EverydaySpy Podcast - Waterboarding DEBATE, Religion & Flat Earth | EverydaySpy Podcast Ep. 4

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

The Cold War didn't end for everyone when the Berlin Wall came down. While the US moved into an economic boom that ultimately dragged us into the 20-year global war on terrorism, other Cold War adversaries stayed locked in the fight. And now that we are coming out of our 20-year cave, we are waking up to realize that the fight is still on. And if that isn't crazy enough, some people still believe the earth is flat! 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

You come from a Buddhist community that believes in proselytizing your faith. I am a Protestant. We believe in proselytizing our faith. But we don't. We don't proselytize or advocate nearly as much as what we're called to do. If they're taking our people and cutting off their heads, I don't see why we can't be allowed to take their people and get them wet. I don't see how that's a problem. I so disagree with you on this. I know you disagree with me, and that's totally fine. I was going for a walk yesterday around the neighborhood here. And, you know, I'm from Florida, from the south.

I say hi to people when I pass by them. I think it's polite. So I'm passing by this truck that had just pulled in front of a house and the guy's opening the door just as I'm walking by. So I'm like, good morning. And he, you know, okay, looks at me and he's like, oh, good morning. And then as I've already walked past, I hear him say, flat earth dave.com.

Like out of nowhere? Out of nowhere. So you're not having a conversation with him? No. I said good morning. He had said good morning. I had passed him. And he like looks over his shoulder?

Yeah, and I hear him yell it out. Flat earthdave.com? Yeah. So there's nobody else on the street. It's early in the morning. So I know he's talking to me. So to not be rude, I turn around. And I'm like, I'm sorry, excuse me?

And he's like, flat earthdave.com. He's got like 172. So this is my Florida accent because this is what. He actually, this is, people sound like in Florida. You know, Flat Earthdave.com. He's got 172 videos. And if you just scroll down to the bottom and watch for you with those, he'll convince you the earth is flat.

And I was like, okay, thanks. You know, thanks for that. I'll check it out. And because I am a complete stranger to him, right? And then I continue to walk and he calls out again. He'll give you three bitcoins if you can prove that the earth isn't flat. Or the, you know, if you can prove, yeah, if you can prove that the earth isn't flat. And I was like, okay, wow, three bitcoins.

Like, thanks. Thanks for that information. But I was stunned because I was like, what? is going on with this gentleman? Like, is he, at first, I couldn't tell if he was being serious or not. I was like, is he a flat-earther who just likes to proselytize flat-ers, right? But then, you know, since I've met some of your fans, I was like, maybe he just binge-watched a bunch of these videos. Like, it's new to him. Right, he's new to him, and he was on fire for it. And that's why he was like, just watch some of these and he'll convince you, right? Maybe he was in the process of

being convinced and he was just on fire, right? But as I kept walking home and I'm thinking about this very interesting exchange I have, I'm like, you know, what evidence is going to convince a true flat earther, a person who really believes that the earth is flat? What level of evidence that isn't currently existence, right? What will actually convince them? Like if we shot them up into space so they could see the earth, would that convince them? Or would they convince themselves that they were being given some kind of drug or they were hallucinating or it wasn't real after all?

They're not really in space. They're watching a TV program. Like, you know, it just, I found it so fascinating because he's not the first Flat Earth I've met and spoken with. That's true. When we were in Maine, we met a whole Flat Earth family. Remember that? And I just find it so fascinating where, you know, at some point, people have to decide what to believe. You know what's fascinating is it reminds me of all of the training that we had about cognitive bias and how the human brain can't be trusted.

The human brain can't actually be trusted to land on the correct decision because the brain is inherently lazy in so much as it's always trying to conserve mental resources. Right. So when you're trying to conserve mental resources, it's actually in the brain's best interest to create shortcuts, to create biases. Right. So what happens is that people who believe something, it gets reinforced over and over again. And then before they know it, their brain just automatically jumps to that conclusion and ignores fact, ignores new information, ignores anything that challenges the preexisting belief. because to consider new information would cost mental resources, would take time to process and think. So it's so much easier just know what you know.

Just trust what you believe because it saves you all those hard thoughts and all that grinding, you know, mental effort. Yeah, because when you learn something new, you're going through the process of rewiring your brain, right? When you are challenging an assumption that you've held for a long time, you're rewiring, like physically rewiring your brain. It's like breaking a bad habit, right? So it's really difficult to do, and it takes time and it takes effort. And most people just aren't interested. And this is what we used in human intelligence operations.

I mean, we laugh when we see it related to flat earth or liquid space. Remember that one that we met in Maine, too, liquid space. when you come across these people who have these conspiracy beliefs, not even conspiracy theories anymore, they believe it's true. But when they come across these beliefs, you know, we're accustomed to looking for those kinds of people. When you can find somebody who has flawed beliefs and access to sensitive information,

it's the perfect target for human intelligence operation. Because you already know that they're a victim to cognitive bias. So you can just feed them more of what they already know to be true, and then they're going to increase in loyalty and favor to you because they believe that you are the same as them. And it's such an easy thing to manipulate. It's such an easy concept to apply that CIA can literally take anybody off the street and teach them human intelligence concepts. We've proven that because everyday spy can take anybody from any walk of life and teach them actionable intelligence techniques that help them. convince other people to give them a promotion, buy from their business, you know, change their job,

change your career path. The human brain is incredibly predictable. But what's not predictable is having a complete stranger holler at you during your morning walk. Yeah. And it's, it's interesting. I mean, I appreciate, like I find other perspectives really interesting. So I appreciate, you know, that he was excited about something and he wanted to share it. You know, it's just I want to know more about, you know, what, how do people come to, come to their conclusions, you know? What is the level of evidence that you're looking for? I think there's a great lesson in here for entrepreneurs, right? Because what was his name?

What was the dot com? Flat Earth. Flat Earth Dave. Flat Earth Dave. Flat Earth Dave. Flat Earth Dave is an entrepreneur. Whether he actually has three bitcoins to give, I'm not so sure on that. But either way, Flat Earth Dave is an entrepreneur.

And what he has successfully done, whether the guy that was talking to you, whether that guy actually believes in Flat Earth originally and Flat Earth Dave just added value through his content, or whether the guy is now on a path to being convinced and he is following Flat Earth Dave, essentially what happened in CIA terminology is that you were approached by an advocate. This guy was advocating on behalf of Flat Earth Dave. so your customer was acting as an advocate for the brand. You know, Flat Earth Dave could never advertise to you. That's true. Like, your social media feed is not going to present an ad from a flat earth guy. I'm never going to look his stuff up. Yep.

I'm never going to wonder about whether or not the earth is flat. Yeah, right? Yeah. Like, you would have never crossed paths with his entire brand, if not for this advocate who just happened to be going in a side door during your walk. Yeah. Right? that's such a powerful lesson for entrepreneurs.

Because one of the things that's the things that is the hardest for entrepreneurs to do, us included, is reach the right audience. How do you find people who you can serve? How do you find people who are struggling to accomplish the thing that you can help with? Right. The right message, the right person,

the right place, the right time. And people spend a lot of money on Facebook ads. They spend a lot of money on LinkedIn ads. They spend a lot of money on YouTube channels. Right? Trying to reach the right audience. It's what we do as entrepreneurs.

We underestimate the value of advocates that when you can just get a few people to be really excited about your brand, they will literally tell absolute strangers. Yeah. They will pitch. You were pitched. He has 172 videos. He'll give you three bitcoins. Look at his old stuff. Like, there was real effort.

That guy just did work for Flat Earthdave.com. And he got paid nothing. Yeah. Right? that's a true advocate right there. And I mean, I can think of instances and where I'm a true advocate too. I mean, we have, we drink our cacao mix every day

and I tell everybody I know about that cacao mix. I'm like, have you tried the cacao? It's so good. It'll replace your coffee. I'm selling for them constantly. They don't even know it. Yeah. It's fascinating to me.

It's fascinating to me because it's what we all want and it's the thing that we are, we, as entrepreneurs, it's the thing that we feel is just out of reach. How do you get people to refer you to other people? How do you get clients to leave testimonials, right? You have to ask for it. You have to do this, you have to do that. But in both cases, in your case, when you're talking about the Creo brew that we use every morning, when we talk about Flat Earthdave.com, their advocacy was one, exclusively through the quality of value delivered. Yes. That guy, believed that the quality of Flat Earth Day was so good that the value of the content itself

was payment for him to proselytize, which, again, we're going to piss people off. That's the church. The church wants people to believe that teaching you that Jesus is going to protect your eternal soul is so much value that you're going to go out and you're going to start telling everybody about Jesus on the street corner. I have never had anybody proselytize Christianity. as effectively as you just described this guy, proselytizing flat earth thief. Seriously. Like, you didn't, not once did you say that guy was crazy. Not once did you say that guy was intimidating.

Not once did you say that guy was offensive. Not once did you say that that guy was weird. You just said he was a nice guy. He was excited. He was just excited about it. Think about how different that is from every person you've seen on a street corner, right? Thumping on a sign or waving around a Bible or talking about your eternal soul. Like, it's hard.

Like, we use the word proselytize. But, you know, it's different. You come from a Buddhist community. Yeah. That believes in proselytizing your faith. I'm a Protestant. We believe in proselytizing our faith. But we don't, we don't proselytize or advocate nearly as much as what we're called to do.

Right? And it makes me wonder, why? Like, is it because of the social stigma? around people who like proselytize their faith? Is it because we're self-conscious about what we believe in? Is it because it doesn't bring us the sense of value that we would need to advocate, like you advocate for your for your cacao mix in the morning? So I think that part of what makes an advocate,

what makes someone an advocate and makes advocates powerful is that it touches on something deeper, right? So for me, cacao touches on, it's not that I just love the cacao. It touches on something deeper for me. It touches on my journey to being healthier. That's why I advocate for that brute, right? Because coffee doesn't make me feel good. Cacao does make me feel good, right? So for this gentleman who, you know, is being an advocate for, you know, the flatter

Dave guy, there's something there. for him that it's touching on something that right something deeper that's that's that's making him be on fire right when i have i have been prophylized to a lot by you know all faiths and what the most powerful advocates are the people who the faith has touched something really deep in their lives right because then they're coming at it from like a very personal perspective of you know this is how it's impacted me. And I want you to have the same feeling. That's what it is.

It's impacted me in this positive way. And I want you to have the same feeling that I have right now. You just described why we started everyday spy. Right. I mean, CIA changed our lives. The skills that they taught us, the insights they gave us, the experiences we had were so good that all I want to do now is just give people just this much of a flavor of what it was like. Because it's so good. The high is so high.

The drug is so good. Right. To know how people think, to be able to anticipate, plan, and control your future. Yes. To understand this concept of advocates and how to build an advocate and how to find an advocate and how to use an advocate and how to gain benefit from an advocate without having to actually spend your own resources to do it. Right.

It's a fascinating concept. To gain leverage and control over your life, over your business, just by implementing these new skills that you weren't taught by your parents. You weren't taught by your school because they're a skill set that is taught to a certain group of people generally to do spies to commit espionage. So skill sets that a lot of times are put in a negative light, but that as you teach can be used for all kinds of positive benefits for yourself and for others. Do you remember when I first started experimenting,

with the phrase unfair advantage. Yes. And I started talking about when we used to theorize like, well, what does everyday spy give people? What are we trying to give people? And I was like, we're trying to give people an unfair advantage. You did not like that at all. Nope.

Right? But now you're just, what you just described, like these unique skills and unique perspectives that give people an edge. Is that not an unfair advantage? Or do you just not like the word unfair? Because I personally love, and everybody understands what I'm saying, when I'm like, I'm going to give you an unfair advantage. I'm going to teach you how to mind hack, teach you how to persuade somebody faster and better

than you've ever done before. Like, CIA knows how to use unfair advantages. Yeah. But why don't you like that? Or have you changed your mind about using that phrase? So it's difficult because I may have changed my mind about using the phrase only because only because I have been proven wrong by your audience. Your audience seems to love.

Why do you keep calling them my audience? They're our audience. Our audience. Like our customers. They're our tribe. I know. But up until now, you're the one they've been listening to. So, you know, now that I've met so many more of the tribe, right?

The spy tribe. The spy tribe. The more spy tribe members I meet, the more I understand that unfair advantage is the correct term for what we are giving them. And you start to see how many of the spy tribe are badasses. Yeah. Successes in their own right, on their own. people who truly have done everything by the book, following all the rules of fairness,

and they have still succeeded. But now to unlock the next level, they kind of need an unfair advantage. They've maximized fair opportunity. Now it's time to tap into unfair opportunity. And I think that, I mean, I still personally think, you know, I have my, I still have a partially liberal heart. Partially. For as sinner as I've become. We talked about this before.

For as center as I've come on some issues and for the little bit of conservative I have on other issues, I still have a large liberal portion of my heart. So the word unfair really greats. So I still think there are other things we could call it. But in the end, you're giving people a skill that intentionally not everybody has, right? Because if everybody had the same skill,

it wouldn't be an advantage for anybody. It's for the people who are hungry enough to learn it and to use it. There's something going on in the news related to MI6. I feel like I read it, but I don't remember it. Do you know what I'm talking about? So speaking of unfair advantages, AI. So MI6 doesn't talk a lot in the press, not like... MI6 didn't even acknowledge they existed until 1989.

Is that what it was? Or 98? I feel like it was something in... I think it was... 96. 96? Yeah. They were a truly secret organization until then.

Even though we all knew about James Bond, but... Details. Details. Yeah, so MI6 had like a, you know, there was like a rare, you know, a conference where they talked about a bunch of stuff. And one of the things they talked about was using AI to combat the Russian threat. And I think we've probably... all known that this was going to come, that, you know, AI, there's so many uses for AI and that,

of course, AI can be used for intelligence purposes as well. What I found fascinating was that there was a conversation about how, you know, even though AI is starting to be used to combat intel threats, to combat military threats, even though, you know, open sources being used so much more against intelligence threats, the human factor for, you know, humans, like collecting intelligence through human efforts is still the core. It's, I mean, the gentleman from the MI-SX was saying that you have to have human intelligence collection. Nothing will ever replace it, right?

You can't, it's like the difference between, like a combat medic in my mind, the difference between a combat medic and a plastic surgeon, right? But combat medic, you know, I see it as like your technical collection, right? Like your technical collection and your AI, anything like that, it's very broad, right? Your combat medic just wants to make sure you don't bleed out on the field, right? But your plastic surgeon goes in with this tiny scalpel. To reconstruct. To reconstruct.

And to make your face or your body look a very specific way. Not like your face. Yeah, not like your face. Face off. Face off. Oh, Nick Cage. I grew up with some Nick Cage. I know.

You grew up with some Nick Cage. You got to love it. So, you know, the plastic surgeon is the human intelligence officer, right? You can use them very strategically to go in and do these very specific intelligence collection efforts that no technical resource could ever do. As fancy as AI seems to be,

no technical resource can ever get themselves into a room with an adversary that doesn't know who they are and collect the information they need and report it back. Yeah, what's really interesting is, you know, as we look towards the future, There was a question when you and I were active at CIA. We started in 2007. We left in 2014.

During those years, there was a lot of open debate about whether or not human intelligence collection would ever be sunsetted. Like, is it even relevant anymore? When technical collection was evolving so quickly and technical devices and technical tools were so superior to human beings. And by the time that we left, I think we had proven, based off of the last assignment that we had before we left, which nobody. knows about yet, but inshallah, they'll know about soon enough.

We'd proven like no human intelligence is the bedrock, right? It may not be the most powerful. It may not be the widest reaching. It may not be the fastest acting. But it is absolutely one of those core pillars of all source intelligence collection. Yes. And as I look to the future with AI, because when somebody says AI is going to be used to combat a threat?

Like, what does that really mean? It means you're just going to do a big data pole. Exactly. What it means is you're going to scrape a bunch of data, AI is going to process all that data and spit out a result. It also means you're going to create fake news. You're going to create fake media. You're going to create deep fake videos.

You're going to do all these things against your opponents. It just sounds way better to say we're going to combat the Russian threat rather than we're going to covertly influence the Russians. It sounds way better to. to say we're going to combat the threat rather than we're going to mess with the bad guys, right? But that's what we're talking about with AI. It's going to take human beings because human beings are the decision makers.

Human beings are the ones who set the strategy and the strategic vision. Human beings are the ones that can actually tell you how the tool is going to be implemented. Technical collection only ever tells you what the tool is currently doing. It doesn't tell you the plans and intentions of what the tool will do in the future. It takes a human being to tell you that. Yeah. And even if AI gets to the point where you can train it to reliably do those things, because you can see even now, AI takes training, it's not perfect, it's already glitching. You know, we're uncertain many years away from AI being able to replace a human in any respect. I don't know if it's many years.

You still need human beings to make that human connection to another human being. To another human being. Oh, but do you? Holy smokes, what goes through my mind right now is all those, all the current AI simulations. They're not even AI based. They're just algorithmic simulations. They are digital girlfriends. I've read this.

Digital boyfriends. Yeah. Right? Where people can essentially train a bot to be their boyfriend, girlfriend, best friend. I'm pretty sure I've read a story recently about. like a beta program that was doing this. And then they decided to disband it because of ethical issues that they were having.

And the public outcry, the people who had dedicated their time to grooming this digital boyfriend or digital girlfriend was horrible. Like they were heartbroken because they had trained a bot to speak to them to acknowledge them like a robot, an artificial intelligence, an algorithm, had built a real relationship with people. And I'm not saying that that's because the algorithm

so good or the AI was so smart, as much as I'm saying, it's probably because the person was so fundamentally flawed in terms of their understanding of healthy relationships. Not their fault. Trauma does what trauma does. And people don't always come out of trauma well. But can do, like your statement was that AI will never be able to replace a human connection. And I wonder if it already has in some cases. And it's provable. I think, so I think it's an interesting question. And I think you have to think about how over the next few generations, how people are going to change, right? Because the people who are currently in power,

who have the intelligence that we want to collect, they're aging. So as AI develops and gets better, and as the current people in power age out and younger people who maybe have a different relationship with AI start to take power. It's a very interesting question of, you know, right now, if you want to get in a room with Xi Jinping, you're not going to do it through an AI robot girlfriend, right?

But 40 years from now, whoever's in power, maybe they came up through a generation where having an AI relationship is a normal thing. Right? And then so until will change, Though it also makes me ask the question of the type of people who get into positions of power, the type of people who take intelligence jobs, because there's a profile of people who work in intelligence. There's a profile of people who work in politics.

Are those the kind of people who would develop these types of relationships with AI? My current guess, though I might be just aging myself, is that they would. wouldn't be and that for that level of intelligence gathering, you would have to still be with them in person. It's still going to be a human to human connection, having a drink with them, being friends with them. I don't know that it's that it will get to a point where those people in those positions are going to be the kind of people who are going to let down their, you know, have let down their operational security for an AI relationship. I'm just going to hope that you're right.

I'm pretty sure I disagree with you. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I disagree with you. I do disagree with you. And I will tell you why. And then we can move on because I don't want to turn this whole thing into a debate about what if, what if, what if, right? Uh-huh. So we've already seen politicians and military people compromise themselves because of personal

flaws, coping mechanisms, alcohol, drug abuse, prostitution, women affairs, whatever, right? Men, whatever it might be. So we've already seen them compromise themselves for these various motivators. Many of those motivators are just being automated, right? Like how many porn sites exist right now? How many dark websites?

You have mail-order drugs for crying out loud through Tor. There's all sorts of tools, and AI is just going to make it. that much easier for those tools to operate, operate effectively, operate intelligently, operate securely. Not to mention the fact that if you think it, we may only be, we may only be like five to ten years away from teachers teaching with AI tools, right? Because I know our son, I love our son to death. He has a unique relationship with learning. Love, hate, a little bit of relationship with our learning, right? If there was right now, if there was an online tool

where we could sign up for a subscription model, who knows what, and an AI intelligent engine essentially adapted to him to teach him in the optimal way just for him, because that's what AI will allow us to do. Right. Optimize on an individual level. And it could ask him a few questions. It could have a few, you know, engagements. It could give him quizzes and games. And all of a it would know this is exactly how this boy likes to learn. And then boom, it could just feed him exactly the way he likes to learn. We homeschool. So right now, you and I are the ones in there hitting our heads against the wall like, I thought he liked this. I thought he liked this. It's very hard for us to adapt. It's very easy for an AI engine to adapt. And I'm not saying AI

is going to replace teachers. But now all of a sudden, one teacher can have 15 times as many students when she has or he has the proper engine to personalize the learning experience, right? So imagine two generations, three generations from now, the people who will be voted into Congress, the people who will be voted into the Senate, they will have been raised from a very young age in close proximity to AI-powered solutions. Right. They're going to have the same three compromises everybody else has, drugs, alcohol, and sex. And those are just going to have advanced as well. So now all of a sudden, like, ooh, I don't know, a digital pimp that we're all payment. happens through cryptocurrency and the whole data log of communication trail is erased or obfuscated

inside of a blockchain that nobody has access to, we do have kind of an interesting future ahead of us. And the only reason I say that is because I disagree with the idea that's that future politicians are going to look anything like current politicians. Our current politicians now look nothing like the politicians in the 1950s. I agree. I think that the future politicians will look very different. The question is, will it be more or less vulnerable? Will they be more or less vulnerable? And how will that impact human intelligence collection? Yeah.

Well, I am willing to bet that China and Russia are gambling on more of the same for the United States, right? And we were talking recently about how while we have long referenced the end of the Cold War with the downing of the Berlin Wall, what we are now waking up to is a realization that, Maybe Russia and China never actually thought the Cold War ended. Yeah, I think in their perspective, the landscape has shifted, but they're still living in the same ideology. You know, that hasn't. The ideology didn't come down. Right. Just the physical wall.

They were communists then. Yeah. They are communists now. Yeah. They were allies then. They are allies now. I mean, the three allies during World War II, the United States, Russia, and China. Of the three of those, two of them are still allies.

Yeah. And then there's us. Yeah. And I think that, you know, Russia and China, they take the long view, you know, because of how their government is structured, because of how they work culturally. They just, they take the long view. And so for them, they always have this like 50-year plan at least. I think China says that, you know, they have like a 500-year plan or something. But so they're always working towards that same plan.

You know, maybe like things happen, but the overarching plan isn't changed. The overarching plan is that they're going to be powerful. They're going to take what's rightfully theirs, what they feel is rightfully theirs. You know, and they're going to do. do what it takes. I always find it interesting when people bash American intelligence. And I don't know if people realize that American intelligence is, we have a lot of legal boundaries in the United States.

The operations that the Russians and the Chinese do are something else. They don't have those boundaries. They don't have those boundaries. And it's amazing to watch them because they're really, they're such incredible adversaries because of how they are able to function. So I remember when we were active at the agency. And I was still young. I mean, I was 27 when we signed in when we first got sworn in.

And I remember I was on a rotation. We do on the job training for your first year, off and on different offices, right? And I went into one of the offices. and I had just read this incredible intel report about something that a foreign adversary was doing that was really clever and really effective. And I was like, oh, this clever, effective thing that this foreign adversary is doing,

we should learn how to do this. And I took it to my supervisor and I was like, sir, I just wanted to highlight to you this cable, you know, reference number, yada, yada, yada. and what it outlines is the process by which this adversary is doing this very clever and effective thing. How do we make this something that we use here at CIA? And he looked at me and he was like, we don't do that here. Yeah.

I was like, we don't do, we don't do what? We don't. Clever operations. We don't, we don't learn from our enemies. We don't, what don't we do? We don't adapt. We don't evolve. And that's exactly what I learned is like, by virtue, there are some.

old school agency types, and maybe it's changed now, that just because an enemy is doing it, just because of that reason alone, they feel like they can't replicate or mimic. Meanwhile, China and Russia make an entire evolutionary cycle out of mimicking and replicating, right? China essentially skipped the entire part of history where you have to build hardline telephone wires

and they went directly to mobile cellular technology. They basically skipped that whole phase, which isn't going to be great if we ever actually shut down their grid. But, I mean, let's think about it. That's how they went from being like sticks and stones in 1949 to being the nearest peer competitor to the United States in 2023. That's how they got there, right? So they learned from the best, mimicked the best, adapted their own, you know, approach,

and then took off. Yeah. That was my experience at the agency. And it was mind-boggling to me to love. learn the culture of we are adaptable, but not if that asshole over there is doing it. Like, it's just. So I had a similar experience where I was working in a small office with, and it was, again, my first year, and I was working with two other very junior officers.

And we had these amazing ideas for these operations that we were going to do against our target. And, you know, I took them to my boss. I was like, we have this super great idea and we can do this operation and it's going to have this result, which is exactly what we want. And it's like, look how clever this is. And the boss looked at me and he was like, that's illegal. I was like, what do you mean it's illegal?

Like, they're bad guys. We can do this. And then this is a result. And he was like, American law doesn't allow us to do this action that you're suggesting. And I was like, even to like a foreign actor? He was like, no. He was like, I can go have you go talk to the attorney. I was like, that's fine.

I was like, okay. So that year I learned how, you know, that people look at things like, you know, waterboarding. And they're like, how can this happen, right? The truth is, and not just how can it happen, but like the CIA. is out of control, right? You know, there are so many ideas that get squashed. There are so many legal boundaries that intelligence agencies have to work within that people don't realize when, you know, the war on terror was a relatively unique situation,

right? And when something like that happens when you're actively at war, like we were at the time, you know, things like waterboarding can happen, but that it goes through, there's still this big approval process, and, you know, there's still all these hoops you have to jump through in America for American government agencies.

The Chinese and the Russians don't have to do that. So are you saying, like, you know. So do you think waterboarding was acceptable? I don't think it was acceptable. Why not? So I used to work with torture survivors before I worked for the CIA.

And in my opinion, torture is never acceptable. Not only is torture never acceptable because of what it does to the human being that you're torturing, but it doesn't yield the result that you're looking for. It's like polygraphs. You just said torture is like polygraphs. I'm just saying what you just said. It doesn't yield the result

that you're looking for. A polygraph doesn't isn't 100% accurate. It doesn't actually tell you if somebody is lying 100% of the time. Waterboarding, maybe if you torture somebody, they'll tell you, but more likely than not, you're not going to get what you want. You're not going to get the truth, right? You're not going to convince them to actually tell you the facts that you're looking for. So I disagree with it. And I think there's been, you know, I'm glad that there have been inquiries into how that process came about. So we can learn from what I consider to be a mistake in our history, you know, in CIA's history.

But, you know, like I said, we were, that came about because of 9-11 and the efforts we were taking so that 9-11 wouldn't be repeated, right? That was the, you know, our whole war on terror. we did not want 9-11 to have a repeat occurrence, right? And then that whole time we were focused on the war on terror, Russia and China were focused on hitting our weak points, right? Or growing there, growing a new strength. Yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, all that time, I saw an article recently that talked about during those years that we were in Afghanistan and in Iraq, Russia was sowing the seeds of dissent already in America, right? Through influence, nobody noticed.

Nobody noticed until it blew up in our face and then suddenly everybody's like, oh, Russia's influencing us. No shit. Out of nowhere? Yeah. We just haven't noticed that they've been influenced it for the last 15 years. Right. Like even afterwards, there have been reports of,

you know, even after the KGB was disbanded, the operatives that were in America, stayed in America, they were still operating here. And now they just fall under one of the other services. Yeah. Different name. Different name. Same function. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. So I disagree with you, I think, on the waterboarding front. I know. But we'll have to have that conversation different day because we're at a time. I will say this though right now that torture needs to be defined. And it needs to be defined much better because I'm a big fan of, you know, eye for an eye, tooth for tooth kind of thing. And if they're taking our people and cutting off their heads,

I don't see why we can't be allowed to take their people and get them wet. I don't see how that's a problem. I so disagree with you on this. I know you disagree with me. And that's totally fine because we can have this conversation in depth another day.