Tomorrow’s Coffee Hour topic is going to make people uncomfortable—in a productive way: The U.S. Intelligence Community isn’t consistently hiring the best and brightest. Not because talent doesn’t exist, but because the pipeline is optimized for credentials, compliance, and patience, not demonstrated thinking. We’ll unpack: - why degrees and GPAs are weak proxies for analytic rigor - how long hiring timelines and “resume signals” filter out real cognitive talent - what audition-based hiring could look like (writing tests, argument defense, probability reasoning, forecasting trials) If you care about analytic integrity, this one matters—because you can’t fix analysis quality downstream if you select the wrong inputs upstream. Coffee, candor, and a little heresy.