Over the past few years, podcasts have become one of my favorite things to do while exercising or doing work where I need some preoccupation—cleaning, cooking, and the like.  They're great; perhaps they're allowing me to be distracted by a kind of higher intellectualized divertissement, and perhaps they're letting me escape from the silence I truly need; but I love them nonetheless.

One of my favorite podcasts is Intelligence Matters, a podcast created and hosted by Michael Morrell, a career CIA analyst who at the end of his career was actually Acting Director of CIA.  He has a range of people he interviews, and the conversations are often deeply informative about the world.  What’s more, from my perspective, the CIA sounds like academia—it’s a place of bewildering bureaucratic complexity, with different units having different sub-cultures and different ways of thinking about the world, all in the service of a basically intellectual undertaking.

There are two really interesting recent conversations on this podcast.  The first, an interview with Robert Draper, about his new book on the US process to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  Morrell disagrees with Draper about this, though he’s super-polite about it (a conflict averse analyst, go figure), but it’s really interesting, in itself and more generally.  What were the causes of the decision?  What were the motives of the actors behind it?  All of it is worth listening to.

The other is an interview with Martin Petersen, retired head of analysis at CIA, is fastinating about intelligence analysis and also about China (and about the CIA from the 70s to the 90s).  He's a CIA booster, which is fine once you know it, but it's interesting hearing about the process of analysis.  It sounds a bit like a carefully designed epistemological process--though they both speak in generalities, and a little bit in clichés, when talking about its details.  Still, it's fascinating.  Check them out.