The Burn Bag Podcast
We’re here to redefine how scholars and policymakers approach national security and foreign policy. Join us, as we make sense of a world in crisis.
The Burn Bag Podcast
Manhunt to Mindshift: Fmr. CIA Analyst Gina Bennett on Hunter-Gatherer National Security and Evolutionary Power
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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SPEAKER_00:Hi, my name is Andre Gonowalla. Welcome back to the Burn Bag Podcast. Today's guest is Gina Bennett, a very famous CIA analyst who spent over 30 years in the intelligence community and was one of the first to warn the country about Osama bin Laden back in 1993. You might recognize her from the Netflix documentary Manhunt, The Search for Bin Laden, as well as many other documentaries. She's also written a great book called The National Security Mom. I heard she has a great historical fiction book coming out very soon. But Gina is not only known for what she saw coming, but she's also pushing us to rethink how we can define national security in the first place. I want to bring Gina on because currently in 2025 in the United States, we're having a lot of debates about what national security means, what the U.S. role in foreign policy is. And Gina has been talking a lot about her hunter-gatherer national security theory, which is challenging the traditional military-heavy approach and argues that we've ignored the skills and instincts often shaped in the domestic sphere that actually keep democracies resilient and bolster our national security. So Gina, thanks for coming back on The Burn Bag. I think the last time we had you on as a guest was about four years ago, but we were able to do some great work with another organization you're involved with, Girl Security, about two years ago, I believe.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, it was wonderful. And thank you for having me again. I'm thrilled to be here.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. So Gina, you were one of the first US analysts to flag Osama bin Laden as a national security threat back in the 1990s, the early 1990s. What did you see then that others in the system didn't?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, it's a great question. And, you know, I'm not sure that I saw anything that others didn't see as much as I didn't have preconceived notions about what terrorism was. look like or should look like or would look like because I was so young and new. And that's one of the reasons why I always tell like I tell my students, When you first go into the job, this is one of the times that you actually will contribute the most because you are new. And that's when you have to have the courage to ask a lot of questions and be very curious about why the experts think what they think. So what I mean by that is when I first started seeing these individuals leaving Afghanistan, as early as 1989, 1990, when the Soviet troops started pulling out, And they were from all different countries, most notably at the time North Africa and Kashmir and even eastwards towards the Philippines. They were starting to be a problem in their home countries, kind of going back and engaging in violence against regime targets or police, things like that. And I didn't really know that much about terrorism at the time. I was so new to the discipline, new to intelligence, new to the workplace, new to everything. And we were still... arguably at the end of the Cold War. We didn't know we were at the end of the Cold War, but we were. We know that now in hindsight. But the Soviet Union was still a thing. And most all of my mentors and teachers and people that I look to for learning and reading and trying to get up to speed in the world of terrorism and counterterrorism were very much focused on leftist Marxist terrorist groups, you know, Red Army factions, even a lot of separatist groups that were trying to, you know, peel away from the once colonial states, you know, that kind of thing. And this form of terrorism, this global jihadist notion that was to come was not known and it hadn't been anybody's experience. So everyone who I was looking to to learn from, you know, had a pretty hardened sense of what terrorist trends, you know, how to read terrorist trends and what to look at and, you know, be vigilant over, and this was not it, right? So without having that expert mindset, because I wasn't an expert, I think I was more curious and more I don't know, eager to see if there was something in all of this that others were just dismissing as not really all that important. And people really didn't see it as important for many years because, again, because we were so used to terrorism being a state-sponsored construct, you know, something that states use as an asymmetric tool with their enemies and often used, you know, as a secret tool of their foreign policy and to have a bunch of what looked like random men from many, many different countries engaged in acts of violence be something that was cohesive was just too hard for imaginations at that time. So yeah, I think I saw what everybody saw. I just took it more seriously maybe.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So, I mean, within that national security bureaucracy, I guess, like Al-Qaeda was sort of viewed then as a sort of band of men, these sort of random guys. Is that sort of the sense?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean, we didn't even know it was Al-Qaeda until well into the 90s. It just looked like the outflow of people who had volunteered to help the Afghan Mujahideen and pushing the Soviet troops out of Afghanistan from different nationalities, from different countries, because volunteers flowed into Afghanistan from over 50 countries around the world, including the United States. And to be fair, only a small percentage of those individuals ended up becoming radicalized and engaged in extremist and terrorist activity later. But I think everyone was probably expecting them to go and just come back and go back to whatever their job used to be. But for a lot of men, they were really moved and changed and transformed by the experience and were easily motivated to engage in insurgency or terror campaigns against their own home government. when they got back because they saw it as alien and not Islamic enough. So not necessarily the Soviet Union having invaded in every single country, but it was close enough. So that sense of fervor of if we can kick out the Soviet Union, which was, of course, one of the superpowers at the time, and we can defeat them and force them out of Afghanistan, then we can defeat these infidel countries. regimes in our own home countries. And so that's the kind of fervor and belief system that was growing out of Afghanistan that just wasn't there really before.
SPEAKER_00:So in elevating the threat internally within CIA, did you ever face resistance? I mean, you said you took this threat way more seriously than a lot of others. Was there resistance in actually elevating the threat, elevating it to another height of seriousness?
SPEAKER_01:You have to understand, too, at the time, again, with the fall of the Soviet Union, you know, the fall of the wall in East, well, between the Germanys, 91, 92, 93 timeframe, you're really looking at a world that's transitioning unbeknownst to it, you know, from a Cold War, decades of a Cold War to something completely new and different. And there's a lot of the intelligence community being targeted by Congress for downsizing and, you know, we don't need it anymore. We've won. There's this whole, like, we won, you know, peace is breaking out all over the world. Democracies are growing like flowers. There's this whole, you know, world that was fabulous, the peace dividend for a few years. And so the focus was, it's not that 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 survived decades of the fear of mutually assured mass destruction with a nuclear war, nuclear holocaust. And so to be talking about, hey, this group of guys who at the time didn't appear to be subject to any coordinating body, it seemed very organic and disorganized, that they could Potentially become a threat. And it was only, you know, with time beginning to see this reference to this same couple of individuals, including the person who turned out to be Osama bin Laden, but we only knew as Abu Abdullah at the time. Maybe there was an organization behind it, or there was an ambition, a coordination occurring. That was a little harder for folks to believe within the intelligence community, as well as, of course, outside the intelligence community. That being said, the Counterterrorist Center was always... It's extremely small at the time, extremely small. But it was really on top of it from the very beginning because its mission is you got to be vigilant. You have to think worst case scenarios in order to Position yourself to have the information, to be able to collect the information, to disprove or prove one way or the other to get to the truth. And so it's not so much from the handful of counterterrorism people. It was more the whole national security apparatus didn't want to hear about this. It wasn't important. And then when you get into the intelligence community, it's got a lot of other struggles occurring at that time. And so it just... you know, maybe seemed like too much warning too early. Yeah, I don't know. I never really, again, I was still pretty young throughout the 90s, and I never thought it was because people were being stubborn or dismissive at the time i thought it's just well this is different and probably i'm wrong you know i'm talking about something that's very different from what everyone is used to and i don't know anything so maybe i'm just wrong it took it took a few years for me to realize okay um and you know meeting some other colleagues and There would be one person at the Defense Intelligence Agency and one person at the FBI and one person here and one person there. We see what you're seeing. And creating a very small interagency group of people who were really seeing the same kind of development and having the same level of concern about it and that we could validate each other's concerns and try to elevate more as a group. representing multiple agencies, that this was a growing threat.
SPEAKER_00:So looking back at that era, I mean, the early 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, many referred to that as the end of history. Mistakenly, it's just the end of one type of threat and the beginning, perhaps, of another. What did that experience in the beginning of your career sort of teach you about how our national security institutions, one, define, and then two, prioritize threats? I mean, you already alluded to this in your answers, but sort of more in a holistic sort of sense, like how does the apparatus actually think through these things?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, for one thing, it became very clear that It's like the system needs an enemy. It doesn't know how to anchor itself without a foreign threat of some sort. But really, even before that particular set of events occurred, as a child, my father was in the Navy, so I grew up in Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Little Creek Base. And I was used to as a kid still doing duck and cover drills. And I remember thinking as I was under the desk, this is really kind of silly because if a nuclear warhead ends up here, this desk is not going to help me at all. I mean, even as a child, I thought this is really illogical. It just makes no sense because we're going to be evaporated. But The Cold War was a very pervasive set of fears and environment. And so even as a young kid, I used to think about it a lot. It was just part of the culture. And I always wondered, also being a big fan of the Revolutionary War and having had ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War, I was just really fascinated with Revolutionary War history. And I thought, you know, if let's just say we have this nuclear holocaust and three quarters of the American population is wiped out in a set of attacks with the Soviet Union. I didn't think that the next day Americans were going to say, OK, we'll be communists. Sounds good. We got it now. I mean, I figured we would just fight back. Right. I mean, yeah, we would survive the event. But there's no way we were going to give in to a form of government that wasn't what we freely chose. That's just not what our founders had in mind. It's not what we thought of as America. And 1976, with the centennial, I was 10. And I was really bought into what it meant, celebrating 200 years of our country's history. I guess even as a kid, I never thought of our security as a nation being related or dependent upon a lack of a foreign threat. Even a foreign invasion, just to me, wasn't the end of our national security because it wasn't the end of our choice, our free choice of choice. a representative democracy. Our desire to have a democracy in this country as our form of government, our constitution as our founding and supreme body of law, those were our choices. And even if somebody else, even if an alien nation came down and tried to take over our land, we were still going to fight back for what we believed in and wanted. So When the Soviet Union disappeared, I guess, I mean, I thought, well, there's going to be a lot of other things that are going to threaten us. So it didn't occur to me that that was the end of history or that there was going to be no more war or conflict. I figured, in fact, maybe more people are going to be jealous and want to bring us down. I don't know. I think in terms of like baseball. You know, if you've won a number of World Series in a row, then everybody really wants you to lose. So here we had just won the Cold War. So there was no question in my mind there were going to be different kinds of threats, if not even the same kinds of threats from other states. Remember, China was still a communist country. So I don't know. I just... I think since I was a kid, just never equated this idea of in order for us to be secure as a nation, we have to have no threats, no external enemies. I think then that just ensures you will never be secure. It's like. It's guaranteeing permanent insecurity.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, and I really appreciate sort of you going back to your childhood to sort of share your thinking on this. And I mean, you know, I'm very curious about at what point in your career, you know, did you sort of realize that the traditional security paradigms weren't really enough? Like, when do you start to feel those models change? were starting to fail, and did the events of 9-11, the global war on terror, sort of reinforce or challenge your thinking around that, your thinking around national security and what it means?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, definitely 9-11 was an evolutionary moment, I suppose. Because while I had thought that in the background, I think our response to 9-11, not the event itself, but our response to it made it more stark to me how tied our sense of national security was to, or still is, to a sense of physical safety and how little we talked about the ideals of democracy and the role of citizenship in securing our nation. And I do think one of the big elements from prior to the end of the Cold War to 9-11, because we had that feeling of we won this ideological conflict between communism and democracy, between Marxism and capitalism, like we won, we stopped competing and the realm of ideals. We stopped competing as a nation in the debate and discussion of what are the best forms of governance and our belief in self-determination as a way of producing a stable world, you know, post-World War II. and one for that matter, the idea that when populations get to decide for themselves the type of government structure that rules over them and you create that social contract, then we are going to see more stable nation states. We gave up competing in that space because we won. And so without competing in it, I think we weren't even reminding ourselves of the importance of it. And we really disconnected, I think, our sense of what does it mean to be an engaged citizen in a democracy? You know, what does it mean to be capable of being the government? Not just... voting, but, you know, of actually 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 way we did to 9-11, which is like a whole other set of, I would love to talk about the responses as like a hunter response versus a gatherer response. The way we responded to 9-11 as if it were an existential threat to the United States, I thought was outrageous um and it really bothered me because al-qaeda was never going terrorism is never going to be an existential threat to the united states of america yes it's going to be a threat yes it's going to be painful it's traumatic it's tragic i understand all of that i'm not dismissing the trauma but again we didn't become a caliphate because we because of 9 11 right It did not destroy the United States as a democracy. It didn't make us abandon our Constitution, at least. I mean, I know some people will argue that we abandoned pieces of it, and that's fine. I'm all for debate. But, I mean, we didn't abandon it wholesale as our governance structure. And so, from my perspective, we went so far as to elevate the individuals who caused 9-11 to being as great a threat to the United States as communism was or the Soviet Union was or the Eastern Bloc. And I just thought that was really a bad set of decisions because they weren't and they never would be. And you give power to the bully when you do that and you weaken yourself. So that was when it became even clearer to me that we have equated our nation's security with the physical aspects of safety, with the tangible and physical set of priorities, which are important. defense of our borders, the integrity of our sovereignty, the safety of our infrastructure, our feeling like we can get on an airplane and fly and be safe and can get on a train or car and drive and be safe, safety in our buildings. All of those things are hugely important for a stable, functioning, happy population. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that it isn't. But We can have all of these things and have a caliphate or a theocracy ruling us. We could have all that safety and stability and have a dictator or a communist regime. Is that U.S. national security? Would we feel like the United States is secure if we are no longer using our Constitution? Or would we be a completely different country and therefore there is no more United States? Do you see what I mean? If our national security is something that's supposed to come out of our defense and our military and our power projection, then it doesn't really matter what kind of government we have. But I don't think we feel that way. I think it does matter to us. And I think Americans do want our Constitution to continue to endure and our democracy to continue to function. And if that's the case, then the only people who really threaten that security are us you know we do and no number of aircraft carriers or drones or you know anything else are going to to make us secure as um as a population believing in our constitution and ideals of democracy and our democratic institutions i mean that comes from somewhere else entirely so i think it was it was more like i said it was more that the response seems so clearly to be a response of fear of feeling vulnerable like someone could destroy who we are even though the soviet union didn't succeed some you know group of not even co-nationalists who live in afghanistan which was arguably not a very modern um infrastructure for anything and and threaten our nation that was just so impossible to believe and such a blow to our pride i think that our fear response was very telling to me that we had defined our security as a nation as a lack of threats to our country. And I thought that that was a big mistake.
SPEAKER_00:Now, this is a good segue into the theory of a hunter-gatherer national security. You mentioned earlier, right, that after 9-11, the U.S. took a, quote, hunter approach to to that threat, what they perceived the threat was. Can you define what the overall theory is in sort of plain terms and more?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, you know, in the simplest terms, it's common sense, right? You will respond to a threat based on the threat itself and the environment you're in. You know, if you are exposed to someone with a communicable disease, You're not going to shoot them. That's not going to really be the way to deal with it. And if you're exposed to someone trying to mug you, you're not going to put a mask on your face. That doesn't make any sense, right? We have common sense. We understand that not all threats are the same. And therefore, the approaches to threats have to be different. You have to match the solution to the threat, the tools to the environment. And that's like the simplest, that's the easiest thing to understand. So when we're facing right now where the majority of Americans are dissatisfied with democracy and they don't think democracy is working, that is a threat to our government. That's a threat because people, if you don't believe that democracy is working, And you are the government. You know, people, every person is the government. It's not just some alien thing in Washington, D.C. If you don't believe it's going to work, then it's not going to work. And there's no, again, there's no amount of physical safety that's going to change people's minds about that. So we have to have a different tool. And it really, you know, it goes back to, and I think it's as clear as... And as simple as hunters and gatherers, whether you believe in the origin story and the first family was kicked out of the Garden of Eden and we became nomadic hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years, or whether you're Darwinian and you believe in it in a different way, the point is we were nomadic hunter-gatherer societies for the vast majority of human existence, hundreds of thousands of years. And as nomadic hunter-gatherers, everyone from you know toddlers to the eldest person contributed in some way to the survival and well-being of the small group that was hunting and gathering so it's not about gender it is about contributing roles to survival and well-being obviously matched for many years based on physical capabilities with you know men taking most of the protector-hunter roles and women taking the gatherer-caretaker roles. Although women gathered and... I mean, women hunted and men gathered, but in general, right? So in general, that's the case. So all of that, those contributions between whether it's protecting the small social group from a predator or... whether it's identifying a poisonous plant that could kill everybody or recognizing that one sick child can make everybody sick or whatever, there's different types of threats, physical threats, to the small grouping of hunter-gatherer community. It's all being done very transparently in the open because you don't, You're not in a brick house. You're moving. You're moving constantly. So it's very transparent. But when we become farming peoples with the agrarian revolution some 10, maybe 15,000 years ago, so pretty recently when it comes to the amount of time we've been on Earth, but when we... we start to farm and settle down, and that's the great luxury, right? Okay, now we can stay put and make food for ourselves, grow food for ourselves. And we see this as the beginning of civilization. You know, we have, with farms, we then have surplus goods that you can then trade with other farmers for their surplus goods, and all of a sudden we have trade, commerce, money becomes, you know, a thing for us to trade. We get communication and mythology explaining everything and eventually rule and law and property ownership and just science, math, everything comes out of all of this ability to stay put. But another thing that comes out of this is that we create this very hard divide between public spaces and private space. In the public space where the trading takes place, And in the domicile, where the once gatherer, sometimes hunter, becomes very much the gatherer, caretaker, and planner inside the domicile, and the hunter becomes a protector, defender, provider outside the domicile. And this is generally, we're talking men and women for the most part at this point. The men are in the trading spaces. They're collaborating with each other. They're advancing their understanding by collaborating with each other, and eventually we get writing and recording of history and warfare, because property ownership immediately breeds, I own this, you don't own it, and all conquest, desire for conquest, all that stuff. But inside the domicile, the gatherer caretakers are still evolving and innovating and planning and contributing to both survival and well-being of the growing family. It's just being done behind walls and it's not being recorded in the public space. So we're missing 10, 15,000 years of understanding of the evolution inside the home and what those skills and survival instincts and approaches were that are still needed, but we end up believing that what happens in the domicile is irrelevant to what happens in the public space, although what happens and is decided in the public 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 greatest examples of this comes from a couple of years ago when archaeologists discovered that a little ivory comb, a little artifact, only a couple inches big, turned out to be a comb that was created to remove lice from your hair and your beard. Because lice from 4,000 years ago could kill many, many people, more people than a saber-toothed tiger anyway, could kill a lot of people. It just creates disease. But when you think about how long... it took someone or some peoples to realize that the sores that were happening on their bodies that were causing disease and death and infection came from these tiny little bugs that we can barely see and then figure out, well, how do we get rid of these tiny little bugs, come up with 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 the ivory because the comb said, May the tusk of this comb root out the lice in hair and beard. And it's actually now the first known example of alphabetic writing. So they bothered to put it on the comb, right? So that anybody who picks up the comb would know how to use it. If you use it enough, you actually prevent lice from nesting. So there they've observed the problem, an existential threat to humanity, long enough to figure out the source, come up with a solution. that they then create, and then they actually put the instruction label on the solution so that they can share it with anybody else, that is a completely different approach to security, right? That's a completely different approach to survival and wellbeing. And a torch or a spear or a nuclear weapon is not a good way to solve lice in your household. So it's really, that's, really all it is is common sense. And it's not because these are soft and feminine solutions. These are just as life-threatening on the physical side and certainly just as existential on the security side. They're just different types of threats and different types of solutions. Whereas the hunter side is still very much focused more on a physical threat, one that's obvious and dynamic, and one from a hunter's perspective. If you were a hunter and your instinct was to stop and observe what you think might be a saber-toothed tiger and take notes on it and exchange with other hunters, do you think that's a saber-toothed tiger? I don't know. It doesn't look like the right size or it's not moving quickly enough. You're going to be dead by the time you finish that conversation, right? So you develop a set of instincts of I see threat, I kill threat. Or I see threat, I smash threat. I destroy threat without thinking because you can't. You're not going to have survival of the fittest if you don't kill the threat. Whereas if you're a gatherer or a caretaker and you see a bug on your child and you smash your kid, that's not a good way of saving your child from the bug. So we're not going to have survival of the fittest if we kill our own. So when you think about that, it should just, in a very common sense and practical way, tell you that you need a different set of skills looking at early warning of some types of threats and different approaches to solving those than... just the military, just the force, just violence.
SPEAKER_00:So when a casual listener or a student of foreign policy or national security, or even many seasoned national security folks will listen to this, they may start to bend this as hard power and soft power. However, you deem it very differently. You talk about it as being evolutionary power. And I think the example of, you know, you don't smash the kid in the head if you see lice, you know, you want to You know, we found these tools, these ivory tools to sort of get this slice out, sort of observant, analytical, trying to figure out how do we prevent this stuff.
SPEAKER_01:And I think of it as evolutionary. You know, it's very cognitive. Yes, you have to develop the discernment to know the difference between something that is a saber-toothed tiger and something that is not. And as you... As you watch our world revolutionize really since the last century, not just because of weaponry and warfare and all, but technology, we're in a place where increasingly we're not going to know the difference between a real enemy and a deep fake. We're not going to know the difference between whether or not someone actually pushed that button to fire that missile or whether it was an agentic AI that accidentally did because that's what it thought you wanted to do. We're not going to know when the cyber attack occurs or all the banks in the United States fail. Who did it? And who do you go to war with if you don't know who is the enemy? Do you go to war with the wrong person just in order to do something about it? Possibly, if you're just a hunter, that's what you will do, if that's the only way you approach things. So we're increasingly in an environment that requires thinking. It requires taking the time to observe and say, wait a minute, what don't we know about what's going on here? What do we know? Who do we collaborate with? How do we consider all the possible alternative explanations of what's happening here? think before you act there's a lot of threats now and moving forward into our future that require that kind of thinking before we act because our actions may end up being irreversible and completely far more harmful and existentially dangerous to us in the long run So that's why I consider it evolutionary, because we have evolved into modern society. It's very different from our hunter-gatherer ancestor days. And to stop and think is not weak. It's not soft. It's not a fear of acting. It's wanting to be smarter. Yeah, that's why I disagree with the idea of influence and collaboration and discussion and research. And using critical thinking is, to me, is not a soft approach. It's a smart approach. It's an evolutionary approach to evolutionary problems.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And, you know, how would US strategy look different if we... put those values much higher up on the priority scale. Values, for example, like the ones you outlined in caretaking, values that we don't really talk much about in a national security lens, but are still super important, like emotional intelligence, for example, or civic education. We don't consider those as security assets, but they very much are in our view.
SPEAKER_01:No, I mean, I think... Number one, if we had a national security strategy that looked more like a combination of hunter and gatherer, I'm not saying get rid of the hunter. I'm not at all. I mean, I was a hunter for 35 years. That was my role. I was a targeter. I understand the importance of it. It's about achieving a balance and not expecting... everything that our military does over hundreds of years to automatically produce depolarization and unity among America and effective government and happiness and democracy, it's not going to produce that no matter how good our military is. That's not what it's designed to do. It can't do that. So it's... It would really be a strategy that recognizes the hunter side, hunter, protector, defender, dealing with that kind of physical, tangible threats to our safety, to our sense of safety here as a country or when we're traveling abroad is one set of priorities. But equally as important is ensuring that our government is governed by people who understand it. I mean, the majority of Americans don't even know that there are three branches of government, let alone some of the more important details about the checks and balances and our institutions. The majority of Americans don't have confidence in our democracy or the elections or election processes, and not just the national level ones, but even local. But a high functioning democracy would ensure that its citizens when they are old enough to vote know what they're doing understand the responsibility and that it's not just about casting one vote it's then also about holding your representatives accountable to what they promised they were going to do what you voted them in for it's also having representatives who realize they are there to serve their entire constituency, not just the people who voted for them or not just for the people they like, not just for the people who gave them money, but for their entire constituency, even if that entire constituency turns out to be mostly people who aren't like you or don't like you. You are a servant. You're not a god. You're not a king or a ruler or a duke. This is That's not what democracy is about. And it requires so much re-education and bringing back, you know, really what our framers believed was so important. And ironically, when I said, you know, hunter-gatherer, I think it's really about common sense. Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, the pamphlet Common Sense, which, of course, informed our framers as they wrote the Declaration of Independence of the Constitution. So we're all equal. Too much power in the hands of one person is dangerous for everyone. And freedom has to be nurtured. It is not a guarantee. You can't just acquire it and be like, 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 have any more threats. It's, that's a fallacy. So if we don't put as much effort in ensuring our citizenry is up for the task, then we're failing. in ensuring and guaranteeing the continuation of the Constitution in our democracy. We need to understand that processes of observing, research, thinking, those are important parts of a high-functioning, decision-making democracy. It's not just what other people want to hear. We need to have much more honest communication with the American people to include parents telling them when they're wrong. We're sorry, but actually gridlock was designed by the framers. Gridlock in Congress is a demonstration of a democracy functioning properly because it's making sure that we don't give in to tyranny of the majority or tyranny of the minority. Nobody's happy. That's how it's supposed to be in a democracy. That's how it is. Daggone it, this family is happy because everybody is miserable because no one gets to ride on every single ride that they want to ride on when we go to Disney World. We're all a little bit miserable. I mean, it's just, again, it's really about common sense, and it's about understanding as a nation that we're going to be threatened. And there are going to be people who hate us. Some of them inside, some of them outside. But if we decide to remain committed to our Constitution, if we really believe in the ideals of democracy, then we have to recognize it's not enough to just be willing to die for your country and say you're a patriot. You have to put up with your country also. And that means... Other people have rights to their ways of pursuing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even if you don't like it, turn the other way. Just ignore it or endure the discomfort of it. But as long as we don't turn away from our Constitution and our democratic institutions, then we're secure as the United States of America, and people can hate on us as much as they want. As long as it doesn't change our minds about us, then it doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. Like terrorists, they are irrelevant. So, I mean, it's a different kind of investment in public education, investment in... ensuring transparency in the way our politicians talk to their constituencies, there's a whole host of ways of reinvigorating our checks and balances and the objectivity of our institution building, trying to depoliticize and departisanize it. And In today's day and age, there's really no reason why people can't be more engaged in their own governance. It's also recognizing that, who knows, maybe democracy is also a constantly evolving thing and we get to a place where, I'm not suggesting direct democracy, but we actually can have more say as individuals in aspects of our experience as Americans that have just been decided for us for forever. I mean, I think we're experiencing some of that now. People are deciding they want more say in how they're being educated. Some people are fine to have it continue to go the way they want. But because we have a communication system that's so modern and so, you know, it's just constantly evolving and we're able to have far more conversations than we ever could before about things that we used to just take as a given.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. So, I mean... I think so much of this conversation is so valuable because when we're thinking about national security, it's really talking about, you know, what is safety versus what is security? You know, what is the security of our form of government? As you said much earlier in the conversation, you know, we can have sort of physical safety, physical safety of our infrastructure, physical safety of our bodies and so on, but still be ruled by a caliphate, still be ruled by a dictator. And this is still make us the United States of America, uh, And I mean, I sort of want to bring this conversation now very much to the present day with so many of the challenges that we are actively dealing with. Both, you know, you outlined very much so the challenges we are facing in the domestic theater, you know, with our government and so on. How do you sort of see the tools of the hunters versus the tools of the gatherers being used in the way we are approaching foreign policy and security in 2025? You alluded to it a little bit earlier with your thoughts on the afghanistan war the global war on terrorism and so on but like how do you sort of see it playing out today yeah
SPEAKER_01:i mean here's where i feel like we have we're definitely going backwards in time um devolving uh because again i mean i really approach things with logic and common sense you are far better off living in a world of friends than you are living in a world of enemies So, you know, friendships and allies and alliances that, you know, we have forged for a hundred years or more across the world are important to us and to our security as a democracy because they are... They reduce and deter enemies from emerging. You know, if you see a massive block of democracies, you're going to be less inclined to challenge that. I mean, this is something we learned, I guess, in the Cold War, too, with the NATO and the Warsaw Pact. So to want to go it alone, I think, is foolish. Everybody does their country first. That's That's nothing new. We all do ourselves first. We do our family first. I mean, of course, America first. Like, duh. France does France first. Singapore does Singapore first. This is not novel. But it doesn't mean you have to be alone. It doesn't mean America has to be America first, America alone. And that's not smart. You want to have as many people have your back as possible. And Using nothing but fear and threats and more aircraft carriers and things like this to deter a world where we do have enemies who are skipping over us and realizing that our vulnerability is our lack of faith in each other. That The weakness of America's democracy is that it relies on its own people, that we have a population that doesn't understand its own democracy or its own government. And so the more they are able to sow the seeds of division or make the seeds of division that are already here flourish even further, they don't need to fire a weapon at us to destroy us. It's about malign influence and disinformation and fanning the flames of divisiveness that are already here that can lead to Americans abandoning democracy themselves without China ever having to threaten us or without Russia or Moscow ever having to build something more stronger than a nuclear arsenal or whatever. And again, somebody comes at us and we can't attribute who it is for months. What are we going to do with that? What are we going to do with that? Even from a safety perspective, what are we going to do with that? So I think... This entrenching ourselves back into this, we're just going to have decisive, overwhelming force, blunt force, military threats, threats of sanctions, tariffs, whatever, whatever you want to call it all. It just creates a hostile environment that increases the likelihood of enemies and adversaries versus decreases it. And that does nobody in the United States any good? That doesn't increase our safety. It doesn't increase our security. And what is it for? You know, just because one man, you know, has a pride problem or, you know, one person wants to run the whole country like a dictator and be able to bully everybody. 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 back to, you know, my very first book, National Security Mom, I really, I don't see government, the idea of governance, as a stretch of the imagination from parenting. It really is, national security government it is so accessible for anyone anybody should be able to understand this because it is nothing more than figuring it out how you divide up resources how you divide up responsibilities within a family um you know and if you're a parent whether you're a mom a dad excuse me whether your mom a dad a grandparent whatever you have a whole bunch of people in your family and you have to take care of all of them and you may not like them all and they may not all do you know pull their weight but you have to take care of them and love them they're they're yours right they're your family and you have to find a way for each of them to contribute as best they possibly can to that family and that family doesn't cease to be a family, if somebody comes in and robs you or burns your house down, you're still family. So it's not just about your physical safety. It's about what you believe in as a group of people, of related people. Anyway. Yeah. I mean, I just think that this painting of the government as a deep state or a bunch of elites who are trying to obscure what they're really doing from the American people is so irresponsible. It's so nefarious. And it just undermines and weakens us as a nation.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And, you know, going as we sort of round out this conversation, so the going back to some of the first topics we discussed in the hour, the global war on terror and so on, and then, you know, juxtaposing that with, the hunter-gatherer theory, and so many of the threats that we are facing to our internal democracy. Do you think we ever truly won the global war on terror, or are we actively losing it today?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I never really liked the framing as a global war on terror to begin with. Look, the reason why I was unhappy on so many levels with the entire response is because there's a lot of reasons, really, but As a counterterrorism expert at the time, and as someone who had been studying Al-Qaeda from before we even knew it was Al-Qaeda, you have to ask yourself, this attack occurred, and I understood we had a law enforcement approach, like we want justice for the criminals as well as justice for the victims. I get that. I do. But I think we lied to ourselves about what we were really doing, which was getting revenge. And that's a very emotional reaction, revenge, wanting revenge, being angry, and having your pride hurt because these people were able to get away with what they were able to get away with. But If you are being completely objective and unemotional in this situation, and you ask yourself, what is justice for the people who were killed? And what is punishment for the people who perpetrated this? Justice for the people who were killed might also be diminishing or reducing the likelihood of another attack, right? and diminishing the influence and power of the individuals who were involved, or al-Qaeda. And punishing the people who were involved is going to be also, if you think about it, well, you have to know what is punishment from their perspective. So those are two different things. So if you really wanted to reduce the influence and the power of Al-Qaeda raising its stature to an enemy combatant and treating it as if the entire U.S. military, not only the entire U.S. military, but the combined forces of our NATO allies, because they invoked Article 5 of NATO, is necessary to defeat this handful of rogue forces terrorists right that's not going to diminish their power or influence it's going to triple it you know quadruple it like a thousand times um exponentially making al-qaeda and bin laden and everyone really you know who believes in what they were doing so much more powerful than they ever were that was stupid i mean i'm just gonna say it that's just short-sighted The other thing is, if you really want to understand what is punishing from their perspective, you can't say, well, it's killing them or torturing them or any of that. That's not what they would have considered the greatest punishment. The greatest punishment to them was being made irrelevant, being ignored, being treated as if they were nothing and didn't have... any influence whatsoever, as if they didn't even occur, as if it didn't happen. That would have required us to rebuild the Twin Towers, start rebuilding them as soon as possible and have them look exactly the same, maybe a story taller if you wanted to feel better about it, but saying, whatever, you don't matter. That would have meant finding the individuals responsible and making sure that they were prosecuted and went off to jail and were forgotten. Not a constant story, a media story, because they're in detention centers in Gitmo or whatever. Instead of killing bin Laden, just having him unable to communicate externally, basically die an old and forgotten man, that would have been more... torture to him than anything, you know, turning him into a martyr and a mythical person. So, you know, we didn't entertain any of those ideas. But if you really want to be strategic and evolutionary thinker when it comes to security you need and maybe you don't do all of the things that I just said I realized that some of those would be a stretch way too far but we never even would have considered it and I think when I'm when I'm suggesting and all of that is worth thinking about because you know even when you hear someone say it like well What would it have meant to al-Qaeda to have been treated like a criminal the next day instead of the global threat that we treated them as? It would have been quite different. That would have undermined their credibility. I mean, it's hard to not, logically, it's very difficult to not acknowledge that we could have done things better. So I think we need to embrace the willingness to challenge our instinctive responses because they're very much rooted in Hunter. They're very much rooted in Hunter, Protector, Defender. And they're rooted in a Cold War construct of deterrence. And they're not going... to help us as we move forward. And while we're using those instinctive responses for dealing with and identifying foreign threats, we are completely losing sight of what we need to be taking care of internally. So it could be that by the time someone is capable of actually destroying us, we will have already done it for ourselves.
SPEAKER_00:Well, Gina, thanks so much for this interview. Thanks so much for this great conversation. There's a lot to ponder for our audience. Gina's done so much great work on the hunter-gatherer theory, some publications on it. We'll link those in the episode description. But for now, Gina, thanks so much.
SPEAKER_01:Of course. Thank you again for having me. I know it's a lot to think about, but again, just logic and common sense.
UNKNOWN:Thank you.
