Intel at the Edge

Latest Episodes:

Governing AI in the Intelligence Community, with Brian Drake Oct 07, 2026

Show notes

On this episode of Intel at the Edge, host Chip Usher talks with Brian Drake, former Chief AI Officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency and current Federal CTO at Accrete AI. They discuss how intelligence agencies should govern the AI systems they are rushing to deploy. Drawing from an early counter-fentanyl project, Drake reflects on how his mentor shifted from skepticism to seeing an ethical imperative for AI in intelligence. He breaks down the distinction between enterprise and retail AI, explains how machines capture tacit knowledge, and warns why over-reliance on generative AI for writing risks eroding analysts' critical thinking.

Drake also makes the case for a calibrated approach to automating the targeting cycle, argues why the IC is "taking a knee" when it should be moving faster, and offers actionable guidance for policymakers, the DNI, and the next generation of intelligence professionals.

Intel at the Edge Podcast is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

AI as the Sixth Intelligence Discipline: Rethinking Analytic Tradecraft with Kendrick Escobar Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

Host Chip Usher sits down with Kendrick Escobar — former intelligence officer, founder of MAIK AI, and author of AI as the Sixth Intelligence Discipline — to explore how generative AI is reshaping the craft of intelligence analysis. Kendrick lays out his three-phase framework for AI's evolving role (tool, intelligence discipline, and peer), explains why AI-generated outputs deserve to be treated as a distinct new source of intelligence alongside SIGINT, HUMINT, and OSINT, and makes the case that AI agents will eventually function as true "digital peers" rather than mere tools.

The conversation digs into tradecraft for evaluating AI outputs, how mentorship — not prompting — will define the analyst's future role, the persistent challenge of hallucinations, and who ultimately bears responsibility when an AI-assisted product fails. A candid look at where human judgment still matters most as the intelligence community adapts to an AI-augmented future.

Intel at the Edge Podcast is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

From Light Tables to AI: Shelby Pierson on the Future of Imagery Analysis Sep 09, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of Intel at the Edge, host Chip Usher sits down with Shelby Pierson, former Director for Analysis at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

Shelby joined the intelligence community in 1999 as an imagery analyst and rose through the ranks — working Iraq ground forces analysis, denial and deception, election security as the DNI's lead, and ultimately serving as NGA's Director of Analysis.

Shelby recently authored "Sensing the Threat: Operationalizing Computer Vision for Intelligence and Warfighting," and in this conversation she unpacks how AI and computer vision are reshaping the discipline — from the days of physical light tables and film to today's data deluge of commercial, national, and airborne collection.

Topics covered include:
- Her path into the CIA and career highlights, including Operation Iraqi Freedom
- How the analyst's job has evolved from imagery exploitation to "data creation"
- The origins of computer vision in GEOINT, from change detection to Project Maven
- Why analyst staffing hasn't kept pace with the data explosion
- Where human judgment and tradecraft still matter most
- How today's crises move faster than the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis timeline — and what that means for AI-assisted decision-making
- Pushing AI compute to the edge — including onboard satellites in orbit
- Her advice for the next generation of imagery analysts

🎧 Listen and subscribe for more conversations on how emerging technology is reshaping intelligence, defense, and national security.

00:00 - Introduction: Shelby Pierson & "Sensing the Threat"
01:05 - Shelby's Path into the Intelligence Community
02:29 - Early Career: Iraq, Denial & Deception, and Working with Engineers
05:03 - From NIM for Russia to Director of Analysis at NGA
05:30 - The Light Table Era vs. Today's Desktop Analysis
07:40 - The Data Deluge: Scale of Modern Imagery Collection
08:37 - Integration: How Analyst Workload Has Changed
09:26 - Staffing Hasn't Kept Pace with the Workload
10:35 - Technology as Offset vs. Replacement for Human Analysts
11:35 - What Is Computer Vision? Origins in NGA
14:20 - Change Detection: The Early Analytics Story
15:34 - Project Maven and Full Motion Video
17:19 - Beyond Visual: Hyperspectral, Radar & Data-Rich Sensors
20:21 - From Imagery Exploitation to Data Creation
20:50 - Why Now? The Convergence of Software, Storage & Compute
22:32 - Tradecraft, Authorship & Trusting the Models
24:51 - Oversight Standards: Are AI Outputs Held to the Same Bar?
25:47 - Error Tolerance: Change Detection vs. Targeting
26:38 - AI in the Kill Chain: The Israel Example
27:57 - Golden Dome and Split-Second Defensive Decisions
29:30 - Case Study: The Chinese Embassy & Iranian Girls' School Incidents
32:36 - Cuban Missile Crisis vs. Today's Compressed Decision Timelines
34:22 - Piecing Together Complex Intelligence Networks
35:17 - Offense vs. Defense: Rules of Engagement for AI
36:15 - Scaling for a Potential China Contingency
37:10 - AI at the Edge: Onboard Compute and Sensors in Orbit
40:07 - Advice for Aspiring Imagery Analysts
42:15 - Closing & Where to Find the Paper

Intel at the Edge Podcast is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

Beyond LLMs: How Jumptuit's Don Leka Is Building AI for the Physical World Aug 26, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of Intel at the Edge, host Chip Usher sits down with Don Leka, Founder and CEO of Jumptuit, to explore a different kind of artificial intelligence — one built not on text, but on real-time data from the physical world.

Don shares his journey from building the Glide OS cloud platform in 2004, to founding Jumptuit, a company using a large dynamic reasoning model to track physical-world signals — from shipping movements and port activity to refinery output and geopolitical indicators — in near real time.

The conversation covers:

- Why Jumptuit's approach differs fundamentally from large language models

- How cross-sector data intersections can reveal probable events before they happen

- Using comparative, causal, and analogical reasoning to forecast geopolitical and economic shifts

- Case studies: Russia's GDP resilience despite sanctions, shifting oil demand, and instability in Niger and Albania

- What the intelligence community could gain from live, empirical, physical-world data

- A must-listen for anyone interested in AI, geopolitical forecasting, and the future of intelligence analysis beyond large language models.

0:00 Intro: AI Beyond LLMs & Meet Don Leka

1:16 Don Leka's Background & Building Glide OS (2004)

3:17 How Jumptuit's Approach Differs from ChatGPT & LLMs

5:10 What Data Jumptuit Collects (Persian Gulf Example)

9:50 Open Source Data & Cross-Sector Event Thresholds

10:48 Case Study: Operation Epic Fury & Iran War Assumptions

13:42 Large Dynamic Reasoning Model as Predictive Analytics Tool

16:16 Lessons from the Arab Spring & Traditional Intelligence Gaps

17:39 Why Historical Data Alone Misleads Forecasting

18:42 Case Study: Russia's GDP Resilience Despite Sanctions

21:10 Persian Gulf Tensions, Oil Prices & China's Reduced Demand

22:23 Ripple Effects: Japan, Albania & Global Instability

23:55 Is It the Data or the Algorithm? The "Secret Sauce"

24:40 Why LLMs Struggle with Outdated, Narrative-Based Data

26:25 Can Jumptuit's Model Be Distilled or Copied?

28:42 Beyond Geopolitics: Climate, Health & Individualized Intelligence

31:12 What the National Security Community Should Be Doing

32:40 How Jumptuit Complements (Not Competes With) LLMs

33:53 Key Customers: Finance, Energy, Defense & More

Intel at the Edge Podcast is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

Narrative Intelligence: How Adversaries Weaponize Stories with Joe Stradinger Aug 12, 2026

Show notes

Narrative intelligence is emerging as one of the intelligence community's most important new disciplines — and few people understand it better than Joe Stradinger.

In this episode of Intel at the Edge, Joe Stradinger — founder of Edge Theory and creator of the National Center for Narrative Intelligence in Oxford, Mississippi — joins Chip to break down what narrative intelligence actually is, how it differs from traditional social media monitoring, and why he believes it's become a central front in modern cognitive warfare.

They cover:

• Joe's path from CPA to early internet entrepreneur to national security advisor

• What "narrative intelligence" means and how it's detected, classified, and measured

• The concept of "intercontinental ballistic narratives" and how adversary messaging spreads over time

• How China, Russia, and other actors exploit real-world events to sow division

• Washington's growing (but still unsettled) response to cognitive warfare

• Why storytelling — from Joe's Mississippi Delta roots to America's own national narrative — may be the most powerful (and underused) tool in this fight

Whether you work in national security, business, or just want to better understand how information shapes belief and behavior, this conversation offers a rare look inside a discipline that's quietly reshaping how the U.S. thinks about influence, deterrence, and truth.

00:00 Intro

00:44 Joe's background & how he got into this space

03:12 Mississippi, storytelling, and why fiction is a weapon

05:04 What is narrative intelligence?

09:06 Tracking narratives over time (the CCP example)

13:21 Case study: the data center narrative war

17:29 How AI has collapsed the influence chain

18:40 Case study: Iran's Hollywood-style war narratives

21:14 Attribution: tracing a narrative back to its source

24:22 Federal vs. commercial — why U.S. citizens are never targeted

26:53 Real-world exploits: Baltimore Bridge, Silicon Valley Bank

27:41 The new NSC role & "putting the I back in DIME"

30:20 Why America needs to tell its own story

34:00 Educating the next generation

36:34 The National Center for Narrative Intelligence

Intel at the Edge Podcast is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

Iran's Nuclear Program: "Down But Not Out" with Amy McAuliffe Jul 29, 2026

Show notes

Four and a half months into the Iran war, what's actually left of Iran's nuclear program — and what would it take to keep it that way?

In this episode of Intel at the Edge, host Chip Usher sits down with Amy McAuliffe, who recently retired from the CIA as the Assistant Director for Weapons and Counter Proliferation. Amy also served as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council and Assistant Director of CIA for the Near East.

Amy breaks down:

· Why she describes Iran's program as "down but not out" after the June 2025 and 2026 strikes on Natanz and Fordow

· The uncertainty around Iran's 60%-enriched uranium stockpile and where it may be located

· The impact of losing key nuclear scientists — and how much technical knowledge Iran has actually retained

· How the death of Supreme Leader Khamenei and the rise of new IRGC leadership could shift Iran's calculus toward weaponization

· What a credible future nuclear deal would need to include, from enrichment caps to IAEA verification

· Whether a purely military solution can ever fully resolve the nuclear question

· Her advice for young people considering a career in the U.S. intelligence community

Intel at the Edge Podcast is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

Kimi K3: What China's Latest Model Means for the US with David Lin Jul 28, 2026

Show notes

Kimi K3, China's largest open-weight AI model yet, just hit the public — and it's rewriting the terms of the US-China AI race. In this emergency episode, host Chip Usher sits down with David Lin, Senior Director for Tech Platforms at SCSP and CIA veteran, to unpack what K3's release really signals.

They dig into how the competition has shifted from a simple US-vs-China contest into a two-axis battle of open weights vs. closed weights, why K3 dropped right alongside Xi Jinping's World AI Conference speech, the eye-popping cost gap between K3 and frontier US models, and the question of large-scale model distillation and IP theft.

They close out with a look at Nvidia's Jensen Huang and a growing coalition of US companies pushing back against a closed-weight future. It's a fast-moving landscape — and this conversation captures exactly where things stand today.

00:00 — Intro: Kimi K3 drops

01:20 — What K3 is and how it compares

03:18 — Open weights vs. closed weights

07:14 — Beijing's role and export controls

12:42 — Security risks of open weights

15:32 — Distillation and IP theft

21:22 — Nvidia and the US open-weight push

24:25 — Closing thoughts

Intel at the Edge Podcast is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

How Agentic AI is Enabling A New Industry: Intelligence-As-A-Service with Ansel Stein Jul 15, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of “Intel at the Edge”, Chip Usher sits down with Ansel Stein, Vice President of Operations at Crisis24 and a former CIA analyst, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way private-sector companies access intelligence analysis.

Stein discusses how Crisis24 is delivering AI-generated intelligence directly to corporate C-suites — from geopolitical risk to tailored daily briefings built on a company's own institutional knowledge. The conversation digs into the tradecraft behind the tools: how intelligence community standards are codified into AI systems, how human oversight fits into an AI-driven analytic process, and how self-improving models are changing the relationship between analysts and decision-makers.

Ansel and Chip also look ahead to how this "intelligence-as-a-service" model might eventually influence government intelligence organizations, and why deep organizational context and culture will remain a human differentiator even as raw intelligence becomes cheaper and more democratized through AI.

0:00 – Introduction

0:46 – Welcome, Ansel Stein

1:12 – Ansel's path from government to Crisis24

2:32 – Why join a company at the intersection of intel and AI

3:48 – What Crisis24 delivers

6:39 – Serving private-sector clients

6:56 – Tailoring intelligence for corporate use

8:46 – Intelligence-as-a-service for the C-suite

10:13 – How AI-generated analysis works

10:40 – Where's the human in the loop?

12:14 – The National Intelligence Priorities Framework

15:23 – Intelligence Community Directives and analytic standards

16:13 – Codifying tradecraft into AI systems

17:44 – Real-world example: a global executive's daily briefing

18:28 – Building in company-specific expertise

19:43 – Trust and adoption among clients

22:11 – Self-improving AI systems

24:27 – Speed, scale, and organizational accountability

26:15 – Correcting AI mistakes and shifting analytic lines

26:42 – Data ownership and client control

29:26 – Educating companies on the value of intelligence

29:54 – Structuring human-AI analytic teams

33:13 – Will government adopt this next?

35:07 – Where the industry is headed

36:57 – Early movers and the future of decision-making

38:39 – Why organizational culture still matters

39:15 – Closing thoughts

Intel at the Edge Podcast is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

Why America Stopped Thinking About the Future with Ari Wallach Jul 06, 2026

Show notes

Futurist Ari Wallach joins Intel at the Edge to discuss why the U.S. government canceled its long-range forecasting program — and what it costs us. From scenario planning and megatrends to AI, loneliness, and narrative warfare, Wallach makes the case for embedding foresight into how America thinks and acts.

Wallach is the founder of Long Path Labs and the former host of the PBS television series A Brief History of the Future. He has advised the Department of State, the United Nations Refugee Agency, and consulted on strategic foresight — the discipline of mapping not just what is likely to happen, but what could happen, and how to recognize the early signals that tell you which future is taking shape.

Intel at the Edge Podcast is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

Inside the US-UK Intelligence Partnership with Gen. Tim Haugh & Sir Jeremy Fleming Jun 17, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of “Intel at the Edge”, former NSA Director General Tim Haugh and former GCHQ Director Sir Jeremy Fleming sit down for a rare, candid conversation about one of the most consequential intelligence relationships in the world. From the wartime roots at Bletchley Park to the age of AI and quantum computing, they explore how the US-UK signals intelligence alliance has evolved over 80+ years — and what it must do to stay ahead of an increasingly complex threat landscape.

Topics covered: The origins of the NSA-GCHQ SIGINT partnership How AI is transforming intelligence work China, cyber threats, and the scale of modern adversaries Space, climate change, and emerging national security domains The critical role of private sector partnerships Advice for the next generation of intelligence leaders

Intel at the Edge Podcast is a product of the Special Competitive Studies Project.

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