Articles
The Cake That Gerhard Baked
Disclaimer… I’m going to torture a metaphor about baking a cake, how the baker is responsible for recipe, how it turns out, and how we can’t un-bake a cake once it has been made.
October 11, 2026
Amy Zegart is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of political science at Stanford University, and the author of a new book, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence. In this frank conversation, Zegart grades American intelligence-gathering operations, recent and historical, and compares them to their counterparts in China and Russia. Professor Zegart also discusses Silicon Valley’s crucial role in these operations and how they often conflict with the politics of the people running tech companies. Finally, Zegart discusses the crucial ability of the intelligence community to recruit the next generation of spies and analysts, some of whom may be her own students.
Recorded on March 17, 2022
To view the transcript of this conversation, click here.
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