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Undisciplined: National Security Now

Daniel Mennerich, creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

The last time the United States Capitol was breached was in 1814, when British troops burned the building using furniture and books from the Library of Congress as fuel. Last week, the capitol was breached again – and that’s raising a lot of questions about the state of our nation. We’re going to work through some of those questions with former CIA analyst Jeannie Johnson.

Jeannie Johnson is the director of Utah State University’s Center for Anticipatory Intelligence, an interdisciplinary research hub fusing expertise in national security and geopolitics with cyber threats, data analytics and emergent technology.

She is a former analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency’s Director of Intelligence, and the cultural topography analytic metric she helped pioneer has been used by the CIA to better understand the nature of threats and opportunities.

Matthew LaPlante has reported on ritual infanticide in Northern Africa, insurgent warfare in the Middle East, the legacy of genocide in Southeast Asia, and gang violence in Central America. But a few years back, something donned on him: Maybe the news doesn't have to be brutally depressing all the time. Today, he balances his continuing work on more heartbreaking subjects by writing books about the intersection of science, human health and society, including the New York Times best-selling Lifespan with geneticist David Sinclair and the Nautilus Award-winning Longevity Plan with cardiologist John Day. His first solo book, Superlative, looks at what scientists are learning by studying organisms that have evolved in record-setting ways, and his is currently at work on another book about embracing the inevitability of human-caused climate change with an optimistic outlook on the future.