EverydaySpy Podcast - 2 Spies, 1 Podcast | EverydaySpy Podcast Ep. 1

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Welcome to the brand new EverydaySpy Podcast! Join former CIA officers officers Andrew Bustamante and Jihi Bustamante to discuss and dissect everyday topics from news headline to lifehacks. Whether you are a student trying to make a career in intelligence, or a parent just trying to make it through the day, Andrew and Jihi are excited to give you spy tips, tactics and insights that give you an unfair advantage in everyday life. Get ready to boost your knowledge, mindset, and confidence! Find your Spy Superpower: https://everydayspy.com/spyquiz Learn more from Andy: https://everydayspy.com/ Join the SpyTribe: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EverydaySpy/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everydayspy/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/EverydaySpy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I was what's known as a staff operations officer. Many people get that wrong. Many people get a lot of the roles at CIA wrong because... I did too when I started. There's a huge, like, curtain between what the public thinks CIA is and what CIA actually is. I worked a lot of hard targets. I think the targeting that most people are probably familiar with is capture kill. Capture kill collect.

Capture kill collect. But usually in the war zone, it was generally capture kill. When there's a group of people and you want to cause discourse. Yeah. What's the first thing you do to that group of people? You touch on their fears. You divide the group. You divide the group, right?

What is polarization? It's division. It's a division of the group, right? This is espionage 101. This is covert influence 101. And yet we live in this world, you and I, where we see it play out in the headlines every day. What we're doing right now is actually unprecedented. Hey, everybody.

I am so excited to introduce. you to the new studio and the new everyday spy podcast. And this is something that's been in the works for much longer than you know about. And it's the very first episode. So we're free to make all the mistakes we need to make, which is really good, because my co-host for this podcast is going to be my lovely spouse, Ghi Bustamante. Ghi, say hello to everybody. Hello, everyone.

Now, Ghi is going to be with me on every episode just about. we don't know yet whether we're not we're going to take guests. So I guess the first thing I would invite you to do is if you think we should invite guests into this podcast, drop us a comment, give us some suggestions on who you think we should let into the studio. I'm thinking about calling the studio the safe house. I like it. Do you like that? Everybody's safe here. Or nothing is safe here. Well, no conversation topic is safe here. Exactly right, exactly right. But the whole idea here is basically to be able to deliver through YouTube at this level of this level of production quality a meaningful conversation with two former covert intelligence officers who are also a married

couple. What we're doing right now is actually unprecedented. That's that? Yeah, there's CIA officers who have shows. There are CIA officers who are married to each other, but there are not two CIA officers that people can actually speak to through a chat box or anywhere else that are live on YouTube at any given time. That's fair. Right? Well, I'm happy to be the trailblazer. So are you actually? Because let's let's let's be honest. Let's be honest. I've been building everyday spy since 2019. You have been increasing your involvement, but you made it really clear in like 2020, 2021 that you did not want to be on screen you did not want to be correct I did not want to be a face why so I am always behind the scenes even when we met I was a targeter you were on the I mean I was

technically on the off side but you were actually doing operations and targeters are the people who sit in the closet inside of a skiff inside of another skiff typing on our little computers and I have little your ear buds in and nobody saw my face except when I had to brief every once in a while at a meeting. So this is a really good chance, I think, to introduce the difference between our two roles at CIA, right? So let's start with you. What is a targeter? What's the publicly available definition of a targeter? So a targeter is a person who, you know, policy makers come down with requirements. And a targeter is the one who finds the people who can fulfill those requirements. So an intelligence It's finding the person who has access to the secret information we want. And then we use data to pull together dossiers so an operator can go out and meet that person

and make them an asset for the U.S. government and get secrets. Can you give us an example that's CIA acceptable of a case where you did that? So I worked a lot of hard targets. I think the targeting that most people are probably familiar with is capture kill. Capture kill collect. Capture kill collect. But usually in the war zone, it was generally capture kill, which is why I ended up doing a lot of hard targets because most of those aren't collect.

But I think what most people are familiar with are, and you can look it up on the internet as well, targeting packages that have, you know, the person's face, their name, their bio data, family information, their location. And then that is given to an operator in the field or that's given to a drone operator. And then they go in and do the actual operation. The operation being capture, kill, or collect. Or collect. So you, you were the one that got to identify who is capture, killed, or collected, against.

Yes. Fair, fair. Okay. So, and then my role at CIA, I was what's known as a staff operations officer. Many people get that wrong. Many people get a lot of the roles at CIA wrong because... I did too when I started. There's a huge, like, curtain between what the public thinks CIA is and what CIA actually is. So CIA is kind of, it's the central intelligence agency, which means it is the central hub of intelligence. that terminology comes from the fact that all source intelligence, all source meaning DOD intelligence, NSA intelligence, NSA intelligence, NGA intelligence, all comes through CIA for final analytical

consumption and synthesizing before it's delivered to the president via the president's daily brief. That's where the central intelligence comes from. But what CIA actually does is foreign collection of human intelligence, humint. Again, people don't realize that, right? NSA does all the SIGAN collection. DoD does DIA does all of the military collection. Yeah. They just feed it to us.

And then our analytical workforce is what creates the product, if you will, right? So within that universe of human intelligence collection, you were a targeter, targeting human intelligence sources. I was a staff operations officer building and sometimes operating to collect that intelligence. And within the world that we come from, there are other roles, too. There are case officers, also known as ops officers or operations officers. There's paramilitary operators. There's special skills officers.

There's linguists. There's kinetic targeters, analytical targetors, tech officers. There's a, I mean, it's a whole smorgasbord of badassery happening inside CIA. But me being staff operations officer, you being a targeter, we met. very shortly after we joined in 2007. And we'll save our whole life-love story for a different day, right? But the point is you and I get a chance to have these conversations. We get to talk about anything we want to talk about.

And we get to bring an audience along with us. You get to come along with us. And there are three areas that we always want to discuss on every single podcast. First, we want to talk about our lives. Our lives as a married couple, our lives as entrepreneurs, as parents, as individuals, as Americans, as Americans going through this great American experiment, because we're still very much in an American experiment. And I think that's important, right?

What are your thoughts on where the United States is on its American experiment journey? Yeah, I think it's fascinating because we were just reading, our son loves the I Survived Books. And we are actually just reading for the second or third time now, I survived the American Revolution. And it's fascinating to think about that we are still a very young country. We are still an experiment. You know, I think people take for granted that democracy is the way and it's, and it's, it works and it's, you know, the end all be all.

And, you know, this is the way everybody should be. But really, America is still, I mean, I think you can see election after election. we're still trying to figure out the path. We are still confused. We are still, you know, people evolve, society evolves. The government has to evolve with it. The way our government looked when it started is not the way it looks now. You know, the power of the executive, the roles of the other two branches, you know, it looks different now.

I mean, when they started talking, when I think a couple of years ago, there was a question of should we add more justices to the Supreme Court? And my mind was blown. I was like, wow, what a question to hear. So, you know, over the years, our government has continued to evolve. So I completely agree. I mean, it's an experiment, and I don't think it will ever be settled. You know, I think we're always trying to find the better path.

What was the American government supposed to be when it was founded? How would you define that? So it's interesting because I went to law school. and I did a study abroad in Argentina. And so one of the classes I took was a class on how Latin America developed. And one of the key things I learned at that time was that America had their battle with the British and then, you know, America won and the British. And then eventually we developed trade ties with the British, right?

Latin America fought Spain multiple times. And so the way that Latin American governments developed was that they put a lot of power in the executive because they needed the executive to be able to like that go to war because Spain kept attacking them. But America wasn't created that way. In the beginning, the executive really had not a lot of power at all. All of the power was supposed to reside in Congress

with the Supreme Court as a check. you know, a check and a balance on the Constitution that they had put so much time writing, right? Now we've seen this big evolution where the executive has been gaining power, you know, and then I think a lot of people misunderstand the way that the judicial branch is supposed to work at that level. But, you know, Congress itself, I think, has always had its, you know, it's never functioned smoothly, I don't think. But I think people might be. losing sight of how it's actually supposed to function. Like it is supposed to function. You're not supposed to, you know, make a last minute budget every time the budget comes to. Like, you can have

conflict and you can have nasty debates, but you're supposed to keep moving, right? Like, So I think your point is really interesting about the difference between the executive in Latin America or Latin American countries and the executive, essentially in North American countries, of which the United States is one of two. I guess technically is Mexico North America? I think it might be. Yes. And as far as the continent goes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we've got three executives in North America, and we have, what, like nine? How many? 13. How many countries are in South America? Yeah, exactly. And Central America is also in there, too. So there's a lot of executives that had to fight Spain. Yeah.

And they evolve their governments a different way than the way that we involved our government. Now, where do you think our president, our executive got, let me phrase it differently. how did our executive get the president, how did our executive get the power that was originally reserved for the Congress? How did that migration or evolution happen? I believe, oh, I know people are going to make comments on my historic knowledge. I have a good friend who I wish it was here. Can I phone a friend? I don't they were allowed to have friends. Oh, don't tell my friend that. So I believe, if I remember correctly,

the powers of the executive started to change around the Great Depression. So you were just at the FDR, the FDR monument. You know, and he had four consecutive terms. That's when they put the presidential term limit in during his fourth term after he passed away, I believe. And I believe that that's when he started to, you know, the executive started to take more of the reins of, I need to get stuff done, right? Because before that, the president was really kind of the vision setter from my understanding of, you know, he set the vision for the country, but it was up to Congress who represented the people to act, to make that happen. So I feel like what you're saying is the

much nicer version of what I understand, too. And this is the way that our relationship has always functioned. You say things the nice way. I try to say things the direct way. Congress gave the president the power that used to belong to them because Congress is stuck in this constant cycle of having to get reelected. Right? They're in a two-year cycle. So every time a congressperson wants to be reelected, they're basically, they just got elected,

and then they have to be reelected again. Yeah, I do find it interesting. To please the people, they basically outsource their power to the executive. So now they can blame the president when the president oversteps power that was given to the president by the Congress.

I think it's interesting because senators have, what, like a six-year term, and then the representatives have a two-year term. And the fact that, you know, at some point, they deemed it necessary to limit a president to two-four-year terms, but they have never found it necessary to change their own terms, right? Whether to lengthen or shorten a term and to limit themselves, which I am a huge fan of, I don't believe that people should have a 30-year career in Congress. I mean, I really feel like, how can you inject the government with new ideas if you're doing that?

So anyways, that can be another conversation. But I do think that, you know, there are a lot of, when you look at laws and policies, oftentimes are awarded in a way where there's leeway. So maybe something, you know, the president was given, you know, a certain degree of power. And then over time, a clever president is like, you know what, I need more. somebody finds me a way around this. Or a disaster happens. Or a disaster happens.

A disaster happens. And then the Congress is like, President, take the power. Yes. Right? Take the power, make the decisions because we start finding ourselves in the same scenario

that the Latin Americans found themselves in, right? The Latin American countries found themselves in, constantly attacked by some outside voice. Yeah. So I know that we are very deep in a social studies conversation right now. I slept through most of social studies. And was it middle school or was it high school?

I was asleep, so I don't really remember. Middle school? It was middle school, right? So leave it. If you want us to continue down this road of social studies, leave it in the comments and we'll come back to it in a future episode. But the next thing I want to is I want to actually transition because we were just recently visiting Washington, D.C. And we took our children with us to D.C. We have our godparents live in the D.C. area, the godparents for our children live in the D.C. area. And we've had a very interesting

relationship with Washington D.C. I think together and separately, tell me a little bit about what are your thoughts when you visit DC now? So it's interesting because every time I land, I have, it's all nostalgia where, you know, that's where I met you. That's where we fell in love. That's where we got engaged. You fell in love first. You fell in love first. I definitely fell in love first. I'm strong man. Strong man. All the ladies fall for me. Nobody has to know that's all fake. Definitely head over heels. So there's all this nostalgia of, you know, our wonderful life together, our career at CIA, our friends there. It was really such a great experience, which, you know, to be honest, was a life before we had children also. So I always have to remind

myself that our life there had we stayed there with children, would have looked very differently. But for me, it's all this, you know, it's all these wonderful memories. And then on the ride from the airport to our friend's house, I hit traffic. And it is so horrible. I mean, it was bad before, but the traffic is just increasing. And then I think to myself, why do they keep increasing the government presence in this one location? Yeah.

I mean, first of all, you know, population density and sustainability for that area, you know, it's not sustainable. Yeah. Second, you know, quality of life for the workers. Versus cost of living. Right. Cost of living. I mean, think about the quality of life

for the people, for the civil servants working for the government. I think we did some research while we were there, cost of living in Washington, D.C. right now is 50% more than cost of living in another major metropolis, Denver? Yeah, so Falls Church, Virginia, which is like a small neighborhood in that northern Virginia area, in that D.C. metro area was 40% more than cost of living in Denver. That's incredible. Yeah, and I thought it was incredible. And then, you know, the second, I've always said this is security. I mean, you have all of your important government offices there, it just takes one attack in one location. Why wouldn't we diversify the locations of our offices?

We don't have to be that close. We don't have to have all of your personnel in that. And when you say attack, I think the conventional thought that goes through most people's mind is a nuke or cluster bombs or something in one area. But what you and I know is that there are many far worse attacks. You could attack the water source. And the water source is shared by the entire Washington, D.C. Metro area. Power grid. Power grid, all shared, right? You could attack any number of institutions in that area, right? You could put bad medicine onto shelves.

You could compromise cybersecurity. There's all sorts of attacks that will still infiltrate and affect the entire population-dense area. It's not just a nuke that comes from the sky and we're going to shoot it down. There's scarier things out there than bombs that go boom, right? But I completely agree. My relationship with Washington, D.C. is not that different from yours.

There's a lot of nostalgia there. But there's also, I mean, I'm coming from a military background. I know you don't have a military background yourself. I can't help but feel frustration when I go to Washington, D.C. Like, it's such a beautiful place. It's such a paradox. It's gorgeous. It's historical.

It's white marble. It's like timeless. It shows the strength of America. But it's also a facade. It's not real. Right? We're, it's a giant propaganda city, right? This idea that America's best, America first, America makes no mistakes. America's the strongest. America's, you know, the savior of the world. That's the message of Washington, D.C. Every monument you walk through is bigger than life,

polished marble, polished bronze, polished granite. It's the, it's the highlights. It's the Instagram of a president's term. Yeah. Which has its place. It's got its place. Yeah, for sure. But let's not, let's not forget that we made some massive mistakes in the history of our country, right? FDR is a fantastic example of one of those beautiful monuments, but he was president for four terms. People don't even realize we had a four term president. Right? Like, that's, that's wild. He was a president for such a long period of time. And he was handicapped, and they hid his handicap from the American people. Yeah. Because they were afraid that if the American people thought, their president was ill or handicapped, he would be judged as not qualified for the job, right?

So it wasn't until like 2007 or something that his monument displayed his wheelchair. I mean, it's insane. It's just wild to think about the evolution of our country over time. So when I go to Washington, D.C., I have those conflicting emotions where I'm very proud of my country. I'm very proud to be an American. But at the same time, as a 43-year-old father of two now, I realize there's a narrative there.

And I was absolutely the person who, when I got recruited by CIA, soon as I landed in DC, babe, I don't know about you. I pulled out my little pocket cell phone. Yeah. And I drove with one hand and I was taking pictures in the buildings with the other hand. I was like, I'm so excited to be here. Well, we both know I'm a safer driver than you are. So I actually took the time out to properly go to the monuments on my feet.

But, you know, something you're saying there is, that's interesting. And we've talked about this too, is it's a bit of a fishbowl. So you go there and almost everybody you meet, I mean, they care about your politics first. Right. Almost everybody you meet has some kind of foot in government, whether they're private sector or public sector, they have some kind of foot in politics and geopolitics. That's the conversation, which is fantastic. But it's not in line with the rest of the country either. So, you know, having all the people who represent everybody else in the country in one place, It really keeps them out of touch with what the rest of the country...

With their own constituents. With their own constituents. So if you started moving the offices out, right? I mean, I met a guy when I started at the agency. He was from Kentucky. And he was so different. I mean, it was just fantastic to meet him and talk to him. And he had come from a different sector in Kentucky.

And now he was there. And I thought, oh, you know. But it was also a big, like, challenge for him to move. because he was moving his wife who had been a teacher, they had been established, right? And they had to move all the way to D.C. Like if you take these government offices and you put them in different places around the country, how many more people might have the opportunity, right? Because a lot of people are tandem.

A lot of people are taking their spouse, right? So how many more people might have the opportunity? How much more diverse could the government workforce be, right? How many more diverse ideas could we add to the pot? Right. How much do we value diversity? Right? I would say that's another question. Well, I say it, and I say it a little bit tongue and cheek because it's a catchphrase, right?

Diversity is absolutely like whatever they call those words now that people get really excited about, right? But it's this hot keyword, this hot button for so many people, right? We need to increase diversity, embrace diversity, et cetera, et cetera. But do we really, because we're willing to say we need to diversify and include more of a certain ethnicity or a certain gender or, you know, people who identify as a specific gender or identify as a specific ethnicity. I don't even know all the things that now qualifies diversity. But what we don't really want is diversity of thought. We still want very rigid, very structured, democratic capitalists thought. We don't want to be open to anybody who talks differently than that, right? Otherwise,

we start having to label them. It's like we're still stuck in the DC of the Nixon years where everybody was trying to chase down communists. Yeah. I mean, I do think, I think that there's been a loss of proper discourse, right, or people exchanging ideas. I mean, the fact that the country has become so polarized is really sad and unnecessary. You know, I mean, there's no reason for us to be entrenched in our ideology and have that ideology shaped by headlines or by,

like, you know, short, what are they, like short snippets of, you know, nobody's looking at a full story anymore. They're reading a headline or a tweet. A tweet, you know, just, yeah, like less than 250 words. You know. Whole idea. Presented to you. Yeah, whole idea.

Presented to you. You know, I mean, we talk to, we have an intern that works for us. And she was talking about a previous internship she did. She did, that was a journalism internship. and how disappointed she was that where she was, not all the facts were represented. Yeah, by the journalistic community. By the journalists of community. You know, both sides aren't represented anymore.

And it's just, it's a shame. It's a skill that we've lost that we really need to regain. If we're going to get ourselves together and be on top. So I'm going to transition us really briefly because I feel like there's a really important spy lesson here that you and I know, right? An espionage lesson in real life. And this is what made our company, right? Everyday spy was built on the idea that maybe we could teach people some of the skills that the CIA taught us that helped us survive outside of CIA.

Really helped us survive inside of CIA, but helped us to thrive and succeed outside of CIA. So you talk about our polarized country and you talk about how unnecessary it is and how disappointing and discouraging it is, right? You served in an office designed to influence foreign governments. What was one of the core things that you tried to do in that office to influence those governments? So it's really interesting when it comes to, you know, all intelligence agencies around the world engage in covert influence and propaganda as a part of that, right? Inside their own country, governments and private sector, you know, propaganda and influence is huge. and it's really just psychology, right? It's knowing how the psychology of people work.

I'm going to interrupt you again because, again, I see my wife being very nice in the explanation, right? When there's a group of people and you want to cause discourse, what's the first thing you do to that group of people? you touch on their fears. You divide the group. You divide them. You divide the group, right? What is polarization? Right.

It's a division of the group, right? And it doesn't take much. It does not take much at all, right? You can literally sit between two friends who've been friends for years. And there will be certain topics that causes one of them fear, anger, discouragement, disappointment, childhood trauma, whatever. You can just drop that one bit into the conversation and they will be divided. Yeah. Right.

So it's strategic. In the covert influence world, the first thing you want to do is you want to divide a group. And you don't divide a group by creating something new and artificial. How do you divide a group? Right. You just play on there. The same old fears. That are already existing.

Already preexisting. This group of people is afraid of what happens if banana sales drop. This group of people is afraid of what happens if we accept too much for an investment. And then all you do is you just feed the feed. that already exists to both groups. And then that makes them both afraid. And then especially if you as the voice in between say that the reason foreign investment is going to stop is because, you know, sales of bananas are going down. And then you say, oh, the reason that banana sales are, you know, need to go up is because if they don't go up and there's going to be no foreign investment.

Now all of a sudden the two groups are attacking each other. Right. This is espionage 101. This is covert influence 101. And yet we live in this world, you and I, where we see it play out in the headlines. every day. And I, the thing that's the most frustrating to me is, yes, I see it when it's Russia. I feel like I see it when it's China. I feel like I see the sloppiness of it when it's North Korea attacking us. The thing that's so frustrating is we do it to ourselves. Just to sell

newspapers, just to get clicks, just to sell advertisements, we do this to ourselves. I mean, it costs millions of dollars for an intelligence service to divide a country. We're doing it to ourselves. We're bankrolling it ourselves. Yeah. For what purpose, right? For what purpose? So. Well, for clicks. For clicks. Why don't we start a YouTube channel?

We're advertising revenue. For clicks. The whole world runs on clicks. Oh my gosh. Eat that, Duncan. Yeah. And what's it? What's a shame now is that it's so much easier now because of how information travels and how information is delivered. You know, you don't have people having, you know, political discussions over dinner with their neighbors, right? Like you have people who feel anonymous online saying whatever nasty thing they want to, parodying and repeating things and not even bothering to look up to

see is, is it, is any of it even true? Yeah. You know, not even bothering to think why might something be happening, right? Like you, even if you see somebody take a certain action, why are they taking that action? Like, it doesn't matter. They just blast them right away. So anonymity online, is it real? Is Mama's Boy 101? Who's on Discord? Who's trash talking and the president actually anonymous? I mean, I think anything digital can be traced.

I mean, if you think that anything you do online is private, that is wrong. Not that, not to say that, you know, somebody's watching. all your data all the time because that's also wrong. But the fact is that if it's online, there's a record, somebody can dig into it if they wanted to. That's always the key that gets me when people are like, the government's looking at all my stuff. The government's not looking at all your stuff.

Facebook might be looking at all your stuff because they advertised to you, right? But it's all there. Right. You know, like it's much less secure than if I wrote you a letter. Right. Right. to me because, you know, in the argument for privacy, you and I, I think, come from the school of of privacy is one thing that lands on a spectrum. CIA taught us there was a spectrum, a spectrum

between security and convenience. Right. Privacy lands on the convenience side, which means the closer you get to something that's convenient, the further you are from something being secure. And what does national security want? Secure. Right. But secure is not convenient. Right? Just think about like, I don't like to lock doors. You lock every door in the house. Yep, all the time. Really inconvenient. It's really inconvenient when I come home late and I want to go to bed and I have to unlock the front door, relock the front door, unlock the bedroom door, unlock the bedroom door, unlock my own bathroom door to get to the bathroom. It's not convenient. But it is secure.

It is secure. Right. So privacy lands on the convenient side of that. And the problem is that our world, our government especially, is the target of every government in the world. We're the target of terrorists. We're the target of drug dealers. We're the target of other aspiring superpowers. With all those attacks, we simply can't afford to be convenient. Among all the American citizens trying to have their privacy are also nefarious actors taking advantage of our privacy laws.

So, to your point, all of the data is accessible. It's just a matter of filling out a few forms so the judicial system allows us to tap Facebook on the shoulder, tap Apple on the shoulder, tap Google on the shoulder, and say, show us your records pertaining to this individual, this IP address, this metadata, whatever might be. And it's not easy. It's not like I meet Joe Blow at the coffee shop. And I'm like, I'm going to look Joe Blow up and fill out my little request form. No. Like when you fill out that request form, you have to have so much evidence to present that they are nefarious actors. like that there is a good solid reason that you need access to their data.

It's very strict. I think it's much strict to them people give it credit for. So, you know, there's, you have to build a case to access data on somebody who is an American citizen. Right. And, you know, I think it's. On someone who's an American citizen. Correct. Because someone who's a foreigner inside the United States, you don't have the same level of rigor.

Right. But if the data is inside the United States, there's still regulations, right? Correct. I think what's interesting that I what I find interesting that I don't think people consider is that they look at themselves in the mirror and they're like American citizen. They're not thinking about the foreign actor who comes to America who's playing the long game for their government who becomes an American citizen, right? Like you aren't who I'm targeting. I'm targeting the person from a hard target country who, you know, there, like, there are these long operations that happen.

The whole goal is for the people to come over and become a citizen or become a green card holder, right? It's not often, which is why those requests don't happen very often, but they exist. The Russians call them illegals. The Chinese call them plants. Terrorist cells call them seeds, right? Yeah. Like all of these are long-term ideas, right?

Whereas for us, we're stuck to a five-year budgetary cycle that Congress can't agree on. So it's really hard for us to run a 15-year operation. All right. So going back to everybody, because we're now deep in the spy espionage niche, if anybody wants to hear more spy espionage niche stuff, please drop in the comments. We're going to move on because we don't really know what you want to hear yet. and we're going to learn from you. So please drop that in there. I have got to ask you, what are your thoughts on AI?

You come from a world where you were the targeter. You were the one looking things up on people. You were the one people went to when they wanted to get all the nasty, dirty secrets about somebody. Now there's a machine that can do that for you. How do you feel about AI? So I'm a huge fan of The Terminator, and you hear me call AI Skynet all the time. I'm just waiting. I was like, oh my gosh, Skynet, it's been invented.

And then is your next thought, hooray? Or is your next thought, oh, no. My next thought is, oh, no, our government is never going to be able to regulate this in time. Yep. So I find AI to be very interesting, but I think it's very dangerous. And I think we really need to tread lightly in my personal opinion. I see the potential for it, but I think that we as a society, as a world, need to decide the purpose of AI. How will we use it?

Because it has tons of nefarious abilities. I mean, we were just talking about covert influence and propaganda, right? We were just talking about how people are not inclined to research, right? So the idea that an AI can create fake artwork or a deep fake video, I mean, and people will just take it at face value. That's terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. And they'll create it at the speed of machines,

not at the speed of human video producers and actors and post editors and everything else. Right. So can you imagine like a foreign government, you know, I mean, how much easier does that make their job to be able to program an AI to just,

you know, this is the theme of what I want to push. And then they start pushing that information and people believe it because they're not fact-checking. So how do you feel about the fact that, If our government does legislate AI, that doesn't mean that our opponents will also legislate AI or legislated in the same way. Right.

Or legislated equally between public sector and national security sector. Right. I mean, I think, you know, I think like lots of things in the field of science, I really think it really needs to be a global effort. But on the other, you know, a global effort government-wise. But I think people really just need to take personal responsibility in recognizing, you know, understanding what AI is, understanding what it can do, understanding that it exists now. So every time you see information, you really do need to check. You really need to fact check now.

You know, not that you didn't need to before, but even more reason for you to understand that what you're looking at may not be real. Security inconvenience. Security and convenient. AI is very convenient. Right. Right. I mean, but, you know, it's funny because we, you know, we strive for this life of convenience. And I can't say that I'm, I'm definitely a person who likes to be comfortable and convenient. But I am learning as I age that life is not about convenience. Life is about putting the effort, you know, doing the hard thing to make sure that it's the right thing. That's what life is about? I think life is about doing the right thing.

Which is hard. Which is hard. But you don't like to do hard things. I'm learning as I age. So I spent, I feel like I spent a good number of years doing the convenient thing. But now, you know, and I have my own children and I'm thinking about their future too, and I'm thinking about the future of the country and the future of the globe, you know, and it's not, it doesn't work.

Let's shout out to parents on this one, right? Because this is a conversation that all the single sons of business, is out there. I love you and I hate you at the same time, single people. And join sleeping in. Sex with multiple partners. Right? Like, no schedule, no responsibilities. You can just walk out the door whenever you want to.

Nobody comes and pokes you in the forehead and says my tummy hurts at 4 o'clock in the morning. Yeah. So single, unattached people, go to hell for a second. But parents, parents get us. And parents get what we're talking about. The world that we're worried about is not a world that we're worried about for us. Right. It's a world that we're worried about for our next generation, for our progeny, for our legacy.

Because my children, our children, are too young right now to shape the world. Right. But you and I are in the prime age. Of shaping. Yep. And if we don't do what we can do to shape it now, what are we leaving them? Yeah. Right?

And I find that this is something that parents, parents think about this all the time. It keeps them up at night. They talk about it over beer and wine at night whenever they go to sleep, whatever. It's the reason why when you marry somebody, you love them. And then when you start a family with somebody, you're in constant conflict. Yes. Absolutely. Because it's like you don't see eye to eye.

You may have seen eye to eye on starting life together, but you may not see eye to eye on shaping life. together, right? And especially when you start mixing in careers and fitness levels and body changes, women's hormones change, men's hormones change, like things that were perky start to sag, things that we're strong, get soft for men, right? Like, we change. And the change sucks, but nobody ever talks about that when you first get married. So how do you, how do you plan to shape the future for our children. What are you doing? How are you executing on that? You know, it's interesting because parenting is, I take parenting day by day. I have an idea. So I read a lot of books, number one. And then I kind of think about, you know, a reflection of how was I raised,

what did I like about it, what didn't I like about it. And then I read books for other ideas. I talk, I love talking to parents about how they raise their children because I do firmly believe that it's, you know, much of parenting is very family-centric. So just because another family does something different than me, like that's good for their family, maybe not for my family, right? And that's fine. So as far as shaping, I'm trying to, you know, I have core values, so do you. And I think we overlap fairly well in our core values. And so trying to stop bad guys, help good guys. Yeah. Drink quality wine.

Good core values. Good core values. Yeah, I mean, you know, take care of your body. You only have one. You know, respect, you know, respect yourself. Respect others, right? Like the golden rule, you know, and it, when they're kids, it's fairly simple, you know, like how would that make you feel?

How does that make your friend feel? That's very simple. It's as they age that the situations come up where you're like, oh, like, how do I handle this where it's kind of not fair to either side or, you know, or maybe they're just different. And that's okay. But how do you teach them the skills to interact and build relationships with other people and to build a better world, right? I really appreciate that I know you want a better world for our kids.

And what makes me pity you, but also what makes me proud of you is that you're constantly struggling with the way that you were raised. Yeah. Because you were raised in a family of a belief set that says that you have to sacrifice for others. And you want your children to believe something different. Yeah. But your instinctive reaction is to teach them, is to act the same way that you were trained

and taught to act. Yeah. So they get this very confusing message as to whether they need to sacrifice for others or whether they're allowed to stand their ground. And our five-year-old stands her ground sometimes and you're like, I'm so proud of her for standing her ground. And then other times she'll stand her ground and you'll be like, why is she standing her ground on something so trivial? Right. And vice versa, our 10-year-old will sacrifice on something and just it'll consume him. And you'll be like, you didn't have to do that.

It was very sweet and very kind and very generous of you, but you didn't have to do that. And it's really hard because he got the version of you when you were a parent of one. Yeah. She gets the version of you when you are an experienced parent. So even our children themselves, they don't get the same parents. Right. They get parents that evolve. And that's what's interesting is parents are constantly evolving themselves.

So when I think about how I was raised in my belief system. So when I was young, I was raised, I was raised Buddhist. and it was all, you know, world peace, right? It was all, let's help other people and world peace. And then as I went through my youth, you know, my parents are very liberal. I come from a very liberal family. And when I got into undergrad, I was so liberal that I fell into a category called Progressive. And I was like, let's save everybody and whatever.

And then I went to law school. And law school really brought me center because suddenly I was in. in an environment where I was surrounded by people that were very different from me. And there were liberal people there too, but they were, suddenly, I was the most conservative people I've ever met. You know, like the most number of conservative people,

suddenly I'm friends with them, and I'm hearing all these different perspectives, and I'm hearing them, you know, I'm hearing perspectives from like legal perspectives, which are very black and white, you know. So that was the beginning of, my evolution from the way I was raised to become more center to my time at the CIA where they were also like I met the most amazing people really diverse viewpoints and that's when I started

to really think about you know when like I'd always been registered a Democrat for voting purposes and when you and I got married suddenly I you know we changed all our stuff when we got married and now I am, you know, non-party affiliated. I'm non-party affiliated because I now I am all over the spectrum on my beliefs. Like I'm conservative in some places. I'm liberal in some places. In some places, I might be considered by an outsider as a liberal, but really it's because I think we're focusing on the wrong issue. So, you know, it's not that, you know, maybe I might fall into a liberal bucket, but it's also because I fall into this other conservative bucket and I've mixed them together and now you don't know what to call me, right? Well, what's funny is you're describing

independence. Like, you have now developed your own independent opinion. And what's really interesting is in our country, the more independent your opinion, the less your opinion counts. Because nobody knows what bucket to put you in. And because you have to be in a bucket to have your vote count. Because it would require a conversation with you. Yep. And right. And it's so much easier to boil it down to a headline or tweet. And then trying to teach that to your children as you yourself are still evolving, right? So what the tack that I've taken with our kids is to try to teach them skills so they can critically think through it on their own. Like you and I are different, we have different faith bases, right? Like you're Christian, I'm Buddhist. I'm right, you're wrong. You know,

who knows really until we die. That's true. And then there's no gotcha. There's no gotcha moment then. Oh, sorry, you're going to miss the gotcha at the end. I'm going to miss it. I'm going to Watch it happen. Go ahead, go ahead. But so, so like for our kids, we decided when we decided to have kids that we would let them discover on their own. They would see you practice your faith. They would see me practice my faith.

They would meet other people of other faiths, right? Our nana is Jewish. Like, and then they. We lived in an Islamic country. We lived in an Islamic country. They got to see that. And then they decide on their own, like this important thing is to give them. them the skills to help them take in information and process the information and make their own

decision. Even though right now they're just very confused. Because our poor children have seen so much of the world in their young knowledge base that it's a beautiful thing. Yeah. Because they don't, they don't have, like, they naturally are not racist. They naturally are not, like, biased against a certain country or certain religion. Yeah. Like, our kids have played with Iranian kids. Yeah. When we live, in the Middle East. Yeah. Like, they don't understand why does America not like Iran, right? And it's not developmentally appropriate for them to be there yet.

Correct. I mean, it wouldn't even be something that resonates in their childhood mind. Right. But it is interesting because it's beautiful in that way, but then they're also very confused whenever they see what most American children think is normal. Yeah. Most American children are like, of course, I just finished studying in social studies class, which apparently is middle school.

Yeah. Or even elementary school, right? Yeah. basic civics class, whatever else, they are getting the version of America that has been propagandized that we all got when we were eight, nine, ten years old, right? Right. And it's very difficult to try to challenge their friend's beliefs with them in the room. And you're like, oh, I don't want to tell your friends that the school they go to is full of

whitewashed, you know, educational department approved curriculum. Yeah. And they haven't actually ever left Florida. Right. Right. It's a challenge. So we're trying to do, we're trying to do this a very specific way. We're trying to host and share this with you in a very specific way so that we can get your feedback

so that we can continue to build a show that you enjoy, that you appreciate, that we can continue to give you. So if you like hearing more about parenthood, if you like hearing about how we raise our kids and what we struggle with, if you like, gee, he's very soft, nondescript, non-committal answers, then you know why I fell in love with her. But either way, leave your comments below so that we know it to come back to this or what to come back to when we talk about this in the future. But I do want to end on one very specific note. We are entrepreneurs now.

You tell me all the time you never expected in your entire life that you would ever be an entrepreneur. Correct. And yet now you are the second in command of a company that is growing 200 to 300% every year. Yeah. How do you feel about being an entrepreneur? I wouldn't do it on my own. That's fair. So we talked about a concept a little bit earlier today about Pacers.

So a few years ago, I read an article about the, there was a Kenyan gentleman who ran a marathon sub two hours. And in the little blurb that I read, what I thought was so fascinating. Ran a marathon? Sub two hours. Most people are proud when they run half a marathon in about two hours. Yeah, it was a record breaker. And what I found so interesting in the article is they talked to.

about how he had 48 pacer's along the way. And a pacer is a person who runs beside you. Correct. Who keeps pace with a target pace, and you just keep pace with the pacer. Right. So you make sure you're not running too slow or running too fast and burning yourself out. You're doing exactly the same pace and they are helping you along, right? And then at the same time, I was taking this online class and I learned that Albert Einstein had a really good friend that he used to have chats with.

he would use as a sounding board and it was after a conversation with this best friend that he had that aha moment where he wrote the theory of special relativity and for me these those ideas were so powerful that you can't go through life by yourself right and um so having you like when i chose you as my life partner it was not because you were easy because you're you are not easy. I'm pretty easy. You're easy in some ways. But I get it.

I get it. You know, and the really important lifelong partnership ways, like you are not easy, but you make me grow, right? Like I can use you as a pacer for growth and life because all I have to do is keep up, right? And when it comes to the business, it's never something I ever would have done on my own. I never would have. I mean, my idea, which is how I was raised. How I was raised was you do well in school, you do well in university, you get a professional

job, you retire with a pension. And I was on that path. And then when you wanted to do something different, I trusted you 100% and I followed. I've always been shocked how much you trust me. Oh, yeah. Because I don't know shit. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just like, let's go.

Maybe this is where what you say, where I'm the smart one, maybe this is, maybe it's the truth. Well, what's interesting is you talked about Pacers. and the way that I see you in the business, and this is, I mean, there's all, to all the mothers, wives, all the sensitive people out there who are other than mothers and wives, you're going to get pissed at me for saying this.

But you get me. You get me. I'm sure. Thanks to you, I learned how to sail. You brought me to Florida. You let me heal with the ocean after we left CIA. I learned how to sail.

Sailboats perform very well on fair weather. days. And they are extremely dangerous and difficult to handle in a storm. During a storm, sailboats lower their sail and they throw something out called an anchor, a sea anchor, which is a giant parachute that catches water. And what that sea anchor does is it keeps the sailboats from ever flipping over or getting lost or getting thrown by the waves. I honestly feel like you have always been my anchor, my sea anchor. So when the weather is fair, you're happy to come on board and we haul ass. And when the storm sets in, that's when you deploy and you keep everything

stable, right? And it's funny because when storms hit, like, I freak out a little bit because I'm like everything we've tried with the business, everything we've tried to build. The legacy we've given our children. We've gambled everything building a business. Our children are homeschooled. They don't go to school with other children. They're behind in some areas. They're ahead in other areas. They've traveled the world. And they're going to continue doing all those things, right?

We have gambled their entire life on making this business work. So when stuff gets hard, when storms set in, I question everything about myself. And that's when you deploy and you keep this ship right. So I feel like the reason we have had the success we've had is because when I doubt myself, you're right there to bring a stability again. And when the weather gets good, you climb on beside me and I haul ass. And you get C-SIC sometimes.

Oh, yeah. Well, this has been an awesome conversation. I'm really excited to start here. If you're watching this, you already know. This channel started with zero subscribers. So hit subscribe and join. Be one of the first. We have every comment is a new comment.

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who literally put food on our table? Right. Yeah. How do we grow our tribe and support them the way that they have supported us? Exactly. And we started with an awesome studio. We started with some nice gear. We'll keep making it better and better. So we want your comments. We want you to subscribe. We want you to share us with your friends. Share us with your family. If you're If you're a married guy and I say something that you agree with, just forward this on to your wife. Don't be the one that says something stupid. Let me be the one that says something stupid.

Right? And I'm sure that there's some version of that that rings true for women. I just don't think women say stupid stuff. Yeah, I would agree with that. All right, folks. And with that, we will say good night for the day. And we'll be following up soon with the next episode. So stay tuned.

Hit subscribe. And thank you so much for all of your support to Everyday Spy and for giving Ghee and I a chance to do this together and continue to contribute to your growth.