Lisa Monaco served as President Obama’s chief counterterrorism and homeland security advisor for his entire second term. She was responsible for policy coordination and crisis management on issues ranging from cybersecurity to natural disasters to terrorist attacks at home and abroad. Previously, Lisa helped Robert Mueller transform the FBI after 9/11 into a national security organization focused on preventing terrorist attacks on the United States.

Does history make statesmen or do statesmen make history? A conversation with Bruce Jentleson about his forthcoming book The Peacemakers: Lessons Learned from 20th Century Statesmanship.

Music: Blue Dot Sessions

The United Nations estimates more than 400,000 people have lost their lives in the Syrian civil war and millions more have had to leave their homes and the country. Cynthia Viveros-Cano is stationed in Damascus, Syria, as a Humanitarian Affairs Officer for the United Nations. Her role is help ensure aid gets to the people who need it most.

Recently, many have protested the dramatically different direction the U.S. is beginning to take in regards to climate change. Tim Profeta, director of Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, helps sort through the many changes being proposed by the Trump administration.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has become the universal yardstick of progress. GDP judges the value of goods and services produced inside a country’s borders. But the number has a big problem: it only judges output. More car production for example, would seem on the surface as a success, but at what cost? Dirk Philipsen's book is The Little Big Number, How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to do About It.

Recently, a team at the Duke Reporters Lab has been developing a fact-checking app for the Amazon Echo. Owners of the Echo can “ask the fact-checkers” about claims they hear on the news and social media. The development team is led by Bill Adair, founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning site  PolitiFact. Student researcher Julia Donheiser and project manager Rebecca Iannucci join Adair to talk through the promise and pitfalls of the project.

There's a project happening now in North Carolina in which people from across the state who have very different political views are meeting on a regular basis. The idea is this: if we can build relationships between people with differing political views, can mutual understanding – or even solutions - be far behind?

In the 1930s, half of all unmarried women who got pregnant out of wedlock got married (a so-called "shotgun marriage.") By the second half of the 2000s, only 6% of women in the same situation married before giving birth. But recently shotgun marriages have actually risen among certain groups of women.

Jared Cohen said recently, “the world is in a perpetual state of cyber-warfare.” He should know, he's the the Founder and CEO of Jigsaw, the tech incubator focused on geopolitical challenges created by Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Previously, Jared served as a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff and thus as a close advisor to both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. Jared has a long-standing interest in international security issues; he has traveled to more than 100 countries, including Iran and North Korea, and has conducted interviews with members of various extremist groups including Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Al-Shabab, Somali pirates, and more recently, failed ISIS recruits. He talks with guest host Peter Feaver about the high-tech efforts Jigsaw is undertaking to harness the power of technology to make the world safer.

Across the globe more than 20 million people are victimized by human trafficking, the modern form of slavery. Judith Kelley has been digging in to the WikiLeaks documents to see whether ranking countries on how well they are tackling human trafficking issues is having an impact on their efforts. Her new book is Scorecard Diplomacy.