EverydaySpy Podcast - What Librarians and CIA Agents Have in Common

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

People mistake information as something you have to personally have in your mind. They assume that If you know a lot of information, you are smart, if you don't, you are dumb. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this episode, Andrew explains why information doesn't have to be in your head to be of value to you, and he shares a few secret people that can help you gain access to information you never even dreamed possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. Information is a funny thing because people seem to think that when you have a lot of information, you are smart. And when you do not have a lot of information, you are not smart. And one of my favorite stories demonstrating this is really a very old story, an old piece of American history. back in 1919, the Chicago Tribune actually filed a lawsuit against Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Vehicles, because of their belief that he was ignorant. They had claimed in a newspaper article that he was an ignorant man, an uneducated man.

And then Henry Ford went on to sue the Chicago Tribune for libel, saying that they libeled his name, his named publicly and he wanted to sue them. So then in response to that lawsuit, the Chicago Tribune actually tried to go to court to prove to the court that Henry Ford was ignorant, that he was dumb, that he was stupid. Now, in that lawsuit, you can imagine there was a ton of people observing who knows what was in the mind of the judge or the attorneys, but you had a prosecutor who was questioning Henry Ford on basically everything you and I have learned in our American civics courses and our history courses all through middle school and high school, trying to prove what Henry Ford didn't know. Now, the story goes on and on with the kinds of questions he was asked

and some of his responses. And don't get me wrong, I don't believe for a second that Henry Ford was a patient or a friendly or a kindly man. And everything I've read about him is quite the opposite of that. what I do love is how he brought all of the questioning to a head and essentially shut down any future arguments. After a barrage of detailed history questions that he didn't have the answer to, he looked at the prosecuting attorney directly in the face, and he said to him, quote, if I should really want to answer the foolish questions you have just asked, let me remind you that I have a row of electric push buttons on my desk, and by pushing the right button, I can summon any aid of man to answer the question that you have for me.

What Henry Ford was saying is that he didn't need to be the person with the information, because he was the person who had access to other men who had the information. This is a fantastic point, a powerful point that the agency taught me that has carried with me to this day. It's a point that empowered me. It empowered Jehi when we first met as well because we realized we didn't have to have all the answers. All we had to do was know where to go to find the answers. The man who knows, the man or woman who knows how to find the answer to their question, is as powerful as the smartest person out there who already knows the answer in advance.

My brother-in-law is a fantastic guy. I've always loved my brother-in-law. My middle sister who married him made probably the best decision of her life when she married him because he's such an interesting and intelligent guy. But he's not intelligent because of the college degree he has. He's not intelligent because of how well he did in high school, which I don't think he did very well at all. He's such an awesome, interesting guy because he is constantly seeking out the correct answer to any question posed to him.

He has become a master at finding the information he needs to answer whatever question he has. And that makes him, in my opinion, a master of information. You can tell him something. He can read something. Anyone can make a claim. and he will be open-minded enough to accept that claim, but then he will go on his own to vet it. Because just like Henry Ford,

he realizes he doesn't have to have the information in his head. He just has to know where to go to find the information. Now, in this season, you've come on a journey with me. We've hacked headlines together. We've dissected articles together. If you were part of my news hacker presentation, then you've actually seen me live go through, through and pull up a news article on my laptop and actually go through the process of vetting

the factual information and the not-so-factual information inside that article itself. The process that we use to do that is at its core, just a process of going out and finding the answer, the correct, true, factual answer to whatever question that we have. Now, there's a few ways that I do that that I want to share with you today. So first, when I go looking for information, I never look for factual information in a blog. Now, I understand how funny that is because Everydayspy.com is my own repository for information, where I collect and share my knowledge with you is essentially through a blog format on Everydayspy.com. And why do I do it that way?

I do it because it gives me a chance to share my knowledge directly with you, but it also gives you a to independently vet any information that I put on my blog with other sources. And the kinds of sources that I like to use when I vet a blog are journals, specifically professional peer-reviewed journals. I love medical journals. I love industry journals. I love quarterly reports. I love government reports, watchdog type reports, international reports. Because here, if you find corroborating information between professional journals, between international journals. When you find that, you know that you have confidence that the information is factual, that the information is complete. But even better, almost all of these professional journals, whether they're medical or whether

they have to do with manufacturing or industry or trade, they're almost all free public information. Don't get me wrong. They're not easy to read. They can be very heady. They can be very specific. They can have a lot of very detailed jargon, but they are free, publicly available, and searchable. If you ever want to find a journal, all you have to do is go to your favorite search engine and type in whatever your search term is and then add to the end journal or academic journal or industry journal. And right away, you're going to get a list at the top of your finding of your search results that specifically point to peer reviewed journals. Google is really very good at this. Even before you start seeing ads, you'll actually see a little section at the top that says, you know, scholarly journals or journal entries for.

And it's an excellent way to start looking at whether the information you're trying to research is accurate or whether the information you're trying to research was stated incorrectly. Because a peer-reviewed journal means that it was reviewed by multiple professionals who have come to the same conclusion about whatever you're reading. So in essence, you're corroborating against a document that has already been corroborated. Now, if you want to go outside of free and you want to start searching in databases that are more proprietary, there are multiple databases out there. Some of the biggest ones that are used even still today in universities, in law schools, by the government,

you can look at Lexis Nexus. Lexis Nexus is a tool that I've become quite intimate with. working in national security, working with private intelligence, working even with individual private investigators, because there's so much information that finds its way into LexisNexis. It's essentially public information that also has a proprietary spin to it, and it's very easy and very fast to search through that information. You can also go to libraries, whether they're public libraries or private libraries, and you can gain access to their own private archives.

I know this sounds a little bit like a high school research project, but if you can't find information online, if you can't find corroborating evidence through journals that are available digitally, there are thousands of recorded documents that exist in physical form or in microfeesh or in some kind of film that are still preserved in an old school library. and librarians are some of the most impressive researchers you've probably never met. At CIA, I was always shocked because when I went to the CIA library and I talked to a CIA librarian, these were individuals who had advanced degrees in library sciences. It's an actual science for a reason because there is a very real system,

a very real skill set that goes along with being a librarian. So don't ever underestimate the value or the contribution of a librarian. If you're trying to find a piece of information, you will unlikely find anyone else as interested in you finding that information as a librarian is, because these are people who have a passion for information, a passion for finding facts. So if you want to find information that helps you research or corroborate information free, then I suggest you look towards journals, professional journals, that you can find on the open internet. If you want to try to corroborate information through a paid source, then I'm turning

you towards databases like LexisNexis or towards your more organized public service like a public library or a university library. Now, the third and final place that you can go to try to find corroborating evidence is to actually reach out to people individually. Now, this is something that I've done quite a bit since I left the agency. When you read a news article, when you hear a story, especially when you're following a journalist who has their own name, their own brand, or when you're following some sort of influencer, it's always an option to reach out to them directly and challenge them to provide the source information for what they have found.

Some of my favorite correspondence from the folks who follow me at Everyday Spy is when they reach out to me and ask me for my source or my citation for a piece of information. Where did you find that? Where did you get that? Where does it say that? It gives me a chance to demonstrate how professional I am being in finding my own information and consolidating that information into my Everydayspy.com website. So when you reach out and you touch an influencer or a journalist or a correspondent or even a pundant directly, an author directly, and you ask them to provide source information, provide a citation or a link or a reference so that you can verify their information, what you're actually doing is inviting them to demonstrate their professionalism. And that's a conversation they don't normally get to have. what they do most of their time is they promote what they've written or they market what they've

written or they share what they've written. It's very rare that they ever get to actually have a meaningful, intelligent conversation with someone who is interested in the content that they've created. So when you get a chance, if you don't want to look online or if you can't find it online, if you don't want to pay to search for it or you don't want to work with someone like a librarian to try to find the information, you always have the option of going directly to the author, directly to the influencer, directly to the expert, and asking them to provide the citation or the direction where they found that information. It doesn't mean they're going to respond. If I get a flood of email tomorrow asking me for verification on different articles, I'm not going to be able to

respond to all of them, but it is an option that I have seen people use when they talk to me, and it's an option I've had great success with when I go to challenge other people's information. Research can be intimidating. And the idea of verifying or fact-checking information on your own is not something that people get excited to do when they're browsing through the headlines that are on their social media feed or when they're looking at the headlines that come across their favorite app. But in today's world, we have gone through and we have learned and understood that there is a monetary benefits to news sources giving us information that is not fully accurate.

We have learned that there's a monetary benefit to news sources giving us information that is intentionally fabricated or false. We know that there's benefits to business, benefits to markets, benefits to political parties when they alter, change, or twist information. That is the world, the information world that we live in today. There's a pressing 24-hour news cycle that forces new information to be pushed out as quickly as possible, and that lends itself to misinformation. So if you want to master information, like my brother-in-law, if you want to master information, like the intelligence professionals that are keeping us safe at CIA and all the intelligence professionals around the world, we have to learn to embrace the fact that we must vet our own information. and we vet it through free online sources.

We vet it through paid professional sources. We vet it through experts. And we even vet it by challenging the source of the information itself. None of those options make you irresponsible or make you annoying or make you a bad person. If anything, they all demonstrate your commitment to mastering the knowledge that you're putting into your own head, the knowledge that you're using to make your everyday decisions. And that is Everyday Espionage. Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing, educating everyday people.

I know that not everyone will listen, but those who listen will learn. If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at EverydaySpy or on my website, Everydayspy.com. If you are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash odd. and join me for an authentic spy training mission. And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.