuch about in a national
security lens, but are stillsuper important, like emotional
(39:17):
intelligence, for example, orcivic education.
We don't consider those assecurity assets, but they very
much are in our view.
SPEAKER_01 (39:25):
No, I mean, I think...
Number one, if we had a nationalsecurity strategy that looked
more like a combination ofhunter and gatherer, I'm not
saying get rid of the hunter.
I'm not at all.
I mean, I was a hunter for 35years.
That was my role.
I was a targeter.
(39:48):
I understand the importance ofit.
It's about achieving a balanceand not expecting...
everything that our militarydoes over hundreds of years to
automatically producedepolarization and unity among
America and effective governmentand happiness and democracy,
(40:12):
it's not going to produce thatno matter how good our military
is.
That's not what it's designed todo.
It can't do that.
So it's...
It would really be a strategythat recognizes the hunter side,
hunter, protector, defender,dealing with that kind of
(40:35):
physical, tangible threats toour safety, to our sense of
safety here as a country or whenwe're traveling abroad is one
set of priorities.
But equally as important isensuring that our government is
governed by people whounderstand it.
(40:56):
I mean, the majority ofAmericans don't even know that
there are three branches ofgovernment, let alone some of
the more important details aboutthe checks and balances and our
institutions.
The majority of Americans don'thave confidence in our democracy
or the elections or electionprocesses, and not just the
national level ones, but evenlocal.
(41:18):
But a high functioning democracywould ensure that its citizens
when they are old enough to voteknow what they're doing
understand the responsibilityand that it's not just about
casting one vote it's then alsoabout holding your
representatives accountable towhat they promised they were
going to do what you voted themin for it's also having
(41:42):
representatives who realize theyare there to serve their entire
constituency, not just thepeople who voted for them or not
just for the people they like,not just for the people who gave
them money, but for their entireconstituency, even if that
entire constituency turns out tobe mostly people who aren't like
(42:04):
you or don't like you.
You are a servant.
You're not a god.
You're not a king or a ruler ora duke.
This is That's not whatdemocracy is about.
And it requires so muchre-education and bringing back,
you know, really what ourframers believed was so
(42:26):
important.
And ironically, when I said, youknow, hunter-gatherer, I think
it's really about common sense.
Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense,the pamphlet Common Sense,
which, of course, informed ourframers as they wrote the
Declaration of Independence ofthe Constitution.
So we're all equal.
Too much power in the hands ofone person is dangerous for
(42:47):
everyone.
And freedom has to be nurtured.
It is not a guarantee.
You can't just acquire it and belike, okay, we're done.
It's kind of like, you know,okay, we got peace after the
Cold War, we're done.
We don't need any, we don't haveany more threats.
It's, that's a fallacy.
So if we don't put as mucheffort in ensuring our citizenry
(43:07):
is up for the task, then we'refailing.
in ensuring and guaranteeing thecontinuation of the Constitution
in our democracy.
We need to understand thatprocesses of observing,
research, thinking, those areimportant parts of a
(43:30):
high-functioning,decision-making democracy.
It's not just what other peoplewant to hear.
We need to have much more honestcommunication with the American
people to include parentstelling them when they're wrong.
We're sorry, but actuallygridlock was designed by the
framers.
(43:50):
Gridlock in Congress is ademonstration of a democracy
functioning properly becauseit's making sure that we don't
give in to tyranny of themajority or tyranny of the
minority.
Nobody's happy.
That's how it's supposed to bein a democracy.
That's how it is.
Daggone it, this family is happybecause everybody is miserable
(44:12):
because no one gets to ride onevery single ride that they want
to ride on when we go to DisneyWorld.
We're all a little bitmiserable.
I mean, it's just, again, it'sreally about common sense, and
it's about understanding as anation that we're going to be
threatened.
(44:34):
And there are going to be peoplewho hate us.
Some of them inside, some ofthem outside.
But if we decide to remaincommitted to our Constitution,
if we really believe in theideals of democracy, then we
have to recognize it's notenough to just be willing to die
(44:57):
for your country and say you'rea patriot.
You have to put up with yourcountry also.
And that means...
Other people have rights totheir ways of pursuing life,
liberty, and the pursuit ofhappiness.
Even if you don't like it, turnthe other way.
Just ignore it or endure thediscomfort of it.
But as long as we don't turnaway from our Constitution and
(45:21):
our democratic institutions,then we're secure as the United
States of America, and peoplecan hate on us as much as they
want.
As long as it doesn't change ourminds about us, then it doesn't
matter.
It's irrelevant.
Like terrorists, they areirrelevant.
(45:44):
So, I mean, it's a differentkind of investment in public
education, investment in...
ensuring transparency in the wayour politicians talk to their
constituencies, there's a wholehost of ways of reinvigorating
(46:07):
our checks and balances and theobjectivity of our institution
building, trying to depoliticizeand departisanize it.
And In today's day and age,there's really no reason why
people can't be more engaged intheir own governance.
(46:29):
It's also recognizing that, whoknows, maybe democracy is also a
constantly evolving thing and weget to a place where, I'm not
suggesting direct democracy, butwe actually can have more say as
individuals in aspects of ourexperience as Americans that
(46:56):
have just been decided for usfor forever.
I mean, I think we'reexperiencing some of that now.
People are deciding they wantmore say in how they're being
educated.
Some people are fine to have itcontinue to go the way they
want.
But because we have acommunication system that's so
modern and so, you know, it'sjust constantly evolving and
(47:19):
we're able to have far moreconversations than we ever could
before about things that we usedto just take as a given.
SPEAKER_00 (47:25):
Absolutely.
So, I mean...
I think so much of thisconversation is so valuable
because when we're thinkingabout national security, it's
really talking about, you know,what is safety versus what is
security?
You know, what is the securityof our form of government?
As you said much earlier in theconversation, you know, we can
have sort of physical safety,physical safety of our
infrastructure, physical safetyof our bodies and so on, but
(47:49):
still be ruled by a caliphate,still be ruled by a dictator.
And this is still make us theUnited States of America, uh,
And I mean, I sort of want tobring this conversation now very
much to the present day with somany of the challenges that we
are actively dealing with.
Both, you know, you outlinedvery much so the challenges we
are facing in the domestictheater, you know, with our
(48:10):
government and so on.
How do you sort of see the toolsof the hunters versus the tools
of the gatherers being used inthe way we are approaching
foreign policy and security in2025?
You alluded to it a little bitearlier with your thoughts on
the afghanistan war the globalwar on terrorism and so on but
(48:31):
like how do you sort of see itplaying out today yeah
SPEAKER_01 (48:34):
i mean here's where i feel like we have we're
definitely going backwards intime um devolving uh because
again i mean i really approachthings with logic and common
sense you are far better offliving in a world of friends
(48:55):
than you are living in a worldof enemies So, you know,
friendships and allies andalliances that, you know, we
have forged for a hundred yearsor more across the world are
important to us and to oursecurity as a democracy because
(49:22):
they are...
They reduce and deter enemiesfrom emerging.
You know, if you see a massiveblock of democracies, you're
going to be less inclined tochallenge that.
I mean, this is something welearned, I guess, in the Cold
(49:43):
War, too, with the NATO and theWarsaw Pact.
So to want to go it alone, Ithink, is foolish.
Everybody does their countryfirst.
That's That's nothing new.
We all do ourselves first.
We do our family first.
I mean, of course, Americafirst.
(50:03):
Like, duh.
France does France first.
Singapore does Singapore first.
This is not novel.
But it doesn't mean you have tobe alone.
It doesn't mean America has tobe America first, America alone.
And that's not smart.
You want to have as many peoplehave your back as possible.
(50:24):
And Using nothing but fear andthreats and more aircraft
carriers and things like this todeter a world where we do have
(50:45):
enemies who are skipping over usand realizing that our
vulnerability is our lack offaith in each other.
That The weakness of America'sdemocracy is that it relies on
its own people, that we have apopulation that doesn't
(51:08):
understand its own democracy orits own government.
And so the more they are able tosow the seeds of division or
make the seeds of division thatare already here flourish even
further, they don't need to firea weapon at us to destroy us.
It's about malign influence anddisinformation and fanning the
(51:35):
flames of divisiveness that arealready here that can lead to
Americans abandoning democracythemselves without China ever
having to threaten us or withoutRussia or Moscow ever having to
build something more strongerthan a nuclear arsenal or
(51:55):
whatever.
And again, somebody comes at usand we can't attribute who it is
for months.
What are we going to do withthat?
What are we going to do withthat?
Even from a safety perspective,what are we going to do with
that?
So I think...
(52:18):
This entrenching ourselves backinto this, we're just going to
have decisive, overwhelmingforce, blunt force, military
threats, threats of sanctions,tariffs, whatever, whatever you
want to call it all.
It just creates a hostileenvironment that increases the
(52:41):
likelihood of enemies andadversaries versus decreases it.
And that does nobody in theUnited States any good?
That doesn't increase oursafety.
It doesn't increase oursecurity.
And what is it for?
You know, just because one man,you know, has a pride problem
(53:04):
or, you know, one person wantsto run the whole country like a
dictator and be able to bullyeverybody.
I mean, what is that?
That's just...
not evolutionary at all.
That's regression to childhood.
So, you know, I think, I guess,again, I wish, and this goes
(53:30):
back to, you know, my very firstbook, National Security Mom, I
really, I don't see government,the idea of governance, as a
stretch of the imagination fromparenting.
It really is, national securitygovernment it is so accessible
for anyone anybody should beable to understand this because
(53:53):
it is nothing more than figuringit out how you divide up
resources how you divide upresponsibilities within a family
um you know and if you're aparent whether you're a mom a
dad excuse me whether your mom adad a grandparent whatever you
(54:15):
have a whole bunch of people inyour family and you have to take
care of all of them and you maynot like them all and they may
not all do you know pull theirweight but you have to take care
of them and love them they'rethey're yours right they're your
family and you have to find away for each of them to
(54:37):
contribute as best they possiblycan to that family and that
family doesn't cease to be afamily, if somebody comes in and
robs you or burns your housedown, you're still family.
So it's not just about yourphysical safety.
It's about what you believe inas a group of people, of related
(55:00):
people.
Anyway.
Yeah.
I mean, I just think that thispainting of the government as a
deep state or a bunch of eliteswho are trying to obscure what
(55:23):
they're really doing from theAmerican people is so
irresponsible.
It's so nefarious.
And it just undermines andweakens us as a nation.
SPEAKER_00 (55:37):
Yeah.
And, you know, going as we sortof round out this conversation,
so the going back to some of thefirst topics we discussed in the
hour, the global war on terrorand so on, and then, you know,
juxtaposing that with, thehunter-gatherer theory, and so
many of the threats that we arefacing to our internal
(55:58):
democracy.
Do you think we ever truly wonthe global war on terror, or are
we actively losing it today?
SPEAKER_01 (56:05):
Well, I never really liked the framing as a global
war on terror to begin with.
Look, the reason why I wasunhappy on so many levels with
the entire response is becausethere's a lot of reasons,
really, but As acounterterrorism expert at the
time, and as someone who hadbeen studying Al-Qaeda from
(56:30):
before we even knew it wasAl-Qaeda, you have to ask
yourself, this attack occurred,and I understood we had a law
enforcement approach, like wewant justice for the criminals
as well as justice for thevictims.
I get that.
I do.
(56:51):
But I think we lied to ourselvesabout what we were really doing,
which was getting revenge.
And that's a very emotionalreaction, revenge, wanting
revenge, being angry, and havingyour pride hurt because these
(57:12):
people were able to get awaywith what they were able to get
away with.
But If you are being completelyobjective and unemotional in
this situation, and you askyourself, what is justice for
the people who were killed?
(57:36):
And what is punishment for thepeople who perpetrated this?
Justice for the people who werekilled might also be diminishing
or reducing the likelihood ofanother attack, right?
and diminishing the influenceand power of the individuals who
(57:56):
were involved, or al-Qaeda.
And punishing the people whowere involved is going to be
also, if you think about it,well, you have to know what is
punishment from theirperspective.
So those are two differentthings.
So if you really wanted toreduce the influence and the
(58:20):
power of Al-Qaeda raising itsstature to an enemy combatant
and treating it as if the entireU.S.
military, not only the entireU.S.
military, but the combinedforces of our NATO allies,
because they invoked Article 5of NATO, is necessary to defeat
(58:44):
this handful of rogue forcesterrorists right that's not
going to diminish their power orinfluence it's going to triple
it you know quadruple it like athousand times um exponentially
making al-qaeda and bin ladenand everyone really you know who
(59:04):
believes in what they were doingso much more powerful than they
ever were that was stupid i meani'm just gonna say it that's
just short-sighted The otherthing is, if you really want to
understand what is punishingfrom their perspective, you
(59:28):
can't say, well, it's killingthem or torturing them or any of
that.
That's not what they would haveconsidered the greatest
punishment.
The greatest punishment to themwas being made irrelevant, being
ignored, being treated as ifthey were nothing and didn't
have...
any influence whatsoever, as ifthey didn't even occur, as if it
(59:49):
didn't happen.
That would have required us torebuild the Twin Towers, start
rebuilding them as soon aspossible and have them look
exactly the same, maybe a storytaller if you wanted to feel
better about it, but saying,whatever, you don't matter.
That would have meant findingthe individuals responsible and
(01:00:10):
making sure that they wereprosecuted and went off to jail
and were forgotten.
Not a constant story, a mediastory, because they're in
detention centers in Gitmo orwhatever.
Instead of killing bin Laden,just having him unable to
(01:00:32):
communicate externally,basically die an old and
forgotten man, that would havebeen more...
torture to him than anything,you know, turning him into a
martyr and a mythical person.
So, you know, we didn'tentertain any of those ideas.
(01:00:56):
But if you really want to bestrategic and evolutionary
thinker when it comes tosecurity you need and maybe you
don't do all of the things thatI just said I realized that some
of those would be a stretch waytoo far but we never even would
have considered it and I thinkwhen I'm when I'm suggesting and
all of that is worth thinkingabout because you know even when
(01:01:21):
you hear someone say it likewell What would it have meant to
al-Qaeda to have been treatedlike a criminal the next day
instead of the global threatthat we treated them as?
It would have been quitedifferent.
That would have undermined theircredibility.
(01:01:41):
I mean, it's hard to not,logically, it's very difficult
to not acknowledge that we couldhave done things better.
So I think we need to embracethe willingness to challenge our
(01:02:05):
instinctive responses becausethey're very much rooted in
Hunter.
They're very much rooted inHunter, Protector, Defender.
And they're rooted in a Cold Warconstruct of deterrence.
And they're not going...
to help us as we move forward.
(01:02:28):
And while we're using thoseinstinctive responses for
dealing with and identifyingforeign threats, we are
completely losing sight of whatwe need to be taking care of
internally.
So it could be that by the timesomeone is capable of actually
destroying us, we will havealready done it for ourselves.
SPEAKER_00 (01:02:49):
Well, Gina, thanks so much for this interview.
Thanks so much for this greatconversation.
There's a lot to ponder for ouraudience.
Gina's done so much great workon the hunter-gatherer theory,
some publications on it.
We'll link those in the episodedescription.
But for now, Gina, thanks somuch.
SPEAKER_01 (01:03:08):
Of course.
Thank you again for having me.
I know it's a lot to thinkabout, but again, just logic and
common sense.
UNKNOWN (01:03:17):
Thank you.
you
SPEAKER_00 (00:10):
Hi, my name is Andre Gonowalla.
Welcome back to the Burn BagPodcast.
Today's guest is Gina Bennett, avery famous CIA analyst who
spent over 30 years in theintelligence community and was
one of the first to warn thecountry about Osama bin Laden
back in 1993.
You might recognize her from theNetflix documentary Manhunt, The
(00:30):
Search for Bin Laden, as well asmany other documentaries.
She's also written a great bookcalled The National Security
Mom.
I heard she has a greathistorical fiction book coming
out very soon.
But Gina is not only known forwhat she saw coming, but she's
also pushing us to rethink howwe can define national security
(00:51):
in the first place.
I want to bring Gina on becausecurrently in 2025 in the United
States, we're having a lot ofdebates about what national
security means, what the U.S.
role in foreign policy is.
And Gina has been talking a lotabout her hunter-gatherer
national security theory, whichis challenging the traditional
(01:11):
military-heavy approach andargues that we've ignored the
skills and instincts oftenshaped in the domestic sphere
that actually keep democraciesresilient and bolster our
national security.
So Gina, thanks for coming backon The Burn Bag.
I think the last time we had youon as a guest was about four
years ago, but we were able todo some great work with another
organization you're involvedwith, Girl Security, about two
(01:34):
years ago, I believe.
SPEAKER_01 (01:35):
Yeah, no, it was wonderful.
And thank you for having meagain.
I'm thrilled to be here.
SPEAKER_00 (01:39):
Thank you.
So Gina, you were one of thefirst US analysts to flag Osama
bin Laden as a national securitythreat back in the 1990s, the
early 1990s.
What did you see then thatothers in the system didn't?
SPEAKER_01 (01:53):
Yeah, no, it's a great question.
And, you know, I'm not sure thatI saw anything that others
didn't see as much as I didn'thave preconceived notions about
what terrorism was.
look like or should look like orwould look like because I was so
young and new.
And that's one of the reasonswhy I always tell like I tell my
(02:15):
students, When you first go intothe job, this is one of the
times that you actually willcontribute the most because you
are new.
And that's when you have to havethe courage to ask a lot of
questions and be very curiousabout why the experts think what
they think.
So what I mean by that is when Ifirst started seeing these
(02:36):
individuals leaving Afghanistan,as early as 1989, 1990, when the
Soviet troops started pullingout, And they were from all
different countries, mostnotably at the time North Africa
and Kashmir and even eastwardstowards the Philippines.
They were starting to be aproblem in their home countries,
(03:00):
kind of going back and engagingin violence against regime
targets or police, things likethat.
And I didn't really know thatmuch about terrorism at the
time.
I was so new to the discipline,new to intelligence, new to the
workplace, new to everything.
(03:22):
And we were still...
arguably at the end of the ColdWar.
We didn't know we were at theend of the Cold War, but we
were.
We know that now in hindsight.
But the Soviet Union was still athing.
And most all of my mentors andteachers and people that I look
to for learning and reading andtrying to get up to speed in the
(03:45):
world of terrorism andcounterterrorism were very much
focused on leftist Marxistterrorist groups, you know, Red
Army factions, even a lot ofseparatist groups that were
trying to, you know, peel awayfrom the once colonial states,
you know, that kind of thing.
And this form of terrorism, thisglobal jihadist notion that was
(04:07):
to come was not known and ithadn't been anybody's
experience.
So everyone who I was looking toto learn from, you know, had a
pretty hardened sense of whatterrorist trends, you know, how
to read terrorist trends andwhat to look at and, you know,
be vigilant over, and this wasnot it, right?
(04:31):
So without having that expertmindset, because I wasn't an
expert, I think I was morecurious and more I don't know,
eager to see if there wassomething in all of this that
others were just dismissing asnot really all that important.
(04:52):
And people really didn't see itas important for many years
because, again, because we wereso used to terrorism being a
state-sponsored construct, youknow, something that states use
as an asymmetric tool with theirenemies and often used, you
know, as a secret tool of theirforeign policy and to have a
(05:13):
bunch of what looked like randommen from many, many different
countries engaged in acts ofviolence be something that was
cohesive was just too hard forimaginations at that time.
So yeah, I think I saw whateverybody saw.
I just took it more seriouslymaybe.
SPEAKER_00 (05:34):
Yeah.
So, I mean, within that nationalsecurity bureaucracy, I guess,
like Al-Qaeda was sort of viewedthen as a sort of band of men,
these sort of random guys.
Is that sort of the sense?
SPEAKER_01 (05:47):
Well, I mean, we didn't even know it was Al-Qaeda
until well into the 90s.
It just looked like the outflowof people who had volunteered to
help the Afghan Mujahideen andpushing the Soviet troops out of
Afghanistan from differentnationalities, from different
countries, because volunteersflowed into Afghanistan from
(06:08):
over 50 countries around theworld, including the United
States.
And to be fair, only a smallpercentage of those individuals
ended up becoming radicalizedand engaged in extremist and
terrorist activity later.
But I think everyone wasprobably expecting them to go
(06:28):
and just come back and go backto whatever their job used to
be.
But for a lot of men, they werereally moved and changed and
transformed by the experienceand were easily motivated to
engage in insurgency or terrorcampaigns against their own home
(06:51):
government.
when they got back because theysaw it as alien and not Islamic
enough.
So not necessarily the SovietUnion having invaded in every
single country, but it was closeenough.
So that sense of fervor of if wecan kick out the Soviet Union,
which was, of course, one of thesuperpowers at the time, and we
can defeat them and force themout of Afghanistan, then we can
(07:16):
defeat these infidel countries.
regimes in our own homecountries.
And so that's the kind of fervorand belief system that was
growing out of Afghanistan thatjust wasn't there really before.
SPEAKER_00 (07:29):
So in elevating the threat internally within CIA,
did you ever face resistance?
I mean, you said you took thisthreat way more seriously than a
lot of others.
Was there resistance in actuallyelevating the threat, elevating
it to another height ofseriousness?
SPEAKER_01 (07:48):
You have to understand, too, at the time,
again, with the fall of theSoviet Union, you know, the fall
of the wall in East, well,between the Germanys, 91, 92, 93
timeframe, you're really lookingat a world that's transitioning
unbeknownst to it, you know,from a Cold War, decades of a
(08:09):
Cold War to something completelynew and different.
And there's a lot of theintelligence community being
targeted by Congress fordownsizing and, you know, we
don't need it anymore.
We've won.
There's this whole, like, wewon, you know, peace is breaking
out all over the world.
Democracies are growing likeflowers.
There's this whole, you know,world that was fabulous, the
(08:32):
peace dividend for a few years.
And so the focus was, it's notthat people didn't want to
believe it.
It's just, it wasn't the focus.
You know what I mean?
It's just, We had just surviveddecades of the fear of mutually
assured mass destruction with anuclear war, nuclear holocaust.
(08:55):
And so to be talking about, hey,this group of guys who at the
time didn't appear to be subjectto any coordinating body, it
seemed very organic anddisorganized, that they could
Potentially become a threat.
(09:16):
And it was only, you know, withtime beginning to see this
reference to this same couple ofindividuals, including the
person who turned out to beOsama bin Laden, but we only
knew as Abu Abdullah at thetime.
Maybe there was an organizationbehind it, or there was an
ambition, a coordinationoccurring.
(09:38):
That was a little harder forfolks to believe within the
intelligence community, as wellas, of course, outside the
intelligence community.
That being said, theCounterterrorist Center was
always...
It's extremely small at thetime, extremely small.
But it was really on top of itfrom the very beginning because
(09:59):
its mission is you got to bevigilant.
You have to think worst casescenarios in order to Position
yourself to have theinformation, to be able to
collect the information, todisprove or prove one way or the
other to get to the truth.
And so it's not so much from thehandful of counterterrorism
people.
It was more the whole nationalsecurity apparatus didn't want
(10:23):
to hear about this.
It wasn't important.
And then when you get into theintelligence community, it's got
a lot of other strugglesoccurring at that time.
And so it just...
you know, maybe seemed like toomuch warning too early.
Yeah, I don't know.
(10:43):
I never really, again, I wasstill pretty young throughout
the 90s, and I never thought itwas because people were being
stubborn or dismissive at thetime i thought it's just well
this is different and probablyi'm wrong you know i'm talking
(11:04):
about something that's verydifferent from what everyone is
used to and i don't knowanything so maybe i'm just wrong
it took it took a few years forme to realize okay um and you
know meeting some othercolleagues and There would be
one person at the DefenseIntelligence Agency and one
person at the FBI and one personhere and one person there.
(11:24):
We see what you're seeing.
And creating a very smallinteragency group of people who
were really seeing the same kindof development and having the
same level of concern about itand that we could validate each
other's concerns and try toelevate more as a group.
(11:46):
representing multiple agencies,that this was a growing threat.
SPEAKER_00 (11:50):
So looking back at that era, I mean, the early 90s,
after the fall of the SovietUnion, many referred to that as
the end of history.
Mistakenly, it's just the end ofone type of threat and the
beginning, perhaps, of another.
What did that experience in thebeginning of your career sort of
teach you about how our nationalsecurity institutions, one,
(12:11):
define, and then two, prioritizethreats?
I mean, you already alluded tothis in your answers, but sort
of more in a holistic sort ofsense, like how does the
apparatus actually think throughthese things?
SPEAKER_01 (12:24):
Yeah.
I mean, for one thing, it becamevery clear that It's like the
system needs an enemy.
It doesn't know how to anchoritself without a foreign threat
of some sort.
But really, even before thatparticular set of events
occurred, as a child, my fatherwas in the Navy, so I grew up in
(12:46):
Virginia Beach, Norfolk,Virginia Beach, Little Creek
Base.
And I was used to as a kid stilldoing duck and cover drills.
And I remember thinking as I wasunder the desk, this is really
kind of silly because if anuclear warhead ends up here,
this desk is not going to helpme at all.
(13:06):
I mean, even as a child, Ithought this is really
illogical.
It just makes no sense becausewe're going to be evaporated.
But The Cold War was a verypervasive set of fears and
environment.
And so even as a young kid, Iused to think about it a lot.
(13:27):
It was just part of the culture.
And I always wondered, alsobeing a big fan of the
Revolutionary War and having hadancestors who fought in the
Revolutionary War, I was justreally fascinated with
Revolutionary War history.
And I thought, you know, iflet's just say we have this
(13:51):
nuclear holocaust and threequarters of the American
population is wiped out in a setof attacks with the Soviet
Union.
I didn't think that the next dayAmericans were going to say, OK,
we'll be communists.
Sounds good.
We got it now.
I mean, I figured we would justfight back.
Right.
I mean, yeah, we would survivethe event.
(14:13):
But there's no way we were goingto give in to a form of
government that wasn't what wefreely chose.
That's just not what ourfounders had in mind.
It's not what we thought of asAmerica.
And 1976, with the centennial, Iwas 10.
And I was really bought intowhat it meant, celebrating 200
(14:38):
years of our country's history.
I guess even as a kid, I neverthought of our security as a
nation being related ordependent upon a lack of a
foreign threat.
Even a foreign invasion, just tome, wasn't the end of our
(15:03):
national security because itwasn't the end of our choice,
our free choice of choice.
a representative democracy.
Our desire to have a democracyin this country as our form of
government, our constitution asour founding and supreme body of
(15:23):
law, those were our choices.
And even if somebody else, evenif an alien nation came down and
tried to take over our land, wewere still going to fight back
for what we believed in andwanted.
So When the Soviet Uniondisappeared, I guess, I mean, I
(15:44):
thought, well, there's going tobe a lot of other things that
are going to threaten us.
So it didn't occur to me thatthat was the end of history or
that there was going to be nomore war or conflict.
I figured, in fact, maybe morepeople are going to be jealous
and want to bring us down.
I don't know.
I think in terms of likebaseball.
(16:05):
You know, if you've won a numberof World Series in a row, then
everybody really wants you tolose.
So here we had just won the ColdWar.
So there was no question in mymind there were going to be
different kinds of threats, ifnot even the same kinds of
threats from other states.
Remember, China was still acommunist country.
(16:27):
So I don't know.
I just...
I think since I was a kid, justnever equated this idea of in
order for us to be secure as anation, we have to have no
threats, no external enemies.
I think then that just ensuresyou will never be secure.
(16:50):
It's like.
It's guaranteeing permanentinsecurity.
SPEAKER_00 (16:54):
Yeah, no, and I really appreciate sort of you
going back to your childhood tosort of share your thinking on
this.
And I mean, you know, I'm verycurious about at what point in
your career, you know, did yousort of realize that the
traditional security paradigmsweren't really enough?
Like, when do you start to feelthose models change?
were starting to fail, and didthe events of 9-11, the global
(17:16):
war on terror, sort of reinforceor challenge your thinking
around that, your thinkingaround national security and
what it means?
SPEAKER_01 (17:25):
Yeah, no, definitely 9-11 was an evolutionary moment,
I suppose.
Because while I had thought thatin the background, I think our
response to 9-11, not the eventitself, but our response to it
(17:45):
made it more stark to me howtied our sense of national
security was to, or still is, toa sense of physical safety and
how little we talked about theideals of democracy and the role
(18:09):
of citizenship in securing ournation.
And I do think one of the bigelements from prior to the end
of the Cold War to 9-11, becausewe had that feeling of we won
this ideological conflictbetween communism and democracy,
(18:29):
between Marxism and capitalism,like we won, we stopped
competing and the realm ofideals.
We stopped competing as a nationin the debate and discussion of
what are the best forms ofgovernance and our belief in
self-determination as a way ofproducing a stable world, you
(18:56):
know, post-World War II.
and one for that matter, theidea that when populations get
to decide for themselves thetype of government structure
that rules over them and youcreate that social contract,
then we are going to see morestable nation states.
(19:17):
We gave up competing in thatspace because we won.
And so without competing in it,I think we weren't even
reminding ourselves of theimportance of it.
And we really disconnected, Ithink, our sense of what does it
mean to be an engaged citizen ina democracy?
(19:38):
You know, what does it mean tobe capable of being the
government?
Not just...
voting, but, you know, ofactually being the government
of, by, for the people.
What does that mean?
And how do we do it?
And why is it important to us?
And so when we responded the waywe did to 9-11, which is like a
(20:01):
whole other set of, I would loveto talk about the responses as
like a hunter response versus agatherer response.
The way we responded to 9-11 asif it were an existential threat
to the United States, I thoughtwas outrageous um and it really
bothered me because al-qaeda wasnever going terrorism is never
(20:26):
going to be an existentialthreat to the united states of
america yes it's going to be athreat yes it's going to be
painful it's traumatic it'stragic i understand all of that
i'm not dismissing the traumabut again we didn't become a
caliphate because we because of9 11 right It did not destroy
(20:49):
the United States as ademocracy.
It didn't make us abandon ourConstitution, at least.
I mean, I know some people willargue that we abandoned pieces
of it, and that's fine.
I'm all for debate.
But, I mean, we didn't abandonit wholesale as our governance
structure.
And so, from my perspective, wewent so far as to elevate the
(21:14):
individuals who caused 9-11 tobeing as great a threat to the
United States as communism wasor the Soviet Union was or the
Eastern Bloc.
And I just thought that wasreally a bad set of decisions
because they weren't and theynever would be.
And you give power to the bullywhen you do that and you weaken
(21:41):
yourself.
So that was when it became evenclearer to me that we have
equated our nation's securitywith the physical aspects of
safety, with the tangible andphysical set of priorities,
which are important.
(22:01):
defense of our borders, theintegrity of our sovereignty,
the safety of ourinfrastructure, our feeling like
we can get on an airplane andfly and be safe and can get on a
train or car and drive and besafe, safety in our buildings.
All of those things are hugelyimportant for a stable,
functioning, happy population.
(22:23):
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying that it isn't.
But We can have all of thesethings and have a caliphate or a
theocracy ruling us.
We could have all that safetyand stability and have a
dictator or a communist regime.
Is that U.S.
(22:44):
national security?
Would we feel like the UnitedStates is secure if we are no
longer using our Constitution?
Or would we be a completelydifferent country and therefore
there is no more United States?
Do you see what I mean?
If our national security issomething that's supposed to
come out of our defense and ourmilitary and our power
(23:04):
projection, then it doesn'treally matter what kind of
government we have.
But I don't think we feel thatway.
I think it does matter to us.
And I think Americans do wantour Constitution to continue to
endure and our democracy tocontinue to function.
And if that's the case, then theonly people who really threaten
(23:27):
that security are us you know wedo and no number of aircraft
carriers or drones or you knowanything else are going to to
make us secure as um as apopulation believing in our
constitution and ideals ofdemocracy and our democratic
institutions i mean that comesfrom somewhere else entirely so
(23:51):
i think it was it was more likei said it was more that the
response seems so clearly to bea response of fear of feeling
vulnerable like someone coulddestroy who we are even though
the soviet union didn't succeedsome you know group of not even
co-nationalists who live inafghanistan which was arguably
(24:12):
not a very modern uminfrastructure for anything and
and threaten our nation that wasjust so impossible to believe
and such a blow to our pride ithink that our fear response was
very telling to me that we haddefined our security as a nation
(24:36):
as a lack of threats to ourcountry.
And I thought that that was abig mistake.
SPEAKER_00 (24:42):
Now, this is a good segue into the theory of a
hunter-gatherer nationalsecurity.
You mentioned earlier, right,that after 9-11, the U.S.
took a, quote, hunter approachto to that threat, what they
perceived the threat was.
Can you define what the overalltheory is in sort of plain terms
(25:03):
and more?
SPEAKER_01 (25:04):
Yeah.
I mean, you know, in thesimplest terms, it's common
sense, right?
You will respond to a threatbased on the threat itself and
the environment you're in.
You know, if you are exposed tosomeone with a communicable
disease, You're not going toshoot them.
That's not going to really bethe way to deal with it.
(25:28):
And if you're exposed to someonetrying to mug you, you're not
going to put a mask on yourface.
That doesn't make any sense,right?
We have common sense.
We understand that not allthreats are the same.
And therefore, the approaches tothreats have to be different.
You have to match the solutionto the threat, the tools to the
(25:52):
environment.
And that's like the simplest,that's the easiest thing to
understand.
So when we're facing right nowwhere the majority of Americans
are dissatisfied with democracyand they don't think democracy
is working, that is a threat toour government.
That's a threat because people,if you don't believe that
(26:15):
democracy is working, And youare the government.
You know, people, every personis the government.
It's not just some alien thingin Washington, D.C.
If you don't believe it's goingto work, then it's not going to
work.
And there's no, again, there'sno amount of physical safety
that's going to change people'sminds about that.
So we have to have a differenttool.
(26:37):
And it really, you know, it goesback to, and I think it's as
clear as...
And as simple as hunters andgatherers, whether you believe
in the origin story and thefirst family was kicked out of
the Garden of Eden and we becamenomadic hunter-gatherers for
hundreds of thousands of years,or whether you're Darwinian and
(26:58):
you believe in it in a differentway, the point is we were
nomadic hunter-gatherersocieties for the vast majority
of human existence, hundreds ofthousands of years.
And as nomadic hunter-gatherers,everyone from you know toddlers
to the eldest person contributedin some way to the survival and
(27:22):
well-being of the small groupthat was hunting and gathering
so it's not about gender it isabout contributing roles to
survival and well-beingobviously matched for many years
based on physical capabilitieswith you know men taking most of
the protector-hunter roles andwomen taking the
(27:45):
gatherer-caretaker roles.
Although women gathered and...
I mean, women hunted and mengathered, but in general, right?
So in general, that's the case.
So all of that, thosecontributions between whether
it's protecting the small socialgroup from a predator or...
(28:07):
whether it's identifying apoisonous plant that could kill
everybody or recognizing thatone sick child can make
everybody sick or whatever,there's different types of
threats, physical threats, tothe small grouping of
(28:27):
hunter-gatherer community.
It's all being done verytransparently in the open
because you don't, You're not ina brick house.
You're moving.
You're moving constantly.
So it's very transparent.
But when we become farmingpeoples with the agrarian
revolution some 10, maybe 15,000years ago, so pretty recently
(28:51):
when it comes to the amount oftime we've been on Earth, but
when we...
we start to farm and settledown, and that's the great
luxury, right?
Okay, now we can stay put andmake food for ourselves, grow
food for ourselves.
And we see this as the beginningof civilization.
You know, we have, with farms,we then have surplus goods that
(29:12):
you can then trade with otherfarmers for their surplus goods,
and all of a sudden we havetrade, commerce, money becomes,
you know, a thing for us totrade.
We get communication andmythology explaining everything
and eventually rule and law andproperty ownership and just
(29:35):
science, math, everything comesout of all of this ability to
stay put.
But another thing that comes outof this is that we create this
very hard divide between publicspaces and private space.
In the public space where thetrading takes place, And in the
domicile, where the oncegatherer, sometimes hunter,
(29:59):
becomes very much the gatherer,caretaker, and planner inside
the domicile, and the hunterbecomes a protector, defender,
provider outside the domicile.
And this is generally, we'retalking men and women for the
most part at this point.
The men are in the tradingspaces.
(30:21):
They're collaborating with eachother.
They're advancing theirunderstanding by collaborating
with each other, and eventuallywe get writing and recording of
history and warfare, becauseproperty ownership immediately
breeds, I own this, you don'town it, and all conquest, desire
for conquest, all that stuff.
(30:41):
But inside the domicile, thegatherer caretakers are still
evolving and innovating andplanning and contributing to
both survival and well-being ofthe growing family.
It's just being done behindwalls and it's not being
recorded in the public space.
(31:05):
So we're missing 10, 15,000years of understanding of the
evolution inside the home andwhat those skills and survival
instincts and approaches werethat are still needed, but we
end up believing that whathappens in the domicile is
(31:26):
irrelevant to what happens inthe public space, although what
happens and is decided in thepublic space absolutely is
relevant to the private space,but not the other way around.
And that is completely, I think,wrong and also illogical.
I think one of the greatestexamples of this comes from a
(31:47):
couple of years ago whenarchaeologists discovered that a
little ivory comb, a littleartifact, only a couple inches
big, turned out to be a combthat was created to remove lice
from your hair and your beard.
Because lice from 4,000 yearsago could kill many, many
(32:08):
people, more people than asaber-toothed tiger anyway,
could kill a lot of people.
It just creates disease.
But when you think about howlong...
it took someone or some peoplesto realize that the sores that
were happening on their bodiesthat were causing disease and
death and infection came fromthese tiny little bugs that we
(32:30):
can barely see and then figureout, well, how do we get rid of
these tiny little bugs, come upwith the idea for a comb, make a
comb out of ivory, by the way,and then carve the instructions
on how to use the comb in theivory because the comb said, May
the tusk of this comb root outthe lice in hair and beard.
(32:51):
And it's actually now the firstknown example of alphabetic
writing.
So they bothered to put it onthe comb, right?
So that anybody who picks up thecomb would know how to use it.
If you use it enough, youactually prevent lice from
nesting.
So there they've observed theproblem, an existential threat
to humanity, long enough tofigure out the source, come up
(33:15):
with a solution.
that they then create, and thenthey actually put the
instruction label on thesolution so that they can share
it with anybody else, that is acompletely different approach to
security, right?
That's a completely differentapproach to survival and
wellbeing.
And a torch or a spear or anuclear weapon is not a good way
(33:39):
to solve lice in your household.
So it's really, that's, reallyall it is is common sense.
And it's not because these aresoft and feminine solutions.
These are just aslife-threatening on the physical
side and certainly just asexistential on the security
(34:01):
side.
They're just different types ofthreats and different types of
solutions.
Whereas the hunter side is stillvery much focused more on a
physical threat, one that'sobvious and dynamic, and one
from a hunter's perspective.
(34:21):
If you were a hunter and yourinstinct was to stop and observe
what you think might be asaber-toothed tiger and take
notes on it and exchange withother hunters, do you think
that's a saber-toothed tiger?
I don't know.
It doesn't look like the rightsize or it's not moving quickly
enough.
You're going to be dead by thetime you finish that
(34:42):
conversation, right?
So you develop a set ofinstincts of I see threat, I
kill threat.
Or I see threat, I smash threat.
I destroy threat withoutthinking because you can't.
You're not going to havesurvival of the fittest if you
don't kill the threat.
Whereas if you're a gatherer ora caretaker and you see a bug on
(35:05):
your child and you smash yourkid, that's not a good way of
saving your child from the bug.
So we're not going to havesurvival of the fittest if we
kill our own.
So when you think about that, itshould just, in a very common
sense and practical way, tellyou that you need a different
set of skills looking at earlywarning of some types of threats
(35:30):
and different approaches tosolving those than...
just the military, just theforce, just violence.
SPEAKER_00 (35:36):
So when a casual listener or a student of foreign
policy or national security, oreven many seasoned national
security folks will listen tothis, they may start to bend
this as hard power and softpower.
However, you deem it verydifferently.
You talk about it as beingevolutionary power.
And I think the example of, youknow, you don't smash the kid in
(35:58):
the head if you see lice, youknow, you want to You know, we
found these tools, these ivorytools to sort of get this slice
out, sort of observant,analytical, trying to figure out
how do we prevent this stuff.
SPEAKER_01 (36:11):
And I think of it as evolutionary.
You know, it's very cognitive.
Yes, you have to develop thediscernment to know the
difference between somethingthat is a saber-toothed tiger
and something that is not.
And as you...
As you watch our worldrevolutionize really since the
(36:33):
last century, not just becauseof weaponry and warfare and all,
but technology, we're in a placewhere increasingly we're not
going to know the differencebetween a real enemy and a deep
fake.
We're not going to know thedifference between whether or
not someone actually pushed thatbutton to fire that missile or
(36:56):
whether it was an agentic AIthat accidentally did because
that's what it thought youwanted to do.
We're not going to know when thecyber attack occurs or all the
banks in the United States fail.
Who did it?
And who do you go to war with ifyou don't know who is the enemy?
Do you go to war with the wrongperson just in order to do
(37:16):
something about it?
Possibly, if you're just ahunter, that's what you will do,
if that's the only way youapproach things.
So we're increasingly in anenvironment that requires
thinking.
It requires taking the time toobserve and say, wait a minute,
what don't we know about what'sgoing on here?
(37:38):
What do we know?
Who do we collaborate with?
How do we consider all thepossible alternative
explanations of what's happeninghere?
think before you act there's alot of threats now and moving
forward into our future thatrequire that kind of thinking
before we act because ouractions may end up being
(38:02):
irreversible and completely farmore harmful and existentially
dangerous to us in the long runSo that's why I consider it
evolutionary, because we haveevolved into modern society.
It's very different from ourhunter-gatherer ancestor days.
And to stop and think is notweak.
(38:26):
It's not soft.
It's not a fear of acting.
It's wanting to be smarter.
Yeah, that's why I disagree withthe idea of influence and
collaboration and discussion andresearch.
And using critical thinking is,to me, is not a soft approach.
(38:49):
It's a smart approach.
It's an evolutionary approach toevolutionary problems.
SPEAKER_00 (38:56):
Absolutely.
And, you know, how would USstrategy look different if we...
put those values much higher upon the priority scale.
Values, for example, like theones you outlined in caretaking,
values that we don't really talkmuch about in a national
security lens, but are stillsuper important, like emotional
(39:17):
intelligence, for example, orcivic education.
We don't consider those assecurity assets, but they very
much are in our view.
SPEAKER_01 (39:25):
No, I mean, I think...
Number one, if we had a nationalsecurity strategy that looked
more like a combination ofhunter and gatherer, I'm not
saying get rid of the hunter.
I'm not at all.
I mean, I was a hunter for 35years.
That was my role.
I was a targeter.
(39:48):
I understand the importance ofit.
It's about achieving a balanceand not expecting...
everything that our militarydoes over hundreds of years to
automatically producedepolarization and unity among
America and effective governmentand happiness and democracy,
(40:12):
it's not going to produce thatno matter how good our military
is.
That's not what it's designed todo.
It can't do that.
So it's...
It would really be a strategythat recognizes the hunter side,
hunter, protector, defender,dealing with that kind of
(40:35):
physical, tangible threats toour safety, to our sense of
safety here as a country or whenwe're traveling abroad is one
set of priorities.
But equally as important isensuring that our government is
governed by people whounderstand it.
(40:56):
I mean, the majority ofAmericans don't even know that
there are three branches ofgovernment, let alone some of
the more important details aboutthe checks and balances and our
institutions.
The majority of Americans don'thave confidence in our democracy
or the elections or electionprocesses, and not just the
national level ones, but evenlocal.
(41:18):
But a high functioning democracywould ensure that its citizens
when they are old enough to voteknow what they're doing
understand the responsibilityand that it's not just about
casting one vote it's then alsoabout holding your
representatives accountable towhat they promised they were
going to do what you voted themin for it's also having
(41:42):
representatives who realize theyare there to serve their entire
constituency, not just thepeople who voted for them or not
just for the people they like,not just for the people who gave
them money, but for their entireconstituency, even if that
entire constituency turns out tobe mostly people who aren't like
(42:04):
you or don't like you.
You are a servant.
You're not a god.
You're not a king or a ruler ora duke.
This is That's not whatdemocracy is about.
And it requires so muchre-education and bringing back,
you know, really what ourframers believed was so
(42:26):
important.
And ironically, when I said, youknow, hunter-gatherer, I think
it's really about common sense.
Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense,the pamphlet Common Sense,
which, of course, informed ourframers as they wrote the
Declaration of Independence ofthe Constitution.
So we're all equal.
Too much power in the hands ofone person is dangerous for
(42:47):
everyone.
And freedom has to be nurtured.
It is not a guarantee.
You can't just acquire it and belike, okay, we're done.
It's kind of like, you know,okay, we got peace after the
Cold War, we're done.
We don't need any, we don't haveany more threats.
It's, that's a fallacy.
So if we don't put as mucheffort in ensuring our citizenry
(43:07):
is up for the task, then we'refailing.
in ensuring and guaranteeing thecontinuation of the Constitution
in our democracy.
We need to understand thatprocesses of observing,
research, thinking, those areimportant parts of a
(43:30):
high-functioning,decision-making democracy.
It's not just what other peoplewant to hear.
We need to have much more honestcommunication with the American
people to include parentstelling them when they're wrong.
We're sorry, but actuallygridlock was designed by the
framers.
(43:50):
Gridlock in Congress is ademonstration of a democracy
functioning properly becauseit's making sure that we don't
give in to tyranny of themajority or tyranny of the
minority.
Nobody's happy.
That's how it's supposed to bein a democracy.
That's how it is.
Daggone it, this family is happybecause everybody is miserable
(44:12):
because no one gets to ride onevery single ride that they want
to ride on when we go to DisneyWorld.
We're all a little bitmiserable.
I mean, it's just, again, it'sreally about common sense, and
it's about understanding as anation that we're going to be
threatened.
(44:34):
And there are going to be peoplewho hate us.
Some of them inside, some ofthem outside.
But if we decide to remaincommitted to our Constitution,
if we really believe in theideals of democracy, then we
have to recognize it's notenough to just be willing to die
(44:57):
for your country and say you'rea patriot.
You have to put up with yourcountry also.
And that means...
Other people have rights totheir ways of pursuing life,
liberty, and the pursuit ofhappiness.
Even if you don't like it, turnthe other way.
Just ignore it or endure thediscomfort of it.
But as long as we don't turnaway from our Constitution and
(45:21):
our democratic institutions,then we're secure as the United
States of America, and peoplecan hate on us as much as they
want.
As long as it doesn't change ourminds about us, then it doesn't
matter.
It's irrelevant.
Like terrorists, they areirrelevant.
(45:44):
So, I mean, it's a differentkind of investment in public
education, investment in...
ensuring transparency in the wayour politicians talk to their
constituencies, there's a wholehost of ways of reinvigorating
(46:07):
our checks and balances and theobjectivity of our institution
building, trying to depoliticizeand departisanize it.
And In today's day and age,there's really no reason why
people can't be more engaged intheir own governance.
(46:29):
It's also recognizing that, whoknows, maybe democracy is also a
constantly evolving thing and weget to a place where, I'm not
suggesting direct democracy, butwe actually can have more say as
individuals in aspects of ourexperience as Americans that
(46:56):
have just been decided for usfor forever.
I mean, I think we'reexperiencing some of that now.
People are deciding they wantmore say in how they're being
educated.
Some people are fine to have itcontinue to go the way they
want.
But because we have acommunication system that's so
modern and so, you know, it'sjust constantly evolving and
(47:19):
we're able to have far moreconversations than we ever could
before about things that we usedto just take as a given.
SPEAKER_00 (47:25):
Absolutely.
So, I mean...
I think so much of thisconversation is so valuable
because when we're thinkingabout national security, it's
really talking about, you know,what is safety versus what is
security?
You know, what is the securityof our form of government?
As you said much earlier in theconversation, you know, we can
have sort of physical safety,physical safety of our
infrastructure, physical safetyof our bodies and so on, but
(47:49):
still be ruled by a caliphate,still be ruled by a dictator.
And this is still make us theUnited States of America, uh,
And I mean, I sort of want tobring this conversation now very
much to the present day with somany of the challenges that we
are actively dealing with.
Both, you know, you outlinedvery much so the challenges we
are facing in the domestictheater, you know, with our
(48:10):
government and so on.
How do you sort of see the toolsof the hunters versus the tools
of the gatherers being used inthe way we are approaching
foreign policy and security in2025?
You alluded to it a little bitearlier with your thoughts on
the afghanistan war the globalwar on terrorism and so on but
(48:31):
like how do you sort of see itplaying out today yeah
SPEAKER_01 (48:34):
i mean here's where i feel like we have we're
definitely going backwards intime um devolving uh because
again i mean i really approachthings with logic and common
sense you are far better offliving in a world of friends
(48:55):
than you are living in a worldof enemies So, you know,
friendships and allies andalliances that, you know, we
have forged for a hundred yearsor more across the world are
important to us and to oursecurity as a democracy because
(49:22):
they are...
They reduce and deter enemiesfrom emerging.
You know, if you see a massiveblock of democracies, you're
going to be less inclined tochallenge that.
I mean, this is something welearned, I guess, in the Cold
(49:43):
War, too, with the NATO and theWarsaw Pact.
So to want to go it alone, Ithink, is foolish.
Everybody does their countryfirst.
That's That's nothing new.
We all do ourselves first.
We do our family first.
I mean, of course, Americafirst.
(50:03):
Like, duh.
France does France first.
Singapore does Singapore first.
This is not novel.
But it doesn't mean you have tobe alone.
It doesn't mean America has tobe America first, America alone.
And that's not smart.
You want to have as many peoplehave your back as possible.
(50:24):
And Using nothing but fear andthreats and more aircraft
carriers and things like this todeter a world where we do have
(50:45):
enemies who are skipping over usand realizing that our
vulnerability is our lack offaith in each other.
That The weakness of America'sdemocracy is that it relies on
its own people, that we have apopulation that doesn't
(51:08):
understand its own democracy orits own government.
And so the more they are able tosow the seeds of division or
make the seeds of division thatare already here flourish even
further, they don't need to firea weapon at us to destroy us.
It's about malign influence anddisinformation and fanning the
(51:35):
flames of divisiveness that arealready here that can lead to
Americans abandoning democracythemselves without China ever
having to threaten us or withoutRussia or Moscow ever having to
build something more strongerthan a nuclear arsenal or
(51:55):
whatever.
And again, somebody comes at usand we can't attribute who it is
for months.
What are we going to do withthat?
What are we going to do withthat?
Even from a safety perspective,what are we going to do with
that?
So I think...
(52:18):
This entrenching ourselves backinto this, we're just going to
have decisive, overwhelmingforce, blunt force, military
threats, threats of sanctions,tariffs, whatever, whatever you
want to call it all.
It just creates a hostileenvironment that increases the
(52:41):
likelihood of enemies andadversaries versus decreases it.
And that does nobody in theUnited States any good?
That doesn't increase oursafety.
It doesn't increase oursecurity.
And what is it for?
You know, just because one man,you know, has a pride problem
(53:04):
or, you know, one person wantsto run the whole country like a
dictator and be able to bullyeverybody.
I mean, what is that?
That's just...
not evolutionary at all.
That's regression to childhood.
So, you know, I think, I guess,again, I wish, and this goes
(53:30):
back to, you know, my very firstbook, National Security Mom, I
really, I don't see government,the idea of governance, as a
stretch of the imagination fromparenting.
It really is, national securitygovernment it is so accessible
for anyone anybody should beable to understand this because
(53:53):
it is nothing more than figuringit out how you divide up
resources how you divide upresponsibilities within a family
um you know and if you're aparent whether you're a mom a
dad excuse me whether your mom adad a grandparent whatever you
(54:15):
have a whole bunch of people inyour family and you have to take
care of all of them and you maynot like them all and they may
not all do you know pull theirweight but you have to take care
of them and love them they'rethey're yours right they're your
family and you have to find away for each of them to
(54:37):
contribute as best they possiblycan to that family and that
family doesn't cease to be afamily, if somebody comes in and
robs you or burns your housedown, you're still family.
So it's not just about yourphysical safety.
It's about what you believe inas a group of people, of related
(55:00):
people.
Anyway.
Yeah.
I mean, I just think that thispainting of the government as a
deep state or a bunch of eliteswho are trying to obscure what
(55:23):
they're really doing from theAmerican people is so
irresponsible.
It's so nefarious.
And it just undermines andweakens us as a nation.
SPEAKER_00 (55:37):
Yeah.
And, you know, going as we sortof round out this conversation,
so the going back to some of thefirst topics we discussed in the
hour, the global war on terrorand so on, and then, you know,
juxtaposing that with, thehunter-gatherer theory, and so
many of the threats that we arefacing to our internal
(55:58):
democracy.
Do you think we ever truly wonthe global war on terror, or are
we actively losing it today?
SPEAKER_01 (56:05):
Well, I never really liked the framing as a global
war on terror to begin with.
Look, the reason why I wasunhappy on so many levels with
the entire response is becausethere's a lot of reasons,
really, but As acounterterrorism expert at the
time, and as someone who hadbeen studying Al-Qaeda from
(56:30):
before we even knew it wasAl-Qaeda, you have to ask
yourself, this attack occurred,and I understood we had a law
enforcement approach, like wewant justice for the criminals
as well as justice for thevictims.
I get that.
I do.
(56:51):
But I think we lied to ourselvesabout what we were really doing,
which was getting revenge.
And that's a very emotionalreaction, revenge, wanting
revenge, being angry, and havingyour pride hurt because these
(57:12):
people were able to get awaywith what they were able to get
away with.
But If you are being completelyobjective and unemotional in
this situation, and you askyourself, what is justice for
the people who were killed?
(57:36):
And what is punishment for thepeople who perpetrated this?
Justice for the people who werekilled might also be diminishing
or reducing the likelihood ofanother attack, right?
and diminishing the influenceand power of the individuals who
(57:56):
were involved, or al-Qaeda.
And punishing the people whowere involved is going to be
also, if you think about it,well, you have to know what is
punishment from theirperspective.
So those are two differentthings.
So if you really wanted toreduce the influence and the
(58:20):
power of Al-Qaeda raising itsstature to an enemy combatant
and treating it as if the entireU.S.
military, not only the entireU.S.
military, but the combinedforces of our NATO allies,
because they invoked Article 5of NATO, is necessary to defeat
(58:44):
this handful of rogue forcesterrorists right that's not
going to diminish their power orinfluence it's going to triple
it you know quadruple it like athousand times um exponentially
making al-qaeda and bin ladenand everyone really you know who
(59:04):
believes in what they were doingso much more powerful than they
ever were that was stupid i meani'm just gonna say it that's
just short-sighted The otherthing is, if you really want to
understand what is punishingfrom their perspective, you
(59:28):
can't say, well, it's killingthem or torturing them or any of
that.
That's not what they would haveconsidered the greatest
punishment.
The greatest punishment to themwas being made irrelevant, being
ignored, being treated as ifthey were nothing and didn't
have...
any influence whatsoever, as ifthey didn't even occur, as if it
(59:49):
didn't happen.
That would have required us torebuild the Twin Towers, start
rebuilding them as soon aspossible and have them look
exactly the same, maybe a storytaller if you wanted to feel
better about it, but saying,whatever, you don't matter.
That would have meant findingthe individuals responsible and
(01:00:10):
making sure that they wereprosecuted and went off to jail
and were forgotten.
Not a constant story, a mediastory, because they're in
detention centers in Gitmo orwhatever.
Instead of killing bin Laden,just having him unable to
(01:00:32):
communicate externally,basically die an old and
forgotten man, that would havebeen more...
torture to him than anything,you know, turning him into a
martyr and a mythical person.
So, you know, we didn'tentertain any of those ideas.
(01:00:56):
But if you really want to bestrategic and evolutionary
thinker when it comes tosecurity you need and maybe you
don't do all of the things thatI just said I realized that some
of those would be a stretch waytoo far but we never even would
have considered it and I thinkwhen I'm when I'm suggesting and
all of that is worth thinkingabout because you know even when
(01:01:21):
you hear someone say it likewell What would it have meant to
al-Qaeda to have been treatedlike a criminal the next day
instead of the global threatthat we treated them as?
It would have been quitedifferent.
That would have undermined theircredibility.
(01:01:41):
I mean, it's hard to not,logically, it's very difficult
to not acknowledge that we couldhave done things better.
So I think we need to embracethe willingness to challenge our
(01:02:05):
instinctive responses becausethey're very much rooted in
Hunter.
They're very much rooted inHunter, Protector, Defender.
And they're rooted in a Cold Warconstruct of deterrence.
And they're not going...
to help us as we move forward.
(01:02:28):
And while we're using thoseinstinctive responses for
dealing with and identifyingforeign threats, we are
completely losing sight of whatwe need to be taking care of
internally.
So it could be that by the timesomeone is capable of actually
destroying us, we will havealready done it for ourselves.
SPEAKER_00 (01:02:49):
Well, Gina, thanks so much for this interview.
Thanks so much for this greatconversation.
There's a lot to ponder for ouraudience.
Gina's done so much great workon the hunter-gatherer theory,
some publications on it.
We'll link those in the episodedescription.
But for now, Gina, thanks somuch.
SPEAKER_01 (01:03:08):
Of course.
Thank you again for having me.
I know it's a lot to thinkabout, but again, just logic and
common sense.
UNKNOWN (01:03:17):
Thank you.
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