Intel at the Edge

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.