Modern Wisdom - #538 - Andrew Bustamante - CIA Spy Explains Nukes, Wars & Double Agents

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

Andrew Bustamante is a Former CIA Intelligence Officer and a Private Intelligence consultant. The CIA is one of the world's most advanced, secretive, shadowy organisations. Only 10% of their officers are field agents and actually have spent time undercover, Andrew is one of those agents. He's also been in charge of nuclear missiles and been multiple cover stories. Expect to learn why an alarm goes off at least once per hour at every nuclear missile silo across America, how the CIA protects itself from undercover agents being turned against them, what is actually in the President's nuclear football, the levels of clearance above Top Secret, what sort of personality traits the CIA look for, why Edward Snowden got Russian citizenship and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all of MASA’s Chips at www.masachips.com/modernwisdom use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Learn more with Andy: https://everydayspy.com/ Find out your Spy Superpower: https://everydayspy.com/quiz Follow Andy's Podcast here: https://everydayspy.com/podcast/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Andrew Boostermante. He's a former CIA intelligence officer and a private intelligence consultant. The CIA is one of the world's most advanced, secretive shadowy organisations, only 10% of their officers are field agents and actually have spent time undercover. Andrew is one of those agents. He's also been in charge of nuclear missiles and had multiple cover stories. Expect to learn why an alarm goes off at least once per hour at every nuclear

missile silo across America. How the CIA protects itself from undercover agents being turned against them. What is actually in the President's nuclear football? The levels of clearance above top secret? What sort of personality traits the CIA looks for, why Edward Snowden got Russian citizenship, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Andrew Bussementi. Androo Busfemante, welcome to the show. Thanks Chris, I'm happy to be here again. For the people who aren't familiar with you and what you do, what's your background? Yeah, I'm an XCIA covert intelligence officer. I spent seven years undercover and I left CIA to start a family, started business, and that's what brings me to where I am today, teaching spy skills to people for everything from business to personal life.

What's a covert intelligence officer? Yeah, so people don't realize that CIA actually has two types of intelligence officers. So CIA has overt, OV-E-R-T, overt officers, and covert, C-O-V-E-R-T, covert officers. Overt officers make up about 90% of CIA. They're all the people who work for CIA. Their tax return says CIA, they go to their parties on Friday night and they say, hey, I work for the CIA, they do disguise stuff, they do accounting, they do financial investigations, they do, you know, you name it, analysis.

But then you have covert CIA. Covert officers are actually undercover. Their IRS receipts, their tax does not say they work at CIA. None of their footprints, as they work at CIA. CIA takes a great deal of effort to kind of erase them from the internet and make sure they don't have a footprint that is affiliated with CIA or Washington, D.C. or the U.S. federal government. So about 10% of all of CIA officers are covert, and that was my 10%. When it comes to a vector for infiltration,

are those equally used? I'm gonna guess the 90% must be significantly more visible. They must be the ones that are easier for some nasty foreign actor to try and get into. Yeah, you know what's interesting is there's actually a third vector that we haven't even talked about because inside the federal government, the softest underbelly is actually in what's known as private intelligence contractors. So private intelligence contractors work for a different company altogether.

They work for Raytheon or Booz Allen or Kackaki, but they actually work at CIA headquarters. So that vector is the most susceptible vector for foreign intelligence because those are just commercial employees. Those have a clearance, but they don't necessarily make a career at CIA. Your overt officers are very paranoid about being approached by foreign actors. Your covert officers are also highly paranoid about being approached by a foreigner, but in the middle you've got this entire, this huge base of contractors that support everything from tech operations to covert action.

And they're not paranoid about being approached because they're just normal everyday contractors and they're always looking for the next big contract that they can sign to. What sort of tasks will the contractors do? They'll do everything that your staff will do with the exception of field collection, actual operational core collecting of intelligence in the field. If you remember Blackwater or if you remember any of the private military contractors, I mean, oftentimes those contractors are called in to do some of the most harrowing, most dangerous work because it's very easy for the government to spend money and hire contractors to get

them operational quickly. It's a much slower process to take a staff officer, train them in a new language, get all of the administrative paperwork, sign to get them, you kind of transitioned to a different operation. So there's a great need for the contracting base, but at the same time, there's been vulnerability in that base that we've identified. Yeah, the ability to expedite bringing them on board also comes with a similar level of increased risk. Exactly, right.

Yeah, we talk a lot in the intelligence world. We talk about convenience and security. And convenience and security sit at opposite ends of a spectrum. The more secure you are, the less convenient life is. If you're, I'm married to a, I love my wife. I'm married to a wonderful woman. She's also XCIA, but she wants to lock every door all the time.

So I get locked out of my own house. It's extremely secure, but it's just really inconvenient. She might just be sick of you. She might just want a little bit of room for one afternoon, you know. And yeah, it just uses a security as a convenient excuse. She's also a very smart girl. I didn't say she wasn't. Talk to me about how the levels of seniority work within the CIA.

I have a very low level understanding that you have the officers that are higher than the infantry, that are higher than how does it work when you get into CIA. Yeah, so there's definitely a hierarchy, but the hierarchy is largely classified, so I don't want to get into how that works, but I can still give you a sense. So everyone at CIA is all of the staff CIA employees, you're over and you're covered employees. They're all called officers. Your contract folks are called contractors,

so we'll leave them out, right? But everybody else is an officer. There's tech officers, field officers, analytical officers, you know, there's open source officers, they're all called officers. But inside the ranks, there's different levels. So it's kind of like if you're familiar with the US military or many militaries,

they'll categorize things based on a number, like an O1 or an E1, which means enlisted level one or officer level one. And you'll have E2 and E3 and etc etc. And as you go up in rank, you go up in number. The CIA has something very similar, right? So you could call it almost like a CIA one or a CIA two. It defines everything from your authority to your pay grade. It speaks to your level of experience. As you do more operations and have more years in service, as you take on larger operations that have a larger budget, you train in different categories, your CIA level will go up.

The hierarchy is a hierarchy because there's not enough space at the top for everybody to become a level 15, or whatever it might be. So what ends up happening is you naturally have a very large amount of, you know, first, second, and third tour officers, and then attrition or career progression just stalls, and then you end up having very few people who find their way into the senior ranks of whatever the senior number might be. Ultimately to the place where you have a few internal officers who might become large-scale leaders, leaders of the directorate of operations, leaders of the directorate of intelligence, leaders of the directorate of science and technology. But there's only one person

who can do that, right? So many, many people either find their way out or terminate at a lower level with their career. So you go from this relatively clandestine or at least a non-public degree of hierarchy, and then eventually you get to the top and you pop back out again, and you're now the director of some sort of operations, and perhaps you have to give press interviews, and you're now responsible for answering to questions from different people and you get drawn into meetings and such like. Yeah, you're exactly right. You'll get drawn into meetings and you might even speak to senders or congresspeople when you're still inside that zone that nobody knows. So that might still happen, but you're exactly correct. You'll disappear into the ether until 15, 20 years into your career. You pop out the other side,

and now you are a reliable source for them to put on CNN or to defend the president's decisions in Afghanistan or whatever else it might be. I imagine that being in the position where you perhaps have to defend the president's decision to do something even if secretly behind the scenes you didn't agree with it, but it is your patriotic and employment duty to ensure that the agency is still looked on in the right light, that it seems like a cohesive, well-oiled machine as opposed to one that's filled with discord and chaos and strife. I imagine that that must be a difficult pill to swallow for somebody that's probably incredibly conscientious, probably a little bit disagreeable, very, very smart, spent a long time doing this thing.

He suggested a particular course of action, something else happened that wasn't his choice. And now he's got to go on and actually defend it. Yeah, so you're not wrong. For sure, there's a little bit of that. And then keep in mind, too, that the CIA reports directly to the executive office. Like the president is the head of the CIA, not in terms of the director of CIA, but CIA doesn't, they don't go to Congress,

they don't go to the Justice Department, they go to the president, they're there to serve at the behest of the president and the president changes. Every four years or eight years, it's been relatively frequent that we've changed every four years recently. So it's almost guaranteed that throughout the course of your 30-year CIA career,

half of the presidents that you serve, you're not going to agree with. And then to your point about, you know, becoming, and we are all very disagreeable people at CIA. We're not hired because we're agreeable. We're hired because we can keep our mouth shut when we need to. But we're all very, you know, fire and brimstone kind of we believe in a cause and we're going to execute on that cause, but we are still, you know, loyal and obedient to the hierarchy. But those what ends up happening is when you get to that senior level, those that can kind of swallow the pill, bite their tongue and put on a smile for the public,

they'll get more press attention than those who don't. And that's why you see, frankly, that's why you see so many anonymous CIA sources in the press because everybody has an opinion, but they don't have the courage to put their name behind it. Yes, that does make sense. I wonder how the agency feels about having somebody who hasn't gone through any of the training, who hasn't gone through the psychometric evaluation, who's had security clearance and has been had the fingerwigged at them that you need to not talk about this, but basically has none of the fundamental skills that you were recruited for. All the skills that have continued to be assessed as somebody has risen

up through the ranks to get to some high-faluting position. It must be probably worrying, I would imagine, to know that the actions that you take within the agency perhaps that would affect history that would go down in the history books that would make press headlines or would potentially put your offices in danger are at the mercy of someone who wasn't selected by your agency who was selected for completely different. But when we think here's an interesting thought experiment, when you consider the role of the president, yes, you think about commander in chief, but mostly you think about someone that's going to deal with political infighting and what's he going to do about taxes and inflation and the rolling back rovers is Wade and blah blah. You don't

think about the military now. And it definitely seems like, is it Tulsi Gabbard she served? Increasingly people who is it it Tulsi or a Red Dead? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Okay. Does somebody in Congress that did spend a little bit of time serving? Dan Crenshaw would be another example, right? Yes, yes.

My point being that there are not massive amounts of people with military or intelligence experience that are rising up through the ranks. And yet, that's a pretty important element of their job. Yeah, you know, one of the things that we often joke about, well, we joke our jokes are different on the inside, obviously. We're not as funny as actual jokes. We're probably more like, you know, academic jokes. But still, one of the things we often comment on is how presidents on presidential candidates on the campaign trail make all these promises that they know nothing about because they don't have the clearance to get a top secret SCI clearance, a special compartment into

information clearance. So they're just promising what they're going to do against Iran and we're not going to take any more crap from people crossing the border and there's no threat from the Middle East and whatever they're saying they have no idea until they basically get to the last four people. The last four actually get an intelligence briefing. They actually are proven to have the need to know so that they can start making reasonable promises or reasonable plans to the American people. So it's really interesting because the American public, even the two Democrats and the Republicans, and as they go through their national conventions and as they hear all of their debates with eight to 12 candidates on each side, none of those candidates know what the hell they're talking about. They're just talking. They're

making whatever promise they truly believe will resonate with their constituency, not recognizing that their entire foreign policy promise might be underwritten as like it could be undermined the day they get that briefing. And what is difficult is that's why there's so much so much frustration with the president on foreign policy because they don't change their campaign speech. They make their promises, they get their briefing, they keep their promise, even if they know they can't fulfill it, they keep the promise, they keep saying the same promise, and then they get to the White House, and then they don't do what they promised. Because the truth is, once you're actually the executive, you have to do what's in the

best interest of the nation, and the best interest of the nation isn't always the thing that got you elected to office. It's a tricky game that they have to play. How much can you explain to me about the way that security clearance levels work? Because I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole a while ago and couldn't really work out. And then there's Q level and tell me what you can about how that works. Yeah, so it's a very complicated mess. So I'll tell you what I understand and fully recognize that there's a thousand people out there who are going to disagree with me because they know something else and that's totally cool with me.

So in the large part secret, secret clearance is the foundation of it all. It's the lowest level of clearance. Sometimes you'll see things as confidential or for official use only or different, different other subcategories, but those categories aren't really a clearance. Like, you don't walk around with a, you know, for your eyes only level of clearance. You either walk around with no security clearance or you walk around with a secret level clearance. Secret level clearance is actually so common that there's something called a provisional secret,

which means just by applying for a secret level clearance, you get a secret level clearance and it's called a provisional secret, which means just by applying for a secret level clearance, you get a secret level clearance, and it's called a provisional secret clearance. And you have it until you're proven to be somebody that can't be trusted. So once you have that, then all the other clearances stack on top of that. So the first most logical one is top secret. Top secret goes on top of secret, and top secret usually has to do with an area or an element of sensitive information. There's definitions for all of them. You can Google them to find out the specific definitions for a level of clearance.

I think secret is it could potentially do damage to national security. Top secret is could do grave damage to national security, right? And then inside of your top secret, top secret becomes a bucket with multiple different verticals. Sometimes when I was in the military, there's a special compartmental information, SCI, TSSCI, that has different categories. When I was in nuclear weapons with the military, those nuclear weapons specific categories were cat six and cat 12. The other 10 categories related to different things, aircraft, nuclear submarines, movements of troops, you know tank weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, whatever it might be.

Inside CIA, we have further subcategories that have to do with human intelligence. So you might have a human intelligence security category that is specific to counter narcotics, or specific to counter proliferation, or specific to Russian operations inside of Russia, Russian operations outside of Russia. It gets super compartmentalized, and the deeper into the rabbit hole you go, the more you get that compartmentalization. All of your, like, I've also heard of Q clearances. Q clearances, I think, are specific to the military. I think they have to do with the people who actually create codes that become the foundation for communication and for nuclear codes and nuclear launch sequences. I very likely wrong, but I do know that a Q-code, a Q-clearance, is a real clearance, it's not just from the exfiles.

Wow. And so we kind of have this same thing again that we talked about, that almost hourglass shape with regards to your level of public exposure. Also must happen here, in that you start off with a very low but incredibly broad type of clearance. You can see everything that is secret, that's not much in terms of the height, but that's everything in terms of the breadth. You get through top secret and then you begin to compartmentalize and you have the different numbers or you have the different subcategories, but then presumably the director and the president, the president has the most high level of clearance that's

possible because he has to be able to see everything across all levels of clearance. Now, I imagine that even the president must be compartmentalized against certain things that he doesn't need to know perhaps right now. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm going to go ahead Chris. Just that it's this same situation again, right? That you compartmentalize in and then you brought the broadened back out again. Yeah, you know it's interesting when you use that example it's a very interesting example.

There are two things that kind of that add context to it right. The first is that the higher the tighter the compartmentalization goes, the stricter the archive and data management process becomes. So a secret piece of information might literally be written on a piece of paper and might just get handed from person to person with a little rubber stamp that says secret on it.

And that's pretty much all the positive control you have. And somebody might accidentally drop it in the trash can or light it on fire or whisk it away and give it to the Russians. Who knows? But when you're getting to those super compartmentalized pieces of information, like you're talking about with the president, every piece of that data is archived, it's strictly monitored. There's, you know, backup against contingency against secondary and tertiary monitoring so that if any of those pieces of information are ever leaked, they can be reverse engineered to find out where the leak is. Because, for example, we would never suspect the president

of being the person who leaks information. I know there are some conspiracy theorists out there who suspect exactly that, but we could actually track back the data points to see, was it the president, was it the briefer? Because every piece of information the president gets comes from a briefer. Was it the person who wrote the article that went into the president daily brief?

Because everybody does a human being who writes that. There's a human being who carries the president's daily brief to the Oval Office every day. That person could open that book and start flipping away pages and taking pictures on their cell phone for all we know, right? So all of that information is really heavily guarded and monitored so that they can reverse engineer and find out where the leak is if a leak is ever identified. Is this a combination of physical and digital security then? Because presumably the

but I know the president's daily briefing is this binder type scenario that gets handed to him. That's something physical, right? There's pieces of paper with words printed on them. Correct. Going further back from that, there will be different types of encryption. There will be tracking on the encryption. There will be ways to work out. I'm going to guess that maybe tied in with the NSA or something, you may even be able to have a way to search for like plagiarism at university. Does this appear on the web anyway, web scraping to see if something matches something that was in the daily briefing, okay, where's this come from? So there must be a

very complex combination of security protocols going on here. Yeah, for sure. And I don't think any of us are really, again, when it comes to level of clearance, there's no need to know. I had no need to know how they protect the president's daily brief. But somebody out there does have that need to know. And that person would know exactly how it's protected. But you are correct in your assessment that there's both a mix of digital and physical securities. On the physical side, we call it positive control. Positive control means you don't only

have one person in control of something. You actually have two people in control of something. So if you or I are carrying a briefcase with something sensitive in it, positive control does not mean you have the briefcase. Positive control means you and I together have the briefcase. Maybe you're the one that has it in your hands, but I'm right beside you at all times. Maybe I'm the one that has it in my hands, but you're right beside me at all times. So at the end of the day, two people can vouch for every step the debt document or the debt code may have taken. That's positive control on the

physical side. And then you've got all the digital controls because your clearance and your role dictate what you actually have access to within a digital system. It's not that different from corporate America. You can't be a salesperson and log in to the accounting side of the software. You can't be an accountant and log in to the sales customer management tool. So there's digital and physical elements that go into protecting everything from the documents all the way to who the primary top 10 terrorist targets are that are going to get neutralized this week.

I'm going to guess as well that makes any infiltration or turning a vassette assets going to be much harder because you don't just need to get the one person you need to get the second person to. Correct, yeah everything's there because when we talk about positive control and physical security what we're really protecting against is it's espionage, we're protecting against an internal insider threat, a mole, an officer that gets turned over. We've seen that and we've seen how devastating it can be. So now, everything we're doing is excessive security, again, on the security and convenience, very secure, not very convenient. It can seem archaic that in the modern day, you're still carrying around a printed binder, right?

Remember when President Obama insisted on having a palm pilot that got the head security on it, there's just there's really funny stuff that we just never think of. Talking about something that's with the president at all times, you were in charge of a lot of nuclear weapons, inter-ballistic, inter-continental ballistic missiles and stuff, what can you tell us about the nuclear football, the president's briefcase thing? What do you know about that? Yeah, you know, that's another one of those areas that we don't, it's kind of a mystery in a lot of ways, but what we do know for sure is that inside the football is a code, a code that authenticates, that it is in fact a code that was dictated by the president. And it's really hard, let me see,

there's a, the way that the codes are carried, I've got, this is just a small piece of cardboard for my desk, right? The cards are actually, cardboard like this, they're pretty thick. And they're encased in plastic. So if you've ever had like a glow stick that you party at a rave with, right? You know how you have to crack the plastic and then shake it up to get the glow. So inside the suitcase is a piece of plastic that's opaque wrapped around a card, and on the card will be 6, 10, 12 code,

the digits, the alpha numerics that show that it's an authentic code. So the president would have to open the case, take this out with somebody with whoever's holding the case for positive control. The president would crack the plastic, take off the case for positive control, the president would crack the plastic, take off the two sides of plastic, and then actually have the authentication code in front of him. And then he would have to dial that into the briefcase, which would send the signal

nationwide to multiple intercontinental ballistic missile bases, as well as the standing nuclear forces that exist with the naval arsenal and the air arsenal all simultaneously. Again, it can seem archaic that it's all in a physical card inside of a briefcase, but that is the only way we can make sure that nobody can pretend or artificially hack into the system and trigger a nuclear response. I'm alright in thinking that there's some sort of machine in there as well with something that you would turn, or is that just in the movies? Two keys that you turn, Mr. President, can you please make sure and then press the button?

That doesn't exist in the suitcase, the briefcase. The briefcase is there just to send a signal. It's a one-way transmitter, right? He puts in the code, it transmits it out. The keys, the two keys that you're talking about, those actually exist with the nuclear officers who are sitting underground in charge of launching the nuclear missiles themselves. So if you continue the same story, after the code puts in the authentication, after the president puts in the authentication code, that authentication code is then digitally sent via something known as an emergency action message in EAM, and it hits all the nuclear

bases in the US simultaneously. Red lights go off and every bunker, every... Even if you're not one of the bases that would need to be able to fire, oh God, so does that mean that some alarms going to go off, and you don't know if your particular base is the one that's going to have to press the, that turn the keys and press the button. That is making all hellbreak loose for, I don't know, 300 operatives across the US or something. Yeah, so, and we can expand on this too, because you're exactly, you have it exactly right. 300 people, there's, there's, each base has 10 silos, each silo has two officers, and each officer is in charge of approximately 10 warheads.

So whatever that comes out to lots, right, 250, 300 or so, individuals will have this red light go off and they'll pull up on their screen, a code, 10, 12, 15 Alphanumeric digits, they'll type in their code. The screen will say this is an authentic code and then they'll follow a checklist that says you have to turn your keys. And eventually they'll go through the whole process of check, check, check, check, check, take off your key, insert it, count down 3, 2, 1, and then the person on the left will turn. At the same time as the person on the right who turns, but here's the thing, nobody knows if their missiles are the missiles who are going to launch because the code tells the system which missiles are going to which target.

The actual operators themselves have no idea. No way. So I might have, I might have my missiles might be aiming at some place in the Middle East, and the guy, you know, the next base over some of his missiles are aiming at whatever, Asia. We're all turning, but the code is what tells the system which one's to actually launch. That's like a nuclear game of Russian roulette. You just don't know which one, but presumably if you guys are on site, how close are the nukes to the guys

in the bunker? Pretty far, actually. Oh, so you wouldn't hear a rumbling, a distant rumbling, or anything like that. If you're, if you happen to be the one launching and you happen to be launching from the closest launch bay, you might hear the rumbling. You might also hear the rumbling from somebody else who turned the key and actually had it, but their missile is closer to you than your own missile. I understand.

Yes. Yeah, that would be the foolproof way of turning the key. Is it me? Yeah, it's not. I don't need to worry. It's not me. Yeah. It's interesting.

So the reason we do it that way in the United States, to get exactly to your point, and I know you're kind of joking about it, but the seriousness is, we don't know. The last thing you want is to have a conscientious objector at the moment where you need to launch a nuclear weapon. So the way that they kind of keep the human safety element, instead of making it something that could be hacked, the way they keep the element of having it be human-based, but prevent against the conscientious objector, is they make it so that everybody has to turn, you know, every time. And then the system determines whether or not the targeted, who the target is. Now, to further add

to that chaos, we get those emergency action messages about every 45 minutes. So they're not, like, on a shift of eight or 12 hours. You're not sitting there quiet for 12 hours. Once every hour, you're getting an EAM, a red light, a siren that goes off that comes in and it gives you a code, you pull out a checklist, you go through everything, you find out whether it's an authenticated code or not, and then you do whatever the authenticated code tells you to do.

It's a constant drill because- Oh, no way. So you never know. Justin Drill. Oh, no way. So they are constantly sending you decoy codes to put into the system. Oh my God. It's a very, very hard job. And for anybody out there who's listening, who's ever been a nuclear missile officer or who plans to be a nuclear missile officer or who currently is, I understand the pain that you go through. The world doesn't know that they're pain, but I understand their pain and I appreciate their pain.

And the whole world does too, we just don't know it yet. There was that story I learned about the Russian operative who decided not to turn his key, even though he'd had the instructions passed down. And I suppose that's the conscientious objector situation you were talking about. Yeah, it's funny. There's a significant difference between how the United States structures their nuclear professionals and how Russia structures their nuclear professionals.

So in the United States, we don't really have a say. Here's the other thing that's kind of crazy, right? If you're in one silo with your partner, Chris, and I'm in a different silo with my partner, if me and my partner like high five each other and we're saying, nope, we're not turning any keys. We're done. We're not playing this game. It doesn't matter.

If you turn your keys, our missiles will still launch because the system controls everything. It's just looking for one authenticated pair out of the hundreds of pairs that are out there. It only needs one and then they're gone. So even though it's not the base that your missiles are aiming at and the code is actually for another set of missiles because you in your particular silo turned the keys, that sends the network a signal. Oh, so this is distributed as hell. You have decoys in terms of the times that are coming through. You have the two people, so in terms of a conscientious objector, you've got pressure from somebody else, and then you've

got this incredibly decentralized system that means only one pair. Dude, that is wild. And in Russia, in Russia, they don't have any of that. In Russia, it's so in the, it's partly because in the US, your, your junior officers are the ones in charge of missile silos. Like, these are guys 22 years old, 23 years old. It's their first job in the military, and they're carrying a nuclear key around their neck after going through three months of school on when to turn the key, right? It's? It's amazing. In Russia, it's the opposite. They are senior ranking officers who control the nuclear weapons. So in Russia, they have actual command and control of their specific warhead. So if the president of Putin says launch, and the person in charge of the missile is a conscientious objector, he won't launch. He can go to jail

or he can do whatever, but he has the right not to press the button, not to turn the key, and nobody can turn the key for him. It's a completely different model than ours, junior officer versus senior officer. There's no space for conscientious objectors on one side, there's space for descent on the other side, and part of it's due to modern technology and everything else, but it's a very different world on the other side of the pond. Speaking of Putin, Edward Snowden just got given Russian citizenship. Congratulations, congratulations Snowden, I'm sure that you worked long and hard for that. What do you think? What's your thoughts there? Yeah, so I feel like there's a lot of, I understand the debate out there about whether or not Snowden's decision was good for America or bad for America, whether it was

legal or illegal, whether he's a criminal or a hero, but there's also a certain element that you are who your friends are. And right now, Russia just granted him citizenship, which shows that Now Russia just granted him citizenship, which shows that he is serving the Russian interests. You don't give citizenship to somebody who isn't serving your own national interests. So we know for sure that's no one serving the Russian interests. Now does that mean that Russian interests were to give away all of his inside NSA, maybe, or are Russian interests simply to create ongoing frustration in the Ukraine Russia front crisis right now by making a very public figure, now a hero of the Russian people, maybe.

But regardless, what we have here is we have an American citizen who, whether he intended to or not, he is now a representation of the greatness of Russia, and he himself continues to be this controversial character for the United States itself. And I'll go one step further to say, Chris, that what Snowden did by whistle blowing on the Patriot Act and the collection against US.S. citizens, what he did there is largely without question. There's not many people in the intelligence community who criticized him for that specific act. It's the fact that he stole a bunch of other compartmented secrets that

had nothing to do with that, and he kept those as like a just-in-case insurance policy, and then he also compromised those secrets that had nothing to do with collection. What were those? What were the second sets that he stole? A lot of those remained classified, but it was secret. It was missions and operations that we were doing outside of the realm of counterterrorism collection within the United States, and the fact that he stole those and downloaded those

and carried them on a thumb drive and continued to use those as ships. If you go back and you look at the Snowden's history, he moved from place to place, from Hong Kong to Ecuador, to Russia, and every time he just gave a little bit more, right? He kind of bought his next airplane ticket, if you will, with a new secret. And that's the piece that makes people so upset.

That's what is technically makes him a wanted man in the United States. Not that he whistle blew on a program that was later determined to be illegal, but that he took this insurance policy with him that actually made him, you know, inviolation of the espionage act. And presumably, maybe the agency knows what he has, but also, I guess, maybe not, depending on the ability to track what he pulls off on a thumb drive, maybe the digital security be sufficient to know what it is. But he could have given back 10% and still have 90%.

Correct. Nobody knows what he's given, but they do know what he's taken. And then it's to your point, it's the digital piece. He only had access to certain programs, according to his clearance and according to his rights. He only had download rights to certain programs. So that's something that the NSA gets to deal with on their own to decide exactly what those programs were and what the damage was. But nobody who is satisfied with solely being a whistleblower takes the extra just in case. Nobody else premeditates how they're

going to continue to flee custody when they think they're doing the right thing. And I think that's the piece that gets overlooked oftentimes because everybody focuses on the it's how they're going to continue to flee custody when they think they're doing the right thing. And I think that's the piece that gets overlooked oftentimes because everybody focuses on the program to collect under the Patriots. Nobody thinks about the secondary and tertiary programs that he also took to help pay his way to protection for the last decade. I guess he foresaw the incoming shitsdom that he was going to have to deal with. And this was his...

Yeah, I suppose that that turns the situation. I hadn't heard about this before, but it changes the situation from being a single, noble patriot who is doing his duty for the country to... someone that feels a little bit more selfish. It feels a little bit more like he has an agenda, he's looking out for himself. And I understand the motivation. We're all looking to preserve our own life and freedom and liberty and who am I to say that I wouldn't do the same thing in his situation as well. But I would agree. I didn't

know about that, but I think that you're right. Had he have been the completely selfless actor doing something to call the powerful to account, maybe he would have got Epstein'd, maybe not, but he wouldn't be the same type of distasteful actor I think that he's seen now. Yeah, and it's very interesting because it just shows how the lens of history, especially in the world of espionage, the lens of history is short. It's, we remember the big things

and we forget the small things. And in the first weeks and months and the first two or three big moves that Snowden made, all of this was very public knowledge. It was very publicly, you know, we were all publicly aware that he stole the, you know, this specific program and others. But then over time, the and others became something nobody talked about. And then now there's this, you know, huge movement about, you know, Snowden is a hero because

he, you know because the court system later found that this one program was in fact illegal. Nobody debates that, right? Even I don't debate that. I've always said he did the right thing the wrong way. And I know I get criticized saying that that's a cop-out answer, but I don't know of a better answer than that. You don't end up a Russian citizen by doing the right thing the right way.

You end up a Russian citizen by doing something wrong along the way. How much do you think Russia could have given him citizenship to get access to some of the information that he's got? And if he was to start to reveal the stuff that he hasn't yet rescinded, does that... I mean, he's already quite a high public enemy, or at least a private enemy, an agency enemy, I suppose. That would... I'm going to guess, make him even more of a concern, even more of a worry. Yeah, what's hard now is... Snowden has always... He's always been seen by the American government as a fugitive.

But now he runs the risk of becoming a combatant because now that he's a Russian citizen, if he participates in some sort of cyber warfare or digital warfare or if he assists their intelligence services operating against American citizens, now he's become a foreign actor. Now he's become a combatant in a large scale conflict that's actively happening in Europe. That, to me, the fact that he was granted citizenship so close to the mobilization of 300 troops, so close to the threat of nuclear retaliation

out of Russia against Ukraine, you know, on the heels or on the front toe tips of a mid-term election in the United States. This is very much an information warfare kind of move. It's not that he gave something new, it's not that he did something new, maybe they've been looking at granting him citizenship for months, they were just waiting for the right time. But the danger that he has now is he goes from being an exiled fugitive to potentially being an actual target because, you know, it depends on whether or not that he rescinded his American citizenship or if he retains his American citizenship,

but we know that terrorists who were also American citizens became targets for kinetic strikes. If he steps into that combative role, the combatant role, he may very well end up on the same list. How do you think the agencies who his evidence or his confidential material relates to will have reacted? Presumablyably when he took this stuff, maybe it's about people that are in the fields, that they will have had covers change

or maybe been pulled from the field or whatever. And I mean, when did he, when did this happen 10 years ago now? Maybe more. Yeah, I think it was more. I don't know the specific year even, but what I would imagine, and this is me being very honest, I'm guessing that most professionals,

most intel professionals at this point in time, they just laugh when they hear the names noted. He's not a serious threat anymore. The first reaction is probably laughter, people scoffing and laughing at this guy who did everything wrong, even though he did change the program, like the court system, the whistle blowing that he did actually changed the direction of American policy. He's not seen as a hero in any kind of professional circle because of the way he did it.

So the first reaction is laughter. And then shortly on the heels of that laughter, if there's somebody in the group who's kind of more somber, the next feeling that we have is pity. Because the guys outcasted. He's never gonna have, he's never gonna live the American dream. He's never going to have, he's never going to live the American dream. He's never going to be welcome back in the United States. He's, he's, he's all, he's going to, if you've ever been to Russia, have you, have you dealt with a Russian person?

Lex Friedman and Michael Males, but I don't think that either of them are representative of Russians. Or maybe they are, maybe they are. So when Lex is in serious mode, he's relatively, he's pretty true to form. But Russian people are very stoic. They're very cold and distant. They're not warm. They're not like friendly or polite or hospitable, like not at first glance at least. So that's his culture now for the rest of his life. There's no, you know, getting drunk in vodka is great, but it's not like he's going to be going to Margarita nights and nobody's going to be bringing over Homemade guacamole and there's not going to be the ball of game tailgate that he's going to be invited to anymore. So, it's kind of sad.

He's missing out on all the best parts of America, even though he, at some point, did what he believed was in the best interest of America. And that's kind of something that's sad when you consider it. Presumably, all of the stuff that he had evidence that related to has now access codes and maybe even the way that the NSA works in terms of hierarchy, how information moves around. I guess that that very quickly

just got retroactively and proactively changed so that all the information that he had was basically useless. So that does make me think that the Russian citizenship in exchange for him giving them information kind of becomes a moot point because you have to be pretty thick to believe that the US wouldn't have changed things in order to basically compartmentalize all of that information to now be obsolete. So yeah, and to go a step further than that, it's, you know, let's, and I apologize in advance if I'm boring anybody with this level of detail, right? But when you give somebody access to an NSA program, it's not like you're giving them, you know, a PDF to page right up about, oh, we have a program that collects on you name it. Iranian generals, you know, traveling to Yemen.

Who knows? You don't give them like, you know, you don't even give them a 30-page PDF. You're actually giving them the source code. You're giving them the specific ports of entry, the file and data infrastructure of how we built it. So if you can imagine giving someone the blueprints to a house, yes, they get to see the house, yes, they get to see how the house is built, yes, they know where all of the doors and entrances and all of the vents are, but they also know how you build a house. They know exactly what your measurements are. They know exactly what kind of wood you use. They have all those details. So if you could apply that to the world of cyber technology, if you could apply that to the world of offensive cyber warfare, now with the source code that NSA actually uses to create a program, you know, the Russians, the Chinese, the, any, the Cubans can reverse engineer exactly how we

create a program, exactly how we create a Trojan horse or a false flag or whatever else it might be. So when NSA has to fix that, they don't fix that quickly. That's not the kind of thing that like we very quickly and efficiently and rapidly change everything. You're talking about, we know that because they understand the blueprint, they're gonna be able to break into five or seven other programs that they've been targeting anyways.

So we have to go through this huge transformation to change the way that we build programs. Wow. So the downstream implications of him getting that information and taking it off-site is huge in terms of the workload? Correct. It's not just, you know, it's not like somebody takes the cipher code to your front door lock and you change it from one, two, three, four to four, three, two, one and now

you're safe again. It's more like they understand every nook and cranny about your house. They know which windows are single-plated glass and which door jams are loose and they know that they know everything. So you basically have to leave that house, sell it to somebody else, and go to a whole new house. And that doesn't happen quickly. Going back to the CIA, what sort of recruits do they, or what sort of What sort of recruits do they, or what sort of talent traits skill sets? Are they looking for in the role that you had particularly? Yeah, there's, you know, it's interesting. I get this question fairly frequently because we like to think that CIA officers are kind of homogeneous, that they all have

certain core character traits in common. And you're not wrong. A high tolerance for risk, a thirst for adventure, a certain level of extravertedness, curiosity, natural memory, whether it's short-term or long-term. There are certain skills that are relevant to a field officer or a national clandestine officer or a core collector, whatever you might want to call them. But then, far more than that are these nuanced skills. Because CIA knows that at any given time, anybody could be a spy, right? You could get tapped on the shoulder tomorrow, Chris, and you could go through the farm,

go through the training pipeline, and come out of spy. And you'd probably be very good at it. and you'd probably be very good at it. Most people would probably be very good at it. The only question is, who they give that training to. So the reason it's hard to get the training isn't because it's hard for people to learn it. It's because CIA is looking for very specific skills at a specific time.

So right now, if you speak Chinese, or if you understand the nuances between Thailand and China or Taiwan and China, if you speak Ukrainian or if you speak Russian or if you speak Belarus, Belarus, if you are familiar with that area, you're going to be in high demand right now. If you know anything about nuclear weapons, you're going to be in very high demand right now. If you understand Iranian drones or drone technology, or if you have a way of traveling to and from Iran safely, you're going to be in high demand right now. Two years ago, we were very interested in what was happening in Africa.

So maybe if you spoke Yemeni, you'd be interesting. Maybe if you spoke Libyan, right? If you had Arabic that was relevant in Yemen or Arabic that was relevant in Libya or in Syria then you'd be of interest. Now those same people aren't of interest. So it's like it's the flavors that get you recruited. The core skills are actually not that hard to find in people. Interesting. I'd hope you say that your profile and your wife's profile are kind of different, in fact, maybe polar opposites. So, yeah, there has to be some core competencies or core elements that make you both usable, but then also you have these different flavors, and presumably you then

get siphoned into different roles based on those. Yeah, exactly right. And, you know, I'm more extroverted, So I was better suited to go out in the field. My wife is very, very introverted. She was perfect for doing deep research. My, but the places where we're both very similar is we're both extremely loyal. The agency is able to test for your loyalty. We're both extroverted. How do they, how do they test for loyalty? Yeah, so they, they do a lot of psychological evaluation. They do a lot of testing of how your brain handles cognitive information. So you go through a significant amount of psychological testing and then you also go through a direct interview with a psychologist themselves. So they can actually measure

your threshold for where you would withhold information from somebody who you are subordinate to and they can also measure how comfortable you are in a subordinate position. So there are some people who don't like bosses at all. I have a problem with authority, but I don't have a problem with authority that I believe in. So if I think that I have a good boss or a good manager, man, I am super loyal to that person. If I think my manager's a dipshit, I'm going to do everything in my power to undermine them, right? But that's a nuance that in the corporate world, nobody likes, right? And the corporate world will be like, oh, that's not really, that's not really professional. But when it comes to who are you going to give secrets to the person who's loyal to a cause that they believe in, all of a sudden you're very willing to take a gamble on that person, whereas the person who's loyal to a cause that they believe in, all of a sudden you're very willing

to take a gamble on that person. Whereas the person who, you know, they always think they're right and they never want to believe anybody's better than them, that's not going to make a good officer. So my wife and I are both very subservient to the person, to the authority that we decide to subvert ourselves to. And some people are like that and other people are not. Is there anyone well-known that you think would make a good intelligence agent?

Obviously, they would have to start again and not be famous, but would you have Lex as an agent? Yeah, so it's interesting. I have come across a number of people who I would say would make good intelligence officers. So Lex is awesome. I really enjoyed talking to Lex. I do think there would be a good spot for Lex in good intelligence officers. So Lex is awesome. I really enjoyed talking to Lex. I do think there would be a good spot for Lex

in the intelligence world. I don't know that it would be in field operations, only because Lex really believes in the goodness of people. When you believe in the- What a flaw. What a flaw. When you believe in the goodness of people, you can't be out there lying to people's faces.

It doesn't work. Right? Like you have to see people as tools, as commodities, as ones and zeros. Like you have to take a very cold hard stance to all people. If you're going to go out there and steal information from them, lie to them and trick them into false relationships. That's essentially what a spy does. And then you get that person to exchange information for liquor or booze or women or money or whatever else they might be, right?

That's not a job for somebody who really believes in the goodness of people. But, you know, on the, as an analyst, taking information and being, being able to make sense out of, out of disparate, conflicting information and coming to a meaningful, probabilistically relevant conclusion. I mean, that's what Lex does all day long with robotics and with mathematics, right? Now to mention what value he could bring in the world of technology, in the science and tech part of CIA. He could be the guy that creates the next SR-71.

So that's what I'm saying. There's a space for everybody at CIA. We don't realize it. We're all much closer than we really think. It's just a matter of the psychological evaluation and then of course being identified, being seen, being discovered. That's the hardest part.

Who else did you meet that you've looked at and thought, you should really consider the little change of career here. I'm trying to think of who else I would know that other people would know too. So when I look at celebrities, right, Dennis Rodman would not make a good spy. It'd be really, really hard to put that guy into skies. It'd be really hard between the piercings and the tattoos and it's hard to put that guy into skies. It'd be really hard between the piercings and the tattoos and it's hard to make that guy not look like the eight or whatever he is as well. Yeah, that's tough, right? But then you have folks like Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks is like your perfect spy. Not only is the guy a great actor, but he is incredibly forgettable. He's just a

forgettable white guy. Even as I say, Tom Hanks, people might have a picture of one character in their brain, probably the guy from Forest Gump. Does that guy look like a threat? Nope. If Daniel Craig walked into a room, would you notice him right away? Fuck yes, you would notice him right away. You'd either be jealous of his good looks, or you'd be excited by his good looks, or you'd be immediately intimidated by his gigantic frame. That guy's not

going to be a good spy, right? Same thing with Pierce Brosnan, like most of the guys out there who would who are playing spies would not actually make good spies. It's not until you get to like, like Black Widow and marble universe. Everybody noticed that. Yeah. Yeah. So you have, you'll be familiar with something called the Halo effect or pretty privilege, basically, that good looking people seem to have better outcomes as they go through life. But not if you want to be a covert infield intelligence

officer. Correct. Yeah. If you were to actually walk through the hallways of CIA, you would be severely disappointed by the lack of attractive people. I'm just growing out like whether you think I'm good looking or not, this is kind of irrelevant. I know objectively I am not a good looking guy in American culture. I know objectively I'm not even a good looking guy in foreign cultures because I'm the ambiguously brown guy that nobody remembers. It's it was a curse in high school. It was a blessing for my career,

right? There's a power to ugly. So call it whatever, call it the corona effect, right? The opposite of the halo effect, when all things go dark, there's a benefit there too. Talk to me about cover legends, what they are, who comes up with it, and stuff like that. So cover legends come, they come in a couple different ways. So some cover is assigned. Like no shit, it's a very true story. My first day at CIA, I walked into the briefing room. I was given an envelope inside my envelope was a strip of paper and on that strip of paper was my new name.

That is exactly how it works. It's super cool sounding, but the name was the worst possible name you could ever imagine. Think of like a name like Herbert Melchovitch or something like that, right? Like it was a horrible name. And that was basically the case for all of us. We open our little thing because they're not just American names. Some of us get foreign names. Some of us get names. We can't even pronounce, right? And you get these names and you're like, this is my new CIA name and this is how everybody's gonna refer to me from now on.

Like Andrew Bustamonte was not the name. It was some crazy, I felt like I was a white guy out of a Western movie from somewhere in New Mexico. That was my name. You just put together the worst Caucasian names you can imagine and that was mine. So that's one way the cover legends are created. They hand it to you. Another way is they tell you what you're going to be doing and then they ask you to create your own legend and then communicate it to

the people who actually create your alias documents, your alias documentation. We call them alias docs. So in that case they might say, hey, we need you to go to whatever. You're going to be in Pakistan, you're going to be in the mountains for three months. You come up with why you're there and how it works. Now it's not going to make, it doesn't make a lot of sense for you to be like, I'm a famous mountain climber and I'm there on behalf of National Geographic and that's not that's that's gonna draw attention to you. So you've got to come up with something obscure like oh I'm a rock scientist looking for you know a specific

type of mineral that only exists in this one rock chain. Nobody's gonna remember you nobody's gonna talk to you. So are you optimizing for purposefully boring? Purposefully forgetable in optimizing for purposefully boring, purposefully forgettable in the face, purposefully forgettable in the personality, purposefully forgettable in the story. Exactly right. You wanna be the kind of person that walks into a room.

Nobody notices you. You have a couple of conversations because you have to, you're trying to get information. And then you leave and nobody even remembers that you are there. That's what clandestine is. Clandestine means so secret that people don't even realize you are a threat when you're in front of them. That's a true clandestine professional. If somebody is in deep cover, whatever it is, deep infiltration, presumably they're going

to spend more and more time around the people that they're trying to infiltrate. How do officers avoid losing themselves if they've spent a long time with other people's Stockholm syndrome or the equivalent? It's every drug gang movie where you don't know if the agent is actually still working for the police or if he's completely gone undercover because now he's got a Mohawk and a lot of tattoos and that's the point of entry, right? That's the vector of the interesting drama. How do officers stop that from happening to themselves? Yeah, there's a couple of ways and to be honest, we know that you can't really stop it. And to be honest, we know that you can't really stop it. The longer you're in deep cover, the higher your risk, your risk quotient is for losing track

and becoming insecure. Now, we're not necessarily worried about your mental health. Yes, your mental health matters. That's fine. But remember, this is still intelligence operations. The biggest risk is the risk to national security. So there's lots of documentications at CIA, where deep cover officers stay in too long,

and then they start to forget who their true master is, and then they turn. Either they turn against CIA, or they turn in favor of their cover business, which isn't even a real business, or whatever they might be, right? They literally lose track of what is reality, because they've been lying so long

that they're now lying to themselves. The trick that CIA gives us is that we're taught to compartmentalize stuff in our brain. So we're taught to take a certain series of actions to go into a role, and then a certain series of actions to go into a role, and then a certain series of actions to come out of a role. So we always remember who we are in our head.

It's the opposite of method acting. Method acting, the actor's job is to go so deep into the character, they lose themselves in the character. And you've seen the results of method actors. A lot of times they'll end up self-destructing at some point, right? CIA doesn't want that to happen, so they teach us to put this compartment in our head and our cognition that reminds us, you are actually Chris Williamson, you are actually collecting information about this, you are actually on task for that. These are the five objectives you're trying to achieve, and when you achieve those five objectives, you're going to expel, trade yourself from the situation.

And then there's this process for you to keep checking in with yourself daily, hourly, every day at lunchtime, whatever it might be. So you keep that constant guideline going. But over time, you start to waver. And when you waver, when you try to come back and walk yourself back, it can be a very damaging thing. Then you start seeing mental health issues. Then you start seeing PTSD pop up.

It's very hard for some people to go undercover as a multi-millionaire oil tycoon for two years. And then they come back and they're a government employee making $90,000 a year again. It's not an easy transition, all in the name of American freedom, but you have lost your freedom as from what you were to what you are now. I suppose as well that there is a very difficult balance to strike with those offices because the longer that they've been undercover, the better the cover is, the deeper their connections

are, but the greater the risk is, the deeper their connections are, but the greater the risk is. So a solution would be to just cycle people out every three months, like you're ending your out, but that reduces the amount of penetration that you get. Exactly. We are back to that security and convenience piece again, right? And you've got the built-in system to prevent that from happening is kind of twofold.

One, your most active field operational years are your first maybe five or six years in the agency. Just like a pilot, your first half of a decade, you're very active in operations. But after that decade is after that five to seven years is over, you're in management roles. You're largely confined to either headquarters buildings or foreign buildings as a leader. You're not out there on the leading edge of operations anymore. So even if you do have a very strong, very effective cover, and if you do run an operation for three, four, six years,

that's all well and good, but then they're going to bring you back and break that system and make sure that you are reminded of your actual role in the larger organization. So they don't let you have subsequent operations in the same alias identity except in rare situations. And they also don't let you have subsequent operations that force you to radically change your alias persona. Those are very high risk operations to do and there's

no net benefit because like you're saying, the risk to reward ratio is skewed with every year that you are in deep cover. You were in the agency for about seven years, is that right? Yeah. Does this play into that at all? I know that you made the decision for the family and so on and so forth, but do you think that a contributing factor of that was you knowing that you're most exciting yours were perhaps behind you? Absolutely. Yeah, that's kind of what made it an easy decision.

Leaving CIA is never an easy decision. And there's a lot of folks out there who know exactly what it feels like to leave CIA. The first few years that you're in, everything's exciting, especially for me, I wasn't married, I had no kids, I was young and single, I was leaving the military, so it was pretty spectacular to leave the military and go into CIA and be the guy that goes and does all the stuff that's in the movies. That was wonderful. But then your assignments go by and each different assignment comes with more responsibility in the next assignment and then all of a sudden that increase in responsibility starts turning into increased

paperwork and increased administrative and increased documentation. And you actually start to see the point, the point in your career where it's going to turn. And you know it's going to turn. It's the same thing that happens with military pilots. They can see exactly where it's going to change, where they're going to go from being in the cockpit to sitting behind a desk, scheduling the guy who's going to be in the cockpit.

And that made it easy to leave, because it happens right in that 7 to 10 year mark. And for my wife and I, we had just come back from a very successful operation together, and the agency had told us, now we need you to sit here and train the next generation of people who are going out. And that we had no problem with that in concept, but in application, they wanted us to basically choose training others over raising our own children. And that was where we had conflict. You met your wife in the CIA and you had this after a while, this sort of misremissive Smith thing going on.

What are the rules about dating intelligence officers within the agency? I thought this would have been a huge no-no. Yeah, it's actually much more common than people think. Well, again, are not so funny jokes that we tell on the inside. We often joke that the CIA is like the best dating service in the world, because you basically have to lie to everybody else, but be honest with the people inside the building. You cut off ties with everybody else. So all those clingy ex-boyfriends and those booty calls and those hookups that you keep around

just in case, when you go into the agency, you have to cut off ties to all of those people because every one of them is a security concern for you. So you just, you kind of start fresh. So then you end up meeting these people inside the agency. They're all very smart, they're all very interesting, they've all got great backgrounds. Nobody is distractingly attractive, like I was telling you before, right? So you end up having these very genuine relationships inside and then you're like, oh, wait a second, we can work on the same case and then we can have dinner in the cafeteria together and

then we can go home and we can do whatever we want to do at home too. And all we have to do is not talk about work at home. Well, that seems easy enough. So there's actually a great deal of intramural dating that happens. There's a large number of people who end up getting married to other agency officers because your whole life becomes the world of intelligence. And if you have to like, you don't want to go out and have, you know, a happy hour with strangers, because strangers are a risk. So you just stay in the building

and have happy hour with friends in the building and whatever else it might be. So there's quite a bit of that that happens internally. I suppose as well that if, although you can't speak about work when you get home, you can be more liberal than you would be with somebody who has zero security clearance and isn't a part of anything.

And you can talk to you can speak to them in the cafeteria, presumably about the jobs that you're doing, or if you're undercover or whatever. So yeah, I totally didn't make sense that it would be potentially an adaptive benefit to allow officers to get into a relationship together because it's actually going to, I would imagine that you will have a higher churn rate or a at least more conflict within a relationship if you do have to not only compartmentalize at work, but then there's another one for the person

that you're supposed to be all in everything for the rest of time in sickness and in health, but not outside of the office. It seems like an odd way or a difficult way to run a relationship. Yeah, it is interesting. There's no convenience one way or the other. If you're inside, if you're undercover and you work at CIA, there's no convenient relationship to be had. Because if you're dating someone or married to someone who's not on the inside, they don't get you. They don't they don't get the stress. They don't get the risk. They don't get the debriefing. They don't get to know what you're actually doing. Yeah, it's

literally how was your day today? My day was fine. What did you do? Paperwork. You can't tell them any details and you can't take them into the building, into a skiff, where you can tell them all the details. It doesn't take them into the building, into a skiff where you can tell them all the details. It doesn't exist, right? But when you're dating somebody who's inside, now all of a sudden you at least know the same people. You have the same policies. You know the same structural changes.

You have the same vocabulary. So where I may not be able to tell you the name of the North Korean who I'm stealing your secrets from, I can tell you I'm working on that North Korean case and it's driving me crazy. And you get me, you understand what I'm saying, right? You can actually give me a true platform to commiserate or you can give me real encouragement. And that means a lot. The agency likes that because dating couples spend more time at work dating couples, you know, they they become two resources on the same case. And they're always culpable for what information they share. They break the rules, then they're in trouble. If they adhere to the rules, then they're supporting each other through the case. That's a win-win for CIA. Very interesting. Going back to the conversation we had about Russia early on, how much of

the discord that we see in the West at the moment do you think is self-generated by polarization because social media and echo chambers and blah blah, and how much do you think are seeds that are sown by foreign actors, China and Russia and such like? Yeah, so I mean, I can confidently say from experience that most of the noise that we hear is internally generated. The whole idea that foreign actors create narratives that cause discord is proven false. And in many ways, it's in case studies, it's in books that people just don't read.

But it also, it violates the core strategy and covert influence, isn't to create a new narrative. It's very hard to create a narrative that anybody hears. The way that you actually cause discord or so miscontent is by just adding fuel to an existing fire. So whether you're Russia or China or Iran or whoever, when you want to cause conflict in the United States, all you do is add fuel to the existing fire. There's no lack of fires that people can add issues to, right? Whether it's the snowed in debate, or whether it's the wiki leaks debate,

or whether it's gender, or whether it's woke, or whether it's sex, or whether it's, you know, whatever. I just found out about something called INCEL recently. There's a thousand different things that you can just pay a marketing company to put a few extra ads out there that say, in-sell is the worst thing ever, and women should adhere to men. And then you pay the same marketing agency to send a second message that says, you know,

women are equals and, you know, men who complain about women are dogs. And then boom, all you're doing is just pouring fire, pouring fuel on an existing fire. I had a conversation a couple of months ago with a friend, Gwinderbogel, and he's got an idea around firehousing that in the modern age, it's so difficult to convince anybody of any particular one narrative. So the goal is to bombard people with so many narratives that they become despondent and nihilistic and give up. Because at that point they are the most easy to sway into one particular. You have two responses basically. It's the, you know, kick a dog, it does a dog bite or does it give up? Either of those, when you don't deal with the biting, that's fantastic. That's going to be looting and riots and

That's fantastic. That's going to be looting and riots and issues and whatnot. Then the despondency as well is going to make for an easier country to roll over too. It's interesting because the strategic benefit of it overall is still in the theoretical stages. We've never seen a country that's able to just roll over another country by just devastating them culturally. Cultural subversion is a theory with lots of real world evidence, but no real world proof of execution, right? So I agree with you, but then there's also the elements of the fact that we just, we're also all still, as much as we hate to admit, we're all still adapting to a digital era. We're all still getting used to what it's like to have smartphones and smart TVs and you name it smart watches.

So we're, we are choosing to get to let ourselves be bombarded with information, but we're also choosing what information bombards us. So yes, we could put out a thousand different narratives, but the algorithms and YouTube and social media and whatever else are only going to feed you the narratives that you engage with the most. So then you're going to become the most engaged with the narratives that you see the most frequently, which are the narratives that you already believe in the most.

So that's exactly the problem with America. It's that once you've told YouTube what kind of content you like, they don't give you any other content. They only give you what you like. Once you tell Twitter what hashtags you like, that's what they keep feeding you whenever they want to suggest someone you might like.

Nobody ever suggests the counterpoint of you. So it just drives this continued wedge between everyone. One of my friends says that if you want to see into somebody's soul and work out who they truly are, look at their YouTube suggested videos. And I don't think that it's too far wrong. The algorithm on YouTube is the most accurate, as far as I can see, of serving me content. There is every time I go on YouTube,

there is five videos that I add to my watch later playlists. I think, oh, that's perfect. And that's, oh, bring it. World War II in numbers, how Hitler defeated the, whatever, whatever. Yeah, that's perfect for me. And then there's something about MMA and whatever. One of the things that I find is kind of an interesting contribution here is that when

we think about our relationship to technology and the difficulty that we have around marrying all of this together, I think not having a common enemy causes us to have nothing to band together about as well, especially when the enemy is internal, because the tribalism, you see tribes relatively all the time, they're splitting off, fracturing. This group was against that group, but now this part of that first group is part of another part of that same first group, and that seems to be a very good way to waste the time of a country in not making progress towards anything meaningful culturally by constantly just repeating similar cycles and fighting against itself.

Or just letting a country distract itself, right? So I don't know if you have kids, I don't know if you've got nieces or nephews or anything, but anybody with children knows that sometimes the best way to give yourself a break from the kids is to just let them distract themselves Just Give them if you give a six-year-old an iPad and you tell them they can watch whatever they want to on YouTube They will distract themselves and you won't hear from them for hours Right if you give them a if you toys, even if it's just the toys from the neighbor's house next door, if you give them a bucket of toys they've never played with before, they'll

distract themselves. Essentially, that's all a country really has to do is just give the tools to one country to distract itself. In that process, they're free. If you're hearing background noise, I'm in DC. So there's all these, I mean, it's like helicopter central. You've got the president and the congress people flying all over the place all the time.

So it's just helicopter city. Very nice. I was in a long island. Is that the one in New York? Yes. As in long island, start of the year, I cannot believe the volume of planes. It's every 90 seconds, pretty much 24 hours a day, pretty much 365 days a year. Why the fuck do you live here?

Apparently it's really, really nice, and it was beautiful and I enjoyed my time there, but that's intense. That is intense flight path. Yeah, what and apparently it's really really nice and it was beautiful and I enjoyed my time there, but That's intense. That is intense flight path. So it's something else that I was thinking about and I this really came up to me when Last year the 20th anniversary of 9-11 and I'm a Brit, you know, I was 12 I think when 9-11 happened. It hit home to me the way that it must have had such an impact on the lives of America with some of the documentaries that were done. Some of the video footage that I'd never seen before, some of the testimony of the FDNY guys that had been going in and I was on one side

of a door and I got down the set of stairs and my best friend who I'd worked with for 20 years was on the other side of a door and he's not with us anymore. Just so many, it was really, really moving. I thought it was an amazing way to sort of show tribute and re-educate people about what had happened, especially people perhaps that hadn't even been around. And something that I've found pretty interesting is the modern confusion around the word conspiracy. Every time that somebody brings up the term conspiracy online, there is a whole bunch of comments that will say something like, well, yesterday's conspiracy is today's top news headline.

And it does seem like the word conspiracy can be used to discredit genuine stories that powerful groups don't want to gain steam. It can be used to create stories that misdirect people away from things that genuinely are true. That just fascinated me, thinking about that, especially looking back last year. Yeah, I have a whole, I mean, I have a YouTube video out there that teaches people the anatomy of a conspiracy. Teachers, tell us. Well, yeah, there's a lot that goes into it, but there's essentially just a few core ingredients, right? So first, there has to be something that happens.

There has to be some factual event, something that's evidentiary, something you can see, you can touch, you can hear whatever it might be. Has to be a kernel of truth somewhere. Yeah, it's how everything has to start with a kernel of truth. But then what happens is immediately after that, there has to be a lack of information. So there has to be an element of truth that's immediately followed by a lack of information. Now what happens cognitively is the human brain wants closure. The human brain always wants to close every open loop of information. Now what happens cognitively is the human brain wants closure. The human brain always wants to close every open loop of reasoning. So when you hear something that's

truthful, right, there's an unidentified object in the sky, right? Then there's a gap of information. Well, what was it? Was it a plane? We don't know. Was it a helicopter? We don't know. There's no information about what it was. Now, the human brain doesn't like that. So the human brain starts to seek possibilities. So the third ingredient in a conspiracy has to be a series of potential explanations. Now in that series of potential explanations, here's what ends up happening. We forget we forget that we're just going through a series of potentialities.

And we start to think instead that the potentialities are in fact the explanation. And then we start to enforce the explanation that we believe explains the original kernel of truth. That's how a conspiracy is born. So the twin towers are destroyed in 9-11. Two airplanes crashing to them. That's, there's all sorts of kernels of truth out there that let us know it's real.

But then there's this break in information. How did the pilots get training and how did they organize this whole thing and how did the police not find out and how did CIA and FBI not find out and then even when there's an explanation about how CIA and FBI didn't communicate effectively, there's still lots of information that people don't get. We want to know what

Intel's were out there, we want to know what sources were out there, but they don't get that information. So then they start saying, well, why is nobody sharing? What could be in that information? Oh, it was an inside job. They don't want to admit that there was an element inside the US government that wanted this to happen, or there, you know, whatever else. It was an inside job. They don't want to admit that there was an element inside the US government that wanted this to happen or whatever else. It was the Israelis and they don't want to let the, you know, they don't want to tell anybody that sees Israelis. So these crazy, I call them crazy, but these conclusions, these estimations pop up in

the absence of information. And then people are like, if it was an inside job, they would have been able to keep it secret because they control all their own information. And then all the if-then start, and the if-then's on their own are valid, right? If you wanted to cover something up here, it's how you would do it. If it was the Mormons that did it,

then this is how they would cover it up. Whatever it is, it would all be in there. So because this reasoning is sound, and this fact is sound, the conspiracy exists, even though nobody is accounting for the fact that there's nothing connecting the two sides that are reasoned and well thought out. And without something to connect the two, there's no foundation and truth. The vacuum in the middle sucks in speculation and the fact that nothing comes out to disprove that.

And if you, even if it's something does come out to disprove that after time, the first story is often the one that people cling onto or at least the first one that makes sense. So there's this story from Matthew Siett and this is in the times back in the start of COVID. Psychologists have conducted experiments to shed light on why people lose or at least suspend rationality. One experiment asked people to imagine going to a doctor to hear an uncertain medical diagnosis, such people were significantly more likely to express the belief that God was in control of their lives. Another asked participants to imagine a time of deep uncertainty, when they feared for their jobs or the health of their children,

they were far more likely to see a pattern in meaningless static or to infer that two random events were connected. This is such a common finding that psychologists have given it a name, compensatory control. When we feel uncertain, when randomness intrudes upon our lives, we respond by reintroducing order in some other way. Superstitions and conspiracy theories speak to this need. It is not easy to accept that important events are shaped by random forces. This is why, for some, it makes more sense to believe we are threatened by the grand plans of malign scientists than the chance mutation of a silly little microbe. Yeah, that's exactly, I think that's a much more eloquent way of saying what I said

for sure and leave it to a psychologist to do it right. But that's exactly what happens. And we're all subject to it. It's why when our wife doesn't say something to us at the end of the day, we think that she's hiding something. It's why when our kids are extra happy, we suspect that they're keeping something from us, right? It's because in a lack of total knowledge, a lack of total information, total transparency, we want to find some rational explanation for our own uncertainty, instead of just embracing the uncertainty. And to a certain extent, there's freedom when you're willing to accept the unknown. Was 9-11 the biggest intelligence failure that the US has had? Was 9-11 the biggest intelligence failure that the US has had? In my in my lifetime, I would say yes. What about before your lifetime?

The largest intelligence failure for the US. I'd have to give it more serious thought to be honest We've had some pretty big intelligence flaps, right? We totally called it wrong in Afghanistan The whole world called it wrong with how Ukraine would respond to Russia. We continue to make wrong estimates about what's going to happen in Ukraine and Russia. And you've got 9-11 is out there. And there's lots of stories of intelligence flaps in other countries as well. France and the UK and even the Nazis. So intelligence is hard. That's just the nature of the game. We mentioned it earlier on. What are your thoughts on QAnon?

So QAnon is interesting. I think that there is a level of value in floating the idea of conspiracies. And here's why, because conspiracies have a kernel of truth, and we have definitely had instances in history where a conspiracy has proven to be correct. So there's always, I don't see any reason to shut down voices that are out there suggesting alternate explanations to the unknown, but it does get to be difficult whenever they start to. They don't account for the fact that they could be used for malicious intent or for malicious purposes, right? It's like cryptocurrency. I'm all for blockchain, but when it comes to cryptocurrency, the only real true use case for cryptocurrency has been in abusing and circumventing laws.

That's what made Bitcoin famous. That's what made Bitcoin wealthy. Now that we're trying to justify, you know, societally beneficial or productive uses for cryptocurrency, doesn't change the fact that it was born out of malicious intent. It was basically a hoala in the digital world instead of... What's a hoala? hoale is how is it's an Arabic term for how you exchange currency without being tracked so terrorist organizations in the early G-Wat and the early global war on terrorism they would actually facilitate financial transfers using rocks so a rock of a certain size would be worth $10,000 a rock of a different size would be worth $10,000. A rock of a different size would be worth $200. And they would make a basket of rocks.

And one terrorist would send that basket to another terrorist. And that would be their Huala evidence that they were given a certain amount of money. And then they would go to this dispersed financial network and pull their money out of the system. That's essentially how big points started as well. It was just Hualala without the rocks. Dude, that's wild. That is so interesting. huwala is still very active. People don't realize it. They're active in air big cultures. They're active in Indian cultures. They're not always malicious, but they have a great deal

of use in malicious circles. I've heard you talk a lot about highly powerful, rich individuals, and the way that they go about their lives, the type of technology that they have with backup phones, the way that they see the world, and the views operating protocol in their own mind, psychological profiles and stuff like that. I had a conversation a couple of years ago on the show with a guy called Daniel Schmackton Burgos, an incredibly smart dude, Polymath guy, and he gets himself into similarly high-level

conversations. He told me this really sort of harrowing story about he was a dinner with somebody who is very influential and has the resources to be able to act on whatever it is that they want to do. This person said something to him along the lines of Daniel had brought up some of the things that he was proposing might be quite damaging, it might make people's lives worse, just not particularly good for society. And this guy said, well, I'm an apex predator. Apex predators don't care about what the prey do. In your experience around high-powered individuals who both have the resources and the network

to be able to do stuff, have you ever come across somebody who you think it would be better if this particular type of personality didn't have access to the capability to enact their dreams? So my answer is no, but you may not like the rest of my answer. So I think that the Apex Predator attitude is very much prevalent among the ultra wealthy, specifically around the ultra wealthy who have built their wealth from nothing. I'm not talking about like talent, like your actors, your talent, people, your musicians that are out there, your podcasters, right? These are people who become extremely wealthy, but they didn't really build their wealth from

nothing. They built their talent from nothing and then somebody else came in and hired their talent. So your talent, it's objectively your talent works for somebody. They have a production schedule, they have to meet. They have a boss, right? They can't just stop producing. If they stop producing movies or stop producing podcasts, then they're not gonna make any more money.

What, but a true entrepreneur, a true business owner, is somebody who can stop working, but the business keeps running, right? The business keeps growing and keeps doing whatever it wants to do. Among those individuals, we call them ultra high net worth, ultra high net worth in our world and our community, we define ultra high net worth as people with a net worth of 15 million or more. So that goes up quite high. There are people who are worth billions of dollars. But essentially, if you're worth a net worth of about 15 million dollars, you have built that. You haven't been given that. If you come from a wealthy family, it's a completely different thing.

But you most likely own a scalable business. And now that's the business that you run. And to get to that point, you have had to make very harsh decisions. You have had to learn how to get into the mind of your customer. You've had to learn how to master negotiation skills with not just people, but with banks, with policymakers, with lobby lobbyists whatever it might be So absolutely in my experience around ultra high net worth wealthy individuals They have that apex predator attitude and to be again to be very frank

I am very happy they have that apex predator attitude because Because without your apex predators, who's going to rule the roost, right? Like, do we want arbitrary, unpredictable leadership? Or do we want very decisive, very predictable leadership? Right? If you think of a lion, a lion is an apex predator. A lion remains the head of their, what are lions in, prides? Right? A lion, a pride has one head lion. Until another lion takes that lion down. But there's always only one. And if you don't want to compete for the pride,

you don't have to compete for the pride. But the pride is stronger because it only has one lion. The same thing is true in multiple different types of societies and civilizations and many ways we've structured our own human experience So reward the apex predator select it for that person Correct, and then if only when that person Times out right after four years or eight years if it's if it's the president or they never time out if you consider a Congressperson to be an apex predator right they just have to keep winning the collective vote of their pride So in many ways we we are people need that

Tribally people need a tribal elder they need a tribal leader we forget that we are a tribal animal I learned a while ago about the functional usefulness of psychopaths. And I asked this guy that researched psychopaths clinically. He was going into jails and speaking to them, doing interviews and stuff. And he said basically, as I cluck, it's so maladaptive for the group. Why would you have a psychopath? You know, why is this, why is it not being competed out of the gene pool? People would have been killed because they would have fucked over too

many others. You can't travel from town to town. You're in a Dunbar number of a hundred or a hundred and fifty or something. Do this once or twice and people are going to know what your nature is and you said yes, but you're forgetting that smeared across an entire population, it's actually quite useful to have psychopaths. If you need to go and wreck Lindisfarne as a group of Vikings, it's actually kind of useful to have as. If you need to go on rec lindus farm as a group of Vikings, it's actually kind of useful to have a group of 10 men that you can throw in there that are going to have no remorse about going and pillaging and bringing back a lot of gold. Okay, well, that's kind of interesting. And I wonder whether it's possible to look at modern apex predator type individuals with the same sort of lens that absolutely.

Look, this is a very specific type of tool or weapon, depending on your point of view. And the choice is we have more than our enemy or enemy has more than us. Who do you want to be generating GDP? Who do you want to be generating GDP? Who do you want to be pushing innovation? Who do you want to be making the strongest connections and networks not only within this country, but also outside of this country? Now there is an externality. There's a risk here that the more that that person gets power, the more dangerous that individual becomes, but they're dangerous in kind of a predictable way sometimes. And also, I'd rather have more psychopaths on my team than on somebody else's.

Yeah, I think, and what you're getting to are our fantastic conclusions that people just don't often, that people are uncomfortable analyzing a situation to get to that point. Do you, do you want to have Navy SEALs that operate on behalf of the United States, or do you want to have, do you want to disband your Navy SEALs,

and instead have the Navy, whatever, a Navy cheerleading team that goes out there and tries to make friends with everybody. You want cold hard killers when you need cold hard killers. You want apex predators when you need cold hard killers. You want apex predators when you need apex predators. And what happens is we, whoever the leading society is, it was true with the Romans, it's true with us, it's going to be true with whoever becomes the next great superpower in the world. That position of first place is a luxury that we tend to take for granted. We all know what it was like in high school

or college if you were an athlete. If you were the best athlete on the team or if your team was the best team in the division, whatever it might be, everybody just expects you to win and win and win again and win again and win again. And then if you're ever beaten, the loss is so much more devastating than if you're the second or third best team and you're used to taking hits and you're used to winning and sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. There's a reason professional athletes suffer from their own kind of trauma from the intense demands of performance because we as a culture, we actually like apex cold-hearted killers. We like them and we celebrate them in sports.

We celebrate them in movies. We like books about assassins and killers and super spies. It's something that culturally we all like and we all want. And the reason is because we all recognize there's a certain level of security when you're with the most proficient of any given skill. There is a functional utility to being around the most dangerous weapon in the room. This is one of the reasons put forward by a evolutionary psychologist when I asked her

why many women seem to have an obsession with darkance and True Crime. And for the record, I believe that Mafia Boss stories are bloke's equivalents of True Crime for chicks. The guys that love learning about Sammy the Bull and about drug kingpins and stuff, you are not allowed to look down on girls that love to learn about True Crime serial, because you are listening to the exact same podcast, it's just on the male side of the fence. But I asked to this question about why is it that these women, and you also find as well with serial killers that women fall in love with these killers. These guys are on death row, and women are sending the marriage proposals and gifts and all sorts of stuff, it's very dangerous.

Why is it that women seem to have this particular obsession? And there's a bunch of different reasons, and maybe some of them are all of them and none of them, but attaching yourself to somebody that is incredibly dangerous falls you under the umbrella of their protection. There is also an element of being able to be better educated in order to protect yourself. Like, I need to know what I need to avoid in order so that I don't get attacked by it. But yeah, man, I do think that the functional utility of having some dangerous guys on your side of the pitch is a difficult reality because they are going to do things that you're not going to be happy about. And also, it's very right to say that we have... It's very difficult to be at the top of your game, the top of any game,

and not have people secretly waiting for your downfall, to unbelievably difficult line to walk, to be the best at what you do, whatever it is, whatever field it is, whether it's podcasting your sports or singing or something else. And Rob Henderson, one of my buddies, shared an article a while ago about how one of those, I think four of the most popular hero story arcs that are typical. And none of them included the person that came into the story, the hero, and left the story, the hero.

There is the Icarus, the guy that starts at nothing, flies too close to the sun and then crashes. There is the guy that starts high, falls, and then comes back, a redemption. There is a from nothing to something, and there is a fourth one as well that I can't remember. No one remember no one No one wants the person that comes into the world with everything and leaves with everything everybody wants them to fail

Yeah, it's interesting and it's it's difficult because it's For many people that demotivates them from trying to be the best for many people that that's exactly the governor that keeps them from Taking it one step further or or taking one you know one extra risk or being vocal or being face forward. It's hard because when you're out there as an athlete, as a business owner, as a podcast or whatever you might be, you do feel it. You feel, I mean, you don't even have to feel it. You can read it on Twitter There's plenty of people out there chanting for your failure every day if you don't know what it looks like just look at look at my

Feed and like there's people out there chanting every day for me to fail and that's that's just part of what it takes to be To be the person who's striving for more if you want to be Ignored and overlooked by history, nobody will ever send you death threats. But if you want to make a splash, if you want to make a ripple in history, you're going to piss people off along the way. You just have to learn to accept it. And that's one of the things that when I'm around my ultra-high net worth clients, it's really refreshing to me because they're clients, but they're also mentors. I am striving to try and be in their shoes. I'm learning from them every day. I'm learning what I want to be, but I'm also learning

what I don't want to be. Because to get to that level, you've made an incredible sacrifices to your health, in your family, to your marriage, right? Like this, there's some seriously devastating circumstances that you're ultra wealthy, you're your business owners who we all think that it must be so great to be Jeff Bezos. It must be so easy to be Mark Zuckerberg. Those guys have not had easy lives. Do they have money? Yes, they have money. But they have problems that we don't want. They don't get to binge watch a Netflix series. That's not in their universe. I get to cuddle with my kids, read them a bedtime story, kiss them on the forehead.

That's my reality, and I like that reality. But there's a lot of people out there, your apex predators don't get to do that. There was an idea I came up with about a reverse role model. So role models are the aspirational version of what you want to look up to. A reverse role model is the inversion of that. It's the people who have the traits that you don't want to have. And from where I come from in the Northeast of the UK, there weren't many people that were

perfectly like the person I wanted to be. But there were many people who had individual fallibilities that I definitely didn't want. And I could look around and say, okay, I definitely don't want his relationship with his family, his approach to gambling, his approach to finances, the way that he treats his partner, all of these things. And I think a lot more success can be found in life by avoiding ruin than by chasing success. You don't ever get completely killed out of the game by not getting sufficient success, but you can do it by multiplying by zero, right? It's the never multiplied by zero rule. And that to me is very reassuring for people that feel like they don't have people around

them that they want to be like, take a look. I know that you might not have an aspirational role model at the moment, but you can avoid failure. And that is not nothing. That is a lot more than not nothing. That might be even 75% of what you're trying to do in life is avoid failure. That might be, it might be even more. It might be 90% of what is involved in success is simply avoiding failure. Yeah, and it's funny because I, I, I loved this whole idea of a reverse role model. I've never heard of it before, so thank you for presenting it. I would say that

just because failure is a word that gets misunderstood and misinterpreted so many ways, when you define it, you're talking about, don't be like the reverse role model. Don't be like this person who represents the things that you don't value and the things that you don't believe in. So when you call that person failure, I agree. But what ends up happening is a lot of times,

people start to fear failure, not understanding that like failures totally fine. Trying and missing is better than never trying at all. So the idea of run away from the negative role model is still taking you somewhere. And it may not be the place that you're ultimately going, but it's definitely, you're not running close to the place that you don't want to go. Yes. That's a really cool visual when you when you talk about that your first role model. What have you come to believe about dealing with risk and putting yourself out there and having a lean in mentality, you know, you're somebody that was working in a clandestine way in the shadows with

no public profile for a long time and the last year or so has been pretty wild for you in terms of exposure and all that sort of stuff. What have you come to believe about that? Yeah, so what I believe about risk is a mix of what I've experienced and then what I've been trained. One of the first things that CIA trains us is to put definitions around risk. There's two types of risk. There's real risk and there's perceived risk. Real risk is the real quantifiable objective risk, right? When you drive in a car,

you are actually putting yourself at risk. If you were just walking on a sidewalk, you're objectively at less risk of a car accident than when you drive in a car. Whenever you pick up a weapon and go to a shooting range, you're putting yourself at risk, right? Those are real tangible risks with real tangible probabilities. There is a probability out there about the likelihood that you're going to get in a car accident and in any given moment.

That's all real risk. Perceived risk is the risk that most of us deal with all the time. It's the fear that we have about getting in a car accident, even when we're not in a car. It's the fear we have about being mugged just because we're in a city. It's the fear we have about making our boss angry or disappointing our spouse or you name it, there's all these perceived risks that were constantly going through in our head. These what if scenarios, these catastrophic scenarios, it's part of a cognitive, something called cognitive distortions. And there's a specific cognitive distortion called catastrophizing. And that's what we're doing with perceived risk.

We're seeing all the worst scenarios and believing that they are somehow likely to happen just because we can think of them. Proceed risk and real risk are not the same thing. So CIA teaches us to focus on real risk. Just because we're lying about our name and going into a foreign country and trying to steal secrets doesn't actually mean we're going to get caught. In fact, it means that we're our training and our preparation reduces the probabilities mean we're going to get caught. In fact, it means that our training and our preparation reduces the probabilities that we're going to get caught. So the real risk is actually quite low. So when I started my own journey of becoming more public,

I had a background in perceived and real risk. The real risks to me, if I say something that violates my secrecy agreement with CIA, I'm going to get a knock on the door from legal counsel, Office of General Counsel at CIA. I might get fined, I might go to jail, who knows what might happen. They're going to shut down my business. That's real risk. I might have somebody who just gets pissed off about what I'm saying, and they send me cyanide in the mail. I don't know. That's all real, like, there's a potentiality for all of these crazy things. But the probability isn't very high, especially not if I take steps to protect myself, protect

my household, make sure I say the right things. But if I let myself focus on perceived risk, or what if I say something people don't like, or what if I say something that people laugh at, or what if I look goofy in a video, whatever it might be, right? Who cares? Like the truth is that you have to be able to calculate real risk and then use real risk to weigh the risk benefit scenario. If you're trying to weigh the risk benefit scenario using perceived risk, you're always going to be underestimating your ability to grow and overestimating your risk factor. So it's all about understanding that risk is

important to success. If you're willing to take on more risk, then you're willing to embrace more success. If you hesitate to add the risk, then you're also holding back your potential for great success. The difficulty is that people confuse the two, you know, perceived risk can appear as real, maybe even more real than real risk. People would say, well, the real risk of receiving some sign-ide in the post is very low. That's okay. But the risk of me being stupid on the internet, actually, maybe that is a big deal. And our ability to lose rationality under cognitive stress and under emotional pain and fear is pretty big. It is, but it's still just perceived. That's what's important. You've got to go

through the cognitive exercise, like just to use your example, saying something goofy on the internet. You say something goofy on the internet. You don't even say something goofy on the internet. You say something goofy on the internet. Do you remember when there was a musician R. Kelly. There was a musician who actually was like caught abusing females. I don't- For sure he's in jail now. Okay. So I don't even remember what happened to him. And I've been most of the people listening to this right now. Don't remember what happened to them. But we all remember that something happened to them. Right. We forget that time, just like I think we talked about it earlier, there's big things and there's small things. We

remember the big things. We don't really remember the small things. So if you go on the internet and say something silly, I've been on the internet and said stupid stuff a thousand times. Right. Those things fade away. The things that you do well are the things that tend to last. Arnold Schwarzenegger has this awesome, I feel like it's a TV interview. I wish I had a citation for it. But somebody out there said, Arnold, do you remember the worst movie you were ever acted in? And he looked at the camera and he was like, oh yeah, I remember the worst movie you were ever acted in. And he looked at the camera and he was like, oh yeah, I remember the worst movie I was ever in, but nobody else does. Right? And I will forever remember that

because Arnold Schwarzenegger was in some terrible fucking movies, man. He was in some horrible movies. Nobody remembers those. We remember all the awesome sorts of nigger movies. Right? Even if you try to remember some of his bad movies, you might only come up with one or two, even though you may have watched three or four,

go do a Google search and you'll be like, I remember watching that, that was a bad movie, that was a bad movie, that was a bad movie. The human condition, we prioritize information, we choose to remember certain things. We remember macro things with macro level emotions. So if you or I do something stupid on the internet, five days from now most people aren't going to remember it

It's got a pretty amazing half-life and then it's gone. So what's the real risk? I would agree I would say that there is a threshold above which stupid things can become who you are though true I would say that the internet's disposition to smear people with negative stories, there are some people for whom Joe Rogan will always be the n-word compilation guy. No. And that's a man who's put out more content than pretty much anybody else alive right now.

Right. The reason that that story trying to take hold was typically they say, look, this is the tip of the iceberg that we know is his bigoted misogynistic racist, cis-hatronomative patriarchal past. The problem and the reason that story didn't take hold is because most of the people that that story was aimed at said, I've seen the whole iceberg. I've watched 200, 500, a thousand hours of this guy. You can't try and tell me that there is something lurking that I haven't seen because the weight of evidence that I have on the other side

of the scale is so great. That being said, I think that not doing something foolish and dumb and silly, that is something which is almost exclusively out of your control. Like you're going to make these little errors regularly. Not doing something which is career ending is almost always within your control. I think that for the most part, unless you get unlucky and it's some strange combination of situations, this is obviously on average, right? But the lion's share of the the bell curve of situations that could end you, you have to have not paid attention. You have to have gone to a situation without the

requisite care and attention. And perhaps I'm creating a little Cassandra complex for myself here, but my point being with sufficient care, I think that you can avoid most of the big problems and the point being once you breach that threshold, I do think that people, you will always be your greatest mistake to a lot of people. Yeah, now I would agree. I would agree with that. You will always be your biggest mistake to a lot of people. I love your bell curve, your bell curve visual right there because so often we forget that there's a big fat center to the bell curve because all of the interesting

stories, the things that most of us like to talk about are not inside the bell curve. They're at the skinny end on either side, the people who are extremely successful, the people who are total failures. Nobody really likes to talk about the middle class guy, making $85,000 a year with a happy marriage and two kids. That's just not an interesting person to talk about. So we end up talking about these fringe issues. Again, going back to real risk and perceived risk,

there will always be people who hate you, always. Even people who don't know who you are right now, if they were to find out who you are, there's always gonna be people who hate you. That's a real risk. So what? There's, they're on the small end of the bell curve. Because let's be honest, the fat end of the bell curve,

most people aren't going to remember you. You run a super successful podcast, man. There's 300 million Americans, 155 million adults. The vast majority of them, they don't know you. They don't know me. They're not going to remember you. They're not going to remember me. Even Joe Rogan is as fantastically famous as he is.

Right? There's a huge population out there that just they don't they know of the name But they've never watched an episode they may never watch an episode It's just the reality of it. That's the bell curve nobody likes to talk about we like to talk about the fringes the people who love you People who hate you there's a whole group in the middle that you kind of don't matter to them because they're watching the history channel They're you know doing whatever trying to just make it by make it through the day. We would care far less about what other people think about us if we realized how rarely they do. Exactly right. Oh, that's beautifully said, man. If that's yours, you need to write that down. Someone's grand

mothers and I'm going to guess she repurposed it from somebody else. There's a really great concept that I love. It's called Churchillian Drift and it's a phenomenon whereby quotes who have which have been unattributed over time tend to converge toward Churchill. And this is how you Google pretty much anything on the internet. There's always an image, a square Instagram story that's gone Winston Churchill. I also think there's an Einsteinian drift as well. A lot of them get attributed to Einstein. But it's a genuine phenomenon. I don't know who said that. I think it was Churchill, actually, who said, if we didn't know how rarely people thought about it. Well, look, Andrew Buster Mente, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check

out the stuff that you do online, where should they go? So seldom your whers. Yeah, absolutely. You can go to my website, everydayspy.com, or if you're a podcast person, you can go have an iTunes top 10 podcast called the Everyday SB Nudge podcast. It's on any of your favorite platforms that are out there. And if you are on social media, then you're just looking for at everyday spy on any social media and you'll find me there. Andrew, I appreciate you'll find me there. Andrew, I appreciate you. Thanks, man.

I appreciate Chris, take care. you