- The intelligence ecosystem blends politics, technology, human psychology, and ethical trade‑offs. It spans U.S. agencies, foreign services, private firms, and the everyday surveillance that touches all citizens.
- **Disguises**: Light (sunglasses, cap), long‑term (permanent physical changes), high‑tech prosthetics. - **Cover Legends**: Fabricated identities that justify a disguise and protect compartmentalization. - **Human Manipulation**: CIA training stresses reading "pink matter" (emotions) to steer feelings, not just detecting lies. - **Polygraph**: Measures physiological deviations from a baseline; used to spot sensitivities rather than as a pure lie detector. - **Personality Typing (MBTI)**: Quick assessment of core traits under stress to predict behavior.
Inside the World of Intelligence: From the CIA’s Daily Brief to Global Spycraft and Modern Surveillance

Q: U.S. Intelligence Structure & the President’s Daily Brief (PDB)

- The CIA is the central foreign‑intelligence collector for the 33‑agency U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). Domestic intelligence belongs to the FBI, DHS and law‑enforcement bodies; the CIA is legally barred from operating inside the United States. - Each morning around 2 a.m. the PDB is produced: a 50‑125‑page binder of short, priority‑focused paragraphs. A senior briefer selects the most relevant items; the President dictates the first‑page topics, creating fierce competition among agencies to make that page.
Q: Power Dynamics: President vs. CIA Director

- The President is the ultimate customer and commander‑in‑chief; the CIA Director functions as the CEO of the intelligence business. - Directors are presidential appointees, often chosen for loyalty rather than merit, which can skew intelligence toward short‑term presidential priorities. - Example: President Trump showed little interest in CIA assessments, preferring private intelligence firms and marginalizing the agency.
Q: Global Intelligence Powerhouses

| Agency | Core Strength | Notable Traits | |--------|---------------|----------------| | Chinese MSS | Massive asset network, cultural integration | Every Chinese abroad is a potential informant | | CIA | Budget, technology, covert‑operations capability | Leads in counter‑terrorism and advanced tech | | DGSE (France) | Economic and corporate espionage | Biggest threat to U.S. commercial secrets | | Mossad (Israel) | Willingness to use lethal force abroad | Operates with fewer political constraints | | FSB/GRU (Russia) | Traditional espionage plus cyber‑warfare | Blends intelligence with political influence |
Lex Fridman
Summary Date: 2025-11-21 21:48:07
•
5 min read
Inside the World of Intelligence: From the CIA’s Daily Brief to Global Spycraft and Modern Surveillance

Overview

The intelligence ecosystem blends politics, technology, human psychology, and ethical trade‑offs. It spans U.S. agencies, foreign services, private firms, and the everyday surveillance that touches all citizens.
U.S. Intelligence Structure & the President’s Daily Brief (PDB)

The CIA is the central foreign‑intelligence collector for the 33‑agency U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). Domestic intelligence belongs to the FBI, DHS and law‑enforcement bodies; the CIA is legally barred from operating inside the United States.
Each morning around 2 a.m. the PDB is produced: a 50‑125‑page binder of short, priority‑focused paragraphs. A senior briefer selects the most relevant items; the President dictates the first‑page topics, creating fierce competition among agencies to make that page.
Power Dynamics: President vs. CIA Director

The President is the ultimate customer and commander‑in‑chief; the CIA Director functions as the CEO of the intelligence business.
Directors are presidential appointees, often chosen for loyalty rather than merit, which can skew intelligence toward short‑term presidential priorities.
Example: President Trump showed little interest in CIA assessments, preferring private intelligence firms and marginalizing the agency.
Global Intelligence Powerhouses

Agency	Core Strength	Notable Traits
Chinese MSS	Massive asset network, cultural integration	Every Chinese abroad is a potential informant
CIA	Budget, technology, covert‑operations capability	Leads in counter‑terrorism and advanced tech
DGSE (France)	Economic and corporate espionage	Biggest threat to U.S. commercial secrets
Mossad (Israel)	Willingness to use lethal force abroad	Operates with fewer political constraints
FSB/GRU (Russia)	Traditional espionage plus cyber‑warfare	Blends intelligence with political influence
Spycraft Essentials

Disguises: Light (sunglasses, cap), long‑term (permanent physical changes), high‑tech prosthetics.
Cover Legends: Fabricated identities that justify a disguise and protect compartmentalization.
Human Manipulation: CIA training stresses reading "pink matter" (emotions) to steer feelings, not just detecting lies.
Polygraph: Measures physiological deviations from a baseline; used to spot sensitivities rather than as a pure lie detector.
Personality Typing (MBTI): Quick assessment of core traits under stress to predict behavior.
Recruitment & Training Journey

Example: Andrew Bustamante left the Air Force, applied online, and underwent a multi‑stage interview process including psychological exams, essays, and polygraph.
Training focuses on compartmentalization, baseline creation, and operating under a cover without losing one’s true self.
Private Intelligence vs. Government Agencies

Post‑9/11 the U.S. turned to private firms (Boeing, Raytheon, etc.) to expand overseas intelligence quickly.
Private firms compete on market performance; government agencies receive guaranteed funding.
The Trump administration highlighted this tension by hiring private intel firms and restricting security clearances for retiring officials.
Ethics, Secrecy, and Surveillance

Intelligence officers are selected for moral flexibility; many actions sit in a gray ethical zone.
Secrets create strategic space, but modern culture rewards whistleblowing, making secrecy harder.
NSA bulk‑metadata collection was justified as a "needle‑in‑a‑haystack" tool; public perception frames it as privacy erosion.
The UAE’s integrated ID‑chip system shows how pervasive surveillance can enforce accountability while also enabling state control.
Historical Operations & Lessons

MK‑Ultra: Cold‑War mind‑control experiments driven by fear of Soviet advances.
Operation Northwoods: 1962 false‑flag proposal rejected by JFK, illustrating extreme ideas can surface within agencies.
9/11 Commission: Many conspiracy theories arise from incompetence and subsequent cover‑ups rather than malicious intent.
High‑Profile Cases and Debates

Trump vs. CIA: Preference for private intel reduced CIA influence.
Edward Snowden: Legally a criminal; publicly a whistle‑blower. The true impact of prevented attacks remains unknowable.
Jeffrey Epstein: Intelligence agencies interacted with him as a nexus of powerful individuals; asset types include reporters, access agents, and agents of influence.
UFOs/UAP: Government focus is on aviation safety and potential foreign platforms; private firms may analyze data for economic forecasting.
Human Element & Personal Cost

Agents face strained families, substance abuse, mental‑health challenges, and profound loneliness.
Consistency over time builds trust; reliable patterns are more valuable than occasional heroic acts.
Ukraine Conflict & Information Warfare

Russia’s strategic win is resource control (energy, food) rather than outright conquest.
Western aid mirrors WWII Lend‑Lease, creating future debt for Ukraine.
Both sides flood English‑language media with narratives to shape global opinion.
Future Outlook

The U.S. system’s blend of political appointment and merit creates chronic tension between short‑term agendas and long‑term security.
Private intelligence will keep growing, driven by market incentives but lacking public accountability.
Technological advances (behavioral biometrics, IoT surveillance) will accelerate data collection, demanding new ethical frameworks.
Understanding human psychology—emotions, loneliness, need for connection—remains the most potent tool for espionage and diplomacy.
Advice for the Next Generation

Live by personal rules, not external expectations.
Take daily incremental steps toward education, relationships, and career.
Consistency builds credibility; inconsistency exposes you.
Self‑respect is the core meaning of life; without it, other achievements lose value.
Conclusion

Effective intelligence requires secrecy, but democratic societies must balance that with accountability. An informed, self‑respecting citizenry that questions power while recognizing the practical limits of surveillance is the best safeguard against abuse.
Intelligence work thrives at the intersection of politics, technology, and human nature; maintaining long‑term security demands merit‑based leadership, ethical oversight, and a vigilant public that understands both the power and the limits of secrecy.
Full Transcript

- 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.
- The following is a conversation
with Andrew Bustamante,
former CIA Covert Intelligence Officer
and US Air Force Combat veteran,
including the job of
operational targeting,
encrypted communications
and launch operations
for 200 nuclear intercontinental
ballistic missiles.
Andrew's over seven years as a CIA spy,
have given him a skillset
and a perspective on the world
that is fascinating to explore.
This is the Lex Fridman 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,
it's primarily looking outward
outside the United States.
- Correct, CIA is the Foreign
Intelligence Collection.
King spoke 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 CIA, FBI
and the other US intelligence
agencies like the DIA,
Defense Intelligence Agency,
Department of Homeland Security,
NSA, National Security Agency.
And there's a list...
- There's a list of about 33 different
intelligence organizations.
- It's like the army, the Navy has it.
All the different organizations
have their own intelligence groups.
So is there clear lines here to be drawn
or is the CIA the giant
integrator of all of these?
- 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 gotta 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
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.
It's somewhere between,
I would give it probably
between 50 and 125 pages a day.
It's produced every day around
two o'clock in the morning
by a dedicated group of analysts.
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.
'Cause 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 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 cases.
And 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
at 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 wanna 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 wanna 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 customer says.
That has backfired in the past,
if you haven't already started seeing how
that could go wrong, that
has 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 president really
leads the focus of the CIA?
- The president is the
commander-in-chief for the military.
But the executive, the president
is also the executive for the entirety
of the intelligence community.
So he's 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 gonna 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 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's 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,
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 go in front of Congress
and they have to have the support
of multiple legislatures or legislators.
But the challenge is that
the shortlist 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 extremely effective
even within the flawed system.
The challenge is
how much more effective
could we be if we improved?
And 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,
authoritarian powers and
a shrinking US economy.
A growing Chinese economy.
And it's just, we have
questions, hard questions
we need to ask ourselves about
how we're gonna handle the future.
- What aspect of that
communication between the president
and the CIA could be fixed 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 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, he or she...
- In the United States.
- In the United States according
to our current constitution.
(Andrew laughing)
But they're very limited
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
a 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 relationship, so first...
- What's the good and the
bad? Sorry to interrupt.
- So lemme start with the good first
'cause 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 gonna 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 gonna take funding away,
or she will take funding away.
They're gonna take attention away.
They're going to shut down
your operations, your missions.
They're gonna 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.
- [Andrew] He did not trust it, yeah.
- He was a disinterested
customer of the information.
- Exactly right, and then what
do disinterested customers do?
They go find someone else
to create their product.
And that's exactly what Donald Trump did.
And 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 this kind of thing
that you're talking about,
over time, they start hearing information
they want to hear.
The agency starts producing
only the kind of information
they want to hear.
And the leader's worldview
starts becoming distorted
to where the propaganda
they generate is also
the thing that the intelligence
agencies provide to them.
And so they start believing
their own propaganda
and they start getting
distorted view of the world.
Sorry for the sort of 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,
I prefer to share my assessment.
Why I assess things a
certain way rather than just
what's my random opinion.
And 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
for his 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.
There was an assumption
that you would be able to
successfully take Kiev.
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 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 Vladi Zelensky
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
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 Zelensky and 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 took Crimean in 14 days.
He basically created
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 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
'cause 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've 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 gonna win in 14 days.
I said that they would win in 14 days
'cause that was the
predominant calculation.
Once the first invasion didn't
work, then the military does
what professional militaries
do, man, they reevaluate,
they reorganize leaders
and then 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.
- [Lev] What's the third?
- Yeah, what you need is
control of natural resources,
which they're taking in the East.
And you need access to the heartbeat,
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 aggressor had a seat
at the negotiation table
to allow Ukraine the ability
to even export one of its top exports.
If Russia would've said no,
then they would not have had that.
That's like someone holding your throat.
It's like somebody
holding your jugular vein
and saying, "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?
So starting from Mariupol,
the Haisyn region,
- All the way to Odessa.
- [Lex] All the way to Odessa
- And into Moldova.
I believe all of 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 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 the pain.
What are they gonna do in the winter?
Because without Russian gas,
their people are gonna freeze to death.
- [Lex] Ukrainian people?
- People all over NATO.
Ukraine, everybody knows
Ukrainians at risk.
Everybody knows Ukrainians are dying.
The game of war
isn't even played majoratively
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.
- [Lex] The flow of
resources and energy, food
- Attention, exactly right.
- I was on the front in the
Haisyn region, this very area
that you're referring to, and
I spoke to a lot of people
and 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 huge amount of artillery
and slaughter of civilians, essentially.
- They're not gonna
use artillery in Odessa
because Odessa is too
important to Russian culture.
It's gonna be even uglier than that.
It's going to be clearing of
streets, clearing of buildings,
person by person, troop by troop.
It'll be a lot like
what it was in Mariupol.
- [Lex] Just shooting at civilians.
- Because they can't afford
to just do bombing raids
because they're gonna
destroy cultural significant
architecture that's just too important
to the Russian culture.
And that's gonna 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,
the Russian soldiers are saying,
the thing the Russian
soldiers really believe
is that they're freeing,
they're liberating the
Ukrainian people from Nazis.
And they believe this
because I visited Ukrainian,
I spoke to the over a hundred,
probably a couple hundred Ukrainian people
from different walks of life.
It feels like the
Russian soldiers at least
aren't 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 true power.
You don't see Xi Jinping worrying about
hearts and minds in China.
You don't see it in North Korea,
you don't see it 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 is absolutely sad.
I am not in any way, shape or form saying
that my assessment on this is enriching
or enlightening or 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
when it comes to enforcing
its own outcomes.
So the real risk gain
scenario here for Russia
is significantly in
favor of gain over risk.
The other thing that I think is important
to talk about is 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 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.
Every piece of news coming outta 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 wanna be named.
There's nothing that links back
responsibility there, right?
There's nothing that
can go to court there.
But the information still gets released
and that's enough to
make Ukrainians believe
that the United States is gonna help them,
or that the West is gonna help them.
It's enough to make Russians think
that they're going to lose.
And maybe 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 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 gorilla
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 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, 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 Lend-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 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 enactment of the Lend-Lease 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 a bill that Ukraine
is just racking up.
It's like when you go to a restaurant
and 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 Nazi invasion.
We signed the same thing into motion.
Do you know 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 gonna look like
for Ukrainians, right?
What are the true handful of outcomes,
the realistic outcomes
that could come of this,
and 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.
We're a democracy, but we're
also a capitalist country.
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 layaway,
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 the other, there's
some aspect of this war
that I've just noticed that one
of the people I talked to
said that, "All great nations
have a independence
war", have to have a war
for their independence.
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 try 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 war
to define the heart of
what the country is.
So 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, in their perspective,
after the war is won.
- It's a difficult situation
because I'm trying to make sure 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.
In the American Revolution was won
because of French involvement.
French ships, French
troops, French generals,
French military might.
The independence of 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 there.
No one is stepping into that
because we live in a world right now
where there simply is no economic benefits
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 on
natural gas pipelines
that flow through Eastern Ukraine.
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.
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
investments in Ukraine.
Ukrainian output, Ukrainian food
goes to the Middle East and Africa.
It doesn't go to Europe.
So the whole, 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, as 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 the 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 possibilities, as you've said.
We're not saying 0% 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.
- [Andrew] Absolutely.
- And so 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 Covid?
China swooped into Hong Kong
violently beating protesters,
killing them in the street,
imprisoning people 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.
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.
- [Andrew] 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 HIMARS systems.
So you mentioned sort of
Putin can't afford to lose,
but winning can look in different ways.
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 can have narratives
of winning that returned back
to the, what was it?
The beginning of this
year before the invasion?
That Crimea is still with Russia.
There's some kind of
negotiated thing about Donbas
where it still stays with the Ukraine,
but it there's some...
- Public government.
Just like what they have
in Georgia right now.
- And that could still be
defined through mechanisms...
- [Andrew] As Russia winning.
- As Russia winning for Russia
and then for Ukraine as Ukraine winning
and for the West as democracy winning.
And you kind of negotiate.
I mean that seems to be
how geopolitics works,
everybody can walk away
with a win-win story,
and then the world progresses,
with 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.
Zelensky 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 gonna
be part of the negotiations.
But the thing to keep in mind also is
that a negotiated piece really just means
a negotiated ceasefire.
And we've seen this
happen all over the world.
North Korea and South
Korea are technically still
just in negotiated cease fire.
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 wanna 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 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 unrolled
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 sort of to
take the pragmatic view.
Don't you think it's possible that
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 that 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,
I mean, you remember what
happened in Chechnya,
without turning to Chechnya level,
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 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 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.
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 circumstances were aligned.
It was a corrupt country
that self-identified
as Russian in many ways.
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 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 as Romania?
Is it as shiny a star as France?
Like it's got a lot of democratic freedom
based countries in Europe
to compete against,
to be the 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 democracy and freedom.
- Outside of resource,
in terms of the shininess of
the star, I would argue yes.
If you look at how much it captivated
the attention of the world.
- The attention of the world has made no
material difference, man,
that's what I'm saying.
- That's your estimation,
but are you sure we can't...
If you can convert that
into political influence,
into money, don't you
think attention is money?
- Attention is money in democracies
and capitalist countries, yes.
- Which serves as a counterweight
to sort of authoritarian regimes.
So for Putin resources matter,
for the United States
also resources matter,
but the attention and the
belief of the people also matter
because that's how you attain
and maintain political power.
- So going to that exact
example, then I would highlight
that our current
administration has the lowest
approval ratings of 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 dissent
coming from the economy
and some of the dissent coming
from the Great Recession
or the great resignation
and whatever's happening
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 stand
next to the president
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.
- But again, empirically
this is, I look at things
through a very empirical lens,
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'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 I think, correct me if I'm wrong,
but I believe the Democrats
went into full like support
of Ukraine on the idealogical side.
And then I guess republicans are saying,
"Why are we wasting money?
The gas prices are growing up."
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 about just like
whatever the heck captivates
Twitter, and we're gonna
use that for politics.
- You're right in the 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 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 weapons systems,
our military is getting stronger,
we get to test military systems
in combat in Ukraine, that's priceless.
In the world of 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 essentially moot
because Ukraine is not
a geopolitical player.
It was not 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's currently going on.
If the Ukraine conflict
resolved itself today
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
or 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 onto 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 breaks my heart
how much generational hatred is born.
I happen to be from, 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.
Because I speak the language,
I can appreciate the beauty
of the literature, the music, the art,
the cultural history of the 20th century
through all the dark times,
through all the hell of
the dark sides of authoritarian regimes,
the destruction of war,
there is still just the 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,
fought mostly by the
politicians, the leaders.
- People are beautiful.
And that's what you're talking about.
People are beautiful creatures.
Culture and art 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 genocide happen in Rwanda.
We've seen horrible things
happen, but people persevere.
Language, culture, arts,
science, they all persevere.
They all shine through.
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 arts 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.
- [Lex] in North Korea?
In North Korea.
Nobody knows these things.
- How do you know about
Taekwondo in North Korea?
I have questions.
(both laughing)
That's fascinating, like,
people don't think about that,
but the culture, the beauty of the people
still flourishes even in
the toughest of places.
- Absolutely and we always will.
We always will because
that is what people do.
And 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
that I'll probably also ask
you about later on is things
that destroy the
possibility of perseverance,
which is things like nuclear war,
things that can do such tremendous damage
that we will never recover.
But yeah, amidst your pragmatic pessimism,
(Andrew laughing)
I think both you and
I have a kind of 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.
I've gotten a chance to
interact with a lot of Israelis
while in Ukraine.
Just incredible people in terms
of both training and skills.
Just all and every front.
American soldiers too.
Just American military is incredible.
The competence and skill of the
military, the United States,
Israeli, got to interact,
and Ukrainian as well.
- [Andrew] It's striking.
- It's striking.
It's beautiful, 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 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, I interviewed
the CTO of Lockheed Martin.
It breaks my heart as a
person who loves engineering
because of the cover of secrecy,
we'll never get to know some
of the incredible engineering
that happens inside of
Lockheed Martin and Boeing...
- [Andrew] Raytheon.
- You know, there's kind of
this idea that these are,
you know, people have conspiracy theories
and they're kind of assign evil
to these companies to some part.
But I think there's beautiful
people inside those companies,
brilliant people and
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 know how much you know,
(both laughing)
or just other intelligence
agencies in India,
Pakistan, I've also heard...
- Yep, RAW is powerful.
And so is ISS or ISSI.
- And then of course European
nations in Germany and France.
Yeah, so what can you say about
the power of the influence
of the different intelligence agencies
within their nation and outside?
- Yeah, so to answer your
question, 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 that's their way of serving
the middle kingdom jungle,
the central kingdom,
the Chinese word for China.
So they're the strongest,
the most intelligence
service in terms of reach,
most assets, most informants,
most intelligence.
- So it is deeply
integrated with a citizenry?
- Correct, with their culture.
You know what, a Chinese person
who lives in Syria thinks of themself as?
A Chinese person.
Do you know what a Chinese person,
a Chinese national living
in the United States
thinks of themself 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 Mossad operates
is similar kind of thing
because people from Israel
living abroad still think
of themselves as Jewish and Israeli 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
than the number of people in China.
- So when it comes to
reach China wins that game.
When it comes to professional
capability, it's the CIA
by far because budget
wise, capability wise,
weapons 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 wanna partner on counter-narcotics
and counter-drug and counter-terrorism
and counter-Uyghur, you name it.
People wanna partner with CIA.
So CIA 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 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're
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 Mossad.
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, the CIA will let
an Americans stay in jail
in Russia unlawfully and
seek a diplomatic solution.
I mean, the United States has let people,
there are two gentlemen in from the 1950s
who were imprisoned in China for 20 years
waiting for diplomatic
solutions to their release.
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.
- They do amazing things.
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, it's
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 GRU
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 Mossad is doing a good job of that.
So this the psychological
information warfare,
and it seems like the CIA also
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 General Petraeus used to be
the director of CIA, 2000...
- And your workout
partner, I read about this.
- [Andrew] And workout partner.
- So 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
'cause he's coming on this podcast.
- Oh, excellent man.
- So can you say
what you've learned from
the man 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 learned
in terms of how to get
strong in the gym, or anything about life?
- Two things right away.
And one of 'em 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 he talked openly about, I asked him,
"How do you keep 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 it. I've never 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
goes in favor of discipline
and loyalty and commitment, I let it run.
If it starts getting
destructive or damaging,
then I have my leadership
team step into fix it."
But when it comes to the mythos,
the myth of him being
superpowered soldier,
that's what he wants every soldier to be.
So he lets it run.
And 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 for me.
- So the catalyst of
the virality of the myth
is just being mysterious.
- 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 use 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 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 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,
absentee father, missing birthdays.
We all say how sad it's to miss birthdays
and miss anniversaries, yada, yada, yada.
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 when you're not there
to handle the bloody lip that
your 9-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?
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 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 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.
(Andrew laughing)
So 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.
You spoken positively about that world
the good it does.
And yet you are also a family
man and you value that.
What's that calculation like?
What's that trade off like?
- 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 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 she cried. My wife was a badass.
I was like the accidental spy,
but my wife was really
good at what she does.
And she cried and she was
like, "What do we do now?"
Like, it's what we've
always wanted, a child,
but we're in this thing right now
and like, there's no space for a child.
So long story short, we had our baby,
CIA brought us back to have the baby.
And when we started having
the conversations about,
"Hey, what do we do next?"
'Cause 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 can both operate together
again during the day.
But CIA, they had no patience
for that conversation.
There, 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
over their own family.
And they've done it even though
it's made them a, you know,
abuse alcohol and abuse substances
and 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 at CIA a are just amazing.
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 top secret,
we had TSSCI 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 specialized.
But 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 'cause
she loved that kind of...
- And now you're just one of
us living in the, you know,
the cloud of mystery.
- [Andrew] Exactly.
Not really 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 direction
of their thoughts, persuading
them, winning negotiations.
You still get to do that.
You do that every day.
- And you go 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?
Were you recruited and
what did the job entail?
To the degree you can speak about.
- Feel free to direct me
if I'm getting too boring.
- No, every aspect of
this is super exciting.
(both laughing)
- So I was leaving the United
States Air Force in 2007.
I was a lieutenant getting
ready to pin on captain.
My five years was up
and I was a very bad fit
for the US Air Force.
I was an Air Force Academy
graduate, not by choice,
but by lack of opportunity,
lack of 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 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
had short hair at the time?
- Yeah, you have to, Military regulations,
you can't have hair longer than one inch.
- Okay, and the beautiful
hair you have now
that came to be in the CIA or after?
- So I discovered I had messy hair in CIA
'cause I used to go muj, we called it muj.
I used to go mujahideen style.
Big burly beard and crazy wacky hair.
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 is a janitor
or they think that he is 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 disguises.
It's what's known as a level two disguise.
One of my favorite disguises to don
was just dilapidated brown guy.
(both laughing)
- Can you actually, we'll
just take a million tangents.
What's a level two disguise?
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 call light disguise.
So that's essentially, you put
on sunglasses and a ball cap
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
'cause they just need to
not look like they look
in the tabloid or not
look like they look in TV.
That's level one.
Lemme 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 feet.
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
baseball hat and sunglasses,
nobody's gonna say, "You're a spy."
But when you're caught with
a custom made, you know,
nose 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 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 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's 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?
What about like, you know, what actors do,
which is the..
- [Andrew] method acting.
- Yeah, the method acting sort of
developing a backstory in your own mind
and then you start, you know, pretending
that you host a podcast
and teach at a university
and then do research and so on,
just so that people can believe
that you're not actually a agent.
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 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 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 get back to a position of safety.
- Is it possible to do that?
So 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
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 I tend to believe that you are able
to communicate a trustworthiness somehow
if you just are who you are.
And I think, I suppose
method actors are trying
to achieve that by becoming something
and 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 away?
- 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 it 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 them,
and just so the women
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 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 thought.
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 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'm asking,
and the thing I was implying is
that creating an artificial relationship
is 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,
my sense is you gotta be really
damn good at that kind of thing.
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 get past that
bullshit detector is tough.
It's a tough skill.
- [Andrew] Well, it's interesting,
so 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 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 manila
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 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 trailer trash,
they might think that
you're a migrant worker,
but they never think you're a spy.
And that lesson in everyday
life is immensely powerful.
If you're trying to take your boss's job,
as long as you don't ever
look like 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 will be,
just show some kind of characteristics
that bin you in some other way.
- Exactly right. You have to be in a bin.
Just choose the bin.
(Andrew laughing)
- Alright, so how
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 don't believe that micro
expressions alone do anything.
I also don't believe
that micro expressions
without an effective baseline 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 baloney.
In my world, that's baloney.
- Like the way you move your
eyes or something like that?
- [Andrew] 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 it's 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's like a set of
like interrogation trajectories
you can go down that can
help you figure out a person.
- Technically they're interview concepts.
- [Lex] Like this podcast concepts.
- Correct, because an interrogation
and interrogation is something
very different than an interview.
And in the world of professionals
and interrogation is very different.
- What's the difference?
The nature or how relaxed
the thing is or what?
- So in an interrogation
there's a clear pattern of dominance.
There's no equality.
Also, there's no escape.
You are there until the
interrogator is done with you.
Anybody who's ever been
reprimanded by mom and dad
knows what an interrogation feels like.
Anybody who'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 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, always.
- I'm sitting here, as
you've spoken about,
my power here is I'm
the quiet one listening.
(both laughing)
- You're exactly right. Guess
where this conversation goes?
Anywhere you choose to take it,
because you're the one asking questions.
Every time I answer a question,
I'm 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 start asking me questions
that should, you know...
But you're saying that there's,
through conversation, you
can call it interviewing,
you can start to
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 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 front of mind.
From those baselines, now we can push
through more intentional
questions to test...
- [Lex] Got it.
- To test whether or not
the person is being truthful
because they're operating
within their baseline.
Or if you are triggering
sensitivities outside
of their baseline, and then you
can start to see their tells.
- That's fascinating, yeah baseline,
like even like the tells, right?
The eye contact.
Like you've probably
already formed a baseline.
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.
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.
Your right. My left, right?
Which is usually someone who's,
if you ask micro expressionists,
that's someone who's referencing fact.
That's not necessarily
what's happening for you
because you're pulling
concepts out of the air.
So it's also a place that you
reference something other than fact.
It's a place for you to find creativity.
So if I just thought that you were lying
because you look up and to 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.
- [Andrew] Right eye dominance.
- Right eye dominance is gonna
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 played
or taught in a very structured manner.
And then the way that you use the skills
after 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 a kind of the study
of human psychology?
Isn't that what a psychologist
does? Or a psychiatrist?
What, from this process, have you learned
about human nature?
- [Andrew] Human nature?
- I mean, I suppose the answer to that
could be a book, and
probably will be a book.
- [Andrew] I'll save you that, yeah.
- But sort of is there
things that are surprising
about human nature,
surprising to us civilians
that you could speak to?
- Yes, one thing is extremely
surprising about human nature,
which is funny 'cause that's
not the answer I would've 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 we all wanna
pretend like we're strong.
We all wanna pretend like
we're, you know, independent.
We all wanna 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 more practical answer
about what I've learned
to be the truth is that
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 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 discover in 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 people
from all walks of life.
Including people that others
might identify as evil or hard
as 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 longing is still there.
Even if it's an ember, it's there.
It's the reason why in World War I
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
like political leaders
and people in conflict at 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 is difficult
because it's a game of chicken
is 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 community.
- What was your recruitment
process and training process
and things you could speak to
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 dip shit at 27.
I'm not much better now at 42, but yeah...
- You owe me both.
(both laughing)
Fake it till you make it.
- 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 and 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, 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 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 it was a person
from Northern Virginia 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 Langley, Virginia.
They didn't say CIA, they said Langley.
I put one and one together and I was like,
maybe this is CIA.
Like this could, how cool is this?
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 remember
thinking, there's no way
that happened and this isn't real.
And then a day later I got
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 as 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 a person
who only told me their
first name 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
and maybe your personality such that...
- [Andrew] That's an adventure.
- It's an adventure and 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
into the adventure one step at a time.
- 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 marched when
they told you to march,
shined your shoes when they
told you to shine your shoes.
Human beings love being told what to do.
- What about the training process
for becoming a covert CIA agent?
- So the interview process is...
- Yeah, the interview process too.
How rigorous was that?
- 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 during the interview process is when
they do your psychological evaluations.
They do personality assessments,
they do skills assessments.
They'll start sending you back to your,
wherever you're living with assignments.
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, yada.
Like super specific stuff.
It's kind of stressful, 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 that's
ever gonna respond to you.
And then you hope you just
send it into the ether
and you hope that you sent it right.
You hope that you wrote 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
in this other nondescript city."
And then you start meeting,
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, 'cause he's still undercover,
is a guy I met during
those interview processes.
And I was like, oh, we met
and I saw what he was wearing.
He saw what I was wearing. I was brown.
- So you immediately connected
and you liked the people there?
- Close. More like we
immediately judge each other.
'Cause we're all untrained.
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 clubbing shirt.
I don't know why I thought
it would be a good idea to go
to a CIA interview in
like a clubbing shirt
with my buttons unbuttoned down to here.
And he was like, 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 and being like,
"Dude, you were just another
white guy in a black suit.
They're not looking for
you. But here you are."
So it was just, those kinds
of things were so interesting
'cause we were totally wrong
about what CIA was looking for.
Until you're in, you have no
idea what they're looking for
and 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
Per 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,
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 one that have to make
the judgment call as to which one it is.
Which is why you might
see multiple interviewers
over the course of multiple polygraphs.
But that's really what they're all about.
So I mean, they're
extremely uncomfortable,
like they're mentally uncomfortable.
But then there's also, you sit on a pad
because the pad is supposed to be able
to tell like your body movements,
but also like your sphincter
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.
- Are they the whole time
monitoring the readings?
- Yeah, from like a big,
they've got multiple screens
and 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's gonna
vary you from your baseline.
And the whole time you're
worried your heart's racing
and your blood pressure's increasing,
which is a variance from baseline.
So yeah, I means an interesting art.
- Or your baseline.
- [Andrew] Correct.
- Maybe there's some people
that are just chilling the whole time
and that's their baseline.
- But that's what they're doing.
They're establishing a baseline.
I mean, I guess that means
the polygraph is a skill
that you develop 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.
And the interviewer 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 a unique skill.
I mean, a really good polygrapher
is immensely valuable.
But it's the misnomers,
the misconceptions about
polygraphs are vast.
- You also mentioned personality tests.
That's really interesting.
So how effective are 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 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.
So there's been criticisms
of that kind of test.
- There have been
criticisms for a long time.
- And you think there's value?
- Absolutely. Absolutely.
And there's a few reasons why, right?
So first, MBTI makes the claim
that your core personality
doesn't change over time.
And that's how it's calibrated.
And one of the big
arguments is that people say
that your personality
can change over time.
In my experience, the
MBTI is exactly correct.
Your core personality does not change
because your core personality 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 much do you like
being around other people?
How much do you like being alone?
Do you make judgements
or do you analyze information?
That's what's so powerful about MBTI,
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 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, 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 only know I
think the first letter,
it's introvert and extroverted, right?
- [Andrew] Yep.
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.
There's the right thorough way of doing it
and then there's like fun
internet way of doing.
And do you mind sharing
what your personality...
- [Andrew] Yeah my type index?
- Yes.
- I'm an ENTP, that's an extrovert,
intuitor, perceiver, 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 intuitive, she's a sensor.
I'm a thinker. She's a feeler.
I'm a perceiver. She's a judger.
- Is there a good science on like
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 think there's a lot of good data
in personalities writ large.
Because there's not a lot of money
to be made in personality testing.
But I would say that
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 taught how
to assess the code of others.
With those two things kind of combined
'cause then you have
experience in learning.
It becomes very useful.
And you can have high
confidence 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,
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's 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,
or at least the science says so,
a stable, consistent intelligence.
Unfortunately, you know,
the G factor that they call
that if you do a barrage
of IQ test that's going
to consistently represent that G factor.
And we're all born with
that and we can't fix it.
And 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
on things that you're
never gonna be good at.
And you get to double down on the things
that you're already naturally
skilled or interested in.
So there's always a
silver lining to a cloud.
But I know now that I
will never be a ballerina
or a ballerino.
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've 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 gonna be a
ballerina (indistinct)?
- Because I'm not graceful.
- And you've learned this
through years of experience.
- [Andrew] Yeah, exactly.
- Well, I don't know if
there's an MBTI equivalent
for grace of movement.
- I think it's called S sensor.
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'd have 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.
- [Andrew] You're a musician man.
- Well the music, I don't
know if that correlated
- [Andrew] To be able to plug guitar.
- Sure, yeah, that's true.
There is that physical component,
but I think deeper
'cause there's a technical aspect to that
that's just like, it's less about feel.
But I do know jiujitsu, 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.
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 little...
- [Andrew] Spiritual orientation.
- Yeah, 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 interesting.
Yeah, you're just like born
with that or something.
- My wife is brilliant and
she still walks into doors.
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 for some reason really hilarious.
That's good for that.
(Andrew laughing)
You've been asked, I think on Reddit,
"Are there big secrets that you know
that could lend you and our
country in terrible trouble
if you came out to the public?"
And you answered, "Yes, I
wish I could forget them."
So lemme 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 deeper question is
what is the value of
secrecy and transparency?
- The standard classification
for all human intelligence operations
is something called 25X2, 25 by 2.
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 potentially dead, which
is either way, that's when
it can come out according to
its typical classification.
The value of secrets 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 change the course of fate.
So 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 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 technology changes.
It's also surprisingly difficult
as our culture becomes one
where people want notoriety,
people wanna 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.
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.
- [Lex] It's 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 makes it difficult to keep secrets,
especially when technology is
going in the same direction.
- Where is the line?
And by the way, I'm one
of those old school people
with the secrets.
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 of the secret,
it's a test of sorts, 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 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 advantage
of 'em 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.
- Let me ask you about
lying and trust and so on.
So I don't believe I've been contacted by
or interacted with the CIA,
the MI6, the FSB, Massod
or any other intelligence agency.
I'm kind of offended.
(Andrew laughing)
But 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 the radar?
- [Andrew] Because you're...
- Who's interesting
- 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.
- The networks are important too?
- Correct, 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 old school planner,
whatever it might be.
But for sure, you are
an intelligence target.
It just may be that you're
not suitable to be a person
who reports foreign intelligence.
We've gotta 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, so to speak to that,
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.
- [Andrew] That's good.
I'm glad to hear that.
- So the moment you start
to think about germs, right,
like you start to freak out
and you become sort of
paralyzed by the stress of it.
So you have to balance those two things.
If you think about all the things
that can hurt you in this world
and all the risk you can take
it can overwhelm your life.
That said, the cyber
world is a weird world.
Because it doesn't have the same...
I know not to cross the street
without looking each way
because there's a physical
intuition about it.
I'm not sure, you know,
I'm a computer science guy,
so I have some intuition,
but it's the cyber world,
it's really hard to build up an intuition
what is safe and not.
I've seen a lot of people, you know,
just a 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 everything's wide open
for physical access of those systems,
which is kind of incredible for somebody,
that sounds really shady, but it's not.
I've written key loggers,
like things that record
everything you type
and the mouse you moved
and like, I did during my PhD,
I was recording everything
you do on your device
and everything you do on
your computer to under, 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 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.
I mean, you could do so much.
Like I can run the entirety of
the CIA just myself if I was,
and I imagine there's a lot of
really good hackers like that
out there, much better than me.
So I try 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 I always advocate is
the low hanging fruit is
what keeps you from being
a target of opportunity
because you're half-assed
hackers, you're 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 $5 million
if you just gimme your bank account.
That's what they're looking for.
And 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 will create a dedicated,
customized vector of attacking
your specific security apparatus.
And because security
is always after, right?
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
countermeasure is deployed.
- Yeah, I tend to think
exactly as you said,
that the low hanging fruit
protects against like yeah,
crimes of opportunity.
And then I assume that
people can just hack in
if they really want.
- 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, to be honest,
it keeps me honest not to be a douche bag
or like not
to assume everything could be public
and so don't trade in information
that could hurt people
if it was made public.
So I try to do that.
And the thing I try to make sure
is I like home alone style, try...
(Andrew laughing)
- [Andrew] A booby trap.
- I really would like
to know if I was hacked.
And so I try to assume
that I will be hacked
and detect it.
- [Andrew] Have a trip wire of some sort.
- Yeah, a trip wire through everything.
And not paranoid trip
wires, just like open door.
But I think that's probably the future
of life on this earth like,
everybody of interest
is going to be hacked.
That hopefully inspires, now
this is outside of company.
These are individuals I mean.
There's of course if
you're actually operating,
like who am I?
I'm just a scientist
person, 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 trying to be ahead
of like the best hackers in
the world that are attacking.
But that requires a team
that like full time is their focus.
Even then you still get in trouble.
- Correct, so what I've
seen as the norm, well
what I've seen is the cutting
edge standard for corporations
and the ultra wealthy
and even intelligence organizations is
that we have trip wires.
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 trip wire 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 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 'cause they don't care
about the price of the phone.
Pick up the next phone and we move on.
That's the best thing that
you can do essentially
outside of trying to out hack the hackers.
And then even in your intelligence
and military worlds where
cyber warfare is active,
the people who are aggressing
are not trying to create
aggression that beats security.
They're trying to find
a 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 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 security paradigm.
People just one up each other
because it's never worth it
to just get to the same level.
You're always trying to outdo each other.
- Yeah, then maybe like banks
have to fight that fight.
But not everybody can...
Yeah, no, so you're saying I
operate at the state of the art
with the trip wires, this is good to know.
- [Andrew] Absolutely, man.
- And also just not using
anybody else's services,
doing everything myself.
So that's harder to figure out
what the heck this person is doing
'cause if I'm using
somebody else's service,
like I did with QNAP.
(Andrew laughing)
I have a QNAP NAS I used for cold storage
of unimportant things
that are large videos.
And I don't know if you know,
but QNAP is a company that
does now 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 thousands of machines.
And they asked,
you can get your data back if you pay,
I forget what it was, but it was
as about a couple thousand dollars.
And the QNAP can get all the data back
for their customers if they
pay, I think $2 million.
But that came from me relying
on the systems of others for security.
I assumed this company would
have their security handled.
But then those very
valuable lessons to me.
I now have 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 subcontractors.
So, you know, fast forward,
you know, a few years
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 provider.
And the army doesn't know
that the provider is changing.
I mean, this is a strategy.
The idea of going through
third party systems
is identifying the vulnerability
in the supply chain.
That's a savvy offensive practice
for more than just, you
know, cyber hackers.
- Let me ask you about physical hacking.
So I'm now like, I'm a introvert,
so I'm a paranoid about
all social interaction.
But how much truth is there?
It's kind of a funny question.
How suspicious should I be
when I'm traveling in Ukraine
or different parts of the world
when an attractive female walks up to me
and shows any kind of a attention?
(Andrew laughing)
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 sex-spionage.
That's the term that we jokingly
call it, is sex-spionage.
But yeah, the art of attraction, appeal,
the manifestation of feelings
through sexual manipulation,
all of that is 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 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 gonna be
that much more willing
to talk to an American
who is also attractive.
So it's (indistinct).
- Well in all definitions,
so it could be all elements of charisma.
So, you know, attractiveness
in a dynamic sense of the word.
So it's visual attractiveness.
But the smile, the humor,
the wit, the flirting,
all that kind of stuff that could be used
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 thoughts, to intelligence.
And then you've got all
the various varieties
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 preferences,
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 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 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 who to trust.
Like how do you know your wife
or how does your wife know
that you're not a double
agent from Russia?
- There's a large element of experience
and time that goes into that.
She's also trained and I
think my wife and I also..
- [Lex] So you think,
- Yeah, my wife and I also
have the benefit of being recruited
young and together where...
- So over time you can
start to figure out things
that are very difficult to...
So you form the baseline,
you start to understand the person,
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.
So I don't ever wanna 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 consistent feedback as to what
that baseline is for them
- So would form a good
model, predictive model of
what their behavior's 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 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 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?
'Cause 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 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 be able to do
that kind of thing effectively.
- And 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 chip that just reads everything.
How heavy are they walking?
How much time do they sleep?
How many times do 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?
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 be behave.
Just that time savings is immense.
- Something you've also spoken
about is private intelligence
and the power and 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 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 9/11,
going all the way back to 2001.
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 fiefdoms and
there was infighting
and there wasn't good intel sharing.
But more than that, they
identified that we were operating
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 outta the 9/11 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
the presence of private
intelligence officers.
From then until now,
it's become a budgetary thing.
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 Palantir
play a role in this?
- Palantir is one of those
organizations that was trying
to pitch their product to
an intelligence community
because it's a fantastic product on paper.
But the challenge was
the proprietary services,
the proprietary systems
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 the close connection
between Peter Thiel and Donald Trump,
did that have a role to play
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 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 Thiel into CIA
only to lose Thiel's contract
as soon as Trump left 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 like
presidentially appoint
Peter Thiel into a position
of government authority.
- What do you think of
figures like Peter Thiel?
And I'm sure there's
figures of similar scale
and reach and power in
private intelligence.
What do you think about their role
and power in this whole,
like without public accountability
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's overseeing private intelligence
is not government legislation.
It's the law of economics.
If they produce a superior product,
then they will have 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 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 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 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 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 away the incentive
of senior officials leaving
their service in order
to just profiteer in the
private intelligence world.
- So in that way, he was
kind of supporting the CIA
in making sure that competent people
and experience people stay
and say are incentivized
to stay there.
- Correct, I think that
there was definitely,
he understood incentives.
I mean, Donald Trump
understands incentives.
So he was 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 coin.
So there was a little bit
of offensive 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 maybe government
agencies operate under?
Like what's your intuition?
Is capitalism lead?
So you mentioned it leads 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 start this
whole thing out by saying,
CIA hires people 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 gonna change
their ethical stance
in self-defense. Right?
But at the end of the day, it's still
hurting another person.
So what CIA looks for is people
who are able to swing across
that spectrum for lesser offenses.
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
dictates certain requirements,
the company has to adapt
to those requirements
in order to continue to scale.
So if a company tries to ostracize
LGBTQ, or if they try to ostracize men
or ostracized 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
'cause 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 oversight, and all
they have to do is deliver.
So without the oversight,
what's holding you back?
And for anybody who's ever run a business,
anybody who'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
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 gotta 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 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 the ethical bounds,
kind of like what you suggested,
if you want to be a company
that's extremely successful,
is win with competence,
not with cheating.
'Cause cheating won't, I
believe, win in the long term.
But 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.
(Andrew laughing)
If I were to put myself into his shoes,
why do podcasts?
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 are doing things
by the book and you're the best
in the world at your job,
then you have nothing to worry about.
And you can advertise that
and you help recruit.
I mean, that's the work of capitalism
is you want to advertise
that 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
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 we could
mention about bulk collection
in general in the CIA,
but, you know, let's look at some history
with the NSA and Snowden.
What's your opinion on
the mass surveillance
that is reported to have been conducted
by the NSA?
We talked about ethics.
Are you troubled from
of 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.
(both laughing)
- I think there's a nuance 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 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 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 do you know what happens
if AT&T or Verizon sees
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.
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
whose 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
talk about shit your boss
or if you hate the US 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 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 'em by you.
They make decisions 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 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, at war for a time,
an insider, meaning you were able
to build up an intuition
about the good, the bad,
and the ugly of these institutions,
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're not sure they
can trust the government
to not go into full dictatorial mode.
And based on your political
preference, your oppositions,
your basically one of the essential powers
the freedom of speech in the United States
is the ability to
criticize your government.
And they worry well,
can't the government get ahold of the NSA
and start to ask the basic question,
well, can you gimme a list of people
that are criticizing the government?
- So let's just walk through
that exact example, right?
Because it's a preponderance.
It's a preponderance fear.
It's a ridiculous fear
because 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
a hundred 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 wanna 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 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 gonna take action.
So all these people who are afraid of
this exact situation that you're outlying,
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,
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
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 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 in a public display,
semi-public display,
you know, basically put 'em 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.
What you just laid out. It's genius.
And that is the standard bottle.
- You don't need the
surveillance for that.
But that said, if you
did do the surveillance,
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.
But you know, yes, the courts wouldn't,
if you were to be able
to get a list of people,
which I think that part you could do.
That opposed the government,
you could do that
just like you said on Twitter publicly,
you could make a list.
And with that you can start to,
especially if you have a
lot of data on those people
find ways in which they
did violate the law.
Not because they opposed the government,
but because in some other
way the parking tickets
or 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're very good at this kind of stuff.
Knowing we 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 they then use that
breaking of the law to come up
with an excuse to actually
put you in jail based on that.
So it is possible to imagine.
But yes, 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 of 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
a level of authoritarianism
in a government,
they're just able to do the usual thing.
One, have propaganda
machine to tell narratives.
Two, pick out, you know, people
that they can put in jail
for opposing the state
and maybe loud members of the press
start silencing the press.
There's a playbook to this thing,
and that 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 state 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 lemme 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 the United Arab Emirates, the UAE.
Now I lived in the UAE from 2019 to 2020.
Came back on a repatriation
flight after Covid broke out.
But we were there for a full year.
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 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 complaints,
it was something that
nobody was comfortable with
because generally speaking,
Emiratis 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 states
is what made sure that justice was played
because the proof 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 extremist terrorist activity happening
inside Abu Dhabi or inside the UAE
because they're under
constant threat from Islam
or 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 you said,
companies do a significant
amount of surveillance
to provide us with services
that we take for granted.
For example, just one of
the things to give props
to the digital efforts
of the Zelensky administration in Ukraine,
I don't know if you're aware,
but they have this digital
transformation efforts
where you could put, like,
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, you know,
like license, like all that kind of stuff.
It's in an app, you could pay each other.
There's 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 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.
- Yep, for everybody to have,
housed in a server that you
have no idea where it's at.
That could 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 Google,
Facebook, Twitter, Apple,
Microsoft products we use.
- Security and convenience
are on two opposite sides
of another spectrum.
The more convenient something
is, the less secure.
And the more secure something
is the less convenient.
And that's a battle that
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
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 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 broke the law.
He broke the confidence.
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 US perspective
to basically seek protection.
How you act in the face of accusation
is in essence part of the case
that you build for yourself.
So running away to China, Russia, Cuba,
there was a Latin Ecuador 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 gonna 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.
It's like Tiananmen Square
standing before the tank.
Is like one man fighting the government.
And I think that there is
some aspect to which taking
that case aside, that
is the American spirit,
which is hold the powerful accountable.
So whenever there's somebody in power,
one individual can change can...
- One man can make a difference.
- [Lex] Can make a difference.
- It's very "Night Rider" of you.
(Andrew laughing)
- It's powerful.
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.
- What's nice about this is
that we can agree to disagree
and history will be the one that decides.
But like there's a reason
that Edward Snowden
needs to do something new
every 16 or 18 months to remain relevant.
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's 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,
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 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?
- So this is what's difficult
because any proof that they collected
that actually prevented
an attack from happening
is proof we'll never know about.
This is 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?
Does it have to remain
secret every time the NSA
or the CIA 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 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,
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 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 US
or if the American government comes in
and says, "We took apart
this amazing attack",
now they have more information.
The whole power of secrets,
like we talked about before,
the power of secrets is in knowing
that not everybody has them.
There's only a shelf life.
So take advantage of the shelf life.
You get space. So you
gotta 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
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.
- [Lex] You think so?
- Absolutely.
If the Austin PD started
telling you every day about
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 to you?
Make us feel less safe?
'Cause if we see competence that there is
extremely competent
defenders of this territory,
of these people, wouldn't that
make us feel more safe or no?
- The human nature is
not to assign competence.
So 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 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 take your point.
It's a powerful psychological point,
but I, looking at the other picture of it,
looking at the police force,
looking at the CIA, the NSA,
those people and now with the police,
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 you're gonna be criticized.
Like that's really bad for the CIA.
- [Andrew] It's terrible.
- Like, as opposed to
being seen as a hero.
Like for example, currently 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.
You've gotta remember that
when you, so first of all,
public service is a sacrifice.
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
'cause then you're basically
a celebrity overnight.
Public service is a sacrifice.
It's a grind.
For all of the soldiers, the
submariners, the missiles,
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,
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 AU, bear and open democracy.
- Why not celebrate
(Andrew laughing)
the killing of Bin Laden?
- [Andrew] We did.
- The search, discovery and the capture
and the killing of Bin Laden.
Actually the details of that,
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?
Do people who serve, do
service for this nation,
do they always have to operate
in a thankless manner in the shadows?
- I think that's a very good question.
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 they were motivated
by something else, they
wouldn't be as good
as they are at doing what they do.
And I see your point about shouldn't we
be celebrating our victories?
But when celebrating our
victories runs the risk
of informing 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 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 MKUltra...
- 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.
How do you make sense
that this program existed?
- Again, you've gotta look
through the lens of time.
You've gotta 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 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 in CIA for people
who have sensitivities
to ethereal energies.
- By the way, is there any proof
that that kind of stuff works?
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.
Speaking from a science-based
point of view only,
if energy and matter
can always be exchanged,
then a person who can understand
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 trying to remain...
- But you should be open-minded, right?
I mean, 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. First
I'm glad that JFK rejected it.
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 "Gimme all your bad ideas"
every time we had any
kind of conversation.
And I was always one of
those people who was like,
isn't a bad idea just a waste of time?
And he was like, "No 'cause
the best ideas oftentimes
come from bad ideas."
So again, Cuban Missile Crisis,
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 a president would go
to a division called special activities,
whose job it is to create,
you know, crazy ideas
that have presidential 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.
'Cause 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.
The president will still come in,
but it'll 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?
- It was baller, right?
(Lex laughing)
That is a mic drop right there.
Nope, not doing that. Yep, doing that.
- You know, a thing that
crosses an ethical line,
even in a time where the entirety
of human civilization hangs in a balance,
still forfeit that power.
That's a beautiful thing
about the American experiment.
A few times throughout its history
that's has happened, including
with our first President
George Washington.
Well, let me ask about JFK.
(Andrew laughing)
- 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 possible to infiltrate
a small part of the CIA in
order to attain political
or criminal gains or financial?
- Yeah, absolutely it's
possible to infiltrate CIA,
there's a long history 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's interlocutor executes
on their own agenda
or 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 US intelligence.
Multiple moles were caught
in the years following.
So it's not surprising
that there would be a priority for that.
But to say that the organization of CIA
was somehow in cahoots
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 CIA played a
part in enabling drug cartels
and drug trafficking, which is another big
kind of shadow
that hangs over the CIA.
- At the beginning of the drug war,
I would imagine the answer is yes.
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 paint a picture for me,
like do you think the CIA was complicit
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 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, on
that point, a connection
between Barry Seal, the great governor,
and then President Bill
Clinton, Oliver North
and vice president, former
CA director George H.W. Bush
in a little town with a little airport
called Mena, Arkansas.
- So I am outta my element now.
This is one I haven't
heard many details about.
- So your sense is any
of the drug trafficking
has to do with criminal operations
outside the United States
and the CIA just leveraging that
to achieve its end, but nothing
to do with American citizens
and American politicians
- With American citizens, again,
speaking organizationally.
So that would be my sense. Yes.
- Let me ask you about, so
back to Operation Northwoods,
because it's such a powerful tool,
sadly powerful tool used by
dictators throughout history,
the false flag operation.
So I think there's,
and you said the terrorist attacks in 9/11
changed a lot for us,
for the United States, for Americans.
It changed the way we see the world.
It woke us up to the
harshness of the world.
I think there's, to my eyes
at least, there's nothing
that shows evidence that 9/11
was a quote "inside job."
But is the CIA
or the intelligence agencies
or the US government capable
of something like that?
(Andrew laughing)
I mean, that's the question.
- I get it, yeah.
- So there's a bunch of shadiness
about how was reported on.
I just can't, that's the
thing I struggle with.
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?
'cause it's sure as heck,
now, looking back 20 years,
the amount of money that
was spent on these wars,
the military industrial complex,
the amount of interest in terms of power
and money involved,
organizationally, can
something like that happen?
- You know Occam's razor.
So the harems razor is that
you can never prescribe
to conspiracy what could be
explained through incompetence.
Those are two fundamental guidelines
that we follow all the time.
The simplest answer is oftentimes the best
and never prescribe to conspiracy
what can be explained
through incompetence.
- Can you elaborate what you
mean by we? As human beings?
- [Andrew] We, as
intelligence professionals.
- So you think there's a deep
truth to that second razor?
- There us more than a deep truth.
There's ages of experience
for me and for others.
- So in general, people are incompetent.
If left to their own means,
they're more incompetent
than they are malevolent
at a large organizational scale.
- 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 9/11 commission is
gonna go down in history
as this painful example
of the incompetence
of the American intelligence community.
And it's going to come
back again and again.
Every time there's an intel flap,
it's gonna come back again and again.
What are you seeing?
Even right now, we missed the
US 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 just embarrassing to the end.
- It's just embarrassing. Exactly right.
- So all the sort of
coverup looking things
around 9/11 is just
people being embarrassed
by their failures.
- If they're taking steps
to cover anything up,
it's just their own.
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 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, charm, charisma,
whatever the hell he used
to delude these people.
He did so successfully.
I'm very open-minded about this thing.
I would love to learn more,
but a lot of people tell me,
a lot of people outta respect
that there's intelligence
agencies behind this individual.
So they were using Jeffrey
Epstein for getting access
to 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 agency is willing
to go to control, to manipulate,
to achieve its means.
Do you think there is,
can you educate me if
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 100% guaranteed.
- [Lex] Ah dammit.
- That some intelligence
organization was involved.
But let's talk about why.
Let's talk about why, okay?
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 intelligence, right?
One is a, 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.
Or maybe they're the ones
that share a phone number with somebody
and then they're just like,
just don't tell 'em you got
the phone number from 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 using the influence
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 too easy
because the man had access to a wide range
of American influential people
for corporate espionage uses,
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
and whether I think
the really important distinction here is,
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
of building a network
and then you start building a relationship
to where at some point 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 seed 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 create an agent that
serves their purposes.
Now, to create someone from
scratch, like Jeffrey Epstein,
the probabilities are extremely low.
They would've 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?
Invest in 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 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 Graves, who's a fighter jet pilot
about many things.
He also does work on autonomous
weapon systems, drones
and that kind of thing, and
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 just not important.
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 anything that is known
of the terrestrial world,
then 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 US national government
or for the US 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 system,
it's a machine from a foreign power
that's doing intelligence collection.
- [Andrew] Correct.
- So it's not
just military purposes, it's
actually collecting data.
- Well, a lot of times the
federal government will see
the two as the same.
It's a hostile tool from
a foreign government.
- Oh, so 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 US citizen or a foreign citizen.
- So I guess they keep digging
until they can confirm it's not a threat.
And you're saying that there's not,
from your 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 make progress on this?
Yeah, it's really difficult
to know the scale.
- Yeah, there's an economic interest
in the private intelligence world.
Because for example,
if you understand why
certain aerial phenomenon
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 it doesn't matter to
the federal government.
- Could these UFOs be aliens?
Now I'm going into a territory of you
as a human being wondering
about all the alien
civilizations that are out there.
The humbling question.
- We are not alone.
- [Lex] You think we're not alone?
- 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 one or a zero.
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 there are 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,
it's just silly.
It's the world of sci-fi.
- [Lex] Well, let me push...
- What does every good scientist...
'Cause we always assume
that they're superior
to us in intelligence.
When any scientist
carries out an experiment,
the whole objective of the
experiment is to observe
without being disclosed
or being discovered.
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
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
infiltrate, I would try
to put, like, figure out
what is the language they used
to communicate with each other.
I would try to operate at
their physical scale, at like,
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
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, 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 think
it's actually an incredibly
difficult problem of figuring
out how to communicate
with a thing way dumber than you.
And 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 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 intelligent.
Ants are not an intelligent species.
They're drone species
that's somehow commanded
through whatever technology, whatever...
- Spoken like a typical human, but yes.
- Whatever biological thing
is in the queen, right?
But 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 is some
sort of intelligence there, or dolphins,
some sort of intelligence, right?
It is 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 in 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 wanna mimic.
If they wanted to mimic,
wouldn't they create devices like ours?
So now we're three steps
removed from the true fact
of there's something
unexplainable in the skies.
- Yeah, so the fact is there's
something unexplainable
in the skies, and then
we're filling in the gaps
with our basic human biases.
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 world or
who knows what, maybe it's...
- I mean, but you have to
somehow construct hypotheses
and theories for anomalies.
And then from that
amidst giant pile of
the ridiculous emerges
perhaps a deeper truth
over period of decades.
And at first that truth is ridiculed
and then it's accepted.
You know, that whole process.
- The earth revolving around the sun.
- Yeah, the earth
revolving around the sun.
But you know, to me it's interesting
because it's 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 inspiring
and challenging to us as human beings,
both on a scientific
and engineering level,
but also on a philosophical level.
I mean, all of those
questions that are laid
before us when you start
to think about alien life.
- So you interviewed Joe Rogan recently.
And he said something
that I thought was really,
really brilliant during
the podcast interview.
He said that you...
- He's gonna love hearing that.
(both laughing)
- Well, go ahead, sorry.
- But 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.
Our pink matter works the same way
as everybody's pink matter.
And one of the ways that
our pink matter works is
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 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
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 when it came to this
topic specifically,
that was just something that
I thought was really powerful
because you learned to not
not trust your own mind.
- Just for the record,
after he drinks one whiskey,
all that goes out.
I think that was just
in that moment in time,
like, you know...
- [Andrew] A moment of brilliance.
- A moment of brilliance.
Because I think he still is...
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 thing
that limits his curiosity
of asking what if,
like the whole, it's entirely possible.
I think that's a beautiful thing,
and it actually represents
what the best of science is,
that childlike curiosity.
So it's good to sort of
balance those two things,
but then you have to wake up to it, like,
is there a chance this is true
or do I just really want it to be true?
- Like the hot girl that
talks to you overseas.
- Yeah, yeah.
(Andrew laughing)
For a brief moment.
(Andrew laughing)
There's a 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
'cause I love this stuff.
Personally, I love pink matter stuff.
In your interview with Jack Barsky,
Jack's a good friend of mine.
- A good dude.
- [Lex] Incredible person.
And your conversation with Jack Barsky,
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 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 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 gotta wake up 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.
- That's the Nietzsche
gaze into the abyss.
It's a dangerous thing,
hat's the past insanity
is to ask that question.
You wanna 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 lay the groundwork
for progress, scientific,
cultural, all that kind of stuff.
"What is one spy trick?"
This is from a Reddit that I really enjoy.
What's one spy trick?
And you're full of a million spy tricks.
People should follow you.
You did an amazing podcast.
You're just an amazing person.
What is the one spy trick
you would teach everyone
that they can use to improve
their life instantly?
Now, you already mentioned quite a few,
but what else could jump to mind?
- My go-to answer for
this is 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 stepdad used to tell me
that perception is reality.
And I was arguing this with him
when I was 14 years old,
"I told you so, dad, you're still wrong."
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 outsell
or 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
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?
You know, are they comfortable?
Are they uncomfortable? Are they afraid?
Are they scared?
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,
if's gonna change your career.
If you do that to your spouse,
it's gonna change your marriage.
If you do that to your kids,
it's gonna 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 like you said,
the spouse, like intimacy.
Like stepping outside of yourself
and really putting yourself in the shoes
of the other person, considering
how they see the world.
I really enjoy that
because how does that
exactly lead to connection?
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 they see together
because you understand their perspective.
And somehow you converge as well.
Of course that allows you
to gather information better
and all that kind of stuff.
And like that allows you
to work together better,
to share in all different kinds of ways.
But for intimacy, that's
a really powerful thing.
And also for actually, like
people you really disagree with
or people on the internet
you disagree with and so on.
I find empathy is such a powerful way
to 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 becomes like an enjoyable comradery
with that person.
- So I wanna draw a pretty hard line
between perspective and empathy.
Because empathy is
frankly an overused term
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 argue 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.
Empathy is about feeling
what other people feel
or understanding...
- It's more about feeling
would you say?
- It's about feelings.
It's about understanding
someone else's feelings.
Feeling, 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 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 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 is it
that you're going to do next?
More than just feelings,
actual tactical actions.
And 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 gonna 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 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, ride 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,
to 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, I would say about a solid 95%
of what I learned at CIA carries
over to the civilian world,
that 5% that doesn't,
it would carry over in a disaster, right?
Knowing how to shoot on target
with my non-dominant hand
really only has one purpose.
It's not gonna happen day-to-day, right?
Knowing how to do a dead
drop that isn't discoverable
by the local police force isn't
gonna be useful right now,
but it could be useful in a disaster.
But the 95% of stuff that's useful,
it's all tied to the human condition.
It's all tied to 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.
As an example, 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 want anybody
to know your Brad Pitt, you
put on a level one disguise
and that's great.
Or maybe you call me and I walk you
through a level two disguise
so that you can go to Aruba
and nobody's gonna know
you're in Aruba, right?
Whatever it is.
But even there with the
5% 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.
They look there and 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.
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 it's Chinese, you know
that they're gonna look from here down
'cause 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 interesting.
- 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 one that 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 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's gonna 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 is connected to you
in any way, is now dead.
You just let the battery run out.
- [Lex] 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 acquire
it essentially by theft
or through the black market.
So you would want something
because you're gonna 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 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 run a massive con.
Keep in mind that we often
talk about conmen and cons.
Do you know the word that con
is a root word for confidence.
That's what a conman is.
A conman 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 wanna be Bill for the afternoon,
just go tell people your name is Bill.
They're not gonna 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?
- 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 your Bill forever.
- How difficult is that to do?
- It's not convenient.
It's quite difficult.
- Does that like require training?
- It does require training.
- Because why do criminals
always get caught?
- Because they stop being consistent.
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.
Most people are so stuck
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 gonna say,
"Psh, that's not gonna work."
But a criminal will be like,
"Oh yeah, I did that once.
I just told everybody my name is Nancy.
I'm a dude and they still believe me."
Criminals just get it, right?
So what happens with criminals
is they go to the school of hard knocks.
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, 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 CIA is watching,
I'm not breaking any rules,
it's all in Wikipedia, but
it's not coming from me.
But that's how we do it.
They train us from a
hundred 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 lifespan
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, they default to wanting
these long-term operations
'cause they don't wanna
have to recreate a new way
to make money every 15 days.
- You mentioned if anybody
from the CIA is watching,
so I've seen you talk about
the fact that sort of people
that are currently working
at the CIA would kind of
look down at the people
who've left the CIA
and they deride them.
Especially if you go public,
especially if there's a book
and all that kind of stuff.
Do you feel the pressure
of that to be quiet,
to not do something like this conversation
that we're doing today?
- I feel the silent
judgment. 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 both feel the judgment.
We know that right now, three
days after this is released,
somebody's gonna send an email
on a closed network system
inside CIA headquarters,
and there's a bunch of people
who are gonna laugh at it.
A bunch of people who are gonna say that,
who knows what, it's
not gonna be good stuff.
- 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 wanna bring them honor,
and I wanna 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, the shame,
the judgment, right?
But the truth is that I've
done this now long enough.
The first few times that
I spoke out publicly,
the response to being a positive voice
for what the sacrifices
that people are making,
it's so refreshing to be an honest voice
that people don't normally hear
that it's too important.
One day I'm gonna be gone
and my kids are gonna
look back on all this
and they're gonna 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,
"Oh, 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.
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 outta 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?
- That's a powerful question, man.
- [Lex] Have you figured
it out yet yourself?
- No, I'm a grand total
of seven days smarter
than I was at 27.
Not a good average.
- [Lex] Progress.
(both laughing)
- There's still time.
- There's still time.
So for all the young people
out there deciding what to do,
I would just say the same thing
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 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's not the day
to start pursuing a career just
because someone else told you to do it.
If you wanna learn a language,
today's the day to find a way
to buy a ticket to another country
and learn through immersion.
If you want a date, if
you wanna 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 every day,
you just make one new step,
just like CIA recruited
me, just do the next thing.
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.
- 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 south
and far south in like
the Armpit of America,
where elite tier one operators go to learn
human intelligence stuff.
And there's a bar inside this base.
And on the wall
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 the only thing they have to do
is if they're gonna
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 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 a
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 makes this country great.
I have to say, after traveling
quite a bit in Europe
and especially in a
place of war, coming back
to the United States
makes me really appreciate
about the better angels of this nation,
the ideals it stands for,
the values it stands for.
And I'd like, like to thank
you for serving this nation
for time and humanity for time,
and for being brave enough
and bold enough to still talk about it
and to inspire others, to educate others,
for having many amazing conversations
and for honoring me by having
this conversation today.
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.
Summary

Inside the World of Intelligence: From the CIA’s Daily Brief to Global Spycraft and Modern Surveillance

Overview

U.S. Intelligence Structure & the President’s Daily Brief (PDB)

Power Dynamics: President vs. CIA Director

Global Intelligence Powerhouses

Spycraft Essentials

Recruitment & Training Journey

Private Intelligence vs. Government Agencies

Ethics, Secrecy, and Surveillance

Historical Operations & Lessons

High‑Profile Cases and Debates

Human Element & Personal Cost

Ukraine Conflict & Information Warfare

Future Outlook

Advice for the Next Generation

Conclusion

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