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.