Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy | Lex Fridman Podcast #310
- Mossad will do anything. Mossad has no qualms doing what it takes to ensure the survival
of every Israeli citizen around the world. Most other countries
will stop at some point, but Mossad doesn't do that. - The following is a conversation
with Andrew Bustamante, former CIA Covert Intelligence Officer and US Air Force Combat veteran, including the job of
operational targeting, encrypted communications
and launch operations for 200 nuclear intercontinental
ballistic missiles. Andrew's over seven years as a CIA spy, have given him a skillset and a perspective on the world that is fascinating to explore. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please
check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here's Andrew Bustamante. The Central Intelligence Agency was formed almost 75 years ago. What is the mission of
the CIA? How does it work? - The mission of the CIA
is to collect intelligence from around the world that supports a national security mission and be the central repository for all other intelligence agencies. So that it's one collective source where all intelligence can be synthesized and then passed forward
to the decision-makers. - That doesn't include
domestic intelligence, it's primarily looking outward
outside the United States. - Correct, CIA is the Foreign
Intelligence Collection. King spoke if you will. FBI does domestic and then Department of Homeland
Security does domestic, law enforcement essentially
handles all things domestic. Intelligence is not law enforcement, so we technically cannot work
inside the United States. - Is there clear lines
to be drawn between, like you just said, the CIA, FBI and the other US intelligence
agencies like the DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, NSA, National Security Agency. And there's a list... - There's a list of about 33 different intelligence organizations. - It's like the army, the Navy has it. All the different organizations have their own intelligence groups. So is there clear lines here to be drawn or is the CIA the giant
integrator of all of these? - It's a little bit of both, to be honest. So yes, there are absolutely lines. And more so than the lines,
there are lines that divide what our primary mission is. Everything's gotta be prioritized. That's one of the benefits
and the superpowers of the United States, is we prioritize everything. So different intelligence
organizations are prioritized to collect certain types of intelligence. And then within the confines
of how they collect, they're also given unique authorities. Authorities are a term that's directed by the executive branch. Different agencies have
different authorities to execute missions in different ways. FBI can't execute the
same way CIA executes and CIA can't execute the
same way NGA executes. But then at the end, excuse
me, when it's all collected, then yes, CIA still acts as a final synthesizing
repository to create what's known as the
President's daily brief. The PDB, the only way
CIA can create the PDB is by being the single source
of all source intelligence from around the IC, the
intelligence community, which are those 30 some odd and always changing
organizations that are sponsored for intelligence operations. - What does the PDB, the
President's Daily Brief look like? How long is it? What does it contain? - So, first of all, it looks like the most expensive book report
you can ever imagine. It's got its own binder.
It's all very high end. It feels important. It looks important. It's not like a cheap trapper keeper. It's somewhere between,
I would give it probably between 50 and 125 pages a day. It's produced every day around
two o'clock in the morning by a dedicated group of analysts. And each page is essentially
a short paragraph to a few paragraphs about
a priority happening that affects national security
from around the world. The president rarely gets to
the entire briefing in a day. He relies on a briefer
instead to prioritize what inside the briefing needs to
be shared with the president. 'Cause some days the PDB will
get briefed in 10 minutes and some days it'll be briefed
over the course of two hours. It depends on the president's schedule. - How much competition is
there for the first page. And so how much jockeying
there is for attention for, I imagine for all the
different intelligence agencies and within the CIA, there's
probably different groups that are modular and
they're all care about different nations or different cases. And do you understand how much competition
there is for the attention for the limited attention
of the president? - You're 100% correct in how the agency and how officers and managers
at the agency handle the PDB. There's a ton of competition. Everybody wants to be
the first on the radar. Everybody wants to be on the first page. The thing that we're not
baking into the equation is the president's interests. The president dictates what's
on the first page of his PDB and he will tell them,
usually the day before, I wanna see this on the
first page tomorrow, bring this to me in the beginning. I don't want to hear about what's happening in Mozambique. I don't really care about what's
happening in Saudi Arabia. I wanna see one, two, three. And regardless of whether or not those are the three biggest things in the world, the president's the executive. He's the one, he's the ultimate customer. So we do what the customer says. That has backfired in the past, if you haven't already started seeing how that could go wrong, that
has backfired in the past. But that is essentially
what happens when you serve in the executive branch. You serve the executive. - So what's the role,
the director of the CIA versus the president? What's that dance like? So the president really
leads the focus of the CIA? - The president is the
commander-in-chief for the military. But the executive, the president is also the executive for the entirety of the intelligence community. So he's the ultimate customer. If you look at it like a
business, the customer, the person spending the
money is the president and the director is the CEO. So if the director doesn't create what the president wants,
there's gonna be a new director. That's why the director of CIA is a presidential appointed position. Sometimes they're extremely qualified intelligence professionals. Sometimes they're just
professional politicians or soldiers that get put into that seat because the president trusts them to do what he wants them to do. Another gaping area that causes problems. But that's still the way it is. - So you think this is a
problematic configuration of the whole system? - Massive flaw in the system. It is a massive flaw in the system because if you're essentially
appointing a director to do what you want them to do,
then you're assigning a crony. And that's what we define corruption as within the United States. And inside the United States, we say if you pick
somebody outside of merit for any other reason other
than merit, then it's cronyism or it's nepotism. Here that's exactly what
our structure's built on. All presidential appointees are appointed on something other than merit. - So for an intelligence
agency to be effective, it has to discover the truth
and communicate that truth. And maybe if you're appointing
the director of that agency, they're less likely to
communicate the truth to you unless the truth aligns perfectly with your desired worldview. - Well, not necessarily perfectly, because there are other steps, right? They have to go in front of Congress and they have to have the support of multiple legislatures or legislators. But the challenge is that
the shortlist of people who even get the opportunity aren't a meritorious list. It's a short list based off of
who the president is picking or who the would be president is picking. Now I think we've proven that an intelligence organization
can be extremely effective even within the flawed system. The challenge is how much more effective
could we be if we improved? And I think that's the
challenge that faces a lot of the US government. I think that's a challenge
that has resulted in what we see today when
it comes to the decline of American power and American influence, the rise of foreign influence, authoritarian powers and
a shrinking US economy. A growing Chinese economy. And it's just, we have
questions, hard questions we need to ask ourselves about how we're gonna handle the future. - What aspect of that
communication between the president and the CIA could be fixed to help fix the problems that you're referring to in terms of the decline of American power. - So when you talk about the
president wanting to prioritize what the president cares
about, that immediately shows a break between what actually matters to the long-term success
of the United States versus what benefits
the short-term success of the current president. - Because any president
is just a human being and has a very narrow focus. And narrow focus is not
a long-term calculation. - Exactly, what's the
maximum amount of years a president can be president? Eight, he or she... - In the United States. - In the United States according to our current constitution. (Andrew laughing) But they're very limited in terms of what they have to prioritize. And then if you look at a four year cycle, two years of that is essentially preparing for the next election cycle. So what's only two years
of really quality attention you get from the president, who's the chief executive of
all the intelligence community. So the most important thing to them is not always the most important thing to the long-term survival
of the United States. - What do you make of
the hostile relationship that to me at least stands
out of the presidents between Donald Trump and the CIA? Was that a very kind of
a personal bickering? I mean, is there something
interesting to you about the dynamics between
that particular president and that particular instantiation of the intelligence agency? - Man, there were lots of
things fascinating to me about that relationship, so first... - What's the good and the
bad? Sorry to interrupt. - So lemme start with the good first 'cause there's a lot of people who don't think there was any good. So the good thing is, we
saw that the president, who's the chief customer,
the executive to the CIA, when the president doesn't
want to hear what CIA has to say, he's not gonna listen. I think that's an important
lesson for everyone to take home. If the president doesn't
care what you have to say, he's gonna take funding away,
or she will take funding away. They're gonna take attention away. They're going to shut down your operations, your missions. They're gonna kill the careers
of the people working there. Think about that, for the four years that President Trump was the president, basically everybody at CIA,
their career was put on pause. Some people's careers were ended, some people voluntarily
left their career there because they found themselves
working for a single customer that didn't want what they had to produce. - So for people who don't know, Donald Trump did not display significant deep interest in the output. - [Andrew] He did not trust it, yeah. - He was a disinterested
customer of the information. - Exactly right, and then what do disinterested customers do? They go find someone else
to create their product. And that's exactly what Donald Trump did. And he did it through the
private intelligence world, funding private intelligence companies to run their own operations that brought him the
information he cared about when CIA wouldn't. It also didn't help
that CIA stepped outside of their confines, right? CIA is supposed to collect
foreign intelligence and not comment on domestic matters. They went way outside of that when they started
challenging the president, when they started questioning
the results, when they started publicly claiming Russian influence. That's all something the FBI
could have handled by itself, the Justice Department could
have handled by itself. CIA had no place to contribute
to that conversation. And when they did, all
they did was undermine the relationship they had
with their primary customer. - Let me sort of focus
in on this relationship between the president or the leader and the intelligence agency and look outside the United States. It seems like authoritarian regimes or regimes throughout history, if you look at Stalin and
Hitler, if you look at today with Vladimir Putin, the negative effects of power corrupting the mind of a leader manifest itself is that they start to get bad information from
the intelligence agencies. So this kind of thing
that you're talking about, over time, they start hearing information they want to hear. The agency starts producing
only the kind of information they want to hear. And the leader's worldview
starts becoming distorted to where the propaganda
they generate is also the thing that the intelligence
agencies provide to them. And so they start believing
their own propaganda and they start getting
distorted view of the world. Sorry for the sort of walking
through in a weird way. But I guess I want to ask, do you think, let's look at Vladimir Putin specifically. Do you think he's getting
accurate information about the world? Do you think he knows
the truth of the world? Whether that's the war in Ukraine, whether that's the behavior
of the other nations in NATO, the United States in general. What do you think? - It's rare that I'll
talk about just thinking, I prefer to share my assessment. Why I assess things a
certain way rather than just what's my random opinion. And my assessment,
Vladimir Putin is winning. Russia is winning. They're winning in Ukraine, but they're also winning
the battle of influence against the West. They're winning in the
face of economic sanctions. They're winning empirically. When you look at the
math, they're winning. So when you ask me whether or not Putin is getting good information for his intelligence services, when I look at my overall assessment of multiple data points, he must be getting good information. Do I know how or why? I do not. I don't know how or why it works there. I don't know how such deep cronyism, such deep corruption can possibly yield true real results. And yet somehow there are
real results happening. So it's either excessive
waste and an accidental win, or there really is a system and a process there that's functioning. - So this winning idea
is very interesting. In what way, short term and
long term, is Russia winning? Some people say there was a miscalculation of the way the invasion happened. There was an assumption
that you would be able to successfully take Kiev. You'd be able to successfully
capture the east, the south, and the north of Ukraine. And with what now appears to be significantly insufficient
troops spread way too thin across way too large of a front. So that seems to be like
an intelligence failure. And that doesn't seem to be like winning. In another way, it
doesn't seem like winning if we put aside the human cost of war, it doesn't seem like
winning because the hearts and minds of the West were completely on the side of Ukraine. This particular leader in Vladi Zelensky captured the attention of
the world and the hearts and minds of Europe, the West and many other nations
throughout the world, both financially in terms
of military equipment and in terms of sort
of social and cultural and emotional support for the independence fight of this nation. That seems to be like a miscalculation. So against that pushback, why do you think there's still kernels of winning in this on the Russian side? - What you're laying out isn't incorrect and the miscalculations
are not unexpected. Anybody who's been to a military college, including the Army War
College in Pennsylvania, where so many of our military
leaders are brought up. When you look at the conflict in Ukraine, it fits the exact mold of what an effective long-term military conflict, protracted military conflict would and should look like
for military dominance. Now, did Zelensky and did the
Ukrainians shock the world? Absolutely, but in that they also shocked American intelligence, which like you said, miscalculated. The whole world, miscalculated how the Ukrainians would respond. Putin did not move in there accidentally. He had an assessment. He had high likelihood
of a certain outcome, and that outcome did not happen. Why did he have that calculation?
Because in 2014 it worked. He took Crimean in 14 days. He basically created an infiltration campaign that turned key leaders
over in the first few days of the conflict. So essentially there was no conflict. It worked in 2008 when he took Georgia, nobody talks about that. He invaded Georgia the exact
same way. And it worked. So in 2008 it worked. In 2014, it worked. There was no reason to believe it wasn't going to work again. So he just carried out the same campaign. But this time something was different. That was a miscalculation for
sure on the part of Putin. And the reason that there
was no support from the West 'cause let's not forget,
there is no support. There is nothing other
than the Lend-Lease Act, which is putting Ukraine in massive debt right now to the West. That's the only form of support
they're getting from NATO or the United States. So if somebody believed Ukraine would win, if somebody believed Ukraine had a chance, they would've gotten more
material support than just debt. And we can jump into
that anytime you want to. But the whole world miscalculated. Everybody thought Russia
was gonna win in 14 days. I said that they would win in 14 days 'cause that was the
predominant calculation. Once the first invasion didn't
work, then the military does what professional militaries
do, man, they reevaluate, they reorganize leaders and then they take a new approach. You saw three approaches.
The first two did not work. The first two campaigns
against Ukraine did not work the way they were supposed to work. The third has worked exactly
like it's supposed to work. You don't need Kiev to win Ukraine. You don't need hearts
and minds to win Ukraine. - [Lev] What's the third? - Yeah, what you need is
control of natural resources, which they're taking in the East. And you need access to the heartbeat, the blood flow of food and
money into the country, which they're taking in the South. The fact that Ukraine had to
go to the negotiation table with Russia and Turkey
in order to get exports out of the Black Sea, approved
again, demonstrates just how much Ukraine is losing. The aggressor had a seat
at the negotiation table to allow Ukraine the ability to even export one of its top exports. If Russia would've said no, then they would not have had that. That's like someone holding your throat. It's like somebody
holding your jugular vein and saying, "If you don't
do what I tell you to do, then I'm not gonna let you breathe. I'm not gonna let blood
flow to your brain." - So do you think it's
possible that Russia takes the south of Ukraine? So starting from Mariupol,
the Haisyn region, - All the way to Odessa. - [Lex] All the way to Odessa - And into Moldova. I believe all of that will
happen before the fall. - Fall of this year?
- Fall of this year. Before winter hits Europe, NATO wants, Germany needs to be able to have sanctions lifted so
they can tap into Russian power. There's no way they can
have those sanctions lifted unless Russia wins. And Russia also knows that all of Europe, all of NATO is the true people
feeling the pain of the war outside of Ukraine are the NATO countries because they're so
heavily reliant on Russia. And as they have supported
American sanctions against Russia, their people feel
the pain economically, their people feel the pain. What are they gonna do in the winter? Because without Russian gas, their people are gonna freeze to death. - [Lex] Ukrainian people?
- People all over NATO. Ukraine, everybody knows
Ukrainians at risk. Everybody knows Ukrainians are dying. The game of war isn't even played majoratively by the people who are fighting. The game of war is
played by everyone else. It's an economic game.
It's not a military game. - [Lex] The flow of
resources and energy, food - Attention, exactly right. - I was on the front in the
Haisyn region, this very area that you're referring to, and
I spoke to a lot of people and the morale is incredibly high. And I don't think the
people in that region, soldiers, volunteer soldiers, civilians, are going to give up
that land without dying. - I agree with you. - I mean, in order to take Odessa would require huge amount of artillery and slaughter of civilians, essentially. - They're not gonna
use artillery in Odessa because Odessa is too
important to Russian culture. It's gonna be even uglier than that. It's going to be clearing of
streets, clearing of buildings, person by person, troop by troop. It'll be a lot like
what it was in Mariupol. - [Lex] Just shooting at civilians. - Because they can't afford
to just do bombing raids because they're gonna
destroy cultural significant architecture that's just too important to the Russian culture. And that's gonna demoralize
their own Russian people. - I have to do a lot of
thinking to try to understand what I even feel, I don't know. But in terms of information, the thing that the soldiers are saying, the Russian soldiers are saying, the thing the Russian
soldiers really believe is that they're freeing, they're liberating the
Ukrainian people from Nazis. And they believe this because I visited Ukrainian,
I spoke to the over a hundred, probably a couple hundred Ukrainian people from different walks of life. It feels like the
Russian soldiers at least aren't under a cloud of propaganda. They're not operating on a
clear view of the whole world. And given all that, I just don't see Russia taking the south without committing war crimes. And if Vladimir Putin is
aware of what's happening in terms of the treatment of civilians, I don't see him pushing
forward all the way to take the south, because that's not going
to be effective strategy for him to win the hearts
and minds of his people. - Autocracies don't need
to win hearts and minds. That's a staunchly
democratic point of view. Hearts and minds mean
very little to people who understand core basic needs and true power. You don't see Xi Jinping worrying about hearts and minds in China. You don't see it in North Korea, you don't see it in Congo, you don't see it in most of the world. Hearts and minds are a luxury. In reality, what people
need is food, water, power. They need income to be
able to secure a lifestyle. It is absolutely sad. I am not in any way, shape or form saying that my assessment on this is enriching or enlightening or hopeful. It's just fact. It's just calculatable empirical evidence. If Putin loses in Ukraine, the losses, the influential losses, the
economic losses, the lives lost, the power lost is too great. So it is better for him to push and push and push through war crimes,
through everything else. War crimes are something defined by the International Court system. The International Court system has Russia as part of its board. And the international court
system is largely powerless when it comes to enforcing
its own outcomes. So the real risk gain
scenario here for Russia is significantly in
favor of gain over risk. The other thing that I think is important to talk about is everybody
is trapped in the middle of a gigantic information war. Yes, there's battlefield
bullets and cannons and tanks, but there's also a
massive informational war. The same narrative that you see these
ground troops in Ukraine, these Russian ground
troops in Ukraine believing they're clearing the land of Nazis. That information is being fed to them from their own home country. I don't know why people seem
to think that the information that they're reading in English
is any more or less true. Every piece of news coming outta the West, every piece of information coming out in the English language
is also a giant narrative being shared intentionally to
try to undermine the morale and the faithfulness of
English speaking Russians, which somebody somewhere knows exactly how many of those there are. So we have to recognize that we're not getting true
information from other side because there is a strategic
value in making sure that there is just the
right amount of miss or disinformation out there. Not because someone's
trying to lie to Americans, but because someone is trying to influence the way English
speaking Russians think. And in that world, that's
exactly why you see so many news articles
cited to anonymous sources, government officials who
do not wanna be named. There's nothing that links back
responsibility there, right? There's nothing that
can go to court there. But the information still gets released and that's enough to
make Ukrainians believe that the United States is gonna help them, or that the West is gonna help them. It's enough to make Russians think that they're going to lose. And maybe they should just give up now and leave from the battlefield now. We have to understand we are in the middle of a giant information war. - Maybe you can correct me, but it feels like in the
English speaking world, it's harder to control,
it's harder to fight the information war because of, you know, some people say there's not
really a freedom of speech in this country. But I think if you compare, there's a lot more freedom of speech and it's just harder to control narratives when there's a bunch of gorilla
journalists that are able to just publish anything they
want on Twitter or anything. It's just harder to control narratives. - So people don't understand
where freedom of speech is. That's the first major problem. And it's shameful how many people in the United
States do not understand what freedom of speech actually protects. So that aside, you're absolutely right. Fighting the information
war in the West is extremely difficult because anyone with a blog, anyone with a Twitter account, I mean, anyone can call themselves
a journalist essentially. We live in a world, we live in a country where people read the headline and they completely bypass the author line and they go straight into the content and then they decide whether
the content's real or not, based on how they feel instead of based on empirical,
measurable evidence. - So you mentioned the Lend-Lease Act and the support of the United States, support of Ukraine by the United States. Are you skeptical to the level of support that the United States is providing and is going to provide over time? - The strategy that the
United States has taken to support Ukraine is similar
to the strategy we took to support Great Britain
during World War II. The enactment of the Lend-Lease Act is a perfect example of that. The Lend-Lease Act means
that we are lending or leasing equipment to
the Ukrainian government in exchange for future payment. So every time a rocket is launched, every time a drone crashes into a tank, that's a bill that Ukraine
is just racking up. It's like when you go to a restaurant and you start drinking shots, sometime the bill will come due. This is exactly what we did when Europe and when Great Britain was
in the face of Nazi invasion. We signed the same thing into motion. Do you know that the UK
did not pay off the debt from World War II until 2020. They've been paying that debt
since the end of World War II. So what we're doing is
we're indebting Ukraine against the promise that perhaps they will
secure their freedom, which nobody seems to want to talk about what freedom is actually gonna look like for Ukrainians, right? What are the true handful of outcomes, the realistic outcomes
that could come of this, and which of those outcomes really looks like freedom to them, especially
in the face of the fact that they're going to be
trillions of dollars in debt to the West for supplying
them with the training and the weapons and the
food and the med kits and everything else
that we're giving them. Because none of it's
free. It's all coming due. We're a democracy, but we're
also a capitalist country. We can't afford to just
give things away for free, but we can give things away at a discount. We can give things away layaway, but the bill will come due. And unfortunately, that is
not part of the conversation that's being had with the American people. - So debt is a way to establish
some level of control. - Power
- Is power. That said, having a
very close relationship between Ukraine and the United
States does not seem to be a negative possibility
when Ukrainians think about their future in terms of freedom. That's one thing. And the other, there's
some aspect of this war that I've just noticed that one of the people I talked to
said that, "All great nations have a independence
war", have to have a war for their independence. There's something, it's dark, but there's something about
war just being a catalyst for finding your own identity as a nation. So you can have leaders,
you can have sort of signed documents, you can
have all this kind of stuff, but there's something about war that really brings the country together and actually try to figure
out what is at the core of the spirit of the people
that defines this country. And they see this war as
that, as the independence war to define the heart of
what the country is. So there's been, before the
war, before this invasion, there was a lot of
factions in the country. There was a lot of
influence from oligarchs and corruption and so on. A lot of that was the
factions were brought together under one umbrella effectively
to become one nation because of this invasion. So they see that as a positive direction for the defining of what a free democratic country looks like after the war, in their perspective, after the war is won. - It's a difficult situation because I'm trying to make sure that you and all everybody
listening understands that what's happening in Ukraine
among Ukrainians is noble and brave and courageous and beyond the expectations of anyone. The fact is, there is no material support
coming from the outside. In the American Revolution was won because of French involvement. French ships, French
troops, French generals, French military might. The independence of communist China was won through Russian support. Russian generals, Russian
troops on the ground fighting with the communists. That's how revolutions are won. That's how independent countries are born. Ukraine doesn't get any of that there. No one is stepping into that because we live in a world right now where there simply is no economic benefits to the parties in power to
support Ukraine to that level. And war is a game of economics. The economic benefit of Ukraine
is crystal clear in favor of Russia, which is why Putin cannot lose. He will not let himself lose. Short of something
completely unexpected, right? I'm talking 60%, 70%
probability Ukraine loses, but there's still 20%, 30% probability of the unimaginable happening. Who knows what that might be. And oligarch assassinates Putin or a nuclear bomb goes off somewhere or who knows what, right? There's still a chance that
something unexpected will happen and change the tide of the war. But when it comes down to
the core calculus here, Ukraine is the agricultural
bed to support a future Russia. Russia knows, they know
they have to have Ukraine. They know that they have to have it to protect themselves against military pressure from the West. They have to have it for
agricultural reasons. They have major oil on
natural gas pipelines that flow through Eastern Ukraine. They cannot let Ukraine fall outside of their sphere of influence, they cannot. The United States doesn't
really have any economic vested interest in Ukraine. You know, ideological points
of view and promises aside, there's no economic benefit. And the same thing goes for NATO. NATO has no economic
investments in Ukraine. Ukrainian output, Ukrainian food goes to the Middle East and Africa. It doesn't go to Europe. So the whole, the West siding with Ukraine is exclusively ideological and it's putting them in a place where they fight a war with Russia so the whole world can
see Russia's capabilities. Ukraine is a, as sad as it is to say, man, Ukraine is a pawn on a
table for superpowers to calculate each other's capacities. Right now we've only talked about Russia and the United States. We haven't even talked about Iran. We haven't even talked about China, right? It is a pawn on a table. This is a chicken fight so
that people get to watch and see what the other trainers are doing. - Well, a lot of people might
have said the same thing about the United States back
in the independence fight. So there is possibilities, as you've said. We're not saying 0% chance, and it could be a reasonably
high percent chance that this becomes one of
the great democratic nations that the 21st century is remembered by. - [Andrew] Absolutely.
- And so you said American support, so
ideologically, first of all, you don't assign much
long-term power to that, that US could support Ukraine purely on ideological grounds. - Just look in the last four
years, the last three years, do you remember what happened in Hong Kong right before Covid? China swooped into Hong Kong
violently beating protesters, killing them in the street, imprisoning people without just cause. And Hong Kong was a democracy and the whole world stood
by and let it happen. And then what happened in
Afghanistan just a year ago? And the whole world stood by and let the Taliban take power
again after 20 years of loss. We are showing a repeatable point of view. We will talk American politicians,
American administrations, we will say a lot of things. We will promise a lot of
ideological pro-democracy, rah rah statements, we will say it. But when it comes down to
putting our own people, our own economy, our own GDP at risk, we step away from that fight. - America is currently supplying military equipment to Ukraine.
- [Andrew] Absolutely. - And a lot of that military equipment has actually been the thing
that turned the tides of war a couple of times already. Currently that's the HIMARS systems. So you mentioned sort of
Putin can't afford to lose, but winning can look in different ways. So you've kind of defined
so on, at this moment, the prediction is that winning
looks like capturing not just the east but the south of Ukraine, but you can have narratives
of winning that returned back to the, what was it? The beginning of this
year before the invasion? That Crimea is still with Russia. There's some kind of
negotiated thing about Donbas where it still stays with the Ukraine, but it there's some...
- Public government. Just like what they have
in Georgia right now. - And that could still be
defined through mechanisms... - [Andrew] As Russia winning. - As Russia winning for Russia and then for Ukraine as Ukraine winning and for the West as democracy winning. And you kind of negotiate. I mean that seems to be
how geopolitics works, everybody can walk away
with a win-win story, and then the world progresses,
with lessons learned. - That's the high likely, that's
the most probable outcome. The most probable outcome
is that Ukraine remains in air quotes, "a sovereign nation". It's not going to be truly sovereign because it will become, it will have to have new
government put in place. Zelensky will, it's extremely
unlikely he will be president because he has gone too far to demonstrate his power over the people and his ability to separate
the Ukrainian people from the autocratic power of Russia. So he would have to be unseated. Whether he goes into exile or whether he is peacefully
left alone is all gonna be part of the negotiations. But the thing to keep in mind also is that a negotiated piece really just means a negotiated ceasefire. And we've seen this
happen all over the world. North Korea and South
Korea are technically still just in negotiated cease fire. What you end up having is
Russia will allow Ukraine to call itself Ukraine,
to operate independently, to have their own debt
to the United States. Russia doesn't wanna take on that debt. And then in exchange for that, they will have firmer guidelines as to how NATO can engage with Ukraine. And then that becomes an example for all the other former
Soviet satellite states, which are all required
economically by Russia, not required economically by the West. And then you can see how the whole thing plays
out once you realize that the keystone is Ukraine. - There is something about
Ukraine, the deep support by the Ukrainian people of
America that is in contrast with, for example, Afghanistan, that it seems like
ideologically Ukraine could be a beacon of freedom used in
narratives by the United States to fight geopolitical wars
in that part of the world. That they would be a good
partner for this idea of democracy, of freedom,
of all the values that America stands for. They're a good partner and so it's valuable if
you sort of have a cynical, pragmatic view, sort of like
Henry Kissinger type of view. It's valuable to have them
as a partner, so valuable that it makes sense to
support them in achieving a negotiated ceasefire that's
on the side of Ukraine. But because of this particular leader, this particular culture,
this particular dynamics of how the war unrolled
and things like Twitter and the way digital
communication currently works, it just seems like this is
a powerful symbol of freedom that's useful for the United States, if we're sort of to
take the pragmatic view. Don't you think it's possible that United States supports
Ukraine financially, militarily enough for it to
get an advantage in this war? - I think they've already
got an advantage in the war. The fact that the war is
still going on demonstrates the asymmetrical advantage. The fact that Russia has stepped
up to the negotiating table with them several times
without just turning to, I mean, you remember what
happened in Chechnya, without turning to Chechnya level, just mass blind destruction,
which was another Putin war. To see that those things
have happened demonstrates the asymmetric advantage
that the West has given. I think the true way to look
at the benefit of Ukraine as a shining example of
freedom in Europe for the West isn't to understand
whether or not they could, they absolutely could. It's the question of how
valuable is that in Europe, how valuable is Ukraine? Which before February, nobody
even thought about Ukraine. And the people who did
know about Ukraine knew that it was a extremely
corrupt, former Soviet state with 20% of its national population, self-identifying as Russian. There's a reason Putin went into Ukraine. There's a reason he's
been promising he would go into Ukraine for the
better part of a decade because the circumstances were aligned. It was a corrupt country
that self-identified as Russian in many ways. It was supposed to be an
easier of multiple marks in terms of the former Soviet
satellite states to go after. That's all part of the miscalculation that the rest of the world saw too, when we thought it would fall quickly. So to think that it could be
a shining example of freedom is accurate, but is it as
shining a star as Germany? Is it as shining a star as the UK? Is it as shining a star as Romania? Is it as shiny a star as France? Like it's got a lot of democratic freedom based countries in Europe
to compete against, to be the shining stellar example. And in exchange on counterpoint to that, it has an extreme amount of
strategic value to Russia, which has no interest in
making it a shining star of the example of democracy and freedom. - Outside of resource, in terms of the shininess of
the star, I would argue yes. If you look at how much it captivated the attention of the world. - The attention of the world has made no material difference, man,
that's what I'm saying. - That's your estimation, but are you sure we can't... If you can convert that
into political influence, into money, don't you
think attention is money? - Attention is money in democracies and capitalist countries, yes. - Which serves as a counterweight to sort of authoritarian regimes. So for Putin resources matter, for the United States
also resources matter, but the attention and the
belief of the people also matter because that's how you attain
and maintain political power. - So going to that exact
example, then I would highlight that our current
administration has the lowest approval ratings of president in history. So if people were very fond of
the war going on in Ukraine, wouldn't that counterbalance
some of our upset, some of the dissent
coming from the economy and some of the dissent coming
from the Great Recession or the great resignation and whatever's happening
with the down stock market, you would think that people would feel like they're
sacrificing for something. If they really believed
that Ukraine mattered, that they would stand
next to the president who is so staunchly driving and leading the West
against this conflict? - Well, I think the opposition
to this particular president, I personally believe has
less to do with the policies and more to do with a lot
of the other human factors. - But again, empirically
this is, I look at things through a very empirical lens, a very cold fact-based lens. And there are multiple
data points that suggest that the American people
ideologically sympathize with Ukraine, but they really just want their gas prices to go down. They really just want to be able to pay less money at the
grocery store for their food. And they most definitely
don't want their sons and daughters to die in
exchange for Ukrainian freedom. - It does hurt me to see the politicization of this war as well. I think that's maybe has to do
with the kind of calculation you're referring to, but it seems like it doesn't. It seems like there's a cynical
whatever takes attention of the media for the moment. The the red team chooses one side and the blue team chooses another. And then I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the Democrats
went into full like support of Ukraine on the idealogical side. And then I guess republicans are saying, "Why are we wasting money? The gas prices are growing up." That's a very crude kind of analysis, but they basically
picked whatever argument on whatever side. And now more and more and more, this particular war in Ukraine is becoming a kind of pawn in the game of politics. That's first the midterm
elections then building up towards the presidential elections and stops being about the
philosophical, the social, the geopolitical aspects,
parameters of this war and more about just like
whatever the heck captivates Twitter, and we're gonna
use that for politics. - You're right in the sense
of the fact that it's, I wouldn't say that the red team and the blue team picked
opposite sides on this. What I would say is that media discovered that talking about Ukraine
wasn't as profitable as talking about something else. People simply, the American
people who read media or who watch media, they simply became
bored reading about news that didn't seem to be changing much. And we turned back into wanting to read about our own economy and we wanted to hear
more about cryptocurrency, and we wanted to hear more
about the Kardashians. And that's what we care about. So that's what media writes about. That's how a capitalist
market-driven world works, and that's how the United States works. That's why in both red papers
and blue papers, red sources and blue sources, you don't see Ukraine being mentioned very much. If anything, I would say that your Republicans are
probably more in support of what's happening in Ukraine right now because we're creating
new weapons systems, our military is getting stronger, we get to test military systems in combat in Ukraine, that's priceless. In the world of the
military industrial complex, being able to field test,
combat test a weapon without having to
sacrifice your own people is incredibly valuable. You get all the data, you get
all the performance metrics, but you don't have to
put yourself at risk. That is one of the major benefits of what we're seeing from supporting Ukraine with weapons and with troops. The long-term benefit to
what will come of this for the United States,
practically speaking in the lens of national security
through military readiness, through future economic
benefits, those are super strong. The geopolitical fight is essentially moot because Ukraine is not
a geopolitical player. It was not for 70 years. And after this conflict is
over, it will not again. Just think about what
you were just saying, with the American people's
attention span to Twitter and whatever's currently going on. If the Ukraine conflict
resolved itself today in any direction, how
many weeks do you think before no one talked
about Ukraine anymore? Do you think we would make it two weeks or do you think we'd
make it maybe seven days? It would be headline
news for one or two days and then we'd be onto something else. It's just an unfortunate reality of how the world works in
a capitalist democracy. - Yeah, it just breaks my
heart how much, you know, I know that there's Yemen and Syria and... - That nobody talks about anymore. Still raging conflicts going on. - It just breaks my heart how much generational hatred is born. I happen to be from, my
family is from Ukraine and from Russia. And so for me, just personally,
it's a part of the world I care about in terms of its history. Because I speak the language,
I can appreciate the beauty of the literature, the music, the art, the cultural history of the 20th century through all the dark times,
through all the hell of the dark sides of authoritarian regimes, the destruction of war, there is still just the beauty
that I'm able to appreciate that I can't appreciate about
China, Brazil, other countries because I don't speak their language. This one I can appreciate. And so in that way, this is
personally really painful to me to see so much of that history. The beauty in that history,
suffocated by the hatred that is born through this
kind of geopolitical game, fought mostly by the
politicians, the leaders. - People are beautiful. And that's what you're talking about. People are beautiful creatures. Culture and art and science, like these are beautiful, beautiful things that come about because of human beings. And the thing that gives me hope is that no matter what conflict
the world has seen, and we've seen some devastating, horrible crimes against humanity already. We saw nuclear bombs go off in Japan. We saw genocide happen in Rwanda. We've seen horrible things
happen, but people persevere. Language, culture, arts,
science, they all persevere. They all shine through. People don't even realize how gorgeous the architecture and the culture is inside Iran. People have no idea. Chinese people in the rural parts of China are some of the kindest, most amazing people you'll ever meet. And Korean arts and Korean
dance, Korean drumming, I know nobody has ever even
heard of Korean drumming. Korean drumming is this
magical, beautiful thing. And the north, in North
Korea does it better than anybody in the world. Taekwondo in North Korea is just exceptional to watch.
- [Lex] in North Korea? In North Korea. Nobody knows these things. - How do you know about
Taekwondo in North Korea? I have questions.
(both laughing) That's fascinating, like,
people don't think about that, but the culture, the beauty of the people still flourishes even in
the toughest of places. - Absolutely and we always will. We always will because
that is what people do. And that is just the truth of it. And it breaks my heart to see travesties that people commit against people. But whether you're
looking at a micro level, like what happens with shootings
here in the United States, or whether you look at a macro level like geopolitical power exchanges and intra and interstate conflicts like what you see in Syria and what you see in Ukraine, those are disgusting, terrible things. "War is a terrible thing." That is a famous quote, but people will persevere. People will come through. - I hope so. I hope so. And I hope we don't do something that I'll probably also ask
you about later on is things that destroy the
possibility of perseverance, which is things like nuclear war, things that can do such tremendous damage that we will never recover. But yeah, amidst your pragmatic pessimism, (Andrew laughing) I think both you and
I have a kind of maybe small flame of optimism in
there about the perseverance of the human species in general. Let me ask you about intelligence agencies outside of the CIA. Can you illuminate what is the most powerful
intelligence agency in the world? The CIA, the FSB, formerly
the KGB, the MI6, Mossad. I've gotten a chance to
interact with a lot of Israelis while in Ukraine. Just incredible people in terms
of both training and skills. Just all and every front. American soldiers too. Just American military is incredible. The competence and skill of the
military, the United States, Israeli, got to interact,
and Ukrainian as well. - [Andrew] It's striking.
- It's striking. It's beautiful, I just love
people, I love carpenters or people that are just
extremely good at their job and they take pride in
their craftsmanship. It's beautiful to see. And I imagine the same kind
of thing happens inside of intelligence agencies
as well that we don't get to appreciate because of the secrecy. Same thing with like Lockheed
Martin, I interviewed the CTO of Lockheed Martin. It breaks my heart as a
person who loves engineering because of the cover of secrecy, we'll never get to know some
of the incredible engineering that happens inside of
Lockheed Martin and Boeing... - [Andrew] Raytheon. - You know, there's kind of
this idea that these are, you know, people have conspiracy theories and they're kind of assign evil to these companies to some part. But I think there's beautiful
people inside those companies, brilliant people and
some incredible science and engineering is happening there. Anyway, that said the CIA, the FSB, the MI6, Mossad, China, I
know very little about the... - MSS Ministry of State Security. - I don't know how much you know, (both laughing) or just other intelligence
agencies in India, Pakistan, I've also heard... - Yep, RAW is powerful.
And so is ISS or ISSI. - And then of course European
nations in Germany and France. Yeah, so what can you say about
the power of the influence of the different intelligence agencies within their nation and outside? - Yeah, so to answer your
question, your original question, which is the most powerful, I'm gonna have to give you a few different answers. So the most powerful intelligence
organization in the world in terms of reach is the Chinese MSS, the Ministry of State Security
because they have created a single solitary intelligence
service that has global reach and is integrated with Chinese culture. So that essentially every Chinese person anywhere in the world is
an informant to the MSS because that's their way of serving the middle kingdom jungle,
the central kingdom, the Chinese word for China. So they're the strongest, the most intelligence
service in terms of reach, most assets, most informants,
most intelligence. - So it is deeply
integrated with a citizenry? - Correct, with their culture. You know what, a Chinese person who lives in Syria thinks of themself as? A Chinese person. Do you know what a Chinese person, a Chinese national living
in the United States thinks of themself as? A Chinese person, right? Americans living abroad often
think of ourselves as expats, expatriates, living on the local economy, embracing the local culture. That is not how Chinese people view traveling around the world. - And by the way, if I
may mention, I believe the way Mossad operates
is similar kind of thing because people from Israel
living abroad still think of themselves as Jewish and Israeli first. So that allows you to integrate the... - Culture and yep, the faith-based
aspects. Exactly right. But the number of people in
Israel is much, much smaller than the number of people in China. - So when it comes to
reach China wins that game. When it comes to professional
capability, it's the CIA by far because budget
wise, capability wise, weapons system wise,
modern technology wise, CIA is the leader around the world, which is why every other
intelligence organization out there wants to partner with CIA. They want to learn from CIA,
they want to train with CIA, they wanna partner on counter-narcotics and counter-drug and counter-terrorism and counter-Uyghur, you name it. People wanna partner with CIA. So CIA is the most powerful in terms of capability and wealth. And then you've got the
idea, you've got tech. So tech alone, meaning
corporate espionage, economic espionage, nothing
beats DGSE in France, they're the top. They've got a massive budget
that almost goes exclusively to stealing foreign secrets. They're the biggest threat
to the United States, even above Russia and above China. DGSE in France is a massively powerful intelligence organization, but they're so exclusively focused
on a handful of types of intelligence collection
that nobody even really thinks that they exist. And then in terms of
just terrifying violence, you have Mossad. Mossad will do anything. Mossad has no qualms doing what it takes to ensure the survival of every Israeli citizen around the world. Most other countries
will stop at some point, but Mossad doesn't do that. - So it's the lines
you're willing to cross? - And the reasons that
you're willing to cross them. You know, the CIA will let
an Americans stay in jail in Russia unlawfully and
seek a diplomatic solution. I mean, the United States has let people, there are two gentlemen in from the 1950s who were imprisoned in China for 20 years waiting for diplomatic
solutions to their release. We do not kill to save a citizen. But Mossad will. - And then they'll not just kill, they'll like do large scale infiltration. - They do amazing things. They spare no expense because it's a demonstration
to their own people. Again, going back to the
whole idea of influence, every intelligence operation
that sees the light of day has two purposes. The first purpose is the
intelligence operation, but if it was just the
intelligence operation, it would stay secret forever. The second purpose of every successful
intelligence operation, when they become public, it's
to send a signal to the world. If you work against us,
we will do this to you. If you work for us, we will
take care of you in this way. It's a massive information campaign. - Do you think in that way,
CIA is not doing a good job? Because there's, you know, the
FSB perhaps much less so GRU but the KGB did this well, which is to send a signal,
like basically communicate that this is a terrifying
organization with a lot of power and Mossad is doing a good job of that. So this the psychological
information warfare, and it seems like the CIA also has a lot of kind of myths about it, conspiracy theories about it, but much less so than the other agencies. - CIA does a good job of
playing to the mythos. So when General Petraeus used to be the director of CIA, 2000... - And your workout
partner, I read about this. - [Andrew] And workout partner. - So I loved and hated
those workouts with Petraeus because he is a physical beast. He's a strong, fit at the time, 60 something year old man. - Let me take a tangent on that 'cause he's coming on this podcast. - Oh, excellent man.
- So can you say what you've learned from
the man in terms of, or like what you think is
interesting and powerful and inspiring about the
way he sees the world, or maybe what you learned
in terms of how to get strong in the gym, or anything about life? - Two things right away. And one of 'em I was gonna
share with you anyway, so I'm glad that you asked the question. So the first is that on our runs, and man, he runs fast, and we would go for six
mile runs through Bangkok. And he talked openly about, I asked him, "How do you keep this mystery, this epic mythology about your fitness and your strength? How do you keep all of this
alive with the troops?" And he had this amazing answer and he was like, "I don't talk about it." Myths are born not from
somebody orchestrating the myth, but from the source of the
myth, simply being secretive. So he's like, "I don't talk
about it. I've never about it. I've never exacerbated it. I just do what I do and
I let the troops talk." And he's like, "When it
goes in favor of discipline and loyalty and commitment, I let it run. If it starts getting
destructive or damaging, then I have my leadership
team step into fix it." But when it comes to the mythos, the myth of him being
superpowered soldier, that's what he wants every soldier to be. So he lets it run. And it was so enlightening
when he told me, "When there's a myth that
benefits you, you just let it go." You let it happen because
it gets you further without you doing any work. It costs no investment for me. - So the catalyst of
the virality of the myth is just being mysterious. - And that's what CIA does well. To go back to your first
question, what does CIA do? They don't answer any questions.
They don't say anything. And wherever the myth goes, the myth goes, whether it's that they sold
drugs or use child prostitutes or whatever else, wherever
the myth goes, they let it go. Because at the end of the
day, everybody sits back and says, "Wow, I really just don't know." Now the second thing that
I learned from Petraeus, and I really am a big fan of Petraeus. I know he made personal mistakes. You don't get to be that powerful without making personal mistakes. But when I worked out with him, the one thing that my
commanding officer told me not to ask about, he was like, "Never ask the general about his family." I'm a family guy. So as soon as I met General Petraeus, one of the first things I asked him was, "Hey, what was it like raising a family and being the commander of
forces in the Middle East? Like you weren't with
your family very much." And the thing I love about the guy, he didn't bite off my head. He didn't snap at me.
He didn't do anything. He openly admitted that he
regretted some of the decisions that he made because he had to sacrifice his family to get there. Relationships with his children, absentee father, missing birthdays. We all say how sad it's to miss birthdays and miss anniversaries, yada, yada, yada. Everybody knows what that feels like. Even business people know
what that feels like. The actual pain that we're talking about
is when you're not there to handle your 13 year old's questions, when a boy breaks up with
her or when you're not there to handle the bloody lip that
your 9-year-old comes back with from their first
encounter with a bully. Those are the truly heartbreaking moments that a parent lives and dies by. He missed almost all of those because he was fighting
a war that we forgot and we gave up on 20 years later, right? He's so honest about that. And it was really inspiring to me to be told not to ask that question. And when I broke that guidance,
he didn't reprimand me. He was authentic. And it was absolutely
one of the big decisions that helped me leave
CIA on my own in 2014. - And he was honest on
the sacrifice you make. - The same man who just taught me a lesson about letting a myth live. That same guy was willing to be so authentic about this personal mistake. - I like complicated people like that. (Andrew laughing) So what do you make of that calculation, of family versus job? You've given a lot of your life and passion to the CIA to that work. You spoken positively about that world the good it does. And yet you are also a family
man and you value that. What's that calculation like? What's that trade off like? - I mean, for me the calculation
is very clear. It's family. I left CIA because I chose my family. And when my son was born,
my wife and I found out that we were pregnant while
we were still on mission. We were a tandem couple. My wife is also a former CIA
officer undercover like me. We were operating together overseas. We got the positive pregnancy
tests like so many people do. And she cried. My wife was a badass. I was like the accidental spy, but my wife was really
good at what she does. And she cried and she was
like, "What do we do now?" Like, it's what we've
always wanted, a child, but we're in this thing right now and like, there's no space for a child. So long story short, we had our baby, CIA brought us back to have the baby. And when we started having
the conversations about, "Hey, what do we do next?" 'Cause we're not the type of people to want to just sit
around and be domestic. What do we do next? But keep in mind we have a child now, so here's some of our suggestions. We could do this and we can do that. Let us get our child to a place where we can put him into
an international school. Or we can get him into
some sort of program where we can both operate together
again during the day. But CIA, they had no patience
for that conversation. There, family is not their priority. So the fact that we were a
tandem couple, two officers, two operators trying to have
a baby was irrelevant to them. So when they didn't play with
us, when they did nothing to help us prioritize parenthood as part of our overall experience, that's when we knew that they never would. And what good is it to commit yourself to a career if the career is always going to challenge the thing
that you value most? And that was the calculation
that we made to leave CIA. Not everybody makes that calculation. And a big part of why I am so
vocal about my time at CIA is because I am immensely
appreciative of the men and women who to this day have failed marriages and poor relationships with their children because they chose national security, they chose protecting
over their own family. And they've done it even though
it's made them a, you know, abuse alcohol and abuse substances and they've got permanent
permanent diseases and issues from living and working abroad. It's just insane the
sacrifice that officers make to keep America free. And I'm just not one of
those people. I chose family. - You said that your wife
misses it. Do you miss it? - We both miss it. We miss
it for different reasons. We miss it for similar reasons, I guess, but we miss it in different ways. The people at CIA a are just amazing. They're everyday people like
the guy and the gal next door, but so smart and so dedicated and so courageous about what
they do and how they do it. I mean, the sacrifices
they make are massive, more massive than the sacrifices I made. So I was always inspired and impressed by the people around me. So both my wife and I
absolutely miss the people. My wife misses the work
because you know everything. When you're inside, it's all,
I mean, we had top secret, we had TSSCI clearances at the time. I had a CAT 6, CAT 12, which
makes me nuclear cleared. My wife had other privy
clearances that allowed her to look into, you know,
areas that were specialized. But there wasn't a headline that went out that we couldn't fact check
with a click of a few buttons. And she misses that 'cause
she loved that kind of... - And now you're just one of
us living in the, you know, the cloud of mystery.
- [Andrew] Exactly. Not really knowing anything
about what's going on. - Exactly, but for me,
I've always been the person that likes operating. And you know what you still
get to do when you leave CIA, you still get to operate. Operating is just working with people. It's understanding how people think, predicting their actions,
driving their direction of their thoughts, persuading
them, winning negotiations. You still get to do that.
You do that every day. - And you go apply that
in all kinds of domains. Well, let me ask you on that, you were a covert CIA intelligence officer for several years. Maybe can you tell me the
story of how it all began? Were you recruited and
what did the job entail? To the degree you can speak about. - Feel free to direct me
if I'm getting too boring. - No, every aspect of
this is super exciting. (both laughing) - So I was leaving the United
States Air Force in 2007. I was a lieutenant getting
ready to pin on captain. My five years was up and I was a very bad fit
for the US Air Force. I was an Air Force Academy
graduate, not by choice, but by lack of opportunity, lack of lack of options otherwise. So I forced myself through
the academy, barely graduated with a 2.4 GPA and then went on the Air
Force, taught me how to fly. And then the Air Force taught
me about nuclear weapons. And I ended up as a nuclear
missile commander in Montana. And I chose to leave the Air Force because I didn't like shaving my face. I didn't like having short hair and I most definitely didn't
like shining my shoes. And I did not want to be one of the people in charge of nuclear weapons. So when I found myself
as a person in charge of 200 nuclear weapons, I knew that I was going
down the wrong road. - I have questions about this and more importantly, I have questions about your hair, so you
had short hair at the time? - Yeah, you have to, Military regulations, you can't have hair longer than one inch. - Okay, and the beautiful
hair you have now that came to be in the CIA or after? - So I discovered I had messy hair in CIA 'cause I used to go muj, we called it muj. I used to go mujahideen style. Big burly beard and crazy wacky hair. Because an ambiguously
brown guy with a big beard and long hair can go anywhere in the world without anyone even noticing him. They either think that he is a janitor or they think that he is like some forgotten part of history. But nobody ever thinks
that that guy is a spy. So it was the perfect, for me, it was one of my favorite disguises. It's what's known as a level two disguise. One of my favorite disguises to don was just dilapidated brown guy. (both laughing) - Can you actually, we'll
just take a million tangents. What's a level two disguise? What are the different levels of disguise? What are the disguises? - Yeah, there's three levels
of disguise by and large. Level one is what we
also call light disguise. So that's essentially, you put
on sunglasses and a ball cap and that's a disguise. You look different than you normally look. So it's just different enough that someone who's never seen you before, someone who literally has to see you just from a picture on the internet, they may not recognize you. It's why you see celebrities
walk around with ball caps and oversized jackets and baseball hats 'cause they just need to
not look like they look in the tabloid or not
look like they look in TV. That's level one. Lemme jump from level one to level three. Level three is all of your prosthetics, all the stuff you see
in "Mission Impossible." Your fake ears, your fake
faces, your fat suits, your stilts inside your feet. All that's level three. Whenever they make any kind
of prosthetic disguise, that's a level three disguise. Because prosthetics are very damning if you are caught with a prosthetic. If you're caught wearing a
baseball hat and sunglasses, nobody's gonna say, "You're a spy." But when you're caught with
a custom made, you know, nose prosthetic, that changes
the way your face looks. Or when someone pops out a fake jaw and they see that your top
teeth don't look like they did in this prosthetic, then all of a sudden you've got some very difficult questions to ask or to answer. So level three is extremely dangerous. Level one is not dangerous.
Level two is long-term disguise. Level two is all the
things that you can do to permanently change the way you look for a long period of time. So that whether you're
aggressed in the street or whether someone breaks
into your hotel room or whatever, it's real. So maybe you get a tattoo, maybe you cut your hair short, maybe you grow your hair
long, maybe you go bald, maybe you start wearing glasses. Well, glasses are
technically a prosthetic, but if you have teeth pulled, if you gain 20 pounds,
really gain 20 pounds or lose 15 pounds, whatever you might do. All of that's considered level two. It's designed for a
long-term mission so that people believe you are who you
say you are in that disguise. - A lot of that is
physical characteristics? What about like, you know, what actors do, which is the..
- [Andrew] method acting. - Yeah, the method acting sort of developing a backstory in your own mind and then you start, you know, pretending that you host a podcast
and teach at a university and then do research and so on, just so that people can believe that you're not actually a agent. Is that part of the disguise levels or no? - So yes, disguise has to do
with physical character traits. That's what a disguise is. What you're talking about
is known as a cover legend. When you go undercover,
what you claim to be, who you claim to be, that's
called your cover legend. Every disguise would theoretically have its own cover legend. Even if it's just to
describe why you're wearing what you're wearing. It's all a cover. So the method acting,
this is a fantastic point that I don't get to make very
often, so I'm glad you asked. The difference between
CIA officers in the field and method actors is
that method actors try to become the character. They try to shed all vestiges
of who they really are and become the character. And that's part of what
makes them so amazing. But it's also part of what, like, makes them mentally unstable
over long periods of time. It's part of what feeds their
depression, their anxiety, their personal issues, because they lose sight
of who they really are. Field officers don't get that luxury. We have to always, always remember we are a covert CIA intelligence officer collecting secrets in the field. We have to remember that. So we're taught a very specific skill to compartmentalize our
true self separately, but make that true self the true identity. So then we can still live and act and effectively carry out
our cover legend without ever losing sight, without ever
losing that compass true north of who we actually are. And then we can compartmentalize and secure all the information
that we need, retain it, remember it, but then
return to our true self when we get back to a position of safety. - Is it possible to do that? So I just have kind of
anecdotal evidence for myself. I really try to be the exact
same person in all conditions, which makes it very easy. Like if you're not lying,
it makes it very easy to, first of all, to exist, but also to communicate
a kind of authenticity and genuineness, which I
think is really important. Like trust and integrity around trust is extremely important to me. It's the thing that opens doors
and maintains relationships. And I tend to think, like
when I was in Ukraine, so many doors just opened to the like very high security areas
and everywhere else too. Like I've just interacted with some incredible people
without any kind of concerns. You know, who's this guy,
is he gonna spread it? You know, all that kind of stuff. And I tend to believe that you are able to communicate a trustworthiness somehow if you just are who you are. And I think, I suppose
method actors are trying to achieve that by becoming something and I just feel like
there is very subtle cues that are extremely difficult to fake. Like you really have to become
that person, be that person. But you're saying as a CIA
agent, you have to remember that you are there to collect information. Do you think that gives you away? - So one of the flaws in your argument is that you keep referring to how you feel. I feel this, I feel that, I feel like this I feel like that. That feeling is a
predictable character trait of all human beings. It's a pink matter, we
call it pink matter. It's a cognitive trait. You are not alone in
trusting your feelings. All people trust their feelings. But because what CIA teaches us is how to systematically create
artificial relationships where we're the one in
control of the source that is giving us intelligence. And the core element to being able to control a relationship is understanding the pink matter truth of feelings. What all people feel
becomes their point of view on what reality is. So when you understand and
you learn how to manipulate what people feel, then you
can essentially direct them to feel any way you want them to feel. So if you want them to feel
like they can trust you, you can make them feel that way. If you want them to feel
like you're a good guy or a bad guy, if you want them to feel like they should give you secrets, even though their government
tells them not to, you can do that. There are men who make women
feel like they love them, and just so the women
will sleep with them. There are women who make
men feel like they love them just so the men will
give them their money. Manipulation is a core behavioral trait of all the human species because we all understand to some level how powerful feelings are, but feelings are not the same thing as logical, rational thought. They're two different sides of the brain. What CIA teaches us how to
do is systematically tap into the right side, emotional side
of the brain so that we can quickly get past all of the
stuff you were just saying. All of the well, don't
you have to be convincing and don't you have to
really know your story and don't you have to
be able to defend it, don't you have to have authenticity and don't you have to
have genuine feelings? Yes, all of those things
are true if you're having a genuine relationship, but
in an artificial relationship, there's ways to bypass all of that and get right to the
heart of making someone feel comfortable and safe. - I guess the question I'm asking, and the thing I was implying is that creating an artificial relationship is an extremely difficult
skill to accomplish the level. Like how good I am at being me and creating a feeling in
another person that I create, for you to do that artificially, my sense is you gotta be really damn good at that kind of thing. I would venture to say it's,
I mean, I don't know how to measure how difficult the thing is, but especially when you're communicating with people whose job depends on forming trusting relationships, they're gonna smell bullshit. And to get past that
bullshit detector is tough. It's a tough skill. - [Andrew] Well, it's interesting,
so I would say that... - Or maybe I'm wrong actually on that. - I would say that once
you understand the system, it's not that hard. It makes a lot of sense. But I would also say
that to your exact point, you are right that people smell bullshit. People smell bullshit. But here's the thing, if you come in smelling like goat shit, you still smell like shit, but you don't smell like bullshit. So they don't count you out right away. And if you come in smelling
like rotten tomatoes or if you come in smelling like lavender, or if you come in smelling like manila or if you come in
without any smell at all, all that matters is that you
don't smell like bullshit. Here's the thing that's one
of the secret sauces of CIA. When you look and act like a spy, people think you're a spy . If you look and act in any
other way, you know what, they never ever think you are? A spy. They might think you're an idiot. They might think you're trailer trash, they might think that
you're a migrant worker, but they never think you're a spy. And that lesson in everyday
life is immensely powerful. If you're trying to take your boss's job, as long as you don't ever
look like the employee who's trying to take the boss's job, the boss is focused on all the employees who are trying to take his job. Everybody's prioritizing
whether they know it or not. The goal is to just not be the
one that they're targeting. Target them without them
knowing you're targeting them. - So people just, when they
meet you, they put you in a bin. And if you want to avoid
being put in a particular bin, just don't act like the
person that will be, just show some kind of characteristics that bin you in some other way. - Exactly right. You have to be in a bin. Just choose the bin. (Andrew laughing) - Alright, so how you knowing these methods,
when you talk to people, especially in civilian
life, how do you know who's lying to you and not? - That gets to be more
into the trained skill side of things. There's body cues,
there's micro expressions. I don't believe that micro
expressions alone do anything. I also don't believe
that micro expressions without an effective baseline do anything. So don't for a second think that I'm... All the people out there pitching that you can tell if someone's lying to you just by looking at
their face, it's all baloney. In my world, that's baloney. - Like the way you move your
eyes or something like that? - [Andrew] Without knowing a
baseline, without knowing... - For that individual.
- For that individual, then you actually don't know. And an individual's baseline
is based on education, culture, life experience, you name it, right? So it's huge. But when you combine facial
expressions with body movements, body language, nonverbal cues, and you add on top of that
effective elicitation techniques that you are in control of, now you have a more robust platform to tell if someone's lying to you. - So there's like a set of
like interrogation trajectories you can go down that can
help you figure out a person. - Technically they're interview concepts. - [Lex] Like this podcast concepts. - Correct, because an interrogation and interrogation is something very different than an interview. And in the world of professionals and interrogation is very different. - What's the difference? The nature or how relaxed
the thing is or what? - So in an interrogation there's a clear pattern of dominance. There's no equality.
Also, there's no escape. You are there until the
interrogator is done with you. Anybody who's ever been
reprimanded by mom and dad knows what an interrogation feels like. Anybody who's ever been called
into the principal's office or the boss's office, that's
what interrogation feels like. You don't leave until the
boss says you can leave and you're there to answer questions, the boss asks questions. An interview is an
equal exchange of ideas. You are in control of
this interview for sure. But if we were having coffee, I could take control if
I wanted to take control, if I wanted to ask you
personal questions, I would, if I wanted to talk to you
about your background, I could. - Why am I in control of
this interview? Exactly. - Because the person in control is the person asking questions, always. - I'm sitting here, as
you've spoken about, my power here is I'm
the quiet one listening. (both laughing) - You're exactly right. Guess
where this conversation goes? Anywhere you choose to take it, because you're the one asking questions. Every time I answer a question,
I'm creating a pattern of obedience to you, which subliminally,
subconsciously makes me that much more apt to
answer your questions. - Of course you can always turn that and start asking me questions
that should, you know... But you're saying that there's, through conversation, you
can call it interviewing, you can start to see cracks in the story of the person and the degree to which
they exaggerate or lie or to see how much they could be trusted, that kind of stuff? - What I'm saying is that through a conversation you
develop a baseline, right? Like even just in the first
part of our conversation, I've been able to create some
baseline elements about you. You've been able to create
baseline elements about me. Maybe they're just not front of mind. From those baselines, now we can push through more intentional
questions to test... - [Lex] Got it. - To test whether or not
the person is being truthful because they're operating
within their baseline. Or if you are triggering
sensitivities outside of their baseline, and then you can start to see their tells. - That's fascinating, yeah baseline, like even like the tells, right? The eye contact. Like you've probably
already formed a baseline. I have trouble making eye contact. And so like, so if you
ask me difficult questions and I'm not making eye contact, maybe that's not a good signal
of me lying or whatever. Because I always have
trouble making eye contact, stuff like that. That's really fascinating. - The majority of your eye
movement is to the right. Your right. My left, right? Which is usually someone who's, if you ask micro expressionists, that's someone who's referencing fact. That's not necessarily
what's happening for you because you're pulling
concepts out of the air. So it's also a place that you reference something other than fact. It's a place for you to find creativity. So if I just thought that you were lying because you look up and to the right, I would be wrong. - That's so fascinating. And a lot of that has
to do with like, habits that are formed and all
those kinds of things. Or maybe some right hand,
left hand type of situation. - [Andrew] Right eye dominance. - Right eye dominance is gonna
make you look to the right. - Is this a science or an art? - It's a bit of both. I would say that like all good art, art is taught from a foundation of skills. And those skills are played or taught in a very structured manner. And then the way that you use the skills after that's more of the artistic grace. So I've always called espionage
an art. Spying is an art. Being able to hack human beings is an art, but it's all based in a
foundation of science. You still have to learn how
to mix the color palette and use certain brushes. - Do you think of that as a kind of the study
of human psychology? Isn't that what a psychologist
does? Or a psychiatrist? What, from this process, have you learned about human nature? - [Andrew] Human nature? - I mean, I suppose the answer to that could be a book, and
probably will be a book. - [Andrew] I'll save you that, yeah. - But sort of is there
things that are surprising about human nature,
surprising to us civilians that you could speak to? - Yes, one thing is extremely
surprising about human nature, which is funny 'cause that's
not the answer I would've said. So I'm glad that you clarified
this specific question. The thing that's surprising
about human nature is that human beings
long, like in their soul, there's like a painful longing
to be with other people. And that's really surprising because we all wanna
pretend like we're strong. We all wanna pretend like
we're, you know, independent. We all wanna pretend like we
are the masters of our destiny. But what's truly consistent
in all people is this like, longing to commune with others like us. My more practical answer
about what I've learned to be the truth is that
human nature is predictable. And that predictability is what gives people an incredible
advantage over other people. But that's not the surprising piece. I mean, even when CIA taught me that human nature is
predictable, it just made sense. I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense. But what I never ever
anticipated was, no matter where I've been in the world,
no matter who I've talked to, no matter what socioeconomic bracket, is that longing, man, it hurts. Loneliness sucks. And
togetherness feels good. Even if you're together
with someone you know isn't the right person, it still
feels better than being alone. - I mean, that's such a
deep truth you speak to. And I could talk about that for a long time. There is, I mean, through
these conversations in general, whether it's being recorded or not, I hunger to discover in the
other person that longing, you strip away the other things and then you share in the
longing for that connection. And I particularly also
have detected that in people from all walks of life. Including people that others
might identify as evil or hard as completely cold, it's there. - It's there, they've hardened
themselves in their search and who knows what dark
place their brain is in, their heart is in. But that longing is still there. Even if it's an ember, it's there. It's the reason why in World War I and World War II, you know, enemy combatants still shared
cigarettes on the front lines, you know, during periods of holidays or bad weather or whatever else. Because that human connection,
man, it triumphs overall. - See, that's in part of what
I refer to when I say love. Because I feel like if
like political leaders and people in conflict at the small scale and the large scale were able to tune into that
longing to seek in each other that basic longing for human connection. A lot of problems could be solved, but of course is difficult because it's a game of chicken is if you open yourself
up to reveal that longing for connection with others,
people can hurt you. - Well, I would go a step farther and I would say that taking
the connection away, punishing, penalizing people by
removing the connection is a powerful tool. And that's what we see. That's
why we send people to jail. That's why we put economic
sanctions on countries. That's why we ground our children and send them to their rooms. We are penalizing them,
whether we know it or not. We're using punitive damage by taking away that basic human connection,
that longing for community. - What was your recruitment
process and training process and things you could speak to in the CIA? - As I was leaving the Air
Force, all that was on my mind. I don't know what you were like at 27, but I was a total dip shit at 27. I'm not much better now at 42, but yeah... - You owe me both.
(both laughing) Fake it till you make it. - But I was like, I just wanted to be anything other
than a military officer. So I was actually in
the process of applying to the Peace Corps through
this thing called the internet, which was still fairly
rudimentary in 2007. I had a computer lab that we went to and it had 10 computers in
it and you had to log in and log out and slow
internet and everything else. But anyways, I was filling
out an online application to go work in the US Peace Corps. I wanted to grow my hair out. I wanted to stop wearing
shoes that were shiny. I wanted to meet a hippie chick and have hippie babies in the wild, teaching Nigerian children how to read. So that was the path I was going down. And as I filled in all of my
details, there came this page that popped up and it was
this blinking red page and it said, "Stop here. You may qualify for other
government positions. If you're willing to put
your application on hold for 72 hours, that gives us a
chance to reach out to you." So again, 27-year-old, I was like, sure, I'll put myself on hold if I might qualify for other government opportunities. And then about a day
later I got a phone call from an almost unlisted number. It just said 703, which was very strange to see on my flip phone at the time. Just one 703 area code. And I picked it up and it was a person from Northern Virginia telling
me that I was qualified for a position in national security and if I would be interested,
they'll pay for my ticket and fly me up to Langley, Virginia. They didn't say CIA, they said Langley. I put one and one together and I was like, maybe this is CIA. Like this could, how cool is this? Or maybe this is all make-believe
and this is totally fake. So either way it doesn't
hurt me at all to say "Yes", they already have my phone number. So yes, yes, yes. And then I remember
thinking, there's no way that happened and this isn't real. And then a day later I got
FedEx or an overnight delivery of an airplane ticket and a hotel reservation and
a rental car reservation. And then I just kept doing the next thing, which I found out later
on as a form of control. You just do the next thing
that they tell you to do. And then before I knew
it, I was interviewing in a nondescript building with a person who only told me their
first name for a position with the National Clandestine Service. - So you never really got
a chance to think about it because there's a small
steps along the way and it kind of just leads you and maybe your personality such that... - [Andrew] That's an adventure. - It's an adventure and because
it's one step at a time, you don't necessarily see
the negative consequences of the adventure. You don't think about any of that. You're just stepping into the adventure one step at a time. - And it's easy. There's no work involved. Somebody else is doing all the work telling me where to be and when. It's a lot like basic
training in the military. Anybody who's ever been through
basic training will tell you they hated the first few days. And then by the end it
was really comforting because you just did what you were told. They told you when to eat, they made the decision of what to eat. Then you marched when
they told you to march, shined your shoes when they
told you to shine your shoes. Human beings love being told what to do. - What about the training process for becoming a covert CIA agent? - So the interview process is... - Yeah, the interview process too. How rigorous was that? - It was very rigorous. That was where it became difficult. Everything up to the
first interview was easy, but there's three interviews
and some people are lucky enough to have four or five interviews if something goes wrong or something goes awry with
the first few interviews. And again, this might be dated
from what I went through, but during the interview process is when they do your psychological evaluations. They do personality assessments,
they do skills assessments. They'll start sending you back to your, wherever you're living with assignments. Not intel assignments, but actual like homework assignments. Write an essay about
three parts of the world that you think will be most impacted in the next three to five years. Or, you know, prioritize the
top three strategic priorities for the United States and you know, put it into
250 words or 2,500 words and whatever else, double spaced in this
font, yada, yada, yada. Like super specific stuff. It's kind of stressful, but it's just like going back to college again. So you go through all of those acts and then you submit this
stuff to some PO box that doesn't have anybody that's
ever gonna respond to you. And then you hope you just
send it into the ether and you hope that you sent it right. You hope that you wrote well enough. You hope that your assessment was right, whatever else it might be. And then eventually get
another phone call that says, "Hey, we received your package. You've been moved to the
next level of interview and now we need you to go to
this other nondescript building in this other nondescript city." And then you start meeting, you start sitting in waiting rooms with other groups of people who are at the same phase
of interview with you, which were some of the coolest experiences that I remember still. One of my best friends to
this day who I don't get to talk to, 'cause he's still undercover, is a guy I met during
those interview processes. And I was like, oh, we met
and I saw what he was wearing. He saw what I was wearing. I was brown. - So you immediately connected and you liked the people there? - Close. More like we
immediately judge each other. 'Cause we're all untrained. So he looked at me and he was like, brown
dude with crazy hair. And I was wearing, dude, I
was dressed like a total ass. I was dressed in like a clubbing shirt. I don't know why I thought
it would be a good idea to go to a CIA interview in
like a clubbing shirt with my buttons unbuttoned down to here. And he was like, after
we got in, he was like, "Yeah dude, you were always
really cool to talk to." But I was like, there's no
way that idiot's getting in. And I remember looking
at him and being like, "Dude, you were just another
white guy in a black suit. They're not looking for
you. But here you are." So it was just, those kinds
of things were so interesting 'cause we were totally wrong
about what CIA was looking for. Until you're in, you have no
idea what they're looking for and you're just shooting in the dark. - Did they have you do
like a lie detector test? - Yes. It's called a polygraph. - Polygraph, how
effective, just interesting Per our previous discussion. How effective are those? - Polygraphs are really interesting. So one of the things that people don't
understand about polygraphs is that polygraphs aren't
meant to detect a lie. Like they're called a lie detector, but they're not actually
meant to detect a lie. They're built to detect variants from your physiological baseline. So they're essentially meant
to identify sensitivities to certain types of questions. And then as they identify a
sensitivity to a question, it gives the interviewer an
additional piece of information to direct the next round of questions. So then from there they can kind of see how sensitive you are to a
certain level of questions. And your sensitivity could
be a sign of dishonesty, but it could also be a
sign of vulnerability. So the interrogator themselves,
the interviewer themselves, they're the one that have to make the judgment call as to which one it is. Which is why you might
see multiple interviewers over the course of multiple polygraphs. But that's really what they're all about. So I mean, they're
extremely uncomfortable, like they're mentally uncomfortable. But then there's also, you sit on a pad because the pad is supposed to be able to tell like your body movements, but also like your sphincter
contractions or whatever. So you're sitting on this
pad, you're plugged in, you're strapped in, you're tied up, and it takes so much time to get in there. And then they start asking you questions, baseline questions at first, and then other questions from there. And you're just answering
the best you can. And you never know what they're seeing and you don't know what they're doing. And it's really hard not to
get anxious of that anyways. - Are they the whole time
monitoring the readings? - Yeah, from like a big,
they've got multiple screens and it's all information superiority. They have information superiority. You're the idiot looking away from them or looking sideways of
them and trying not to move because you're afraid
that if you like have gas or if you move a little bit's gonna vary you from your baseline. And the whole time you're
worried your heart's racing and your blood pressure's increasing, which is a variance from baseline. So yeah, I means an interesting art. - Or your baseline.
- [Andrew] Correct. - Maybe there's some people that are just chilling the whole time and that's their baseline. - But that's what they're doing. They're establishing a baseline. I mean, I guess that means
the polygraph is a skill that you develop to do it well. - So when people talk about
beating a lie detector, it's not that they're
telling an effective lie. That's not hard. It's not hard to tell a
lie to an interviewer. And the interviewer doesn't
care if you're being honest or not honest about a topic. What they're looking for is sensitivity. If they see no sensitivity,
that's a big sign for them. That's a big sign that you're
probably a pathological liar. If you show sensitivity to
many things, then that's a sign that you're probably an anxious person and they can still reset their baseline because they can tell how
your anxiety is increasing, you know, in 15 minute increments. It's a unique skill. I mean, a really good polygrapher
is immensely valuable. But it's the misnomers, the misconceptions about
polygraphs are vast. - You also mentioned personality tests. That's really interesting. So how effective are personality tests? One for the hiring process, but also for understanding a human being. - So personality is extremely important for understanding human being. And I would say that there's
a thousand different ways of looking at personality. The only one that I count with any significance is the MBTI. And the MBTI is what all
the leading spy agencies around the world use as well. - Well, that's kind of
interesting to hear. So there's been criticisms
of that kind of test. - There have been
criticisms for a long time. - And you think there's value?
- Absolutely. Absolutely. And there's a few reasons why, right? So first, MBTI makes the claim that your core personality
doesn't change over time. And that's how it's calibrated. And one of the big
arguments is that people say that your personality
can change over time. In my experience, the
MBTI is exactly correct. Your core personality does not change because your core personality is defined as your personality when
all resources are removed. So essentially your emergency
mode, your dire conditions, that is your core personality. We can all act a little more extroverted. We can all, you know, be a little more empathetic
when we have tons of time and money and patience. When you strip away all that
time, money, and patience, how empathetic are you? How much do you like
being around other people? How much do you like being alone? Do you make judgements or do you analyze information? That's what's so powerful about MBTI, it's talking about what people are like when you strip away resources. And then because it's so consistent, it's also only four codes. It's super easy to be able
to assess a human being through a dialogue, through
a series of conversations to be able to hone in with high accuracy, what is there four letter code. There's only 16 options and
it becomes extremely valuable. Is it perfectly precise? And
does everybody do it the same? I mean, the answers to those are no. But is it operationally useful
in a short period of time? That is a resoundingly powerful yes. - Yeah I only know I
think the first letter, it's introvert and extroverted, right? - [Andrew] Yep.
I've taken the test before, just like a crude version of the test. And that's the same problem
you have with IQ tests. There's the right thorough way of doing it and then there's like fun
internet way of doing. And do you mind sharing what your personality... - [Andrew] Yeah my type index?
- Yes. - I'm an ENTP, that's an extrovert, intuitor, perceiver, thinker. ENT thinker, P perceiver. My wife is an ISFJ, which
is the polar opposite of me. E, I'm extroverted. She's introverted. I'm an intuitive, she's a sensor. I'm a thinker. She's a feeler. I'm a perceiver. She's a judger. - Is there a good science on like long-term successful relationships in terms of the dynamics of that? The 16, I wonder if
there's good data on this. - I don't think there's a lot of good data in personalities writ large. Because there's not a lot of money to be made in personality testing. But I would say that with experience with a good MBTI test with a good paid test, a
400, 500 question test. Once you understand your own code and then you're taught how
to assess the code of others. With those two things kind of combined 'cause then you have
experience in learning. It becomes very useful. And you can have high
confidence in the conclusions that you reach about people's professions, about people's relationships with family, about people's relationships
professionally, people's capabilities to deal with stress, how people will perform when pushed outside of
their comfort zones. Really, really powerful useful
stuff in corporate world and in the espionage world. - So in terms of compressed representation of another human being, you can't do much better
than those four letters. - I don't believe you can do much better. In my experience, I have
not seen anything better. - Yeah, it's difficult to realize that there is a core personality
or the degree that's true. It seems to be true. It's even more difficult to
realize that there is a stable, or at least the science says so, a stable, consistent intelligence. Unfortunately, you know,
the G factor that they call that if you do a barrage
of IQ test that's going to consistently represent that G factor. And we're all born with
that and we can't fix it. And that defines so much
of who we are. It's sad. - I don't see it as sad because it's, for me,
the faster you learn it, the faster you learn what your
own sort of natural strengths and weaknesses are, the faster
you get to stop wasting time on things that you're
never gonna be good at. And you get to double down on the things that you're already naturally
skilled or interested in. So there's always a
silver lining to a cloud. But I know now that I
will never be a ballerina or a ballerino. I know that I'll never be an artist, I'll never be a musician. I'll never be any of those things. And when I was 18, that
might've made me sad. But now at 42, I'm like,
well shit, awesome. I can go be something else good instead of always being bad. - You're not gonna be a
ballerina (indistinct)? - Because I'm not graceful. - And you've learned this
through years of experience. - [Andrew] Yeah, exactly. - Well, I don't know if
there's an MBTI equivalent for grace of movement. - I think it's called S sensor. Because a sensor is someone
who's able to interact with the world around them through their five
senses very effectively. Like if you talk to dancers, dancers can actually feel the
grace in all of their muscles. They know what position
their finger is in. I don't have any idea, I don't know what position my feet are in right now. I'd have to look to make sure I actually feel the floor right. - Yeah, I definitely have...
Oh, that's good to know. So I don't, you know, I'm not
a dancer, but I do have that. - [Andrew] You're a musician man. - Well the music, I don't
know if that correlated - [Andrew] To be able to plug guitar. - Sure, yeah, that's true. There is that physical component, but I think deeper 'cause there's a technical aspect to that that's just like, it's less about feel. But I do know jiujitsu, you know, and grappling I've done all my life. I don't, you know, there's
some people who are clumsy and they drop stuff all the time. They run into stuff. I don't. First of all, I don't know
how that happens, but to me, I just have an awareness of stuff. Like if there's a little... - [Andrew] Spiritual orientation. - Yeah, like I know that
there's a small object I have to step over and I have
a good sense of that. It's so interesting. Yeah, you're just like born
with that or something. - My wife is brilliant and
she still walks into doors. I mean, she'll walk in a doorway, she'll bang her knee on the same wall that's been there for the last 50 years. - It's for some reason really hilarious. That's good for that.
(Andrew laughing) You've been asked, I think on Reddit, "Are there big secrets that you know that could lend you and our
country in terrible trouble if you came out to the public?" And you answered, "Yes, I
wish I could forget them." So lemme ask you just
about secrecy in general. Are these secrets or just other secrets, ones that the public will never know or will it come out in 10, 20, 50 years? I guess the deeper question is what is the value of
secrecy and transparency? - The standard classification for all human intelligence operations is something called 25X2, 25 by 2. So 50 years, 25 years times
two years, or times two rounds. So in essence, anything that
I've seen has the first chance of becoming public domain
declassified after 50 years, unless there's some
congressional requirement for it to be reviewed and assessed earlier. So by then, you know, I'll
be 80 something years old or potentially dead, which
is either way, that's when it can come out according to
its typical classification. The value of secrets I have seen is that secrets create space. Secrets give opportunity for security. They give opportunity for
thinking they give space. And space is an incredibly
advantageous thing to have. If you know something
somebody else doesn't know, even if it's just 15 or
20 minutes different, you can change the course of fate. So I find secrets to be extremely valuable, extremely useful. Even at the place where
secrets are being kept from a large mass, part of what all Americans
need to understand is that one of the trade-offs to
building a system of government that allows us to be first world and wealthy and secure and successful. One of the trade-offs is that we have given up a great
deal of personal freedom. And one of the personal freedoms that we give up is the freedom of knowing what we want to know. You get to know what the
government tells you. You get to know what you need to know or what you've learned yourself, but you don't get to know secrets. People who do get to know
secrets know them for a reason. That's why it's called a need to know. - How difficult is it to maintain secrecy? - It's surprisingly difficult
as technology changes. It's also surprisingly difficult as our culture becomes one
where people want notoriety, people wanna be the person
who breaks the secret. 25 years ago, 40 years
ago, that wasn't the case. There was a time in the United States where if someone gave you a secret, it was a point of personal
honor not to share the secret. Now we're in a place where
someone tells you a secret like that could turn into a Twitter post that gets you a bunch of thumbs up and a bunch of likes or whatever else. - [Lex] It's an opportunity.
- Right. So the value of secrets has changed and now there's almost a greater
value on exposing secrets than there is on keeping secrets. That makes it difficult to keep secrets, especially when technology is
going in the same direction. - Where is the line? And by the way, I'm one
of those old school people with the secrets. I think it's a karma thing. Again, back to the trust. I think in the short term, you can benefit by sharing a secret. But in the long term, if people know they can trust you, like the juicy of the secret, it's a test of sorts, if
they know you can keep that secret, that means
like you're somebody that could be trusted. And I believe that like, not just effectiveness in this life, but happiness in this
life is informing a circle of people you can trust. - Right, we're taught that secrets and lies are similar in that
they have a limited shelf life. If you treat them like food. Secrets and lies have a
very limited shelf life. So if you cash in on them
while they're still fresh, you beat them before they spoil. You get to take advantage
of 'em before they spoil. However, trust has no
limit to its shelf life. So it's almost like you're
trading a short-term victory and losing a long-term victory. It's always better to keep the secret. It's always better to let the lie live because it will eventually come
to light from somebody else, not from you, because it already
has a limited shelf life. But what you win in exchange
for not being the one that cashed in on the
secret is immense trust. - Let me ask you about
lying and trust and so on. So I don't believe I've been contacted by or interacted with the CIA,
the MI6, the FSB, Massod or any other intelligence agency. I'm kind of offended.
(Andrew laughing) But would I know if I was? So from your perspective.
- No. You would not know if you were. For sure you've been on
their radar. Absolutely. You've got a file, you've
got a dossier somewhere. - Why would I be on the radar? - [Andrew] Because you're...
- Who's interesting - It's not necessarily that you are interesting to
someone as a foreign asset or an intelligence collection source, but your network is extremely interesting. - The networks are important too? - Correct, if someone was
able to clone your phone, every time you cross a border, you go through some sort of security. If you've ever been pulled into secondary and separated from your
bag, that's exactly when and how people clone computers. They clone phones, they
make whatever photocopies of your old school planner,
whatever it might be. But for sure, you are
an intelligence target. It just may be that you're
not suitable to be a person who reports foreign intelligence. We've gotta understand that all
people are potential sources of valuable information to the national security
infrastructure of our host country and any country that we visit. Someone like you with
your public footprint, with your notoriety, with your educational background, with your national
identifications, becomes a viable and valuable target of information. - Yeah, so to speak to that, you know, I take security
pretty seriously, but not to the degree that, you know, it runs my life, which
I'm very careful about. - [Andrew] That's good.
I'm glad to hear that. - So the moment you start
to think about germs, right, like you start to freak out and you become sort of
paralyzed by the stress of it. So you have to balance those two things. If you think about all the things that can hurt you in this world and all the risk you can take it can overwhelm your life. That said, the cyber
world is a weird world. Because it doesn't have the same... I know not to cross the street
without looking each way because there's a physical
intuition about it. I'm not sure, you know,
I'm a computer science guy, so I have some intuition,
but it's the cyber world, it's really hard to build up an intuition what is safe and not. I've seen a lot of people, you know, just a logging out of
your devices all the time, like regularly, just like
that physical access step is, a lot of people don't take, I can just like walk in into
the offices of a lot of CEOs and everything's wide open for physical access of those systems, which is kind of incredible for somebody, that sounds really shady, but it's not. I've written key loggers, like things that record
everything you type and the mouse you moved and like, I did during my PhD, I was recording everything
you do on your device and everything you do on
your computer to under, like, people sign up to the study,
they willingly do this to understand behavior. I was trying to use machine
learning to identify who you are based on different biometric and behavioral things, which allows me to study human behavior and to see which is uniquely identifiable. And the goal there was to
remove the need for a password, but how easy it is to write a thing that logs everything you type. I was like, wait a minute. Like I can probably get a
lot of people in the world to run this for me. I can then get all of their passwords. I mean, you could do so much. Like I can run the entirety of
the CIA just myself if I was, and I imagine there's a lot of
really good hackers like that out there, much better than me. So I try to prevent myself from being all the different low
hanging fruit attack vectors in my life. I try to make it difficult to be that. But then I'm also aware
that there's probably people that are like five steps ahead. - You're doing the right thing. What I always advocate is
the low hanging fruit is what keeps you from being
a target of opportunity because you're half-assed
hackers, you're lazy hackers, your unskilled hackers they're looking for low hanging fruit. They're looking for the person
who gets the Nigeria email about how you could be getting $5 million if you just gimme your bank account. That's what they're looking for. And the thing that's scary is
that if you're not a target of opportunity, if you
become a intentional target, then there's almost nothing you can do. Because once you become
an intentional target, then your security apparatus, they will create a dedicated,
customized vector of attacking your specific security apparatus. And because security
is always after, right? There's the leading advantage and the trailing advantage. When it comes to attacks, the leader always has the advantage because they have to create the attack before anybody else can create a way to protect against the attack. So the attack always comes first and that means they
always have the advantage. You are always stuck just leaning on this is the best security that I know of. Meanwhile, there's always
somebody who can create a way of attacking the best security out there. And once they win, they have a monopoly. They have all that time until a new defensive
countermeasure is deployed. - Yeah, I tend to think
exactly as you said, that the low hanging fruit
protects against like yeah, crimes of opportunity. And then I assume that
people can just hack in if they really want. - Think about how much
anxiety we would be able to solve if everybody just accepted that. - Well, there's several things you do. First of all, to be honest, it keeps me honest not to be a douche bag or like not to assume everything could be public and so don't trade in information that could hurt people
if it was made public. So I try to do that. And the thing I try to make sure is I like home alone style, try... (Andrew laughing)
- [Andrew] A booby trap. - I really would like
to know if I was hacked. And so I try to assume
that I will be hacked and detect it. - [Andrew] Have a trip wire of some sort. - Yeah, a trip wire through everything. And not paranoid trip
wires, just like open door. But I think that's probably the future of life on this earth like, everybody of interest
is going to be hacked. That hopefully inspires, now
this is outside of company. These are individuals I mean. There's of course if
you're actually operating, like who am I? I'm just a scientist
person, podcasting person. So if I was actually running a company or was an integral part of some kind of military operation,
then you have to probably have to have an entire team
that's now doing that battle of like trying to be ahead of like the best hackers in
the world that are attacking. But that requires a team that like full time is their focus. Even then you still get in trouble. - Correct, so what I've
seen as the norm, well what I've seen is the cutting
edge standard for corporations and the ultra wealthy and even intelligence organizations is that we have trip wires. If you can't prevent from being hacked, the next best thing is to know
as soon as you get hacked, because then you can essentially terminate all the information. If you know it fast enough, you can just destroy the information. This is what the ultra wealthy do. They have multiple phones. So as soon as one phone gets
hacked, the trip wire goes off, the operating system is totally deleted along with all data on the phone. And a second phone is turned on with a whole new separate set of metadata. And now for them, there's
no break in service. It's just, oh, this phone went black. It's got a warning on it
that says it was hacked. So trash it 'cause they don't care about the price of the phone. Pick up the next phone and we move on. That's the best thing that
you can do essentially outside of trying to out hack the hackers. And then even in your intelligence and military worlds where
cyber warfare is active, the people who are aggressing are not trying to create
aggression that beats security. They're trying to find
a aggressive techniques, offensive techniques that have no security built around them yet,
because it's too cost and time intensive to protect against what you know is coming. It's so much more efficient
and cost effective to go after new vectors. So it just becomes like, it becomes almost a silly
game of your neighbor gets a guard dog, so you
get a bigger guard dog and then your neighbor gets a fence. So you're just constantly
outdoing each other. It's called the security paradigm. People just one up each other because it's never worth it
to just get to the same level. You're always trying to outdo each other. - Yeah, then maybe like banks
have to fight that fight. But not everybody can... Yeah, no, so you're saying I
operate at the state of the art with the trip wires, this is good to know. - [Andrew] Absolutely, man. - And also just not using
anybody else's services, doing everything myself. So that's harder to figure out what the heck this person is doing 'cause if I'm using
somebody else's service, like I did with QNAP.
(Andrew laughing) I have a QNAP NAS I used for cold storage of unimportant things
that are large videos. And I don't know if you know, but QNAP is a company that
does now storage devices and they got hacked. And everybody that didn't update as of a week ago from the point of the zero day hack,
everybody got hacked. It's several thousands of machines. And they asked, you can get your data back if you pay, I forget what it was, but it was as about a couple thousand dollars. And the QNAP can get all the data back for their customers if they
pay, I think $2 million. But that came from me relying on the systems of others for security. I assumed this company would
have their security handled. But then those very
valuable lessons to me. I now have like layers of security and also an understanding
which data is really important, which is somewhat important,
which is not that important and layering that all together. - So just so you know, the US government, the military woke up to
that exact same thing about two years ago. It's still very new. I mean, they were sourcing, take night vision goggles, for example. They were sourcing
components and engineering and blueprints for night vision goggles from three, four, five
different subcontractors all over the country. But they never asked themselves
what the security status was of those subcontractors. So, you know, fast forward,
you know, a few years and all of a sudden they start
getting faulty components. They start having night vision
goggles that don't work. They start having supply
chain issues where they have to change their provider. And the army doesn't know
that the provider is changing. I mean, this is a strategy. The idea of going through
third party systems is identifying the vulnerability
in the supply chain. That's a savvy offensive practice for more than just, you
know, cyber hackers. - Let me ask you about physical hacking. So I'm now like, I'm a introvert, so I'm a paranoid about
all social interaction. But how much truth is there? It's kind of a funny question. How suspicious should I be
when I'm traveling in Ukraine or different parts of the world when an attractive female walks up to me and shows any kind of a attention? (Andrew laughing)
Is that like this kind of James Bond spy movie stuff? Or is that kind of stuff used
by intelligence agencies? - I don't think it's used.
It's absolutely used. It's called sex-spionage. That's the term that we jokingly
call it, is sex-spionage. But yeah, the art of attraction, appeal, the manifestation of feelings
through sexual manipulation, all of that is super powerful tool. The Chinese use it extremely well. The Russians use it extremely well. In the United States, we actively train our
officers not to use it because in the end, it
leads to complications in how you professionally run a case. So we train our officers not to use it. However, you can't control
what other people think. So if you're an attractive male or an attractive female officer and you're trying to talk to a, you know, an older general who
just happens to be gay or happens to be straight and is attracted to you,
of course they're gonna be that much more willing
to talk to an American who is also attractive. So it's (indistinct). - Well in all definitions, so it could be all elements of charisma. So, you know, attractiveness
in a dynamic sense of the word. So it's visual attractiveness. But the smile, the humor,
the wit, the flirting, all that kind of stuff that could be used to the art of conversation. - There's also elements of sexuality that people underestimate, right? So physical sexuality, physical attraction is
the most obvious one. It's the one that everybody
talks about and thinks about. But then there's also sapiosexuality, which is being sexually attracted to thoughts, to intelligence. And then you've got all
the various varieties of personal preferences. Some people like people
of a certain color skin or they like big noses,
they like small noses, they like big butts,
they like small butts, they like tall guys, they like bald guys. Whatever it might be,
you can't ever predict what someone's preferences,
sexual arousal preferences are going to be. So then you end up
walking into a situation where then you discover, you know, and just imagine being an unattractive, overweight, married guy. And you're walking into an asset or a target meeting with
like a middle aged female who is also not very
attractive and also married. But then it turns out that
that person is a sapiosexual and gets extremely turned on
by intelligent conversation. That's exactly what you're there to do. Your mission is to have
intelligent conversation with this person to find out
if they have access to secrets. And by virtue of you
carrying out your mission, they become extremely
aroused and attracted to you. That is a very complicated situation. - It's hard to know who to trust. Like how do you know your wife
or how does your wife know that you're not a double
agent from Russia? - There's a large element of experience and time that goes into that. She's also trained and I
think my wife and I also.. - [Lex] So you think,
- Yeah, my wife and I also have the benefit of being recruited young and together where... - So over time you can
start to figure out things that are very difficult to... So you form the baseline, you start to understand the person, it becomes very difficult to lie. - The most difficult thing
in the world is consistency. It's the most difficult
thing in the world. Some people say that discipline or self-discipline, what they're really talking about is consistency. When you have someone
who performs consistently over long periods of time
under various levels of stress, you have high, high confidence that that is the person that you can trust. You can trust again, you can trust them to behave within a certain pattern. You can trust an asshole to be an asshole without trusting the asshole
to take care of your kids. So I don't ever wanna mix up the idea of personal trust versus
trusting the outcome. You can always trust a person to operate within their
pattern of behavior. It just takes time for you to get consistent feedback as to what that baseline is for them - So would form a good
model, predictive model of what their behavior's going to be like. - Right and you know, what's
fascinating is I think the challenge is building
that model quickly. So technology is one of those tools that will be able in the future to very quickly create
a model of behavior. Because technology can pull
in multiple data points in a very short period of time that the human brain simply can't pull in at the same speed. - Well, that's actually
what I did my PhD on. That's what I did at Google, is forming a good representation,
unique representation, across the entire world based on the behavior of the person. The specific task there is, so that you don't have
to type in the password. The idea was to replace the password. But it also allows you to
actually study human behavior and to think, all right,
what is the unique representation of a person? 'Cause we have very specific patterns and a lot of humans are very
similar in those patterns. What are the unique identifiers within those patterns of behavior? And I think that's, from
a psychology perspective, a super fascinating question. And from a machine learning
perspective, it's something that you can, as the systems
get better and better and better, and as we get more and more digital data
about each individual, you start to be able to do that kind of thing effectively. - And I mean, when I think of the fact that you could create a
dossier on somebody in a matter of 24 or 48 hours, if you could wire them for two days, right? Internet of things style. You put it in their
underwear or whatever, right? Some chip that just reads everything. How heavy are they walking?
How much time do they sleep? How many times do they
open the refrigerator? When they log into their
computer, how do they do it? Like which hand do they
use when they log in? What's their most common swipe? What's their most visited website? You could collect an enormous amount of normative data in
a short period of time where otherwise we're stuck. The way that we do it
now, once or twice a week, we go out for a coffee for two hours. And two hours at a time, over the course of six,
eight weeks, 12 weeks, you're coming up with a 50% assessment on how you think this person
is going to be behave. Just that time savings is immense. - Something you've also spoken
about is private intelligence and the power and the reach and the scale and the importance of private intelligence versus government intelligence. Can you elaborate on the role of what is private intelligence and what's the role of private
intelligence in the scope of all the intelligence that is gathered and used in the United States? - Yeah, absolutely, it's something that so few people know about, and it became a more mainstream topic with the Trump administration because Trump made it no
secret that he was going to hire private intelligence organizations to run his intelligence
operations and fund them. So that really brought
it to the mainstream. But going all the way back to 9/11, going all the way back to 2001. When the 9/11 attacks happened,
there was a commission that was formed to determine the reasons that 9/11 happened. And among the lists that they determined, of course they found out that
the intelligence community wasn't coordinating well with each other. There were fiefdoms and
there was infighting and there wasn't good intel sharing. But more than that, they
identified that we were operating at Cold War levels, even though we were living
in a time when terrorism was the new biggest threat
to national security. So the big recommendation
coming outta the 9/11 commission was that the intelligence organizations, the intelligence community
significantly increased the presence of intelligence
operators overseas and in terms of analytical capacity here in the United States. When they made that decision,
it completely destroyed, it totally was incongruent with
the existing hiring process because the existing
hiring process for CIA or NSA is a six to nine month process. The only way they could plus
up their sizes fast enough was to bypass their own hiring and instead go direct to
private organizations. So naturally the government
contracted with the companies that they already had secure
contracts with, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman,
Khaki, you know, you name it. And then over time, from 2001 to now, or I guess that started really in 2004, when they started significantly increasing the presence of private
intelligence officers. From then until now, it's become a budgetary thing. It's become a continuity
of operations thing. And now the reason Northern Virginia has become one of the wealthiest
zip codes in America is because of the incredible concentration of private intelligence that is supporting CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, and all
the slew of IC partners. - By the way, does Palantir
play a role in this? - Palantir is one of those
organizations that was trying to pitch their product to
an intelligence community because it's a fantastic product on paper. But the challenge was
the proprietary services, the proprietary systems that we used in CIA prior to Palantir, continued to outperform Palantir. So just like any other business decision, if you've got homegrown systems that outperform external systems and it's not worth it to share
the internal information. - Got it, so the close connection between Peter Thiel and Donald Trump, did that have a role to play in Donald Trump's leveraging
of private intelligence? Or is that completely disjoint? - I think that they're related,
but only circumstantially because remember Donald
Trump wasn't really investing in CIA, so the last thing
he wanted to do was spend his network wasta. Wasta is a term that we call influence. It's an Arabic term for influence. Trump didn't want to use his
wasta putting Thiel into CIA only to lose Thiel's contract
as soon as Trump left office. So instead, it was more valuable
to put Peter Thiel's tool to use in private intelligence. And then of course, I think
he nominated Peter Thiel to be his Secretary of
Defense, Secretary of State. At some point in time, he tried to like presidentially appoint
Peter Thiel into a position of government authority. - What do you think of
figures like Peter Thiel? And I'm sure there's
figures of similar scale and reach and power in
private intelligence. What do you think about their role and power in this whole, like without public accountability that you would think
directors of CIA perhaps have? - So this is where private intelligence has both a strength and a weakness. The ultimate law overriding that's overseeing private intelligence is not government legislation. It's the law of economics. If they produce a superior product, then they will have a buyer. If they do not produce a superior product, they will not have a buyer. And that's a very simple
business principle. Whereas in the current national
security infrastructure, you can create a crap product, but the taxpayer dollars are
always going to be spent. So it's really thrown things for a loop, especially during the
Trump administration. And this is one of the things
that I will always say I liked about the Trump administration. It put a big blazing bright light on all of the flaws within our system. One of those flaws being
this executive power over the intelligence organizations and the lack of accountability for intelligence organizations to produce a superior product. When that light got shown down, that's when you also saw
Trump start to go after. If you remember, there was a period where he was taking
security clearances away from retiring officers. That became a big, hot issue. That became something that
people were very opposed to when they didn't realize that that process of taking security clearances away, that incentivized seasoned senior officers to stay in service. Because with private
intelligence paying a premium during the Trump administration, because Trump was paying a premium to the private intelligence world. When senior officers found
that it was more profitable to retire early, keep their clearance and go work for Raytheon, Trump saw that as bypassing service
to the American people. You've made a career in CIA,
you've made a career in NSA, you should stay there. If you leave, you lose your clearance because you no longer have a need to know. He upset the apple cart with that. And unfortunately, the narrative
that came out in many ways was a negative narrative against Trump, when in fact he was actually
doing quite a service to the American people trying
to take away the incentive of senior officials leaving
their service in order to just profiteer in the
private intelligence world. - So in that way, he was
kind of supporting the CIA in making sure that competent people and experience people stay
and say are incentivized to stay there. - Correct, I think that
there was definitely, he understood incentives. I mean, Donald Trump
understands incentives. So he was trying to
incentivize them to stay, but I think he was also
playing a safety card because he didn't want
former CIA officials who were not listening to him to then move into private
intel organizations that he may be hiring only to then have them undermine
him from both sides of the coin. So there was a little bit
of offensive calculation in there as well. - But do the dynamics and the incentives of
economics that you refer to, that the private
intelligence operates under, is that more or less
ethical than the forces that maybe government
agencies operate under? Like what's your intuition?
Is capitalism lead? So you mentioned it leads to
maximizations of efficiency and performance, but
is that correlated with ethical behavior when we're talking about such hairy activities like
collection of intelligence? - The question of ethics
is a great question. So let me start this
whole thing out by saying, CIA hires people on a spectrum of our ability to be morally
flexible, ethically flexible. All people at their heart
are ethically flexible. I would never punch
somebody in the face. Right? Some people out there would say, "I would never hurt another human being." But as soon as a human
being posed a direct threat to their daughter or their son or their mother, now all of
a sudden they're gonna change their ethical stance
in self-defense. Right? But at the end of the day, it's still hurting another person. So what CIA looks for is people
who are able to swing across that spectrum for lesser offenses. More flexibility, I do not
believe that private intelligence and the laws of economics lend themselves to increased ethics or increased ethical
behavior in the short term. But what ends up happening
is that in the long term, in order to scale economic
benefits, you are forced to act within norms of your customer base. So as the norms of that customer base dictates certain requirements, the company has to adapt
to those requirements in order to continue to scale. So if a company tries to ostracize LGBTQ, or if they try to ostracize men or ostracized women, they're
limiting their ability to grow economically. They have to adapt to whatever is the prevailing
ethical requirement of their customer base. - That's such an interesting question 'cause you look at big pharma
and pharmaceutical companies and they have a quite a poor
reputation in the public eye. And some of it, maybe
much of it is deserved, at least historically speaking. And so you start to wonder,
well, can intelligence agencies use some of the same technique
to manipulate the public, like what they believe about
those agencies in order to maximize profit as well,
sort of finding shortcuts or unethical paths that allow you to not be ultimately responsible to the customer. - Absolutely and I would go
a step further to say that the covert nature of
intelligence operations is really attractive when it
comes to the private sector because now they have
all the same money with none of the oversight, and all
they have to do is deliver. So without the oversight,
what's holding you back? And for anybody who's ever run a business, anybody who's ever started a startup or tried to make something succeed, we all know that there come
those times where you have to skirt the boundaries of proprietary or morality or commitments
or promises to other people. Because at the end of the day, if your business fails, it's on you. So if you promise to deliver
something to a client, you've gotta deliver it to the client. Even if that means you stay up late or if you lie on your
taxes, whatever it might be, there's a certain level of do or die. - Yeah, I personally have
a sort of optimistic view that ultimately the best way is to stay within the ethical bounds, kind of like what you suggested,
if you want to be a company that's extremely successful,
is win with competence, not with cheating. 'Cause cheating won't, I
believe, win in the long term. But in terms of being publicly responsible to your decisions, I mean, I've already been supposed to talk to Peter Thiel twice on this podcast, and it's just been complicated. (Andrew laughing) If I were to put myself into his shoes, why do podcasts? The risk is too high to
be a public person at all. And so I totally understand that. At the same time, I think
if you are doing things by the book and you're the best in the world at your job, then you have nothing to worry about. And you can advertise that and you help recruit. I mean, that's the work of capitalism is you want to advertise
that this is the place where the best people in the
world at this thing work. - True. I think that your
point of view is accurate. I would also say that the complexities of what
makes somebody make a decision can only really be properly
calculated with a baseline. So because there is no baseline that you or I have on Peter Thiel, it's difficult to really ascertain why he does or doesn't accept invites or why he does or doesn't appear. - Well, let me ask your opinion on the NSA and then maybe we could
mention about bulk collection in general in the CIA, but, you know, let's look at some history with the NSA and Snowden. What's your opinion on
the mass surveillance that is reported to have been conducted by the NSA? We talked about ethics. Are you troubled from
of a public perception, the unethical nature of mass surveillance of
especially American citizens? - This is a topic that I never
get tired of talking about, but it's very rare that anyone
ever really agrees with me. Just so you know. (both laughing) - I think there's a nuance thing here. Maybe we'll find some agreement. - The truth is that
the American experience after 9/11 is nothing like
the American experience now. So all the terminology,
all this talk about privacy and privacy laws and mass surveillance and all this other stuff,
it was a completely different time then. And that's not to say it was an excuse, because to this day, I will
still say mass collection, bulk collection of data that allows for an expedient
identification of a threat to national security benefits all of us. But people don't
understand what they want. Like people don't
understand what the value of their own privacy is. First of all, the fact that people think they have personal privacy is laughable. You have no privacy. The cell phone that you
carry in your pocket, you're giving permission
to those apps constantly. You're giving commercial
organizations, what you and I have already said are less tied to ethical responsibility. You're giving them permission
to collect enormous amounts of private data from you all the time. And do you know what happens
if AT&T or Verizon sees some nefarious activity on your account? They do nothing. They might send a note to FBI because they have to
according to some checklist. But when NSA was collecting
intelligence on metadata from around the United States,
they were very specifically looking for terrorist threats that would harm American lives. Man, NSA can clone my phone. I will give them my children's phone. I will give them the passwords
to every one of my accounts if it means that there's a likelihood that my family will be
safer from a nefarious actor whose intent on hurting us. NSA doesn't care about your affair. NSA doesn't care if you're
cheating on your taxes. NSA doesn't care if you
talk about shit your boss or if you hate the US President,
nobody cares about that. Your intelligence community
is there to find threats to national security. That's what they're there to do. What Snowden did when he
outed that whole program, the fact that the court,
the justice system, the civilian justice system went back and essentially overruled the ruling of the intelligence courts
before them, just goes to show how the general mass community
really shouldn't have a say in what happens in the
intelligence community. They really shouldn't. You have politicians and
you have the opportunity to elect people to a position
and then you trust them. That's what a representative republic is. You vote the people in, you trust them to work on your behalf. They make decisions
without running 'em by you. They make decisions that they believe are in the best interest
of their constituency. And that's how our form
of democracy works. It worked. We were safer. Now that we don't have that information and now that there's this giant
looming question of whether or not NSA is there to serve people or is collecting mass surveillance against all American people, that's not really a true
accurate representation of what they were ever doing. They were looking for
the needle in a haystack of the series of transactions
in metadata that was going to lead to American deaths. We are now less secure
because they can't do that. And that bothers me. - So you said a few really
interesting things there. So because you are kind of an
insider, at war for a time, an insider, meaning you were able to build up an intuition
about the good, the bad, and the ugly of these institutions,
specifically the good. A lot of people don't have
a good sense of the good. They know the bad and the ugly or can infer the bad and the ugly. You mentioned that the one
little key little thing there at the end saying the NSA doesn't care about whether you hate
the president or not. Now that's what people really worry about, is they're not sure they
can trust the government to not go into full dictatorial mode. And based on your political
preference, your oppositions, your basically one of the essential powers the freedom of speech in the United States is the ability to
criticize your government. And they worry well, can't the government get ahold of the NSA and start to ask the basic question, well, can you gimme a list of people that are criticizing the government? - So let's just walk through that exact example, right? Because it's a preponderance. It's a preponderance fear. It's a ridiculous fear because you would have to
tap on multiple elements of government for anything to happen. So for example, let's just say
that somebody goes to the NSA and says, "Hey, can you give
us a readout on all the people who are tweeting terrible
things about the president?" Okay, cool, here's your
a hundred million people, whatever it is, right? Here's all the people
saying negative things about the government. So now they have a list.
What do they do next? Well, let's just make it simple. They stay with NSA and they
say, "Surveil them even more. Tap their phones, tap their computers. I wanna know even more." So then they get this
preponderance of evidence. What do you do with evidence?
You take it to a court. Well, guess what? No court is going to support anything that goes against the freedom of speech. So the court is not going to support what the executive is asking them to do. Even before you take somebody to court, you have to involve law enforcement. Essentially you have to send
some sort of police force to go apprehend the
individual who's in question. Well, guess what doesn't meet criteria for any police force anywhere
in the United States? Arresting people who say negative things about the president. Now, if somebody poses
a threat to the life of a public figure or the
threat to life of a politician, that's a completely different case. Which means the standards
of evidence are much higher for them to arrest that person. So unless you create
a secret police force, then your actual public police force is never gonna take action. So all these people who are afraid of this exact situation that you're outlying, they need the creation
of a secret police force. The creation of a secret
court that operates outside the judicial system, the creation of a secret intelligence
service that operates outside of foreign intelligence collection. All so that a handful of people
who don't like the president get what whisked away,
assassinated, put in prison, who knows what. Think about the resources,
the amount of money and time and how hard would it
be to keep that secret, to have all of those things in motion. The reason it worked in
Russia and Soviet, Germany or Russia and Communist Germany was because everybody knew
there was a secret police. Everybody knew that like, that
there was a threat to work to speaking out against the government. It's completely different here. - Well, so there's a lot to say. So one is yes, if I was a
dictator and I wanted to, and just looking at history, let me take myself out of it. But I think one of the more effective ways is you don't need the surveillance. You can pick out a random person and in a public display,
semi-public display, you know, basically put 'em in jail for opposing the government,
whether they oppose it or not. And the fear that sends a
message to a lot of people. - That's exactly what you
see happening in China. What you just laid out. It's genius. And that is the standard bottle. - You don't need the
surveillance for that. But that said, if you
did do the surveillance, so that's the support, the sort of the incentives aren't aligned. It seems like a lot of work to do for the thing you could do
without the surveillance. But you know, yes, the courts wouldn't, if you were to be able
to get a list of people, which I think that part you could do. That opposed the government,
you could do that just like you said on Twitter publicly, you could make a list. And with that you can start to, especially if you have a
lot of data on those people find ways in which they
did violate the law. Not because they opposed the government, but because in some other
way the parking tickets or didn't pay the taxes. That's probably a common one. Or like screwed up
something about the taxes. I just happen to know Russia and Ukraine, they're very good at this kind of stuff. Knowing we how the citizens
screwed everything up. Because especially in those countries, everybody's breaking the law because in a corrupt nation, you have to bend the law to operate. Like the number of people
that pay taxes fully in those nations is just
very low, if not zero. And so they then use that
breaking of the law to come up with an excuse to actually
put you in jail based on that. So it is possible to imagine. But yes, I think that's the ugly part of surveillance. But I do think, just like you said, the incentives aren't correct. Like you really don't need to
get all of the secret police and all of these kinds
of organizations working. If you do have a
charismatic, powerful leader that built up a network
that's able to control a lot of organizations to
a level of authoritarianism in a government, they're just able to do the usual thing. One, have propaganda
machine to tell narratives. Two, pick out, you know, people
that they can put in jail for opposing the state and maybe loud members of the press start silencing the press. There's a playbook to this thing, and that doesn't require the surveillance. The surveillance, you know, what is useful for the surveillance is the
thing you mentioned in China, which is encourage everybody in the citizenry to watch each
other to say there's enemies of the state everywhere. And then you start
having children reporting on their parents and that kind of stuff. Again, don't need a
surveillance state for that. Now, the good of a surveillance system, if it's operating within
ethical bounds, is that yes, it could protect the populace. So you're saying like the good,
given on your understanding of these institutions, the
good outweighs the bad? - Absolutely. So lemme give
you just a practical example. So people don't realize this, but there's multiple surveillance
states that are out there. There are surveillance states that are close allies
with the United States. One of those surveillance states is the United Arab Emirates, the UAE. Now I lived in the UAE from 2019 to 2020. Came back on a repatriation
flight after Covid broke out. But we were there for a full year. We were residents, we had
IDs, we had everything. Now, when you get your
national ID in the Emirates, you get a chip and that chip
connects you to everything. It connects you to
cameras, it connects you to your license plate on your car, to your passport, to your
credit card, everything. Everything is intertwined. Everything is interlinked. When you drive, there are no police, there are no police on the roads. Every 50 to 100 meters you cross a camera that reads your license plate, measures your speed, and if you're breaking the speed limit, it just immediately
charges your credit card because it's all tied
together, totally surveillance. That technology was invented by the Israelis who use it in Israel. When I was in Abu Dhabi, and I was rear-ended at high
speed by what turned out to be an Emirati official, a senior ranking official
of one of the Emirates. It was caught on camera. His ID was registered,
my ID was registered, everything was tied back to our IDs. The proof and the evidence
was crystal clear. Even still, he was Emirati. I was not. So when I went to the police
station to file the complaints, it was something that
nobody was comfortable with because generally speaking, Emiratis don't accept legal claims against their own from foreigners. But the difference was
that I was an American and I was there on a contract supporting the Emirati government. So I had these different variances, right? Long story short, in the
end, the surveillance states is what made sure that justice was played because the proof was incontrovertible. There was so much evidence collected because of the surveillance
nature of their state. Now why do they have a surveillance state? It's not for people like me. It's because they're constantly afraid of extremist terrorist activity happening inside Abu Dhabi or inside the UAE because they're under
constant threat from Islam or from extremists. And they're under
constant threat from Iran. So that's what drives the
people to want a police state to want a surveillance state. For them, their survival is paramount and they need the surveillance
to have that survival. For us, we haven't tasted
that level of desperation and fear yet, or hopefully never. But that's what makes us
feel like there's something wrong with surveillance. Surveillance is all about the purpose. It's all about the intent. - Well, and like you said, companies do a significant
amount of surveillance to provide us with services
that we take for granted. For example, just one of
the things to give props to the digital efforts of the Zelensky administration in Ukraine, I don't know if you're aware, but they have this digital
transformation efforts where you could put, like, it's laughable to say
in the United States, but they actually did a really good job of having a government app
that has your passport on it. It's all the digital information
you can get a doctor. It's like everything that you would think America
would be doing, you know, like license, like all that kind of stuff. It's in an app, you could pay each other. There's payment to each
other, and that's all coming. I mean, there's probably
contractors somehow connected to the whole thing, but that's like under
the flag of government. And so that's an incredible technology. And I didn't, I guess, hear anybody talk about
surveillance in that context, even though it is. But they all love it and it's super easy. And frankly already, it's
so easy and convenient they've already taken for granted that of course, this is what you do. Of course your passport is on your phone. - Yep, for everybody to have, housed in a server that you
have no idea where it's at. That could be hacked at
any time by a third party. - They don't ask these kinds of questions because it's so convenient. As we do for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft products we use. - Security and convenience
are on two opposite sides of another spectrum. The more convenient something
is, the less secure. And the more secure something
is the less convenient. And that's a battle that we're always working with as individuals and then we're trying to outsource that battle to our politicians. And our politicians are frankly just more interested in being politicians. - Yeah, that said, I mean,
people are really worried about giving any one institution
a large amount of power, especially when it's a
federal government institution given some history. First of all, just
history of the corruption, of power corrupting
individuals and institutions. And second of all, myth or reality of certain institutions
like the CIA misbehaving. Well, let me actually ask
you about the Edward Snowden. So outside of the utility
that you're arguing for of the NSA surveillance program, do you think Edward Snowden
is a criminal or a hero? - In terms in the eyes of the law? He's a criminal. He broke the law. He broke the confidence. He was under security obligation. And then when he ran
away, he ran away to all of the worst villains in the
world from the US perspective to basically seek protection. How you act in the face of accusation is in essence part of the case that you build for yourself. So running away to China, Russia, Cuba, there was a Latin Ecuador I think, that just paints a very negative picture that does not suggest that
you were doing anything that was ethical and upright and in favor of the American people if you're gonna run to American
enemies to support yourself. So for sure in the eyes
of law, he's a criminal. In the eyes of a group of people who are largely ignorant
to what they lost. To them, he's a hero. To me, he's just kind of a sad case. I personally look at Snowden
as a sad, unfortunate case. His life is ruined. His
family name is tarnished. He's forever going to be a desperate pawn. And that's all because of
the decisions that he made and the order that he made them. - I'm not sure his name is tarnished. I think the case you're making
is a difficult case to make. And so I think his name represents fighting one man. It's like Tiananmen Square
standing before the tank. Is like one man fighting the government. And I think that there is
some aspect to which taking that case aside, that
is the American spirit, which is hold the powerful accountable. So whenever there's somebody in power, one individual can change can... - One man can make a difference. - [Lex] Can make a difference. - It's very "Night Rider" of you. (Andrew laughing)
- It's powerful. Well, I mean that's the
American individualism. And so he represents that. And I think there's a huge skepticism against large federal institutions. And I think if you look at
the long arc of history, that actually is a forcing
function for the institutions to behave their best. So basically hold them accountable. - What's nice about this is
that we can agree to disagree and history will be the one that decides. But like there's a reason that Edward Snowden
needs to do something new every 16 or 18 months to remain relevant. Because if he didn't, he
would just be forgotten. Because he was not a maverick who changed history for the better. He was a man who broke a
law and now he's on the run. And to some people, he is a hero. To other people, he's a criminal. But to the vast majority,
he's just a blip on a radar of their everyday life that really makes no difference to them at all. - So actually let's linger on that. So just to clarify, are you making the difficult case that the NSA mass surveillance
program was one, ethical and two, made a better
world for Americans? - I am making the case that
at the time it was exactly what we needed to feel
safe in our own homes. - But what about to be
safe, actually be safe? - So this is what's difficult because any proof that they collected that actually prevented
an attack from happening is proof we'll never know about. This is the really unfortunate side of intelligence operations, and I've been at the front end of this. You work your ass off,
you take personal risk, you make personal sacrifice to make sure that something terrible doesn't happen. Nobody knows that that ever happens. - Does that have to be that way? Does it have to remain
secret every time the NSA or the CIA saves the lives of Americans? - It does for two reasons.
It has to be secret first. The mythos, the same thing
we were talking about with General Petraeus. You can't brag about your victories if you want to let the myth
shape itself, you can't do that. The second thing is, once a victory is claimed, the danger comes from
letting your enemy know that you claimed the victory. Because they can reverse engineer and they can start to
change how they did things. If a terrorist cell tries
to execute an operation, the operation fails. From their point of view,
they don't know why it failed. They just know that it failed. But then if the US or if the American government comes in and says, "We took apart
this amazing attack", now they have more information. The whole power of secrets,
like we talked about before, the power of secrets is in knowing that not everybody has them. There's only a shelf life. So take advantage of the shelf life. You get space. So you
gotta keep it a secret. There is no tactical advantage
from sharing a secret unless you are specifically trying to achieve a certain tactical
advantage from sharing that secret, which is
what we've seen so much of with US intel sharing with Ukraine. There's a tactical advantage
from sharing a secret about Russian military movements
or weaknesses in tanks or, you know, supply chain
challenges, whatever it might be. - Well, let me argue that
there might be an advantage to share information
with the American public when a terrorist attack is averted or the lives
of Americans are saved. Because what that does... - Is make every American think
that they're not that safe. There is no tactical advantage there. - [Lex] You think so?
- Absolutely. If the Austin PD started
telling you every day about these crazy crimes that they prevented, would that make you feel more safe? It would make you feel like
they're doing their job. - Is that obvious to you? Make us feel less safe? 'Cause if we see competence that there is extremely competent
defenders of this territory, of these people, wouldn't that
make us feel more safe or no? - The human nature is
not to assign competence. So empirically humans overvalue losses and undervalue gains. That's something that we've seen from finance to betting and beyond. If the Austin Police
Department starts telling you about all these heinous
crimes that were avoided because of their hard work, the way that your brain is
actually going to process that information is you are going to say, if this is all the stuff
that they've stopped, how bad must this place be? How much more haven't they stopped? - I take your point. It's a powerful psychological point, but I, looking at the other picture of it, looking at the police force,
looking at the CIA, the NSA, those people and now with the police, there's such a negative feeling amongst Americans towards
these institutions. Who the hell wants to work for the CIA now and the police force? Like you're gonna be criticized. Like that's really bad for the CIA. - [Andrew] It's terrible. - Like, as opposed to
being seen as a hero. Like for example, currently soldiers are for the most part seen as heroes that are protecting this nation. That's not the case for the CIA - Soldiers weren't seen as
heroes in the Vietnam War. You've gotta remember that
when you, so first of all, public service is a sacrifice. We oftentimes forget that. We start to think, oh,
government jobs are cushy and they're easy. And it must be so easy to be the president 'cause then you're basically
a celebrity overnight. Public service is a sacrifice. It's a grind. For all of the soldiers, the
submariners, the missiles, the police officers,
intelligence specialists, they all know what it's
like to give things up to serve a public that
can turn its opinion at any given time. And history is what defines it. The more important thing is to understand that if you want a true
open and fair democracy, you cannot control a narrative and starting to share
all of your victories or starting to share
your biggest victories with the intent of shaping public opinion, to be supportive of the police
force or supportive of CIA or supportive of you name
it, is shaping a narrative that is intentional,
operational use of influence to drive public opinion. That is something nobody
wants to get into. It is much more professional
to be a silent sentinel, a silent servant, humbly
carrying the burden of public service in the United States where we are AU, bear and open democracy. - Why not celebrate
(Andrew laughing) the killing of Bin Laden?
- [Andrew] We did. - The search, discovery and the capture and the killing of Bin Laden. Actually the details of that, how much of the details of that, how he was discovered were made public? I think some of it was made public enough. Why not do that? Doesn't that make heroes out of the people that are servants? Do people who serve, do
service for this nation, do they always have to operate in a thankless manner in the shadows? - I think that's a very good question. The folks who I left
behind when I left CIA, who continue to serve as faceless, nameless heroes every day,
I am grateful to them. The truth is that if they were motivated by something else, they
wouldn't be as good as they are at doing what they do. And I see your point about shouldn't we be celebrating our victories? But when celebrating our
victories runs the risk of informing our enemies, how we operate, giving away
our informational advantage, giving away our tactical
battlefield advantage, and running the risk of shaping
a narrative intentionally among our own American people. Now all of a sudden we're
turning into exactly the thing that the American people
trust us not to become. - Yeah. but then you
operate in the secrecy, and then there's corrupt and
douchebag people everywhere. So when they, even inside the CIA and criminals inside the CIA, there's criminals in all organizations, in all walks of life. Human nature is such that
this is always the case. Then it breeds conspiracy theories. - It does and sometimes
those conspiracy theories turn out to be true, but
most times they don't. That's just part of the
risk of being a myth. - Can you speak to some of
the myths? So MKUltra... - Not a myth. - Not a myth, so this is a
fascinating human experimentation program undertaken by the
CIA to develop procedures for using drugs like LSD to
interrogate people through, let's say, psychological manipulation and maybe even torture. The scale of the program
is perhaps not known. How do you make sense
that this program existed? - Again, you've gotta look
through the lens of time. You've gotta look at where we were historically at that time. There was the peak of the Cold War. Our enemies were doing the
same kind of experimentation. It was essentially another space race. What if they broke through
a new weapon technology faster than we did? What would that mean for the safety and security of the American people? So right decision or wrong
decision, it was guided by and informed by national
security priorities. So from this program that
was designed to use drugs to drive interrogation and torture people, was born something very
productive, Operation Stargate, which was a chance to use remote viewing and metaphysics to try
to collect intelligence. Now, even though in the
end the outcome of MKUltra and the outcome of Stargate were mixed, nobody really knows if they did or didn't do what they
were supposed to do. We still know that to this
day, there's still a demand in the US government and in CIA for people who have sensitivities
to ethereal energies. - By the way, is there any proof that that kind of stuff works? It shows that there's interest, it shows that there's openness to consider those kinds of things. But is there any evidence
that that kind of stuff works? - If there's evidence, I haven't seen it. Speaking from a science-based
point of view only, if energy and matter
can always be exchanged, then a person who can understand and become sensitive to
energy is a person who could become sensitive to
what does become matter. - Yeah, I mean, the basics of
the physics might be there, but a lot of people
probably are skeptical. - I'm skeptical too, but
I'm just trying to remain... - But you should be open-minded, right? I mean, that's actually, you know, that's what science is
about, is remain open-minded, even for the things that are long shots, because those are the things that actually define
scientific revolutions. What about Operation Northwoods? It was a proposed 1962
false flag operation by the DOD and the CIA to
be carried out by the CIA to commit acts of terrorism on Americans and blame them on Cuba. So JFK, the president
rejected the proposal. What do you make that this was on the table, Operation Northwoods. - So it's interesting. First
I'm glad that JFK rejected it. That's a good sign. So we have to understand that good ideas are oftentimes
born from bad ideas. I had a really good friend
of mine who actually went on to become a pastor, and he
used to say all the time that he wanted all the
bad ideas on the table. Like "Gimme all your bad ideas" every time we had any
kind of conversation. And I was always one of
those people who was like, isn't a bad idea just a waste of time? And he was like, "No 'cause
the best ideas oftentimes come from bad ideas." So again, Cuban Missile Crisis, mass hysteria in the United
States about nuclear war from Cuba, missiles
blowing up American cities faster than we could even see them coming. It makes sense to me that
a president would go to, especially the part of CIA, which is the special activities division. It makes perfect sense to
me that a president would go to a division called special activities, whose job it is to create,
you know, crazy ideas that have presidential approval, but nobody knows they exist. So it makes sense that he would
challenge a group like that to come up with any wacky idea, right? Come up with anything. Just
let's start with something. 'Cause we can't bring
nothing to the table. We have to do something
about this Cuban issue. And then that's how an operation like that could reasonably be born. Not because anybody wants to do it, but because they were tasked
by the president to come up with five ideas. And it was one of the ideas. That still happens to this day. The president will still come in, but it'll basically send out a notice to his covert action arm and he will say, "I need this and I need it on Wednesday." And people have to come back with options for the thing he asked for, a finding. He will issue a presidential finding, and then his covert action
arms have to come back and say, "Here's how we would do this." And hide the hands of the Americans. - How gangster was it of
JFK to reject it though? - It was baller, right?
(Lex laughing) That is a mic drop right there. Nope, not doing that. Yep, doing that. - You know, a thing that
crosses an ethical line, even in a time where the entirety of human civilization hangs in a balance, still forfeit that power. That's a beautiful thing about the American experiment. A few times throughout its history that's has happened, including with our first President
George Washington. Well, let me ask about JFK. (Andrew laughing) - 25 times two, and they still
keep that stuff classified. - So do you think the CIA had a hand in
the assassination of JFK? - I cannot imagine in any
reasonable point of view that the organization of
CIA had anything to do with the assassination of JFK. - So it's not possible to infiltrate a small part of the CIA in
order to attain political or criminal gains or financial? - Yeah, absolutely it's
possible to infiltrate CIA, there's a long history of
foreign intelligence services infiltrating CIA from
Aldrich Ames to Jerry Lee, recently with China. So we know CIA can be infiltrated. Even if they are infiltrated, and even if that's interlocutor executes on their own agenda or the agenda as directed
by their foreign adversary, their foreign handler, that's different than organizational support for an event. So I do think it's possible
they could have been infiltrated at the time, especially, it was a massive, a major priority for the
Cubans and the Russians to infiltrate some aspect
of US intelligence. Multiple moles were caught
in the years following. So it's not surprising that there would be a priority for that. But to say that the organization of CIA was somehow in cahoots to independently assassinate
their own executive, that's a significant stretch. I've seen no evidence to support that. And it goes contrary to everything I learned
from my time at CIA. - Well, let me ask you, do you think CIA played a
part in enabling drug cartels and drug trafficking, which is another big kind of shadow that hangs over the CIA. - At the beginning of the drug war, I would imagine the answer is yes. CIA has its own
counter-narcotics division. A division that's dedicated to fighting and preventing narcotics from
coming into the United States. So when you paint a picture for me, like do you think the CIA was complicit in helping drug trafficking or drug use? When I say yes, my exception
is I don't think they did that for Americans inside the United States. If the CIA can basically set it up so that two different drug
cartels shoot each other by assisting in the transaction of a sale to a third country and then leaking that that sale happened to a competing cartel, that's just letting
cartels do what they do. That's them doing the dirty work for us. So, especially at the
beginning of the drug war, I think there was tons of
space, lots of room for CIA to get involved in the economics of drugs and then let the inevitable happen. And that was way more efficient, way more productive than us
trying to send our own troops in to kill a bunch of cartel warlords. So that makes a ton of sense to me. It just seems efficient,
it seems very practical. I do not believe that CIA would like, I don't think all the
accusations out there about how they would
buy drugs and sell drugs and somehow make money
on the side from it. That's not how it works. - So do you think, on
that point, a connection between Barry Seal, the great governor, and then President Bill
Clinton, Oliver North and vice president, former
CA director George H.W. Bush in a little town with a little airport called Mena, Arkansas. - So I am outta my element now. This is one I haven't
heard many details about. - So your sense is any
of the drug trafficking has to do with criminal operations
outside the United States and the CIA just leveraging that to achieve its end, but nothing
to do with American citizens and American politicians - With American citizens, again,
speaking organizationally. So that would be my sense. Yes. - Let me ask you about, so
back to Operation Northwoods, because it's such a powerful tool, sadly powerful tool used by
dictators throughout history, the false flag operation. So I think there's, and you said the terrorist attacks in 9/11 changed a lot for us, for the United States, for Americans. It changed the way we see the world. It woke us up to the
harshness of the world. I think there's, to my eyes
at least, there's nothing that shows evidence that 9/11
was a quote "inside job." But is the CIA or the intelligence agencies or the US government capable
of something like that? (Andrew laughing) I mean, that's the question.
- I get it, yeah. - So there's a bunch of shadiness about how was reported on. I just can't, that's the
thing I struggle with. While there's no evidence
that there was an inside job, it raises the question to me, well, could something like
this be an inside job? 'cause it's sure as heck,
now, looking back 20 years, the amount of money that
was spent on these wars, the military industrial complex, the amount of interest in terms of power and money involved, organizationally, can
something like that happen? - You know Occam's razor. So the harems razor is that
you can never prescribe to conspiracy what could be
explained through incompetence. Those are two fundamental guidelines that we follow all the time. The simplest answer is oftentimes the best and never prescribe to conspiracy what can be explained
through incompetence. - Can you elaborate what you
mean by we? As human beings? - [Andrew] We, as
intelligence professionals. - So you think there's a deep
truth to that second razor? - There us more than a deep truth. There's ages of experience
for me and for others. - So in general, people are incompetent. If left to their own means, they're more incompetent
than they are malevolent at a large organizational scale. - People are more incompetent
of executing a conspiracy than they are of competently, yeah, than they are of competently
executing a conspiracy. That's really what it means,
is that it's so difficult to carry out a complex lie that most people don't have
the competency to do it. So it doesn't make any sense
to lead thinking of conspiracy. It makes more sense to
lead assuming incompetence. When you look at all of the outcomes, all the findings from 9/11,
it speaks to incompetence, it speaks brashly and
openly to incompetence, and nobody likes talking about it. FBI and CIA to this day
hate hearing about it. The 9/11 commission is
gonna go down in history as this painful example
of the incompetence of the American intelligence community. And it's going to come
back again and again. Every time there's an intel flap, it's gonna come back again and again. What are you seeing? Even right now, we missed the
US intelligence infrastructure misjudged Afghanistan,
misjudged Hong Kong, misjudged Ukraine's, and
Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Those were three massive
misjudgments in a few years. - It's just embarrassing to the end. - It's just embarrassing. Exactly right. - So all the sort of
coverup looking things around 9/11 is just
people being embarrassed by their failures. - If they're taking steps
to cover anything up, it's just their own. It's a painful reminder of their lack of competency at the time. Now, I understand that
conspiracy theorists want to take inklings of information and put them together in a way that is the most damning. But that goes back to our
point about overvaluing losses and undervaluing gains. It's just predictable human behavior. - Let me ask you about this,
because it comes up often. So I'm from MIT and there's a guy by the
name of Jeffrey Epstein that still troubles me to this day. That some of the people
I respect were interacted with this individual and fell into his influence, charm, charisma, whatever the hell he used
to delude these people. He did so successfully. I'm very open-minded about this thing. I would love to learn more, but a lot of people tell me,
a lot of people outta respect that there's intelligence
agencies behind this individual. So they were using Jeffrey
Epstein for getting access to people and then to control and manipulate those powerful people. The CIA, I believe is not
brought up as often as Mossad. And so this goes back
to the original aspect of our conversation is how much each individual
intelligence agency is willing to go to control, to manipulate, to achieve its means. Do you think there is,
can you educate me if obviously you don't know, but you can bet. What are the chances the
intelligence agencies are involved with the character of Jeffrey Epstein - In some way, shape or form
with the character of Epstein? It's 100% guaranteed.
- [Lex] Ah dammit. - That some intelligence
organization was involved. But let's talk about why. Let's talk about why, okay? There's multiple types
of intelligence assets, just like we were talking earlier. There's foreign intelligence
reporting assets, there's access agents, and then
there's agents of influence. Three different categories
of intelligence, right? One is a, when you talk about foreign intelligence reporters, these are people who
have access to secrets and their job is to give you
their secrets in exchange for gold or money or alcohol or prostitution or whatever else, right? Their job is to give you secrets and then you pay them for the secrets. Access agents, their job is
to give you physical access or digital access to
something of interest to you. So maybe they're the ones that open a door that should have been
locked and let you come in and stick your thumb
drive in the computer. Or maybe they're the ones that share a phone number with somebody and then they're just like, just don't tell 'em you got
the phone number from me. Their job is to give you access. Then you have these agents of influence. An agent of influence's job is to be part of your effort to influence the outcomes in some way that benefits your intelligence
requirements, right? Of these three types of people, the least scrupulous and the most shady is
your agent of influence. Because your agent of influence understands exactly what they're doing. They know they're working with one guy, and they know they're using the influence to manipulate some other guy. When it comes to powerful people, especially wealthy, powerful people, the only thing that
interests them is power. Money is not a challenge anymore. Prestige, notoriety, none of
those things are a challenge. The rest of us, we're
busy trying to make money. We're busy trying to build a reputation. We're busy trying to build a career, keep a family afloat. At the highest levels, they're bored. They don't need any of that. The only thing that
they care about is being able to wield power. So a character like
Jeffrey Epstein is exactly the kind of character that
the Chinese would want, the Russians would
want, Mossad would want, the French would want. It's too easy because the man had access to a wide range of American influential people
for corporate espionage uses, for economic espionage uses, for national security espionage uses. It doesn't make any sense
that a person like that wouldn't be targeted. It doesn't. - So the question is who and whether I think the really important distinction here is, was Jeffrey Epstein created,
or once he's achieved and built his network,
was he then infiltrated? And that's a really sort
of important difference. Like at which stage do you
connect a person like that? You start to notice
maybe they're effective of building a network and then you start building a relationship to where at some point it's a
job, they're working for you. Or do you literally
create a person like that? - Yeah, so intelligence organizations have different strategies here. In the United States, we never create, we don't have a budget cycle
that allows us to create, I mean, the maximum budget
cycle in the United States is five years. So even if we were to try to
invest in some seed operation or create some character of influence, essentially every year you have to justify why you're spending budget. And that becomes very difficult
in a democracy like ours. However, Russia and
China are extremely adept at seed operations, long-term operations. They are willing to invest and develop and create an agent that
serves their purposes. Now, to create someone from
scratch, like Jeffrey Epstein, the probabilities are extremely low. They would've had to start with like a thousand different targets and try to grow a thousand
different, if you will, influencers, and then
hope that one of them hits kind of like a venture
capital firm, right? Invest in many hope that a few hits. More likely they observed him at some point in his own natural rise. They identified his
personal vulnerability, very classic espionage technique. And then they stepped in,
introduced themselves mid-career and said, "Hey, we know you
have this thing that you like, that it's frowned upon by your own people, but we don't frown upon it, and
we can help you both succeed and, you know, have an endless supply of ladies along the way." - I've recently talked to Ryan
Graves, who's a lieutenant, Ryan Graves, who's a fighter jet pilot about many things. He also does work on autonomous
weapon systems, drones and that kind of thing, and
including quantum computing. But he also happens to be
one of the very few pilots that were willing to go on record and talk about UFO sightings. Does the CIA and the federal government
have interest in UFOs? - In my experience at CIA, that is an area that remains very compartmented. And that could be one of two reasons. It could be because there
is significant interest and that's why it's so
heavily compartmented. Or it could be because it's an area that's just not important. It's a distraction. So they compartment it
so it doesn't distract from other operations. One of the areas that I've
been quite interested in and where I've done a lot of research, and I've done some work in
the private intelligence and private investigation
side, is with UFOs. The place where UFOs really connect with the federal government
is when it comes to aviation safety and predominance of power. So FAA and the US Air Force and the US military are
very invested in knowing what's happening in the skies
above the United States. And that's of primary interest to them. When they can rule out the direct threat to national security of UFOs, then they become less interested. That said, when you have
unexplained aerial phenomenon that are unexplained, that
can't directly be tied to anything that is known
of the terrestrial world, then they're left without
an answer to their question. They don't know if it's
a threat or not a threat. But I think the scarier concern for the US national government or for the US federal
government, the scarier concern that nobody talks about is
what if the UFO isn't alien? What if it is actually a cutting edge war machine that we are eons behind ever being able to replicate? - Or the other concern
is that it's a system, it's a machine from a foreign power that's doing intelligence collection. - [Andrew] Correct.
- So it's not just military purposes, it's
actually collecting data. - Well, a lot of times the
federal government will see the two as the same. It's a hostile tool from
a foreign government. - Oh, so collection of
information is a hostile act. - Absolutely. That's why
the Espionage Act exists. That's why it's a criminal
offense if you're committing espionage in the United States as a US citizen or a foreign citizen. - So I guess they keep digging until they can confirm it's not a threat. And you're saying that there's not, from your understanding much
evidence that they're doing, so it could be because
they're compartmentalized, but you're saying private
intelligence institutions are trying to make progress on this? Yeah, it's really difficult
to know the scale. - Yeah, there's an economic interest in the private intelligence world. Because for example, if you understand why
certain aerial phenomenon are happening over a location,
then you can use that to inform investors whether
to invest in that location or avoid investment in that location. But that's not a national
security concern. So it doesn't matter to
the federal government. - Could these UFOs be aliens? Now I'm going into a territory of you as a human being wondering about all the alien
civilizations that are out there. The humbling question. - We are not alone. - [Lex] You think we're not alone? - It's an improbability that we are alone. If by virtue of the fact that
sentient human life exists, intelligent human life
exists, all the probabilities that would have to be
destroyed for that to be true, simply speak over the galaxies that exist that there's no possible way we're alone. It's a mathematical equation.
It's a one or a zero. And for me, it has to exist. It's impossible otherwise,
rationally for me to think that we are truly the
only intelligent life form in all of the universe. But to think that an alien life form is anything
like us at all, is equally as inconceivable to think
that there are carbon-based, bipedal, humanoid, alien
species that just happen to fly around in metal machines and visit alien planets in a
way that they become observed, it's just silly. It's the world of sci-fi. - [Lex] Well, let me push... - What does every good scientist... 'Cause we always assume that they're superior
to us in intelligence. When any scientist
carries out an experiment, the whole objective of the
experiment is to observe without being disclosed
or being discovered. So why on earth would we think that the superior
species makes the mistake of being discovered over and over again? - So, to push back on
that idea, if we were to think about us humans trying
to communicate with ants. First, we observe for a
while, there'll be a bunch of PhDs written, a bunch of people just sort of collecting data, taking notes, trying to understand about
this thing that you detected that seems to be a living thing, which is a very difficult thing to define from an alien perspective. Or from our perspective, we find life on Mars
or something like that. Okay, so you observe for a while, but then if you want to
actually interact with it, how would you interact with the ants? If I were to interact with
the ants, I would try to infiltrate, I would try
to put, like, figure out what is the language they used to communicate with each other. I would try to operate at
their physical scale, at like, in terms of the physics of
their interaction, in terms of the information methods,
mediums of information exchange with pheromones or whatever,
however the heck ants. So I would try to mimic them in some way. So in that sense, it makes sense that the objects we would see,
you mentioned bipedal. Yes, of course it's ridiculous that aliens would actually be very similar to us, but maybe they create
forms in order to be like, here, the humans will understand it. And this needs to be sufficiently
different from humans to know that there's something weird. I don't know., I think
it's actually an incredibly difficult problem of figuring
out how to communicate with a thing way dumber than you. And people assume, like if you're smart, it's easy to talk to the dumb thing. But I think it's actually
extremely difficult when the gap in intelligence is just
orders of magnitude. And so of course you can observe, but once you notice the thing
is sufficiently interesting, how do you communicate with that thing? - So this is where one of
the things I always try to highlight is how conspiracies are born. Because many people don't
understand how easy it is to fall into the conspiratorial cycle. So the first step to a
conspiracy being born is to have a piece of evidence that is true. And then immediately
following the true evidence is a gap in information. And then to fill in
the gap of information, people create an idea, and then the next logical
outcome is based on the idea that they just created, which is an idea that's based on something that was imagined in the first place. So the idea, the factual
thing is now two steps away, and then three steps away, four steps away as the things go on. And then all of a sudden you
have this kernel of truth that turned into this wild conspiracy. So in our example, you talked about humans trying
to communicate with ants. Ants are not intelligent. Ants are not an intelligent species. They're drone species
that's somehow commanded through whatever technology, whatever... - Spoken like a typical human, but yes. - Whatever biological thing
is in the queen, right? But it's not a fair equivalent. But let's look at gorillas
or let's look at something in the monkey family, right? Where largely we agree that there is some sort of intelligence there, or dolphins, some sort of intelligence, right? It is A human thing to want to observe and then communicate and integrate. That's a human thing, not
an intelligent life thing. So for us to even think that a foreign and intelligent alien species would want to engage in communicate at all, is an extremely human assumption. And then from that assumption, then we started going into
all the other things you said. If they wanted to communicate,
wouldn't they wanna mimic. If they wanted to mimic, wouldn't they create devices like ours? So now we're three steps
removed from the true fact of there's something
unexplainable in the skies. - Yeah, so the fact is there's
something unexplainable in the skies, and then
we're filling in the gaps with our basic human biases. But the thing is... - Now we're getting right
back to project Northwood. We need some plan. I don't care how crazy the idea
is, guys, give me some plan. So that's where we come up with, well, maybe it's an alien
species trying to communicate or maybe it's an alien, a
hostile threat that's trying to take over the world or
who knows what, maybe it's... - I mean, but you have to
somehow construct hypotheses and theories for anomalies. And then from that amidst giant pile of
the ridiculous emerges perhaps a deeper truth over period of decades. And at first that truth is ridiculed and then it's accepted. You know, that whole process. - The earth revolving around the sun. - Yeah, the earth
revolving around the sun. But you know, to me it's interesting because it's asks us
looking out there with SETI, just looking for alien life is forcing us to really ask questions about
ourselves, about what is life, how special, first of
all, what is intelligence? How special is intelligence in the cosmos? And I think it's inspiring and challenging to us as human beings, both on a scientific
and engineering level, but also on a philosophical level. I mean, all of those
questions that are laid before us when you start
to think about alien life. - So you interviewed Joe Rogan recently. And he said something
that I thought was really, really brilliant during
the podcast interview. He said that you... - He's gonna love hearing that. (both laughing) - Well, go ahead, sorry. - But he said that he
realized at some point that the turn in his
opinion about UFOs happened when he realized how desperately
he wanted it to be true. This is the human condition. Our pink matter works the same way as everybody's pink matter. And one of the ways that
our pink matter works is with what's known as a cognitive bias. It's a mental shortcut. Essentially, your brain
doesn't want to process through facts over and over again. Instead, it wants to assume
certain facts are in place and just jump right to the conclusion. It saves energy, it saves megabytes. So what Joe Rogan, I feel weird calling him
Joe, I don't know him. But what Joe identified on his own... - Mr. Rogan,
- What Mr. Rogan identified on his own was his own cognitive loop. And then he immediately grew
suspicious of that loop. That is a super powerful tool. That is something that
most people never become self-actualized enough to realize that they have a cognitive loop, let alone questioning
their own cognitive loop. So when it came to this
topic specifically, that was just something that
I thought was really powerful because you learned to not
not trust your own mind. - Just for the record,
after he drinks one whiskey, all that goes out. I think that was just
in that moment in time, like, you know... - [Andrew] A moment of brilliance. - A moment of brilliance. Because I think he still is... One of the things that
inspires me about Joe is how open-minded he is, how curious he is. He refuses to let sort of the conformity and the conventions of any one community, including the scientific
community, be a kind of thing that limits his curiosity
of asking what if, like the whole, it's entirely possible. I think that's a beautiful thing, and it actually represents
what the best of science is, that childlike curiosity. So it's good to sort of
balance those two things, but then you have to wake up to it, like, is there a chance this is true or do I just really want it to be true? - Like the hot girl that
talks to you overseas. - Yeah, yeah.
(Andrew laughing) For a brief moment.
(Andrew laughing) There's a actually a
deeper explanation for it that I'll tell you off
the mic that perhaps a lot of people can kind
of figure out anyway... - Just to take it one step further 'cause I love this stuff. Personally, I love pink matter stuff. In your interview with Jack Barsky, Jack's a good friend of mine. - A good dude.
- [Lex] Incredible person. And your conversation with Jack Barsky, he started talking to you about how his recruiters were
feeding back to him his own beliefs, his own
opinions about himself, how smart he was, how good he was, how uniquely qualified he was. That's all pink matter manipulation. Feeding right back to the person, what they already think of themselves is a way to get them to
invest and trust you faster, because obviously you value
them for all the right reasons, because that's how they see themselves. So that loop that the
KGB was using with Jack, Jack did not wake up to
that loop at the time. He woke up to it later. So
it happens to all of us. We're all in a loop. It's just, whether it's about oat milk or whether it's about aliens or whether it's about, you
know, the Democrats trying to take your guns, whatever
it is, everybody's in a loop. And we've gotta wake up to ask ourselves, just like you said, is it true or do we just really want it to be true? And until you ask yourself that question, you're just one of the
masses trapped in the loop. - That's the Nietzsche
gaze into the abyss. It's a dangerous thing, hat's the past insanity
is to ask that question. You wanna be doing it carefully, but it's also the place
where you can truly discover something fundamental about this world that people don't understand and lay the groundwork
for progress, scientific, cultural, all that kind of stuff. "What is one spy trick?" This is from a Reddit that I really enjoy. What's one spy trick? And you're full of a million spy tricks. People should follow you.
You did an amazing podcast. You're just an amazing person. What is the one spy trick
you would teach everyone that they can use to improve
their life instantly? Now, you already mentioned quite a few, but what else could jump to mind? - My go-to answer for
this is not really changed much over the last few years. So the first, the most important spy trick to change everything
immediately is something called perception versus perspective. We all look at the world
through our own perception. My dad used to tell me,
my stepdad used to tell me that perception is reality. And I was arguing this with him when I was 14 years old, "I told you so, dad, you're still wrong." But perception is your interpretation of the world around you. But it's unique only to you. There's no advantage in your perception. That's why so many people
find themselves arguing all the time trying to
convince other people of their own perception. The way that you win any argument, the way that you get ahead in your career, the way that you outsell
or out race anybody, is when you move off of perception and move into perspective. Perspective is the act or the art of observing the
world from outside of yourself. Whether that's outside of yourself as like an entity just observing from a different point of view. Or even more powerful,
you sit in the shoes, you sit in the seat of
the person opposite you, and you think to yourself,
what is their life like? What do they feel right now?
You know, are they comfortable? Are they uncomfortable? Are they afraid? Are they scared? What's the stressor that
they woke up to this morning? What's the stressor that they're gonna go to sleep with tonight? When you shift places and get
out of your own perception and into someone else's perspective, now you're thinking like them, which is giving you an
informational advantage, but you know what they're all doing? Everyone else out there is
trapped in their own perception. Not thinking about a
different perspective. So immediately you have
superior information, superior positioning,
you have an advantage that they don't have. And if you do that to your boss, if's gonna change your career. If you do that to your spouse, it's gonna change your marriage. If you do that to your kids, it's gonna change your family legacy because nobody else out there is doing it. - It's so interesting
how difficult empathy is for people and how powerful it is. Especially for like you said, the spouse, like intimacy. Like stepping outside of yourself and really putting yourself in the shoes of the other person, considering
how they see the world. I really enjoy that because how does that
exactly lead to connection? I think when you start to understand the way the
other person sees the world, you start to enjoy the
world through their eyes. And you start to be able to
share, in terms of intimacy, share the beauty they see together because you understand their perspective. And somehow you converge as well. Of course that allows you to gather information better
and all that kind of stuff. And like that allows you
to work together better, to share in all different kinds of ways. But for intimacy, that's
a really powerful thing. And also for actually, like
people you really disagree with or people on the internet
you disagree with and so on. I find empathy is such a powerful way to resolve any tensions there. Even like people like trolls or all that kind of stuff,
I don't deride them. I just kind of put myself in their shoes and it becomes like an enjoyable comradery with that person. - So I wanna draw a pretty hard line between perspective and empathy. Because empathy is
frankly an overused term by people who don't really know what they're saying sometimes. I think you know what you're saying, but the vast majority
of people listening... - I would argue that, but that's fine. - As soon as you say empathy,
they're gonna just be like, oh yeah, I know I've heard
this a thousand times. Empathy is about feeling
what other people feel or understanding...
- It's more about feeling would you say? - It's about feelings. It's about understanding
someone else's feelings. Feeling, it's not the same as sympathy where you feel their feelings. Empathy is about recognizing
that they have feelings and recognizing that
their feelings are valid. Perspective is more than just feelings. It's about the brain, it's
about the pink matter, on the left side and the
right side of the brain. Yes, I care about feelings. And this goes directly to
your point about connection. Yes, I care about feelings, but I also care about objectives. What is your aspirational goal? What was it like to grow up
as you, yeah, what was it like to experience this and how did this shape
your opinion on that? And you know, what is it
that you're going to do next? More than just feelings,
actual tactical actions. And that becomes extremely
valuable in the operational world because if you can get
into someone's head, left brain and right
brain, feelings and logic, you can start anticipating what actions they're gonna take next. You can direct the actions
that they're going to take next because you're basically telling them the story that's in their own head. When it comes to relationships and personal connection,
we talked about it earlier, the thing that people want
the most is community. They want someone else
who understands them. They want to be with people.
They don't want to be alone. The more you practice perspective,
empathy or no empathy, the more you just validate
that a person is there. I am in this time and space
with you in this moment. Feelings aside, right, that is powerful. That is intimate. And whether you're talking about lovers or whether you're talking
about a business exchange or whether you're talking
about collaborators in a crime, I'm here
with you, ride or die, let's do it. Right? That's powerful. - How much of what you've
learned in your role at the CIA transfer over to relationships,
to business relationship, to other aspects of life? This is something you work closely with powerful people to help them out. What have you learned
about the commonalities, about the problems that people face? - Man, I would say about a solid 95% of what I learned at CIA carries
over to the civilian world, that 5% that doesn't, it would carry over in a disaster, right? Knowing how to shoot on target with my non-dominant hand
really only has one purpose. It's not gonna happen day-to-day, right? Knowing how to do a dead
drop that isn't discoverable by the local police force isn't
gonna be useful right now, but it could be useful in a disaster. But the 95% of stuff that's useful, it's all tied to the human condition. It's all tied to being able to understand what someone's thinking, understand what someone's
feeling, direct their thoughts, direct their emotions,
direct their thought process, win their attention, win their loyalty, win influence with
them, grow your network, grow your own circle of influence. I mean, all of that is
immensely, immensely valuable. As an example, the disguise
thing that we talked about earlier, disguise in and
of itself has mixed utility. If you're Brad Pitt and
you don't want anybody to know your Brad Pitt, you
put on a level one disguise and that's great. Or maybe you call me and I walk you through a level two disguise
so that you can go to Aruba and nobody's gonna know
you're in Aruba, right? Whatever it is. But even there with the
5% that doesn't apply to everyday life, there's
still elements that do. For example, when a person
looks at a human being's face, the first place they look
is the same part of the face as if they were reading a piece of paper. So in English, we start from the top left and we read left to right, top to bottom. So when an English
speaking person interacts with another person, the
first thing they look at isn't their eyes, it's the upper left,
from their point of view, corner of their face. They look there and the
information they get is hair color, hair pattern, skin color, right? That's it, before they know
anything else about the face. This is one of the reasons
why somebody can look at you and then you ask them,
"What color are my eyes?" I don't really remember. Because the way they read the face, they read it from left
to right, top to bottom. So they're paying a lot of attention to the first few things they see, and then they're paying less attention as they go down the face. The same scrolling behavior
that you see on the internet. So when you understand that
through the lens of disguise, it allows you to make a
very powerful disguise. The most important part
of your disguise is here, if you're English speaking. Right here, if you're speaking
some foreign languages that read right to left, right? If it's Chinese, you know that they're gonna look from here down 'cause they read left down. - So it's so interesting. So yeah, knowing that really
helps you sort of configure the things in terms of
physical appearance. That's interesting.
- Correct. Correct. So when it comes to
how to make a disguise, not so useful to the
ultra wealthy usually. But when it comes to how to read a face or more importantly how people
are going to read your face, that's extremely important because now you know
where to find the first signs of deception in a
baseline or anything else. - You mentioned that the
idea of having privacy is one that we think we
can, but we really don't. Is it possible for maybe somebody like me or a regular person to
disappear from the grid? - Absolutely and it's not
as hard as you might think. It's not convenient. Again, convenience and security. You can disappear tomorrow, right? I can walk you through
three steps right now that's gonna help you disappear tomorrow. But none of them are convenient. They're all extremely secure, right? The first thing you do is every piece of digital technology you
have that is connected to you in any way, is now dead. You just let the battery run out. - [Lex] forever.
- Forever. You never touch it again.
Starting at this moment. What you have to do is go
out and acquire a new one. Realistically, you will not be able to acquire a new one in the
United States by buying it because to do so, you would
tie it to your credit card, you would tie it to a
location, a time, a place, a registered name, whatever else. So you would have to acquire
it essentially by theft or through the black market. So you would want something because you're gonna need
the advantage of technology without it being in your name. So you go out and you steal a phone or you steal a laptop, you
do whatever you have to do to make sure that you can
get on with the password and whatever else that might be, As dirty or as clean
as you want that to be, we're all morally flexible here. But now you have a technological device that you can work with,
and then from there on, you're just doing whatever you have to do. Whether you're stealing
every step of the way or whether you run a massive con. Keep in mind that we often
talk about conmen and cons. Do you know the word that con
is a root word for confidence. That's what a conman is. A conman is a confidence man. Just somebody who is so brazenly
confident that the people around them living in
their own perception, not perspective and their perception, they're like, "Well, this guy really knows what he's talking about, so
I'm gonna do what he says." So you can run a massive con and that can take care of your
finances, that can take care of your lodging, whatever
amount, whatever else it is. You are whoever you
present yourself to be. So if you wanna be Bill for the afternoon, just go tell people your name is Bill. They're not gonna question you. - So the intelligence, the natural web of
intelligence gathering systems we have in the United
States and in the world, are they going to believe
for long that your Bill? - Until you do something that
makes them think otherwise. If you are consistent, we talked about consistency
being the superpower. If you are consistent, they
will think your Bill forever. - How difficult is that to do? - It's not convenient. It's quite difficult. - Does that like require training? - It does require training. - Because why do criminals
always get caught? - Because they stop being consistent. I never hesitate to admit this, but people tell me I should
hesitate to admit it. So now I hesitate because of the guidance I've gotten to hesitate, right? I like criminals. I'm friends with a number of criminals because the only people
who get me like right away who get me, are criminals because we know what it's like to basically abandon all
the rules, do our own thing our own way, and watch the
world just keep turning. Most people are so stuck in the trap of normal thought and behavior that when I tell them, they just don't just go tell
people your name is Bill. Most people are gonna say,
"Psh, that's not gonna work." But a criminal will be like,
"Oh yeah, I did that once. I just told everybody my name is Nancy. I'm a dude and they still believe me." Criminals just get it, right? So what happens with criminals is they go to the school of hard knocks. They learn criminal behavior on the job. Spies go to school, we go to the best spy school in the world. We go to Langley's, the farm, right? What's known as Field
Tradecraft Course, FTC, in a covert location for
a covert period of time. And covert, covert, covert. So if anybody from CIA is watching, I'm not breaking any rules, it's all in Wikipedia, but
it's not coming from me. But that's how we do it. They train us from a
hundred years of experience in the best ways to carry
out covert operations, which are all just criminal
activities overseas. We learn how to do it the right way so that we don't get caught. We learn how to be consistent. More importantly, we learn
how to create an operation that has a limited lifespan because the longer it lives,
the more at risk you are. So you want operations to be short, concise on the X, off the X,
limit your room for mistakes. Criminals, they default to wanting these long-term operations 'cause they don't wanna
have to recreate a new way to make money every 15 days. - You mentioned if anybody
from the CIA is watching, so I've seen you talk about
the fact that sort of people that are currently working
at the CIA would kind of look down at the people
who've left the CIA and they deride them. Especially if you go public, especially if there's a book
and all that kind of stuff. Do you feel the pressure
of that to be quiet, to not do something like this conversation that we're doing today? - I feel the silent
judgment. That's very real. I feel it for myself and
I feel it for my wife who doesn't appear on camera very often, but who's also former CIA,
we both feel the judgment. We know that right now, three
days after this is released, somebody's gonna send an email
on a closed network system inside CIA headquarters, and there's a bunch of people
who are gonna laugh at it. A bunch of people who are gonna say that, who knows what, it's
not gonna be good stuff. - A bunch of people you respect probably. - A bunch of people who I'm
trying to bring honor to, whether I know them or
respect them is irrelevant. These are people who are out
there doing the deed every day, and I wanna bring them honor, and I wanna do that in a
way that I get to share what they can't share and what they won't share when they leave, because they will also
feel the silent pressure, the pressure, the shame,
the judgment, right? But the truth is that I've
done this now long enough. The first few times that
I spoke out publicly, the response to being a positive voice for what the sacrifices
that people are making, it's so refreshing to be an honest voice that people don't normally hear that it's too important. One day I'm gonna be gone and my kids are gonna
look back on all this and they're gonna see their dad trying to do the right thing
for the right reasons. And even if my son or
daughter ends up at CIA and even if they get ridiculed for being, "Oh, you're the Bustamante kid, right? Your dad's a total sellout." Whatever it might be. Like, I want them to know,
you know, dad was doing what he could to bring
honor to the organization even when he couldn't stay
in the organization anymore. - So you said when you were 27, I think, you didn't know what
the hell you're doing. So now that you're a few
years older and wiser, let me ask you to put
on your wise sage hat and give advice to other 27 year olds or even younger, 17, 18 year olds that are just outta high
school, maybe going to college, trying to figure out this life, this career thing that they're on. What advice would you give
them about how to have a career or how to have a life
they can be proud of? - That's a powerful question, man. - [Lex] Have you figured
it out yet yourself? - No, I'm a grand total
of seven days smarter than I was at 27. Not a good average. - [Lex] Progress.
(both laughing) - There's still time.
- There's still time. So for all the young people
out there deciding what to do, I would just say the same thing that I do say, and I
will say to my own kids, you only have one life. You only have one chance. If you spend it doing what
other people expect you to do, you will wake up to your
regret at some point. I woke up when I was 38 years old. My wife, in many ways
is still waking up to it as she watches her grandparents pass and an older generation pass away. The folks that really have a blessed life are the people who learn early on to live with their own rules, live their own way, and live every day as
if it's the last day. Not necessarily to waste it
by being wasteful or silly, but to recognize that today
is a day to be productive and constructive for yourself. If you don't want a
career, today's not the day to start pursuing a career just because someone else told you to do it. If you wanna learn a language,
today's the day to find a way to buy a ticket to another country and learn through immersion. If you want a date, if
you wanna get married, if you want a business, today
is the day to just go out and take one step in that direction. And as long as every day,
you just make one new step, just like CIA recruited
me, just do the next thing. If the step seems like it's too big, then there's probably two other steps that you can do before that. Just make constant
progress, build momentum, move forward and live on your own terms. That way you don't ever
wake up to the regret. - And it'll be over before you know it. - Whether you regret it or not, it's true. - What do you think is the
meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life? - Self-respect. That's a fast answer. There's a story behind
it, if you want the story. - I would love to have the story. - There's a covert training
base in Alabama in the south and far south in like
the Armpit of America, where elite tier one operators go to learn human intelligence stuff. And there's a bar inside this base. And on the wall it's scribbles of opinions. And the question in the
middle of the wall says, "What's the meaning of life?" And all these elite operators
over the last 25 or 30 years, they all go, they get drunk
and they scribble their answer and they circle it with a Sharpie, right? Love, family, America
Freedom, right, whatever. And then the only thing they have to do is if they're gonna
write something on there, they have to connect it with
something else on the wall, at least one other thing. So if they write love, they can't just leave it floating there. They have to write love in a little bubble and connect it to something else, connect it to family, whatever else. When you look at that wall, the word self-respect is on the wall and it's got a circle around it, and then you can't see any other word because of all the things
that connect to self-respect. Just dozens of people have written over, have written their words
down and been drawn and scribbled over
because of all the lines that connect self-respect. So what's the meaning of life? From my point of view, I've
never seen a better answer. It's all self-respect. If you don't respect yourself, how can you do anything else? How can you love someone else if you don't have self-respect? How can you build a
business you're proud of if you don't have self-respect? How can you raise kids? How
can you make a difference? How can you pioneer anything? How can you just wake up and have a good day if you
don't have self-respect? - The power of the individual. That's what makes this country great. I have to say, after traveling
quite a bit in Europe and especially in a
place of war, coming back to the United States
makes me really appreciate about the better angels of this nation, the ideals it stands for,
the values it stands for. And I'd like, like to thank
you for serving this nation for time and humanity for time, and for being brave enough and bold enough to still talk about it and to inspire others, to educate others, for having many amazing conversations and for honoring me by having
this conversation today. You're an amazing human. Thanks so much for talking today. - Lex, I appreciate the
invite, man, and it was a joy. - Thanks for listening
to this conversation with Andrew Bustamante. To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Sun Tzu in the "Art of War." "Let your plans be dark
and impenetrable as night and when you move, fall
like a thunderbolt." Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.