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I'm Zoe Weinberg and this is next in foreign policy. The podcasts were the next generation of national security and foreign policy leaders. Talk about the issues of today and tomorrow.

This week we're joined by April Arnold. April has over a decade of experience in arms control and non-proliferation implementation as a contractor for the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy.

She was a 2022 Aspen Rising Leader and a board fellow for the 2021-2023 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

April, welcome to the show. Hello. How are you?

April, this is a little bit unusual because this podcast usually isn't reporting on contemporaneous events.

Both of us have spent the last week at the Aspen Security Forum, which is an annual gathering of foreign policy and national security policy makers, researchers and observers.

Can you tell us some of the highlights from this week's conference, what your big takeaways were, what themes kept surfacing throughout the sessions?

Yeah, sure. So it's always wild. This is my second time going under the Rising Leader banner and each time it's a wild experience primarily because you're being fed with a fire hose.

And you kind of have to pick and choose which ones you're going to fully engage on and kind of come back and take notes on the other stuff.

So I would say the highlights that I had were Monica Juma, the National Security Advisor of Kenya.

I don't know much about Kenya and so just hearing her talk about her viewpoint as well as Kenya's viewpoint on many of the subject matters was really interesting, but she was also just a really dynamic speaker.

She could touch on a lot of things and you could just tell she was incredibly just articulate on many of the subjects and could speak from many angles.

And she was just a fun speaker to listen to and so she was I think the first or second speaker and headset or really high bar that I'm not sure many of the other panelists quite met up to.

So she was probably one of my favorites and then granted this is going to be colored by my preferences, but I also like the critical mineral panel and hearing particularly from Heidi Hyde camp about the need and involvement for community and local communities to address many of the problems we're facing with this.

One, I completely agree, but to just hearing sort of someone at her level speak to the need for just small local towns and cities was encouraging as I kind of go about my work.

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