CIA Spy WARNING: "We're positioned for complete nuclear destruction." | Andrew Bustamante

There are absolutely things that I learned that that shook me and that I am certain would shake the American public Snowden he did everything wrong he is a traitor he does not ever deserve to come back cia's mission is not protecting the American people it's protecting American interests as defined by policy makers teach me how to be a better liar learning how to lie is really just a matter of when you hear certain experts Talk about micro expressions in Reading someone's face it is such that's really the only thing that's going to stop China had

Co not holy dude we are Hamas you're suffering because of Israel and then of course all those ignorant masses are like yes we are suffering because of Israel this is something most people don't understand every nuclear missile is pointed at a Target so it really is like the 1980s doomsday [Music] situation so you were in the CIA for 7 years approximately correct my wife was like where was he I'm like I don't think you can ask that but I don't know here we are the where the where are you the where where did you operate

question actually is a question that we can't answer yeah I figured that's one of the there's actually not many but that is one of the few that we are hard like hard pressed not to answer it seems Right because otherwise you have to admit like we were spying on Saudi Arabia or wherever you were like we were spying on and the answer is everyone except for the five eyes right uh yes yeah yeah except in big air quotes the five eyes yeah yeah that makes sense because otherwise right you have to admit you were spying

on somebody and we spy everywhere like you said except for the five eyes and although didn't we get have we Gotten in trouble for spying on the five eyes or has that just been sort of a non-public stuff uh I actually don't know if there's ever been any public flap or public fuxa in the five eyes but what's important to understand is that American Military and intelligence Doctrine assumes that every country in the world is an enemy mhm there's just some enemies that have aligned interests that are so strong that we share more with them

than with others so that's a Lot of where the five eyes comes from is the idea that there are these four other countries New Zealand the UK uh the Australians and Canada there's these four other countries that together make a team of Allied Democratic free peoples who will share more than anybody else but that does not mean will share all right I man I I do wonder what do they what do they not know right what do they not know do you have any idea what's off limits I mean I'm sure there's nothing Public but

they surely they know like our nuclear program and things like that or you think that's over that that line uh you know there's certain we have a saying inside the agency that there are keys to the kingdom and nuclear codes are one of those things that we consider keys to a kingdom uh understanding the health of the president the health of the world of the chief executive those are something that we consider keys to the kingdom so if I had to make an an an Informed guess I would guess that no we do not share

secrets about our nuclear uh operational platforms we do not share secrets about the health of our chief executive uh as basic basic things but I'm guessing there's also probably you know beyond that too we we're not going to share secrets that we know about how we were cyber uh cyber hacked or cyber violated we're not going to share secrets that give us an advantage over uh let's say a a close Trading partner Of an Allied partner so for example China is a main trading partner for both uh Australia and the UK so that means it's

going to be in our best interest to really protect what we know about China even from our UK and and Australian peers because we don't want to run the risk of something we know about China leaking back to China through one of the five ey peers yeah that that's what makes the most sense to me right because let's say that you have a Aldrich Ames Situation who is a Trader inside the the agency right who who sold nuclear secrets we don't want the Australian version of that to go oh well I have all these secrets

not only about Australia but about the United States and the leak just becomes even more problematic for everybody corre involved correct and that's you're thinking exactly like an intelligence agency thinks you've got to have uh backups of backups of backups layered security is what call like our Lavalier situation exactly right we have two mics to make sure in case one fails that's aside from the secret mics I have hidden around my my studio kitchen yeah that that makes a lot of sense uh always was curious about that before that you're in the military yeah yes

I was in the Air Force okay flying planes uh I learned how to fly but I actually I did I was kidding actually oh yeah no the Air Force taught me how to fly which was pretty cool what's funny is this for for Me at least and for many people who are pilots once you learn how to fly that's when you fall out of love with flying really because flying is a pain in the ass imagine driving in the sky and that's essentially what flying is but you don't have LA traffic that is that is

true uh but you do have more damaging uh uh effects if you run out of gas that's that's true that's true right like the air conditioner not working is the least of your concerns at that point Right yeah and then it's it's it's just a pain I mean you got to worry about air speed you got to worry about uh those weight fuel smells like one of the things that it's really hard for me to shake is how much you smell jet fuel and it's such a pain in the ass once you fall out of

love with flying smelling the the fuel smell in an airline is a total turnoff But to answer your question I learned how to fly learned I didn't love flying and then the Air Force cross trained me into something called space and missiles and it was in space and missiles that I learned about satellite operations and nuclear missile operations and ultimately ended up being a nuclear missile officer okay so and is that when you fell out of love with nuclear missiles I mean I fell out of nuclear I fell out of love with nuclear weapons a

long time ago but it was a it was a pragmatic solution to having to serve my time for the United States and I I mean I had a fantastic military career even though I was doing something underground with like a key around my neck that could destroy the world yeah and it's kind of one of those best of bad situations I wasn't as bad off as some people tell me about that job because when you hear about those NORAD gu were you one of those NORAD guys is like looking at the or is that a

different job it is I mean this is what's funny About how people perceive nuclear weapons and how how people perceive the Federal government really and all the military and federal government jobs media does it wrong M because media has to make it look dramatic but what the government actually wants of its military and its intelligence Services is the exact opposite they want no drama so what you see in TV is about as far from the truth as you can get so the NORAD that you see in TV this giant Underground base and Cheyenne Mountain where

like there's you know futuristic displays and everybody sits in one room and everybody's having sex with everybody else and the bosses don't get along none of that's the way it actually works yeah you're like undergrounded some gas tank sized that's exactly right thing where no cell phone service and like no just a book and a crappy light that turns off every and you're no your your food is Basically the same quality of food that you had in high school or middle school like tater tots and like shrink wrapped uh Egg McMuffins like that's that is

literally what life looks like and you're down there with just one other person and who I'm sure you get along with at no matter what and make sure of that and then you're spread out like two to three driving hours from each other so you're like super remote super alone in the most like remote auster places in The United States babysitting nuclear missiles it's it's super boring super low drama especially with the idea that we're hopefully never going to use those nuclear missiles and although I've heard and and this is I guess a pro for

that particular job if there's a nuclear war those get launched first because they can't move around it's it's interesting we are a redundancy and you don't realize that the human beings in the missile silos are a redundancy of a Redundancy right like we are not not critical Personnel even though we are called critical Personnel but yeah you're exactly right I mean if uh if true nuclear war were to break out true true nuclear war which is the nuclear war that most people are afraid of everything would be launched all at once from all nuclear bases

to all programmed Targets this is something most people don't understand every nuclear missile is pointed at a Target mhm the target Can change every few hours or it can change every few days but they're not all pointed at the same Target they're pointed at different targets because the assumption is that if there is an allout nuclear war everybody's going to blow up everybody else so we might have let's say there's 300 missiles pointed at 70 different targets once the once the dials turn everything goes everywhere else in the world the assumption is when they turn

the dials Everything goes so it really is like the 1980s doomsday situation we talked about this on the show with Annie Jacobson and she said as much essentially like the ground the ones that are in the ground like the ones you were controlling they they're use it or lose it right so they launch just as soon as the launch is detected against us because those are probably going to get destroyed by whatever is coming in in a few minutes whether it's detected or not when a Ballistic missile is launched at the United States the Department

of Defense is very technically Advanced Satellite Systems detect that launch within a few within a fraction of a SE second initially we have a policy that you're asking about launch on warning so those get launched I guess maybe the submarine ones are later in the game CU they can survive pretty much anything and then you have air launched as well so those are how are those launched then from Airplanes correct yeah okay so you have there's a this what's called a nuclear Triad and the nuclear Triad is air-based nuclear weapons cbas nuclear weapons and then

groundbased nuclear weapons okay the underground nuclear warheads the ICBM intercontinental ballistic missiles those are your groundbased of the nuclear Triad but then you have B-52 bombers and other stealth bombers and large scale bombers that would that are waiting at all times on alert so that if A launch is detected they can quickly be scrambled loaded up with nuclear warheads that are alive a pin gets pulled and now they're they're weaponized and then they take off and their whole job is just to loer which means kind of fly circles in the sky until all the Fallout

is done and we see what targets were destroyed and what targets weren't destroyed and then they could be directed those targets that makes sense because I was wondering if Everybody's launching at everybody else and you're like oh well this one's going to pongyang well pongyang was has been gone for 45 minutes there's why would we launch anything else at that hit Novo s instead or whatever I don't know I mean hopefully none of this happens like it's just it's nightmare I mean everybody you want to die early if there's nuclear Holocaust that's that's what I

learned from Annie Jacobson and she's I mean that's the exact conclusion that I Reached when I was in that field I mean in that career field just for the men and women who are sitting underground right now put yourself in their shoes and think about a career in their discipline M they're going to they're going to live underground for about two to two to four years on assignment and then they're going to rotate to another assignment for two to four years and then they're going to come right back to a missile assignment again where they

go Underground again they rotate out again and they rotate back again and that is their career for 20 years of military service brutal and they make a whole career out of it right that's when they're away from their family they're not doing God's work they're just waiting for the hopeful yeah never end of of the planet earth right what do you do to kill time down there do you bring a book and read there's a lot of Correspondence education there's a lot Of reading there's a lot of uh learning how to make friends with people

you don't get along with yeah man yeah you there's actually a lot of sleeping but it's not in one long stint cuz you can't sleep in one long stint cuz every 15 to 30 minutes there's an emergency action message that comes through an e am an alarm that like blares so that's the drill so what ends up happening is you as as either the junior or the senior Missile Command officer you'll try to Rest being interrupted every four or so hours this is literal torture and then you'll work together and then the other person will

rest for about 4 hours and then you'll work together and then that's kind of how the shift goes for 24 to 72 hours but you're always being interrupted so that's why you never get quality sleep so you try to get as much low quality sleep as you can the why do are so are these drills to make sure you're not just like screwing around There's two reasons there's two reasons one the drills are there because they need to desensitize you okay to potentially launching nuclear weapons so you like when the when the order comes in

to launch a nuclear a nuclear going oh my God should I do this I've never had to think about this before they want you to be like Jesus Christ turn the thing and then just you slam the thing down and go back and you lay in your cot and then you hear a rumbling sound as The world is destroyed around you correct cuz it's all it's I mean essentially it's all ones and zeros so you don't actually know if this eam is an e that's really going to launch missiles or if this e is just

a drill Jee because you're doing it every 15 or 20 minutes so it's like one boop boop boop beep beep beep turn and you're go back to sleep s you know boop boop boop beep turn and go back to sleep one of those times you're exactly right it's Going to be boop boop boop beep turn Rumble Rumble Rumble oh I real right I just launched a real weapon so there there's a system there that says this is a drill and there's a system there that says this is not a drill and you just have no

idea where the system is behind the actual the software of the system so that's reason number one reason number one is so that the crews can't become consciencious objectors reason number two is because we assume That our adversaries are tapped into ouram system so the Russians the Chinese the North Koreans the Iranians are listening to every emergency action message and what they see are ones and zeros beoop well we also have to send a message every 20 minutes so they don't know what the hell they're seeing either right so there's some guy whose's job it

is to monitor you guys doing your boring ass job and he's going emergency action Message yeah what else is new and he goes back to plan can whatever Chinese version of Candy Crush is on his phone and he just like whatever and then he one day he hears a rumble and there's a Flash and everything is over y that is just crazy and that's your career so I mean this is why I have such incredible respect for the men and women who do that job because that is their reality just like you and I get

to like tune in to Netflix every now and then or we get To veg out to like a long fantasy book we get to take a 25 minute poop if we want to they don't get that option man you can't even poop underground you but you can't take that long okay comes in you're just running out that's surely that's happened over seven years I mean people get food poisoning down there people show up with the flu down like some nasty stuff happens underground oh yeah and you're just the guy comes in and goes sorry man

I'm sick and you go Well I'm definitely getting that yeah that's I mean and so is the next guy that comes in after we're done because you're going to be touching all of his buttons oh man man you all need PRL probably a regulation against spraying that on the nuclear launch computer but you know some rules are meant to be broken um so let's let's talk about what a spy actually is because that's one of those terms that spies probably never use and also people don't know the Difference between handlers analysts assets Etc so can

we just do like a quick overvie sure I mean there's a huge index a huge glossery we could get into but I'll keep it simple and I'll let you tell me where you want to go from there so you are exactly right spy is a term that professional Intelligence Officers don't use it doesn't exist because what's the definition of a spy what's in reality what we have are agents and officers agents are the people who Officers recruit to sell secrets about their own country so you don't have an American agent what you have is an

agent of some foreign country that's giving the US secrets that's what an agent is it's very different than FBI an FBI agent is in fact an officer of the country but in CIA in intelligence terms an agent is a foreign intelligence Source but then you have Intelligence Officers Intelligence Officers are the people who are charged by the government Of the United States to collect secrets from Agents and the reason that they're called officers is because they come with a certain level of uh information handling security handling um Information Management they come with real skills that

would qualify them as officer Cadre okay and so what what was it that you did in this that you can talk about yeah I was an intelligence officer and then inside the intelligence officer Cadre there are many types of Officers there are analysts there are technical officers there are uh field or case officers there are staff officers there are paramilitary officers uh linguistic officers I mean the list is quite significant open source analysts um I mean our disguise people are officers our uh Alias doc people who make our documentation are officers and there's all these

different skill sets within so I was a what's known as a staff operations officer which means an Officer who is what's there's different categories of of blue badge and green badge whether you're a contractor or hired on behalf of the federal government but I was a federal government staff operations officer um a CIA employee who was not disclosed to the public whose job was to manage operations and those operations were intelligence collection operations yeah okay that that makes sense because I I of course have been tricked a few times So I was like all right

is this guy real so I called my friend Daryl blocker I don't know if you yes I used to work for Daryl okay that's so he was like I can confirm he definitely worked here what he says he did I was like oh okay cool cool cuz there's a lot of people I'm sure you've come AC oh like do you know this person and you're like that doesn't sound right yeah there's a few of those well there's dozens what's fascinating is you know especially in social media Right now you will hear lots of people come

out and say that this was a I worked for the agency or I was an agency officer and they're not necessarily lying because the way that the CIA works it does a lot of different types of uh of Blended operations so it will reach out to the military like it'll reach out to the Navy Seals mhm and it will succ a Navy SEAL into CIA for an operation so for the for the course of these three months they're still a Navy SEAL but They're granted uh CIA status but then when they're done with their operation

they go right back to Navy Seals and their CIA status is withdrawn same thing is true about contractors that's what happened with Edward Snowden people thought Snowden was a CIA officer he was not he was a contractor hired by CIA for a short period of time to carry out a task before he was then sent back to his contract comp Hamilton yeah is that right yeah boo Allen I think Booz Allen Yeah boo or is it boo Allen Hamilton we'll we'll figure that out after the show when I get a 100 emails about it yeah

um um it was something like that yeah that makes sense there's there's a lot there's this trend I'm sure you've seen where somebody who is an analyst respectable job will say yeah I'm a CIA officer and people go oh my gosh and then they do the rounds of media or they write a book or something like that and it's like then but you put two whiskies In them and they're like yeah I was in charge of looking at a lot of documents in a desk and I never really left the desk and I know a

lot about Egypt and you're just like oh have you ever been there no yeah okay well that's not what I thought this was you know so there's a there's a whole lot of that my friends who are all do guys like where you were they were all like don't join they don't do it um but I'm curious what your opinion well what year was it too I'm Curious these guys were in the do pre SL like through 911 so they must have been joined in the 90s cuz my law school career ended in 2006 so

unless their career was only like a year or two long which I doubt they were there through September 11th and everything and I one guy was like I can never go to Egypt and I never even saw the freaking pyramids and I was there for a long time because he's he got uh PNG so Persona nrata is basically you get banned from a country So he's banned from a country I don't know if they found out he was there illegally I guess that's probably why well that's what's funny about PNG status is I mean it's

a it is a punitive measure against the federal government more than a person so he could have not even been discovered he could have been totally an upstanding citizen in Egypt but Egypt wanted to send a message to the United States so it would PNG 10 people on a list and he could have been One of those people I see okay so maybe they didn't know anything but I think there's a couple things that are important here so one you were getting you were cons you were being considered potentially for recruitment at a critical time6

7 I was recruited in 2007 that means the post 911 or the pre- 911 Cadre were still in charge but the reason 9911 happened frankly I mean I'm sorry to say this about your friends was because the pre- 911 people didn't keep Us safe on 911 sure the CIA pre 911 was focused on Cold War stuff it was staffed with for the most part Caucasian ivy league educated that's what this dude was he he told me he's like the agency is so broken you can't get anything done you can't even do your own job I

mean that's why he told me not to join not because it was boring or something and that led to the September 11th attacks that led to us failing to prevent the September 11th tax well then September 11th happened two years after September 11th the 9/11 commission came out that was when the when the federal government especially the Congress and the house all came together the the the house and the Senate came together and said CIA you're broken FBI you're broken you guys caused this whole thing so now we as the federal legislature are going to

come in and force you to change mhm that was 2003 that turned into a ton of money coming into the federal government all Focused on counterterrorism operations which had been overlooked prior to 2003 and then this massive surge of new hiring and the new hiring was not ivy league Caucasian people anymore right it was people of diversity people who have World Travel people who had foreign languages people of a certain age group so went I was like 25 I was 27 yeah right that's what they were looking for was mixed ethnic like people with strong

educational histories But not necessarily from predictable schools a huge variance from what the pre- 911 days look like yeah that's interesting it it when I was in in the 90s I remember asking a guy who's a former Intel officer how to become how to join and he was like join a church and or the Freemasons and he's like what ethnicity are you because this was not a this is not a inperson conversation and I was like a white dude from Michigan he's like okay he told me this very Totally Antiquated way that they recruit which

was go to the best go go to an i League school that was one of the things uh join a church and or the Freemasons and like rise up in the ranks of whatever you can because they look for I don't know just like really waspy people probably and then because they were looking for people loyal to the body not loyal to the organization I see right loyal to the body means loyal to the other CIA officers because pre 911 it Was kind of the Wild West there was not a lot of oversight there was

a big black budget that officers could just do whatever they wanted to do the the term a term was coined that is unfortunately still present at CIA now where you were looking for people who will play nicely in the sandbox okay so you're basically looking for other kids that you want to let into your sandbox so they'll all play nicely with each other but if you're the kind of kid that comes in and Is like well why are we playing in a sandbox or if you throw sand in somebody else's face or if you take

someone else's truck they don't want you in their sandbox that was all pre 911 there are still cultural vestiges of that that have carried through because the senior officers there right now were the junior officers before 9/11 sure okay so that cultural carryover is still there but in about 10 more years they'll be gone right it'll be interesting yeah I I I've Never been to CIA headquarters or anything but I'm guessing in the 90s it was a bunch like you said a bunch of white dudes and now it's like men women different colors different hairstyles

I assume did you have that at the no I tried I tried having long hair and it turned into a big deal for the trainers there cuz the people training us were vestages of the Cold War you've never been to CIA headquarters do you want to go yeah I will take you yeah That would be awesome that would be really they'll only let us on the first floor well it's the coolest floor to be honest okay yeah the one with the stars and the flags and everything all the busts and all the art and all

the museums sweet yeah no the other floors I can only imagine look like it's like an embassy right you're like wa this place is amazing and then the rest of it's in office and it's like well so true so I it's all cubicles and and Cream colored walls yeah I ended up uh I was working at the embassy in Panama in 2002 but it took forever to get my security clearance because of September 11th and I remember I had a meeting with one of the security guys and he was like let me expedite this for

you I know you want to start your career and I said here's my stuff he's like I don't know why it's taking so long I mean September 11th we're really busy but like how hard can it be to clear a gy and he looked And it was like lived in Germany but the former East Germany and then it was like Israel and and he how long did you spend in Egypt and he's like this is going to take years so I ended up working in a part of the embassy that didn't require any security clearance

and I couldn't go on the other floors but my friends could and I was like just tell me what's on the other floors and he's like it looks like the second floor except in the corner there's a box where you can light on fire and I was like that's it that's all you have like an incinerator and you they like that's all and there's no USB ports to put in your music or whatever and I'm like that sucks cuz I was just making travel arrangements for like uh Narco officers in Panama and the military and

they basically sending guys to Vegas on the US taxpayers dime sorry folks and that was it and they were like yeah I'm looking at a bunch of crap I actually ended up with one of the better Jobs with like minimal responsibility actual stuff that I was doing and those guys were just doing intern work but in a secured area which is awful it's the equivalent of being in an underground tank for 3 days at a time not quite well I mean I think that's the thing that's again we were talking about how media gets it

all wrong what you just described that's clandestine operations what you see on James Bond and Jason Bourne and what you see in Alias and What you see in most of that that's not how it works it works like it's a plane building with a secure floor there's a big heavy bolt on the front door and once you go past that door there's no iPods there's no cell phones there's no music there's no this there's there's no Freedom yeah there's just secure messaging systems and guess what secure messaging systems don't carry gifts and can't handle PDFs

so it's all tippity tap no Emojis yeah no but I mean back Then cell phones if you even had one were like it had snake on it you know but yeah I could bring my phone nobody cared those guys had to leave theirs in a box I've heard you talk a bit about your upbringing on other shows and how you started keeping secrets kind of earlyish and I wonder well one what happened and also did that make compartmentalization in your life easy when you got to CIA yeah and it's you know I love I love

these Conversations because like with most people what's my childhood I tend to think of as normal for everybody's childhood same of course like we all think that if whatever our childhood would must have been the average for everybody else and it's surprised to me when it's not so I didn't trust my parents growing up and it was because I my father died when before I was really born um I think technically he died when I was a few months old but he was out of My life before I was ever born so I always just

kind of summarize to say he died before I was born my mom Remar Mar um a Caucasian guy who became my stepdad when I was five and apparently we had a good relationship until I was five but once I hit like 12 or 13 and once I had half sisters which were his biological children with my mother our relationship kind of got shaky that's too bad well I mean I think again that's that's the plight of a step parent as an adult and A dad now I kind of sympathize with my stepdad for what he

must have had to go through really but regardless I'm 7 years old and I'm learning I can't trust my dad that there's favorites he clearly shows favoritism towards my sisters he like he clearly trusts what they say more than what I say so I'm learning I can't trust him and then my biological mother who's trying to make a marriage work again 44 years old looking back it makes sense but 7 years old 8 years old 9 years old it didn't make sense all I picked up was mom doesn't believe me she believes him he doesn't

believe me he believes my sisters who are just making up because they're four years old right so I can't trust either of them so once that started to take hold I learned through the School of Hard Knox how to lie more effectively how to lie to survive I also started learning that there's no reason to be honest first there's a reason to be Cy and kind of Distant and and aloof first and then over time decide if somebody has earned your trust or not earned your trust so I started understanding that secrets were valuable and

I started understanding that I had the ability to control secrets and then as I got into like my teenage years in public school you start realizing that other people they don't keep secrets at all other people are very transparent and they're very open and then I started realizing like if you If you keep good secrets and you're around somebody who can't keep a secret then you are like you have tons of information that you can use for whatever you want to use it for whether you want to use it to get laid or whether you

want to use it to get a head on test or whether you want to use it to get a teacher in your pocket like whatever you want to do so you saw the advantage of being able to keep your mouth shut kind of early on and not Trusting people but man that is a rough way to grow up and I'm I'm wondering surely you're taking steps to make sure you don't wire your own kids the same way correct yeah and that's uh that's again something else that I think all parents do we all well I'll

be honest I don't think all parents are aware no of how their childhood impacts them as adults so then often times what happens is parents will replicate the same way they were parented with their Own children my wife and I were benefited because my wife grew up in a similar household to mine where she also learned early she couldn't trust what her parents said because what they did was different than what they said interesting the big difference between she and I is that she didn't trust her parents and what they said but she did trust

that they loved her whereas for me I didn't trust what they said and I didn't actually trust that they loved me I I kind of still wonder if my mom could have changed her decision in 1980 would she have changed her decision in 1980 have you asked her that I have I my mom doesn't tell the truth so oh right so what's the point so I have asked her I have made the suggestion that maybe she would have like chosen not to have me she's always like no baby I would have had you I would

have had you but at the same time there are pictures of her taking me to abortion rallies when I'm 3 Four and 5 years old oh that's interesting so I don't know what like she I'm I'm glad that she was there you know sponsoring women's power and women's rights but it's got to be a little up to be like here's my three-year-old and I think you should be able to take your baby's life if you want to like that's interesting that's an interesting persp her choice but it is really interesting to me when she tries

to tell me that of course she Would have had me at 19 years old with no husband and all that other stuff like that's tough that is that is tough and I'm what she what it seems like what she's saying is no I really love you and I'm so glad you're in my life but if you were able to go back in time and say you can turn this pregnancy off with a light switch she would probably go oh my God I'm a kid what am I doing right like it's it's a hard call and

that's whenever the topic of abortion comes up Like for me I'm very sensitive to it not like in an emotional way but this is why whatever your politics are I women should have a choice because my mom had a choice at at whatever level she had a choice and she chose to give me a chance and I was not an easy child like I was a sickly child when I was born I had some like you're in good shape now because I was able to I was able to recover because my mom had me and

there was a hospital that took care of me and there Was you know modern day medicine and I was in the United States so but it's tough man it's it's a sticky situation that's interesting it's interesting you grew up not trusting your parents I because I can't can't most people listen well many people listening just can't relate to that at all you really you trusted your parents yeah trusted my parents they even my even my dad it's funny because my dad and I we have a Good relationship I want everybody to know I just talked

with them but he you know he's like a really terrible Communicator it's comical it is so I trusted him is in so far that we all understood what the hell he was even talking about at any point in time or like we but he wasn't a guy who was going to like yeah my parents were you could rely on them as well I trust being able to trust somebody and rely on them are two totally different things I guess As well but yeah I trusted my parents and um yeah and our relationship is really good

as a result I that's awesome man that's a beautiful thing and that's what I'm hoping will happen with my kids I'm sure it will if you're actively cultivating it how old are your kids now I have an 11-year-old son and I have a six-year-old you would have screwed this up already I'm pretty sure right come on I'm not I mean mine are younger so who Knows but you still have time to screw it up if you try it's true but I think if you're focused on this and you haven't already messed it up you're probably

you're probably doing okay my poor children I mean I have to give them credit and one day I'm hoping there'll be adults listening to this interview right like they're raised by two spies their their mom and their dad are two professionally trained Liars we're not only trained to tell lies but we're Trained to identify when we're being lied to yeah yeah sucks for them well it's well with wild is like it sucks for them because it's tough for them to come up with a a fabrication right but they're also essentially modeling us so they're going

to be like really good that's true you got to be careful they don't misuse that you know with great power comes great responsibility and all that yeah so I'm I'm very fortunate because we have like our son does not Even like to try to lie because he's been caught so many times but our daughter is fearless and she really is hard to read sometimes sometimes you're like I think you're lying but I don't know yeah go go go hook yourself up to the machine I'll be in in a few minutes sit on the pad yeah

sit on the pad no I know you I know you have a thumbtack in your shoe take take the shoe off that doesn't work anyway from what I Understand no it's a well I mean it's a baseline thing but you're with I'm with you I think I I did an episode a long time ago on polygraph and I had to remove it because the guy was an expert Circa 1975 and a guy from the state department was like yeah that the beginning of my career we didn't even have that anymore like that guy was an

expert on the polygraph when they invented it 1965 or whatever but now it's like he's like I'd Love it if somebody puts a thumb tack in their shoe we see it immediately on the graph and then we know that they're trying to beat the test and then we know that they like immediately fail so he's like those are the quick that's an early lunch for me yeah so he meanwhile it's like this other guy wrote a whole book on it well I love I mean I'm just I'm sorry I don't want to dwell Forever on

that but I think that's so interesting right PE there's so much interest in how To beat a polygraph yeah and what's fascinating to me is like the polygraph is the exact right time to just lay it all out there like if you want something so bad that it requires a polygraph to get there you want to just go in and comply because if you comply it's hard for the polygrapher to determine whether you're being honest or not because Normal honesty makes you sweat it changes your heart rate it makes you uncomfortable like real Genuine honesty

makes them have to work actual dishonesty comes much easier than honesty so polygraphers don't have to work as hard that's interesting so if if somebody's like have you ever looked at joining a an organization that's TOS to the United States you're like so in high school yes exactly this is awkward yes but I was just curious and they're like crap I was hoping you would lie about that because then I can see the thing go like that and you're you're just like This is the dumbest what's the dumbest thing you've ever done you're like H

really all right here we go so a big deal so I I had I had to take the the polygraph uh there's the way that they execute the polygraph or at least the way they did in when I was when I was being recruited uh it was multi-day so one you would come in but they would make you reserve a second day just in case you needed to come back for a second day well I didn't like to me I Was like oh if I'm honest on day one I won't have to come back on

day two because they they'll see that I'm being honest well then I learned long after I was recruited long after I was a successful officer oh the second day is really there for the people who are honest the second day is not there for the people who are dishonest because dishonest people get identified quickly and boom they're out the door H okay but honest people are the ones that have all The variation from Baseline because that is uncomfortable for me the thing that got me hooked like the thing that that was my second day Clause

was they asked me if I'd ever taken control substances now I've never taken a drug I've never taken a narcotic I've never smoked marijuana I can't wait until I get the chance to do it but I'm married I married a woman I married a woman who did drugs in in high school and college and she was like now that we're married I'm not letting you do that until we're like 75 years old and yeah I would say you're not missing a whole lot and that's what a lot of people tell me these days but I

don't know what I'm missing so I'm kind of jealous my point is when I was in the military and I was sitting underr at the missile silos it was considered under UCMJ a controlled substance even if it was over the counter if it had a sleep aid or if it had a painkiller oh man because they Don't want somebody on a sleep aid underground that makes sense can't wake you up for the drill correct so they drilled that into us in the military well then when I go to do my polygraph for CIA they're like

have you ever taken a controlled substance and I'm just like what you just said I want to be honest I'm like well technically I used to take Tylenol PM with me on alert underground even though I knew I shouldn't have it because I didn't want to be the guy that Called in sick and sent somebody else underground so just in case I needed it I would take it with me and I would share it with the person that I was underground with and once or twice I took it myself but I don't know if that

counts well the polygrapher was like you just ruined my day because now I don't know if that's controlled or not and then I turned into a whole second day of deeper digging into like have you taken cocaine have you taken heroin have you Done this have you done that how many times have you seen marijuana and I remember being like like sweating in my seat being like well there was this one time at band camp where my friend who plays the baritone was smoking a joint and he was offering it to me and I thought

maybe I should take it like it was the most humiliating like I feel like a I feel like a bad guy it was a oregano in the first place wasn't even weed he was 13 how do you think he got Weed so it was just so funny that's what a real polygraph looks like sticking a thumb tag in your shoe is not going to change right no you're just sitting there talking about how much of a loser you were in high school no the biggest the biggest Bender was a Tylenol PM Bender in 1998 god

um that that qualifies you for CIA that's really funny that's really funny so you said uh when you were getting recruited how did you get Recruited I you went to the Air Force did they pluck you from the high performing ranks of those that dwell underground or was it like a career shift after you got out it was a career shift for sure so I I was a mediocre officer like in my opinion I was a mediocre Air Force officer well that's why they put you in a bin underground for real right they don't they're

not sending their best and the uh when the time came to leave the Air Force I Started looking for a job and uh and one of the things that I wanted to do was get as far away from nuclear weapons as possible Plus at 27 years old I was really into having sex so I was like I was like how do I find a career field that's also like easy to find women so I looked at going to the Peace Court oh I you know I've really wanted to join I I regret not having done

that so just knowing that you went to law school and knowing that you recorded by CIA I'm not Surprised at all to hear is there like a ven diagram overlap of huge overlap because should I spy and ruin other people's lives or should I be in the Peace Corp and help other people's lives Point Flip yeah if you're going to live if you're willing to put yourself in car living in a tent helping people with micro Finance think about all the things that you're willing to give up yeah yeah I would have loved to have

lived in yeah like Central African Republic Congo like Just some crazy Place y well guess what CIA is looking for yeah right the same the same person people who are willing to give it all up only instead of helping people with micro Finance you're going to steal secrets about how the Russians are helping people with micro Finance you know what I mean that's essenti it's the same person it's just ideologically there's some Nuance there between the two of them if they're prag enough to be like oh you're going to put Me in like you're going

to put me in a tuxedo and possibly also send me to like Albania and do all I'm going to have like a chance to to steal I I'm open to the idea of stealing where a true peace core person would never steal ideologically they would never even take you seriously if you were like how would you feel about stealing Secrets they're going to be like that's wrong yeah no I definitely F in the other side of this V diagram as long as I won't get in Trouble for it I will steal Secrets all day long

yeah man it's it's worth it because because America because America yes because of freedom freedom said freedom for me means I can take freedom from them Freedom says I'm supposed to Blackmail you I'm sorry that's just how it is that's what makes a good that's what makes a good C officer so I was leaving the air force trying to go the exact opposite direction trying to like I mean I I tell people all the time all I wanted was to have tent sex with hippie chicks while helping children that were starving that's instead you got

air conditioned sex with God yeah K can't talk about it yeah exactly but at least you had air conditioning but it's important to highlight like because of the overlap in the VIN diagram CIA has a strict policy where it does not recruit or accept applicants who have ever served in the Peace Corps well and the Peace Corps has the same strict rules About never accepting applicants who have served with CIA so CIA definitely disqualifies you from the Peace Corps for life however CIA will recruit after the Peace Corp if enough time is elapsed under certain

circumstances I that I looked it up before you came over that's not just something that's in the back of my brain I looked that up because I thought oh I wonder if you can still join the Peace Corp the answer is no uh but if you join the Peace Corp first Then maybe 10 years later you join the CIA and you end up back there but you I I would imagine they would not it's a sticky one man sticky because if they put you in as an aid worker they endanger every Aid worker which is

I think why they typically don't do but it's not a complete uh I mean the CIA will just do whatever the hell they need to do when it comes down to it and that's I mean I I love that you have that rationale like when it comes down To it the CIA is an agency of Last Resort if it can be done by anybody else somebody else should do it but only when nobody else can do it does CIA get called in I would imagine the Peace Corp folks are not fans because you're Your Existence

endangers their lives every single day basically really side of CIA nobody's a fan of CIA which is why that's true I mean even the American people don't trust CIA so for sure Dia doesn't like Us FBI doesn't like US state department doesn't like us Health and Human Services don't like us IRS doesn't like us nobody likes us because anytime we do anything just like you said we are we are causing people to question the purpose of anyone else's role the diplomats and the embassy in Panama were split on this us younger guys were like who

that's the CIA one of the CIA guys and then we're like he's really normal and kind of boring but then but then There were other older guys who were like yeah not impressed because when they go to a meeting and everyone's like you're a spy I don't trust you you're like God I've been here for 20 years I am not a spy I am the commercial atache can we please just get this done no you're a spy and it's just like thanks a lot CIA for existing yeah there was a little bit of that and

it's a problem it's a it's a problem and it's a problem that was that existed long before there Was you know media and it's a problem that will exist long into the future because the the concept here is that once you give someone a reason not to trust you it's impossible to earn that trust back right that's the real lesson here so what CIA is is it's a constant Thorn reminding people around the world not to trust the United States so they always come to a meeting with anybody and they're like that could be a

spy even when I lived in well especially When I lived in Serbia everybody even my closest friends were like we would be super super drunk and they'd go okay you got to Dude tell me you're a spy right no come on man why would you come live here of all places it doesn't make any sense they would just get so frustrated it was very good-natured but they were like come on just tell me I won't tell anyone I got to know I we all and I'm like does do does our whole circle assume that I'm

a spy and they're like Yeah of course and I'm like why am I not getting more women because that's supposed to be a thing they're like yeah hey look we're also equally mystified by your lack of success maybe you should tell us that you're a spy and it'll work yeah there was there was a bit of that so what is what is the CIA training like for the directorate of operations I mean I know you can't say much uh let's just I know other people that I can't mention here have told me about the existence

of The farm which is maybe the place that you go to learn some of this stuff but what's the environment like so uh I do have to be a little bit careful here obviously yeah but there's a lot that we can still talk about so I love that you called it the director of operations because it's its name changes M essentially the what is currently the director of operations when I was recruited was called the National Clandestine Service the NCS I but that Name changes depending on who needs a promotion at any given time because

it's still a giant bureacracy that's weird cuz I remember the the the document they gave me said do on it it was do until I think it was like 2004 2005 oh I see so it was under Porter Goss maybe it changed to NCS and then it changed back to do again under Brennan in 200 uh maybe 16ish that was after my flirtations with the AG but you see I Mean it goes back and forth either way uh National Clandestine Service director of operations is the is the operational arm of clandestine operations around the world

clandestine operations are what we technically call what the media calls undercover operations or Alias operations or whatever else it's for us they're all CL secret right when you go through training for that operational Cadre you're taken to a location that's that's physically segregated from the Rest of society and they do that to control your entire experience during the training agenda they essentially simulate what it's like to deploy to a foreign country and then in that controlled environment they teach you everything from the basics basics of social engineering like how to introduce yourself and remember someone's

name how to read body language how to uh identify a baseline or create human assessment how to build a a relationship that we Call is a fictionalized or a fabricated relationship meaning you know it's artificial but they feel like it's real so all of those like social skills are taught in addition to field triage offensive and defensive and tactical driving weapons handling you know surveillance detection you name it do you know Jon Mendes yeah Jones yeah so she told me about learning how to Ram through barricades with a car they drop you into like a

fake town where Everybody speaks another language and they tell them that they'll pay they will pay you if you can catch our guys and she told me how they have to like sneak through this whole thing and people are out there looking because they get paid if they find you so I mean she's dated obviously what she went through was was a different time period than what I went through sure this is Cold War like this is probably in the 60s or 70s right right right but um it's Not it's not that dissimilar now the

the main thing that we do now is uh since 911 MH they they find as many ways the Congress has made it very uh very important for CIA and FBI and Dia and etc etc to all work together so even in our training at the farm and even in our initial training months they force us to work together so instead of being dropped into a foreign country or dropped into a place where strangers are trying to catch you they'll drop us into A place where FBI trainees are trying to catch us I see so now

you got trained FBI surveillance teams who are trying to surveil trained yeah but it's trainy against training Israel does this too yeah the shinb does it with mad yeah they they it's there's a really good book I think called the way of deception or something like that and they talk about the the the police not the regular police but some sort of like domestic police in Israel and then shinb and then Mad are all out trying to find each other and there's like this little sort of whiteboard tally going on and it's like it's it

seems goodish natured but it's serious business because if they get caught anywhere around Israel they get shot for it or if they're lucky right oh I mean not with each other no no if they do it in Lebanon and they screw up they get hung by a lamp post or something so they're they're always trying to sharpen each other's axxes and That's exactly what I mean everybody refers back to biblical principles right iron sharpening iron that's exactly what it is at a trainee level well the other thing it does is it makes it so that

I meet my surveillance teams at the end of training and they're FBI trainees well then 10 years later when I'm in charge of an office and they're in charge of an office and we are on a Joint Task Force it's like oh hey I remember you you and I work together in XYZ City where you Caught me or where I escaped you or whatever else it might be interesting yeah I I know one of the things I do to confirm people who say they work for an agency is show them a picture because y'all don't

know each other's names so I'll ask a friend I'll say do you know this guy and she'll go once again I have no idea and I'm like this guy and I have to like pull up a picture on the phone and she's like ah let me send this to somebody else because he probably was Deployed in this region and then it's like like darl blocker oh yeah yeah I know this guy uh is didn't have the same name back then but now oh his name is Andrew he doesn't look like an Andrew like there's a

few of those that happened over over time which I think is kind of funny like oh her name is Aaron man I really I should never would have I had a lot of guesses but it was never Aon yeah we all had different names inside and then when we we have names Upon names upon names and uh and it's difficult it's it's I mean my uh my actual official record of performance at the farm isn't in my name so like even official government documentation about my performance is not in my name so so so when

they're looking for people who they're going to recruit you ever seen Men In Black remember when Will Smith goes in and it's all like the Air Force graduate and the Army graduate and the and then Tommy Lee Jones is like trust Me I've seen him in action and Will Smith is like writing it uncomfortably and he just takes the table and he goes and moves it closer and everyone staring at him CU he's like this the whole point of the scene is to show that he's this outside of the box thinker like There are rules

in this room but I'm not going to follow them I'm going to talk with people even though everyone's serious and silent and move the table and change the environment to Fit me is that sort of what is that remotely what they're looking for they kind of like no thanks we don't need independent thinkers you know it's they do want independent thinkers only in certain job categories though I see so remember how I told there's a whole list of job categories well what ends up happening is during your first round of interviews it's fairly routine people

who are up for the and there's also a huge pool of people who go to First interviews you will I mean if you really ask your peer Network to be honest you'd be surprised most people are probably one or two people away from away from someone who did go to a first round interview with an intelligence service it's not super rare but the whole purpose of that first round interview is really just to see whether or not you'd be a good fit for Intel and then what category you might fit into I see so during

that first round interview You've got analysts and Tech officers and linguists who are all sitting in the same room and they're all going through the same 25 questions but then if they fit the behavior model of a CIA officer then the person interviewing them will basically say this person might be a good analyst this person might be a good case officer this person might be a good linguist then the second round of interviews and this was this is dated 200 sish right the second round of Interviews is when you actually go through the personality battery

which is two full days of personality testing and assessment what that does is it identifies would you actually be good at a case officer or a Sue or a an targeting officer or a tech officer would you actually personality-wise be good at that job what about an entj asking for a friend so entjs actually make fantastic Mission planners and really effective uh Tech off officers because the J means that you follow a system M but without a system Jays get lost a lot of the time oh interesting where entps don't have a they are very

comfortable without a system so they end up making very good case officers right but the JS I mean even if you think about just look at them look at the metrics entjs cart blanch by a long margin are the most successful people in America oh because they follow a system once they Find a system that works they just repeat that system over and over again where entps do not entps find a working system and they still try something different yeah yeah interesting I'm my son is it was talking about this with my wife in the

car he does this really interesting thing that shows me how his brain works cuz he's four he doesn't have a lot of like he he hasn't been beaten down by public education yet so he'll play a game on The iPad right and it's a a game where you build things out of Legos or something like that and he's he's doing this and I go why are you dragging all the pieces in different parts of the screen instead of building he goes I just want to see what's going to happen and then whenever we play with

things he's like what happens if I do this instead I'm like well that would that would break the thing and he goes well how then what happens and then how do You fix it and I'm just like oh his he's always looking to he's like he sees the edges of whatever it is and then he's like I want to pop that bubble and see if there's room around the it's very interesting to watch because my daughter is very much like this is how you do this game and she's two so it's a little early but

she's like this is how you play the game you build the thing that's it you don't try to test the outsides of the boundaries you don't try she's like You push the right answer you don't push all the wrong answers to see if the colors change which is what my son does and then we go you know this answer why did you push that I just want to see what would happen she's like I don't know the answer I'm going to hit it so it's really it's interesting to see how different their brains are and

that's that's more in line with answering your original question right so do they put analysts and case officers and Tech Officers all in the same room and then make make their behavior in the room part of the test no they'll they'll test to see what you fit into and then they'll put a bunch of tech officers a bunch of CAS case officers a bunch of analysts they'll all go into the same room and then inside that room everybody just behaves the same way in the tech officer room you're going to have people who studiously do

whatever and who show up in like t-shirts and shorts because They're they're kind of socially awkward for the most part because they're so heavily focused on engineering I feel seen But in inside the case officer room those are all the people who are like super jocks and they're all wearing shirts unbuttoned to the third button and they're like sitting back and whatever else and they're pulling tables and but they're all doing it so it makes them all feel like they're all winning because they're all with each other and They feel like oh I must be

elevated into a group of peers they don't realize that the what actually matters is not their behavior in the room but the results of the task they're being given I that's s do status jockeying stuff I let those guys play that game I I maybe I'm too old for it but I'm like you know what you guys can dick measure over there I I I can't I can't handle that maybe I wouldn't have fit in after all I I've heard that the parking at the CIA Headquarters is horrible it's so funny because you get these

people with insane stories but since they can't talk about 9% of it they just about the parking about the parking L yeah and I mean there's there's a lot of stupid stupid stuff that we that that America doesn't realize about CIA that shows it is a government institution just like the DMV just like the IRS right just like the VA it's just as broken and flawed and the parking Situation is one of them you have to I mean I'm sure you've heard a million times in the past but just to summarize it parking lots gigantic

it wraps around both the Old and the new headquarters building and depending on what time you show up or like the the level of of authority that you carry you end up parking very far away and and then for me like for people like me I learned to come in I hacked the system because when I started dating my wife who was also a CIA officer it only takes two people before you're considered a car pool and there's very specific car poool parking that's right by the front entrance so now when I started dating my

wife we would carpol in together park right by the front entrance and save ourselves 15 minutes of walking but when you walk when you're driving and you and you get there after 8: a.m. you're basically in like the nose bed seats that's funny yeah like I can just See you guys dating you're like you know what I don't I'm not crazy about you but this parking is unbeatable we should just get married and make a thing out of it in the basement of the new headquarters building there's a hot dog machine like I don't know

have you heard that before no I love this because people don't realize it my wife adores the story cuz it's so gross it is a hot dog machine which means what is that it's a vending machine That is gross so you walk yes you put in like your $150 or whatever and no A a cold Wier comes out goes onto like a little rack that microwaves it basically on a roller and then out of nowhere comes like a singularly wrapped bun and the two things were like dropped into each other and then like spit out

the bottom on like a little paper tray you know it's probably not worse than any other hot dog you eat honestly except that it's a CIA hot dog machine and and The fact that it's in the basement just makes it that much funnier because now you realize who must be using using that machine it's all the poor bastards who have to work in the basement after the cafeteria area closes which closes at like 5:00 in the afternoon so all those poor that are working like 1:00 in the morning and hungry they only have a hot

dog machine our National Defense like people analyzing Al-Qaeda and Isis Communications are like guess I'm going To go eat another hot dog until I get a new job yep and then that also means that the Operation Center must just smell like hot dog farts yeah all the time hot constant hot dog farts the the LIE detection stuff I've heard you know Joe novaro is he's he's a former FBI he he's former FBI wrote a lot of books on Deception but he told me was on this show I can't remember the episode number but he told

me he's like all these people that think they can detect lies Especially the YouTube crowd it's just BS I agree you agree I completely agree I completely agree because the whole so micro expressions and the Mastery of micro expression it's real but the problem is that it takes a very specific environment for that stuff to work and I'm so glad you're bringing this up right and I'm I'm so glad to know that Joe is out there telling the truth about this because it is such when when you hear certain Experts talk about micro expressions and

reading someone's face they are assuming it's happening in an interrogation setting and in an interrogation setting you control the environment and the poor bastard sitting across from you cannot leave they're a captive audience they have to have this conversation and you control what they eat what they drink the temperature in the room the smell you control everything long before I want to ask how they control the smell Long before you ever start having an actual interrogation where there's two people usually in the interrogation Swip swapping sto like questions so that both can watch the micro

Expressions because it's very hard to identify someone's blink rate or you know someone's eyebrow movements or someone it's hard it's just hard to do if you're having an Engaged conversation field operations and the kind of that 90% 99% of people do you're not in a captive audience that Person can leave you you don't control the temperature of the room you don't control what they ate in the morning or when they showed up for them like you don't control it so they could be looking up to the upper leand corner just because they saw a bird

flying by they could be oh the eye thing is always such BS every time I'm on a YouTube video there's a comment like he looked up and to the right he must be lying and I'm like dude there's A freaking camera up there or there's an audience with an upper row I'm looking at the person who sneezed like you're not reading my body language furrowing an eyebrow could be because they were confused or because they felt the breeze on their head or any number of things that you can't control so the whole idea of mastering

this lie detection through Visual identification of behaviors only applies if you're in a controlled environment the second place where it Applies is if you have a standing relationship what's known as a baseline right with the person this is why your mom knows well except for you and your kids cuz they're spy progyny but like most people you kind of know when your kid's lying because you have a 30 20 10 whatever year long Baseline on them so you know that there's that being kind of weird you're not looking at me it's why husbands know when

their wives are lying Even when their wives say fine yeah I'm fine well that's also not that coded that's not that they're not trying to hide by the way Pro tip she's not fine um yeah but Jen will be like if she's like hey do you like that I'm like yeah she's like no you don't because you're not talking and when you don't talk while you're eating means you don't like the food stuff I don't even notice about myself she's like no I know I know you I know you don't like that I can Tell

yeah I mean if if I could if I could turn all that off with like a light switch it would be awesome because all it's doing is it's dumbing Americans down it's distracting them from actual skills like knowing when you're being lied to is such a useful skill and you can actually master that skill but you will not master that skill if you're worried about micro expressions in the face or blink rates it's just not going to happen what does it take to master That type of skill like learning how to essentially interrogate somebody you

well it's not interrogation because they're not a captive audience what you have to do is you have to learn how to assess verbal and non-verbal cues okay and that's that's something that we teach my company teaches that I teach that to people all the time Co it's it's just a matter of understanding how people work how the brain works and how people respond to different types of Questions and then you just kind of set up a system of asking certain types of questions and seeing what the response is and how that response varies from the

Baseline that was set the last time you asked that kind of question ah it's interesting I I would love to get into more that in a future episode for sure there's one uh Dr Daniel liberman do you know who he is I've heard that name man he's so good at this and one of the one of the tricks that I remember from his Episode I should I should re listen to my own episode one of the tricks I remember was he said when when you think somebody's lying to you fill in the reason that they

did the thing so if it's like your friend was your teenager was late why were you late coming home was it because of the water M break right instead of why were you late coming home and they're like oh um you no reason you said was it because of the water M break and then what a liar will Do is hesitate because they're like should I agree with that or should I disagree with that and that hesitation shows you they're lying but if they go if they're not lying you go were you late were you

late because of the watermain break I don't know there was just a shitload of traffic that's all I is is there a water man break is that why there was tra that's probably they're probably not lying but the hesitation which you really cannot turn Off manually unless you are extremely skilled that's that's the that's the Killer and that's the indicator I mean a similar a similar example to that is asking people what we call emotional questions ask someone how they feel because you know what happens is when you ask someone how they feel they recall

the feeling right like how did you feel when your son was born MH like you know exactly how you felt it's it's not it's on your face that you Can remember exactly how you I'm trying really hard not to smile with this part of the I was like I'm going to throw him a curveball not do anything like dang this guy's a cold bastard doesn't even care when his sound was Bor but what ends up happening is when somebody when somebody uh when you ask an emotional question the first response is always the true response

like I see you can see it in their face that they're remembering the Real feeling but then the hesitation is when they assess should I tell them the real feeling or should I make a different feeling up and then you can see that transition too because you can see from the relaxed face to the thoughtful face to then they make a decision and then they actually say something you know it's interesting that it's also hesitation based I mean maybe you just maybe this just happens to be because it's also hesitation the example I gave you

that's what made me what made me come up with the example that hesitation is a true tell it's really hard to to to break it right that so it's a true tell yeah that does make sense that's that's an interesting point it would it's very even if you are because I've tried to I'm like okay I'm going to get tricky with this libran thing this little technique it is very difficult you have to rehearse rehearse rehearse That lie and think of all these different things they might ask you or you have to decide I'm going

to say this no matter what but if it doesn't make sense then it's weird as hell and that's what you're looking for right and you're looking for that too if you're smart yeah that's that's fascinating thanks for watching us on YouTube remember you can also enjoy the Jordan Harbinger show on Apple podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen to Podcasts our podcast feed is a treasure Trove of insights from intellectuals authors spies artists athletes Pioneers Engineers former Mafia bosses and Business Leaders all sharing their Amazing Stories and secrets to success for more information click the link

in the description now back to the show I watched that video where you were analyzing mission impossible oh my gosh oh that was so funny I wonder if I I for sure have some questions on it I gotta Figure this out I'm glad you enjoyed that um oh yeah in that video there's one part where they show I can't remember if this is also Mission Impossible but they show him working on a team and it's like you may select any two team members but it is essential that the third team member be NAA nordol Hall

she is a civilian I expected you to go yeah we don't pair them up with random folks but apparently that's not correct Apparently that is something That happens I mean they they well they'll pair you up with random people who are vetted by them because they want the team to work together you got to understand that when CIA builds a team mhm they're not looking for teamwork what they're looking for is a mix of skill sets and personality fit cuz they already know if you're going to work or not based on your personality and your

behaviors and they also know that a high performance team has conflict baked in So when they build a team like it doesn't matter what you think you want because they know what will biologically work so that's why they can pair you up with somebody who's completely strange like a complete stranger to you but vetted by them because they know Under Pressure the two of you are going to Jive or they know that Under Pressure the two of you are going to have conflict but then there's this third person or fourth person on the team That's

going to resolve that conflict and that makes you a high performance team that's interesting the big mistake that most people make is they build teams of people who will get along if you build a team of people who will get along that's how all the bad ideas get elevated to the top because it's like I like you and I don't want to disagree with you so I'm going to say yes to your bad idea even though I have a better idea I'll keep quiet about it yeah this Is I'm going to but this analogy here

but I do you ever see that movie about Queen forget what it's called I think it's called Bohemian rap city or something it's pretty good I'm not a huge music guy or whatever but there's a part where Remy Malik he goes off and he does his own thing because they're not getting along right and then he goes back to them I don't know however many years later and he goes the problem is not that the problem is not that what Those guy with the new band didn't do what I wanted to do the problem is

they just did whatever I wanted them to do whereas the old band they were like no we're going to do this riff and he would get so mad cuz he's like it's my idea but the music was crap is I guess uh people are going to email me about how that was the best ERA I don't care you're ruining my metaphor you're ruining my analogy the the idea was when the basist or the guitarist or what the Drummer was like I want to do this this is the right thing to do in this situation that

was like where the gold came out that was the magic it wasn't just about what he wanted but when he got what ever he wanted it just wasn't that good it's very similar to what you're saying the teams absolutely and and the difference is that you know CIA is pulling from Decades of of uh industry secrets in the intelligence world and an unlimited budget that they Use to hire the most modern-day Uh current psychology and and education that's out there they're pulling from both to make sure that their team always has an edge over their

adversaries that's the way it works so so when CIA builds team and they build a team for conflict and then you're put on the team you already know to expect I'm not going to get along with everybody on the team but I don't have to my job is not to get along my job is to make sure that in This a or in this technical expertise or in this planning piece I Stand My Ground and then everybody has to work together and then there's usually somebody who's kind of what what we call the lion of

the group there's some lion who ultimately has to make the final decision it would be so fun to be of the psychologists or psychiatrists who's like these two people they are going to really not get along and this is going to be a fun read folks this is going to Be a fun watch whatever however they're monitoring you because it's like Andrew and her nails meet chalkboard right and you're just they're just like waiting for you you're going and they're like I got this and it's just like nope this person is going to push every

single one of your buttons and then put more buttons in that you didn't know we're there and push those even harder it's like oh God would be so fun I you're not wrong Are if we but instead we're all thrown in there and we're like we've got 72 hours to make this thing happen no one's going to sleep we're all going to argue but at the end of 72 hours the op will either be successful and we'll all fist bump each other and be happy to meet each other or the op will be a failure

and we're all going to be like we all failed yeah it wasn't it wasn't Susan's fault it was all of us well there's a lab Certainly where they test these things that's the fun part right cuz the stakes are lower you're just trying to see if you can piss people off enough that they do their best work um teach me how to be a better liar I am a freaking terrible liar I can't there's probably not a situation actually that's a lie too um there's probably a situation in which I should become a better one

I'm curious and a lot of people reading or listening and watch let me retake that no one's Reading this maybe this there's a few de people reading this but people watching and listening they're for sure everybody wants to know how to be a better liar like oh it takes a lot of work to detect lies uh okay how do I just lie better yeah yeah certainly that's easier yeah it is and that's a it's a great Point learning how to lie is much easier than learning how to detect Liars um and honestly learning how to

lie is really just a matter of aligning your rational And your emotional brain your left and right hemispheres the thing that most people do wrong with lying is they don't pre-plan the lie and then if they do pre-plan the LIE they don't rehearse the lie so what I mean by that is if you don't know know the lie that you're telling you just lie spontaneously it's hard to remember that it's hard to keep the facts straight when you have to recreate or recall the lie that you made in the moment right so trained Liars do

Not spontaneously lie because when you spontaneously lie you don't know what your body's doing you don't know what your face is doing you don't know what your uh you don't know what you're going to say next if it's going to be congruent with the lie that you just made you don't know that in seven days you're going to remember the lie that you just had so it's very dangerous and amateur to lie spontaneously I see instead you plan your lie in advance Well the next mistake people make is they don't practice the lie so if

you plan a lie like if if I'm in my head in the shower and I'm like I'm going to uh I'm going to tell my wife that I didn't spend $500 on furniture right I'm going to lie to her I'm going to I'm not going to admit that I spent that money I'm not going to do it I'm just not going to do it but you've never practiced saying the words I didn't buy a new furniture you never practiced saying the words oh I Did buy that couch but it only cost 150 bucks and because

you haven't practiced saying it there's a body brain disconnect so then when you actually go to say it you stumble over your own well I the thing well Tom yes it was $500 right and that's so you have to premeditate your lie you have to rehearse and actually build the muscle memory to State the LIE those are the two fastest ways to become a very good liar yeah that that makes sense uh you See with kids man they don't think about it ahead of time hopefully they don't think about it too much ahead of time

they don't rehearse the lie that's yeah that that stuff in the moment will get you every time and parents lie to their kids all the time right we lie to our kids all the time we tell them that that you know gum is going to rot their teeth or that that TV screens are going to rot their eyes or whatever and you know what we do we say the exact same thing over And over again I bet you can recall five or seven things that your parents said to you wrote memory yeah they said this

all the time they said don't do or this would happen don't do this or this would happen they like that's them lying don't make funny faces it'll stay that way that was one of the OG kind of cliches right but it becomes muscle memory is built so even though they know it's a lie and even though you know it's a lie they can't stop the brain Body Connection from the muscle memory of just saying it over and over again that's perfect when you're trying to actually lie when you're trying to actually say that was I

got that couch at a discount it cost 150 bucks like you want to say that exact same phrase every single time anybody ever asks you about that couch bold if you to assume she's never going to check the credit card statement or whatever but that's what you do right man manipulation and Motivation are two sides of the same coin I've heard you say this in other interviews what do you mean by that so when it comes to CIA and when it comes to human operations human intelligence operations people love to throw around the word manipulate

yeah and manipulation has such a negative connotation all over the world where people are like don't manipulate me it's wrong to manipulate him don't manipulate her don't manipulate your kids so Manipulation has this this strong negative uh connotation okay but in reality all manipulation is is directing human behavior MH well when you look and you consider motivation what is motivation motivation is just directing human behavior so what they they're both going for the same outcome but motivation has this fantastic connotation right like oh you're a motivator you're a motivational speaker right no you're not a

manipulator Speaker nobody's highering thaty you're not a manipulation speaker exactly but they they both do the same thing it's all about getting people to do something getting people to take some action the thing that really makes motivation and even at CIA what we're taught is that motivation and manipulation are both useful tools to getting information you just have to decide whether or not you want to use motivation or manipulation at any given moment because the outcome Is the same the skills to apply it are the same the only thing that's different is the actual way

that you leverage those skills I see manipulation is defined as getting people to take an action that's not in their best interest that's manipulation oh so you just make it in their best interest to do something and then it's motivation when I get you to do something that's good for me and bad for you I manipulate you when I get you to do something that's Good for you and good for me I just motivated you right right I motivated you because you get something out of it it seems like the carrot is probably more powerful

than the stick in most cases we start with motivation in fact that is one of the like one of the core tenets of of intelligence Doctrine is start with motivation right try to get people to do what's in their best interest first because once you connect doing this task is in your best interest Every time you ask them to do it again it's that much easier right right right but when you yeah if you got to put a gun to someone's head you got to put a gun to someone's head every single time and the

gun has to get bigger and the bullets like it you can't just use the same 9 mm every time because they're like you've done this to me before right now it's like oh I've got a two gunmen now I've got you in a private room with a sack over your head now like it just Gets worse and worse that makes sense what there's an acronym for people who is it is I can't remember exactly what it is but when you're talking about Counter Intelligence it's like money what the motivators are like money ideology coer and

ego okay yeah I knew it was mice rice why do I think it's rice so rice rice is what I teach I see rice is the most modern version of it okay mice is the pre- 911 Cold War version of it but It basically stands for the same thing right these are the four core motivations that make any of us do anything motivation or manipulation and those four core motivations are reward reward yeah ideology coercion and ego like at any given time if if she offered you uh a special ice cream dessert that might be

enough to get you to cut the interview off early and go out to ice cream with your wife right that's reward you are trying to do the best possible Interview you can that's why you have backup microphones that's an example of ideology coercion is putting a bullet to someone's head right like like you have to stay here or else I'm going to right find you whatever it is that's coercion ego you want to have the you want to have the public see you certain way that's your public Persona that is ego not the same as

egotistical egotistical means you have to be powerful and correct all the time but you also have An ego I mean we just edited a part out of this interview because you accidentally said the word read and you were like no one's actually going to read this right that's part of your ego where you're like I'm very particular and I want people to see that I want I want to deliver a product that is a particular type of product leave that in just to screw up Jace leave it in leave in me telling you to leave

it in so I then it's back on me that's how this Works um yeah I think that actually that would be funnier just to leave that whole thing um Robert Hansen famous Trader FBI yep one of the things he he barely got paid this dude threw his life in career way and got tons of people killed for like I can't even remember but it was a freaking pittance it was it like Jack squat it was something you would never you could dude couldn't even buy a house with the money I mean it was it was

it was that crappy so the idea is He did it for ego but this wasn't a public facing thing he did it for ego from what like his Russian handlers telling him how he was a smart boy I don't really understand he he did it because the ego was himself he felt like the FBI had rejected his ideas they had marginalized his career blah blah blah blah blah blah blah so he wanted to get back at the FBI when the Soviets came in they were like hey we know how you can get back at the

FBI you can spy and give Us the secrets that help us and then we know you are one of the best and you're going to be operating right under their nose so how and like that shows their incompetence they can't even catch the person and then as he was promoted to being the head of the CI division looking for a Russian mole who was him it just magnified and Amplified that ego right that's how it works because and and you know what's really interesting is because he was so effective and Understood uh how to reverse

engineer Counter Intelligence operation he knew if they paid him too much it would look suspicious and then people would be turned on to that suspicion so instead he made sure that he was paid a very small amount and then he would be able to take the money and get away with it which just further kind of stroked his ego about how good he was yeah he just died in a super max Rest in Piss um guy got so many people killed how do you Elicit what will motivate people in the first place like look maybe

you know look this guy is a simpleton we can pay him he's going to look cool the end or if you're like this guy is immune to money he doesn't care about that he just wants to make sure that his particular brand of I don't know fundamentalism is validated I whatever how do you elicit this kind of thing from the per from the target so you're using the term elicit which is a very Specific term for me the word elicit or elicitation is an actual term it's a skill so I'm going to take a that

road because it's a very specific skill what you're talking about is is how are you able to assess a person's motivations by meeting with them that's how I would rephrase your question sure yeah and then using the skills of elicitation are just one of the ways that you would assess that person so uh let's start with something simple right So uh physical behav environment is the simplest way just by looking around this room and the camera that's on you is probably the best camera to actually show it I can see that you have the pictures

of your children on the back wall Oh I thought you were going to say I'm using the best camera I was like actually I can see that your your home alarm system has pictures of your of your children yeah like it's very clear to me that you are motivated that There's an element of Pride and motivation for your children and your family and your status as a father just because in this this very modern beautiful home where nothing is really on most of the walls there's like 12 paintings by kids right over there that's right

so your environment tells you a lot of what you need to know about the person so that's before you even ask them a question and then the next thing you want to do is you want to start Eliciting information from them by asking them questions and you want to try to focus your questions on things that will make them feel remember how we said earlier if you want to tell if someone's lying you ask feeling questions you ask feeling based questions right so you say something like I say that you have an animal fan in

your family yeah yeah that emotional response right there just validated for me that some like you do and you know Who it is and right now in your mind you're picturing whoever that child is that's right right well now you're associating me with that child because and you're associating the fact that I noticed enough to care there's a couple animal fans uh the giraffe is my personal favorite it's all neck that thing would fall over in real life I don't know if that's in the shot maybe it is if not we'll have to take it

one and place it in the YouTube video but my Point is but that's how you start to elicit so you start from the environment we call it macro to micro I see the environment as a macro objective I then pull something from the environment and ask a question that pertains to that specific macro item and then I get a micro response I get a smile I get laughter I get you volunteering information I assumed only one child you just told me that you have a couple well you only have two children so now you Just

told me without me asking that you have two children who like animals that is elicitation I didn't ask you you volunteered that and that was just because of us talking about the environment yeah getting I mean talking for a living and getting people to talk for a living are very well I wish most hosts did this but it's sort of two sides of the same coin and people really they want to tell you things that's why I was wondering if you really do even Need to elicit things from people or if you can just wind

them up and let them go you can't wind up everybody that's the thing you you have to assess them to know how to even get them talking I guarantee you you've had interviews here where it was like pulling teeth out of them yeah that just shows that you can not everybody will talk you have to find something that breaks down their barrier to sharing what's in their head there are plenty of people out there who want To talk but don't feel comfortable talking there's also people out there who live so much in their head they

think they're talking when they're really thinking yeah yeah yeah I've met those those people are very difficult to deal with very much so ever you ever dated anybody like that I it's weird man that's why I have like anybody who dates a true artist I I don't know how that I don't know how they make those relationships work it's very difficult I Know exactly what you're talking about and they'll tell you something and they're using a name and you're like who's Bob M oh it's the person who raised me you're dad just say Dad what

are you doing like it's just so there's like are you ins yes there's a whole Running World in their head yeah that you can see in their eyes that it's playing but it's not coming out like and they don't even realize they're not communicating I know I as an entj I Cannot deal with that um it for me like looking at like an Isis guy for example they will not shut the hell up about their ideology CU it's the only thing they have aside from a rusted out AK-47 and a and a slave and you

know chained up that they've kidnapped or something in in raqa right so so those guys it seems like there's certain types of people like that that are just really easy to read because their motivation I mean maybe it's a Little bit more veiled right like you think it's their ideology but really they just want Power because they were losers back in the UK that's why joined Isis and ran off to Syria like it can be a little bit like that but it seems like a lot of times the label on the jar is more or

less accurate I I would disagree honestly yeah I would just I would say that the label on the jar is the one thing you shouldn't trust really okay because to get to the place like to get To the place where somebody represents a larger cause like think about your us your typical US soldier right if you were to have any private from any military and like in the United States any if you had a brand new recruit from any of the four Services we'll throw the Coast Guard in sure if you had any of them

sit down in this chair and talk to you they would all pretty much look the same yeah they would probably all have the first response would be almost the Same to all of your questions right Hur America America's the best y that's not what I mean by I just mean the the the way that you detect it I guess you're right that phrasing is garbage you're you're right you would if you were really looking at the label you would say it's patriotism but it's really that's not what I would say same thing is true for

Isis yeah you look at the label you think it's all about ideology yeah I wouldn't think they've been Radicalized and they were radicalized because there was something in their background that where they felt powerless most likely but that thing that made them feel powerless could be different this person's dad was killed by an American Soldier this person's mother was blown up in a bomb by the Israelis this person's sister may have been raped by you know the nextd door neighbor who knows what something led to the chain of events that then ultimately Radicalized them when

you first talk to them you're all you're going to get is ideology yeah I yeah no this makes sense I I wish I could rephrase this because I've talked with a couple of those guys and it is really it's usually some sort of Shame derived crap like I I I guess I shouldn't feel guilty because they're in Isis so I'll talk about them but a lot of it is kind of like incel adjacent where it's like oh you literally were such a loser in life that You you felt your best option was to escape to

Syria to get purpose to maybe get find a wife cuz the only way you were going to find a woman is at the end of a gun and then to find some sort of like way to feel M it's it's it's basically they're a like a mass shooter except they traveled abroad to do it that's really what it is it's almost the same thing and and I'm going to I mean I'm sure I'm going to piss people off but good but clicks you have to you have To recognize the humanity of even terrorist ah yeah

like were they a loser were they Insel adjacent you know it's not it's not a stretch to say yes but you also have to understand they were just people they were just angry people and we were all just angry people at some point the difference was when you were the there's a literal thing called the radicalization ladder and we're taught the radicalization ladder specifically so that when we meet a Radical we can reverse engineer the ladder yeah mhm it all starts the very first step in a radicalization ladder is identifying people who feel like they

had an injustice MH all of us at some point in our life felt like we had an injustice Mom Dad teachers whatever grandparents wealth everybody feels at some point like the head in Injustice what ends up happening especially in the third world is that the people who have experienced Injustice There they are surrounded by other people who are suffering from the same Injustice so for for me when my father died and I didn't have a dad that felt like an injustice but I didn't really have anybody else in my immediate Network who could relate to

that Injustice and just like you know i' I've had friends who were when they were young M there's not a lot of people in their Circle who had the same Injustice so what ends up happening is you're Immediately reminded that your Injustice is very personal to you yeah you're shamed as well yeah well it and and you might be ashamed of it but you you start to realize that other people don't judge you for it but when you talk about like poor people in Syria like like impoverished people in Syria which again the the UK

extremist who's converted to Isis is rare he's an outlier but the person who comes from Syria who's radicalized Isis is common and it's Because everyone in their Community has the same Injustice once you identify people have an injustice all you have to do is direct their Injustice at a cause and then you have an enemy well this is why Hamas is so success I mean everybody's been oppressed get oppressed bombed y with by the US and Israel and now they and they all share that and then there's one organization that allows that is allowed to

exist there because they killed the Palestinian Authority guys off hey you want revenge we are waiting with open arms to help you give that opportunity get that opportunity you're suffering because of Israel and then of course all those ignorant masses are like yes we are suffering because of Israel that's the second step in the ladder direct against the common enemy well once you have a common enemy it's very easy to identify a common cause well we are also against Israel we are Hamas right and now that that radical that individual who was just lost is

like someone sees my plight the enemy is Israel the cause against Israel is Hamas and now all of a sudden before they even realize it they're carrying a Hamas flag and wearing a t-shirt right and that's the problem with extremism that's how Al Qaeda grew so fast that's how Isis grew so fast because where it's similar to your incel example is that they feel so outraged And so marginalized that psychologically they're looking for an explanation and that psychological explanation comes through the radicalization ladder and it only takes a few well-trained salespeople to basically create an

extremist cause yeah the the recruiters are looking for that kind of thing it's that's it's fascinating there's this um this documentary that I don't think anybody has seen but there's a Journalist investigating online Isis recruiters and she ends up falling in love with the Isis recruiter and the only reason that she didn't run off or end up in deeper but maybe even run off to Syria and meet this guy I think she was about to do that uh was because he had thought he had hung up a call and she was recording their calls for

her documentary uh about Isis recruiting ironically and he said something in Arabic and she was like that's weird um I wonder what that was so she was like I'm going to ask somebody to translate it and the person was like he said hey Abdullah I got you another one these girls are so dumb you're going to owe me so much money after I'm done with all of them I'm bring sending you a wife she's going to leave soon and she was like oh I'm being played super freaking interesting and so it's easy for us to

say oh only dumb people fall for this but when somebody has enough of a Baseline on you to figure out where your little holes in your soul are and they know how to fill them because they've been trained by Iranian intelligence or to do that or whatever it it's pretty it's a pretty good sell it's a pretty good pitch you only need 15 skilled recruiters to create thousands of volunteer recruits we're right back to the same topic we had earlier motivation and manipulation it's very hard to manipulate people into joining an Ideological cause it's hard

to manipulate someone into wearing a a bomb vest and killing themselves it's much easier to motivate them when you connect the fact that their Injustice is going to be wred forever and they can have a legacy impact on every Palestinian or every Sunni Islam or Shia Islam person in the future right like that's how it works it's the same it's as frustrating as it is and as angry as people get it is the same way we recruit for the US Military it is the same thing we do here we fill new recruits heads with ideology

you know Army of one you know Marine strong we fill people with this ideology so then this injust this poor child this 18-year-old is it Army Strong it's the few the the proud Marines I know that much thank you jeez man come on I know you're in the Air Force you should have this but all you're doing is you're just you're reaching into ryal America for the most part you're reaching into ryal America finding these people who are who don't know where they're going to go and they feel lost and Mom and Dad didn't save

any money for for college manufacturing's gone for the most part again there's a bell curb right and then you're basically telling them they can be part of a larger cause and then that part of the larger cause is you can come fight for your country and Fight For Freedom what they're I mean at the end of the day what they're saying is if you Die in Service to America that's a life well spent that's why they always show those funerals man but the gun the salutes and the flag and the folding of the flag and

giving it to the person it's like they show I know they show that all the time in part it's really impressive but one of the reasons it's impressive the whole design is I I think if you sort of maybe I'm paranoid but I feel like if you backwards rationalize why they make that impressive it's Because it's all propaganda yeah and there isn't a veteran out there who won't tell you they fell for it once and then when they actually saw their buddies die they were like what a waste of a good life yeah right you

want to know what honorable having a long fulfilling productive life that serves a family and the American dream and all that's what's a long productive successful life the the most honorable thing you can do is live a fulfilling Life serving your family and the people of the country by being productive and being a contributing member of society the most honorable thing dying in service to your nation is not the most honorable thing it's just an another honorable thing the challenge is like and that's part of why you're seeing a recruitment crisis right now because today's

generation who has has lived with information at their fingertips they know there's Alternatives yeah and They know that no matter how desperate they might feel there's still Alternatives and once you sign that paperwork you're locked in for a long time plus you have a whole generation of people like me Veterans of the year past who now that we have children and we're mentoring teenagers we're like you don't have to join the military when I was a teenager everybody in my sphere of influence was like you got to join the military really I and we're going

to end Up doing if we haven't already some program where it's like you want to move to the United States you have to join the military you have to we're in a bad place yeah for recruiting we are in a bad bad place yeah I'm I'm surp it will not surprise me if in 5 years it is every single immigrant who's under the age of I don't know whatever 33 36 man or woman must at age 18 or something serve for seven years and you Get your blue passport after the fact it's going to be

something like that I mean we already have to do that for labor so it's just it's a natural extension of that a lot of people say things like trust your gut trust your intuition I don't know what you think but I hate that because your intuition is made up of a a bunch of your feelings that are like based on other things that have happened to you over your life or things how you feel like it's just not Reality yeah I completely agree trusting your gut does not account for what we call cognitive bias like

yes it's bad enough that you're just trusting your emotions but there's actual science that shows that the human brain leaps to conclusions yes and then after it's leaped to a conclusion enough times it just wires itself that way so I mean you see this every time you talk to somebody who's like hyper religious or somebody who's hyper political there's no space For any kind of new information because they just leap to a conclusion that is essentially trusting your gut I see this with one of the worst examples I've seen recently is a doctor made a

video I don't do a lot of social media but I saw that someone sent this to me on Instagram a doctor made a video about and I can't remember what it was but it's not relevant it was just something like hey here's a medical thing that you might not know about your child and a Lot of the top comments were no way my mama gut says this and I will always do that Mama Knows Best and I'm like you are arguing with a doctor a physician an MD and she is saying don't do this this

is bad and it's like well my mama knows best why would you know best you gave birth to this person good you have a good Baseline on your kid as per our previous conversation that does not indicate whatsoever that you are qualified to give medical advice or even Make a really good medical decision yeah it's it's terrifying to see stuff like that happens all the time and what's worse is because we live in an age that where information is so available it gets reinforced because now in your algorithm your algorithm looks for how you respond

to things and then it feeds you more of what you already believe so you end up in this Echo chamber that gets smaller and smaller and more hyper nich to you and then we all end up Wondering how that other person end up so crazy before we think oh wait maybe I'm equally as crazy in my own Echo chamber of what social media and media and entertainment is telling me I know fear has some wisdom in it we've talked about the gift of fear with Gavin debecker and you know who he is yeah most of

the time though it's just a bad idea to go with subjective emotion right it seems like do you train that out of people at the CIA is that something they Train out of you you know it's funny the answer is no because the the gift of fear is very real oh not the sorry with I know what you're saying I know what you're saying but here's what I'm saying right the gift of fear is very real so you don't ever want to undermine the value of that gift yes CU that's what keeps us alive not

only what keeps us alive but often times when it comes to a field operation you're keeping yourself alive and the other people on your team So you want everybody to have the gift of fear but what we try to do is we try to reprogram how the brain and body connection reacts to fear so I'm going to try and do this in like a reader digest version fear always comes from an external um stimulus so if you can if you picture like a a diagram of like connecting lines you got an external stimulus that triggers

that is picked up by one of your five senses sight sound touch taste feel right so somewhere in There one of your five senses picks up on this external stimulus that is then just information not an emotion just information is then sent to both your left and right hemisphere simultaneously your left hemisphere of your brain is your emotional Center so or I'm sorry your left is your logical Center your right is your emotional Center so when is that real I I thought that was sort of like not a thing the left and right left and

right is totally real that left And right hemispheres are but is it is it true that our emotions are really located in one hemisphere that's not I mean scientifically they cross-pollinate and there's like Central there's Central nodes inside the brain so it's just okay but as a as an example okay there's essentially two parts of your two pathways through the brain that are conveniently described as left and right but the pathway of your brain that is uh emotional when it sees the stimulus Through the five senses the emotional part of your brain immediately triggers your

survival Instinct right fight or flight threat or non-threat really right and then it feeds it can immediately tell your amydala which is the physiological response of your body how to react because it's a one-step connection right it's literally stimulus goes to brain brain reacts emotionally fight or flight tells body sweat Panic increase your heart rate get ready to Run mhm that's your emotional pathway your logical pathway has two extra steps the information comes in the information is shared with your brain but the first thing your brain does is it says have I seen this before

so it it goes against an index of previous experiences and then after it processes through that index and it says yes I have seen this before or no I haven't seen it before it then goes to another part part of your rational brain that says when I saw this Before or when I if when I've seen something like this before what was the outcome well then it comes up with a response that is measured and rational and then it goes to the amydala and then it tells the body how to react so what I'm saying

there is that the left and right brain are these the emotional pathway and The Logical pathway in response to the same fear stimulus one happens faster than the other so have you ever had a moment where you've been Startled by something in the corner of course yeah you you see something socks on your floor or whatever and you think it's a snake or a rat you startle but then like a half a second later you're like oh it's just socks and then you come down well the startle is a physiological response you actually had an

increase in your in your heart rate and your blood pressure right you had a very real physical response physiological response and then when you Came down you had a very real physical response that is exactly what's happening so that is the gift of fear the gift of fear is the startle that could would have kept you alive if it was actually a rat so what CIA trains us to do this is a lot longer than reader digest I can tell it from your face no no I'm now I'm all paranoid like how many of my

kids drawings are on camera the uh what CIA trains you to do is slow down the emotional side of your Thinking and speed up the rational side of your thinking so that you startle less and you rationalize more but the the to your amydala it levels out your physiological response so now when you see something in the corner of your of your house you still see it but you don't panic instead you see it and you're like what's that in the corner of the house right that's what it's all about and that's exactly how you

train a very successful case officer that's how You train a very successful field operator that's how you you train a successful shooter you train them to not have a spike in their physiological response to a true fear stimulus how do CIA agents develop Assets in other countries you know if you you let's say you're you're stationed in Panama or whatever like where I was you're going to meet somebody you know that they're a narco trafficker because you've got background information on People that are going to be at the party at the Australian Embassy or whatever

it is you just know his he's a real estate developer right A lot of these guys do but he's really he's a narco how do you start to develop a relationship with this person it's a great question There's an actual process that we're taught and it's a process very similar to the sales cycle very typ very similar to like a leadership cycle very similar to a social cycle about how you make a Friend or how you gain someone's trust or how you make someone take action and and buy your product Espionage is really nothing more

than the selling of of treachery that's all Espionage is right you're you're just pitching somebody on the idea of giving away secrets in exchange for something else it's it's it's very much a sales pitch right so that process to develop the asset is uh it's an acronym that we call sad rat s a d r a t that's funny great acronym it's A government acronym but the Sadat acronym stands for spot assess develop recruit handle even though handle starts with an H it's a government acronym I got you yeah and T is terminate this process

sad d r a t is just the process that's always happening so you spot a Target you assess the target for whether or not they have access to information and whether or not they're susceptible to potential Espionage because remember if they have access but they can't be Turned you don't want to waste your time if they don't have access and they're they look like they're going to be easy to turn they're not going to be helpful so you're looking for that right person who both has access to secrets and is willing to share those secrets

so the a is very important and then you go into the the the term develop which is the term you use how do you develop the asset develop is a very specific term that we use that talks about cultivating And training and exchanging information and ex and testing core behaviors to make sure that that person can truly engage in a secret relationship that nobody else knows about if you apply Sadat to like getting married it makes a lot of sense you spot a lot of potential Partners you assess potential Partners against could I live with

them could could they live with me could they raise children could they be financially responsible and then you kind of Whittle It down to the ones who say who are yes to all of those but that's not where you stop then you actually date them for a while you test them for a while you see how do they handle you know how do they handle when I'm when I'm sick with food poisoning how do they handle when we travel overseas that's all part of the D and develop because you're developing a relationship that ends like

the development period ends when you actually ask the question will you marry Me when they say yes they are now recruited MH and then when they're recruited Everything Changes right that's why it's so much fun to like be dating and it's not fun at all to be engaged the sad part is the F the happy part yeah and the rat part not not always not always smooth sailing right so in the recruitment phase now it's like they said yes you said yes you're in a relationship that is intentionally there to exchange secrets well now there

Has to be like rules and there have to be actions that are consistent and there's responsibility and obligation all this other stuff and then through the entirety of that relationship you are in the handling phase handling is really more like what we joke about with marriage where most husbands joke that happy wife happy life yeah it's kind of real but it's also we joke about it because what we're really saying is we have to meet our wife's expectations to Keep her happy yeah like I'm pretty sure I was going to say I'm pretty sure I'm

the one being handled which is why this doesn't always hold up the analogy doesn't always hold up yeah correct well that's how most husbands are and we we think that we're the developing officer until we actually get married and then we all realize we're being handled being played by double agent that's how it works and then but the place where I hope you and I never get to is the tea The terminate because in a true clandestine relationship when the asset is no longer useful you don't want to continue having meetings with that asset so

you terminate the relationship not terminate the person just terminate the relationship and that means you find a reason to stop talking and in marriage terms that would be like your typical divorce or your separation it's like hey you no longer serve me so I'm going to Let you go so I can go right back to the spot part of sad rat I heard uh that when the Soviet Union fell a lot of people who thought they were in relationships with Russian women were just like completely ghosted I this I'm sure this number is relatively small

right but people who are being developed by KGB agents suddenly found themselves on the other end of yeah not answering my letters or my calls or whatever it was back in the 80s like what happened And the the answer is their paycheck stopped coming and they were like screw this I'm going back to usbekistan or whatever and I'm done with this and so the Diplomat or whatever that had been cheating on his wife is no longer in a relationship with anybody and it it just brings up sort of an interesting well actually let me ask

you this sex beaj I know you get asked about this a lot yeah there's a podcast about this it's called to die for my friend Neil You know Neil St yeah yeah so Neil did this podcast and I I love Neil but the I think This Woman's story is BS I not that because sex bage isn't a thing uh nothing adds up but sex sex bage happens I'm sure of it I think I've known some people who I'm like I'm pretty sure you're being played by this person uh but I'm curious if you've certainly they

train you guys on how to avoid this tell me about it a little bit I'm I'm I think a lot of people are curious about this Yeah absolutely so so sexpionage is a commercial term we call them sexual exploitation operations MH um because essentially what you're doing is you're exploiting or motivating SL manipulating somebody on the basis of their sex not their not their gender but their sexual preferences so that can be homosexual that can be heterosexual that can be bisexual that can be any number of The Kinks that are out there if you exploit

their sexuality it is a sexual Exploitation operation um and there's there's left and right boundaries so to speak in the United States we have no problem with sexual exploitation operations but we will not sexually exploit using one of our Intelligence Officers H because what ends up happening pragmatically is once once you cross the boundary into sex with the Western mentality you also cross a boundary emotionally in the west that's something That's very unique to the West in Latin America and in Asia and in like India people have sex all the time and it's not emotional

but here in the United States we are we are of a culture where once you cross the sex boundary you can't help but by the conditioning of our culture also cross an emotional boundary interesting so we do not create operations where our officers engage in sex to withdraw secrets from a Target that does not mean that our officers Don't facilitate sex for a Target so if you have some who's really into you know transgender men or transgender females you might facilitate them getting a transgender prostitute or transgender boyfriend or girlfriend and you become the friend

that helps them get the sex they want yeah that's an interesting little hustle right there huh left and right boundaries right whereas you consider uh svr or MSS the Russians or the Chinese they very much let their own Officers they push their own officers to engage in sexual exploitation operations because they don't have freedom of choice in those countries they don't have personal rights in those countries and often times what they find is that in those countries sex is already like not an emotional thing yeah so they can leverage that tool much faster and it's

better to put a trained operator in bed with a Target than it is to put a trained operator in the room next to the Target and then after the target gets their rocks off then you have a conversation but in our country that's essentially what we're left with yeah interesting and by the way one of the other reasons I brought up Neil stra not to throw crochet on his podcast which I actually quite enjoy it even though again I think her story is full of holes he was supposed to write a profile of lucenko the

president of Bose the dictator of Bose and he started getting These emails that were like hey by the way in preparation for your visit we just want to know what kind of girls you like and it was very clunky and I thought this is KGB training literally ask the dude what kind of girls he likes or you could just read you could just read the game he basically outlin his dream like look at the woman he's dating now I mean there's clearly there's a type here man uh it's it was really kind of ridiculous but

he started to be like What are you talking about and the emails are comically clunky man it's like we just want you to have a good time maybe you'll meet somebody and maybe there's a future in it and it's just like you have read this entirely wrong like the the the budget cuts over there at the Bell Russian kg must be pretty intense uh but it was just very it was very clunky but it was so funny to see this happen because he was supposed to go there and write a profile The president obviously what

they're looking for is to get him in a compromising situation videotape it or whatever and then make sure that the the profile is flattering uh or they were going to do something you know otherwise what's the point you if you want to show somebody a good time and it's spontaneous just wait till they're there and have a party I mean that's all you need to do but they were like no we really want to make damn Sure that this person gets it in it's it was just so ridiculous and I'm imagining that most operations involving

sex being not sexual exploitation are a little bit smoother it's not it's not necessarily uh that they're smooth it's that they are they are very intentional and often times what happens is when you're when you're dealing with somebody who can be sexually exploited M they don't want to like they don't want to be Coy about it they prefer a bold approach really yeah Yeah yeah so so more often than not when like a true sexual exploitation operation happens it's kind of like the smoke smoking hot female or the smoking hot gay guy or the smoking

hot whatever walks right up to the person and is super bold and it's just like hey I saw that you're sitting here alone and what are you doing in town and do you want to go up to my room and have a good time that it's just bold and what ends up happening is the for anybody who's Listening and watching and here's here's a moment here's what I call real talk right let's have a real talk moment here if sex motivates you the only thing more motivating than sex is fast sex so I suppose you're

right so like there are plenty of people out there that and and the reason bellarus does it is because they learned it from KGB and MSS learned it from KGB why beat around the bush it's better to just say hey yeah yeah hey what kind of women do you Like what kind of wine do you like what kind of this do you like what kind of that do you like you bury it among four or five options but what they're really saying to the right person who can be exploited what they're really saying is if

you'll tell us what kind of women you like we'll make sure you get them MH but to some people they they judge it wrong but to most people that are actually exploitable sexually they will answer that question and they'll be like I like I like red wine I like Cabernet I like red beef or I like I like rare beef I like blondes that weigh 130 lb or less I like X whatever I know they put their list they lost you there for a second Andrew let's see what's on the menu yeah it was uh

it it just it you're right it seems like it must be a filter like hey look basically proposition this dude as much as you can in writing and if he runs not the right target not the right target cuz you know what there are Plenty of other journalists that we can have come out and do the profile right and if we can't get this one there's nine others that we can choose yeah interesting he didn't end up doing the profile obviously he was afraid to go after that for obvious reasons yeah it's it's bellus it's

belus I mean even people who are from belus don't want to go to B for real like everyone should be afraid of going to bellarus under any conditions yeah it's my my brother is Getting married and he's dating a girl from bellarus and this will come out after that so I'm not afraid to talk about this but one of the reasons he's getting he's getting married in Georgia and I don't mean the state I mean the country of and the reason is because her passport was expiring she lives in a third country I'm not going

to say where they live um they live in a third country in Eastern Europe she wanted to go renew her passport because they Wanted to come here and visit for Christmas well as it turns out you need to go to the Embassy and renew your passport okay so she goes to the Embassy the Bell Russian Embassy and they said you can't renew your passport you have to go back to bellarus so she goes huh okay it calls her family in bellarus and they were like do not come back so and so's uncle came home and

now he can't go work in Germany where he has his job because they won't let him leave and They confiscated his passport so they're like don't come back crap my passport is not going to get renewed so my brother's like screw it I guess I'm proposing romantic right to get documents so he goes all right let's get married he's a citizen of another country and they have a couple citizenships between them I or sorry he's got a couple citizenships or whatever residences anyways so she has to get a document in the country where they live

she needs a document that says She's not already married in bellarus so she goes back to the Embassy and the guy goes I'm not giving you that you should marry a bell Russian and besides if you want to get married to that guy go get married in bellarus it's cheaper anyway so they are just like no no no go back to Beller and so she knows she's going to get there's just a nonzero chance she can never leave yeah so he calls me in a panic and he's like where can we get married when you

don't need documents And I'm like the United States kind of and it's like Iceland and Georgia Georgia so he's like great I've already been to Georgia we really like it there so they're getting getting married in Georgia quite quickly and she's going to then have a marriage that's valid to this guy who's got a passport from another country which gets her D she doesn't need a b Russian passport anymore she's basically abandoning that whole idea and it's it's quite a it's Quite a saga I forget what the hell my original point was but here we

are that's okay well me it's going to be tough but your your your point your original point was about sexual exploitation operations and why nobody should go to belus right I think it was just why nobody should go to belus I that was just an anecdote about that particular thing which is a shame because I would love to visit a place like that the problem is I want to Eventually leave and I think that's the that's the trick there's really nothing to see that I would want to see in belus have you been there before

so bellus is on a short list of places where like I'm never never really allowed to go and uh and Russia's on that list too but if anything you want to see in bellus you'd prefer to see it in Russia anyways right so because that's that's really the whole reason bellarus is a dangerous place is because it's essentially a Shadow government run by Russia yeah what is the what is the term people use like not puppet state which is also true but and not even fom but uh there's a there's a term that they use

it's it's an Antiquated term whatever I'll look it up later it's like a principality almost of of Russia yeah uh where else can you not go uh Cuba is on my list of places where I can't go uh China is on my list of places where I can't go uh Hong Kong is Now on that list uh Taiwan will will probably be on that list very soon you think so yeah I mean it's not just me it's really anybody with my credentials or background like I can't go to Ukraine right now yeah so there's just

there's places where we become a risk if someone with our credentials ends up being picked up in a place like that and these are not free countries there's not Taiwan is free but there's a lot of MSS operating in Taiwan obviously and T and Like again when we talk about free like the Taiwanese police could wrap us up could wrap me up and then come up with any trumped up claim and it would work but Taiwan is a friendly state in so many ways why would they wrap you up the Taiwanese president is friendly the

Taiwanese legislature is not the Taiwanese police divisions are different by by uh principality and that's what people don't realize about most of the world people don't realize that the the Way that laws work in the United States where the federal law is similar if not the same as most state laws like in the United States we have very like very little difference between state and municipality and federal superceding federal law and things like and the rest of the world is not like that like you could literally enter one part of Cambodia cross through a police

district where the laws are completely different and end up violating a law where they Hold you in that Precinct even though you have you were you entered into a different Precinct and you just traveling through on a bus who knows what right it's not it's not the same as United States yeah Taiwan I I I'm still a little confused by that just because it it it does seem so friendly I mean Hong Hong Kong obviously is part of China Hong Kong was so Hong Kong was super friendly yeah until it suddenly wasn't friendly right if

you were there 4 days before it was suddenly unfriendly it would have still been unfriendly right like since the Taiwanese elections in January the pro-unity with China government yeah that they control the legislature the president is pro segreg is pro separation but that president is having a hell of a hard time getting anything done in Taiwan right now because the the legislation the the the legisl wants to go closer back To ties with China so even sitting here having a conversation where we're like Taiwan is free Taiwan is not free Taiwan is split Taiwan is

torn right the parliament the legislature has representatives of all the districts of Taiwan sure the majority of those districts are represented by somebody who wants to reunify with China which means that just I mean China spreads its hands everywhere anyways it's definitely deep into those districts that want Unity with China so now more than half of Taiwanese districts we can assume are influenced by if not penetrated by China yeah and their police precincts in those districts will be heavily influenced by if not penetrated by China so when we say Taiwan is free I I just

mean from a personal Liberties St Democratic standpoint it it seems quite Democratic right now but maybe not I don't know I mean it's I I I I'm not not going to risk it personally yeah yeah I mean I Don't blame you for that I'm just saying it seems like I this is something where I have to ask like an actual sort of Taiwan that Taiwan China experts because I know dissidents that freely travel to Taiwan but can obviously not go to China and you know they would never go to Hong Kong because they'd be arrested

immediately are they traveling after January of this year yeah that's a good question I don't know I ask mean every the the danger of traveling in and out Is is increasing every day and the same thing with Hong Kong I'll have to ask Hong Kong I I can't definitely I can't go to China or Hong Kong but I I last went to Taiwan in October and now I'm like well crap should I not go back I talk a lot about China on this show I am not in their good graces by any stretch um but

I'm no I'm no spy as far as as far as they know um you mentioned secret life before sharing your secret life can you separate that from well first of all I'd like to Define that a little more and then talk about how you pry your way into something like that so we talked about this earlier when we were when we were discussing the idea of judging people by the label like the label on the on the can if you will or the label on the jar there's three types of lives that we all carry

at least we're taught that everybody carries three types of lives right there's a public life a private life and a secret life the Public life is the life you want other people to see so going back to our example about the Isis extremist who's paring ideology or the brand new you know US military recruit who's paring ideology that is their public life that's that's what they put on so everyone around them can see it right I'm smiling not that I'm actually happy I'm laughing at your joke even though it's not really funny pretending that my

relationship with my wife is perfect Even though I know that it's flawed yeah that's all public life stuff and we all have a very public life we carry it with us to work we carry it with us on dates we carry it with us at the gym we want people to believe that we're confident and capable right that's all public life stuff not real public then behind that we have what's called a private life your private life is what's known to the people who are in your inner circle the people who are your closest friends

but And in that private life they know things about you that nobody on the public knows right they know that I'm lactose intolerant they know that your feet maybe stink when you take them out of your shoes they know that you don't like to stay up past 10 public and private life are crashing into each other right now on this podcast but that's that's all part of your private life right your wife knows it your mom knows it your close friend from college These people know whatever it is uh and it's it's more compromising than

what the public knows but it's not compromising enough that it makes you feel nervous right now my wife tells me I'm exactly like I am on the podcast which is who knows what that really I guess that means that those things merge together a little bit but clearly there are things that I don't broadcast on this show well I mean just a few minutes ago you were talking about how you were Immediately distracted by the idea of how much else about your children is posted on the walls oh just the drawings yeah cuz I I

realized how much I don't really mind if people know that you know they know my kid concern yeah it's a private life concern right that's a private life concern the third life that we have is called a secret life your secret life is the life that you keep secret from even your closest people in the private Circle there are secrets you Have that your wife doesn't know there are secrets that your wife has that you don't know a uncomfortable super uncomfortable but this is what's so powerful about Espionage when you learn that that's the truth

and then you validate you're like holy there are definitely secrets that I have that I don't tell anybody once you learn you have a secret life it's that much of a stretch to understand everybody has a secret life the power happens when you When you can get other people to share their secret life with you secret life is all the things that you're the most ashamed of you're the most guilty about the things that you're you fear judgment and shame like it's the places the things that you don't even like to talk to yourself about

but you know they're true all of that constitutes your secret life what's so powerful about secret life is once somebody shares their secret life with you they are forever Wedded to the fact that you have been led into their secret life right it's like the ultimate form of loyalty yeah because they nobody knows this thing about them except them and you well it's like guys you've ever traveled with when you go to Thailand you just come back and it's like remember when Tom and I went to Thailand with it's like sh she's in the other

room you know like there's there's there's a few of those there's a bond there right and that bond is super Powerful when it comes to the idea of using that bond for leverage gain Secrets again ESP is all about stealing secrets well once you have once you've beened into someone's Secrets it's very easy to get them to tell you more secrets that don't even compare to that secret from their secret life right so if you want to get Le I mean obviously right you used to I used to teach like share and then be shared

with it seems like if you're CIA you would share Something that was fake and constructed because you don't really want them to have leverage over you you make a so what you're talking about is elicitation and this is what I I mean I always loved what you taught in your previous podcast right but it's still surface level yeah it's still like introductory level it's like Neil Strauss the stuff that he teaches is all very superficial surface level psychology when it comes to actually applying that psychology Against a wide variety of targets it gets more nuanced

so share to be shared with is an elicitation technique that's technically called give to get I went to this University well it's logical for you to tell me where you went to University when it comes to getting into someone secret life you can't give to get because then you're giving your secrets that's my point and if you give a lie if you give a lie you're not showing that you're worthy of their Inner of their secret life because if they suspect or or or think that there's a lie there they're not going to let you

in what you have to do is you have to make you have to make um assessed guesses hypotheses that come with validation about what you already suspect is in their secret life so you look at them and you're kind of like I understand a lot of people have a hard time around seven years of marriage and They start wondering whether or not their wife is a good fit and I see the way that you and your wife argue sometimes and I can't help but wonder if maybe you're feeling that way too and I don't want

you to feel bad if that's the way you feel because I've had lots of friends feel the same way this sounds exactly like what we used to teach uh not not in not on the podcast but in the programs that we were selling because I did teach it to MI6 and possibly a qu Big question mark to see because they don't tell you what you're doing there's a lot of like film this training for our Corporation in a room with one person who's just taking notes and quiet yeah there's a so it which was kind

of how the I think the MI6 thing was it was just there wasn't like a room full of guys looking at me was like a video camera thing and it found out more or less by accident um and definitely when you're teaching I wonder in fact confirm This for me if you can do you ever receive training where it's just a person on video teaching something yeah because there were times where I'm like so I'm going to I don't know Northern Virginia to teach this thing in just like an empty room and there's essentially a

secretary or like one other person asking me if I need water or something to drink turning off a video camera on and off comes back into the room after lunch with a bunch of Random questions that I'm guessing she didn't come up with herself clarifications do it again at the end of the thing and I'm like who's watching me give this training that doesn't want to just sit in this room yeah and that's that's exactly how uh that's how a lot of our training works really okay um and it's and it's because we get I

mean it's top tier training yeah but it's still one-sided you have a need to know the content of the training but the trainer Does not have a need to know the people who are in the training well right that I just suspect I'm like these have got to be Dia or do officers that can't have me see their face and there's also an element of of I mean it may just be a panel of HR people who are determining whether or not your training is even applicable because there's no benefit to letting you know that

there's even real people there so if they had five different people coming in to talk about Five different ways to apply psychology to relationship building they have one person at 9:00 a.m. another person at 1230 another person at two another person at five whatever right it's all recorded yeah and it's all assessed by an HR panel and then that HR panel could split and splice all the best pieces of all five together into one packaged video that then gets sent to the do yeah this is multiple days so either it was a really in-depth assessment

or it was a Training cuz I was so confused as to why I'm training this completely disinterested person in a video camera yeah and I and I'm like this can't be used for commercial use you signed off on the thing so what are you using this tape for it was very and then my friends from agencies were like maybe it was this thing but you know nobody know nobody's going to tell me so it's funny you you and I got in touch years and years ago and again we forgot how that Even happened uh or

at least that's the story we're going with and you I was like oh call me when you have a book it's easier for me to prep what is going on because the the clearance process for these books I made a joke about the clearance process but it's it was apparently that's really the holdup yeah the clearance process so as a former CIA officer I have a lifetime SEC secrecy agreement an NDA yeah where I can't disclose operational details About my past I can talk about lots of other things but sources and methods about intelligence operations

that I participated in is one of those no-go lists to get that approved I have to run it through CIA so we wrote a manuscript that manuscript has been with CIA it has actually technically been approved by CIA however there were changes in the geopolitical um landscape related to what we wrote about in our book that then CIA exercised their right to to Deny the book so then we had to change some of the details to accommodate cia's requirements and then it's gone back in for another round of revisions so we are hoping to have

a book approved by CIA so that we can get it published on bookshelves by summer of 2025 wow but it was originally supposed to be released by summer of 2024 until CIA changed their mind and it's really tied to the fact that my wife and I our operations were so modern that the contents of the Book is unlike anything anybody's ever seen before and it makes CIA nervous it's a great pitch um yeah just just telling just spit and facts guys my my book is full of amazing things no one's ever seen before uh are

you going to be able to tell where you were deployed in the book not not in terms of specific countries region Regional yes because I mean I have my suspicions but I you know can't talk about that yet so I'm sure they're in a huge rush to get this Cleared for exactly exactly exctly they have nothing else going on that's why every 30 days we remind them that they had a 30-day timeline to approve the book we'll make the rules around here thank you very much yeah you you've got this cool I guess Tech for

lack of a better word which is two questions and one confirmation and when you talked about this I it was so funny because I go oh I'm pretty sure that this is one how I have most conversations of my life With new people and two how almost how I conduct this exact podcast because if I just ask questions I've seen hosts do that it's it's weird it's a weird vibe it doesn't work well and people go you know Jordan I like your show cuz it's a conversation and I'm like yeah but I'm definitely controlling the

questions question question and then I tell an anecdote or something like that and I think it works really well I mean scoreboard I suppose but tell me about This because I never really thought about it as a as a tactic that would make sense outside of this particular job oh yeah so does it absolutely it makes sense because what you're what what the tactic of two questions and a confirmation or a validation what the tactic does is it builds an artificial relationship it manufactures trust between two people because it shows shows that one person's in

control but it also shows that the one person who's In control is actually interested enough that they're part they're contributing they're participating in the conversation which makes the person answering questions feel like they're special makes them feel like they're being listened to it makes them feel heard it makes them feel validated right and that is a natural human response to being in a community where you are valued and where you are an equal player so this idea of ask a question ask a Relevant follow-up question and then volunteer a a congruent fact to validate the

person is just a constant snowball that builds more and more momentum that makes the target feel comfortable I will sometimes retain journalists and be like how can I improve my interview technique and I I did that in years past especially and what's funny is they go well this it did work when I listened to it however in at ABC we were trained to only ask questions so when you do an Interview with them if they ever interview we' do like mock interviews I'm just like this is weird you're just asking me questions you're not adding

to this at all and occasionally on YouTube someone will be like I'm a journalist and I want to help you get better at this interview thing and they're like never talk about yourself never add anything they just they're like just stick to the questions and it's it's always kind of funny to me because I'm Thinking this is like how to make your show exactly like anybody else and make yourself totally replaceable and uninteresting 101 yeah it's never add anything well what's funny is like journalists don't realize that the medium of a podcast is not anything

like journalism right that's you you can say that again yeah right it's completely different it's a whole different media platform which is why podcasting is so popular and journalism is going the way Of the dodo not not to mention the fact that with a when a journalist interviews somebody it's because they want the attention to be on the subject and they're trying to inform the public about the subject with podcasting what you're trying to do is you're trying to create a relationship between the guest and the audience yes and the host is just the conduit

to represent the audience to the guest so that the guest always feels like they have a Conversation with or the audience always feels like they having a conversation with the guest that's the difference between the two uh platforms and and for me it speaks to why podcasting is not going anywhere anytime soon yeah I I there's some Nuance in here that isn't worth discussing I but you're you're largely correct by the way I want to stick up for good journalism I think it's one of the most important things in the world there's a reason it's

called The Fifth Estate or whatever I think it's super important but you're right the journalistic sort of interview there's a reason those things are five 10 two minutes because that's as long as people want to hear somebody be grilled about I don't know their new music album or whatever it's you have to have a conversation if you want to keep people interested it's just that's just how it how it goes and I I also I will always stand up for good journalism Unfortunately good journalism is getting harder and harder to find it is it is

uh I wanted to go back to one of your earlier points about creating relationships I I I love the idea that this is you said effective at sales my previous company I sold I probably tens of millions of dollars worth of services essentially but I had so much trouble hiring someone else to do the same thing and part of it was because I was not good at all at training them on how to Do this thing that we just discussed with the I I never really thought about it even until recently is question follow-up question

maybe third follow-up question and then a share or a confirmation as you called it so when I this is a high ticket item I was selling I me is a like a large seminar $6 to 8,000 and this is a decade and change ago so that that was real money uh it is still real money but I spent months just talking to people and it would be like Oh I got to check in call with this person hey man how did that thing go that you were doing did you end up switching companies oh man

oh did you break up with her oh finally she was driving you nuts okay well I got a run man are you still thinking about summer of next year when you get your new job and you get your bonus cool all right well I'll talk to you in a few months no ask just like moving things along kind of one increment at a time and then I One day I would call and go ready man time to pull the trigger and they go here's $10,000 and then I remember people seeing those closing calls and going

how did you do that well 18 months ago I started this train this freight train moving cuz it looks like magic if you just look at the last phone call it's like you just called that person and they gave you $8,000 $110,000 how did that happen it but it Was like making friends having them tell me big problems they're having in life and then being like here's a solution that I will sell you for a reasonable cost relative to the scale of your problem right and end correct I mean what what sales should be mhm

that so few sales people understand is sales is just a relationship it's a relationship where you're trying to find the right balance of what we call Rapport and leverage Rapport is the back and forth Exchange of not of things that are not sales related that build momentum for what feels like trust right and then once you have the Rapport in place you have built Leverage The Leverage is what you need in order to get the person to take the action that you want when you think about manipulation versus motivation manipulative Leverage is something everybody wants

to avoid because it feels gross and it feels sticky yeah Motivational leverage people lean into like we all love it when our close friend is like dude you need to get into the gym we should start tomorrow in fact I bought you the first month at my gym let's go out in the morning together we're like hell yeah let's go that's motivational leverage works better than hey you're so fat no one's ever going to love you right that's not that one of those is going to be more effective yeah or I bought you your first

month and you Owe me right like it's just it's not the same thing so with what ends up happening is sales people think that it's like this process of of calls and getting enough information and yeah and like understanding the product details like the features and benefits features and benefits they don't realize features and benefits don't equal purpose right the features and the benefits are there to complement the purpose of the sale alt together right I need a car I don't Really care if the car has all weather tires and Leather Interior right I don't

care that it comes with a warranty what I'm what I care about is the purpose of the car which is transportation that keeps my family safe and is healthy for the environment and can go a long distance on a on a small thing of gas right whatever it might be it this this realization was so huge this type of thing was so huge for me in early in my sales career because it was just like I Remember closing people and getting you know processing their payment and they would go wa wait what did I just

buy I don't even know and I'm like oh yeah you're going to get this and this and this and this and they're like yeah yeah but what else and I'm like and you list the thing and you go wait a minute you just gave me all this money and you didn't even really know what it was and I remember being kind of confused and then I asked some of my sales mentors And they're like no that means that this person trusted you so much that it didn't even really matter yeah they just knew that you

weren't going to screw them over that you had a solution to their problem the details were just not even at the front of their mind they they had to call you back or email you to get the brochure that they never looked at and you just start to realize like wow this is kind of a superpower if you get good at it we call it in the Espionage world we call it selling yourself like they they sell themselves and when you have a really good well-developed appropriate intelligence source and you go to actually pitch them

on this idea of Espionage they sell themselves and you're like hey I think that you have I think we have an opportunity here for your secrets to make a difference in your Financial life and in the future of your country and they're like yeah I Thought I might have that opportunity and I think I'm really as long as I work with you I trust you and I think I'm ready to do this thing and then you're like I didn't even make a pitch I just said I think you have an opportunity and they're like yeah

I'm ready to do this thing does the CIA ever use like celebrities to get something out of folks because it seems like someone with massive status would in some cases do really well the problem the problem is People with massive status are unpredictable that's yeah how do you get them to keep a secret how do you know who's watching them and who's not watching them how long before they brag about whatever else like the problem with celebrities is celebrities to gain celebrity and you know this too CU you yourself are a celebrity there's a certain

element where you have but you have to Value yourself whereas the best Intelligence Officers they are Sacrificial they're like my the best thing I can do is die for my country you don't think that at all you don't think the best thing you can do is die for the United States you're like right now exactly so that's why like if they want to when you want to train somebody to be a secret operative a clandestine operative you want them brainwashed to use your term in a way where they believe the best thing they can do

is sacrifice yeah no if they' caught me if They'd actually caught me at age 25 totally different story they had you y yeah no I have a honestly before getting married plus kids there was a there was a chance not that they were trying by any by any means but once you're married with kids yeah once you see what it's like to have people Unconditionally Love you there's no way to like the service to to your country never compares to service to the people you love yeah I think it's it's quite Fascinating I've heard you

say anxiety is a superpower it obviously keeps you alive um are there a lot of Jews in the CIA so I mean yes there are a lot of Jewish people in CIA yes there are a lot of Mormons at CIA okay and uh and there was something else that we mentioned earlier but I forget what it was oh there's also a lot of law school grads at CIA yeah that yeah mhm so clearly a very anxious group but but my point is uh CIA recruits knowing that they're Looking for people that have the right balance

of anxiety and risk tolerance for most of their positions because remember most positions at CIA require heavy analytical thought uh heavy learning heavy repetition or training attention to detail all of those skills are built into some some who has anxiety right anxious people with their natural paranoia their natural introversion their natural distrust their natural uh research curiosity are a fantastic fit For that kind of work it's really only the field officers who have to go around the world and travel and try to meet people those are the only people where anxiety could potentially be a

detriment and even then you want them to have some anxiety because you want them to always remember they always need to have the gift of fear recognizing that they're on the they're on the edge of getting caught at all times yeah that's weirdly my anxiety Works its way out socially like it if I'm home that's that could be bad but if I go to a party I'm like God I feel so much better yeah and it's almost like I'm working my anxiety out by having a conversation with somebody it's very odd it's probably a flow

State type of thing where I don't even have time to deal with it because I'm like really enjoying this for for example but if I were having if I had background stress like a lot of it after this episode was over or After we stopped hanging out I might be like oh crap here's the anxiety monster once again you know it it depends and but it's something I've learned to tame on awkwardly maybe through unusually through this the work that people are experiencing right now I find you to be a fantastic example of this right

because look at what you've accomplished even before you were accomplished in business you were being assessed for work in a secret Intelligence agency then you built a massive business and then even after the previous podcast changed you rebuilt another podcast right like how keep fluffing me up I'm here for it but but think about it for a second think about it for a second how does somebody achieve all of that and then you also know that person has anxiety oh no it's the the anxiety is the superpower man I'm yeah I'm telling you agree with

you well I just I Think it's so fascinating and I think it's such a detriment that socially we make anxiety out to be like a bad thing like we publish news articles or or medical articles that say that 25% or 30% of Americans have anxiety like it's a bad thing yeah I guess it depends on the level of anxiety but I will tell you now that I'm 44 family man more chilled out my growth the growth of the business has flowed and I like it that way it the People that I know that really are

like at the top top top busting their ass all the they're miserable but they are they're they could be a billionaire one day good for them I wouldn't trade lives with them tell you that certainly not but I just I just want to make like to me it's I loved working at CIA with such amazing people and so many of those people had anxiety and watching how capable and talented they were at what they did and then coming into the Outside world where somehow like people with anxiety felt ashamed and they felt like they were

lesser or inferior it's just heartbreak because how much productivity and talent is being underutilized because we're letting people believe that anxiety is a weakness when in fact the people without anxiety are the ones who have less capability to really make a massive Splash is there anything you learned at the CIA that the American public doesn't Know that you think was like disturbing or shook your worldview obviously you can't share what it is but I'm curious because you know I feel like I ask a lot of these folks and they're like H you'd be surprised how

boring it is back there but you kind of you a unique access yeah it it is really boring out there but I will also say that there are absolutely things that I learned that that shook me and that I am certain would shake the American public in fact before CIA I Used to be one of those people that was like oh the American public can handle anything like trust them and just tell them the truth and then I got to CIA and I was like do not tell the American public the truth like if my

mom or my sister or my brother-in-law learned about this they would lose their and then they have an opinion about what we should do about it and then they would all start to like join communities of people who thought what we should and Then all of a sudden would just fall apart right it's so much better to keep people who do not need to know keep them blind and focused on the things that they can control and that's really the important part here is there's so much that you and I and the American public cannot

control and we have to learn to be okay with that because we have a democracy that allows us to vote in the people that we trust to do the things that we can't control the day That you think that you should be given access to all the secrets that's basically the day that you stop believing in democracy and you start thinking I can do my job better than the people who are elected above me if that's what you believe then we are a long we're a lot further away from our goals of successful democracy than

we thought yeah I could not agree more I I wonder are the things that you learned things that we will learn about In Our Lifetime or is it just stuff that's probably going to get swept under the rug forever I mean it's probably stuff that's going to be swept away forever because it's just one of those things that that not in our lifetimes unless something unexpected happens but it probably won't right and it's secrets that some of those are secrets that were there before I was even born I was like really that's how that worked

and it still works that way and it's probably Never going to stop working that way interesting what what about like JFK for example like this is something where I feel like aam's razor comes into play and the simplest answer is that we just had a cookie communist dude who shot him I would have said that except that um in 200 what was it 18 20 no it was 200 uh yeah I think it was 2018 during the Trump presidency the time came to reup the let just release all those that's that's what I was going

to ask You about I think it might have even been I don't even was it Trump or was it Biden that was just like actually we're not going to release that CIA file and that's whoever it was when that moment happened what that communicated to me and probably to to you but maybe not to all the other Americans out there was that there is something still relevant still there's a secret in that file at least one that's still so damaging to National Security that it can't be Released publicly that doesn't necessarily mean Americans shouldn't know

it but it means it can't be released publicly because publicly released information is also available to our adversaries so the fact that something 50 plus years old could still be so relevant that it requires reclassification that's a big deal and there that's not the only instance of that there's a lot of 25x 2 25 years time 2 there's a lot of clandestine or Confidential information classified information that's classified for 50 years 25 X2 that gets re-up again yeah because it needs to be what do you think of guys like Assange and Snowden leaking Secrets as

a man of Secrets yourself Assange and Snowden are not even in the same park they're not even in the same Lane they're not similar people at all Snowden is a traitor against his country he swore an oath signed a paper that said he would not disclose secrets that Put National Security at risk that could harm American lives and then he did exactly that and he released information that could harm American lives the fact that a different Court than the court that originally deemed the collection of uh of metadata legal the fact that a different Court

you know overruled that previous Court ruling shouldn't surprise anybody that is the entire judicial process that's why there are appeals that's why people are convicted on in One year and two years later they're released that's why we're looking at a president who's been convicted of being a felon but then at his next appeal could be granted you know release or whatever else right that's the way our court system works so we shouldn't be surprised that he whistle blew on a program that a different Court had a different opinion about that is not the argument the

argument is did he damage American security did he hurt American Lives by whistleblowing to the guardian which is a foreign news source which he then used as leverage to to travel from anti-American country to anti-American country until he ended up in Russia snow in he did everything wrong he is a traitor he does not ever deserve to come back Julian Assange is a completely different ball of wax he's not an American citizen did he disclose Secrets yes did he steal those Secrets himself no could he been used as a covert Influence parrot because he released

certain information and not other information yes but he's not under American jurisdiction so he didn't sign an agreement he didn't swear an oath to protect the American people completely different person which I think is why what we're seeing play out like Julian Assange has is making progress in kind of being granted citizenship or or recognition for what he did without being a criminal but Snowden is is a Russian citizen now like as unamerican as it gets that's going to be a great clip and I don't normally say or think like that but that that you

I got you fired up on that one I appreciate that um do you know much about the MSS Chinese intelligence I wonder what level of like familiarity SLR you have because they seem like they have just gone Leaps and Bounds in the past few decades yeah I I am willing to say that I have a very healthy respect for MSS I have more Knowledge than most people but not the most knowledge of anybody at CIA but when you think about the Ministry of State security in China you're you've got to look at them through a

lens of not just their capability and their resources which has grown along with Chinese resources but also their foundation and their Beginnings which came from SV and KGB before that so just like China has been on the rise economically and they've been on the Rise technologically there's no reason to suspect that they're not on the rise through their Espionage practices as well I I would say probably even more so because as and I'm sure you know look tell me what you think but States like Russia right they're never going to beat well especially as we've

seen now they're never going to beat a a major world power in an armed conflict it's just that is just not going to happen Look nukes aside whatever they have to rely on the Cyber capabilities intelligence capabilities Israel is very similar right they're not going to be able to invade seven countries or whatever it is they got to have amazing intelligence and cyber capabilities failures aside China's very similar right them building a Navy it's happening but it's still kind of a joke Space Program again happening still not really up to Snuff they're making tons Of

strides don't get me wrong but it it just makes sense that they would have a disproportionate intelligence program because if they can invest a few billion dollar in that it's going to punch a lot harder than another Battleship well the other thing to keep in mind is that China's intelligence program it's not just about having a capable intelligence program it's about having time mhm from 2001 to 2022 United States was not focused on intelligence we were fighting A war on terror China was not part of that war on terror so for 21 years they got

to invest their growth in a different capability military modernization technological innovation the spreading of the belt and Road initiative the spreading of Chinese influence around the world they did not get distracted by a war on terror so all the trillions that we spent on a war on terror they invested somewhere else MH and if we are not getting an Roi on our Investment just think about the ROI they are getting on theirs yeah exactly I I do of course think and worry about that quite a bit my friends who are operating in the Middle East

told me hey there's a Chinese base near us and all they I think it was jaib boti actually I take it back in Africa they the Middle East they they uh yeah the Horn of Africa yeah they said that whenever they're out operating there's just this Chinese base and they can just see there's antennas They're looking at them they'll drive around they'll get close to what they're doing they're testing weapons the Chinese are just sitting there looking at him taking pictures when they were doing oper they would even get in firefights not in jibuti of

course but in other areas and they said they were just like this Chinese unit that would deconflict and call in and go hey we're just Chinese guys over here don't shoot at us we're we're just over here Observing what's going on uh because we have interests in the area and they're like what China's interests are in the area and they were just watching how America fights how Isis fight whatever it was just watching everything happen just kind of just sitting over there videotaping the whole thing it was well a wakeup call that nobody's apparently waking

up to waking up to because there're still they do a fantastic job of creating a narrative That there are friend they're a trading partner and that we are economically tied together and in reality they are creating lots of economic Divergence that gives them the option of not cooperating with us anymore yeah they have to because otherwise we can unplug them from the the markets exactly and the whole world that's that's the problem is that the American Mo of economic leverage and economic that thing that keeps us in control of NATO that thing that keeps us

in control of our relationships in South America and Latin America China woke up to that and then started duplicating and mimicking it and then during the whole global war on terror they were just making more and more people dependent and reliant on them and now we're at a place where Biden and Trump woke up and they were like oh Co happened had Co not happened I know holy dude ironically probably caused by Chinese Incompetence and or malice and also certainly the Xi Jinping overplayed his hand with Co all we can do tell me if you

agree all we can do is hope that Xi Jinping continues to overplay his hand that's really the only thing that's going to stop China is if they're if the man at the top and the The Cult of Personality screws up and makes a couple bad moves more that's that's the soft underbelly of authoritarianism right that's the same thing with Putin and the Same thing with Kim Kim Jong-un and the same thing with even with Netanyahu right now when strong men strong men govern ments authoritarian governments when they overplay their hand when they make a mistake

nobody says no yeah nobody says no here in a democracy lots of people might be like I don't think that's a good idea and some people even put their foot down and make it a public offense and whatever else but bad ideas slow down good ideas slow down too tell Me about uh if we could do a quick comparison tell me about CIA compared to the FSB compared to mad for example and also let's throw out for honorable mention the isi over in Pakistan have you dealt with them well don't tell me that yeah yeah

yeah yeah so if you were I mean comparing CIA to the various intelligence so for an apples to Apple's comparison we have to compare them against the foreign intelligence collection capability in other countries Right so in Russia the foreign collection is svr FSB is their internal collection so Russia's svr versus America's CIA America CIA is better funded it's more modern it's uh it's based in democratic principles right so it's more motivational than manipulative svr is more manipulative than motivational however they're ruthlessly pragmatic they are also very well funded uh they are less reliant on modern

technology but way more capable in The Proven traditional tactics like in CIA if if we think we can do something with cyber that we don't need human for we'll just do it with cyber but in Russia they're like we will do both yeah right why not uh let compare that with something like mad mad is the external intelligence collection capability for Israel the internal police of the shinb right internal FSB equivalent is shinb when mad goes out big part of the difference Between mad and CIA is mad knows everything around Israel wants to kill Israel

right in the United States we don't feel an imminent threat from all around us so our risk tolerance as CIA is much reduced the risk tolerance from Assad is almost non-existent if they need the ride a bicycle next to a car and stick a bomb to it they will right if they need to kill somebody in a Public Square to keep Israel safe they will so very capable very well funded Very skilled but also like very Brazen yeah I I wondered why you thought that is I mean you see I was reading an interview with

like a a nuclear scientist in Iran and he's like can you believe they blew up this car and they're coming after me and I was like yeah you work for an enemy State and you're trying to get nuclear weapons they will drone strike you with your family in the car I'm not sure how bad any of us should feel about that with a Second drone to put the whole thing on Instagram right yeah they will do that to show everybody we did that that and people go wow I you see this on like uh Instagram

they go how do we know that Israel did that they admitted it why would they do that you know how good the branding is when you can be in Tron at a cafe and someone rides by in a motorcycle and shoots every single person at the meeting and then gets away with it what was the other one that they Did where they put they the Mad had like rigged up a truck with a 50 cal machine gun or whatever in the back the truck drove next to this guy who was in a convoy shot the

car into a million pieces and then when people were like who's in that damn truck it blew itself up and they videotaped the whole thing it's just nuts it's branding it's it sends a message it's it's covert influence simultaneous with covert action it's it's a two for one it's a Two for one right but they're not the only braz and service out there right Pakistani isi also along with the India raw the research and Analysis wing isi for Pakistan and raw for India very Brazen intelligence services with a foreign collection priority that nobody even knows

exists because they're primarily working against each other working against each other yeah exactly but the they do with each other is nuts I mean they basically carry out Covert terrorist operations against each other they sabotage each other they they steal from each other they I mean they have no problem with assassinating leadership from each other's countries like it's a nutsoid world especially when you consider the fact that both Pakistan and India are American Allies and somehow these two very talented Services probably trained by us are taking that training to fight each other and using techniques

that we would never Sanction in a million years yeah very interesting and then the last one I'll mention we've already talked about MSS but I'll throw out there that the MSS for China China's foreign intelligence service is all the best parts of svr they've learned so much they've been funded so well but they are even less risk tolerant than CIA because where CIA has no problem being the world's bad guy MSS doesn't want to be the world they want to save face yeah they're also I've Seen some clunky crap from them that I was surprised

because I thought uh there's my friend tried they tried to Honey Trap A friend of mine very messy I mean very slpp bullsh kind of but also kind of KGB like really like out there what kind of you like yeah and it was just like the it was a fake interview that with a journalist and then she wanted to do it in her hotel room and I was like are they just trying to get you to realize What this is or is it just really really clunky and I'm I'm sort of on the fence but

I don't know it could have been one or the other yeah cuz they're also like decentralized in a lot of ways and they don't they don't uh they don't report up bad news very well so it could have just been it it could have been sloppy or it could have been amateur or it could have been just a junior officer making a bad call because how do you get promoted in China you're the son or the nephew of Somebody else yeah that that's what's going to end up bringing China down is the the the sort

of nepo baby crap that we definitely have here but over there it's and it Russia has it too it's called blad and not blat that's something else blad it's like the way you get ahead as your uncle owns the factory you literally have no chance of any doing anything other than assembly line work if you're if you're not really like all the managers are related all The except for the guy who's in the mafia and his uncle pulled the thing with the thing and then now he's working you know it's just it's just the whole

system works like that and it's really it's it's why people are leaving China and coming here to work uh and moving to Canada surprised they're not all Chinese agents what's that surprised they're not all Chinese surprised they actually really are stoked to be in the United States The the the joke that a lot of us make about China who are like China Watchers or hanging out with people who've immigrated here is there there's this certain group of people that have moved here from China and they non-stop complain about the United States but then the next

sentence is how they want to bring their parents over here to live when they retired and it's like didn't you just get done telling me how much you hate this place and I you know you Drink it a bit and they go yeah but I can't say that stuff about China because my family will get in trouble with the police and you're just like oh it's almost it's almost cute at that point it's like you're just sitting here complaining because you're not allowed to do that over there it's it's kind of hilarious I I love

uh China and Chinese culture but you know CCP I have a political different opinion um do you think the cia's reputation has been Damaged by news and events over the past few years I think cia's reputation is is and always will be bad only because they have secrets that no allowed to know and they will always have secrets that no one's allowed to know and when you have secrets that somebody else can't know the natural thing to do is to distrust and accuse you of all sorts of CIA is never going to be popular it's

never going to be liked it's never going to be loved by the majority but there will Always be a group who understand that it's a pragmatic service and those secrets are required and they give us an edge would you recommend a CIA career in general I would recommend a CIA career to people who who are willing to accept the reality of what a CIA career means it means you aren't the most important the service is the most important it means you will lie to everybody it means you will take advantage of people because somebody above

you in the chain Of command tells you it's what needs to be done and most importantly you have to understand cia's mission is not protecting the American people it's protecting American interests as defined by policy makers so if you go in thinking that you're going to do something that keeps your family safe you need to let that go cuz what you're actually doing is you're doing what the senator of Wisconsin decides as important when they sit on the Senate Intelligence committee and you just have your job is to do what they say that is not

the same thing as the nationalistic pitch that they use to recruit people into CIA what's your favorite spy show the one that I am building based off of my book not the one that there's really nothing out there that's that great okay then we'll talk about that in a future episode man uh I have so many more questions but I think we have to do a separate episode just about current Events and and rally up on that thank you so much for coming out to my kitchen stud living room I really appreciate it man it's

good to finally meet you dude it was awesome to have this peak into your life and to finally get a chance to sit with you and I'm excited for next time thank you for checking out this entire episode on YouTube if you want to follow up on this topic check out our podcast feed or visit us on our website at Jordan Harbinger tocom where you can Learn more about our guest and dive even deeper into what we discussed today and remember YouTube only has about a quarter of the episodes that we release here on the

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