Locked In with Ian Bick - I Was a CIA Officer for 18 Years — Here's What They Never Tell You About the Job | Charles Finfrock

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

Charles Finfrock grew up with one dream — to become a spy. In this episode of Locked In with Ian Bick, Charles takes us through the extraordinary journey it took to make that dream a reality — from the US Navy to the National Air Intelligence Center to 18 years as a Senior Operations Officer at the CIA living and working across Europe the Middle East and Asia. He pulls back the curtain on CIA interrogation tactics and how to spot when someone is lying — skills he used in some of the most sensitive operations conducted at the direction of the President. He opens up about what nobody talks about — leaving the CIA with no support no follow up and a wave of trauma that led to struggles with alcohol. He shares how he rebuilt — moving to Tesla where he built their Insider Threat Program before founding Vigilance his own intelligence and security firm in 2018. He also gets into the cyber security threats most people don't take seriously enough — what to actually worry about with AI the Nancy Guthrie case and accessing home video systems whether your phone is really listening to you and what corporations and individuals need to know to stay safe. _____________________________________________ #CIA #CyberSecurity #truecrimecommunity _____________________________________________ Connect with Charles Finfrock: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-finfrock-302021109 Website: https://vcci.io/charles-finfrock/ _____________________________________________ Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ _____________________________________________ Timestamps: 00:00 Former CIA Officer Finally Tells the Truth About What the Job Really Looks Like 02:27 His All American Upbringing and the Early Aspirations That Set Everything in Motion 05:27 His Path to the Military and What That Journey Really Looked Like From the Beginning 09:00 Military Boot Camp SEAL Ambitions and the Realities Nobody Prepares You For 13:10 From SEAL Training to Navy Law Enforcement — the Unexpected Path That Changed Everything 16:18 His First Assignments in Bahrain and the Early Lessons That Defined His Career 19:40 Developing the Investigation and Interrogation Skills That Would Define His CIA Career 23:09 Moving Beyond the Navy — Education and Setting His Sights on the CIA 27:27 Getting Into Intelligence — the Student Years Mentors and Internships That Opened the Door 32:09 Joining the CIA — the Preparation the Culture and What Public Perception Gets Completely Wrong 38:00 The Impact of 9/11 on His Training and How That Moment Changed Everything About the Job 43:24 His First Field Assignments as a CIA Officer and What That World Really Looked Like 47:00 The Reality of the Job — the Early Excitement and the Daily Grind Nobody Talks About 51:40 Living Undercover — the Psychological Difficulty of Secrets and Hidden Identity 54:52 The Interagency Relationships and CIA Ethics That Defined How the Job Really Works 59:41 Career Longevity and What the Transition From CIA to Civilian Life Actually Required 01:03:40 The Mental Health Struggles and Bureaucratic Disconnect Nobody in Intelligence Talks About 01:09:01 Coping After CIA Service — the Reinvention and Finding New Purpose That Followed 01:14:11 Corporate Security and Insider Threats — What Life After the CIA Really Looks Like 01:20:31 The Tech Threat — Privacy Data and What Everyone Needs to Know About Everyday Security 01:32:00 Digital Forensics Data Deletion and What Your Car Knows About You That You Don't 01:36:07 The Life Lessons and Advice for Success He Learned From a CIA Career 01:38:53 His Final Reflections and What He Wants Everyone to Take Away From His Complete Story _____________________________________________ To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/LockedInWithIanBicka Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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CIA senior operations officer living and working across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, running some of the most sensitive operations conducted at the direction of the president. And when he left, the CIA gave him nothing. No support, no follow-up, and the trauma nearly destroyed him. His name is Charles Finfrock. He rebuilt, and now he's telling us everything. I grew up just outside of Dayton, Ohio, in a small farm community. What was your upbringing like?

Pretty basic, pretty all-American. A lot of, I grew up on a farm. My dad was a high school teacher. My mom was a secretary. And a lot of summer baseball, fall football, winter basketball, you know, normal, just normal America. How would you have described yourself as a kid? Oh, athletic, outgoing, a little bit of precocious, perhaps. I probably wouldn't use such a big word to describe myself.

But what does precocious even mean? I think my grandma would have said ornery. I think it would have been a better way to say it. You know, just like having fun and going out and pre-internet childhood, pre-social media childhood, where, you know, summers, we'd just go out and have a good time and we'd shoot baskets until the sun went down. Then we'd pull the cars around and turn the headlights on and keep playing basketball. That was awesome. It was great childhood.

If someone had asked you what you were going to be when you grew up back then, what would your answer about? Spy. Really? Yeah. Why? I have no idea. Ian, this is one of these odd things. I was thinking about this the other day.

I was just down in Tampa for Soft Week. It's the big special operations convention. Socom sponsors it. Someone was asking me, they said, what's your origin story? How did you end up here? And I said, you know, I really don't know. God put me on the earth to do this. And it sounds really weird to say it out loud.

But since I was as young as I could remember, I thought about this. and I partly attributed to it. This is going to sound a little hokey, partly attributed to probably when I was a kid playing with G.I. Joe. You know, I always wanted to be an army man or always want to do something like that. And as soon as I understood about special operations and special mission units and, you know, things like that, I was in. Where do you even get advice to go that career route, you know, when you're a kid?

So I can remember when I was really young, looking up intelligence, books on intelligence in my library. Third grade small town, not a lot of books on that. And I can remember some kind of nonsense books on artificial intelligence. And of course, this is in the mid 80s. So, you know, there's not really artificial intelligence like we know it now. But that was as close as I could find on intelligence. But I did find a couple of books on the Green Berets and found a couple of books on special operations. But even then, that wasn't like today when everybody tells their story, as we're doing today. I don't know. It was weird. Well, and I should say, real honest. Look, I was either going to be an NFL quarterback or an intelligence officer. And I don't

know if you saw me walk in, but apparently 5-9, 160-pound kids don't get recruited into major college football programs and probably aren't on their way to the NFL. Spoiler alert. You could be a certain position, right? You know, you could. You could, but I wanted to be a quarterback. I mean, I was a Joe Montana guy, and that was just what it did. How'd your parents react to you saying that you wanted to become a spy? You know, it's really funny. I didn't really talk to him about it because that's part of the hook, right? You don't talk about it.

When I first told my dad about it, he was like, no, you don't. Don't you want a family? Don't you want a normal life? And I said, Dad, that's, I can remember. I can remember exactly where we were. We're playing golf. And out on the golf course, and I was telling him about it. And he just couldn't get his mind around why I'd want to do something like that.

So do you graduate high school? What happens? Yeah, so, okay, so I'm into my senior year. And, you know, again, I was still on the fence. I was very confident that Ohio State was going to come calling and I was going to get that football scholarship. And I got hurt my senior year playing football. Probably wasn't going to happen anyway, but that's okay. And so I was a little bit lost.

I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do. And I had a colonel in my junior ROTC program. he said, what do you want to do? And I said, Colonel, I want to join the agency or the Bureau. I was still a little bit, you know, FBI or CIA. And so he grabs me, takes me down to the guidance counselor's office. This is true story. Gets into the phone book, right?

This is 93. So he's flipping through the phone book. Obviously, no number for CIA in there, but finds the FBI. Calls the FBI field office in Dayton or Cincinnati. I can't remember which. And he said, hey, I got a kid here who wants to, you know, potentially join the FBI. what does he need to do? And they sort of laid out the requirements, one of the, you know, requirements and some of the things that would make people more competitive. And one of those things was the military.

As soon as he said that, I was like, done, I'm in, going to the military. Because I wanted to do it, and this is how ignorant I was and how uninformed I was back in the day. I thought you couldn't join the military after high school, right? I thought that was just the normal way to do it. You go to high school and then you joined the military like every other 17 or 18-year-old, you know, young man. So that's what I did. I joined the military, joined the Navy, and did a stint in the Navy. Did people tease you for your aspirations? I didn't say anything about it.

I didn't talk about it. Just the people that you were just referring to that. Yeah, yeah, that was it. I mean, Air Force Colonel who, you know, understood what I wanted to do. But no, I didn't really talk about it. Yeah, it was kind of odd. How was boot camp for you? Boot camp was easy.

I'll tell you a couple of funny stories about the Navy. So I originally, my plan was to join the Marines because this is mid-90s, right? We're in between wars, but I was, my dad was a Vietnam guy. And I said, man, I want to join the military. But if I'm going to join the military, if there's war, I want to go. I don't want to not go. So Marines, right? Marines first end.

Marines, Marines, Marines. And I kind of dismissed the Army, dismissed the Air Force, even though I grew up right by an Air Force base. And then the Navy, those sons of guns, got me. And I was coming by and I said, man, I, Navy, come on, man. I'm joining the Marines. They said, let me pop in a video for you. And they popped in the Navy SEAL recruiting video. And so I watched that and I was like, oh, yeah, that's it.

That's what I'm going to do. So I signed up in my senior year of high school, 17, had to have my parents sign permission slip for it or waiver or whatever it was. And yeah, left for boot camp. I'd just turned 18, left for boot camp. And boot camp was fine. Great Lakes, you know, Illinois, it was fine. It was, I don't know.

Maybe boot camp wasn't the hardest thing in the world. Now, what was your goal to become a seal at that point? Well, so my goal was to become a seal because I thought by becoming a seal and doing a tour as a seal, it would better qualify me for and better position me to go into the CIA when I was done. Oh, so you still have that on your mind? Oh, no, no, no, no. That doesn't discourage you at all. The seals were just going to be a pathway from where I was to where I wanted to go.

Absolutely. You were determined. Well, that was it. And, you know, I was young. I was physical. Loved working out. And so for me, that just made a ton of sense. So do you go right to seal training or how does that work?

So what you have to do? Oh, man, the Navy. So when I enlisted, I wanted to be an intelligence specialist. Again, hey, thoughtful, got a plan. It's fine. I go down to the personnel place MEPs, as they call it. And again, anyone who's a young enlisted guy out there will appreciate this story. So I go down there and I'm like, I want to be an IS intelligence specialist.

They're like, oh, we don't have any those openings. I'm like, well, I guess I'll just come back when you do. They said, well, you'll really want to be an IS, right? You can do one of these 15 jobs. And that's what they call source rating. And that will get you into the SEAL program. You want to be a seal, right? So, yeah, that's the plan.

They said, oh, great. Well, then anything will do. I'm like, oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense. So what kind of other jobs you have? They're like, you know, what do you want? And I'm like, I guess the shortest thing that will get me there. And I said, okay, great. Why don't you be a personnelman?

I'm like, seven-week school, fastest way to get in there. And it doesn't matter. You're never going to do the job anyway. Okay, fine. So I signed up to be a personnelman. And then, oh, my favorite part was they told you, they're like, but it's okay. when you get to boot camp, just tell your company commander,

and they'll change it for you, right? If you really want to be an IS, they'll change it for you. Sure, sure. And so, which is hysterical because you go to boot camp and you're like, oh, I really want to be this? And they're like, they kind of laugh in your face. You know, the boiler tech second class Betty officer, who was her boiler BT2 Wetrek with all of his tattoos and, you know, anger.

Yeah, threw you back in line and that was that. So, yeah, no, long story short. So you go to boot camp, then you go to your A school. I went down to Meridian, Mississippi, had the greatest military training I've ever had that I use every single day. And that was two weeks of typing training. Wait, really? They taught you how to type? Two weeks.

And I forget what we had to do, like 40 words a minute or something like that with, I think, 10-10 out of 100, 90% accuracy, something. And I always joke, that was the absolute greatest training I've ever received that I use. Every single day. Why did they, is that for officers? Yeah. Well, no, no, no, because as a personnelman, like we, you know, if, if you're just going to be a normal personnelman, you handle people's personnel records, you know, and all that. So it's office work and so they teach you out of type. I guess a lot of people didn't necessarily know how to type back then, too, because computers had just started, what, 10 years earlier?

Yeah, no, no, no, yeah. It wasn't a normal. Wasn't normal. And so, okay, so did my A school? I had to wait to class up. Oh, I had to take the test in boot camp to pass the physical test to go to Buds, basic underwater demolition seal school. And a couple of things I should have known up front, right, from Ohio, wasn't a good swimmer,

wasn't a good runner, sprunter, athlete, 4-6 flat 40 guy, but long distance, not so much. And so I took the test in boot camp. I didn't pass the first time. I forget what the measure was, but I was good enough on the swim, which took me a long time to get there. Push-up, sit-ups were fine. Pull-ups were a challenge for me. Still are. So I had to retake it in boot camp, past it. Fine. Get my orders. Great. Now I'm ready to go out. And yeah, then we, A-school, a little bit of time up in Bethesda, Maryland, while we were waiting to class up and then went out to Coronado. And what happens?

So I like to say I had a rock and roll experience at Buds. I swam like a rock and ran like a roll, like a dinner roll, like a sticky bun. It was fine. I gutted it out because that's, you know, the majority of it. But then at a certain point, I was just every open water swim we had, two mile open water swims, you know, I was cramping up and failing. And so started to get performance boarded and all those kind of things. And I was always when we did beach runs, I was always the last guy. like they would come up with the truck beside us and would, you know,

mock us and heckle us while we were running because that's part of the experience. And I always felt like I was the cutoff and it was, man, it was hard. In any case, after a while, you know, just because of my limitations was swimming and running and some other things, I was invited not to be there anymore. And so, which is fine. It's fine. You don't join the seals to prep to do something else. That's not a, that's not a thorough way to a different career.

That is the career. And so, fine. So left the SEAL program, they went and sent me to a law enforcement academy because what else you're going to do with young, aggressive hyper alpha males who don't make this program? Let's turn them into cops. That sounds like a good idea. And so that's what I did. But military cops?

Military cops. Yes, sir. And that's a separate training? Separate training. So they sent us to a law enforcement academy in San Antonio, Texas. I went to the law enforcement academy. I was looking at your handcuffs in there and whatever. So, yeah, became a law enforcement specialist.

in the Navy. And yeah. I didn't realize that they had a separate law enforcement academy for actual military cops. They do. You know, and it makes sense. So that Navy is probably the worst when it comes to law enforcement. They just, it's not in the culture. It's not in the tradition.

Army, really good. Marines good. Air Force really good. Navy, not so much. And so we actually went to the Air Force Law Enforcement Academy. And then I'll tell you another funny story. people always ask me, how did you get to be a Middle East expert? Because I spent the majority of my career in the Middle East.

And I said, well, I got to be a Middle East expert because I was really bad at geography. We finished up with the Academy and we get on the phone with the personnel guy. Then I can remember me and a buddy mine, Lee. And he said, okay. And everyone was going cool places. Rake of Vic, Iceland, Sicinal to Sicily, Road to Spain, awesome places, right? So I get on the blower with the guy and he says, well, I got two places. I got Guantanamo Bay and I have Manama.

I was like, I know where Guantanamo Bay is. I don't know where Manama is. I'll call you back. Hand the phone to my buddy. My buddy takes it. He gives them the same two choices. And Lee goes, da, I'll take Manama. I'm like, where is that?

He goes, I don't know. So I grabbed the phone from him and goes, I'll take it to. So we both end up going to Manama. This is a little bit to tell you about what period of time it was. So we hang up the phone. and we get under the base library and pull up an encyclopedia. And I was like, Manama, I think it's somewhere in Central America. I said, I don't know.

And so we're flipping through the encyclopedia and we get to Managua, a whole different place in Manama, Nicaragua, right? And Manama, Bahrain, Bahrain, where the hell is Bahrain? Oh, it's in the middle of the Persian Gulf. Oh, we just signed up to go to the Persian Gulf. And so my first assignment to the Persian Gulf, I ended up there in November of 1995. Yeah, it was because I was...

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I mean, it was incredible. My experience, and this has just been my life, right? And this is part of the reason why, and again, it sounds hokey, but the hand of God has directed me through my life in multiple different times. And part of it was that. I could have ended up in Cigonella, Sicily, Italy, and had a Cigonell, Italy, and had a great, time. Could have ended up a lot of other places and had a lot of other experiences, but I didn't. I ended up in Bahrain, and I started learning about the Gulf, learning about Islam, learning about Islam, learning about those things that made connections and had experiences that have impacted

the rest of my life. What kind of investigations were you doing over there as a military police officer? So when we first started off, I started off like everybody else is a patrol dog. And so I was working the gates. And that's it. You know, work in the gates, 12 hours shifts, three days on, three days off. I mean, you know, basically a guard. And I started, you know, working extra, doing studying, things like that. And ultimately, I became certified as an investigator. And it became a command investigator. And so even when I was a kid, I mean, I was a kid, 20 years old, 18, 19, 19, 20 years old, a plainclothes investigator on the base. So we were doing assaults,

DUIs, house breakings or break-ins, petty theft. things like that, which is fascinating. I learned a tremendous amount about law enforcement, and it really answered the biggest question for me, which was, I am not a cop. I don't have that mentality. Love them, respect them, back to blue, all that stuff. I am not a cop.

You're telling me if I get the right answer, but I skip a step, it doesn't count. Get out of here. And if anything, it reinforced my desire to be an intelligence officer. I love being overseas. I love being in plain closed. I love, you know, working with sources, talking to people. I love the interviews and interrogations.

That was the part that I really enjoyed and was pretty good at. But yeah, definitely didn't want to be a cop. You probably learned about interrogations as a police officer, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. That was it. I mean, look, we learned apparently techniques that have been debunked now, the read technique. I love the read technique. Apparently it elicits false confessions.

I don't know. That sounds like somebody else's. What's out with the reed technique? The read technique is very specific interviewing and interrogation technique that's got a very specific methodology to it. And again, I think it's been a little bit out of favor now, but it is exceptionally effective. And that's what they teach you as a military police officer. Yeah, well, at the time it was, yes. At the time it was.

So, no, look, learned about rules of evidence, learned about, you know, worked with the lawyers, prosecution and defense. All things that have just really, really, really helped me out in my life. life in my career, both as an intelligence officer and sense, yeah, it was great. Wouldn't have traded it for the world. What do you think it was the biggest skill or lesson you learned during that period of time that you carried over? Interviews and interrogations. Reading and understanding verbal and nonverbal signs of deception.

Understanding the empathy of a good interview and interrogation, that an interview is just a conversation with a purpose, an interrogation as a custodial conversation with the purpose. No, I think that was one of the things that when I started, you know, on down my career, being able to quickly discern, you know, as a cop, everybody lies to you. I mean, spoiler alert, people lie to cops all the time. And so having had that experience in the, I don't want to say being jaded, but being realistic, that people will provide information that is less than accurate for a lot of different reasons in being able to understand that and not take it personally, because we do the same.

Look, you stole that from the store. Everybody steals. It's not that big of a deal, right? And of course it's a big deal, but this is part of the technique. Do you think that technique is a skill that could be taught, or do you think it's a talent? Because I feel like it takes some sort of individual to be able to disarm someone, like if I was very standoffish

or wasn't comforting, if people didn't feel comfortable with me, they're not going to say anything. Does that apply in your world, too? I think in my world that there is a little bit of nature and a little bit of nurture. You absolutely can teach it. And the same with human recruiting sources and convincing people to commit espionage. You can train someone in the methodology and the mechanisms, in the steps. And if you follow the steps, you're going to be successful.

But I do think there is a component of the nature, whether it's having that little bit of empathy, that advanced emotional intelligence. and even something as simple as when somebody gives you their throat, knowing when to go for it and smelling blood in the water and knowing when to push and when to pull back and when to push and when to pull back. Some of that's experience, a lot of that's training, but I do think there is a component of nature that's really hard to teach. And it's the same thing. It's a difference between, you know, excellence in any field where you can learn how to do

something. You could probably give me a class on how to be a podcaster and would be able to be able to to tell me all the steps and I'd probably be okay, but, you know, the top people in the field just, you know, maybe have a little bit of that nature component to it. How long do you think it took for you to be able to tell when someone was lying to you? Oh, you know, quickly because there's steps, you know, verbal, nonverbal signs of deception. If you follow what is taught, you'll start to see it and pick it up, everything from qualifiers. You know, how many times in your life does someone say, well, look, honestly, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah. Anyone says honestly, it's verbal qualifier. People that are telling the truth, don't say honestly. They just tell the truth. You know, I swear to God. Well, you only swear to God when you're fibbing. People may disagree with that. You know, when I can establish a baseline on how you look at me in the eye and then when you look away, whether you look down, you look up, you touch your nose, you pull that piece of lint off your pants. It doesn't really exist. Your mouth gets dry. I can actually see the spittle form around your mouth because you're so uncomfortable with what you're saying, because you're lying. All these little things that you can teach. And I think it's just a matter of the reps because as soon as you start to see it, it's awesome.

You're like, holy smokes, this actually works. I can't believe this guy just did this. So I don't know. I mean, again, it's like everything else. If you learn it and practice it and think and be thoughtful about it, it doesn't take that long. Now, once you made that decision in your mind that I'm not going to do this cop thing, how long do you have to stay with the Navy for? Great question. So I had a four-year enlistment.

And this was in the, now we're fast forward to 96, 97. This was during the Clinton years. And we were capturing the peace dividends from the end of the Cold War. And so we were right-sizing the force, which is a nice way to say downsizing the force. And the Navy at the time, excuse me, in my career field went from being undermanned and then, you know, typical government efficiency. They flooded the, flooded the zone. And so we went from being like a career specialty that was like 95%. man to one that was 110% manned. And so at that time, they were offering early outs. And so I had

finished two years. I was supposed to be in Manama for a year. I extended for another year because I loved it. And then that was up to November. Well, my enlistment wouldn't have ended until August. So I applied for an early out and was given it. And that allowed me to leave. I left the Navy in November of 97, in the middle of November 97, and then start school that January. Wow, I didn't realize that they do early outs? Well, again, it's really, it's really case dependent. I mean, obviously not now, not during the GWAT period, but during that time, it was part of the peace dividend. And so they, they, yeah, let us out early. And, you know, still honorable, still, you know, all my, all my accoutrements and all that stuff. And for the, for the Navy, it was cheaper to let me out than it would have been

to move me to a new duty assignment. Now, at that point, do you think you had the skills or experience needed to go to, say, a place like the CIA? You know, interesting. enough, because I had my eye on the prize and I was working with some people at the time that had some experience in those fields. And so I spent a lot of time talking to them. And I came across a lot of agency people, not on purpose for the most part, but by accident and people that nudged me in certain directions. And so I knew, you know, the agency, you had to have a four-year degree, which I did not have. But they also like military service. They like people who'd been spent time living overseas and traveling overseas and spoke foreign languages.

Well, I had learned some basic Arabic, spent two years living in the Middle East, had my military experience, you know, a little bit of hard skills, and traveled through Europe and that. And so I had been able to in that short period of time check a lot of boxes and was encouraged by a couple of mentors of mine to go to school and get a degree in a relevant field. They said, well, what are you going to do to do school for? I said, man, I'm going to go study Russian. Russian studies. They're like, hey, kid, that's a good idea, man, good idea. But I don't know if you've read a newspaper. It's 97, and we kind of won that war. And we got a lot of under-employed Russian speakers right now. So what would you think about China? And I said, man, I don't know anything about China. They said, yeah, nobody else does either. So that was the encouragement for me to go and pursue an undergraduate degree in Chinese language and East Asian and China Studies. And so that's what I did. when you finally met your first CIA guy, was it what you expected? That's a great question. In a lot of ways, it was.

And I won't say his name. So I was taking night classes through the University of Maryland worldwide campus. You know, they do this for the military. And I had this professor for international relations, Arab-American guy, great guy. And he was fascinating, really interesting guy. And I was big, I've always been a big reader. And so I'm reading, reading, reading, I'm reading a book about the Mossad. at the time, the Israeli intelligence service.

And it starts describing this guy. And I'm reading it. And I'm like, so next day I go to class, I'm like, hey, Dr. So-and-so, where were you at in 1970, blah, blah, blah? He goes, what are you been reading? And I said this, he goes, let's grab a cup of coffee. And so we talked about it afterwards. And we got together and he disclosed that he'd been an agency officer.

You know, his bio said that he was Department of State, but he'd been an agency officer and told me about the career. And it was incredible. And it was the first, it was one of the first times where you learned. This is what, this is the agency that I want to work for, right? The clandestine side where you don't get a,

you know, you don't wear your t-shirt around and you don't trumpet what you do. It's, you know, you live a whole life. And then when you retire, you still are living a whole life where you're not acknowledging a lot of what you had done in the past. But even someone like that,

why do you think he trusted you enough to share that information? Well, interestingly enough, because I had trusted him enough to disclose that I was interested in following up on that kind of path. You know, he had asked me, you know, what do you want to do? Like a lot of good college professors. You know, I was a military guy and was young and enthusiastic and interested and curious. And yeah, he pulled me aside and kind of had that conversation with me. Learned a lot from that guy.

I mean, yeah, learned in the classroom, but outside of the classroom, watching how he comported himself, watching how he handled himself. Oh, it's amazing. How did you provide for yourself those four years of college? GI Bill. Oh, through the military. Yeah. So I was on the GI Bill and really cool. So I went to a little liberal arts college in Ohio.

Expensive college, however, I went back and played college football after I had, you know, been in the Navy. Long story on that. But, and so the GI Bill, one, two, when I applied for financial aid because I was a veteran, I could apply under my own status. Well, I don't have any money. And it was funny. I bought back my military time when I was in the agency and I looked at my pay statement. How much I had made in those three years and three months that I had been in the Navy, total. Three years, three months in the Navy, how much I made total.

And it was like, I want to say it was like $41,000. Total. Three years, three months. So anyway, when I applied for student aid, obviously, I qualified for as much as I could. And even though way, way, way before the time of NIL, not that I would have qualified for any NIL at the time. But the football team was a good football team. Always said set aside money for, you know, appropriate people, you know, for grants and things like that. And so, no, it was great.

Now, are your parents looking at you crazy that you're going to college for this specifically? I don't think so because they knew that I had an interest in foreign affairs. They knew that I was going to do something like that. And when I had first come back from the military, I actually looked into going to Princeton. Princeton didn't take transfer. And by that time, I had a fair amount of hours. and then I looked at Georgetown. They kind of knew that I was motivated and, you know, but no, I don't think so.

I think they were curious with what exactly what I was going to do with, it ended up with a double major in political science and East Asian studies. But no, I don't remember to spend a lot of time talking to my parents about it. So once you get the degree, what happens? Okay. So while I was in college, I interned one summer at the department of state. State. 100% sure I don't want to work for the Department of State. Holy crap.

Great people. Great Americans. But golly, Ned. They said, you know, as you know, finding a job is kind of like finding your tribe. And those were not, that was not my tribe. And then I ended up interning a Department of Defense. And then my final summer, I interned at FBI. And in my last year in college, I worked for the National Air Intelligence Center at Wright, Patterson Air Force Base.

and I kind of manipulate it, not manipulated, I maneuvered my way into all those different positions. But I had connections at that point at the agency and was, you know, very much trying to leverage those. And I was an absolutely aggressive networker and aggressive maneuver for my career. And so, yeah, I had connections at the agency and was, you know, my senior year. It's not a quick process. It wasn't then, isn't now. had my application in and was trying to get worked into the agency there. Now, doesn't the FBI have some elements of the type of work you wanted to do?

Why didn't that interest you? Great question. You know, they do. But the FBI is inherently a law enforcement organization. And so I got this great advice. I'll say it to all your listeners out there. If there's any youths, any kids, they're looking at going into any of the federal services, I'll tell you exactly what I was told.

And I'd still tell people this today. If you want to be in law enforcement, go to the FBI. because they're at the top. If you want to go be a cyber warrior, go to NSA. If you want to go be an intelligence officer, go to CIA. There's a lot of other organizations that do great work at different echelons, but always go as high as you can possibly go in the realm. And so when I talked to the Bureau, even when I interned at the Bureau,

they're like, oh, well, we've got an international operations division. Fine. But that's something you do, sort of. And it's a little bit out of the mainstream. I was working in what was then called the Columbia Caribbean drug unit at the Bureau when I, when I interned that summer. And even then, and this was back in 99 or 2000, you could tell the difference. The wall was still up between the intelligence side and the law enforcement side.

Even though we were working on Planned Columbia, we were still doing Ariano Felix organization and some really interesting international narcotics work. It was just different. It was very different than what I was. looking for. When you're interning, do they give you a badge and a gun? No gun, no badge. You get a, you get a, you get a, you know, a badge to be a bureaucrat, you know, bureaucrat and work at the Hoover building there. No, and you get a bunch of scutwork because you're an intern, which is what you expect. You know, the benefit of being an intern is you get a chance to work with the agents, work with the SSAs and understand what a career would look like. And then you do a little bit of work, right? You do some reporting and you do a lot of the scut work, but that's kind of the, you know, the social contract of the intern program. Now, what was the public's perception of the CIA by the time you join? Oh, gosh.

Okay, so great question. I, senior year, I had the opportunity to meet the deputy director of CIA when I was the summer before my senior year, when I was interning at FBI, a guy by name of John McLaughlin. Mr. McLaughlin was, had just been appointed to be the deputy director of CIA. He was an alumni. It was my small college in Wittenberg. And so I got contacted by the alumni office and said, hey, I know you're in D.C. I know you're interested in this kind of job.

Do you want to go interview? And I said, absolutely. And so I went to CIA headquarters and interviewed him on behalf of the alumni magazine. It's supposed to be 15 minutes, you know, softball had 15 minutes with him. And at the end of it, he said, well, and I said, sir, I just want to thank you so much. This was, this was special. He goes, you want to get a cup of coffee? I said, yeah, sure.

So we spent 45 minutes talking. And he's kind of like, what do you want to do when you grow up? I'm like, you know, to be real honest, I want to end up here. He goes, yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking too. And so, and then again, because, I don't know, Hutzpah, because of whatever gene that makes people not do crazy things I wasn't born with. And so I said, sir, I can't make any promises. Now, I was the student Senate president, student body president, but not the senior class president. I said, I can't make any promises, but let me ask you this.

if we invited you back to be our commencement speaker, would you be willing to do that? He said, yeah, I would do that. I said, I can't make any promises. And so, anyway, gave us the opportunity to keep in touch. And so I went back and mounted one of my first successful covert action campaigns where I got the senior class to vote for him to be the commencement speaker. So the reason why I go into that is because you asked me what the view on the CIA was.

Well, come that spring, you know, most people supported it. This is the late 90s. We won the Cold War. you know, uh, Kosovo was happening and, and all that. This was before 9-11. This was before any of the other stuff. And so we were at a good spot in between times. But still, there were people that wanted to come in and talk to him about, oh, what the CIA did in the 70s and oh, what you, you know, in the 80s and the 50s and the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there were still the peace knicks and the and the, and the hippies that, that just, you know, are against any kind of intelligence, any kind of

secret work. But for the most part, it was, it was fairly positive. How did it feel when you finally became a CIA agent? Okay, so officer. Officer. And I'll, I'll just, just a clarification for you. Officer, CIA employees or CIA officers, agents, we, when we say agent, this is the people that we hire, foreign people that we hire to provide secrets to us. And so you can always know if someone's, if someone's full of malarkey, if they're like, well, when I was a CIA agent, okay, cool, cool, good story, bro, you know you aren't. And a lot of times people refer to that, you know, refer to us as agents, and it's the quickest way to know that someone's full of,

that doesn't know what they're talking about. So, yeah, I became a CIA officer in July of 2001, thinking that I was going to work China issues my whole career. And it was amazing. First off, it was amazing. Going through the recruitment process and the hiring process, every time I would show up, there would be these large groups of people, you know,

and it would kind of narrow, down as you go farther through the process. But everybody you meet, everybody you meet are the most amazing humans you've ever met. It's like, oh, I work at Goldman. Oh, I'm a high-powered lawyer over here. Oh, I'm a PhD professor here. Oh, I'm a special operations guy over here. And you're like, what the hell am I doing in this room? But you kind of keep going through the process. And then, yeah, you finally show up and you look around and there are just some really impressive humans that come through the door, particularly the program I was in. You know, they tell us at the time, I don't know if it's still the case, that to become a case officer in CIA, for as many people that has applied for it as actually were accepted in, had a higher ratio or a smaller ratio of people accepted in than any other program in the country, including the astronaut program.

So it was it was humbling to be brought in. It was amazing. It was incredible. And the people I worked with were, yeah, it was awesome. Do they put you through like a boot camp type of training? So we go through our, the first year of your employment is training. And it is, we do have a part of it that is a special operations training where we do land navigation and where we, you know, we did foreign weapons and we did driving and we did medical work. And then when I went through, we still did our two weeks of airborne school where they put us through airborne school and we jumped out airplanes and did the whole, the whole shoot match, small boats and helicopter and landing zones and all that kind of stuff.

But that's a part of it, but that's really not the crux of it, if that makes sense. I mean, the crux of it is six months of training on how to do the job. What about people that are recruited, say, like a teacher? Do they pass that physical training? That's part of it, yes. Absolutely. Well, in my specialty. Now, I'm not saying the analysts or not saying, you know, there's a lot of other folks.

But, yeah, I mean, it's not, I don't want to say it's super, super physically. challenging, but there's, you know, there's a component to it. Where were you assigned first when you first started in July? Because 9-11 changes everything in September, but from July to September, what's happening? July to September, we were in our basic course. You know, we were just in, it's funny to call it, CIA 101. Do they actually call it? Of course, yeah. Well, that's, you know, learn about the agency. And so we were still in northern Virginia. We were at some buildings that were outside of what you'd know to be the agency buildings. Yeah, so we're still in Northern Virginia when 9-11 happened.

What happens? On 9-11? Well, for you. Oh, so for me. From your perspective. Yeah. So for me, you know, it's funny. I'll tell you a couple of stories there. For me, when it had, everything changed, right? That morning, everything changed. I can remember sitting there, well, two things. We're sitting in a class. Teacher comes in and says, well, you know, the World Trade Center in New York was just hit. This is why we're here. This is what we're doing. You know, we're going to keep working.

Now, I can remember that morning before anything had happened, we're sitting and, you know, having coffee. And again, I'm around some pretty exceptional humans. And they start talking about Ahmed Shah Masood being assassinated in Afghanistan the night before, right? If you remember that was the kickoff to 9-11 was the al-Qaeda assassinated Masood, the head of the Northern Alliance. That meant nothing to me. right i'll just be very candid meant nothing but these guys are talking about like yeah i can't believe that oh my gosh and yet subsequently that morning 9-11 happens okay so uh we're gonna keep going you know all that good so great well then like an hour later you know second plane hits up in new york and we're still

rah-rah uh but that point we'd stop class we're all standing and watching TVs and trying to figure out what's going on and i pulled out a little notebook and just started taking notes and i have no idea why. I had no idea why. 25. Yeah, 25 at the time. Just turn 25. Take it notes and making observations about what I'm seeing and the reactions of people. And I'll never forget one of the things. And it's one of my prized possessions. I still have this notebook where I wrote in that notebook. And this is the sort of the gravity of what we were seeing, but I wrote in that notebook. I hope they forgive us for what they're going to ask us to do because you knew it. This is war. This is terrorism. This isn't a U.S. Department of State or AID or another issue. This is a, this is us.

And I didn't, I knew nothing. I knew nothing. I'd been in the agency 15 minutes. I knew nothing. But I knew that. And so, me and a couple of guys, one was a former Navy SEAL, another was a former Marine Corps officer in Gulf War I went to a bar at like 1030. And we're sitting there having drinks watching it on TV because all the traffic was flowing out of D.C. All the cell phones were down. You know, and so you really, there wasn't anything to do. So we're sitting there and that was it. We're just sitting there talking like, all right, boys, we're going, you know, we're going to war. Period, full stop. And, you know, it just was what it was. Now, obviously, for me, it wasn't nearly as dramatic as it was for a lot of my friends that were, you know, turned right around and 18 days later

or whatever it was, we're actually on the ground in Afghanistan. I was still a trainee. But Yeah, no, it changed. It changed everything. Now, they weren't sending any of the CIA guys to the actual, say, ground zero or in D.C. itself? No, we weren't. I mean, look, the agency, for the most part, that's not, you know, we're not first responders. We're not, you know, that's not what we do necessarily. But if you recall, I mean, look, all the stories are out there now that the agency was, you know, thought, thought it was one of the potential targets for the fourth plane, the one that went down in Shanksville.

And so, uh, a director tenant at the time sent everyone home. And a lot of people left, but a lot of people didn't. Because, you know, Kofa Black was a director of CTC at the time, counterterrorism center. We were working. This, you know, we were, we were at war the moment the first plane hit, we were at war. We could argue we'd been a war a long time before that, but the government didn't acknowledge it. But no, no, yeah, no, it was agency people went to work, started calling through those lists and finding what, you know, and had the picture

put together pretty quickly. How long do you stay in the U.S. for before they ship you out? So in general, you know, it's funny. I was, in general, so you've got your full basic training, so a year, year and a half. Now, if you get language, it could be another year. If you have any other advanced training, could be a little bit longer. So the average, but the average people, I think, it's probably a year and a half before you get sent to an assignment. And how long was it for you? I was about 13 months because of some things that happened. And I'm a, I don't know, I'm a pretty go-along to get a long kind of guy. And so I had some adversity, me and a couple of other people had some adversity,

things he wanted us to do that wasn't exactly what we wanted us to do. Two of my colleagues sort of complained about it and then got stuck in purgatory. And I saluted and said, Roger that. How much shit you want me to eat? Fine. I'll do it. And so I got sent out early. which was awesome. I was the first one of my class to actually be sent out to the field.

I got stuff done, you know, coming out of the, coming out. When people are still years before they're even out, I'm on my second and third tour because I just said, yes, sir, and did what, you know, did what they asked. Now, at that point in your life, are you thinking about relationships or kids or anything or you just can't in that line of work? I don't know. You're 25, man. I mean, 26. I had a long-term girlfriend, but I don't know. That wasn't as big of a deal for me. I was exceptionally ambitious. I'm willing to say that now. And no, I wasn't really thinking about it.

No, it was get out, get going, get in the career, and be successful. And that's what I did. Where do you get sent to first? I was sent to a super high profile position. I can't necessarily say where on this one because it was very early in my career and I was, you know, super high profile position. awesome job. And the only reason I got it was because someone pulled out last minute and they're like, hey, kid, I remember they came in and they said, if you can be at this place, this is Thursday. If you can be at this place on Monday, that job's yours.

And I had been, and again, I said yes, sir, when it was going to be crap job one, crap job two. I'm like, that all sounds horrible. Sure. And so, yeah, they came down Thursday afternoon. If you can be there on Monday, it's yours. And so I went home, sold my car, packed my bag, and, you know, was there on Monday. And it ended up being an incredible assignment. Was it what you expected it to be overall, the job?

I mean, you dedicated your whole childhood and teenage years to get to that point. Was it what you expected it to be? At the beginning it was, absolutely. I think. That's a great question. I don't know. No, at the beginning it was because you're doing the job. And the job's incredible.

Right? I was a case officer. You know, I was an operations officer. My job was to recruit people to provide, you know, secrets. He was incredible. It was what I thought it was. You know, it was, it was, it was, uh, it was money. It was, it was excitement. It was, you know, really long hours. Uh, it was awesome. Seeing amazing things, learning amazing things,

talking to amazing people. Uh, it wasn't until sort of later in my career where, you know, the life catches up with you and the bureaucracy catches up to you and all of a sudden you're, you're doing government things where it starts to feel like a job. Not say the first 10, 12, 13, 14 years. That was great. It's incredible. What do you think hits you first mentally or physically? From a good or a bad? Either one.

Oh. Well, physically, when you're young, your liver works. And you can stay up all night and get up in the morning. So, you know, no, it's a young man's game because there's a lot of hours, right? You do one job from the morning till evening. And then you do your real job, right? And then if you're doing it well, you're up all night, you know, talking to people and working and shucking and john. And, you know, we used to talk about nobody gets recruited over lunch, right? These are nights and weekends and mornings and, you know, events. So your body when you're young can handle that.

Mentally, it's more of an, I don't know, for me, it was just, it was interesting, stimulating. I think some of the challenges, we were having to learn about things that were so different. I had no idea, right? I talked about Amishamasud had no idea. but now, you know, one day it's one area in one area of the world. The next day it's another area in a completely different topic. And you have to learn. You have to be conversant. You know, the agencies are worldwide organization. And so you have to be conversant on all these different issues. That was really challenging.

Fun, but challenging. Yeah, no. And then I think when you get a little bit older, when you've been around a little bit, when you've got a few experiences, good, better and different, the mental thing, well, the body, physically, physically it's harder. You know, hangovers last longer and, you know, you're just tired and cranky and, you know, whatever else and the accumulation of stress. But then the mental, too, you know, of losing colleagues or losing people you've worked

with or even the frustration of seeing, no, no, no, I provided exquisite, perfect information. Why do we make a bad decision there? And having to grow up and say intelligence is just one component. you could give them the perfect answer and they could still make a bonehead decision. You could give them the worst answer and they could still make a great decision. You know, grow up Peter Pan, intelligence is just one piece of the whole pie. And you're going to serve, I think the other thing was the transition between Bush and Obama. And you serve at the pleasure of the president and you are a civil servant.

You don't serve a party. You don't serve an ideology. You don't have positions. You don't have opinions. You know, you do what they say to do. And so some of the things that we were doing and some of the changes and some of those things, that was the other real big like, oh, okay, cool, this is different. Different way to approach some things. Is it hard to, you know, find out information that the public's not supposed to know about and, you know, see how things work behind the scenes and not share that with anyone or, you know, have an opinion on it internally and not be able to let that out or talk about it to people at the time when things were happening?

Yeah. I would say no. Now, a lot of people seem to be incapable these days of separating their personal feelings from policy. But that just wasn't how we grew up, right? It wasn't until John Brennan sort of queered the whole system by bringing in politics into the intelligence. But before then, you didn't have a position. We didn't make policy. We executed policy. We informed policymakers and then executed policy. We had no policymaking role. Period. Full story. up. And that was just the way we were raised. So there wasn't any kind of expectation, expectation for that. But no, I think, yeah, it's different. To know things that were happening and to know the story behind things and not be able to share that with people. But again, that's what we do. That's who we are. Right. My mom and dad, ultimately my mom and dad knew where I truly worked, but my brother and sister didn't. But my best friends in the world, I had to tell ridiculous stories to about what I was really doing.

Stories had barely made any sense. They're like, wow, that doesn't sound very interesting, and that sounds really boring. And I really thought you'd do more. And you're like, yeah, I know, I'm a huge disappointment. Does it feel like you're living a lie going through those years? And how hard is it to balance different identities or just, you know, and when you're coming back to the states versus when you're overseas? You know, to an extent, yeah, 100%. Look, I lived overseas in an alias name for two years.

And so I always joke, you know, when I first started going, my true name wallet was fat that I would leave behind and my alias wallet was thin. Well, after two years, my alias wallet's fat, not with money, but with, you know, whatever. and my true name while it's thin. And you start to kind of compartmentalize and firewall. People are like, oh, friends, you don't make a lot of new friends. I mean, you've got targets. You've got developmental. You've got agents.

You've got partners. But you don't have friends. Because what kind of relationship do you start with a new friend where you start off with the basis of a lie? And it's just easier to avoid that. Oh, high school reunion? Nah, I'm going to skip it. College reunion?

Nah, I'm going to skip it. Hey, did you check in with so-and-so? No, I didn't. Because the last thing you want to do is go back there and talk to your football coach or your professor, these people who you care about and care about you, and look them in the face and lie. I mean, it is what it is. But, again, you got to have sort of a... Okay, here's a good one.

So the Bureau used to say, you guys lie. And I'm like, no, no, we don't lie. We use cover. It's a tool to conduct this operation. Yeah, but, you know, we say we're FBI. I'm like, yeah, we don't. Ah, so you lie. No, no.

No, no. We use cover to protect our identities. And it's just, it's a reframing in your mind. And it reframe sort of the way you approach the world. One person's lies and another person's cover. And it's operationally necessary. I'm legally mandated. Legally mandated to fib to you about, you know,

or to not tell you the full truth about who I, am and what I do and what where I've been and all that stuff. And yeah, that, I mean, it, it weighs on you. I'd be, I'd be kidding if I said it didn't. But that's alive. How do other law enforcement agencies treat the CIA? Oh, most law enforcement agencies love us when they, when they know us. I mean, everyone's, look, everyone, until you meet us, everyone's fairly skeptical, rightly so, mostly because of what they see on TV or what they see in movies, you know, that all we do is manipulate people and we lie and we, you know, we, what do we go out and kill American citizens and all the crazy stuff that you would see. But once they meet us, they generally, generally like us quite a bit. I've had great relationships with U.S. and other law enforcement partners. Great relationships. Great relationships. Because, you know, again, at the end of the day, unlike what they really think, we're quite transparent. because we're not out here to manipulate U.S. people. We're not out here to break U.S. laws.

I think that's the other thing that really shocks them. We are the straightest arrows in the quiver. You're like, wait a minute. You just told me you use cover and that you do, you know, I mean, look, we bribe foreign officials and we steal and we break in and blah, blah, blah. And I'm going to tell you in the same breath, we are the straightest arrow in the quiver. And we are straighter than anybody.

Straighter than anybody. I'm going to tell you a story, right? when we pay people, I could pay you a million dollars right now, and it's me and you. And I'm going to give you a bag with a million dollars in it. And you're going to sign a three by five index card. I'm going to put up my pocket. And I'm going to come home and I'm going to do my accounting. And that's that.

And we do that all the time. Now, if you're the Bureau or you're the DEA or your other law enforcement, you've got to have two people to observe that. And you've got to have another person that's going to, you know, be the witness. And you've got to do all this paperwork and all this stuff. Why do they trust us to do that? because we are the absolute straightest arrow. Now, they recruit us to be the straightest arrow. And foreign laws, absolutely.

We break foreign laws. We are trained to break foreign laws. We're mandated to break foreign laws. We are mission to break foreign laws. But U.S. laws, we don't mess with it. 100%. That is the biggest fallacy of the agency. And so it's really funny.

So I just use that as an example. You know, these law enforcement folks that think that we're, you know, super bendy. Absolutely not. We're the straightest arrows there are. I mean, you don't see really scandals on the news of like CIA agents, X, X, Y, or officers, you just don't see it. Thank you. Well, I mean, look, you do from time to time.

We're like anyone else. But no, for the most part, the little chicanery stuff, the fraud, the stealing, the things like, no, we don't do it, not least of which we take polygraphs. But they really, you know, they recruit the straightest arrows and they bend us to go overseas, but they know, we know 100% when we come and, now, your listeners are this going to be like, oh, yeah, sure, yeah, what a liar, what a liar. Fine, dude. Don't believe me. I don't care.

I'm just telling you, we are the straightest arrows out there, which is nuts. What is your opinion on polygraphs? I think there are tremendous deterrence. If I had a nickel for every time that we'd make a joke about, oh, man, I'd do this, but I got to take polygraphs. Or I'd do that, but I got to take polygraphs. I think it's tremendous deterrence. I think as far as a piece of technology that enhances an interrogation, it's great. Or an interview, it's great.

You know, but as far as an objective tool, as long as you, treat it for what it's worth, a tool, great. But if you think it's the end-all-be-all, you're absolutely wrong. And too many people have beat them. Anna Montez, Alder James, you know, people beat polygraphs from time to time because it's just a tool. And the strength of the polygraph is the polygrapher. If you've got a good polygrapher, forget about it. It's great.

If you've got a shit polygrapher, the whole thing's no good. Yeah, I interviewed a former Secret Service agent who was kind of breaking it all down recently, Brad Beeler. And it was fascinating how they're using it now to hunt, say, sex offenders to kind of stop them to see what level they're at psychologically in their process. Interesting. So they're trying to see, like, is it someone that's just focused on, say, child pornography and hasn't physically touched someone yet? Are they fixable? What can we do here? At what level is it at?

Which is crazy. But that's how they're, you know, applying these techniques. God bless him. That is, God bless them. Yeah, I've had Homeland Security agents on that have worked those specific type of cases too. I think that's got to be one of the worst, if not the worst, types of crimes to work. Yeah, that's tough. That's as tough as it gets.

Yeah, interesting. Well, yeah, back to your question. Polygraphs are just a tool like a lot of other technologies, just a tool. and really the art of the technologies in the user. And we could talk about that with facial recognition. We could talk about that with a lot of high-tech type things. But that's how I feel polygraph. But the deterrence, man.

Yeah, it's no joke when you say, if I do X, Y, or Z, but I got to take a poly. Now, the CIA, very secretive. They never, you know, came out on the news or told stories or anything like that over all of these years. And how did the movies kind of get knowledge to portray certain things? Yeah. I would say there's probably always been people that have talked a little bit. And a lot of it is, I think, it's creative. You know, L.A.'s full creative people. And so, you know, you watch James Bond. I always say the most, the most authentic intelligence movie that ever would be, would be if it was like the first 30, you know, the first two minutes of James Bond where he does something really exciting. And then they cut to the opening scene. But if they cut to the opening scene, but if they cut to the opening scene, and it was James Bond from then on for the next two hours, sitting at his desk, writing a report, and then filing his accounting, and then getting some coffee,

and then having to sit in a meeting, and then finishing his report. That would be the most realistic movie ever. No, I think it's, you know, there are some daring do tales from the OSS in World War II, and obviously since then, people have a perspective and people want to get information out there, either to write or wrong, to clarify,

something that's untrue. Yeah, in today's world, I think, yeah, there's a lot more information that's out. And you have to. I mean, if you go all the way back, right, it was a church hearings and it was the Rockefeller Commission that outed a lot of the activity that we're doing in the 50s and 60s. Funny now that Cuba's back in the news, you know, some things that we were doing before. So there's always information that gets out, but, yeah. Is it hard for you to watch those types of shows or movies if you do at all?

Yeah, I watch them, but mostly, yeah, it's a laugh. You know, anytime there's an analyst or anything operational, it always makes me chuckle, right, Jack Ryan. Yeah, Jack Ryan is an analyst. Yeah, cool, cool, good story, bro. No, you know, I don't mind watching them. You always watch them, right? It's probably like any cop that watches a cop show and rolls their eyes, but still watches it. Or, you know, Navy pilots that watch Top Gun and roll their eyes, but they're still going to watch it.

You know, that's how I feel about it. I love watching Lioness. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I've actually never seen that one, but I don't know. There's there's, there's some, some things I try to stay away from on the two-wad stuff. Just discuss. What's the average career expectancy of a CIA officer?

Yeah. So for the most part, people don't join the CIA and leave traditionally. 30 years, 35 years. In today's world, just reflecting the demographics of our service and our society, society. People are leaving a lot earlier than they did before. It's not, people aren't looking at it as a career. You know, it's almost just a thing they do before they do the next thing. I always looked at it when I first started. It wasn't a career. It wasn't a job. It was a life. It's who I was, what I became. It's what I wanted to become. You know, there was no, there was no separation to it.

Now, I sort of, you know, got, got religion on that a little bit later on in my career. But, no, I think most people stay for quite a while. For you, when, when did you? When did you? start to feel that this wasn't going to be a forever thing? I would say about 14, 15 years in, and there were a couple of things that were going on. I had a son that was born exceptionally premature. He's born 28 weeks, a pound and a half. Mitch is my man. He's awesome.

He's incredible. Love that kid. And so I wasn't, I had to do some work that wasn't going to be overseas. and in my job I'm an overseas guy. I'm not a home guy. I'm not a home guy. And so we did some things that weren't overseas. And when I did that, I started looking around.

And I had an opportunity to meet with some really interesting people, legit billionaires. And hey, not to my Honda Accord, wasn't awesome. But when I drove my Honda Accord up to meet these guys and I'm looking at him and I'm going through his private exotic car collection. And I'm like, son of a gun. And again, hey, rightly so. But I'm looking at him, I'm saying, this guy's not any smarter than me, and he certainly does work any harder than me.

He's just made different choices and look at what he's getting. Fine. But he was meeting with me because something's money can't buy, which is Masters of the Universe type stuff. That was my first inclination. And at that time, I started to get a little entrepreneurial itch and, you know, bought some real estate and did some other, you know, things like that. But then went back overseas. Loved it. Great time.

Had to end up coming back from that assignment, not early. but I could have stayed longer because of my son's condition. And then I was going to end up having to be back in the States and working at our headquarters. And again, I'm not a I'm not a headquarters guy. And so, and there are some other things that were happening. The agency started to be politicized. People started to do some things inside that I didn't agree with. And I've always said, but dude, if you don't agree, watch that.

Nobody's making you stay. Go. And yeah, started looking around and thinking about other things. And then started to deal with, I think, my own mortality. You know, we all get one time around the sun or, you know, one time on this earth. And there's other things that I can do in other ways that I can make a contribution. And, you know, I have 22 years of federal service. I was old enough to retire, but not, I was, had enough years to retire, but it wasn't old enough to retire. And so ended up making a decision to leave. Without retirement. Correct. So how does that work? Yeah. It's awesome. You know, all that security of retirement with all your money and pension and health care and all that stuff?

No, I just left. So does that, how does that make you reflect on 22 years dedicated to something? Oh, I had an incredible life. You know, I've lived, and I'm still a young man. You look young. I appreciate that. I self-identify as a 28-year-old, but I'm a little north of that these days. You're 30.

Yeah, yeah. But I was, so it's funny, I was driving, I was in North Carolina, I was driving with a former colleague of mine. We were going out to teach a course. And her sister had, or sister or aunt or someone had breast cancer and was not doing well. And we were just talking about it and reflecting. And she said, you know, and she was early 50s or so. She said, if something happened to me right now and I, and I died, I'd feel great. I lived a great life. And I think that was one of the first times when I really reflected back. And I was like, you know, son of a gun. I've lived multiple lives. I haven't left a single thing on the field. And again, I'm not ready to finish now. But no, when I look back, I've had a great career. I've had great chapters in my life. I've had great relationships. I've done, I've done things that will make your toes curl and then I would never talk about publicly. And, uh, yeah, dude, if I walked out here today and I got hit by a milk truck, I got it, man. I got after it. And I had a, I had a great one. And so when I looked at my career in the agency, I had done a lot. I had done a lot. Now, at a certain point, I looked sideways and up, and I said, who do I want to be like? Or what do I want to do? And what am I willing to do to take the next step? In a certain point, the agency is just like any other government bureaucracy or like any other bureaucracy for that matter,

where you've got to start to do things that aren't about the mission to advance, right? you've got to adhere to certain things and yeah I just wasn't wasn't interested so it was a good time for me how was your mental health when you finished that's a really good question shitty I'm going to say some things that are a little bit controversial because I know there's some people that that think differently and maybe it's different now I hope it's different now hey could be completely different now the CIA does not care about your mental health, particularly the director of operations. Couldn't care less, right?

I can remember, I was just having the story the other day. I didn't understand that at the time. Since that time, I worked very closely with Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command and some of our Tier 1 units. And I see how those organizations take care of their Tier 1 operators, right? People who've put it all on the line and these guys get, I don't want to say whatever they want, I mean, it's the rehabilitation, it's the counseling, it's the help, it's all that stuff. And it's great.

They've absolutely deserve it. They've earned it. I'm glad that we do that. And they'll ask me, they're like, oh, it must be the same for you. I'm like, no, no, no, that's not how it works with us, right? Our medical professionals are there, first time when you're a young officer, right, and you go in and you talk to them. They're like, how you do you do? And you, like, oh, man, these guys are here to help.

And then you go put on, like, medical hold for overseas. and then you talk to a senior guy and they're like, no, no, no, no, no, see, here's the deal. They don't care about you. Their job is to disqualify you from overseas service. So if you're not feeling good or you're having too many drinks or whatever, shut up. Shut up.

That's not the people you talk to. And so, and that's, that's the hook, right? We've done and seen and, you know, I mean, if you're doing it right, you're doing some pretty horrible things or things that will, I won't say horrible. You're going to do some things that are going to weigh on you. And our, you know, so, so what's the, what's the, what's the treatment for that? What's the come around for that? Scotch. Whiskey, bourbon, right? But we don't generally, you know, there is no other mechanism. When I left the agency, people like, oh, you must have like went through some kind of like big evaluation or anything like that.

Absolutely not. Not a single person talked to me and asked me, hey, how you? you doing? You ever feel like putting a gun in your mouth? You ever drink till you, you know, you can't walk just so that you can get up and do it the next day? Nobody asked me any of that stuff. They don't care. It's a little strong to say they don't care, but organizationally, they don't care. On an individual level, some people care. And again, maybe this is all completely different now. But we put people in the hardest areas, asked us to do the hardest things, you know what you got a chance to do after you're done? Shut up. Move on. to the next thing. And if you express concerns about it, if you express concerns about the way that

you're medicating yourself or that you're doing any of these other things, you'll be disqualified from overseas service. No, they only, I guess, knock on your door if you went and, you know, when you retired and you started telling stories about everything you did or wrote a book or anything like that. Well, look, and that's just it too, right? I mean, we've got, you know, we signed lifelong secrecy agreements. If I'm going to write a book or if I'm going to write something, I am obligated to run it past the CIA's pre-publication review panel to make sure that I'm not disclosing any classified information. Now, that's exceptionally ridiculous. You know, if you look at these people that are the seniors out there that have leaked information and talk about sensitive information, you know, it's like everything else, right?

Everyone's equal, but some people are more equal. That only really works for, you know, people on the downside. But yeah, no, I mean, there's no, yeah, you think there's anybody out there that's reaching out and going, hey, you spent a lot of time here. did some really heavy stuff. How you doing, man? Somebody going to call me and go, how you feel these days? No, absolutely not. So where did that leave you? How did you cope with it? What was your path? Oh, drank a lot. Pushed it down. Pushed it real far down. Yeah. How long did that go on for? A handful of years. Yeah. I'm back around on it now. I did some things to reset. and I'm doing better now.

Back in a community, working with military and doing things like that. Give myself an opportunity to go back and give back and all that stuff. But no, it just, you know, it's funny. And really, the crux of it is, and you learn this right at the beginning. Or you learn it. People tell you. You don't believe it. The agency's never going to care about you.

It won't. It won't. It can't. It's an organization. Your family, they're going to care. care about you. Some people are going to care about you. The agency is never going to care about you. And you got to be okay with that. And, and, you know, you hear it and you're like, okay, cool, that makes sense. But then, you know, as you go on, you're like, yeah, but I'm different. I'm really good.

I sacrificed a ton. My time, my, you know, years, my happiness, my mental health. So it'll be different. And I think one of the hardest things is, uh, it's not at all. And it's such a slap in the face where you're like, son of a gun, I really thought it was going to be different. And they're like, no, we really told you it was going to be like that. No one's going to care. You want to applause. Join the circus. Not this. And for me it was, well, I'm sure, you know, I'm going to be all dramatic. For me, it was worse. I didn't retire. Right. So when you retire, you get a flag. You get this blue bag. You get a medal. You go to the awards suite and your family comes in and they read all the stuff that you did. And there's some closure to it. Right. But if you just leave,

even if you spent 18 years there, if you just leave, you hand them your badge, walk through the turnstile and walk away. That's it. And I was a. I was a 15-10. I was kind of a senior guy. I mean, you know, not senior-signor, but I was a guy. I would not a guy. DDO called me up. Nope.

Anybody senior called me up and says, gee, Charles, looks like you're leaving. Why are you going? Nope. But again, it's the life we chose. Is what it is, man. I don't know. It probably feels like prison.

You probably got. more outreach after you left prison than I did just to check in on you. Well, not from the system. The system, they'll be quick if you fail, you know, to re-arrest you. Yeah. But not, hey, did you find a job? Yeah. I mean, like probation and the halfway house does just because that's their job to make sure.

That's what I'm saying. But do they really care about you? They don't care, you know? There you go. But what the government does to individuals like yourself or the veterans, like I've interviewed so many, interviewed this army sniper, Cody Bowden, fell into addiction when he got forced to retire because of injuries. And that was his passion.

That was his purpose. Yeah. Going overseas, doing tours. He was a fighter. Yeah. No purpose when they forced him to retire. No checkup. He fell into addiction and ended up in prison.

Yeah. They weren't there to help him. Yeah. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, uh, God, it's horrible here. And I'm a little bit spoiled now. I deal with, you know, special operations community and those guys. spend a lot of time taking care of each other. And rightly so.

I mean, these are guys, all of them, all of our military veterans are all people that have done, you know, hard things. Even if the hardest thing was just leaving home and going to boot camp, right? You don't have to be getting blown up with IEDs or blowing people up to have, you know, served and sacrificed. But yeah, no, it's, you know, but it is what it is. It is what it is. It is fun.

I'll tell you another funny story. We just, my company just finished a big project. And it was wildly successful. And I told my guys, I said, this is the closest you're ever going to get to like a CIA thing, not being in the CIA. And I'll tell you why. We supported this project behind the scenes. There was a big team that was associated with it, but we were doing a pretty significant amount of lifting. And some people knew what we were doing, but most people didn't.

One person did. And we were supporting things behind the scenes and doing all this stuff. And again, it was wildly successful. A team gets together and they take a big picture. And we're not in it because we've already moved. on to the next thing. And no one knows what we did or what we did or the contributions that we made. And that's fine. And I told my guys, I was like, and that's a life. And if you don't, if that's not enough for you, knowing that we're going to get together and talk about what we did.

But if you need that public accolades and if you need all that stuff, uh, do something else. Now here's, Ian, this, this may be where the cognitive dissidents for me comes from. I wouldn't expect it from the public. I wouldn't expect the public to say, thank you. because they don't know. They don't need to know. I don't even know. But it's home team. You expect it from the home team.

And not to get that, it's just a little soul crushing. But, you know, it's life. So now you were young when you left. Yeah. A whole life ahead of you still. Yes. How did you, or when did it, what did it take to figure out what you were going to pivot to, what your new purpose was going to be?

Oh, my new purpose was going to be making money. And so I didn't, I had a, I was hired by Tesla, right? I had a really nice job offer from Tesla. And I wasn't, frankly, I still wasn't ready to leave the agency. And so it was awesome because I was in the catbird seat from the negotiation standpoint where I could just ask for a bunch of ridiculous things. And I got it.

And so, including like working from home before that was a thing and whatever. And so, but it was awesome. You know, the work that I got to do at Tesla to protect the company's intellectual property was incredible. catching, and it was great because that's what I do. And I remember, you know, talking to them about it. I'm like, insider threat. I was like, I don't know anything about insider threat other than I spent the last 20 years,

you know, creating and exploiting insider threats and other hard target countries and companies. So I come at it from that perspective. If you want to, if you want a bank security guard to design the security for the bank, get a cop. But if you want a bank thief, call me. And that's what they did. And so, yeah, I spent a couple of years doing that.

a nice chunk of cash. I hit it right at the right time. I had nice equity and, yeah, made a lot of money. And then I did that for a couple of years and then have my own company now. I was able to take the majority of that. I was able to take chunks of that money and start my company. And then the rest of it, of course, went to my now ex-wife. So here I am. So now do you think it's beneficial for those companies to hire former law enforcement like yourself? Well, yes and no. It depends on what they want to do. I think for most companies, if you want to protect your intellectual property from it being stolen from competitors or nation states, hire former intelligence officers. We know exactly what's, we know what it looks like.

There were times where, I'll never forget this one guy went to a conference. He got hit up by somebody from a foreign country, and we were watching it in the email exchange. And the foreign guy sent our guy in email and said, hey, you know, it was great meeting you. Excuse me. If you wouldn't mind, can you send that white paper that you mentioned? And so we're watching it. And our dude sends it. And it was nothing, right? It wasn't classified. It wasn't sensitive or anything like that. And I said to my guys, I was like, watch this. This dude, give him three days, he's going to respond. He's going to be over the top and say how great that was, how appreciative he was, and then move him from his company email to a personal email. And sure enough, three days later, he goes,

man, that was great. That was a really great paper. Hey, if you wouldn't mind, why don't you hit me up from this email and not that email? And they're like, how did you know that? I said, because I've done that a thousand times. He's moving him down the path. That's why we're going to get in front of it right now. So is it beneficial for companies to hire people like me that have been on the other side of this?

Absolutely, because we can see it coming from down the street. You know, almost be like, well, if you're designing an artificial intelligence algorithm, would it be helpful to hire someone who's done that before? Absolutely. cops are hit or miss. Cops are great from a physical security, from a lost prevention, from a workplace violence, you know, all the copy things. But when law enforcement comes in and tries to protect from theft of information,

it's a different beast. Kind of like if you brought me in to look at your physical security, I could do it because I spend a lot of time in that environment right now. But, yeah, hiring people with the right experience. The problem is for a lot of companies, they don't understand what it is that we do. And so they wouldn't necessarily think about, gosh, you know what, I really need a case officer. They don't know the hell a case officer is. Why would they?

But was it hard when you stepped into Tesla to like disassociate from your CIA skills compared to the corporate world skills? Um. Because you obviously there's no, you know, like a violent aspect or no one's shooting at you or anything like that. Well, honestly, that was one of the easiest things ever, man. People get really worked up about something and they're all excited and they're all exercised. Oh my God. Oh my God. And you're like, uh, hold on.

Time out. Time out. Is anyone shooting at us? Do we have any indirect? fire coming in. If we don't fix this tonight, is anyone going to die? No? All right, let's keep it in perspective. So in a lot of ways, in a lot of ways, it was easier because there are some things that people think are really important, and they are really important. But in the grand scheme of life or death, really important takes on different meanings. And so, and for us, I think the biggest

challenge for me, and this is where it was really useful to go back to my origin of law enforcement, understanding what attorney-client privilege was, understanding rules of evidence. Because if I had just come from the agency, it would be different because, you know, the agency, we're mission-driven, right? We don't break U.S. laws, but we break foreign laws. And so it would be very easy to look at something and be like,

yeah, but that's not really a thing. Well, starting off as a cop, coming in saying, yeah, I know it's not really a thing, but we have to do it procedurally, procedurally, or for, you know, employment legal or for whatever. There's some elements of a crime, elements that we have to prove here. And so I don't know, for me, again, without any malice of forethought, my two, the two experiences

I had were super relevant to come into the private sector. And I didn't find myself, I don't know, wanting to do any CIA stuff because I don't know. I just, yeah, I played within the rules because, you know, again, we're the strangest arrows. What's your business focus on now? So we are a private intelligence and security company, and we do two different things. for the public sector, we train SOCOM, J-SOC, intelligence community, and some federal law enforcement, on threats from technology, right? All the data that we throw off in our lives, whether it's from surveillance cameras, phones,

cars, wearables, travel, your online profile, how you spend money. We teach people how all that data can be collected. We teach them the threats from it. And more importantly, we teach them how to avoid that data. out being used to identify our operations. So we teach the threats and the mitigations, people to go overseas and continue to be able to do their mission in this age of ubiquitous information out there. We teach a couple of other things. We teach people how to harden their personal electronic devices and do what we call digital force protection, meaning if you're,

you know, your normal military guy, we teach you how to set up your phone and your browser and your AirPods and your PS5 or your Xbox so that when you go overseas, you're not leaking a ton of data that can be used to target you. So that's on the public sector side. On the private sector side, we support companies in a lot of different ways. We do insider threat investigations. We conduct enhanced due diligence and open source intelligence, enhanced and advanced open source intelligence.

We are a security integrator where we'll come in and evaluate a company's security posture and then make recommendations for developing security programs. And then, you know, we solve problems. And so in a really, and help people with their privacy. Same thing. Help protect executives. Help protect family members, how to regain their privacy. And even though that sounds like we do a lot, it actually all lays right along the same tree trunk.

And that is, you know, we play really advanced adult hide and seek. I teach people in the military how to hide. And we seek on the public sector side. We teach people how to protect themselves. What do you think is the biggest threat with technology to the average person? Ignorance. Ignorance. Not knowing the amount of information that you're unknowingly putting out into the world.

Anytime that we have an executive and, you know, one of the first things we do, what we do what's called a core report or a comprehensive online risk evaluation. And I'll say, okay, Ian, let me take a look at you just for fun. What are you concerned about being out there? Oh, no, I'm super private. Hey, you probably are. but just for Grins, we'll take a look anyway. And so I'm going to look at your open source information,

you know, some of the basic, the easy stuff, the publicly available information, but then I'm also going to want to go into the commercially available information, the paid databases and things like that. Then I'm going to go into breach data in the dark web, and I'm going to use all these other tools. I'm going to get a picture of you. And now you may be locked down tight.

Oh, but your wife or your girlfriend or your kids or your parents are not. and all the information I need about where you live, where you work, your pattern of life is open. You bought a new house. Love it too much. You know what's still on Zillow or Redfin, all the interior pictures of your house? I'm going to help you get those taken down. Hey, cool. You use the same password for all these different accounts?

Hey, how do you know that? Because it's been breached and it's available on the dark web. Here's your password, by the way. And oh, here's your social security number and your date of birth and your address. and all the information I need to be able to steal your identity. And people are gobsmacked. It's a girl, Peter Pan. Remember that breached data notification you got?

The latest credit card company, Walmart, Target, whoever, that says, oh, we'll give you life lock for a year and you never take it because it's the seventh time you've been offered that. I get the feeling of overwhelmingly like, yeah, but there's nothing I can do. You know, there are some things that you can't necessarily put that toothpaste back in the tube. but surrendering your privacy isn't an option either. And so that's it for me. It's just the ignorance and the, yeah, people not understanding what's out there about them.

And I will say that's by design. One of my hooks now that I talk about is like, you know, back in the day, humans used to be fit by default. And you had to really work to be fat, right? You get the gout? Well, that's a rich person's disease. you know, to be fat, you had to, that was a sign of opulence or a sign of wealth. Privacy was the same way. We were all private by default, and you had to really work to be public.

Well, now it's the opposite. Now we're all fat by default and design, based on the food we're given and, you know, all those kind of things. I'm not going to get off into that tangent, but we're also public by default and by design. Your social media, public by default, why they want engagement, and that's how they make their money. You know, all this information is out there public by default. And you, if you're not doing anything, all your information's out there. But you could much like, you know, you can choose to be fat or you can choose to be fit.

But if you choose to be fit in today's world, you have to take steps and you have to be thoughtful. You can't just go to McDonald's every day. You know, you're going to need to exercise. You're going to watch your diet and do some other things. Privacy is the same way. Hell, it's a lot. Frankly, it's easier to be private than it is to be fit. I'm chubby myself, so I can appreciate where they're coming from.

You know, by changing these settings on your phone, changing these settings on your social media, just being thoughtful about where you're posting your information or, or is it really worth giving up your email or your phone number or your date of birth just to get a $5 coupon from some store you're going to that you'll ever go to again. I mean, even with all the security, though, say I'm on Facebook and I'm talking to you about shoes, two minutes later, that ad's going to come up about shoes. Yes. Do the phones listen to you in that sense?

So you know, it's interesting. I was just reading an article about that the other day. There were a couple of companies that claimed that they were selling, or they claimed they had the ability to use your phone's microphone and run that through AI and be able to drive advertising from it. And these three companies had to settle with the FTC and with some other things because they didn't actually have that capability. I have seen mixed stories about it.

I think that the, I think it's possible. But what's really fascinating for me is the way, technology sort of is mixed and matched. You know, is it, is it Facebook this is listening to you or is it your browser? Is it your browser with a mobile ad ID that's in there? Is it some other, you know, feature or part? Is it because you're talking about shoes or is it because you wrote an email about shoes or is it because you looked at a picture about shoes or heaven forbid your gaze while you were scrolling your feed lasted a fraction of a second longer on a pair of shoes? You know, but all of that comes into it. All of it comes into it. And that's part of that. That's just, that's the

we live in. You know, for the most part, that's not nefarious. But knowing that that, if you're like, man, why do I, why do I feel like I need a new pair of shoes? Maybe you need a new pair of shoes or maybe you've been incepted with the marketing. That's true. I mean, maybe you searched for it a couple days before and the browser. It's just so weird. Is it every time a coincidence or, you know, it's just crazy. And, you know, there's also a reticular activating system, your RAS and your brain. It's the reason why, if you buy a black Honda Accord, now you drive off the lot and you start to see black Honda Accords everywhere. Well, is the universe putting more Honda? No, no. Your brain is now subconsciously focused on it. You hadn't been focused on it before. It's one of the reasons why affirmations and visualization is so

powerful for success is because when you implant that stuff into your brain, your brain will look for instances of it even when you're not consciously thinking about it. I think in a lot of ways, marketing works similar. And there's a little bit of confirmation bias of this. Is this real? Or is this, is the algorithm getting me? Or is it because I really do want some shoes? And I was just looking for that the other day. And now I see it.

And I had always been there. I don't know the answer to it. I do know that it is not fully coincidental. People spend a lot of money and spend a lot of time trying to get your attention in the attention economy and get you to focus on something so they can sell it to you. Now, I'll be at the airport and I'll be going through TSA. And there's, you know, maybe one in a blue moon where. someone's freaking out about refusing to use the photos. Are they actually protecting themselves or are they already caught by 9 million other cameras?

No, that's ridiculous. Yeah. No, what are you going to protect yourself from, you know, you're putting your photo in there? No, if you have a driver's license, if you have a passport, if you have a form of ID, your face is out there. But if you have a Facebook account or an Instagram account or an X account or what the hell else else. Otherwise, your photo's out there. No, this is a really interesting thing from.

me. And I always say, there is no reason to truly live private. If you want to be the Unabomber and live in a cabin, or if you want to be completely off the grid and buy a mansion, you know, and abat-a-bod, if you're a big enough deal, we're going to find you anyway. But most of us aren't. So for me, trying to strike that right balance between appreciate and enjoy and take advantage of all the conveniences of life now. There's a lot of tons of conveniences of life. you know, and understand kind of what's important and what's not. Now, don't be out there, you know, completely raw dogging it with your privacy. But at the same time, you know, find that balance.

Find that balance. The ring camera thing was fascinating. Which one? That just came out because of the Nancy Guthrie case about how they can actually tap in. And no one knew about this. Okay. So it's funny. I was just out in front of Anthony Guthrie's house about three weeks ago.

So I do a lot of security research. anytime that there is a big incident that happens, I'll go out and do a forensic review on it because I'm looking at how do you conduct the forensic reconstruction of it because I teach people how to avoid being forensically reconstructed. Here's what was happening with that. People were shocked, I think.

First off, it was a Google Nest camera. And they're like, yeah, but they didn't pay for the subscription so that information is not stored. Well, yes and no. anyone who understands, you know, information and sort of how information works, information is generally always stored. Is it saved? Well, that's a whole different story.

Is it saved in a cataloged, indexed way that you can find it easily? That's what, when we think of stored or saved, that's what we think about. Right? When I go into my file system on my computer and I find Ian Beck Interview 07, okay, that's saved. Well, if I drag that to the trash can and I hit delete, is it no longer saved? It's no longer indexed and easily findable,

but it's still on the hard disk of my computer until it gets overwritten. And this is where people don't understand. And this is what happened with Google, because again, I looked into that quite a bit. That was a thing. How did this happen? Well, the Bureau was able to go in

with some Google engineers and go into the disk space that hadn't been overwritten. So was it saved? Well, once, you know, was it indexed and stored where Nancy Guthrie could have, accessed it? No. Well, does that mean it's not saved or stored? No, it's different. And so that's what

happened here. They went into un- they went into disk space where this had been written on, but not overwritten yet. Until you override a disc, it is still there. It is still there. And I learned that recently, too, with so Google Drive, I permanently deleted something. Yep. Like I went through trash and then permanently delete. I'm going to air quotes that for you. Yeah, I found out you can email Google and make up to 30 days, they can re-put that back in, something that's already permanently deleted twice from your computer. Permanently deleted. That's what I'm saying. It is permanently deleted for you, but it is still on disk space until it's written over.

I'll tell you something that I'm tracking on now that's interesting. When's the last time you, you know, you traded a car in or you sold a car or something like that? Did you wipe the hard drive on the car? No. A lot of times you got into a rental car and you still see 10 other people's phones. Talk about that in a second. But even now, right? So if you turn your car in, you know how much personally identifiable information you were giving in to whoever buys your car?

I don't know why we're not buying cars now. It's almost like the data on the cars is probably worth more money than the car that you actually turned in. Rental car, same thing. So you plug your, you plug your gear in. You want it to sink. You know, do you want it to take your contacts? I don't know if you know, you know, what information that it's collected on cars. Matt, Matt, Matt, and I talked a little bit about this.

And I asked him because, you know, talks to a lot of criminals. And I said, hey, Matt, how do criminals think of cars? You know, when you're getting ready to commit a crime, how do you think about managing your car? And I thought his answer was kind of interesting that didn't really think about it all that much. But the amount of data that's stored on cars is tremendous. Tremendous. You rent a car, you plug it in. It's going to rip all the data from your phone if you're not using a data block.

And now, as you said, yeah, but you can go in and just delete it off the screen. It's the same thing. All you've done is delete the path that will give you back your ability to access. It doesn't mean the data's gone. The hard drive that sits underneath the infotainment system in the middle of the console of your car has that stored on there. Period, full stop. So how do you get rid of that info? You have to format the drive or format the car.

Most people don't. But what would you even do? You would tell the, say, like, Nissan, hey, can you please format this for me? in front of me? So you can go in, there's settings and things like that, and you go in a format the hard drive. Or, frankly, it's funny, I was talking to somebody, this is a great business idea. You go in and replace the hard drive. Oh, before you sell the car. Before you sell the car. Or you go to a service that would offer you, I'm going to go in and wipe your hard drive for you and overwrite it. Wiping, it's not enough, right? You have to overwrite it. The best encryption or

the best data deletion, you don't just delete it. You delete it and then you overwrite it with all, you know, random zeros and ones, that's how you really make something disappear and make it non-recoverable. Because if you don't, it's still going to be there in fragments on the hard disk. But for me, I'm an old school guy. I would take that hard drive out and put new hard drive in. I saw now, too, that they're putting cameras inside cars on some newer models. Well, no, I mean, the vast majority of cars, new cars, have cameras on the inside. And they want to do that, I guess, for insurance purposes? Well, insurance and, you know, drowsy drivers and all that. You know, Congress is working through

this legislation. It's, you know, we'll make the OEMs, the original equipment manufacturers, the car manufacturers actually put kill switches in there if you're drowsy or if you're distracted or, you know, something along those lines, which is ridiculous. I can't imagine it's even under consideration. But yeah, of course. Cameras in cars, cameras around cars. That's what we live in.

I mean, you look at a Tesla that tracks someone, those are pretty, you can't try to rob a Tesla without getting caught on camera. You're probably going to get, yes. Or even commit any type of crime around a Tesla. Well, you know, and again, people say Tesla's, and I always joke, you know, because I've worked at Tesla. I drive at Tesla. Every car is going to that. But Teslas are pretty cool.

I mean, we could sit and look right now. We could get on my app and look at my car parked in the parking lot of the airport. And we could look inside the car, around the car. We could talk to people around the car, just through my app. But most cars are going to that. Which is also crazy why that singer David put a body allegedly in a Tesla. I wonder what information they've been able to pull off of that. Because it's got to be stored somewhere.

Somewhere, presumably. Yeah. I am, well, this is why I had the conversation with Matt. I am shocked that I feel like everybody knows this, right? Everybody knows that your wheels have tire pressure monitoring systems that disclose information about the wheels in your infotainment system and your phone and your wearables. browser activity. I think everybody knows all this stuff, but I am constantly surprised by people who I feel like should be curious about this because they're committing crime and aren't,

or aren't thinking about it exactly in the right way, if there's a right way to think about it if you're going to commit crime. Not that I encourage people who make crime. I'm talking about the good people that are going overseas to do things on behalf of our country. What do you think is the biggest life lesson you've taken away from your career and, you know, the job you have now, just throughout your whole entire life that you want to share? with the audience. I got you thinking today. You do, man.

This is well, well done, sir. Well done. Biggest life lesson I have, and I tell this to my son all the time, and that is, right now, the differentiation between the opportunities

for success used to be access to information and opportunity. Well, now, access to information and opportunity, the playing field is level. now it's your ability to be able to consume that information, put that information into action, and work hard, and work hard.

I don't know, my life lessons, man, I've got it tattooed on my chest. Nobody cares. Work harder. If you're waiting for somebody else to help you, it's not coming. It's up to you, man. If you want it to be, it's you. And you can do anything you want to do. This life is incredible.

man, I've met some really fascinating people that started off from nothing and turned into something. Why? Because they wanted to. Because they were uncomfortable and wanted something different. And that's whether you came from nothing and you wanted to be something or you came from something and you wanted a lot. And just willing to go out there and push it into the table and just keep on going. It's incredible, man. I mean, I, gosh, greatest life lessons. Zig Ziglar, I love this one. You can have everything you want in life if you help enough other people. people get what they want in life. Most successful people I've known have been some of the most generous people I've known with their time, with their money, with their ideas. It's not about the

idea. It's about the execution. Everybody's got great ideas. It's the execution where people fail. Oh, I don't want to tell anybody what I'm going to do because I want to surprise them. I'm in stealth mode. Spoiler alert. One, there's no new ideas under the sun. Somebody else has thought of it. Two, you sharing your idea, it doesn't mean that someone's going to be. going to take it and execute. It's execution. Three, stay at the damn table, man. Life is hard. Life is hard. And it's what you do after you think you've done everything is the difference between success and failure. And I've, a million times in my life. You work until you're exhausted and you're ready to fall over. And you're like, I'm done, dude. Cash me in. I am done. And then you do one more

thing and that makes all the difference in the world. Time and time again I've done that. And I've seen so many people that have just stopped or quit or took a break or were happy enough with what they did, which is great. Now, part of that's my own neurosis of never being satisfied, having unreasonably high expectations of myself and others. But the greatest lesson? Yeah, very few problems in life that hard work won't fix in high explosives. But mostly hard work. Well, Charles, I appreciate this conversation. You coming on the show today.

It was great to meet you. And, yeah, it was a pleasure. Awesome. Ian, thank you so much, man. Really appreciate it. I'm really impressed with your operation you've got here. This is pretty awesome. So thank you for the opportunity.

Of course.