Dr. Eric Haseltine

not to the James Bond kind of side of the spy business, but the analytic academic kind of intellectual side of it, which is, okay, we have spies that collect the information, but then how do we make sense of it?

And when you look at intelligence failures, such as 9-11, Pearl Harbor, and so forth, with one exception, which is we missed the Indian nuclear program, that was a failure of collection.

We just didn't have the data.

But in every other case, we've had the information.

We just didn't know what was staring us in the face.

Well, I think AI is going to help that.

True, yeah.

I will tell you that the biggest problem in the intelligence world is not collecting.

It's understanding what you've collected.

And, you know, there's so many reasons for that.

There's the volume, velocity, and variety of information.

It goes up exponentially every day, right?

There's a lot more information out there.

And then, yeah, so the real frontier in intelligence is to understand information.

Yeah, yeah.

But a good intelligence analyst will be humble and look outside the lamppost.

In other words, be aware of their own biases.

There's this great book called The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richard Toyers.

All analysts are taught to read it.

It's part of our training.