Hello, I'm Dr. Stephen Hassan, and I'm absolutely delighted to have a very amazing colleague

who's consented to this interview.

Welcome, Dr. Anne Speckart.

I'm going to just give you a little, give our listeners rather, a little bio on you first.

Dr. Anne Speckart is director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism

and serves as an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at the Georgetown University School of Medicine.

Anne has interviewed over 700 terrorists, their family members, and supporters in various parts of the world.

She's interviewed over 250 ISIS defectors.

She's helped to develop counter-narrative videos interviewing these former ISIS people.

More recently, Anne has been interviewing white supremacists, which is of great interest.

And Anne is a expert witness. She's an educator.

She's also got a clinical psychology background as a mental health professional.

And I recently invited her to present at the program in psychiatry at the law,

which Anne, you did a great presentation for us.

Thank you so much. And I want to welcome you to the Influence Continuum Podcast. Thank you, Steve. It's an honor to be here with you.

So let's just start with a little background. How did you get interested in this weird,

alternative field of study, radicalization?

I always blame my husband. He dragged me overseas. He's a U.S. ambassador, now retired.

And we were over in Brussels when 9-11 happened, and we were all told to stand down, stay home. And after four or five days, I got stir crazy, so I started volunteering to help. And that was part of it.

And then I ended up going to help with Nordast as well when they took over the theater.

And I started interviewing people that were involved in terrorism.

And I ended up going through Gaza and West Bank.

...