00:01 – Peter Mina
Hello, my name is Peter Mina. I am the founder of the MENA firm, a civil rights and federal employment law firm here in Washington, D.C., as well as a former Deputy Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, where I worked to integrate civil rights and civil liberties protections in the department’s national security programs. And you are listening to the Steady State Sentinel from the Steady State.
We are facing an existential threat: growing autocracy in the United States. The Steady State Sentinel is a place where we and our distinguished guests use our national security expertise to discuss and analyze the decisions and acts of this administration that feed that autocratic slide and threaten to supplant the pillars of our constitutional democracy.
Today is a little bit of a different episode than our normal format. You’ve heard us interview people from across the national security world on a wide array of topics since we started this podcast in January of this year. But what we wanted to do today is begin opening a little bit of the history books on ourselves, so you can really get to know us as people, just like we want to get to know you as our listening audience.
I am very fortunate to have the opportunity to interview my co-host Lauren Anderson. You’ve heard tremendous interviews from her across a wide array of guests – from her time at the Bureau, as well as folks in the immigration community and elsewhere. And so I get the honor of talking to her a little bit about her origin story, what brings her to this moment, what brings her to this podcast. I’m sure I expect to learn a lot, and I hope you will too. Lauren, welcome to the show as a guest.
01:53 – Lauren Anderson
Thanks, Peter. It’s very odd to be on the receiving end instead of the giving end.
01:56 – Peter Mina
Yeah, absolutely. So, I think obviously people have heard that you were a former senior executive at the FBI, but let’s go back to the beginning. Why public service? Why the Bureau? How did that happen?
02:14 – Lauren Anderson
That’s a great question, and one I get asked a lot. I will tell you that service was something that was a part of my life from the time I was a child. I was very involved in community service, but I think one of my pivotal moments – although I didn’t recognize it until later – was when I was 11 years old. Our family went to Washington, D.C. to see all the monuments, as you do at that age. And we visited the FBI, which at the time was still in the Department of Justice building, which tells you how old I am.
In any event, I was fascinated by it. And I thought, wow. I’d been raised in a family where my mom and dad told me I could do anything. My dad said, “You can be anything you want, you can do anything you want, but you should always be the boss, Lauren.” So I raised my hand because I was fascinated by the tour, and I said to the tour guide, “Can girls be FBI agents?”
He looked down at me and said, “No.” And me being the kid I was, I said, “Why not?” And he literally told me, Peter, because girls spent all their time painting their fingernails, so they couldn’t be FBI agents.
03:26 – Peter Mina
Wow. Talk about a shock to the system as a child.
03:34 – Lauren Anderson
It was amazing. I just was puzzled. I thought, well, that doesn’t make any sense to me at all. And then 15 years later – I’ll tell you a little bit more in between – but when I got my offer of a position at the FBI Academy, the first person I thought of was the tour guide, not my parents, oddly enough.
My road from there wasn’t as clear. I did get very involved with politics and worked on a lot of political campaigns as a teenager. So for me, being a part of service, understanding the value in that was critical. In fact, one of the amazing members of the House of Representatives that I got to know and spent a lot of time with was Millicent Fenwick, who was first elected to the House, and I worked on her campaign. She gave me such a perfect picture of a human being who was dedicated to service. She came from a very well-to-do family, but for her it was all about service and about doing the right thing.
As a teenager, in addition to my family, to have someone of her stature be a role model to me and show me what integrity looked like and what ethics looked like in public service was really instrumental to me. She remained in my life through college and when I first got out and was considering jobs. So she modeled that for me at an early age.
But I initially thought I wanted to be a doctor. And so part of my other service was volunteering in a local hospital. There was a phrase back then called “candy stripers” based on the uniform we wore. So I worked in our hospital in New Jersey. And I loved that. That’s where I thought I would be heading professionally. That was my focus, that was part of the calculus of what colleges I looked at for applying.
I wound up going to Muhlenberg College. They were well known – they still are – for a very strong sciences program. So I was super excited. My grades had always been good – not perfection, but good – and I was a hard worker. And it wasn’t working. My first year was tough. My second year I was like, “My God, I’m so unhappy. I’m not getting good grades. I’m seeing grades like Cs and D’s” – not in my repertoire up until that point.
06:08 – Peter Mina
For someone that clearly is an overachiever, I can imagine how jarring that must have been.
06:18 – Lauren Anderson
It was horrible, and it was a real struggle with my parents. My mom was supportive, my dad was not. So I often call that my first failure because it was. Things didn’t go as I thought they were going to. I had to figure out how to pivot, what that was going to look like. That was a skill set that I had help with, but also developed in me that made it so much easier to move through life, recognizing what was right for me, what wasn’t, and recognizing those characteristics in my own personality that make me better suited for some things than others.
I switched and got my degree in psychology because we didn’t have the money for me to stay in school, frankly, and I had to graduate on time. I took two separate internships. One was working with severely mentally challenged children. The second was working in the district attorney’s office in Allentown, Pennsylvania. So I had two very different parallel paths going on. I found out something really important about myself in that moment: I loved both. But I realized that when I was coming home from the days with the kids, their state of mind, their emotions became mine. I was incorporating far too much. I said, “Okay, this is not healthy for me. I could do this as volunteer work, but I don’t think this is the right career move.”
And that was literally what was going through my head at 19. I made that pivot and started thinking more seriously. Then we wound up with me getting into the FBI at a time when there still were very few women. William Webster was the director and had a real push on for getting a wide variety of American society to be a part of the organization.
08:13 – Peter Mina
So many thoughts in reaction to the stories you just told. As I’ve gotten to know you, it seems so clear to me that the through‑line of service is a consistent theme. Interestingly, your background in psychology and the volunteer opportunity helping children with mental health issues – to me, that seems a clear indication of the humanity you ultimately brought to your job. Seeing people as humans, not just as the subject of an investigation or somebody you arrest or a source of information – they’re real people too. I think particularly in this moment, that is so critically important.
And the last thing I’ll say before we move on: you and I were talking before we started recording about gut‑check moments. It seems to me – and it’s pretty impressive to have that sense of yourself at nineteen – you clearly had this gut‑check, fork‑in‑the‑road moment: “Okay, what do I want to do with my life? The thing I thought I was going to do turns out not to be the thing. How do I move forward?” I think a lot of us have gone through that or are going through that – as topsy‑turvy as this world is right now, I can only imagine there are lots of us having that conversation with ourselves: “What do I do now? How do I deal with this world? How can I be helpful and do something that matters to me?”
10:21 – Lauren Anderson
You’re in that moment because you were faced with that – not even a year ago yourself – as you watched the destruction, maybe it’s too strong a word, but the dismantling of civil rights and civil liberties. That was challenging. I think those gut‑check moments are important. One of the things I learned that I love to share with people is: truly pay attention to how you feel. What’s going on inside of you? Because it’s never going to steer you wrong. We get so involved with being professional and choosing careers that we forget that very basic instinct that will guide us and guide us correctly, at least make us pause and say, “Wait, I need to stop for a minute and give this some thought.”
11:16 – Peter Mina
Absolutely. I know one question you probably get all the time is: what was it like being a woman in the FBI in a male‑dominated law enforcement world? I’m sure we could spend lots of time exploring that – particularly in this moment, when diversity of all kinds is under attack, especially in the national security community and the defense community, as we’re seeing Secretary Hegseth demolish diversity at DOD. But I actually want to turn that on its head. What do you see as the strengths – the benefits to the mission of the Bureau – that you were able to bring because of the fact that you were a woman?
12:13 – Lauren Anderson
Thanks for asking that. First of all, being a woman – being somebody who’s not in the majority wherever you live in the world – means that you learn how to negotiate, whether you realize it or not, at a very young age, because you are constantly negotiating everything in your life. I’m not saying that to be dramatic. I’m just saying it’s a fact of life that wherever you are, whoever you are, if you’re not in the majority of who’s in power or in control, you have to find ways to succeed and maneuver.
For me, it brought a couple of things. First, I had a high degree of comfort being around men because I had two brothers and a mom and a dad and uncles – family members that were really important in my life. They taught me essentially to give as good as I got. So I didn’t get offended. A sense of humor was critical. Coming in at the time I did, when there were maybe 320 women in the world doing what I was doing, that sense of humor goes a long way. Some women agents would get offended if a guy said something slightly off, but I would just make a joke of it and sling it right back. Obviously there’s a line – certain things were not acceptable – but because of how I was raised, I was able to come in confident in who I was as a human being, even though I was still very much developing as an FBI agent.
I would also say that because of my public service, because of who I am as a human – I feel things deeply. When I see something happen to someone or an animal, it doesn’t matter whether they have a direct connection or not – I feel that. So for me, I try to channel that. And remember all the time – because as you know, that career that I chose, which I loved and I love what I do now, put me face to face with the most horrific things that people do to other human beings, to children, to babies, to blowing people up. So a big part of not only being good at that job, but continuing to be a good person, was keeping that thread of humanity always in every situation.
There was one story I shared with you. Perhaps you’d like me to share it – something that happened in Gabon.
14:28 – Peter Mina
Please, absolutely.
14:32 – Lauren Anderson
Gabon in West Africa is a beautiful country – one of the few remaining pristine rainforests. But we were there because a woman named Karen Phillips, a Peace Corps volunteer, had been murdered. It had happened a few years earlier, but Gabon was a very authoritarian country – so corrupt that evidence was being stolen in the case. They broke into a prosecutor’s office to try and steal files relative to this case, and the investigation was beginning to suggest that somebody with ties to the president’s family may have been involved. So we get called in.
The ambassador basically says: “You have to cooperate with the FBI and redo this investigation because Karen Phillips and her family deserve justice, or I will pull the Peace Corps out of the country and the Peace Corps will not exist here anymore” – which in that part of the world was a huge threat.
To fast‑forward to the point I think is really important: we were literally reconstructing the investigation. We started interviewing people in Libreville, the capital, and then moving up into Oyam in the jungle in the northern part of the country where she was murdered. We asked to speak with a friend of hers who was a next‑door neighbor. He had nothing to do with the murder at all. We knew he was living in another part of the country, and they said, “Sure, no problem.”
I walk in one morning into the colonel’s office at the police headquarters in Libreville, and there’s a man sitting in a chair – just a metal chair with no arms – with his back to me. I can see he has no clothing on except for undershorts. No clothing. The colonel is sitting there. I look at the colonel and say, “I’m sorry,” and I backed out because I thought I interrupted something.
“No, no, ma soeur,” he called me – “my sister” in French, which was very typical. “Ma soeur, ma soeur, viens, come in. This is this person.” I looked at the man and I looked at the colonel and said, “Where’s his clothing?” He said, “Don’t worry about that.”
This was one of those moments, Peter, that I had a full team from Washington and some other colleagues from Paris to do this investigation. But I was the leader. So I had to be concerned for the well‑being and caring for everybody on my team. And here I was faced with a human being who committed no crime – whose only crime was being a friend of a murder victim and a next‑door neighbor. In those split seconds, for a situation no one had ever prepared me for, I thought, “My God, what can I do to give him some dignity and care, and also not put the entire team and myself in danger when we’re up in the jungle?”
It was a horrifying moment. I finally negotiated with the colonel – I negotiated for him to have his long pants given back to him. I found out that he had been kept in a cell overnight and had not been provided any food or any water. I simply said, “You kept him in a cell.” The other point I negotiated was to get him a snack and water. Then we had to move forward with the interview.
One other point: he at one point started crying and talking about having been tortured at the time that Karen was murdered. I knew that independently. I was sitting face to face with him and I said, “It’s okay. Take your time.” All in French. The colonel was sitting back there waving his cigarette and saying, “Okay, we get it, you were tortured. Move on with the story. We don’t have time for your emotions.”
It was one of those gut‑check moments that no one prepares you for. But that humanity – that recognition that this guy is trying to help us – how can I make this situation better without making it worse for him when we leave and without putting others in danger? It was a really pivotal moment for me.
19:56 – Peter Mina
I have so many questions based on that story. But I know we have a lot more stuff to explore, so I won’t ask them all. Just a couple. You talked about your own gut‑check moment and what you brought to that situation. You also mentioned leading a team. How do you think your team members internalized what they were seeing? It’s very apparent that seeing this person as a human being actually made him open up in ways he wouldn’t have otherwise. If you could put yourself in their shoes – and I don’t know if you talked to your team about this afterwards – how did they process it?
20:49 – Lauren Anderson
That’s a great question. I was very cognizant of everybody. While I’m concerned about this man, I was also concerned for the safety of my team – my day‑to‑day colleagues in Paris as well as the team from Washington. But I think what I have tried to show in my life – how I live my life and how I lead – is that you can be tough and you can be compassionate at the same time. How critically important it is to allow that humanity to be seen.
I could be a hard ass – I could be as tough as the next person, and my brothers would probably tell you I was too much of that sometimes. But it’s important. I want everybody to understand that for those people who work for the government, who believe in service – we’re not automatons. We care. Bringing that humanity and that recognition that these are living, breathing people to every situation is so important.
When each of us in the FBI got our credentials, our badge, and our gun, we were given enormous power – power like nobody in the country has. We had the legal authority to take away somebody’s livelihood, their liberty, or their life. That is a responsibility I took, and my colleagues overwhelmingly took so seriously. It was something I had to remind myself when I was dealing with horrible people and horrible things – yeah. But at the end of the day, I had to look at myself in the mirror. Overwhelmingly, the people I worked with recognized that and did their level best in every situation.
It was important for them to see that when you’re in your home turf – here in the United States – your ability to do things the way you want to do, to be humane, is great. But when you’re working in other parts of the world, as a lot of us have, you don’t have that freedom. Anything you do not only impacts your immediate task or investigation, but has the potential to impact the relationship between the United States and that country and other countries. That’s another consideration people often forget – it’s very much a part of the calculus of how we lead and how we do our jobs. We are very cognizant of the actions we take and try to think of second and third order effects.
23:41 – Peter Mina
What a contrast to the moment we’re in right now. One of the phrases you just mentioned resonates with me: that you can be tough but compassionate. Right now, that is not the mode of our current administration. It is “be tough” and essentially everyone is a means to an end. How do you think we get back to that tough‑but‑compassionate approach? As you were talking, the way you describe how you handled yourself and your work is, in my opinion, the definition of what service should be. Appreciating that shared humanity also is a great indicator that we’re all part of the same global community. There really is nothing different from you or the person you were interviewing in Gabon or anyone else in the world. Could you comment on that a little bit, and when this period in our history is over, how do we go back?
25:11 – Lauren Anderson
Objectively speaking, there is no reason for us as a country, as a government, to be conducting ourselves in the manner we’ve witnessed in the last 18 months. That is not a political statement – it’s just a fact. I work closely with the men and women who are a part of the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, ICE. They are good people, overwhelmingly like we are. But they’re being told to behave in a certain manner. Some have forgotten that humanity part. These are human beings. Yes, you’re being given orders, but the other pivotal point for all the people still working in government is they have to figure out where their line is now.
Are they going to accept an order which could be illegal or unethical? That’s a different situation. How are you going to approach that? This is not who we are, and this is not how we behave. Yes, we need to enforce our laws, we need to respect the rule of law, but there’s a degree of proportionality and what is appropriate in the situation. One of the things I discussed in the immigration episode we did with Amy Peck was proportionality – people who are out of status absolutely need to be held accountable, but that’s a civil violation if they’ve not committed another crime. You enforce the law, but you don’t mistreat human beings. You don’t warehouse human beings. You don’t shoot people without your life being threatened. Objectively, that’s what we saw in Minneapolis and in other places. There is no justification for that.
How do we get back to it? First, we need to be more compassionate with each other. We all have different political beliefs, and even within the Steady State we run across a spectrum. We recently had a very healthy dialogue about a particular podcast episode because of what it did or did not convey – and that’s important. Talk to people. I want to understand why people think a certain way. If we remember the humanity piece and get involved in community service – individuals can do that. But what we also need to do is hold our leaders accountable.
Right now we have policy being dictated by people who were not elected to office. We have a new acting DNI who has no background whatsoever – and by law, whoever inhabits the role of Director of National Intelligence must have background. We have somebody in the White House who is largely driving immigration policy and enforcement – not elected. These are people who may be very competent in their sphere, what they were trained in, what they’ve done professionally – but they do not belong making statements and pushing people to go out in a way inconsistent with the Constitution, the rule of law, and every statute on the books, in addition to the humanity aspect of it.
One more thing on differences coming from different perspectives. Obviously I’m a woman. One of the things I saw consistently across the world in law enforcement is an effort to de‑escalate. Women overwhelmingly are going to try to avoid a conflict from escalating – whether as a member of law enforcement or in a community. Women are generally, not always, the peacemakers. There are terrific men doing the same thing, but women are going to look to de‑escalate. If you look over and over at scenes we’ve seen over the last year and a half, think about how often you’ve seen a woman in some of the most egregious situations. You’re not. Because as somebody who has been in those situations, who is SWAT trained, who has done the kinds of things we’ve seen videoed by citizens – I know what it looks like.
In that scenario, that would have been a verbal conversation from me – keeping a distance from that car and saying, “I need you to turn the car off, or I need you to leave,” whatever was appropriate. It’s not to pull out a gun and scream obscenities. Diversity has become a dirty word, and it’s a lovely word because difference of experience comes into that as well. That’s a point I would make too. As I’ve watched everything unroll, we don’t know all the facts – and I’m very careful about never trying to judge a shooting situation because I’m not there. But with all the information we currently have, that’s another difference – a de‑escalation approach.
I know some current agents, both in the FBI and DEA, and I know that’s how they would approach those situations. Instead, they’re being forced – one in particular, I will not say where or who – into a car stop that was unnecessary because they knew the person, they knew his address, they knew where he lived. It was a civil warrant, no violent criminal activity. Yet a decision was made for political reasons to make a giant show with a car stop. It went bad. It created an accident. A vehicle behind the subject vehicle was hit. The subject runs away. Absolute chaos for no reason in the middle of the street, where a woman and her two children she was taking to school were hurt. There is no reason for that.
32:18 – Peter Mina
I feel like we could have this conversation all day. One thing I hear loud and clear is that in the current moment, we refuse to see another perspective other than our own. No one is sanctioning criminal conduct. In all these First Amendment protected activities, while the activity is protected, it’s not okay to damage property or engage in anything in violation of the law. But to your point about proportionality and de‑escalation, that does not give law enforcement the right to detain someone or see them as less than human because they are not part of the law enforcement objective or, worse yet, the political aim of the administration, regardless of what party’s in power.
One of the things I’ve grappled with over the course of my career – especially at the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties – is I have profound respect for the mission of law enforcement and how hard it is. I think about my colleagues at ICE, CBP, TSA, all over the department, and the tough job they have every day. But that challenge, that responsibility, is not focusing solely on, for example, “My job is to enforce the Immigration and Nationality Act, period.” You’re a sworn law enforcement officer to the Constitution and to the laws of the United States – all of them that are relevant. How did you see that in your career? And how do you advise all the people that seek your guidance as they try to do their jobs to the best of their ability?
35:06 – Lauren Anderson
First, I have to say that priorities always fluctuate within law enforcement. A particular program or area may rise and fall in terms of priority, but there was never a situation in my 29 years in the Bureau where anyone was told not to enforce laws. That’s important: we can’t selectively enforce the law. We enforce them all. Now, what happens down the road – charges brought, through the system – that’s another conversation.
Part of the dialogue, and I encourage people to speak up when they see law enforcement acting inappropriately – now you shouldn’t be interfering, for sure – but I have no problem with people documenting it. I never conducted myself in a way that – I mean, there weren’t cameras on me, but frankly I wouldn’t have had a problem with that. I wouldn’t have had a problem wearing a camera.
Another thing: I think sometimes politicians and leaders hijack stories. When we consider real criminal activity happening in the country, we have one side that is over‑enforcing – lacking proportionality. We have another side saying, “Defund ICE, shut them down.” Neither is the solution. In my experience – both during my time in the Bureau and since – people in the most crime‑ridden communities want police. They want a relationship though. They want to know they can trust them. They want to recognize that, “Okay, if I break the law, I’m going to get arrested, or I may get arrested.” But they want that dialogue. They don’t want to be ignored.
I heard an activist in St. Louis, Missouri, I think in 2018, say something that stuck with me to this day. She said, “Don’t talk about us without us.” That’s another key thing when we have these conversations – when members of Congress have these conversations – we have to include the people who are affected. I’m a big believer in a whole‑of‑society approach. When you talked earlier about how we get back to where we need to be – we need to all be talking to each other. I can say “I don’t like this about what you do,” you can say that to me. But finding a way forward – it’s not all or none on either side. It’s not “lock them all up and throw them in a warehouse.” And it’s not “eliminate law enforcement.” It’s not helping our country when our leaders – and each of us – don’t take that responsibility in our own lives to look at that and say, “Could I do something better? Could I reach out and give a hand to someone else? How can we make that better?”
But it is a challenge right now. What I stick with always is: respect the rule of law, follow the law. Our system is imperfect. But in all of the now about 70 countries I’ve been in – having worked in a lot of different countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as across the United States – our system is probably one of the best ones out there. But it’s not looking that way recently. And it’s very distressing for me as an American citizen.
38:54 – Peter Mina
I think as we wind down this conversation – what made you, obviously having a really successful career in the FBI, committing yourself to service, having lots of other projects – why the Steady State, why the podcast, why all the things you’re doing in this space when you certainly didn’t have to? You could say, “Look, I had my career, I served my country, it’s someone else’s turn.”
39:32 – Lauren Anderson
Because if everybody takes the approach that it’s someone else’s turn or someone else’s problem, we will never be the best we can be as a community and as a society. One of the things that disappoints me and that I’d love to see change is that in the last twenty‑five or thirty years, the degree to which people engage in their communities has really dropped. I was raised in a period where it was expected that I would participate in the community. I think that’s really important. I will never stop participating in my community – whether it’s where I live here in New York, whether it’s my community of national security, whether it’s my community of women leaders across the globe, many of whom are in conflict. That’s never going to change.
I’ve been on podcasts, but I’ve never hosted one. I love being challenged. I’m somebody who wants to keep trying new things. But really at its core, when I received the call from Jim Lawler last September, I thought this is perfect because I had been feeling frustrated. I love mentoring – I do a lot of it with men as well as women, and that feeds me – but I was feeling frustrated watching so many former colleagues in the government still struggling on a day‑to‑day basis. I thought, “What can I do?”
When Jim Lawler said, “Hey, here’s this organization. Have you heard about it? Let me talk to you about it,” I thought, “Okay, I can do something here. I can hopefully add value.” When he called like two weeks later, I said, “I don’t want to be a member in name only. I don’t do that. If I commit, I’m 100% in. So what can I do?” They said, “Well, you could write” – and I’ve always wanted to write – and I thought, “Perfect. This feeds this thing I have not focused on.”
Then when he called about the podcast two weeks later, he goes, “Just hear me out.” I’m thinking, “What’s he going to ask me?” When he talked about it, I said, “First, I’m really honored. Second, I would love to do it.” To me, it’s a great opportunity to learn. I learn from you and from everybody in the Steady State. It’s providing a great opportunity to share what we know, what our experience has been, and how much we all care about our fellow Americans and our fellow humans who live in this country and in the world. I couldn’t say no to that. I just couldn’t say no, because that service matters.
Now to be able to be a voice – I’ve heard from so many people that listen, and I know you have – both across the United States and in other countries. What I hear over and over and over again is: “Thank you and your colleagues so much for talking from a position of experience as practitioners – not as politicians, not as talking heads.” I take nothing away from politicians or journalism – they’re all critical to a democratic society. But the fact that we speak from experience and do it in a calm manner, without people screaming at each other and getting angry – that’s what I hear over and over. I’ve heard it from people in India. I’ve heard it from Palestinians I know. I’ve heard it from people in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands. They’re loving the chance to learn and to have input – because that’s something you and I have talked about: how much we want to hear from the people that listen and give us ideas. We want a dialogue with you.
For me, there was no question – no turning back – when Jim called me last year. It’s something I relish. I love meeting other people I haven’t met before. I love sharing it. I love giving the opportunity, as I know you do, to people we’ve already had in our lives who have something important to say to bring it here – as Amy Peck did, who’s actually going to be speaking in Washington, DC tomorrow night at Amy Kaslow’s gallery on immigration with the American Immigration Council. To me, that was a natural – look, we know these amazing people. Let’s give them the opportunity to share what they know and how this could be valuable in our fellow humans’ lives.
44:18 – Peter Mina
It is understanding not just what you know, but what you don’t know and what someone else can teach you. Just because somebody has a different viewpoint doesn’t mean they’re less than human or less than you in any way. We should approach life as constant learners. It gets back to that concept of our shared humanity.
44:55 – Lauren Anderson
And curiosity, Peter. Being curious in life – in people – that’s really important.
45:02 – Peter Mina
Yeah. Ask good questions. Absolutely.
Lauren, I can’t thank you enough for having this conversation, for opening up your life to us, for your commitment to service. It’s been such a joy getting to know you, doing this podcast with you, and being able to share the very rich and important experiences you’ve had with the next young girl who may be thinking, “I want to be an FBI agent” – to tell someone who says no, “Pound sand, I’ll show you.” Obviously you can use lots more colorful language these days, but we’ll keep it PG.
First, I want to give you an opportunity. I know people know you through the Steady State, but how can they find you? How can they learn more about you? Where are you on social media?
46:10 – Lauren Anderson
I’m on Substack. In addition to writing for the Steady State’s Substack, I have my own page under my name, which is actually titled What We Choose to Defend. I am also on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Blue Sky – although I have to confess I am not terribly active on some of those platforms. But I am out there, and I encourage people to reach out. I’m happy to talk with people. I like you – I love getting questions and I love getting challenged.
46:42 – Peter Mina
Awesome. So if you like what you hear on today’s show, please subscribe to the Steady State Sentinel wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five‑star review on Google. Those subscriptions and five‑star reviews help us get this important content to the widest audience possible. As always, the Steady State Sentinel is for you, our listeners, and our fellow citizens of the world. Please tell us what you like, what you don’t like, what you want to hear. Join us for our next episode so you can stay engaged and stay informed.
Remember, protecting democracy is not a spectator sport. This is Peter Mina for the Steady State Sentinel, and with my outstanding colleague Lauren Anderson – and we are still standing watch.
47:34 – Lauren Anderson
Thank you, Peter.