Transcript for:
Insights from Andrew Bustamante on Intelligence

massage will do anything mossad has no qualms doing what it takes to ensure the survival of every israeli citizen around the world most other countries will stop at some point but mossad doesn't do that the following is a conversation with andrew bustamante former cia covert intelligence officer and u.s air force combat veteran including the job of operational targeting encrypted communications and launch operations for 200 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles andrews over seven years as a cia spy have given him a skill set and a perspective on the world that is fascinating to explore this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's andrew bustamante the central intelligence agency was formed almost 75 years ago what is the mission of the cia how does it work the mission of the cia is to collect intelligence from around the world that supports a national security mission and be the central repository for all other intelligence agencies so that it's one collective source where all intelligence can be synthesized and then passed forward to the decision makers that doesn't include domestic intelligence is primarily looking outward outside the united states correct cia is the foreign intelligence collection kingspoke if you will fbi does domestic and then department of homeland security does domestic law enforcement essentially handles all things domestic intelligence is not law enforcement so we technically cannot work inside the united states is there clear lines to be drawn between like you just said the fbi cia fbi and the other u.s intelligence agencies like the dia defense intelligence agency department of homeland security nsa national security agency and and there's a list there's a list of about 33 different intelligence organizations yeah so the army the navy has all the different organizations have their own intelligence groups so is there is there clear lines here to be drawn or is the cia the the giant integrator of all of these uh it's a little bit of both to be honest so yes there are absolutely lines and more so than the lines there are lines that divide what our primary mission is everything's got to be prioritized that's one of the benefits and the superpowers of the united states is we prioritize everything so different intelligence organizations are prioritized to collect certain types of intelligence and then within the confines of how they collect they're also given unique authorities authorities are a term that's directed by the executive branch different agencies have different authorities to execute missions in different ways fbi can't execute the same way cia executes and cia can't execute the same way nga executes but then at the end excuse me when it's all collected then yes cia still acts as a final synthesizing repository to create what's known as the president's daily brief the pdb the only way cia can create the pdb is by being the single source of all source intelligence from around the ic the intern the intelligence community which are those 30 some odd and always changing organizations that are sponsored for intelligence operations what does the pdb the president's daily brief look like how long is it what does it contain so first of all it looks like the most expensive book report you can ever imagine it's got its own binder it's all very high-end it feels important it looks important it's not like a cheap trapper keeper um it's somewhere between i would give it probably between 50 and 125 pages a day is produced every day around two o'clock in the morning by a dedicated group of analysts and uh and each page is essentially a short paragraph to a few paragraphs about a priority happening that affects national security from around the world the president rarely gets to the entire briefing in a day he relies on a briefer instead to prioritize what inside the briefing needs to be shared with the president because some days the pdb will get briefed in 10 minutes and some days it'll be briefed over the course of two hours it depends on the president's schedule how much competition is there for the first page and uh so how much jockeying there is for attention for i imagine for all the different intelligence agencies and within the cia there's probably different groups that are modular and they're all care about different nations or different uh cases and is there do you understand how much competition there is for the attention for the limited attention of the president you're 100 correct in how the agency and how officers and managers of the agency handle the pdb there's a ton of competition everybody wants to be the first on the radar everybody wants to be on the first page the thing that we're not baking into the equation is the president's interests the president dictates what's on the first page of his pdb and he will tell them usually the day before i want to see this on the first page tomorrow bring this to me in the beginning i don't want to hear about what's happening in mozambique i don't really care about what's happening in saudi arabia i want to see one two three and regardless of whether or not those are the three biggest things in the world the president's the executive he's the one he's the ultimate customer so we do what the cus the customer says that has backfired in the past if you haven't already started seeing how that could go wrong that is backfired in the past but that is essentially what happens when you serve in the executive branch you serve the executive so what's the role the director of the cia versus the president what's that dance like so the the president really leads the focus of the cia the president is the commander-in-chief for the military but the the executive the president is also the executive for the entirety of the intelligence community so he's the the ultimate customer if you look at it like a business the customer the person spending the money is the president and the director is the ceo so if the director doesn't create what the president wants there's going to be a new director that's why the director of cia is a presidential appointed position sometimes they're extremely qualified intelligence professionals sometimes they're just professional politicians or soldiers that get put into that seat because the president trusts them to do what he wants them to do another a gaping area that causes problems but that's still the way it is so you think this is a problematic configuration of the whole system massive flaw in the system it is a massive flaw in the system because if you're essentially appointing a director to do what you want them to do then you're assigning a crony and that's what we define corruption as within the united states and inside the united states we say if you pick somebody outside of merit for any other reason other than merit then it's cronyism or it's nepotism here that's exactly what our structure is built on all presidential appointees are appointed on something other than merit so for an intelligence agency to be effective it has to discover the truth and communicate that truth and maybe if you're appointing the director of that agency you're not they're less likely to communicate the truth to you unless the truth aligns perfectly with your desired worldview well not necessarily perfectly because there are other steps right they have to be they have to go in front of congress and they have to have the support of of multiple legislatures uh or legislators but they they're the challenge is that the short list of people who even get the opportunity aren't a meritorious list it's a short list based off of who the president is picking or who the would-be president is picking now i think we've proven that an intelligence organization can be an intelligence organization can be extremely effective even within the flawed system yeah the challenge is how much more effective could we be if we improved and that's i think that's the challenge that faces a lot of the us government i think that's a challenge that has resulted in what we see today when it comes to the decline of american power and american influence the rise of foreign influence attack authoritarian powers and a shrinking u.s economy a growing chinese economy and it's just we have questions hard questions we need to ask ourselves about how we're going to handle the future what aspect of that communication between the president and the cia could be fixed to to help fix the problems that you're referring to in terms of the decline of american power so when you talk about the president wanting to prioritize what the president cares about that immediately shows a break between what actually matters to the long-term success of the united states versus what happened what benefits the short-term success of the current president because any president is just a human being and has a very narrow focus and narrow focus is not a long-term calculation exactly what's the maximum amount of years a president can be president eight yeah he has to be he or she in the united states in the united states according to our current constitution yeah but they they're very limited uh in terms of what they have to prioritize and then if you look at a four-year cycle two years of that is essentially preparing for the next election cycle so what's only two years of really quality attention you get from the president who's the chief executive of all the intelligence community so the most important thing to them is not always the most important thing to the long-term survival of the united states what do you make of the hostile relationship that to me at least stands out of the presidents between donald trump and the cia was that a very kind of personal bickering i mean is there something interesting to you about the dynamics between that particular president and that particular instantiation of the intelligence agency man there were lots of things fascinating to me about that that relationship so first what's the good and the bad sorry gentry so let me start with the good first because there's a lot of people who don't think there was any good so the good thing is we saw that the president who's the chief customer the executive to the cia when the president doesn't want to hear what cia has to say he's not going to listen i think that's an important lesson for everyone to take home if the president doesn't care what you have to say he's going to take funding away or she will take funding away they're going to take attention away they're going they're going to shut down your operations your missions they're going to kill the careers of the people working there think about that for the four years that president trump was the president basically everybody at cia their career was put on pause some people's careers were ended some people voluntarily left their career there because they found themselves working for a single customer that didn't want what they had to produce so for people who don't know donald trump did not display significant deep interest in the output uh he did not trust it yeah he was a disinterested customer exactly right the information and then what do disinterested customers do they go find someone else to create their product and that's exactly what donald trump did he did it through the private intelligence world funding private intelligence companies to run their own operations that brought him the information he cared about when cia wouldn't it also didn't help that cia stepped outside of their confines right cia is supposed to collect foreign intelligence and not comment on domestic matters they went way outside of that when they started challenging the president when they started questioning the results when they started publicly claiming russian influence that's all something the fbi could have handled by itself the justice department could have handled by itself cia had no place to contribute to that conversation and when they did all they did was undermine the relationship they had with their primary customer let me sort of focus in on this relationship between the president or the leader and the intelligence agency and look outside the united states it seems like authoritarian regimes or regimes throughout history if you look at stalin and hitler if you look at today with vladimir putin the negative effects of power corrupting the mind of a leader manifest itself is that they start to get bad information from the intelligence agencies so the this kind of thing that you're talking about over time they start hearing information they want to they want to hear the agency starts producing only um the kind of information they want to hear and their the leaders world view starts becoming distorted to where the propaganda they generate is also the thing that the intelligence agencies provide to them and so they start getting this they start believing their own propaganda and they start getting a distorted view of the world sorry for the sort of uh walking through in a weird way but i guess i want to ask do you think let's look at vladimir putin specifically do you think he's getting accurate information about the world do you think he knows the truth of the world whether that's the war in ukraine whether that's the behavior of the other nations in nato the united states in general what do you think it's rare that i'll talk about just thinking it's i prefer to share my assessment why i assess things a certain way rather than just what's my random opinion in my assessment vladimir putin is winning russia is winning they're winning in ukraine but they're also winning the battle of influence against the west they're winning in the face of economic sanctions they're winning empirically when you look at the math they're winning so when you ask me whether or not putin is getting good information from intelligence services when i look at my overall assessment of multiple data points he must be getting good information do i know how or why i do not i don't know how or why it works there i don't know how such deep cronyism such deep corruption can possibly yield true real results and yet somehow there are real results happening so it's either excessive waste and an accidental win or there really is a system and a process there that's functioning so this winning idea is very interesting in what way short term and long term is russia winning some people say there was a miscalculation of the way the invasion happened uh there was an assumption that you would be able to successfully take kiev you you'd be able to successfully capture the east the south and the north of ukraine and with what now appears to be significantly insufficient troops spread way too thin across way too large of a front so that seems to be like an intelligence failure and uh and that doesn't seem to be like winning in another way it doesn't seem like winning if we put aside the human cost of war it doesn't seem like winning because the hearts and minds of the west were completely on the side of ukraine this particular leader in vladimir zelinski captured the attention of the world and the hearts and minds of europe the west and many other nations throughout the world both financially in terms of military equipment and in terms of sort of social and cultural and emotional support for the independence fight of this nation that seems to be like a miscalculation so against that pushback why do you think there's still kernels of uh winning in this on the russian side what you're laying out isn't incorrect and the miscalculations are not unexpected anybody who's been to a military college including the army war college in pennsylvania where so many of our military leaders are brought up when you look at the conflict in ukraine it fits the exact mold of what an effective long-term military conflict protracted military conflict would and should look like for military dominance now did zielinski and did the did the ukrainians shock the world absolutely but in that they also shocked american intelligence which like you said miscalculated the whole world miscalculated how the ukrainians would respond putin did not move in there accidentally he had an assessment he had high likelihood of a certain outcome and that outcome did not happen why did he have that calculation because in 2014 it worked he invaded he took crimea in 14 days he basically created a an infiltration campaign that turned key leaders over in the first few days of the conflict so essentially there was no conflict it worked in 2008 when he took georgia nobody talks about that he invaded georgia the exact same same way and it worked so in 2008 it worked in 2014 it worked there was no reason to believe it wasn't going to work again so he just carried out the same campaign but this time something was different that was a miscalculation for sure on the part of putin and the reason that there was no support from the west because let's not forget there is no support there is nothing other than the lend lease act which is putting ukraine in massive debt right now to the west that's the only form of support they're getting from nato or the united states so if somebody believed ukraine would win if somebody believed ukraine had a chance they would have gotten more material support than just debt and we can jump into that anytime you want to but the whole world miscalculated everybody thought russia was going to win in 14 days i i said that they would win 14 days because that was the predominant calculation once the first invasion didn't work then the military does what professional militaries do man they they re-evaluate they re-uh reorganize leaders and then they they take a new approach you saw three approaches the first two did not work the first two campaigns against ukraine did not work the way they were supposed to work the third has worked exactly like it's supposed to work you don't need kiev to win ukraine you don't need hearts and minds to win ukraine what do you need yeah what you need is control of of natural resources which they're taking in the east and you need access to the heart beat the blood flow of food and money into the country which they're taking in the south the fact that ukraine had to go to the negotiation table with russia and turkey in order to get exports out of the black sea approved again demonstrates just how much ukraine is losing the the aggressor had a seat at the negotiation table to allow ukraine the ability to even export one of its top exports if russia would have said no then they would not have had that russia has that's like someone holding your throat it's like somebody holding your jugular vein and saying if if you don't do what i tell you to do then i'm not gonna let you breathe i'm not gonna let blood flow to your brain so do you think it's possible that russia takes the south of ukraine it takes um so starting from mariupol the herson region all the way to odessa all the way to odessa and into into moldova i believe all that will happen before the fall fall of this year fall of this year before winter hits europe nato wants germany needs to be able to have sanctions lifted so they can tap into russian power there's no way they can have those sanctions lifted unless russia wins and russia also knows that all of europe all of nato is the true the true people feeling the pain of the war outside of ukraine are the nato countries because they're so heavily reliant on russia and as they have supported american sanctions against russia their people feel the pain economically their people feel their pain what are they going to do in the winter because without russian gas their their people are going to freeze to death ukrainian people people all over nato i ukraine everybody knows ukraine's at risk everybody knows ukrainians are dying the game of war isn't played just it isn't even played majority by the people who are fighting the game of war is played by everyone else it's an economic game it's not a military game the flow of resources and energy attention food exactly right i was on the front in the hersan region this very area that you're referring to and i spoke to a lot of people and those the morale is incredibly high and i don't think the people in that region soldiers volunteer soldiers civilians are going to give up that land without dying i agree with you i mean in order to take odessa would require a huge amount of artillery and slaughter of civilians essentially they're not going to use artillery odessa because odessa is too important to russian culture it's going to be even uglier than that it's going to be clearing up streets clearing of buildings person by person troop by troop it'll be a lot like what it was in marvel just shooting at civilians because they can't afford to just do bombing raids because they're going to destroy cultural significant architecture that's just too important to the russian culture and that's going to demoralize their own russian people i have to do a lot of thinking to try to understand what i even feel i don't know but in terms of information the thing that the soldiers are saying that the russian soldiers are saying the thing the russian soldiers really believe is that they're freeing they're liberating the ukrainian people from [Music] nazis um and they believe this because i visited ukraine i spoke to the over 100 probably a couple hundred ukrainian people from different walks of life it feels like the russian soldiers at least under a cloud of propaganda they're not operating on a clear view of the whole world and given all that i just don't see russia taking the south without committing war crimes and if vladimir putin is aware of what's happening in terms of the treatment of civilians i don't see him pushing forward all the way to take the south because that's not going to be effective strategy for him to win the hearts and minds of his people autocracies don't need to win hearts and minds that's a staunchly democratic point of view hearts and minds mean very little to people who understand core basic needs and uh and true power you don't see xi jinping worrying about hearts and minds in china you don't see you don't see it in north korea you don't see it in in congo you don't see it in most of the world hearts and minds are a luxury in reality what people need is food water power they need income to be able to secure a lifestyle it's it is absolutely sad i am not in any way shape or form saying that my assessment on this is is enriching or enlightening or or uh hopeful it's just fact it's just calculatable empirical evidence if putin loses in ukraine the losses the influential losses the economic losses the lives lost the power lost is too great so it is better for him to push and push and push through war crimes through everything else war crimes are something defined by the international court system the international court system has russia as part of its board and the international court system is largely powerless outs when it comes to enforcing its own outcomes so the real risk gain scenario here for for russia is is is significantly in favor of gain over risk the other thing that i think is important to talk about is we everybody is trapped in the middle of a gigantic information war yes there's battlefield bullets and cannons and tanks but there's also a massive and from informational war the same narrative that you see these ground troops in ukraine these russian ground troops in ukraine believing they're clearing the land of nazis that information is being fed to them from their own home country i don't know why people seem to think that the information that they're reading in english is any more or less true the enti every piece of news coming out of the west every piece of information coming out in the english language is also a giant narrative being shared intentionally to try to undermine the morale and the faithfulness of english-speaking russians which somebody somewhere knows exactly how many of those there are so we have to recognize that we're not getting true information from other side because there is a strategic value in making sure that there is just the right amount of miss or disinformation out there not because someone's trying to lie to americans but because someone is trying to influence the way english-speaking russians think and in that world that's exactly why you see so many news articles cited to anonymous sources government officials who do not want to be named there's no nothing that links back responsibility there right there's nothing that can go to court there but this the information still gets released and that's that's enough to make ukrainians believe that the united states is going to help them or that the west is going to help them it's enough to make russians think that that they're going to lose and maybe they should just they should just give up now and leave from the battlefield now we have to understand we are in the middle of a giant information war maybe you can correct me but it feels like in the english-speaking world it's harder to control it's harder to fight the information war because of you know some people say there's not really a freedom of speech in this country but i think uh if you compare there's a lot more freedom of speech and it's just harder to control narratives when there's a bunch of um guerrilla journalists that are able to just publish anything they want on twitter or anything it's just harder to control narratives so people don't understand where freedom of speech is that's the first major problem and it's it's shameful how many people in the united states do not understand what freedom of speech actually protects so that aside you're absolutely right fighting the information war in the west is extremely difficult because anyone with a blog anyone with a twitter account anyone i mean anyone can call themselves a journalist essentially we live in a world we live in a country where people read the headline and they completely bypass the author line and they go straight into the content and then they decide whether the content's real or not based on how they feel instead of based on empirical measurable evidence so you mentioned the len lease act and the support of the united states support of ukraine by the united states are you skeptical to the level of support that the united states is providing and is going to provide over over time the strategy that the united states has taken to support ukraine is similar to the strategy we took to support great britain during world war ii the the enactment of the lend least act is a perfect example of that the lend lease act means that we are lending or leasing equipment to the ukrainian government in exchange for future payment so every time a rocket is launched every time a drone crashes into a tank that's that's a bill that ukraine is is just racking up it's like when you go to a restaurant you start drinking shots sometime the bill will come due this is exactly what we did when europe and when great britain was in the face of uh nazi invasion we signed the same thing into motion do you know that that the uk did not pay off the debt from world war ii until 2020 they've been paying that debt since the end of world war ii so what we're doing is we're indebting ukraine against the promise that perhaps they will secure their freedom which nobody seems to want to talk about what freedom is actually going to look like for ukrainians right what are the true handful of outcomes the realistic outcomes that could come of this and what which of those outcomes really looks like freedom to them especially in the face of the fact that they're going to be trillions of dollars in debt to the west for supplying them with the training and the weapons and the food and the med kits and everything else that we're giving them because none of it's free it's all coming due it's all we're a democracy but we're also a capitalist country we we can't afford to just give things away for free but we can give things away at a discount we can give things away lay away but the bill will come due and unfortunately that is not part of the conversation that's being had with the american people so debt is a way to establish some level of control power is power that said having a very close relationship between ukraine and the united states does not seem to be a negative possibility when ukrainians think about their future in terms of freedom that's one thing and uh the other there's some aspect of this war that i've just noticed that um one of the people i talked to said that all great nations uh have a independence war they have to have a war for their independence in order there's something it's dark but there's something about war just being a catalyst for finding your own identity as a nation so you can have leaders you can have sort of signed documents you can have all this kind of stuff but there's something about war that really brings the country together and actually tried to figure out what is at the core of the spirit of the people that defines this country and they see this war as that as the independence wars to define the heart of what the country is so there's a there's been before the war before this invasion there was a lot of factions in the country there was a lot of influence from oligarchs and corruption and so on a lot of that was the factions were brought together under one umbrella effectively to become one nation because of this invasion so they see that as a positive direction for the defining of what a free democratic country looks like after the war at in their perspective after the wars won it's a difficult situation because i'm trying to make sure that that you and all everybody listening understands that what's happening in ukraine among ukrainians is noble and brave and courageous and beyond the expectations of anyone the fact is there is no material support coming from the outside the american in the american revolution was won because of french involvement french ships french troops french generals french military might the uh independence of of uh communist china was won through russian support russian generals russian troops on the ground fighting with the communists that's how revolutions are won that's how independent countries are born ukraine doesn't get any of that no one is stepping into that because we live in a world right now where there simply is no economic benefit to the parties in power to support ukraine to that level and war is a game of economics the economic benefit of ukraine is crystal clear in favor of russia which is why putin cannot lose he will not let himself lose short of something completely unexpected right i'm talking 60 70 probability ukraine loses but there's still 20 30 probability of the unimaginable happening who knows what that might be and oligarch assassinates putin or a nuclear bomb goes off somewhere or who knows what right there's still a chance that something unexpected will happen and change the tide of the war but when it comes down to the core calculus here ukraine is the agricultural bed to support a future russia russia knows they know they have to have ukraine they know that they have to have it to protect themselves against military pressure from the west they have to have it for agricultural reasons they have major oil and natural gas pipelines that flow through eastern ukraine they they cannot let ukraine fall outside of their sphere of influence they cannot the united states doesn't really have any economic vested interest in ukraine ideologics you know ideological points of view and promises aside there's no economic benefit and the same thing goes for nato nato has no economic investment in ukraine ukrainian output ukrainian food goes to the middle east and africa it doesn't go to europe so the whole the sai the west siding with ukraine is exclusively ideological and it's putting them in a place where they fight a war with russia so the whole world can see russia's capabilities ukraine is a it's sad as it is to say man ukraine is a pawn on a table for superpowers to calculate each other's capacities right now we've only talked about russia and united states we haven't even talked about iran we haven't even talked about china right it is a pawn on a table this is a chicken fight so that people get to watch and see what the other trainers are doing well a lot of people might have said the same thing about the united states back in the independence fight so there is there is possibilities as you've said we're not uh saying zero percent chance and it could be a reasonably high percent chance that this becomes one of the great democratic nations that the 21st century is remembered by absolutely and so uh you said american support so ideologically first of all you don't assign much long-term power to that that us could support ukraine purely on ideological grounds just look in the last four years the last three years do you remember what happened in hong kong right before kovid china swooped into hong kong violently beating protesters killing them in the street imprisoning people without just without just cause and hong kong was a democracy and the whole world stood by and let it happen and then what happened in afghanistan just a year ago and the whole world stood by and let the taliban take power again after 20 years of loss this we are showing a repeatable point of view we will talk american politicians american administrations we will say a lot of things we will promise a lot of ideological pro-democracy rah-rah statements we will say it but when it comes down to putting our own people our own economy our own gdp at risk we step away from that fight america is currently supplying military equipment to ukraine absolutely and a lot of that military equipment has actually been the thing that turned the tides of war a couple of times already currently that's the highmar systems so you mentioned sort of putin can't afford to lose but winning can look a different way so you've kind of defined so on at this moment the prediction is that winning looks like capturing not just the east but the south of ukraine but you could have narratives of winning that return back to the uh what was at the beginning of this year before the invasion correct that crimea is still with russia there's some kind of negotiated thing about donbass where it still stays with ukraine but there's some public government yeah yeah that's what they have in georgia right now and that could still be defined through mechanisms as russia winning as russian winning for russia and then for ukraine as ukraine winning uh and and for the west as uh democracy winning and you kind of negotiate i mean that seems to be how geopolitics works is everybody can walk away with a win-win story and then the world progresses with the lessons learned that's the high likely that's the most probable outcome the most probable outcome is that ukraine remains in air quotes a sovereign nation it's not going to be truly sovereign because it will become it will have to have new government put in place zielinski will it's extremely unlikely he will be president because he has gone too far to demonstrate his power over the people and his ability to separate the ukrainian people from the autocratic power of russia so he would have to be unseated whether he goes into exile or whether he is peacefully left alone is all going to be part of negotiations but the thing the thing to keep in mind also is that a negotiated peace really just means a negotiated ceasefire we've seen this happen all over the world north korea and south korea are technically still just in negotiated cease power what you end up having is russia will allow ukraine to call itself ukraine to operate independently to have their own debt to the united states russia doesn't want to take on that debt and then in exchange for that they will have firmer guidelines as to how nato can engage with ukraine and then that becomes an example for all the other former soviet satellite states which are all required economically by russia not required economically by the west and then you end up seeing how it just you can see how the whole thing plays out once you realize that the keystone is ukraine there is something about ukraine the deep support by the ukrainian people of america that is in contrast with for example afghanistan that it seems like ideologically ukraine could be a beacon of freedom used in narratives by the united states to fight geopolitical wars in that part of the world that they would be a good partner for this idea of democracy of freedom of all the values that america stands for they're a good partner and so it's valuable if you sort of have a cynical pragmatic view sort of like henry kissinger type of view it's valuable to have them as a partner so valuable that it makes sense to support them in achieving a negotiated ceasefire that's on the side of ukraine but because of this particular leader this particular culture this particular dynamics of how the war enrolled and things like twitter and the way digital communication currently works it just seems like this is a powerful symbol of freedom that's useful for the united states if we're starting to take the pragmatic view don't you think it it's possible that uh united states supports ukraine financially militarily enough for it to get an advantage in this war i think they've already got an advantage in the war the fact the war is still going on demonstrates the asymmetrical advantage the fact that russia has stepped up to the negotiating table with them several times without just turning to chechen i mean remember what happened in chechnya without turning to chechnya levels just mass blind destruction which was another putin war to see that those things have happened demonstrates the asymmetric advantage that the west has given i think the the true way to look at the benefit of ukraine as a shining example of freedom in europe for the west isn't to understand whether or not they could they absolutely could it's the question of how valuable is that in europe how valuable is ukraine which before january before february nobody even thought about ukraine and the people who did know about ukraine knew that it was a extremely corrupt former soviet state with 20 of its national population self-identifying as russian like you there's a reason putin went into ukraine there's a reason he's been promising he would go into ukraine for the better part of a decade because the the circumstances were aligned it was a corrupt country that self-identified as russian in many ways it was a it was supposed to be an easier of multiple marks in terms of the former soviet satellite states to go after that's all part of the miscalculation that the rest of the world saw too when we thought it would fall quickly so to think that it could be a shining shining example of freedom is accurate but is it as shining a star as germany is it as shining a star as the uk is it as shining a star is romania is it as shiny as star as uh as france like it's got a lot of democratic freedom-based countries in europe to compete against to be this shining stellar example and in exchange on counterpoint to that it has an extreme amount of strategic value to russia which has no interest in making it a shining star of the example of of democracy and freedom outside of research in terms of the shininess of the star i would argue yes if you look at how much you captivated the intention of the world the attention the world has made no material difference man that's what i'm saying that's your estimation but you know are you sure we can we can't um if you can convert that into political influence into money don't you think attention is money attention is money in democracies in capitalist countries yes which serves as a counterweight to sort of authoritarian regimes so for for putin resources matter for the united states also resources matter but the attention and uh the belief the people also matter because that's how you attain and maintain political power this so going to that exact example then i would highlight that our current administration has the lowest approval ratings of any president in history so if people were very fond of the war going on in ukraine wouldn't that counterbalance some of our upset some of the distinct coming from the economy and some of the dissent coming from from the the great recession and or the second great or the great resignation and whatever is happening with the draw with the down stock market you would think that people would feel like they're sacrificing for something if they really believed that ukraine mattered that they would they would stand next to the president who is who is so staunchly driving and leading the west against this conflict well i think the opposition to this particular president i personally believe has less to do with the policies and more to do with a lot of the other human factors and but again empirically this is i look at things through a very empirical lens a very a very cold fact based lens and there are multiple data points that suggest that the american people ideologically sympathize with ukraine but they really just want their gas prices to go down they really just want to be able to pay less money at the grocery store for their food and they most definitely don't want their sons and daughters to die in exchange for ukrainian freedom it does hurt me to see the politicization of this war as well i think that has that's maybe has to do with the kind of calculation you're referring to but it seems like it doesn't it seems like there's a cynical whatever takes attention of the media for the moment the the red team chooses one side and the blue team chooses another and then um i think correct me if i'm wrong but i believe the democrats went into full like support of ukraine on the ideal logical side and then i guess republicans are saying why are we wasting money the prices are the the gas prices are going up that's that's a very crude kind of analysis but they basically picked whatever argument on whatever side and now more and more and more this particular war in ukraine is becoming a kind of pawn in the game of politics that's first the midterm elections then building up towards the presidential elections and stops being about the philosophical the social the geopolitical aspects parameters of this war and more biologists like whatever the heck captivates twitter and we're gonna use that for politics you're right in sense of the fact that it's i wouldn't say that the red team and the blue team picked opposite sides on this what i would say is that media discovered that talking about ukraine wasn't as profitable as talking about something else people simply the american people who read media or who watch media they simply became bored reading about news that didn't seem to be changing much and we turned back into wanting to read about our own economy and we wanted to hear more about cryptocurrency and we wanted to hear more about the kardashians and that's that's what we care about so that's what media writes about that's how a capitalist market driven world works and that's how the united states works that's why in both red papers and blue papers red sources and blue sources you don't see ukraine being mentioned very much if anything i would say that your republicans are probably more in support of what's happening in ukraine right now because we're creating new weapon systems our military is getting stronger we're sending these military we get to test military systems in combat in ukraine that's priceless in the world of the military the military industrial complex being able to field test combat test a weapon without having to sacrifice your own people is incredibly valuable you get all the data you get all the performance metrics but you don't have to put yourself at risk that is one of the major benefits of what we're seeing from supporting ukraine with weapons and with troops the long-term benefit to what will come of this for the united states practically speaking in the lens of national security through military readiness through future economic benefits those are super strong the geopolitical fight is is essentially moot because ukraine is not a geopolitical player it was not for for 70 years and after this conflict is over it will not again just think about what you were just saying with the american people's attention span to twitter and whatever is currently going on if the ukraine conflict resolved itself today in either in any direction how many weeks do you think before no one talked about ukraine anymore do you think we would make it two weeks do you think we'd make it maybe seven days it would be headline news for one or two days and then we'd be on to something else it's just an unfortunate reality of how the world works in a capitalist democracy yeah it just breaks my heart how much you know i know that there's yemen and syria and that nobody talks about anymore still raging conflicts going on it just it breaks my heart how much generational hatred is born i happen to be from uh my family is from ukraine and from russia and so for me just personally it's a part of the world i care about in terms of its history i because i speak the language i can appreciate the beauty of the literature the music the art the the cultural history of the 20th century through all the dark times through all the the hell of um the dark sides of authoritarian regimes the destruction of war there's still just a beauty that i'm able to appreciate that i can't appreciate about china brazil other countries because i don't speak their language this one i can appreciate and so in that way this is personally really painful to me to see so much of that history the beauty in that history suffocated by the hatred that is born through this kind of geopolitical game uh fought mostly by the politicians the leaders people are beautiful and that's what you're talking about people are just people are beautiful creatures culture and art and and science like these are beautiful beautiful things that come about because of human beings and the thing that gives me hope is that no matter what conflict the world has seen and we've seen some devastating horrible crimes against humanity already we saw nuclear bombs go off in japan we saw we saw genocide happen in rwanda we've seen horrible things happen but people persevere language culture arts science they all persevere they all shine through some of the most people don't even realize how gorgeous the architecture and the culture is inside iran people have no idea chinese people in the rural parts of china are some of the kindest most amazing people you'll ever meet and korean art and korean dance korean drumming i know nobody has ever even heard of korean drumming korean drumming is this magical beautiful thing and the north in north korea does it better than anybody in the world taekwondo in north korea is just exceptional to watch north korea in north korea nobody knows these how do you know about taekwondo north korea i have questions but fascinating that's that's uh like people don't think about that but the culture the beauty of the people still flourishes even in the toughest absolutely and we always will we always will because that is what people do and that is that is just the truth of it and it breaks my heart to see travesties that people commit against people but whether you're looking at a micro level like what happens with shootings here in the united states or whether you look at a macro level like geopolitical power exchanges and intra and interstate conflicts like what you see in syria and what you see in ukraine those are disgusting terrible things war is a terrible thing that is a famous quote but people will persevere people will come through i hope so i hope so and i hope we don't do something um that i'll probably also ask you about later on is things that um destroy the possibility of perseverance which is things like nuclear war things things that can do such tremendous uh damage that we we will never recover but yeah i i amidst your pragmatic pessimism i think both you and i have a kind of uh maybe small flame of optimism in there about the perseverance of the human species in general let me ask you about intelligence agencies outside of the cia can you illuminate what is the most powerful intelligence agency in the world the cia the fsb formerly the kgb the mi6 mossad uh i've got a chance to interact with a lot of israelis while in ukraine just incredible people yeah in terms of both training and skill just all every fr american soldiers too just um american military is incredible i just uh the competence and skill of the military um the united states israeli i got to interact in ukrainian as well it's just it's striking it's beautiful i i just love people i love carpenters or people that are just extremely good at their job and they take pride in their craftsmanship it's uh it's beautiful to see and i imagine the same kind of thing happens inside of intelligence agencies as well that we don't get to appreciate because of the secrecy same thing with like lockheed martin maybe the the cto of lockheed martin it breaks my heart as a person who loves engineering um because of the cover of secrecy we'll never get to know some of the incredible engineering that happens inside vlocky martin and boeing and raytheon yeah um you know there's kind of this idea that these are you know people have conspiracy theories and they kind of assign evil to these companies in some to some part but i think there's beautiful people inside those companies brilliant people and uh some incredible science and engineering is happening there anyway that said the cia the fsb the mi6 mossad china i know very little about the mss ministry of state security i don't i don't know how much you know uh or just other intelligence agencies in india pakistan i've also heard raw is powerful and so is iss or issi and then of course european nations in germany and france yeah so um what can you say about the power the influence of the different intelligence agencies within their nation and outside yeah so to answer your question uh your original question which is the most powerful i'm gonna have to give you a few different answers so the most powerful intelligence organization in the world in terms of reach is the chinese mss the ministry of state security because they have created a single solitary intelligence service that has global reach and is integrated with chinese culture so that essentially every chinese person anywhere in the world is an informant to the mss because it all that's their way of serving this this is the middle kingdom jungwoo the central kingdom the chinese word for china so they're the strongest they're they're it's the the most powerful intelligence service in terms of reach most assets most informants most intelligence is deeply integrated with a citizenry correct with their culture you know what a chinese person who lives in syria thinks of themselves as a chinese person do you know what a chinese person a chinese national living in the united states thinks of themselves as a chinese person right americans living abroad often think of ourselves as expats expatriates living on the local economy embracing the local culture that is not how chinese people view traveling around the world and by the way if i may mention i believe the way messiah operates is similar kind of thing because people from israel living abroad still think of themselves as jewish and israeli first first so that allows you to integrate the culture and yep the faith-based aspects exactly right but the number of people in israel is much much smaller exactly number one people in china so when it comes to reach china wins that game yeah when it comes to professional capability it's it's the cia by far because budget-wise capability-wise weapon system-wise modern technology-wise cia is the leader around the world which is why every other intelligence organization out there wants to partner with cia they want to learn from cia they want to train with cia they want to they want to partner on counter narcotics and counter drug and counter terrorism and counter wieger you name it people want to partner with cia so ci is the most powerful in terms of capability and wealth and then you've got the idea you've got tech so tech alone meaning corporate espionage economic espionage nothing beats nothing beats dgse in france they're the top they've got a massive budget that almost goes exclusively to stealing foreign secrets they're the biggest threat to the united states even above russia and above china dgse in france is a massively powerful intelligence organization but they are so exclusively focused on a handful of types of intelligence collection that nobody even really thinks that they exist and then in terms of just terrifying violence you have massage mossad will do anything mossad has no qualms doing what it takes to ensure the survival of every israeli citizen around the world most other countries will stop at some point but mossad doesn't do that so it's the lines you're willing to cross and the reasons that you're willing to cross them you know there's cia will let an american stay in jail in russia unlawfully and seek a diplomatic solution i mean the united states has let people there there are two gentlemen in from the 1950s who were imprisoned in china for 20 years waiting for diplomatic solutions to their release so that's it's we do not kill to save a citizen but mossad will and then they'll not just kill they'll like do large-scale infiltration amazing things there is no they they spare no expense because it's a demonstration to their own people again going back to the whole idea of influence every intelligence operation that sees the light of day has two purposes the first purpose is the intelligence operation but if it was just the intelligence operation it would stay secret forever the second purpose of every successful intelligence operation when they become public is to send a signal to the world if you work against us we will do this to you if you work for us we will take care of you in this way it's a massive information campaign do you think in that way cia is not doing a good job because there's you know the fsb perhaps much less so jru but the kgb did this well which is to send a signal like basically communicate that this is a terrifying organization with a lot of power and so mossad is doing a good job of that correct the psychological information warfare uh and it seems like the cia also has has a lot of kind of myths about it conspiracy theories about it but much less so than the other agencies cia does a good job of playing to the mythos so when uh general petraeus used to be the director of cia 2000 and your workout partner in my workout i write about this so i i loved and hated those workouts with petraeus because he is a physical beast he's a strong fit at the time 60 something year old man let me take a tangent on that because he's coming on this podcast oh excellent man so uh can you say what you've learned from the man uh in terms of or like what you think is interesting and powerful and inspiring about the way he sees the world or maybe what you learn in terms of how to get uh strong in the gym yeah or anything about life two things right away and one of them i was gonna share with you anyway so i'm glad that you asked the question so the first is that on our runs and man he runs fast and we would go for six mile runs through bangkok and uh and he talked openly about i asked him how do you keep this this this mystery this epic mythology about your fitness and your strength how do you keep all of this alive with the troops and he had this amazing answer and he was like i don't talk about it myths are born not from somebody orchestrating the myth but from the source of the myth simply being secretive so he's like i don't talk about i've never talked about it i've never exacerbated it i just do what i do and i let the troops talk and he's like when it's in favor when it goes in favor of of discipline and loyalty and commitment i let it run if it starts getting destructive or damaging then i have my my leadership team step in to fix it but when it comes to the the mythos the myth of him being superpowered soldier that's what he wants every soldier to be so he lets it run and he was fanta it was so enlightening when he told me when there's a myth that benefits you you just let it go you let it happen because it gets you further without you doing any work it costs no investment so the catalyst of the virality of the myth is just being mysterious and and that's what cia does well to go back to your first question what does cia do they don't answer any questions they don't say anything and wherever the myth goes the myth goes whether it's that they sold drugs or used child prostitutes or whatever else wherever the myth goes they let it go because at the end of the day everybody sits back and says wow i really just don't know now the second thing that i learned from petraeus and i i really am a big fan of petraeus i know he made personal mistakes you don't get to be that powerful without making personal mistakes but when i worked out with him the one thing that that my uh the one thing that my commanding officer told me not to ask about he was like never ask the general about his family i'm a family guy so as soon as i met general petraeus one of the first things i asked him was hey what was it like raising a family and being the commander of forces in the middle east like you weren't with your family very much and the thing i love about the guy he didn't bite off my head he didn't snap at me he didn't do anything he openly admitted that he regretted some of the decisions that he made because he had to sacrifice his family to get there relationships with his children uh absentee father missing birthdays missing we ju we all say we all say how sad it is to miss birthdays and miss anniversaries yadda yadda everybody knows what that feels like even business people know what that feels like the actual pain that we're talking about is when you're not there to handle your 13 year old's questions when a boy breaks up with her or what you're when you're not there to handle the bloody lip that your nine-year-old comes back with from their first encounter with a bully those are the truly heartbreaking moments that a parent lives and dies by he missed almost all of those because he was fighting a war that we forgot and we gave up on 20 years later right it's he's so honest about that and it was really inspiring to me to be told not to ask that question and when i broke that guidance he didn't reprimand me he just he was authentic and it was absolutely one of the big decisions that helped me leave cia on my own in 2014. and he was honest on the sacrifice you make the same man the same man who just taught me a lesson about letting a myth live that same guy was willing to be so authentic about this personal mistake i like complicated people like that so what did you um what do you make of that calculation of family versus job you've given a lot of your life and passion to the cia to that work it uh you spoken positively about that that world the good it does um and yet you're also a family man you value that what's that calculation like what's that trade off i mean for me the calculation is very clear it's family i left cia because i chose my family and when my son was born my my wife and i found out that we were pregnant while we were still on mission we were a tandem couple my wife is also a former cia officer undercover like me we were operating together overseas we got the positive pregnancy tests like so many people do and uh and she cried my wife was a badass i was just i was like the accidental spy but my wife was really good at what she does and and she cried and she was like what what do we do now like it's what we've always wanted a child but we're in this thing right now there's no space for a child so long story short um we had our baby we cia brought us back to have the baby and when we started having conversations about hey what what do we do next because we're not the type of people to want to just sit around and be domestic what do we do next but keep in mind we have a child now so here's some of our suggestions we could do this and we can do that let us get our child to a place where we can put him into an international school or we can get him into some sort of program where we have we can both operate together again during the day um but cia just had no they had no patience for that conversation there was no family is not their priority so the fact that we were a tandem couple two officers two operators trying to have a baby was irrelevant to them so when they didn't play with us when they did nothing to help us prioritize parenthood as part of our overall experience that's when we knew that they never would and what good is it to commit yourself to a career if the career is always going to challenge the thing that you value most and that was the calculation that we made to leave cia not everybody makes that calculation and a big part of why i am so vocal about my time at cia is because i am immensely appreciative of the men and women who to this day have failed marriages and poor relationships with their children because they chose national security they chose protecting america over their own family um and they've done it even though it's made them you know abuse alcohol and abuse substances and who and they've gotten themselves they've got permanent permanent diseases and issues from living and working abroad it's just insane the sacrifice that officers make to keep america free and i'm just not one of those people i chose family you said that your wife misses it do you miss it we both miss it we miss it for different reasons we miss it for similar reasons i guess but we miss it in different ways the people the people at cia are just amazing they're they're people that they're everyday people like the guy and the gal next door but so smart and so dedicated and so courageous about what they do and how they do it i mean the sacrifices they make are massive more massive than the sacrifices i made so i was always inspired and impressed by the people around me so both my wife and i absolutely miss the people my wife misses the work because you know everything when you're inside it's all i mean we had we had top secret we had ts sci clearances at the time i had a cat 6 cat 12 which makes me nuclear cleared my wife had other privy clearances that allowed her to look into you know areas that were uh specialized but there was not there wasn't a headline that went out that we couldn't fact check with a click of a few buttons and she misses that because she loved that kind and now you're just one of us living in the you know the cloud of mystery exactly knowing anything about what's going on exactly but for me i've always been the person that likes operating and you know what you still get to do when you leave cia you still get to operate operating is just working with people it's understanding how people think predicting their actions driving their their direction of their thoughts persuading them winning negotiations like it's you still get to do that you do that every day and you can apply that in all kinds of domains well let me ask you on that you were a covert cia intelligence officer for several years maybe can you tell me the story of how it all began how were you recruited and what did the job entail to the degree you can speak about it feel free to direct me if i'm getting too boring or if the every aspect of this is super exciting so uh so i was leaving the united states air force in 2007 i was a i was a lieutenant getting ready to pin on captain my five years was up and i was a very bad fit for the u.s air force i was an air force academy graduate not by choice but by lack of opportunity like a lack of options otherwise so i forced myself through the academy barely graduated with a 2.4 gpa and then went on the air force taught me how to fly and then the air force taught me about nuclear weapons and i ended up as a as a nuclear missile commander in montana and i chose to leave the air force because i didn't like shaving my face i didn't like having short hair and i most definitely didn't like shining my shoes and i did not want to be one of the people in charge of nuclear weapons so when i found myself as a person in charge of 200 nuclear weapons i knew that i was going down the wrong road i have questions about this and more importantly i have questions about your hair so you have short hair at the time i had yeah you have to military regulations you can't have hair longer than one inch okay and this the the beautiful hair you have now that that came to be in the cia or after this so i discovered i had messy hair and cia because i used to uh i used to go muj we called it mooj i used to go mujahideen style big burly beard and crazy wacky hair yeah because an ambiguously brown guy with a big beard and long hair can go anywhere in the world without anyone even noticing him they either think that he's a janitor or they think that he's like some forgotten part of history but nobody ever thinks that that guy is a spy so it was the perfect for me it was one of my favorite uh disguises it's what's known as a level two disguise one of my favorite disguises to don was just dilapidated brown guy uh can you actually we'll just take a million tangent what what's the skies uh what what's uh what are the different levels of disguise what are the disguises yeah there's three levels of disguise by and large level one is what we also know what we also call light disguise so that's essentially you put on sunglasses and a ball cap and and that's a disguise you look different than you normally look so it's just different enough that someone who's never seen you before someone who literally has to see you just from a picture on the internet they may not recognize you it's why you see celebrities walk around with ball caps and oversized jackets and baseball hats because they just need to not look like they look in the tabloid or not look like they look in tv that's level one uh let me jump from level one to level three level three is all of your prosthetics all the stuff you see in mission impossible your fake ears your fake faces your fat suits your stilts inside your leg your feet uh all that's level three whenever they make any kind of prosthetic disguise that's a level three disguise because prosthetics are very damning if you are caught with a prosthetic if you're caught wearing a sudden wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses nobody's gonna say you're a spy but when you're caught with a custom-made you know nose uh prosthetic that changes the way your face looks or when someone pops out a fake jaw and they see that your top teeth don't look like they did in this prosthetic then all of a sudden you've got some very difficult questions to ask or to answer so level three is extremely dangerous level one is not dangerous level two is long-term disguise level two is all the things that you can do to permanently change the way you look for a long period of time so that whether you're aggressed in the street or whether someone breaks into your hotel room or whatever it's real so maybe that's uh maybe you get a tattoo maybe you cut your hair short maybe you grow your hair long maybe you go bald maybe you start wearing glasses well glasses are technically a prosthetic but you can you if you have teeth pulled if you gain 20 pounds really gain 20 pounds or lose 15 pounds whatever you might do all of that is considered level two it's designed for a long-term mission so that people believe you are who you say you are in that disguise a lot of that is physical characteristics right what about like um you know what actors do which is the method acting yeah the method acting sort of developing a back story in your own mind and then you start um you know pretending that you host the podcast and teach at a university and then do research and so on just so that people can believe yeah that you're not actually uh agent uh what is that part of the disguise levels or no so yes disguise has to do with physical character traits that's what a disguise is what you're talking about is known as a cover legend when you go undercover what you claim to be who you claim to be that's called your legend your cover legend every disguise would theoretically have its own cover legend even if it's just to describe why you're wearing what you're wearing it's all a cover so the method acting this is a fantastic point that i don't get to make very often so i'm glad you asked the difference between cia officers in the field and method actors is that method actors try to become the character they try to shed all vestiges of who they really are and become the character and that's part of what makes them so amazing but it's also part of what like makes them mentally unstable over long periods of time it's part of what feeds their depression their anxiety their personal issues because they lose sight of who they really are field officers don't get that luxury we have to always always remember we are a covert cia intelligence officer collecting secrets in the field we have to remember that so we're taught a very specific skill to compartmentalize our true self separately but make that true self the true identity so then we can still live and act and and effectively carry out our cover legend without ever losing sight without ever losing that compass true north of who we actually are and then we can compartmentalize and secure all the information that we need retain it remember it but then return to our true self when we when we get back to a position of safety is it possible to do that so i i just have kind of anecdotal evidence for myself i really try to be the exact same person in all conditions which makes it very easy like if you're not lying it makes it very easy to first of all to exist but also to communicate a kind of authenticity and genuineness which i think is really important like trust and integrity around trust is extremely important to me it's the thing that opens doors and maintains relationships and i tend to think like when i was in ukraine so many doors just opened to the hot like very high security areas and everywhere else too like i've just interacted with some incredible people without any kind of concerns you know who's this guy is he gonna spread it you know all that kind of stuff and they i tend to believe that you're able to communicate a trustworthiness somehow if if you just are who you are and and i think i suppose method actors are trying to achieve that by becoming something and they can i just feel like there is very subtle cues that are extremely difficult to fake like you really have to become that person be that person but you're saying as a cia agent you have to remember that you are there to collect information do you think that gives you a way so one of the flaws in your argument is that you keep referring to how you feel i feel this i feel that i feel like this i feel like that that feeling is a predictable character trait of all human beings it's a pink matter we call pink matter it's a cognitive trait you are not alone in trusting your feelings all people trust their feelings but because what cia teaches us is how to systematically create artificial relationships where we're the one in control of the source that is giving us intelligence and the core element to being able to control a relationship is understanding the pink matter truth of feelings what all people feel becomes their point of view on what reality is so when you understand and you learn how to manipulate what people feel then you can essentially direct them to feel any way you want them to feel so if you want them to feel like they can trust you you can make them feel that way if you want them to feel like you're a good guy or a bad guy if you want them to feel like they should give you secrets even though their government tells them not to you can do that there are men who make women feel like they love they love them and just so the woman will sleep with them there are women who make men feel like they love them just so the men will give them their money manipulation is a as a core behavioral trait of all the human species because we all understand to some level how powerful feelings are but feelings are not the same thing as logical rational thoughts they're two different sides of the brain what cia teaches us how to do is systematically tap into the right side emotional side of the brain so that we can quickly get past all of the stuff you were just saying all of the well don't you have to be convincing and don't you have to really know your story and don't you have to be able to defend it don't you have to have authenticity and don't you have to have uh genuine genuine feelings yes all of those things are true if you're having a genuine relationship but in an artificial relationship there's ways to bypass all of that and get right to the heart of making someone feel comfortable and safe i guess the question i i'm asking and the thing i was implying is that creating an artificial relationship was an extremely difficult skill to accomplish the level like how good i am at being me and creating a feeling in another person that i create for you to do that artificially that's gotta be you gotta be my sense is you gotta be really damn good at that kind of thing i i would venture to say it's i mean i don't know how to measure how difficult the thing is but especially when you're communicating with people whose job depends on forming trusting relationships they're gonna smell bullshit and to to get get past that bullshit detector is tough it's a tough skill well it's interesting so i would i would say that or maybe i'm wrong actually on that i would say that once you understand the system it's not that hard it makes a lot of sense but i would also say that to you to your exact point you are right that people smell bullshit people smell bullshit but here's the thing if you come in smelling like goat shit you still smell like shit but you don't smell like bullshit so they don't count you out right away and if you come in smelling like rotten tomatoes or if you come in smelling like lavender or if you come in smelling like vanilla or if you come in without any smell at all all that matters is that you don't smell like bullshit here's the thing that's that's one of the secret sauces of cia when you look and act like a spy people think you're a spy if you look and act in any other way you know what they never ever think you are a spy they might think you're an idiot they might think you're a they might think you're trailer trash they might think that you're a a migrant worker but they never think you're a spy yeah and that's what's that lesson in everyday life is immensely powerful if you're trying to if you're trying to take your boss's job as long as you don't ever look like the bot the employee who's trying to take the boss's job the boss is focused on all the employees who are trying to take his job everybody's prioritizing whether they know it or not the goal is to just not be the one that they're targeting target them without them knowing you're targeting them so people just when they meet you they put you in a bin and if you want to avoid being put in a particular bin just don't act like the person that would be just show some kind of characteristics that bing you in some other way exactly right you have to be in a bin just choose the bin all right so uh you knowing these methods when you talk to people especially in civilian life how do you know who's lying to you and not that gets to be more into the trained skill side of things there's body cues there's micro expressions i'm not a big fan of i don't believe that micro expressions alone do anything i also don't believe that micro expressions without without an effective bass line do anything so don't for a second think that i'm all the people out there pitching that you can tell if someone's lying to you just by looking at their face it's all it's all baloney in my world that's baloney like the way you move your eyes or something like that without knowing a baseline without knowing for that individual for that individual then you actually don't know and an individual's baseline is based on education culture life experience you name it right so this is huge but when you combine facial expressions with body movements body language nonverbal cues and you add on top of that effective elicitation techniques that you are in control of now you have a more robust platform to tell if someone's lying to you so there there's like a set of like interrogation trajectories you can go down that can help you figure out a person technically their interview interview like this concepts correct because an interrogation an interrogation is something very different than an interview and in the world of professionals and interrogation is very different what's the difference the the nature of how relaxed the thing is or what so in an interrogation there's a clear pattern of dominance there's no equality got it also there's no escape you are there until the interrogator is done with you right anybody who's ever been reprimanded by mom and dad knows what an interrogation feels like anybody's ever been called into the principal's office or the boss's office that's what interrogation feels like you don't leave until the boss says you can leave and you're there to say to answer questions the boss asks questions an interview is an equal exchange of ideas you are in control of this interview for sure but if we were having coffee i could take control if i wanted to take control if i wanted to ask you personal questions i would if i wanted to talk to you about your background i could why am i in control of this interview exactly because the person in control is the person asking questions yeah sitting here as you've spoken about uh my power here is i'm the quiet one listening you're exactly right guess where this conversation goes yeah anywhere you choose to take it because you're the one asking questions every time i answer a question i am creating a pattern of obedience to you which subliminally subconsciously makes me that much more apt to answer your questions of course you can always turn that and ask start asking me questions it should you know uh so but you're saying that there's through this this through conversation you can call it interviewing you can start to you can start to see um see cracks in the story of the person and the degree to which they exaggerate or lie or to see how much they could be trusted that kind of stuff what i'm saying is that through a conversation you develop a baseline right like even just in the last the last the first part of our conversation i've been able to create some baseline elements about you you've been able to create baseline elements about me maybe they're just not friend of mind from those baselines now we can push through more intentional questions to test got it to test whether or not the person is being truthful because they're operating within their baseline or if you are triggering uh sensitivities outside of their baseline and then you can start to see their tells that's fascinating yeah baseline like uh even even like yeah the tells right the the eye contact like you you've probably already formed a bass line that i i have trouble making eye contact and so like so if you ask me difficult questions and i'm not making eye contact maybe that's not a good signal of me lying or whatever correct because i always have trouble making eye contact stuff like that that's really fascinating the majority of your eye movement is to the right yeah my your right my left yes right which is usually someone who's if you ask micro expressionists that's someone who's referencing fact yeah that's not necessarily what's happening for you because you're pulling concepts out of the air so it's also a place where you reference something other than fact it's a place for you to find creativity yeah so if i just thought that you were lying because you look up into the right i would be wrong that's so fascinating and a lot of that has to do with like habits that are formed and all those kinds of things or maybe some right hand left hand type of situation right eye dominance yeah right that's going to make you look to the right is this a science or an art it's a bit of both i would say that like all good art art is taught from a foundation of skills and those skills are are played are taught in a very structured manner and then the way that you use the skills after that that's more of the artistic grace so i've always called espionage an art spying is an art being able to hack human beings is an art but it's all based in a foundation of science you still have to learn how to mix the color palette and use certain brushes do you think of that as as a kind of uh the study of human psychology is that what a psychologist does or psychiatrists what from this process have you learned about human nature human nature i mean i suppose the answer to that could be a book but uh it probably will be a book i'll save you that yeah but sort of is there is there things that are surprising about human nature surprising to uh us civilians that you could speak to yes one thing is extremely surprising about human nature um which is funny because that's not the answer i would have said so i'm glad that you clarified this specific question the thing that's surprising about human nature is that human beings long like in their soul there's like a painful longing to be with other people and that's really surprising because you we all want to pretend like we're strong we all want to pretend like we're you know independent we all want to pretend like we are the masters of our destiny but what's truly consistent in all people is this like longing to commune with others like us my my more practical answer about what i've learned to be the truth is that people human nature is predictable and that predictability is what gives people an incredible advantage over other people but that's not the surprising piece i mean even when cia taught me that human nature is predictable it just made sense i was like oh yeah that makes sense but what i never ever anticipated was no matter where i've been in the world no matter who i've talked to no matter what socioeconomic bracket is that longing man it hurts loneliness sucks and togetherness feels good even if you're together with someone you know isn't the right person it still feels better than being alone i mean that's such a deep truth you speak to and and i i could talk about that for a long time there is i mean through these conversations in general whether it's being recorded or not i hunger to discovering the other person that longing you strip away the other things and then you share in the longing for that connection and i particularly also have detected that in um people from all walks of life yes including people that others might identify as evil yeah or hard as uh completely cold it's there it's there they've hardened themselves in their search and who knows what dark place their brain is in their heart is in but that that longing is still there even if it's an ember it's there it's the reason why why in world war one and world war ii you know enemy combatants still shared cigarettes on the front lines you know during periods of holidays or bad weather or whatever else because that human connection man it triumphs overall see that's in part of what i refer to when i say love because i feel like if uh like political leaders and people in conflict that the small scale and the large scale were able to tune into that longing to seek in each other that basic longing for human connection a lot of problems could be solved but of course um it's difficult because uh it's a it's a game of chicken because uh if you open yourself up to reveal that longing for connection with others people can hurt you well i would go a step farther and i would say that taking the connection away punishing penalizing people by removing the connection is a powerful tool and that's what we see that's why we send people to jail that's why we put economic sanctions on countries that's why we ground our children and send them to their rooms we are penalizing them whether we know it or not we're using punitive damage by taking away that basic human connection that longing for for community what was your recruitment process and training process and things you could speak to in in the cia as i was leaving the air force all that was on my mind i don't know what you were like at 27 but i was a total dipshit at 27. i'm not much better now at 42 but yeah you owe me but i would say make it yeah but i was like i just wanted to be anything other than a military officer so i was actually in the process of applying to the peace corps through this thing called the internet which was still fairly rudimentary in 2007. i had a computer lab that we went to and it had 10 computers in it you had to log in and log out and slow internet and everything else but anyways i was filling out an online application to go work in the us peace corps i wanted to grow my hair out i wanted to stop wearing shoes that were shiny i wanted to meet a hippie chick and have hippie babies in the wild teaching nigerian children how to read so that was the path i was going down and as i filled in all of my details there came this page that popped up and it was this blinking red page and it said stop here you may qualify for other government positions if you're willing to put your application on hold for 72 hours that gives us a chance to reach out to you so again 27 year old dipshit i was like sure i'll put myself on hold if i might qualify for other government opportunities and then about a day later i got a phone call from an un an almost unlisted number it just said 703 which was very strange to see on my flip phone at the time just one 703 area code and i picked it up and and it was it was a person from northern virginia asking me if i would be telling me that i was qualified for a position in national security and if i would be interested they'll pay for my ticket and fly me up to to langley virginia they didn't say cia they said langley i put 101 together and i was like maybe this is cia yeah like this could how cool is this yeah or maybe this is all make-believe and this is totally fake so either way it doesn't hurt me at all to say yes they already have my phone number so yes yes yes and then i i remember thinking there's no way that happened and this isn't real and then a day later i got a fedex or an overnight delivery of an airplane ticket and a hotel reservation and a rental car reservation and then i just kept doing the next thing which i found out later on is a form of control you just do the next thing that they tell you to do and then before i knew it i was interviewing in a nondescript building with an with a person who only told me their first name uh for a position with the national clandestine service so you never really got a chance to think about it because there's a small steps along the way and it kind of just leads you uh and you're maybe your personality is such that that's an adventure it's an adventure and it you know because it's one step at a time you don't necessarily see the negative consequences of the adventure you don't think about any of that you're just stepping on stepping into the adventure and it's easy there's no work involved somebody else is doing all the work telling me where to be and when it's a lot like basic training in the military anybody who's ever been through basic training will tell you they hated the first few days and then by the end it was really comforting because you just did what you were told they told you when to eat they made the decision of what to eat then you just you marched when they told you to march shine your shoes when they told you to shine your shoes human beings love being told what to do what about the training process um for for for beco becoming a covert cia agent yeah so uh so the interview process is yeah the interview process too was that how rigorous was that it was it was very rigorous that was where it became difficult everything up to the first interview was easy but there's three interviews and some people are lucky enough to have four or five interviews if something goes wrong or something goes awry with the first few interviews and again this might be dated from what i went through but uh but during the interview process is when they start they do your psychological evaluations they do your they do personality assessments they do skills assessments they'll start sending you back to your wherever you're living with assignments not not intel assignments but actual like homework assignments write an essay about three parts of the world that you think will be most impacted in the next three to five years or you know prioritize the top three strategic priorities for the united states and you know put it into 250 words or 2 500 words and whatever else double-spaced in this font yada yada like super specific stuff that's kind of stressful uh but it's just like going back to college again so you go through all of those acts and then you submit this stuff to some po box that doesn't have anybody's ever going to respond to you and then you hope you just send it into the ether and you hope that you hope that you sent it right you hope that you wrote right well enough you hope that your assessment was right whatever else it might be and then eventually get another phone call that says hey we received your package you've been moved to the next level of interview and now we need you to go to this other nondescript building and this other nondescript city and then you start meeting you start you start sitting in waiting rooms with other groups of people who are at the same phase of interview with you which were some of the coolest experiences that i remember still one of my best friends to this day who i don't get to talk to because he's still undercover is a guy i met during those interview processes and i was like oh we met i saw what he was wearing he saw what i was wearing i was immediately connected and you like the people there close more like we immediately judge each other because we're all untrained right so he looked at me and he was like brown dude with crazy hair and i was wearing dude i was dressed like a total ass i was dressed in like a a clubbing shirt yeah i don't know why i thought it'd be a good idea to go to ci interview in like a clubbing shirt with my buttons on button down to here yeah and he was like yeah you were really after we got in he was like yeah dude you were always really cool to talk to but i was like there's no way that idiot's getting in and i remember looking at him being like dude you were just another white guy in a black suit yeah they're not looking for you but here you are yeah so it's just those kinds of things were so interesting because we were totally wrong about what cia was looking for until you're in you have no idea what they're looking for um and you're just uh you're just shooting in the dark did they have you do like a lie detector test yes it's called a polygraph polygraph how effective just interesting for our previous discussion how effective are those polygraphs are really interesting so one of the things that people don't understand about polygraphs is that polygraphs aren't meant to detect a lie like they're called a lie detector yeah but they're not actually meant to detect a lie they're built to detect variants from your physiological baseline so they're essentially meant to identify sensitivities to certain types of questions and then as they identify a sensitivity to a question it gives the interviewer an additional piece of information to direct the next round of questions so then from there they can kind of see how sensitive you are to a certain level of questions and your sensitivity could be a sign of dishonesty but it could also be a sign of vulnerability so the interrogator themselves the interviewer themselves they're the ones that have to make the the judgment call as to which one it is which is why you might see multiple in uh interviewers over the course of multiple polygraphs but that's really what they're all about so i mean outside of they're extremely uncomfortable like they're mentally uncomfortable but then there's also you gotta you sit on a pad because the pad is supposed to be able to tell like your body movements but also like your sphincter uh contractions or whatever so you're sitting on this pad you're plugged in you're strapped in you're tied up and it takes so much time to get in there and then they start asking you questions baseline questions at first and then other questions from there and you're just answering the best you can and you never know what they're seeing and you don't know what they're doing and it's really hard not to get anxious of that anyways and they the whole time monitoring the the readings yeah from like a big they've got multiple screens and they've got just it's all information superiority they have information superiority you're the idiot looking away from them or looking sideways of them and trying not to move because you're afraid that if you like have gas or if you move a little bit it's going to vary you from your baseline yeah and the whole time you're worried your heart's racing and your blood pressure is increasing which is a variance from baseline yeah so yeah that means it's it's an interesting art or your baseline correct maybe there's some people that are just chilling the whole time and that's their baseline right right but that's what they're doing they're establishing based i mean i guess that means the polygraph is uh is a is a skill that you develop absolutely to do it well so when people talk about beating a lie detector it's not that they're telling an effective lie that's not hard it's not hard to tell a lie to an interviewer what in the interview doesn't care if you're being honest or not honest about a topic what they're looking for is sensitivity if they see no sensitivity that's a big sign for them that's a big sign that you're probably a pathological liar if you show sensitivity to many things then that's a sign that you're probably an anxious person and they can still reset their baseline because they can tell how your anxiety is increasing you know in 15 minute increments it's it's a unique skill i mean a really good polygrapher is a is immensely valuable but the uh yeah it's the misnomers the misconceptions about polygraphs are vast you also mentioned personality tests that's really interesting so how how effective personality tests one for the hiring process but also for understanding a human being so personality is extremely important for understanding human being and i would say that there's a thousand different ways of looking at personality the only one that i count with any with any significance is the mbti and the mbti is what all the leading spy agencies around the world use as well well that's kind of interesting to hear oh yeah there's been criticisms of that kind of test there have been criticisms for a long time yeah and you think there's value absolutely absolutely and here's there's a few reasons why right so first mbti makes the claim that your core personality doesn't change over time uh and that's how it's that's how it's calibrated and one of the big arguments is that people say that your personality can change over time now what i in my experience the mbti is exactly correct you can your core personality does not change because your core personality is is defined as your personality when all resources are removed so essentially your emergency mode your dire conditions that is your core personality we can all act a little more extroverted we can all you know be a little more empathetic when we have tons of time and money and patience when you strip away all that time money and patience how empathetic are you how how much do you like being around other people how much do you like being alone do you make judgments or do you do you analyze information that's what's so powerful about mbti is it's talking about what people are like when you strip away resources and then because it's so consistent it's also only four codes it's super easy to be able to assess a human being through a dialogue through a series of conversations to be able to hone in with high accuracy what is there for code four letter code there's only 16 options and it becomes extremely valuable is it perfectly precise and does everybody do it the same i mean those things are the answers to those are no but is it operationally useful in a short period of time that is a resoundingly powerful yes yeah i just i only know i think the first letter it's the introvert and extroverted right yeah uh i i i've taken the test before just like a crude version of the test and that's the same problem you have with iq tests yeah there's the right uh thorough way of doing it and then there's like fun internet way and uh i do you mind sharing what your uh personality um my my type index yes i'm an entp that's an extrovert intuiter perceiver uh thinker ent thinker p perceiver my wife is an isfj which is the polar opposite of me e i'm extroverted she's introverted i'm an intuiter she's a censor uh i'm a thinker she's a feeler i'm a perceiver she's a judger is there good science on like uh long-term successful relationships in terms of the dynamics of that the 16 i wonder if there's good data on this i don't i don't think there's a lot of good data in personalities writ large yeah because there's not a lot of money to be made in personality testing but i would say that there's uh that with with experience with a good mbti test with a good paid test a 400 500 question test once you understand your own code and then you're you're taught how to assess the code of others with those two things kind of combined because then you have experience in learning it's it becomes very useful and you can have high confidence in this in the conclusions that you reach about people's professions about people's relationships with family about people's relationships professionally people's capabilities to deal with stress how people will perform when pushed outside of their comfort zones really really powerful useful stuff in corporate world and in the espionage world so in terms of compressed representation of another human being um you can't do much better than those four letters i don't believe you can do much better in my experience i have not seen anything better yeah it is kind of it's uh difficult to realize that there is a core personality or the degree that's true it seems to be true it's even more difficult to realize that there is a stable at least the science says so a stable consistent intelligence unfortunately uh you know the g factor that they call that uh if you do a barrage of iq test that's going to um consistently represent that g-factor and we're all born with that we can't fix it yeah that defines so much of who we are it's sad i don't see it as sad because it's for me the faster you learn it the faster you learn what your own sort of natural strengths and weaknesses are the faster you get to stop wasting time yeah on things that you're never going to be good at and you get to double down on the things that you're already naturally skilled or interested in so there is a there's always a silver lining to a cloud but i know now that i will never be a ballerina or a ballerina i know that i'll never be an artist i'll never be a musician i'll never be any of those things and when i was 18 that might have made me sad but now at 42 i'm like well shit awesome i can go be something else good instead of always being bad you're not going to be a ballerina oh let me know because i'm not graceful and you've you've you've learned this after years of experience yeah exactly well i don't know if there's an mbti equivalent for the for grace of movement i think it's called s sensor oh yeah because a sensor is someone who's able to interact with the world around them through their five senses very effectively like if you talk to dancers dancers can actually feel the grace in all of their muscles they know what position their finger is in i don't have any idea i don't know what position my feet are in right now i had to look to make sure i actually feel the floor right yeah i definitely have oh that's good to know so i don't you know i'm not a dancer but i do have that you're a musician man like well the music i don't be able to plug a guitar sure yeah that's true that there is that physical component but i think deeper because there's a technical aspect to that that's just like um it's less about feel but i do know jujitsu you know and grappling i've done all my life i don't you know there's some people who are clumsy and they drop stuff all the time they run into stuff i don't i don't first of all i don't know how that happens but to me i just have an awareness of stuff like if there's a spiritual orientation yeah like like i know that there's a small object i have to step over and i have a good sense of that it's so it's so interesting yeah you're just like born with letters my wife is brilliant and she still walks into doors yeah i mean she'll walk in a doorway she'll bang her knee on the same wall that's been there for the last 50 years it's it's uh for some reason really hilarious so it's good you've been asked i think on reddit other big secrets that you know that could land you and our country in terrible trouble if he came out to the public and you answered yes i wish i could forget them so let me ask you just about secrecy in general are these secrets or just other secrets ones that the public will never know or will it come out in 10 20 50 years i guess the the deeper question is what is the value of secrecy yes transparency the uh the standard classification for all human intelligence operations is is something called 225x2 25x2 so 50 years 25 years times two years or times two rounds so in essence anything that i've seen has the first chance of becoming public domain declassified after 50 years unless there's some congressional requirement for it to be reviewed and assessed earlier so by then you know i'll be 80 something years old or or potentially dead which is either way that's when it's it can come out uh according to its typical classification the the value of secrets i i have seen is that secrets create space secrets give opportunity for security they give opportunity for thinking they give space and space is an incredibly advantageous thing to have if you know something somebody else doesn't know even if it's just 15 or 20 minutes different you can direct you can change the course of faith so i i find secrets to be extremely valuable extremely useful even at the place where secrets are being kept from a large mass part of what all americans need to understand is that one of the one of the trade-offs to building a system of government that allows us to be first world and wealthy and secure and successful one of the trade-offs is that we have given up a great deal of personal freedom and one of the personal freedoms that we give up is the freedom of knowing what we want to know you get to know what the government tells you you get to know what you need to know or what you've learned yourself but you don't get to know secrets people who do get to know secrets know them for a reason that's why it's called a need to know how difficult is it to maintain secrecy it's surprisingly difficult as the best technology changes uh it's also surprisingly difficult as as our culture becomes one where people want notoriety people want to be the person who breaks the secret 25 years ago 40 years ago that wasn't the case there was a time in the united states where if someone gave you a secret it was a point of personal honor not to share the secret yes now we're in a place where someone tells you a secret like that could turn into a twitter post that gets you a bunch of thumbs up and a bunch of likes or whatever else an opportunity right so the value of secrets has changed and now there's almost a greater value on exposing secrets than there is on keeping secrets that's that makes it difficult to keep secrets especially when technology is going in the same direction yeah where is the line and by the way i'm one of those old school people with the secrets i i think it's a karma thing again back to the trust i think in the short term you can benefit by sharing a secret but in the long term if people know they can trust you like the juicy is a secret if it's a test of sorts if if they know you can keep that secret that means like you're somebody that could be trusted and i believe that like not just effectiveness in this life but happiness in this life is is informing a circle of people you can trust right we're taught that secrets and lies are similar in that they have a limited shelf life if you treat them like food secrets and lies have a very limited shelf life so if you cash in on them while they're still fresh you beat them before they spoil you get to take the advantage take advantage of it before they spoil however trust has no limit to its shelf life so it's almost like you're trading a short-term victory and losing a long-term victory it's always better to keep the secret it's always better to let the lie live because it will eventually come to light from somebody else not from you because it already has a limited shelf life but what you win in exchange for not being the one that cashed in on the secret is immense trust me ask you about lying and trust and so on so um i don't believe i've been contacted by or interacted with the cia the mi6 the fsb massage or any other intelligence agency i'm kind of offended but uh would i know if i was so from your perspective no you would not know if you were for sure you've been on their radar absolutely you've got a file you've got a dossier somewhere why would i be on their radar because you're uh you're interesting it's not that it not it's not necessarily that you are interesting to someone as a foreign asset or an intelligence collection source but your network is extremely interesting it's networks are important correct if someone had access to if someone was able to clone your phone every time you cross a border you go through some sort of security if you've ever been pulled into secondary and separated from your bag that's exactly when and how people clone computers they clone phones they make whatever photocopies of your of your old school planner whatever it might be but but for sure you are an intelligence target it just may be that you're not suitable to be in a person who reports foreign intelligence we've got to understand that all people are potential sources of valuable information to the national security infrastructure of our host country and any country that we visit someone like you with your public footprint with your notoriety with your educational background with your national identifications becomes a viable and valuable target of information yeah that's so to speak to that um you know i take security pretty seriously but not to the degree that you know it runs my life which i'm very careful about because it's good i'm glad to hear that so the moment you start to think about germs right like you you start to freak out and you become sort of paralyzed by the stress of it so you have to balance those two things um you know uh if you think about all the things that could hurt you in this world and all the risk you can take is um it can overwhelm your life that said the cyber world is a weird world because it's uh it doesn't have the same you know i know i know not to cross the street without looking each way because there's a physical intuition about it i i'm not sure you know i'm a computer science guy so i have some intuition but it's the cyber world you it's really hard to build up an intuition what is safe and not you know i've seen a lot of people you know just logging out of your devices all the time like regularly just like that physical access step is a lot of people don't take i can just like walk in into the offices of a lot of ceos and it's like why don't everything's wide open uh for it's for physical access of those systems which is kind of incredible for uh somebody that sounds really shady but it's not i've written key loggers like things that record everything you type in the mouse you move and like i i did that for um during my phd i was recording everything you do on your device and everything you do on your computer to unders like people sign up to the study they willingly do this to understand behavior i was trying to use machine learning to identify who you are based on different biometric and behavioral things which allows me to study human behavior and to see which is uniquely identifiable and the goal there was to remove the need for a password but the how easy it is to write a thing that logs everything you type i was like wait a minute like i can probably get a lot of people in the world to run this for me i can then get all of their passwords uh i mean you could do so much like i can run the entirety of the cia from just myself if i was and i imagine there's a lot of really good hackers like that out there much better than me um so i tried to prevent myself from being all the different low-hanging fruit attack vectors in my life i try to make it difficult to be that but then i'm also aware that there's probably people that are like five steps ahead you're doing the right thing what what i always advocate is the low-hanging fruit is what keeps you from being a target of opportunity because you're half-assed hackers your lazy hackers your unskilled hackers they're looking for low-hanging fruit they're looking for the person who gets the nigeria email about how you could be getting five million dollars if you just give me your bank account exactly that's what they're looking for the thing that's scary is that if you're not a target of opportunity if you become a intentional target then there's almost nothing you can do because once you become an intentional target then your security apparatus they they will in they will create a dedicated customized uh way vector of attacking your specific security apparatus and because security is always after right there's always there's the there's the leading advantage and the trailing advantage when it comes to attacks the leader always has the advantage because they have to create the attack before anybody else can create a way to protect against the attack so the attack always comes first and that means they always have the advantage you are always stuck just leaning on this is the best security that i know of meanwhile there's always somebody who can create a way of attacking the best security out there and once they win they have a monopoly they have all that time until a new defensive counter measure is deployed yeah i tend to think exactly as you said that uh the long-hanging fruit protects against like uh yeah crimes of opportunity and then i assume that people can just hack in if they really want uh think about how much anxiety we would be able to solve if everybody just accepted that well there's several things you do first of all i to be honest it just makes me it keeps me honest not to be a douchebag or like uh not yeah to to uh to assume everything could be public and you know and so don't trade in information that could hurt people if it was made public so i tried to do that and the thing i tried to make sure is i like home alone style try a booby trap i really would like to know if i was hacked right and so i try to assume that i will be hacked and detect it yeah uh have a tripwire of something yeah tripwires through through everything uh and not paranoia-wise just like uh open door but that's that i think that's probably the future of life on this earth is you're going like everybody of interest is going to be hacked um that hopefully inspires now this is outside of company there's uh these are individuals i mean there's of course if you're actually operating like i'm just a who am i i'm just a scientist person um podcasting person so if i was actually running a company or was an integral part of some kind of military operation then you have to probably have to have an entire team that's now doing that battle of like being trying to be ahead of like the best hackers in the world that are attacking but that that requires a team that like full time is their focus yeah and then you still get in trouble correct yeah so what i've seen as the norm well what i've seen is the cutting edge standard for corporations and the ultra the ultra wealthy and even uh intelligence organizations is that we have tripwires it's better if you can't prevent from being hacked the next best thing is to know as soon as you get hacked because then you can essentially terminate all the information if you know it fast enough you can just destroy the information this is what the ultra wealthy do they have multiple phones so as soon as one phone gets hacked the tripwire goes off the operating system is totally deleted along with all data on the phone and a second phone is turned on with a whole new separate set of metadata and now they for them there's no break in service it's just oh this phone went black it's got a warning on it that says it was hacked so trash it because they don't care about the price of the phone pick up the next phone and we move on that's that's the best thing that you can do essentially outside of trying to out hack the hackers uh and then even in your intelligence and military worlds where the cyber where cyber warfare is active the people who are aggressing are not trying to create aggression that beats security they're trying to find aggressive techniques offensive techniques that have no security built around them yet because it's too cost and time intensive to protect against what you know is coming it's so much more efficient and cost effective to go after new vectors so it just becomes like it becomes almost a silly game of of your neighbor gets a guard dog so you get a bigger guard dog and then your neighbor gets a fence so you're just constantly outdoing each other it's called the the security paradigm people just they just one up each other because it's never worth it to just get to the same level you're always trying to out to each other yeah and then maybe like banks have to fight that fight but not not everybody can right yeah no so you're saying i operated at the state of the art with the trip wires this is good to know absolutely man and also just not not using anybody else's services doing this doing the everything myself so that's harder to figure out what the heck this person is doing because if i'm using somebody else's service like i did with qnap i have a queued up nasa used for cold storage of unimportant things but at large videos and i don't know if you know but qnap is a company that does nas storage devices and they got hacked and everybody that didn't update as of a week ago from the point of the zero day hack everybody got hacked it's several thousand machines and they asked um you can get your data back if you pay i forget what it was but it was um it's about a couple thousand dollars and the qnap can get all the data back for their customers if they pay i think two million dollars wow but that came from me relying on the systems of others for security i was i assumed this company would have their security handled but then those very valuable lesson to me i now have uh like layers of security and also an understanding which data is really important which is somewhat important which is not that important and layering that all together so just so you know the us government the military woke up to that exact same thing about two years ago it's still very new i mean they were sourcing take night vision goggles for example they were sourcing components and engineering and blueprints for night vision goggles from three four five different subcontractors all over the country but they never asked themselves what the security status was of those self of those subcontractors so you know fast forward you know a few years and uh and all of a sudden they start getting faulty components they start having night vision goggles that don't work they start having supply chain issues where they have to change their their provider and and the army doesn't know that the provider is changing i mean this is a strategy the the idea of of going through third-party systems is identifying the vulnerability in the supply chain that's a that's a a savvy uh offensive practice for for more than just you know cyber hackers let me ask you about physical hacking uh so i'm now like i'm an introvert so i'm a paranoid about all social interaction but um how much truth is there is kind of a funny question uh how suspicious should i be when i'm traveling in ukraine or different parts of the world when when an attractive female walks up to me and shows any kind of attention is that is that like this kind of james bond spy movie stuff or is that kind of stuff used by intelligence agencies i don't think it's used it's absolutely used it's called sexbionage it's that's the term that we jokingly call it is espionage but yeah the the art of attraction appeal um the manifestation of feelings through sexual manipulation all of that is a super powerful tool the chinese use it extremely well the russians use it extremely well in the united states we actively train our officers not to use it because in the end it leads to complications in how you professionally run a case so we train our officers not to use it however you can't control what other people think so if you're an attractive male or an attractive female officer and you're hap you're trying to talk to a you know an older general who just happens to be gay or happens to be straight and is attracted to you of course they're going to be that much more willing to talk to an american who is also attractive so it's well it's hard to walk that back in all definitions so it could be all elements of charisma that's so you know uh attractiveness in the dynamic sense of the word so it's visual attractiveness but the the smile the humor the wit the the flirting all that kind of stuff that could be used to uh correct to the art of conversation there's also elements of sexuality that people underestimate right so physical sexuality physical attraction is the most obvious one it's the one that everybody talks about and thinks about but then there's also sapiosexuality which is being sexually attracted to uh to thoughts to intelligence and then you've got all the various varieties of of personal preferences some people like people of a certain color skin or they like big noses they like small noses they like big butts they like small butts they like tall guys they like bald guys whatever it might be you can't ever predict what someone's preference is sexual arousal preferences are going to be so then you end up walking into a situation where then you discover you know and just imagine imagine being being an unattractive overweight married guy and you're walking into an asset or a target meeting with like a middle-aged female who is also not very attractive and also married but then it turns out that that person is a sapiosexual and gets extremely turned on by intelligent conversation that's exactly what you're there to do your exact your mission is to have intelligent conversation with this person to find out if they have access to secrets and by virtue of you carrying out your mission they become extremely aroused and attracted to you that is a very complicated situation it's hard to know to trust like how do you know your wife or how does your wife know that you're not a double agent from russia i there's a a large element of uh of experience and time that goes into that she's also trained and i i think my wife and i also think yeah my wife and i also have the benefit of of being recruited uh young and together where so over time you can start to figure out things that are very difficult to do so you form the baseline you start to understand the person's very it becomes very difficult to lie the most difficult thing in the world is consistency it's the most difficult thing in the world some people say that discipline or self-discipline what they're really talking about is consistency when you have someone who performs consistently over long periods of time under various levels of stress you have high high confidence that that is the person that you can trust you can trust again you can trust them to behave within a certain pattern you can trust an asshole to be an asshole without trusting the asshole to take care of your kids right so i don't ever want to mix up the idea of personal trust versus trusting the outcome you can always trust a person to operate within their pattern of behavior it just takes time for you to get a consistent uh to get consistent feedback as to what that baseline is for them to to form a good model predictive model of what their behavior is going to be like right and you know what's fascinating is i think the challenge is building that model quickly so technology is one of those tools that will be able in the future to very quickly create a model of behavior because technology can pull in multiple data points in a very short period of time that the human brain simply can't pull in at the same period at the same space at the same speed well that's actually what i did my phd on that's what i did at google is forming a good representation unique representation across the entire world based on the behavior of the person the the specific task there is so that you don't have to type in the password the idea was to replace the password but it also allows you to actually study human behavior and to think all right what is the unique representation of a person how um because we have very specific patterns and a lot of humans are very similar in those patterns what are the unique identifiers within those patterns of behavior and that's i think that's from a psychology perspective a super fascinating question and from a machine learning perspective it's something that you can as the systems get better and better and better and as we get more and more digital data about each individual you start to get you start to be able to do that kind of thing effectively and it's i mean when i think of the fact that you could create a dossier on somebody in a matter of 24 or 48 hours if you could wire them for two days right internet of things style you put it in their underwear or whatever right some some chip that just reads everything how heavy are they walking how much time do they sleep how many times they open the refrigerator when they log into their computer how do they do it like which hand do they use when they log in yeah what what's their most common swipe what's their most visited website you could collect an enormous amount of normative data in a short period of time where otherwise we're stuck the way that we do it now once or twice a week we go out for a coffee for two hours and two hours at a time over the course of six eight weeks 12 weeks you're coming up with a 50 assessment on how you think this person is going to behave just that time savings is immense something you've also spoken about is private intelligence and the the power and the the reach and the scale and the importance of private intelligence versus government intelligence can you elaborate on the role of what is private intelligence and what's the role of private intelligence in the scope of all the intelligence that is gathered and used in the united states yeah absolutely it's a it's something that so few people know about and it became a more mainstream topic with the trump administration because trump made it no secret that he was going to hire private intelligence organizations to run his intelligence operations and fund them so that really brought it to the mainstream but going all the way back to 911 going all the way back to 2001 when when the 9 11 attacks happened there was a commission that was formed to determine the reasons that 9 11 happened and among the lists that they determined of course they found out that the intelligence community wasn't coordinating well with each other there were fife dumbs and there was infighting and there wasn't good intel sharing but more than that they identified that we were operating uh at cold war levels even though we were living in a time when terrorism was the new biggest threat to national security so the big recommendation coming out of the 911 commission was that the intelligence organizations the intelligence community significantly increased the presence of intelligence operators overseas and in terms of analytical capacity here in the united states when they made that decision it completely destroyed it totally was incongruent with the existing hiring process because the existing hiring process for cia or nsa is a six to nine month process the only way they could plus up their sizes fast enough was to bypass their own hiring and instead go direct to private organizations so naturally the government contracted with the companies that they already had secure contracts with boeing raytheon northrop grumman khaki you know you name it and then over time from 2001 to now or i guess that started really in 2004 when they started significantly increasing their private the presence of private intelligence officers uh from there from then until now it's become a budgetary thing it's become it's become a continuity of operations thing and now the reason northern virginia has become one of the wealthiest zip codes in america is because of the incredible concentration of private intelligence that is supporting cia nsa dia fbi and all the slew of ic partners by the way does volunteer play a role in this palantir is one of those organizations that that was trying to pitch their product to an intelligence community because they have it's a fantastic product on paper um but the challenge was the proprietary services the proprietary systems that we current that we used in cia prior to palantir continued to outperform palantir so just like any other business decision if you've got homegrown systems that outperform external systems and it's not worth it to share the internal information got it so what uh the close connection between peter thiel and donald trump did that have a role to play in the um in donald trump's leveraging of private intelligence or is that completely disjoint i think that they're related but only circumstantially because remember donald trump wasn't really investing in cia so the last thing he wanted to do was spend his his network wasta wasta is a term that we call influence it's an arabic term for influence trump didn't want to use his wasta putting teal into cia only to lose teal's contract as soon as trump lost office so instead it was more valuable to put peter thiel's tool to use in private intelligence and then of course i think he nominated peter thiel to be his secretary of defense secretary of state at some point in time he tried to present like presidentially appoint peter thiel into a position of of uh government authority what do you think of figures like um like peter thiel do they wield and i'm sure there's figures of similar scale and reach and power in private intelligence what do you think about their role in power in this whole like without public accountability yeah that you would think directors of cia perhaps have so this is where private intelligence has both a strength and a weakness the ultimate law overriding that that's overseeing private intelligence is not is not um government legislation it's the law of economics if they produce a superior product then they will have us a buyer if they do not produce a superior product they will not have a buyer and that's a very simple business principle whereas in the current national security infrastructure you can create a crap product but the taxpayer dollars are always going to be spent so it's really thrown things for a loop especially during the trump administration and this is one of the things that i will always say i liked about the trump administration it's shown it put a big blazing bright light on all of the flaws within our system one of those flaws being this executive power over the intelligence organizations and the lack of the of accountability for intelligence organizations to produce a superior product when that light got shown down that's when you also saw trump start to go after if you remember there was a period where he was taking security clearances away from retiring officers that became a big hot issue that became something that people were very opposed to when they didn't realize that that that process of taking security clearances away that incentivized seasoned senior officers to stay in service because with private intelligence paying a premium during the trump administration because trump was paying a premium to the private intelligence world when when senior officers found that it was more profitable to retire early keep their clearance and go work for raytheon trump saw that as bypassing service to the american people you've made a career in cia you've made a career in nsa you should stay there if you leave you lose your clearance because you no longer have a need to know he upset the apple cart with that and unfortunately the narrative that came out in many ways was a negative narrative against trump when in fact he was actually doing quite a service to the american people trying to take take away the incentive of senior officials leaving their service in order to just profits here in the private intelligent world so in that way he was kind of supporting the the cia in in making sure that competent people and experienced people stay and say are incentivized to stay there correct i think that there was there was definitely he understood incentives i mean donald trump understands incentives so he was in trying to incentivize them to stay but i think he was also playing a safety card because he didn't want former cia officials who were not listening to him to then move into private intel organizations that he may be hiring only to then have them undermine him from both sides of the of the coin so there was a little bit of of offensive uh calculation in there as well but do the dynamics and the incentives of economics that you refer to that the private intelligence operates under is that more or less ethical than the forces that uh maybe government agencies operate under like what's your intuition is capitalism lead so you mentioned at least to maximizations of efficiency and performance but is that correlated with ethical behavior when we're talking about such hairy activities like collection of intelligence the question of ethics is a great question so let me let me start this whole thing out by saying cia hires people on a on a spectrum of our ability to be morally flexible ethically flexible all people at their heart are ethically flexible i would never punch somebody in the face right some people out there would say i would never hurt another human being but as soon as a human being posed a direct threat to their daughter or their son or their mother now all of a sudden they're going to change their ethical stance in self-defense right but at the end of the day it's still hurting another hurting another person so what cia looks for is people who are able to swing across that that spectrum for lesser offenses right more flexibility i do not believe that private intelligence and the laws of economics lend themselves to increased ethics or increased ethical behavior in the short term but what ends up happening is that in the long term in order to scale economic benefits you are forced to act within norms of your customer base so as the norms of that customer base dictate certain requirements the company has to adapt to those requirements in order to continue to scale so if if a company tries to ostracize lgbtq or if they try to ostracize men or ostracize women they're limiting their ability to grow economically they have to adapt to whatever is the prevailing ethical requirement of their customer base that's such an interesting question because you you look at big pharma and pharmaceutical companies and they have a quite a poor reputation in the public eye and some of it maybe much of it is deserved at least historically speaking and so you start to wonder well can intelligence agencies use some of the same technique to manipulate the public like what they believe about those agencies in order to maximize profit as well sort of finding shortcuts or unethical paths that allow you to not be ultimately responsible to the customer absolutely and i would go a step further to say that the covert nature of intelligence operations is really attractive when it comes to the private sector because now they have all the same money with none of the oversights and all they have to do is deliver so without the oversight what's holding you back and in in a lot of for anybody who's ever run a business anybody's ever started a startup or tried to make something succeed we all know that there come those times where you have to skirt the boundaries of proprietary propriety or or morality or commitments or promises to other people because at the end of the day if your business fails it's on you so if you promise to deliver something to a client you've got to deliver it to the client even if that means you stay up late or if you lie on your taxes whatever it might be there's there's a certain level of do or die yeah i personally have a sort of optimistic view that ultimately the best way is to stay within ethical balance kind of like what you suggested if you want to be a company that's extremely successful is uh win with competence not with cheating because cheating won't i believe win in the long term but uh in terms of being publicly responsible to your decisions i mean i've already been supposed to talk to peter thiel twice on this podcast and it's just been complicated if i were to put myself into his shoes why do podcasts the the risk is too high to be a public person at all and so i totally understand that at the same time i think if you're doing things by the book and you're the best in the world at your job um then you have nothing to worry about and you can advertise that and you recruit you help recruit i mean that's that's the work of capitalism is you want to advertise that um this is the place where the best people in the world at this thing work true i think that your point of view is accurate i would also say that there the complexities of what makes somebody make a decision can only really be properly calculated with a baseline so because there is no baseline that you or i have on peter thiel it's difficult to really ascertain why he does or doesn't accept invites or why he does or doesn't appear well let me ask your opinion on the nsa and then maybe you could mention about bulk connection collection in general in the cia but you know let's let's look at some history with nsa and snowden what's your opinion on the mass surveillance that is um reported to have been conducted by the nsa we talked about ethics are you troubled by the from a public perception the unethical nature of mass surveillance of especially american citizens this is a topic that i never get tired of talking about but it's very rare that anyone ever really agrees with me just so you know so i see where you're well what i think there's a nuanced thing here maybe we'll find some agreement the truth is that the american experience after 9 11 is nothing like the american experience now so all the terminology all the all this talk about privacy and privacy laws and mass surveillance and all this other stuff it was a completely different time then and that's not to say it was an excuse because to this day i will still say mass mass collection bulk collection of data that allows for an expedient identification of a threat to national security benefits all of us but people don't understand what they want like people don't understand what the value of their own privacy is first of all the fact that people think they have personal privacy is laughable you have no privacy the cell phone that you carry in your pocket you're giving permission to those apps constantly you're giving commercial organizations what you and i have already said are less tied to ethical responsibility you're giving them permission to collect enormous amounts of private data from you all the time and you know what happens if at t or verizon sees some some nefarious activity on your account they do nothing they might send a note to fbi because they have to according to some checklist but when nsa was collecting intelligence on metadata from around the united states they were very specifically looking for terrorist threats that would harm american lives i don't man nsa can clone my phone i will give them my children's phone i will give them the passwords to every one of my accounts if it means that there's a likelihood that my family will be safer from a nefarious actor who's intent on hurting us nsa doesn't care about your affair nsa doesn't care if you're cheating on your taxes nsa doesn't care if you're if you talk shit about your boss or if you hate the u.s president nobody cares about that your intelligence community is there to find threats to national security that's what they're there to do what snowden did when he outed that whole program the fact that the court the justice system the civilian justice system went back and essentially overruled the ruling of the intelligence courts before them just goes to show how the general mass community really shouldn't have a say in what happens in the intelligence community they really shouldn't you have politicians and you have the you have the opportunity to elect people to a position and then you trust them that's what a representative republic is you vote the people in you trust them to work on your behalf they make decisions without running them by you they make decisions that that that they believe are in the best interest of their constituency and that's how our form of democracy works it worked we were safer now that we don't have that information and now that there's this giant looming question of whether or not nsa is there to serve people or is collecting mass surveillance against all american people that's not really a true accurate representation of what they were ever doing they were looking for the needle in a haystack of the tre of the series of transactions in metadata that was going to lead to american deaths we are now less secure because they can't do that and that bothers me so you said a few really interesting things there so because you are kind of an insider war for time an insider meaning you were able to build up an intuition about the the good the bad and the ugly of these institutions uh specifically the good a lot of people don't have a good sense of the good they know the bad and the ugly or can infer the bad and the ugly you mentioned that the one little key little thing there at the end saying the nsa doesn't care about whether you hate the president or not now that's what people really worry about is they they're not sure they can trust the government to not uh go into full dictatorial mode and and uh based on your political preference your oppositions your basically one of the essential powers uh uh the freedom of speech in the united states is ability to criticize your government exactly and that they they worry while can't the government get a hold of the nsa and start to ask the basic question well can you give me a list of people that are criticizing the government think about so let's just walk through that exact example right because this is it's a preponderance it's a it's a preponderance fear it's a ridiculous fear because of you would have to tap on multiple elements of government for anything to happen so for example let's just say that somebody goes to the nsa and says hey can you give us a readout on all the people who are tweeting terrible things about the president okay cool here's your 100 million people whatever it is right here's all the people saying negative things about the government so now they have a list what do they do next well let's just make it simple they stay with nsa and they say surveil them even more tap their phones tap their computers i want to know even more so then they get this preponderance of evidence what do you do with evidence you take it to a court well guess what no court is going to support anything that goes against the freedom of speech so the court is not going to support what the executive is asking them to do even before you take somebody to court you have to involve law enforcement essentially you have to send some sort of police force to go apprehend the individual who's in question well guess what doesn't meet criteria for any police force anywhere in the united states arresting people who have who say negative things about the president now if somebody poses a threat to the life of a public figure or the threat to life of a politician that's a completely different case which means the standards of evidence are much higher for them to arrest that person so unless you create a secret police force then your actual public police force is never going to take action so all these people who are afraid of this this exact situation that you're outlining they need the creation of a secret police force the creation of a secret court that operates outside the judicial system the creation of a secret intelligence service that operates outside of foreign intelligence collection all so that a handful of people who don't like the president get what whisked away assassinated put in prison who knows what think about the resources that would be the amount of money and time and how hard would it be to keep that secret to have all of those things in motion the reason it worked in in russia and soviet germany or russia and communist germany was because everybody knew there was a secret police everybody knew that like that there was a threat to work to speaking out against the government it's completely different here well so there's a lot to say so one is yes if i was a dictator and i wanted to and just looking at history let me let me take myself out of it but i think one of the more effective ways is you don't need the surveillance you can pick out a random person and and in a public display semi-public display you know basically put them in jail for opposing the government whether they oppose it or not and the fear that sends a message to a lot of people that's exactly what you see happening in china that's what you just light out it's genius and that is the that is the standard you don't need the surveillance for that yep but that said if you did do the surveillance uh so that's the support the sort of the incentives aren't aligned it seems like a lot of work to do for the thing you could do without the surveillance right but you know yes the courts wouldn't uh if if you were to be able to get a list of people which i think that part you could do correct uh and that opposed the government you could do that on like just like you said on twitter publicly you could make a list and with that you can start to if especially if you have a lot of data on those people find ways in which they did violate the law not because they oppose the government but because in some other way the parking tickets or uh didn't pay the taxes that's probably a common one or like screwed up something about the taxes i just happen to know russia and ukraine they they're very good at this kind of stuff that knowing good how the citizens screwed everything up because especially in those countries everybody's breaking the law because in a corrupt nation you have to bend the law to operate like the number of people that pay taxes fully in those nations is just very low if not zero and so uh they then use that breaking of the law to come up with an excuse to actually put you in jail based on that you know so it's possible to imagine but yes i think i think that's the ugly part of surveillance but i do think just like you said the incentives aren't correct like you really don't need to get all of the secret police and all these kinds of organizations working if you do have a charismatic powerful leader that built up a network that's able to control a lot of organizations to to a level of authoritarianism in a government they're just able to do the usual thing one have propaganda machine to tell narratives to pick out you know uh people that they can put in jail for opposing the state and maybe loud members of the press start silencing the press there's there's like a there's a playbook to this thing right it doesn't require the surveillance the surveillance you know what is useful for the surveillance is the thing you mentioned in china which is encourage everybody in the citizenry to watch each other to say there's enemies of the state everywhere and then you start having children reporting on their parents and that kind of stuff again don't need a surveillance date for that now the good of a surveillance system if it's operating within ethical bounds is that yes it could protect the populace so you're saying like the good given on your understanding of these institutions the good outweighs the bad absolutely so let me give you just a practical example so people don't realize this but there's multiple surveillance states that are out there there are surveillance states that are close allies with the united states one of those surveillance states is is the united arab emirates the uae now i lived in the uae from 2019 to 2020 came back on a repatriation flight after covet broke out and but we were there for a full year we were we were residents we had ids we had everything now when you get your national id in the emirates you get a chip and that chip connects you to everything it connects you to cameras it connects you to your license plate on your car to your passport to your credit card everything everything is intertwined everything is interlinked when you drive there are no police there are no police on the roads every 50 to 100 meters you cross a camera that reads your license plate measures your speed and if you're breaking the speed limit it just immediately charges your credit card because it's tied it's all tied together totally surveillance that technology was invented by the israelis who use it in israel when i was in abu dhabi and i was rear-ended at high speed by what turned out to be an emirati official a senior ranking official of one of the emirates it was caught on camera his id was registered my id was registered everything was tied back to our ids the proof and the evidence was crystal clear even still he was emirati i was not so when i went to the police station to file the complaint it was something that nobody was comfortable with because generally speaking emiratis don't don't accept legal claims against their own from foreigners but the difference was that i was an american and i was there on a contract supporting the emirati government so i had these different variances right long story short in the end the surveillance state is what made sure that justice was played because the proof was was incontrovertible there was so much evidence collected because of the surveillance nature of their state now why do they have a surveillance state it's not for people like me it's because they're constantly afraid of extreme extremist terrorist activity happening inside abu dhabi or inside the uae because they're under constant threat from islam and there are from from extremists and they're under constant threat from iran so that's what drives the people to want a police state to want a surveillance state for them their survival is paramount and they need the surveillance to have that survival for us we haven't tasted that level of desperation and fear yet or hopefully never but that's what makes us feel like there's something wrong with surveillance surveillance is all about the purpose it's all about the intent well and like like you said companies do a significant amount of surveillance to provide us with services that we uh take for granted for example just um one of the things to give props to the digital efforts of the zielenski administration in ukraine i don't know if you're aware but they they have this digital transformation efforts where you can put like there's an it's uh it's laughable to say in the united states but they actually did a really good job of having a government app that has your passport on it it's all the digital information you can get a doctor it's like everything that you would think america would be doing uh you know like license like all that kind of stuff it's in an app you could pay this payment to each other and that's all coming i mean there's probably contractors somehow connected to the whole thing but that's like under the flag of government and so that's an incredible technology and i didn't i guess hear anybody talk about surveillance in that context even though it is but they all love it and it's super easy and they frankly already it's so easy and convenient they've already taken for granted that of course this is what you do of course your passport is on your phone yeah for everybody to have yeah housed on a server that you have no idea where it's at that can be hacked at any time by a third party they don't ask these kinds of questions because it's so convenient as we do for uh for google facebook twitter uh apple microsoft um products we use security and convenience are on two opposite sides of another spectrum yeah the more convenient something is the less secure and the more secure something is the less convenient and that's a that's a battle that we're always we're always working with as individuals and then we're trying to outsource that battle to our politicians and our politicians are frankly just more interested in being politicians yeah that said i mean people are really worried about giving any one institution a large amount of power especially when it's a federal government institution um given some history first of all just history of the corruption of power corrupting individuals and institutions and second of all myth or reality of certain institutions like the cia misbehaving well let me actually ask you about the edward snowden so you outside of the utility that you're arguing for of the nsa surveillance program do you think edward snowden is a criminal or a hero in terms in the eyes of the law he's a criminal he he broke the law he broke the confidence he made us he was under security obligation and then when he ran away he ran away to all of the worst villains in the world from the u.s perspective to basically seek protection that's that how you act in the face of accusation is in in essence part of the case that you build for yourself so running away to china russia cuba there was a latin ecuadore i think that just paints a very negative picture that does not suggest that you were doing anything that was ethical and upright and in favor of the american people if you're going to run to american enemies to support yourself so for sure in the eyes of law he's a criminal in the eyes of a group of people who are largely ignorant to what they lost to them he's a hero to me he's just kind of a sad case i personally look at snowden as a sad unfortunate case his life is ruined his family name is tarnished he's forever going to be a desperate pawn and that's all because of the decisions that he made and the order that he made them i'm not sure his name is tarnished i think the case you're making is a difficult case to make and so i think his name represents fighting one man uh it's like tiananmen square standing before the tank is like one man uh fighting the the government and i think that there is some aspect to which taking that side case aside that is the american spirit which is hold the powerful accountable so whenever there's somebody in power one individual can change um can can uh one man can make a difference it can make a difference yeah of you well i mean that's the american individualism and so he represents that and i think there's a huge skepticism against large federal institutions and i think if you look at the long arc of history that actually is a forcing function for the institutions to behave their best so basically hold them accountable if what's nice about this is that we can agree to disagree and history will be the one that decides but but once like there's a reason that edward snowden needs to do something new every 16 or 18 months to remain relevant right because if he didn't he would just be forgotten because he was not a maverick who changed history for the better he was a man who broke a law and now he's on the run and to some people he is a hero to other people he is a criminal but to the vast majority he's just a blip on a radar of their everyday life that really makes no difference to them at all so actually let's linger on that so just to clarify do you think are you making the difficult case that the nsa mass surveillance program was one ethical and two made a better world for americans i am i am making the case that at the time it was exactly what we needed to feel safe in our own homes but what about to be safe actually be safe this is you so this is what's difficult because any proof that was that they collected that actually prevented an attack from happening is proof we'll never know about this is the the really unfortunate side of intelligence operations and i've been at the front end of this you work your ass off you take personal risk you make personal sacrifice to make sure that something terrible doesn't happen nobody knows that that ever happens does that have to be that way is does it is does it have to remain secret every time the nsa or the cia saves saves the lives of americans it does for two reasons it has to be secret first the mythos the same thing we were talking about with with general petraeus you can't brag about your victories if you want to let the myth shape itself you can't do that the second thing is it's once something is once a victory is claimed the danger comes from letting your enemy know that you claimed the victory because they can reverse engineer and they can start to change how they did things if a terrorist act if a terrorist cell tries to execute an operation the operation fails from their point of view they don't know why it failed they just know that it failed but then if the u.s or if the american government comes in and says we took apart this this amazing attack now they have more information right the whole power of secrets like we talked about before the power of secrets isn't knowing that not everybody has them there's only a shelf life so take advantage of the shell the shelf life you get space so you got to keep it a secret there is no tactical advantage from sharing a secret unless you are specifically trying to achieve a certain tactical advantage from sharing that secret which is what we've seen so much of with us intel sharing with ukraine there's a tactical advantage from sharing a secret about russian military movements or weaknesses in tanks or you know supply chain challenges whatever it might be well let me argue that there might be an advantage to share information with the american public when a terrorist attack or is averted or the lives of americans are saved because what that does is make every american think that they're not that safe there is no tactical advantage there you think so absolutely if if if the austin pd started telling you every day about the these crazy crimes that they prevented would that make you feel more safe it would make you feel like they're doing their job is that obvious do you make us feel less safe because if we see confidence that there is uh extremely competent defenders of this territory of these people wouldn't that make us feel more safer no the human human nature is not to assign competence so uh empirically humans overvalue losses and undervalue gains that's something that we've seen from finance to betting and beyond if the austin police department starts telling you about all these heinous crimes that they that were avoided because of their hard work the way that your brain is actually going to process that information is you are going to say if this is all the stuff that they've stopped how bad must this place be how much more haven't they stopped i i take your point it's a powerful psychological point but i looking at the other picture of it uh looking at the police force looking at the cia the nsa those people and now with the with the police they're seeing there's such a negative feeling amongst americans towards these institutions who the hell wants to work for the cia now and the police force like that's you're going to be criticized like that's a i mean that's really bad for the cia it's terrible like as opposed to being seen as a hero like for example currently uh soldiers are for the most part seen as heroes that are protecting this nation that's not the case for the cia soldiers weren't seen as heroes in the vietnam war right you've got to remember that when you so first of all public service is a sacrifice yeah we oftentimes forget that we start to think oh government jobs are cushy and they're easy and it must be so easy to be the president because then you're basically a celebrity overnight public service is a sacrifice it's a grind for all of the soldiers the soldiers the the submariners the missileers the police officers intelligence specialists they all know what it's like to give things up to serve a public that can turn its opinion at any given time and history is what defines it the more important thing is to understand that if you want a true open and fair democracy you cannot control a narrative and starting to share all of your victories or starting to share your biggest victories with the intent of shaping public opinion to be supportive of the police force or supportive of cia or supportive of you name it is shaping a narrative that is intentional operate operational use of influence to drive public opinion that is something nobody wants to get into it is much more professional to be a silent sentinel a silent servant humbly carrying the burden of public service in the united states where we are a fair and open democracy why why not celebrate uh the killing of bin laden we did the search discovery in the capture and the killing of bin laden wasn't that actually the details of that how many how much of the details of that how he was discovered were made public i think some of it was made public enough why not do that doesn't that make heroes out of the people that are servants or do you do this do people who serve to do service for this nation do they always have to operate in a thankless manner in the shadows that's i think that's a very good question the the folks who i left behind when i left cia who continue to serve as faceless nameless heroes every day i am grateful to them the truth is that if you if they were motivated by something else they wouldn't be as good as they are at doing what they do and i i see your point about shouldn't we be celebrating our victories but when celebrating our victories runs the risk of informing our our enemies how we operate giving away our informational advantage giving away our tactical battlefield advantage and running the risk of shaping a narrative intentionally among our own american people now all of a sudden we're turning into exactly the thing that the american people trust us not to become yeah but then you operate in the secrecy and then there's there's uh corrupt and douchebag people everywhere so when they even inside the cia and criminals inside the cia there's criminals in all organizations in all walks of life human nature is such that this is always the case then it breeds conspiracy theories it does and sometimes those conspiracy theories turn out to be true but most times they don't that's just part of the risk of being a myth can you speak to some of the myths so mk ultra so not a myth not a myth so this is a fascinating human experimentation program undertaken by the cia to develop procedures for using drugs like lsd to interrogate people through let's say psychological manipulation and maybe even torture the scale of the program is perhaps not known uh how do you make sense that this program existed again you've got to look through the lens of time you've got to look at where we were historically at that time there was the peak of the cold war our enemies were doing the same kind of experimentation it was essentially another space race what if they broke through a new weapon technology faster than we did what would that mean for the safety and security of of the american people so right decision or wrong decision it was guided by and informed by national security priorities so from this program that was designed to use drugs to drive interrogation and torture people was born something very productive operation stargate which was a chance to use remote viewing and metaphysics to try to collect intelligence now even though in the end the outcome of mkultra and the outcome of stargate were mixed nobody really knows if they did or didn't do what they were supposed to do we still know that to this day there's still a demand in the us government and ncia for people who have sensitivities to ethereal energies oh by the way is there any proof that that kind of stuff works or just it just shows it shows that there's interest it shows that there's openness to consider those kinds of things but is there any evidence that that kind of stuff works if there's evidence i haven't seen it yeah speaking from a science-based point of view only if energy and matter can always be exchanged then a person who can understand and and become sensitive to energy is a person who could become sensitive to what does become matter yeah i mean the basics of the physics might be there but a lot of people probably are skeptical i'm skeptical too but i'm just like you should be open-minded i mean that's that's that's actually you know that's what science is about is remain open-minded even for the things that are long shots because those are the things that actually define scientific revolutions what about operation northwoods it was a proposed 1962 false flag operation by the dod and the cia to be carried out by the cia to commit acts of terrorism on americans and blame them on cuba so jfk the president rejected the proposal what do you make that this was on the table operation northwoods so it's interesting uh first i'm glad that jfk rejected it that's uh that's a good sign so we have to understand that good ideas are oftentimes born from bad ideas i had a really good friend of mine who actually went on to become a pastor and he used to say all the time that he wanted all the bad ideas on the table like give me all your bad ideas every time we had any kind of conversation and i i was always one of those people who's like isn't a bad idea just a waste of time and he was like no because the best ideas oftentimes come from bad ideas so again cuban missile crisis uh mass hysteria in the united states about nuclear war from cuba missiles blowing up american cities faster than we could even see them coming it makes sense to me that a president would go to especially the part of cia which is the special activities division it makes perfect sense to me that the president would go to a division called special activities whose job it is to create you know crazy ideas that have presidential uh approval but nobody knows they exist so it makes sense that he would challenge a group like that to come up with any wacky idea right come up with anything just let's start with something because we can't have we can't bring nothing to the table we have to do something about this cuban issue and then that's how an operation like that could reasonably be born not because anybody wants to do it but because they were tasked by the president to come up with five ideas and it was one of the ideas that still happens to this day this the president will still come in but will basically send out a notice to his covert action arm and he will say i need this and i need it on wednesday and people have to come back with options for the thing he asked for a finding he will issue a presidential finding and then his covert action arms have to come back and say here's how we would do this and hide the hands of the americans how gangster was it of jfk to reject it though this baller right that's like that is the that is a mic drop right there nope not doing that so yep doing that you know a thing that crosses an ethical line even in it in a time where the human the entirety of human civilization hangs in a balance still forfeit that power that's um that's a beautiful thing about the american experiment that's a few times throughout the history that's has happened including with our first president george washington uh well let me ask about jfk [Laughter] 25 times two and they still keep that stuff classified so do you think the cia had a hand in the assassination of jfk i cannot imagine in any reasonable point of view that the organization of cia had anything to do with the assassination of jfk so it's not a possible to infiltrate the cia a small part of the city in order to attain political or criminal uh gains i think financial yeah absolutely it's possible to infiltrate cia there's a long history of of foreign intelligence services infiltrating cia from aldrich ames to jerry lee recently with china so we know cia can be infiltrated even if they are infiltrated and even if that interlocutor executes on their own agenda or their the agenda as directed by their foreign adversary their foreign handler that's different than organizational support for an event so i do think it's possible they could have been infiltrated at the time especially it was a massive a major priority for the cubans and the russians to infiltrate some aspect of of u.s intelligence multiple moles were caught in the years following so it's it's not surprising that there would be a priority for that but to say that the organization of cia was somehow in cahoots with to independently assassinate their own executive that's a significant stretch i've seen no evidence to support that and it goes contrary to everything i learned from my time at cia well let me ask you do you think say played a part in enabling drug cartels and drug trafficking which is another big kind of um shadow that hangs over the cia at the beginning of the drug war i would imagine the answer is yes we cia has its own counter-narcotics division a division that's dedicated to fighting and preventing narcotics from coming into the united states so when you when you paint a picture for me like do you think the cia was complicit in in helping drug trafficking or drug use when i say yes my exception is i don't think they did that for americans inside the united states if the cia can basically set it up so that two different drug cartels shoot each other by assisting in the transaction of of a sale to a third country and then leaking that that sale happened to a competing cartel that's just letting cartels do what they do that's them doing the dirty work for us so especially at the beginning of the drug war i think there was tons of space lots of room for cia to get involved in the economics of drugs and then let the inevitable happen and that was way more efficient way more productive than us trying to send our own troops in to kill a bunch of cartel warlords so that makes a ton of sense to me it just seems efficient it seems very practical i do not believe that cia would like i don't think all the accusations out there about how they would buy drugs and sell drugs and somehow make money on the side from it that's not how it works so do you think there's a on that point a connection between barry seal the great governor and then president bill clinton oliver north and vice president former cia director george h.w bush and the little town with a little airport called mina arkansas so i am out of my element now this is this is one i haven't heard many details about okay your your senses any of the drug trafficking has to do with criminal operations outside the united states and the cia just leveraging that to achieve its ends but nothing to do with american citizens and american politicians uh with american citizens again speaking organizationally so that that would be my sense yes let me ask you about uh so back to operation northwoods because it's such a powerful tool sadly powerful tool used by dictators throughout history the false flag operation um so i think there's and you said the terrorist attacks in 911 were changed a lot for us for for the for the united states for americans it changed the way we see the world who woke us up to the harshness of the world i think there's uh to my eyes at least there's nothing that shows evidence that 911 was a quote inside job but is the cia or the intelligence agencies or the us government capable of something like that but that's the question so yeah i there you know there's a bunch of shadiness about how it was reported on i just can't that's the thing i struggle with um while there's no evidence that there was an inside job it raises the question to me well could something like this be an inside job because it sure as heck now looking back 20 years the amount of money they'll spend on these wars the military-industrial complex the min the amount of interest in terms of power and money involved organizationally can um can something like that happen you know occam's razor so the harem's razor is that you can never prescribe to conspiracy what could be explained through incompetence yeah right that is one of those are two two fundamental guidelines that we follow all the time right the simplest answer is oftentimes the best and never prescribe to conspiracy what can be explained through incompetence can you can you elaborate what you mean by we we as beings as intelligence professionals so you see there's a deep truth to that uh that second razor there is more than a deep truth there is there's ages of experience for me and for others so in general people are incompetent if left to their own means they they're they're more incompetent then they are malevolent at a large organizational scale uh people are more incompetent of executing a conspiracy than they are of competently yeah than they are of competently executing a conspiracy that's really what it means is that it's so difficult to carry out a complex lie that most people don't have the competency to do it so it doesn't make any sense to lead thinking of conspiracy it makes more sense to lead assuming incompetence when you look at all of the outcomes all the findings from 9 11 it speaks to incompetence it speaks brashly and openly to incompetence and nobody likes talking about it fbi and cia to this day hate hearing about it the 911 commission is going to go down in history as this painful example of the incompetence of the american intelligence intelligence community and it's going to come back again and again every time there's an intel flap it's going to come back again and again uh what are you seeing even right now we miss we missed the u.s intelligence infrastructure misjudged afghanistan misjudged hong kong misjudged ukraine's and russia's invasion of ukraine those were three massive misjudgments in a few years it's it's just embarrassing just embarrassing exactly right so all the sort of cover-up looking things around 9 11 is just people being embarrassed by their failures if if they're taking steps to cover anything up it's just their own it's a it's a painful reminder of their lack of competency at the time now i understand that conspiracy theorists want to take inklings of information and put them together in a way that that is the most damning but that goes back to our point about overvaluing losses and undervaluing gains it's just predictable human behavior let me ask you about this because it comes up often so i'm from mit and there's a guy by the name of jeffrey epstein that still troubles me to this day that some of the people i respect were interacted with this individual and fell into his influence the charm charisma whatever the whatever the hell he used to uh delude these people he did so successfully i'm very open-minded about this thing i just i would love to learn more but a lot of people tell me a lot of people i respect that there's intelligence agencies behind this individual so they were using jeffrey epstein for uh for getting access to powerful people and then to control and manipulate those powerful people the cia i believe is not brought up as often as mossad and so this goes back to the original aspect of our conversation is how much each individual intelligence agencies is willing to go to control to manipulate to achieve its and means do you think there is can you educate me if um obviously you don't know but you can bet what are the chances the intelligence agencies are involved with the character of jeffrey epstein in some way shape or form with the character of epstein it's a hundred percent guaranteed damn that some intelligence organization was involved but let's let's talk about why let's talk about why okay yeah there's multiple types of intelligence assets just like we were talking earlier there's foreign intelligence reporting assets there's access agents and then there's agents of influence three different categories of of intelligence right one is uh when you talk about foreign intelligence reporters these are people who have access to secrets and their job is to give you their secrets in exchange for gold or money or alcohol or prostitution or whatever else right their job is to give you secrets and then you pay them for the secrets access agents their job is to give you physical access or digital access to something of interest to you so maybe they're the ones that open a door that should have been locked and let you come in and stick your thumb drive in the computer yes or maybe they're the ones that that share a phone number with somebody and then you're they're just like just don't tell them you got the phone number for me their job is to give you access then you have these agents of influence an agent of influence's job is to be part of your effort to influence the outcomes in some way that benefits your intelligence requirements right of these three types of people the least scrupulous and the most shady is your agent of influence because your agent of influence understands exactly what they're doing they know they're working with one guy and they know they're giving they're using the influence to to manipulate some other guy when it comes to powerful people especially wealthy powerful people the only thing that interests them is power money is not a challenge anymore prestige notoriety none of those things are a challenge the rest of us we're busy trying to make money we're busy trying to build a reputation we're busy trying to build a career keep a family afloat at the highest levels they're bored they don't need any of that the only thing that they care about is being able to wield power so a character like jeffrey epstein is exactly the kind of character that the chinese would want the russians would want mossad would want the french would want it's it's too easy because the man had access to a wide range of american influential people for corporate espionage uses for for economic espionage uses for national security espionage uses it doesn't make any sense that a person like that wouldn't be targeted it doesn't so the question is who um who and whether i think the the the the really important distinction here is was this person was jeffrey epstein created or once he's achieved and built his network was he then infiltrated and that's a really sort of important difference like at which stage do you connect a person like that you start to notice maybe they're effective at building a network and then you start making uh building a relationship to where at some point they're it's a job they're working for you or do you literally create a person like that yeah so intelligence organizations have different strategies here in the united states we never create we don't have a budget cycle that allows us to create i mean the maximum budget cycle in the united states is five years so even if we were to try to invest in some c operation or create some character of influence essentially every year you have to justify why you're spending budget and that becomes very difficult in a democracy like ours however russia and china are extremely adept at seed operations long-term operations they are willing to invest and develop and and create an agent that serves their purposes now to create someone from scratch like jeffrey epstein the probabilities are extremely low they would have had to start with like a thousand different targets and try to grow a thousand different if you will influencers and then hope that one of them hits kind of like a venture capital firm right and best and many hope that a few hits more likely they observed him at some point in his own natural rise they identified his personal vulnerability very classic espionage technique and then they stepped in introduced themselves mid-career and said hey we know you have this thing that you like that isn't really a it's frowned upon by your own people but we don't frown upon it and we can help you both succeed and you know have an endless supply of ladies along the way i've recently talked to ryan graves who's a lieutenant ryan grace who's a fighter jet pilot um about many things he also does work on autonomous weapon systems drones and that kind of thing including quantum computing but he also happens to be one of the very few pilots that were willing to go on record and talk about ufo sightings does the cia and the federal government have interest in ufos in my experience at cia that is an area that remains very compartmented and that could be one of two reasons it could be because there is significant interest and that's why it's so heavily compartmented or it could be because it's an area that's non-it's just not important it's a it's a distraction so they compartment it so it doesn't distract from other operations one of the areas that i've been quite interested in and where i've done a lot of research and i've done some work in the private intelligence and private investigation side is with ufos the place where ufos really connect with the federal government is when it comes to aviation safety and predominance of power so faa and the us air force and the us military are very invested in knowing what's happening in the skies above the united states and that's of primary interest to them when they can rule out the direct threat to national security of ufos then they become less interested that said when you have unexplained aerial phenomenon that are unexplained that can't directly be tied to uh to anything that is known of the terrestrial world then they they're left without an answer to their question they don't know if it's a threat or not a threat but i think the scarier concern for the u.s national government or for the u.s federal government the scarier concern that nobody talks about is what if the ufo isn't alien what if it is actually a cutting-edge war machine that we are eons behind ever being able to replicate or the other concern is that it's a it's a system it's a machine from a foreign power that's doing intelligence collection correct so it's not just military purposes it's actually collecting data well they fall a lot of times the federal government will see the two is the same it's a hostile tool from a foreign collection of information is a hostile act absolutely that's why the espionage act exists that's why it's a criminal offense if you're committing espionage in the united states as a u.s citizen or a foreign citizen so i guess they keep digging until they can confirm it's not a threat but it just um and you're saying that there's not from you understanding much evidence that they're doing so it could be because they're compartmentalized but you're saying private intelligence institutions are trying to to make progress on this yeah it's really difficult to know uh there's a vested yeah there's an economic interest in the private invest in the private intelligence world because for example if you understand why certain aerial phenomena are happening over a location then you can use that to inform investors whether to invest in that location or avoid investment in that location but that's not a national security concern so that doesn't it doesn't matter to the federal government could these ufos be aliens now i'm going into territory of you as a human being wondering about all the alien civilizations that are out there the hum the humbling question we are not alone you think we're not alone there's it's an improbability that we are alone if by virtue of the fact that sentient human life exists intelligent human life exists all the probabilities that would have to be destroyed for that to be true simply speak over the galaxies that exist that there's no possible way we're alone it's a mathematical equation it's a it's a one or a zero right and for me it has to exist it's impossible otherwise rationally for me to think that we are truly the only intelligent life form in all of the universe but to think that an alien life form is anything like us at all is equally as inconceivable to think that they're carbon-based bipedal humanoid alien species that just happen to fly around in metal machines and visit alien planets in a way that they become observed is uh it's just silly it's the world of sci-fi well every good scientist because we always assume that they're superior to us and intelligence yes when any scientist carries out an experiment the whole objective of the experiment is to observe without being disclosed or being discovered yeah so why on earth would we think that the superior species makes the mistake of being discovered over and over again so to push back on that idea if we were to think about us humans trying to communicate with ants first we observe for a while there'll be a bunch of phds written a bunch of people just uh sort of collecting data taking notes trying to understand about this thing that you detected that seems to be a living thing which is a very difficult thing to define from an alien perspective or from our perspective we find life on mars or something like that okay so you observe for a while but then if you want to actually interact with it how would you interact with the ants if i were to interact with the ants i would try to uh infiltrate i would try to put like figure out what is the language they used to communicate with each other uh i would try to operate at their physical scale like uh in terms of the physics of their interaction in terms of the information methods mediums of information exchange with pheromones or whatever however the heck ants so i would try to mimic them in some way so in that sense it makes sense that um the objects we would see you mentioned bipedal yes of course it's ridiculous that aliens would actually be very similar to us but maybe they create forms in order to be like here uh the the the humans will understand it and this needs to be sufficiently different from humans to know that there's something weird i don't know i i i think it's actually an incredibly difficult problem of figuring out how to communicate with a thing way dumber than you people assume like if you're smart it's easy to talk to the dumb thing but i think it's actually extremely difficult when the gap in intelligence is just orders of magnitude and so of course you can observe but once you notice the thing is sufficiently interesting how do you communicate with that thing so this is where one of the things i always try to highlight is how conspiracies are born because many people don't understand how easy it is to fall into the conspiratorial cycle so the first step to a conspiracy being born is to have an a piece of evidence that is true and then immediately following the true evidence is a gap in information and then to fill in the gap of information people create an idea and then the next logical outcome is based on the idea that they just created which is an idea that's based on something that was imagined in the first place so the idea the factual thing is now two steps away and then three steps away four steps away as the things go on and then all of a sudden you have this kernel of truth that turned into this wild conspiracy so in our example you talked about humans trying to communicate with ants ants are not intelligence there's no ants not intelligent species they're drone species that's somehow commanded through whatever technology whatever whatever spoken like a typical human but yes whatever biological thing is in the queen right but they're they're not it's not a fair equivalent but let's look at gorillas or let's look at something in the monkey family right where largely we agree that there there is some sort of intelligence there or dolphins some sort of intelligence right it is a human thing a human thing to want to observe and then communicate and integrate that's a human thing not an intelligent life thing so for us to even think that a foreign and intelligent alien species would want to engage and communicate at all is an extremely human assumption and then from that assumption then we started going into all the other things you said if they wanted to communicate wouldn't they want to mimic if they wanted to mimic wouldn't they create devices like ours so now we're three steps removed from the the true fact of there's something unexplainable in the skies yeah so the the fact is there's something unexplainable in the skies and then we're cons we're filling in the gaps with all our basic human biases and assumptions exactly but the thing is now we're getting right back to project northwood we need some plan i don't care how crazy the idea is guys give me some plan so that's where we come up with well maybe it's an alien species trying to communicate or maybe it's an alien a hostile threat that's trying to take over the uh the world or who knows what maybe it's but you have to uh you have to somehow construct hypotheses and theories uh for anomalies and then from that amidst giant pile of the ridiculous emerges perhaps a deeper truth absolutely over over a period of decades and and uh at first that truth is ridiculed and then it's accepted you know that whole process um the earth revolving around the sun yeah the earth revolving around the sun and but you know to me it's interesting because it asks us looking out there with seti just looking for alien life is forcing us to really ask questions about ourselves about what is life how special first of all what is intelligence how special is intelligence in the cosmos and i think it's it's um inspiring and challenging to us as human beings both on a scientific and engineering level but also on a philosophical level i mean all those questions that are laid before us when you start to think about alien life so you you interviewed joe rogan recently yeah and he said something that i thought was really really brilliant during the podcast interview he said that he's gonna love hearing that very good sorry but he he said that he realized at some point that the turn in his opinion about ufos happened when he realized how desperately he wanted it to be true this is the human condition we our pink matter works the same way as everybody's pink matter and one of the ways that our pink matter works is with this thing with what's known as a cognitive bias it's a mental shortcut essentially your brain doesn't want to process through facts over and over again instead it wants to assume certain facts are in place and just jump right to the conclusion it saves energy it saves megabytes so what joe what joe or joe rogan i feel weird calling him joe i don't know him but what joe identified on his own mr rogan what mr rogan identified on his own yeah was his own cognitive loop and then he immediately grew suspicious of that loop that is a super powerful tool that is something that most people never become self-actualized enough to realize that they have a cognitive loop let alone questioning their own cognitive loop so that was when it came to this topic specifically that was just something that i thought was really powerful because you learned to not just not trust yourself on the record after he drinks one whiskey all that goes out i think that was just in that moment in time like you know of brilliance a moment of release because i i think he still is uh you know um he's he's definitely one of the things that inspires me about joe is how open-minded he is how curious he is he refuses to let sort of the conformity and the conventions of any one community including the scientific community be a kind of uh thing that limits his curiosity of asking what if uh it's like the the whole it's entirely possible i think that's a beautiful thing it actually represents what uh the best of science is that childlike curiosity but so it's good to sort of balance those two things but then you have to wake up to it like is is this is there a chance this is true or do i just really want it to be true and that like that hot girl that talks to you overseas yeah yeah for a brief moment there's there's actually a deeper explanation for it that i'll tell you off the mic that perhaps a lot of people can kind of figure out anyway just to take it one step further because i love this stuff personally i love pink i love pink matter stuff and your interview with jack barsky jack's good a good friend of mine a good dude incredible person yeah in your conversation with jack barsky you guys uh he started talking to you about how his recruiters were feeding back to him his own beliefs his own opinions about himself how smart he was how good he was how uniquely qualified he was that's all pink matter manipulation feeding right back to the person what they already think of themselves is a way to get them to invest and trust you faster because obviously you value them for all the right reasons because that's how they see themselves so that that loop that the kgb was using with jack jack did not wake up to that loop at the time he woke up to it later so it's it's happens to all of us we're all in a loop it's just whether it's about oat milk or whether it's about aliens or whether it's about you know the democrats trying to take your guns whatever it is everybody's in a loop and we've got to wake up to to ask ourselves just like you said is it true or do we just really want it to be true and until you ask yourself that question you're just one of the masses trapped in the loop yeah that's the that's the really the the nietzsche gaze into the abyss it's a dangerous thing it's that's the path to insanity is to ask that question you want to be doing it carefully but it's also the place where you can truly discover something fundamental about this world that people don't understand and then that and lay the groundwork for progress scientific uh cultural all that kind of stuff absolutely what is one spy trick this is from a reddit i really enjoy it what's one spy trick and and you're full of a million spy tricks um people should follow you you did an amazing podcast you're just an amazing person thank you um what is the one spy trick you would teach everyone that they can use to improve their life instantly now you already mentioned uh quite a few but what what else could jump to mind my go-to answer for this has not really changed much over the last few years so the first the most important spy trick to change everything immediately is something called perception versus perspective we all look at the world through our own perception my dad used to tell me my step-dad used to tell me that perception is reality and i i was i was arguing this with him when i was 14 years old i told you so dad you're still wrong yeah but perception is your interpretation of the world around you but it's unique only to you there's no advantage in your perception that's why so many people find themselves arguing all the time trying to convince other people of their own perception the way that you win any argument the way that you get ahead in your career the way that you out sell or out out race anybody is when you move off of perception and move into perspective perspective is the act or the art of observing the world from outside of yourself whether that's outside of yourself as like an entity just observing in a third from a different point of view or even more powerful you sit in the shoes you sit in the seat of the person opposite you and you think to yourself what is their life like what do they feel right now uh you know are they comfortable are they uncomfortable are they afraid are they scared what are they what's the stressor that they woke up to this morning what's the stressor that they're gonna go to sleep with tonight when you shift places and get out of your own perception and into someone else's perspective now you're thinking like them which is giving you an informational advantage but you know what they're all doing everyone else out there is trapped in their own perception not thinking about a different perspective so immediately you have superior information superior positioning you have an advantage that they don't have and if you do that to your boss it's going to change your career if you do that to your spouse it's going to change your marriage if you do that to your kids it's going to change your family legacy because nobody else out there is doing it it's so interesting how difficult empathy is for people and how powerful it is especially for for like you said the spouse like intimacy yeah like stepping outside of yourself and really putting yourself in the shoes of the other person considering how they see the world and that that that's uh i really enjoy that because um how does that exactly lead to connection i i think when you start to understand the way the other person sees the world you start to enjoy the world through their eyes and you start to be able to share in terms of intimacy share the beauty that they see together because you understand their perspective and that's and somehow you converge as well of course that allows you to gather information better and all that kind of stuff and like that that allows you to work together better to uh share in all different kinds of ways but for intimacy that's a really powerful thing and also for um actually like people you really disagree with or people on the internet you disagree with and so on i find empathy is is such a powerful way to uh resolve any tensions there even like people like trolls or all that kind of stuff i don't deride them i just kind of put myself in their shoes and it it it becomes like an enjoyable uh camaraderie with that but what's that so i want to draw a pretty hard line between between perspective yeah and empathy because empathy is frankly an overused term um by people who don't really know what they're saying sometimes i think you know what you're saying but the vast majority of people listening i would ask you that but that's fine as soon as you say empathy they're gonna just be like oh yeah i know i've heard this a thousand times yes empathy is about feeling what other people feel and or understanding feeling would you say yeah it's about feelings it's about understanding someone else's feelings feeling uh it's not the same as sympathy where you feel their feelings empathy is about recognizing that they have feelings and recognizing that their feelings are valid perspective is more than just feelings it's about it's about the brain it's about the pink matter on the left side and the right side of the brain yes i care about feelings and this goes directly to your point about connection yes i care about feelings but i also care about objectives what is your life what is your aspirational goal what was it like to grow up as you yeah what was it like to experience this and how did this shape your opinion on that and you know what what is it that you're going to do next more than just feelings actual tactical actions and that's that becomes extremely valuable in the operational world because if you can get into someone's head left brain and right brain feelings and logic you can start anticipating what actions they're going to take next you can direct the actions that they're going to take next because you're basically telling them the story that's in their own head when it comes to relationships and personal connection we talked about it earlier the thing that people want the most is community they want someone else who understands them they want to be with people they don't want to be alone the more you practice perspective empathy or no empathy the more you just validate that a person is there i am in this time and space with you in this moment feelings aside right that is powerful that is intimate and when whether you're talking about lovers or whether you're talking about a business exchange or whether you're talking about collaborators in a crime i'm here with you write or die let's do it right that's powerful how much of what you've learned in your role at the cia transfer over to relationships the business relationship to other aspects of life this is something you work closely with powerful people to help them out what have you learned about the commonalities about the problems that people face man uh i would say about a solid 95 of what i learned at cia carries over to the civilian world that five percent that doesn't is it would carry over in a disaster right there's knowing how to shoot on target with my non-dominant hand really only has one purpose it's not going to happen day to day right knowing how to do a dead drop that isn't discoverable by the local police force isn't going to be useful right now but it could be useful in disaster but the 95 of stuff that's useful it's all tied to the human condition it's all tied to uh being able to understand what someone's thinking understand what someone's feeling direct their thoughts direct their emotions direct their thought process win their attention win their loyalty win influence with them grow your network grow your own circle of influence i mean all of that is immensely immensely valuable uh as an example the disguise the disguise thing that we talked about earlier disguise in and of itself has mixed utility if you're brad pitt and you don't anybody know you're brad pitt you put on a level one disguise and that's great or maybe you call me and i i walk you through a level two disguise so that you can go to aruba and nobody's gonna know you're in ruby right whatever it is but even there with the five percent that doesn't apply to everyday life there's still elements that do for example when a person looks at a human being's face the first place they look is the same part of the face as if they were reading a piece of paper so in english we start from the top left and we read left to right top to bottom so when an english-speaking person interacts with another person the first thing they look at isn't their eyes it's the upper left from their point of view corner of their face yeah yeah right they look there and that's the information they get is hair color hair pattern skin color right that's it before they know anything else about the face this is one of the reasons why somebody can look at you and then you ask them what color are my eyes i don't really remember because the way they read the face they read it from left to right top to bottom so they're paying a lot of attention to the first few things they see and then they're paying less attention as they go down the face the same scrolling behavior that you see on the internet right so when you understand that through the lens of disguise it allows you to make a very powerful disguise the most important part of your disguise is here if you're english speaking right here if you're speaking some foreign languages that read right to left right if you're if it's chinese you know they're going to look from here down because they read left down so it's so interesting so yeah knowing that really helps you sort of configure the things in terms of physical appearance that's correct correct so when it comes to how to make a disguise not so useful to the ultra wealthy usually but when it comes to how to read a face or more importantly how people are going to read your face that's extremely important because now you know where to find the first signs of deception in a baseline or anything else you mentioned that the idea of having privacy is um uh is is one that we kind of we think we can but we really don't is it possible for maybe somebody like me or a regular person to disappear from the grid absolutely yeah and it's not as hard as you might think it's not convenient again convenience and security you can disappear tomorrow right i can walk you through three steps right now that can help you disappear tomorrow but none of them are convenient they're all extremely secure right the first thing you do is every piece of digital technology you have that's that is connected to you in any way is now dead you just let the battery run out forever forever you never touch it again starting at this moment what you have to do is go out and acquire a new one realistically you will not be able to acquire a new one in the united states by buying it because to do so you would tie it to your credit card you would tie it to a location a time a place a registered name whatever else so you would have to require it essentially by theft or through the black market so you would want something because you're going to need the advantage of technology without it being in your name so you go out and you steal a phone or you steal a laptop you do whatever you have to do to make sure that you can get on with the password and whatever else that might be as as dirty or as clean as you want that to be we're all morally flexible here but now you have a technological device that you can work with and then from there on you're just doing whatever you have to do whether you're stealing every step of the way or whether you uh you run a massive con keep in mind that we often talk about con men and cons do you know what the root the word that khan is a root word for confidence that's what a con man is a con man is a confidence man just somebody who is so brazenly confident that the people around them living in their own perception not perspective and their perception they're like well this guy really knows what he's talking about so i'm gonna do what he says so you can run a massive con and that can take care of your finances that can take care of your lodging whatever amount whatever else it is you are whoever you present yourself to be so if you want to go be if you want to be bill for the afternoon just go tell people your name is bill they're not going to question you so the intelligence the natural web of intelligence gathering systems we have in the united states and in the world are they going to believe for long that your bill are they until you do something that makes them think otherwise if you are consistent we talked about consistency being the superpower if you are consistent they will think you're bill forever how how difficult is that is that to do it's it's not convenient it's quite difficult is that like required training it does require training um because why do criminals always get caught because they stop being consistent criminals i i've i've as i i never hesitate to admit this but people tell me i should hesitate to admit it so now i hesitate because of the guidance i've gotten to hesitate right i like criminals i'm friends with a number of criminals because the only people who get me like right away who get me are criminals because we know what it's like to basically abandon all the rules do our own thing our own way and watch the world just keep turning yeah most people are so stuck in the in the trap of normal thought and behavior that when i tell them they just don't just go tell people your name is bill most people are going to say that's not going to work but a criminal will be like oh yeah i did that once yeah i just told everybody my name was nancy and dude and they still believe me yeah criminals just get it right so uh what happens with criminals is they go to the school of hard knocks they go to they learn criminal behavior on the job spies go to school we go to the best spy school in the world we go to langley's uh the farm right what's known as field tradecraft course ftc in a covert location for a covert period of time and covert covert covert so if anybody from ci is watching i'm not breaking any rules it's all on wikipedia but it's not coming from me yeah but we do that's how we do it they train us from 100 years of experience in the best ways to carry out covert operations which are all just criminal activities overseas we learn how to do it the right way so that we don't get caught we learn how to be consistent more importantly we learn how to create an operation that has a limited life span because the longer it lives the more at risk you are so you want operations to be short concise on the x off the x limit your room for mistakes criminals want law they default to wanting these long term operations because they don't want to have to recreate a new way to make money every 15 days you mentioned if anybody from the cia is watching uh so i've i've seen you talk about um the fact that sort of people that are currently working at the cia would uh kind of look down on the people who've left to say and they deride them especially if you go public especially if there's a book and all that kind of stuff uh do you feel the pressure of that to be quiet to to not to you know um to not do something like this conversation that we're doing today i feel the silent judgment it's that's very real i feel it for myself and i feel it for my wife who doesn't appear on camera very often but who's also former cia we we both feel the judgment we know that right now three days after this is released somebody's going to send an email on a closed network system inside cia headquarters and there's a bunch of people who are going to laugh at it a bunch of people who are going to say that who knows what it's not a bunch of people you respect probably a bunch of people who i'm trying to bring honor to whether i know them or respect them is irrelevant these are people who are out there doing the deed every day and i want to bring them honor and i want to do that in a way that i get to share what they can't share and what they won't share when they leave because they will also feel the silent pressure the pressure to the shame the judgment right but the truth is that i've i've done this now long enough the first few times that i spoke out publicly uh the response to being a positive voice for what the sacrifices that people are making it's so refreshing to be of an honest voice that people don't normally hear that it's too important one day i'm going to be gone and my kids are going to look back on all this and they're going to see their dad trying to do the right thing for the right reasons and even if my son or daughter ends up at cia and even if they get ridiculed for being no you're the bustamante kid right your dad's a total sellout whatever it might be like i want them to know you know dad was doing what he could to bring honor to the organization even when he couldn't stay in the organization anymore so you said when you were 27 i think you didn't know what the hell you're doing um so now that you're a few years older and wiser let me ask you to put on your wise sage hat and give advice to other 27 year olds or even younger 17 18 year olds that are just out of high school maybe going to college trying to figure out this life this career thing that they're on what advice would you give them about how to have a career or how to have a life they can be proud of a powerful question man um have you figured it out yet yourself no i'm i think i'm a man i'm a grand total of seven days smarter than i was at 27. it's not a good average progress there's still time there's still time so for all the young people out there deciding what to do i'm i would just say the same thing that i would say that i do say and i will say to my own kids you only have one life you only have one chance if you spend it doing what other people expect you to do you will wake up to your regret at some point i woke up when i was 38 years old my wife in many ways is still waking up to it as she watches her grandparents pass and an older generation pass away the folks that i've that really have a blessed life are the people who learn early on to live with their own rules live their own way and live every day as if it's the last day not necessarily to waste it by being wasteful or silly but to recognize that today is a day to be productive and constructive for yourself if you don't want a career today is not the day to start pursuing a career just because someone else told you to do it if you want to learn a language today's a day to find a way to buy a ticket to another country and learn through immersion if you want a date if you want to get married if you want a business today is the day to just go out and take one step in that direction and as long as you every day you just make one new step just like cia recruited me just do the next thing if the if the step seems like it's too big then there's probably two other steps that you can do before that just make constant progress build momentum move forward and live on your own terms that way you don't ever wake up to the regret and it'll be over before you know it whether you regret it or not it's true uh what what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing what's the meaning of life self-respect that's a fast answer there's a story behind it if you want the story i would love to have the story there's a covert training base in alabama in the sin south and far south and like the armpit of america where elite tier 1 operators go to learn human intelligence stuff and there's a bar inside this base and on the wall is just it's scribbles of opinions and the question in the middle of the wall says what's the meaning of life and all these elite operators over the last 25 or 30 years they all go they get drunk and they scribble their answer and they circle it with a sharpie right love family america freedom right whatever and then they're the only thing they have to do is if they're going to write something on there they have to connect it with something else on the wall at least one other thing so if they write love they can't just leave it floating there they have to write love in a little bubble and connect it to something else connect it to family whatever else when you look at that wall the word self-respect is on the wall and it's got a circle around it and then you can't see any other word because of all the things that connect to self-respect just dozens of people have written over have written their words down and been drawn and scribbled over because of all the lines that connect with self-respect so what's the meaning of life from my point of view i've never seen a better answer it's all self-respect if you don't respect yourself how can you do anything else how can you love someone else if you don't have self-respect how can you build the business you're proud of if you don't have self-respect how can you raise kids how can you make a difference how can you pioneer anything how can you just wake up and have a good day if you don't have self-respect the power of the individual that's what uh that's what makes this country great i have to say after traveling quite a bit in europe and especially in in a place of war um coming back to the united states makes me really appreciate about the the the better angels of this nation the ideals it stands for the values it stands for and i'd like to thank you for serving this nation for time and humanity for time and um for being brave enough and bold enough to still talk about it and to inspire others to educate others for having uh many amazing conversations and for honoring me by having this conversation today you're you're an amazing human thanks so much for talking today lex i appreciate the invite man and it was a joy thanks for listening to this conversation with andrew bustamante to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some words from sun tzu in the art of war let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night and when you move fall like a thunderbolt thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you