EverydaySpy Podcast - CIA Spy: The Dark Seduction Trick That Gets Anyone Obsessed With You

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

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Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca. 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 attention? 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 sexpionage. That's the term that we jokingly call it is sexionage. 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 happy, 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 going to be that much more willing to talk to an American who is also attractive. So it's hard to walk that back. In all definitions, so it could be

all elements of charisma. That's, 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. 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 sapio-sexuality, 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 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. 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 sapiens sexual 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 to trust. 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 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's very, 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, right? So I don't ever want to 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 a consistent feedback as to what that baseline is for them. To form a good model, predictive model of what their behavior is going to be like. Right. And, you know, as fascinating as 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 space, at the same speed.

That's actually what I did my PhD on. That's what I did at Google is forming a good representation, unique representation to cry of 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? How, because 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, of 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 it's, 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 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% an assessment on how you think this person is going to 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 out of 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 that started really in 2004 when they started significantly increasing

their private, 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 they have, it's a fantastic product on paper.

But the challenge was the proprietary services, the proprietary systems that we current, 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 what the close connection between Peter Thiel and Donald Trump, did that have a role to play in the, in Donald Trump's leveraging of private intelligence or is that completely disjoint? I think that they're related. only...

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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 Teal into CIA only to lose Teal's contract as soon as Trump loft 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 present like presidentially appoint Peter Thiel into a position of, of government authority. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research.

Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world for. free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca. What do you think of figures like Peter Thiel? Do they wield, and I'm sure there's figures of similar scale and reach and power in private intelligence? What do you think about their role in power in this whole, like without public accountability? Yes. 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 shone, 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 shone 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 profits here in the private intel and work.

So in that way, he was kind of supporting the CIA in making sure that competent people and experienced people stay and incentivize 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? 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 going to 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, right? 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 ostracize women, they're limiting their ability to grow economically. they have to adapt to whatever is the prevailing ethical requirement of their customer base.

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create. a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca.