The Ricochet Podcast - Spies Like Us

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

There are no secrets at Ricochet: the web’s best place for civil conversations. That’s why we’re happy to have Amy Zegart join us to divulge the details of her soon-to-be-published Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (pre-order your copy today!) We rely on Amy’s decades of research on the Intel Community to help us make sense of dizzying changes that have... Source

Great. Thank you. Thank you. I was getting kicked out here. Somebody nicely let me stay 10 minutes longer in this conference room. I have a dream this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created. The strongest job growth on record, The largest decline in unemployment on record. The strongest small business growth in a long time. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lylex, and today we talk to Amy Ziegert about spies like us and like them. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, episode number 578. Join us at ricochet.com. Why don't you and you can be part of the most stimulating conversation and community as well on the web.

I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis, where it's warmed up to minus one. Doesn't feel that bad. It's dry, cold. Peter Robinson in Clement, California. Rob Long in exciting Gotham. Gentlemen, how are you today? I'm a little grumpy, but I'll get over it. Good. We like grumpy, Peter. Just about the world or something? Well, no, something in particular. I grew up in a time and place, I don't know about

you fellows, where doctors were demigods and surgeons were gods and a cardiologist was Zeus himself. And my cardiologist said, your heart's in good shape, but get a whoop. Do you know what this thing is? This whoop that you wear and it tells you when you're in good condition and should work out hard and when you're in bad condition and monitors you. I got up this morning, thought to myself, well, I slept like a baby. I looked at the whoop. It said I slept less than two and a half hours. Meanwhile, it's been accumulating this sleep deficit. Wait, so how does the WHOOP know? The WHOOP checks heart rate, respiration, and on paper, it's just the kind of thing both of you would love because it applies techie algorithms to the work of staying fit, knowing when you should work out hard,

knowing when you have a resting day in theory it's perfect and i have i'm going back and forth with a whoop specialist now to adjust the algorithm to my sleep anyway it's just a little you get up and say i don't need any of that information i don't need any of that information don't i don't know even if a cardiologist tells you to do it perhaps so but my watch periodically tells me to breathe. It's like, you know what? I got the whole autonomous nervous system thing figured out. Fair enough. I'm good with that.

When it warns me about this or it jibes, no, I don't need that granular level of information. I'll be fine. My father did not have such a watch and he proceeded to stroll through nine decades of life and rob you and i have uh i i do have i have i have sleep cycle oh so wait well what's that well it's a it's a

app and you put on your phone you put your phone next to your bed and then it kind of listens to you and then we wake up in the morning and it literally gives you a good a number grade of your sleep so i don't 100 so the thing the problem with it is that in order for it to work you have to have the phone by the bed right but your life is so much better without your phone by your bed correct uh that i suspect that not having it is better i'm a married man i don't need somebody else to judge me okay also like one more area in which you're like oh by the way you're failing at sleep you don't do that well right i think i can when i get up i can tell exactly how it's been by the alacrity and the

with which i swing my feet upon the floor well or not or not or not yes there's always that um so we have um in the news briyer has decided to step down, which led to a whole lot of clever ice cream jokes, actually, on the Internet. And this was done sort of around him. He was not ready to say so, but somebody rushed that out there. And the assumption now that I'm reading from the left side of the web is that the Republicans will block everything that Biden tries to do. You think that's going to be the case or they're just going to say, yeah, it's his choice to let it go?

Should we do this before an election? There's an election coming up after all. There's always an election coming up in America. Our friend Mickey Kaus. I thought, Breyer, I'm just looking at Twitter a moment or two before trying to sleep last night. Apparently I failed. And Mickey Kaus put up a post that stopped me cold because it's Mickey being Mickey. And he said, hey, wait a minute.

Breyer laid out very specific conditions in his formal announcement, I will retire when the court shall rise from the current session, assuming that the Senate will retain its present partisan representation and that my successor will have been nominated and confirmed. Okay. He said, I will step down under conditions X, Y, and Z. Conditions X, Y, and Z have not been met. Therefore, there is no vacancy on the Supreme Court. Therefore, argues Mickey, reading the text of the Constitution in a very straightforward way, the president may not nominate anyone to fill the vacancy when the vacancy doesn't exist. And I thought, whoa, leave it to Mickey to ask a law school 101 question here. Con law 101. Hey, wait a minute, fellas.

There's no vacancy. He laid out specific conditions which have not been met. Sounds like a Mobius strip. Yes, it does. That's the belt drive for a perpetual motion machine. Maybe that's why I slept so badly last night. It was going round and round in my head. That is interesting.

Well, of course, you know, the resignation letter is not illegally binding. It's not as if he's, so the most interesting thing about it is the suggestion that I think that there will never be, if Breyer can avoid it, there will not be an eight-person court, right? That's what he's saying is that I'll never let it go to eight. I'm not going to run out the door and then just let the bonfire happen. What he means is I'll never let the conservatives achieve a three-to-one majority even for a moment. Right, not for a moment. But I suspect his problem is going to be, I mean,

you know, he wakes up in the morning, eats his cornflakes, drinks his coffee, and reads the paper like anybody else, I suspect, and sees that there's probably no chance that the Senate is going to be more amenable

to the Democrats or the liberals than it is right at this minute. And if you're, once again, if you're the Democrat, all eyes on essentially Manchin, I don't know about Sinema, essentially Manchin, because he's still a Democrat. He's a very conservative Democrat. The kind of justice he's going to feel comfortable voting for is going to be the kind of justice he's going to feel comfortable voting for is going to be the kind of justice that liberal Republicans with a Democratic Senate or moderate Republicans with a Democratic Senate nominate.

Somebody designed to infuriate the conservative, but also totally infuriate the liberals. And so threading the needle will be really interesting. On the other hand, it's an easy way for Manchin to say, listen, I'm still on the team. So he could, but there's no reason why Manchin

should not betray Republicans. He's not a Republican, but he could easily, I mean, we all know who it's going to be too, right? Oh, we do? It's going to be Kamala Harris. I think Bill Kristol said Kamala Harris goes on the Supreme Court. And then Joe Biden picks Mitt Romney as his vice president.

Straightforward from here. That's how we knit the nation. Politically, it's fascinating. There's also this piece of interest that Justice Breyer, right up until yesterday, was viewed as the high-minded liberal on the court. He gave a lecture at Harvard a few months ago, I think it was last autumn, in which he decried any notion that the court acted out of any political considerations whatsoever. This got wide coverage. It was praised in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. And now in his leave-taking, he is being as straightforwardly political as anyone has ever been. I'm out now,

but only if the composition of the Senate doesn't change, and only if you fellows nominate and confirm my successor, implicitly somebody of whom I approve, and then I'll step down. It is as, I mean, he is being, playing as straightforwardly, he is as coy as coy can be. Furthermore, the interest in all this, you mentioned Manchin. I'd keep an eye on Mitt Romney as well. I could easily see Manchin refusing to vote for a Democratic nominee and Romney saying, oh yeah, go ahead, they deserve their guy or their woman. This will be fascinating. Somebody also pointed out, if Bernie Sanders has a stroke and departs this veil of

tears, the governor of Vermont is a Republican and could be expected to appoint a Republican to fill out the remainder of Bernie Sanders. I'm not suggesting Bernie Sanders is doomed in any short term. I mean, I don't know. Authoritarianism, right there, rule by decree, end of our democracy, if that happens. We'd have to speak to Bernie Sanders as a cardiologist, I guess, since we're talking about cardiologists. I hope he's not wearing whoop.

Show us Bernie's whoop. Yeah. It's all kind of fascinating. This is sort of fascinating. Weird little chess, three-dimensional chess, four-dimensional chess. What makes it so ludicrous or so hilarious, depending on what side you're on, or so terrifying, I guess, if you're a Democrat, is that the people in charge right now of strategizing and strategizing this are the Biden administration, who seems to be incapable of making a speech, passing a bill, getting above 33 percent popularity. This seems to be the – there is no area in which the Biden administration has shown competence.

Competence, just competence. Maybe this is the area, but I suspect not. I suspect not. My closing comment on all this is, and this is more horrifying than anything else I can conceive of. In the comment section, we are certain to get ricochet listeners saying, fellas, you've got to get John Yoo on the podcast next week to sort all this out for you. I guess we do, yeah. You're right yeah you're right oh yeah yeah here we go oh i wonder is he available i wonder if he'll give me a break there have been mutterings actually that the person that they choose may not be chosen specifically for their legal knowledge but that that that ethnicity and gender may play a deciding role i know that sounds sounds crazy, but what do you guys think about that?

James, that would be outrageous. Well, it's also a very strange kind of – this is a sort of classic – I don't know. What is it? Cash 22? It depends on, I guess, on how you think about it. The idea that you've announced ahead of time who you're – the complexion and the background of who you're going to nominate without naming a name, And then people say, well, you really shouldn't do that. You shouldn't, it shouldn't matter.

And then you turn on those people and say, oh, what are you, a bigot? Right, right. Well, no, I'm just quite saying the opposite. And, you know, just, I mean, he said he wanted to nominate a black woman. But just like, just assume he had said something else, like, I'd like to nominate an Asian man. Just another, designating another ethnicity that is a growing ethnicity in America, probably growing at a faster rate than African Americans. Imagine the outrage. Imagine the crazy

backtracking they would have to do imagine just the weird yoga like gymnastic press release and buyback that they'd have to make if he had said that it's just the idea that these things are

I mean if he came out and he said there's all of these cases that are coming to the Supreme Court about the supposed quotas and the denial of opportunity of Asian-Americans in the Ivy League schools. And I think it'd be very important to have an Asian man there who would bring life experience about that. Yes, heads would explode. And part of it would be like, well, wait a minute. Hold on a second here. He's not going to judge by the law. He's going to judge based on his particular genetic makeup. Wait, wait, what? I mean, but whether or not the left would say that, I don't know. I mean, the left would want to say that, perhaps,

because they're behind what Harvard and Yale are doing. But at the same time, it sort of gives the game away, doesn't it? And I'll tell you, just to change the subject slightly, but on the same general topic, the game was given away this week in the New York Times. Two NYPD officers were shot and killed last week, making a domestic violence stop in, I think it was East Harlem. They were shot point blank. The guy opened the door and just started firing.

That's how that worked. So the idea, of course, from two years ago, that what we need are different, are police trained differently to respond to these domestic violence things. Well, okay, these were... If only they'd been wearing webcams. If only they had had a psychology degree,

then he'd be... So it doesn't matter, right? The New York Times piece on it, which I know came from the place where they wanted to honor these heroes who were both Latino, was probably one of the most shockingly disgusting pieces

I've read in the New York Times. The first three or four or five paragraphs threaded throughout this two-page, almost two-page obituary, essentially, described how both of these Latino gentlemen had reporters is that you may draw the conclusion by the fact that these two Latino police officers were shot dead, that we need more police. You may also draw the conclusion that there are dangerous people behind the front door when you knock. You may also draw the conclusion that there is a problem with soaring crime in New York City that has nothing to do with Latinos, Asians, white people. You may not like that.

That may upset you, but it is nonetheless true. uniform and face death every day behind a door they did not expect um is that was this meretricious sniveling incredibly incredibly uh backwalking uh indefensible uh article designed even more atrociously as a celebration of these two heroes. It was shocking to read. Well, the city council person for that area, I believe, made a statement where she, and she said to fund the police and empty out the prisons person. I made the point that she honored and regretted the loss of life. And in doing so, she named the two cops and the person who shot them as if to put them all under the umbrella of gun violence and the hideous capitalist system that we live in

that must be dismantled completely, which many people, as Rob did, found to be rather appalling. Doesn't make me want to go to New York. Especially doesn't want to make me go to New York because I read a whole bunch of pieces this week about how we have a local Minneapolis pizzeria that is attempting to reproduce New York pizza, which people hold up as the new ultra of pizza. And I think they're absolutely wrong.

I'll argue with this until the day I die. New York pizza is nothing special. It has its attributes, but don't tell me that it's the greatest in the world. No, it just isn't. And I know this because I make, I know, I know pizza is one of those things that actually gives my life a little extra bounce on Fridays when I have it. It's necessary. Okay, I don't want to say that you should take your pizza to bed, but if you're spending lots of time and attention making sure that your pizza is good, that's an indication that

you like your life to be well-ordered and that quality matters and those little details. Like Peter was saying before, sleep. Now, I can only assume that Peter's not sleeping in the room with the Bowling Branch sheets if he's only get two and a half hours in, because frankly, when I lie myself down in mine, I'm there for the duration. You don't cut corners on what's important, do you? And few things matter more than a good night's rest. Bowling Branch's signature sheets are so soft, so light, you'll forget you're not actually sleeping on a cloud. And they are sustainably made for uncompromising quality from field to factory. So I love them

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at your checkout. That's bowlingbranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com, promo code RICOCHET. And we thank BowD, branch.com, promo code Ricochet. And we thank Boland Branch for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Amy Zickart, professor of political science at Stanford, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a contributor to The Atlantic. She specializes in U.S. intelligence, emerging technologies, and national security, and is the author of five books covering these areas,

including The Forthcoming, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, The History and Future of American Intelligence. It'll be released on February 1st. Welcome to the podcast. And we have to ask you, do you think New York pizza is the best? I'm sorry, no, that's a previous conversation. I won't bother you with that. The intelligence community today as it stands. Now, in the old days of spycraft, we had the secret hidden agents. We had the people who were stands. Now, in the old days of spycraft, you know, we had the secret hidden agents, we had the people who were skulking around in the back, taking small, tiny microfilm pictures of key documents. Now it's different. Now it seems as if somebody sitting at a terminal in the West can affect what goes on in the infrastructure in Iran

or Russia or the rest of it. So my first question is, knowing virtually nothing about this, how much of our current intelligence posture has gone back from the old ways of collecting information and is relying on new ways and chugging things through algorithms? And does that actually mean that we're better at this or safer? Oh, it's great. It's a great question. So the short answer is not enough. How much have we changed? Not enough. So you laid out spine is not what it used to be. And spine isn't even for governments anymore, right? So when we think about China's nuclear missile silos, for example, which were discovered a few months ago, they were discovered by people who didn't

hold security clearances and didn't work for U.S. intelligence agencies. So there's a whole ecosystem now. Anybody with a cell phone and an internet connection can collect and analyze information. So it's a radically different world than it was even 10 years ago. We've seen in the last year or two virtually the failure of nearly every institution in government that we thought at least was basically competent. And if there's one thing we've lost a lot of faith in, it's the FBI and the CIA for their inability to see something coming, for their flat-footed response.

And we think sometimes maybe these institutions are so big that they can't be nimble anymore. That's what we fear. We like to think, because we've seen the movies, that actually they're really good at this. With a lot of very fast typing, they can figure things out. But how far behind the curve are we when it

comes to other countries? And is this, I mean, should we be hiring these guys who are making the decisions about Chinese missile silos? Or is there some sort of institutional sclerotic inertia that keeps us from moving faster? Look, you know, I'd be the first to say I've criticized the intelligence community for a long time, but it's hard what they do, right? So I'm always reminded of when Mike Hayden, who led the CIA and the NSA, gave a talk years ago in Los Angeles. This is before we found Osama bin Laden. He gave the speech, and the first question in the audience was, we spend tens of billions of dollars on these intelligence agencies. Why can't you find Osama bin Laden? And Hayden said, I'll tell you why. Because he's hiding, right? Everyone laughed.

But it's a very serious point, which is that this stuff is hard. It is hard to anticipate the future. It's hard for us to anticipate what we're going to do a month from now. So figuring out what Vladimir Putin's up to, what Kim Jong-un is going to do, what Xi Jinping's intentions are, this is hard stuff. So while I'm the first to criticize the intelligence community for failures like 9-11, it's important to bear in mind, as you pointed out, you know, this stuff looks a lot easier in the movies than it is in real life. And in fact, one of the things I found in my book, and the reason I started writing the book, was that I found that most

Americans actually get their knowledge of intelligence from spy-themed entertainment. And it's become adult education. And that leads to all sorts of expectations, as you pointed out, of a little bit of typing and you get the answer. And that has profound implications even for intelligence policy. So I found examples of policymakers being confirmed for CIA director, asked hypothetical questions from Jack Bauer plot lines. This is not good for our country in terms of encouraging good oversight. So we're really misled by spy themed entertainment, I think. Amy, Peter here. First of all, the book, again, is Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, published on February 1st is the pub date. You can preorder it, as I have, on Amazon.

And congratulations. It's getting reviewed everywhere, and it's getting reviewed spectacularly. Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Harvey Clare, who is one of the great men of intelligence and one of the leading Cold War historians, gave it a rave and detailed and thoughtful but rave review. So congratulations. If I were you after this podcast, I'd take the rest of the day off. Thank you, Peter. It's very nice of you to say and it's always nice to be able to say you've finished writing a book and you're currently writing a book. Yes, yes, yes. So here's the question. This is rough draft because you and I are going to sit down for an hour and record an episode of Uncommon Knowledge, I believe, in the middle of next week, working on a date, in any moment. But the dividing line between the Pentagon and the private sector has shifted in recent years. Witness, for example, Palantir, whose principal clients, at least at one point early in the company's life, were federal agencies, including the Department of Defense.

Our Hoover colleague, James Mattis, loves Palantir. Why is that? Because Palantir can hire really bright engineers and promote them and pay them well, and they can do a better job analyzing data than the Pentagon's data, at least in certain regards, than the Pentagon can do itself. So now to intelligence in your book. One of the things, I haven't read the book yet, but I read Harvey Clare's review yesterday. And one of the things that struck me was he said that you make the point that 80% of what our intelligence agencies do is comb through publicly available information. You said a moment ago that Chinese nuclear sites were discovered outside the intelligence agencies.

All kinds of people have access to high-grade electronic information. So I'm just wondering, should we be thinking about pushing more and more work? Should our intelligence agencies become more and more simply the writers of checks, procurement agencies for private operations that can prove nimbler, hire and promote talent, doesn't have all the work rules and bureaucratic constraints under which the intelligence agencies operate? Is there some argument in that direction?

Surely, if there is, you'd have found it in writing this book. Well, Peter, it's a really great point. So two things, I'd say. One is that, as you pointed out, technology has dramatically changed the game. So you have companies like Palantir, DataMiner, a number of different startups that are moving faster, able to do things our government can't do. This is part of a broader radical transformation of our world, right? So in the book, I talk about how we've never been at the juncture we are with so many revolutionary technologies. So think about the internet, social media, AI, for example, the proliferation of commercial satellites. Think about how you can use Google Maps to find detailed locations in a way that only spy satellites used to do 20 years

ago. What does that mean? It means that there is real insight from all this publicly available information that there didn't used to be. Secrets still matter. Even if 80% of a typical intelligence report comes from publicly available information, secrets are still crucially important. And so in answer to your question, what can the intelligence community do? The name of the game in the future is open source intelligence. It's going to be foundational, but it has to marry all that publicly available information with the secrets stolen from the prime minister's safe or the intercepted communication. Explain that term, Amy,

open source intelligence. I'm just not sure what you mean by that. Open source intelligence is things that are publicly available. So think about Twitter feeds, right, or anything on the internet. So there's incredible insight by bringing all of this data together using machine learning tools and other things. But the challenge is then how can the intelligence community gain insight at speed and how can it do that better than all these other people out there in the world? So the point or the big point that I make in the book is that the intelligence playing field is leveling. There's what we call a democratization of capability, that anybody can

do these things. And what that means is the intelligence community has to get better at hiring technological people. It has to get better at working with private sector companies like Palantir. It has to get better at recruiting the right tools and harnessing the insights from them, using artificial intelligence more to augment analysis. But the secret part of what they do still matters. And so as I tell my students, what do we get for intelligence that we can't get from Google? I think we get three things. We get the marriage of that open source stuff with the secrets, right? So how do we know that Vladimir Putin was directing election interference in 2016?

A human source publicly reported, right, inside the Kremlin. It wasn't just from open source stuff. So that's incredibly important, the marrying of the public with the secrets. The second thing is that the intelligence community tailors that information to what a policymaker needs, right? So will that bridge up ahead hold my tank, right? What is Putin going to do? So intelligence agencies are supposed to serve policymakers when they need it, right? And then the third thing is they say things that policymakers might not want to hear, right? Those are the unwelcome truths of you might not be happy about this, Mr. President, but we think Xi Jinping is doing X, Y, and Z. And you can't get that just from the open source community. So the spy agencies still matter. There's still a job for them. Right, right. Rob. Hey, thank you for joining, Sammy.

This is Rob Long in New York. I got a question. We were told, and I think it happened by looking at an org chart, that in response to 9-11, American intelligence gathering and analysis would be radically changed. And org charts got moved around and boxes got created and new bureaucracies happened. And I guess the theory was you have Defense Department intelligence, naval intelligence, Army intelligence, I guess probably even an Air Force intelligence. And then you have Central Intelligence, and then you have National Security. Defense Department intelligence, naval intelligence, army intelligence, I guess probably even in Air Force intelligence. And then you have central intelligence, and then you have national security. Henry Kissinger was the national security advisor during the Yom Kippur War, during detente, during the opening of China. He had 40 people working for him. There are now over 400 people working in the National Security Council.

So my priors are all the reforms we undertake are usually pointless and too little too late. Did we get it right after 9-11? And if we didn't get it right, how do we get it right? We got some things right after 9-11. I agree with you. So we now have 18 different intelligence agencies. And if we look at what was the big problem that led our intelligence community to miss, and I found 23 opportunities to have penetrated that plot and possibly stopped it, why did they miss it?

The right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. Too many organizations to coordinate. So what did hand was doing. Too many organizations to coordinate. So what did we do? We added more organizations to coordinate. But I mean, when you say right hand, left hand, do you mean, I mean, I think there's a lot of ways to interpret that, but is it one way to interpret that, that the right hand being, we'll say international offshore intelligence and the left hand being FBI domestic intelligence? I mean, are we hamstrung by that division? We were, but the FBI didn't know what the FBI had, right? So there were three different offices in the FBI. Each had clues to the plot.

None of them knew what the other one was doing, right? So even the FBI didn't coordinate well among itself. So coordination was a huge problem, Rob, as you point out. And now we have even more organizations to coordinate. So I think that makes life more difficult all accounts has been a great success after 9-11. And we did have more of a marriage between intelligence and military action in the battlefield. Now that's good and bad, right? So one of the senior intelligence officials said to me shortly after 9-11, and I never forgot it, he said his biggest fear was by the time we mastered the Al-aeda problem, will Al Qaeda be the problem? And what he meant by that, and we've seen this movie, right? So we've got really good at this coordination between intelligence and the military.

What does that mean? We've taken our eye off the ball in China. We've actually, you know, the more that the CIA is hunting, the less the CIA is gathering. And so you can't do everything. So the more we're involved in really supporting the warfighter on the battlefield, the less the Central Intelligence Agency can look at the future and prevent strategic surprise. Right now, how free do you think the CIA is to gather? I mean, by when I say gather, I mean to gather without a policy framework guiding what they're looking for.

You know how sometimes when you're looking for something, you find it, and when you're not looking for something, even if it's in front of you, you don't find it? How free is the central intelligence? How free is sort of the bottom of the pyramid to gather stuff that may contradict the president, a president, any president, may contradict current policy, may suggest that our current policy is a mistake. How free do you think that is? I think it's pretty free. I mean, I'm on the outside looking in, right? So I only know what I can, what I'm able to see from the outside. I mean, I guess what I would say is, and I'm probably leading the answer here.

People always work better, I think, when they really do believe there's an existential threat. So I have a friend of mine who's in the intelligence business, and I say, so who does it right? What's the gold standard here? Maybe in 1895 to 1911, it was Great Britain, right? Because they were the great game. They were all over that place. Who does it right? And his answer has been for the past 10 years, Israel.

Does Israel do it right? I think Israel does a lot right. Israel has a lot of advantages that the United States doesn't, chiefly size, right? So it's a small country. It has national service requirements. So it's able to your earlier point about how can you recruit the best and brightest to go not to Silicon Valley, but the government? Well, there's mandatory service in Israel. So they do get the best and brightest to do service in government. And there's a closer connection between the private sector and the government. You know, here, we don't have that kind of close cooperation. It's getting better. But, you know, private sector companies have some incentives that are aligned and some that aren't with the nation. And we live with that. And that's easier in Israel than it is

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So Israel has another advantage, I suppose, in a weird kind of topsy-turvy way that it faces accidental threats. It is a do-or-die proposition for Israel. Intelligence isn't just guiding future policy. It's maintaining its existence on the earth.

And I suspect that, I guess one of my real questions is, I mean, you pointed to it with the idea of solving the al-Qaeda problem and then missing the other problems. What are we really missing? I mean, we have differences in America right now that are profound and intellectual about whether it matters to us if Putin marches into Ukraine, about whether China is a threat to us or simply it is emerging on the world stage as a great power that it's something to be celebrated we don't know yet

whether there there are muslim fundamentalism is still a danger for the united states there are people who think it isn't um how do you gather how do you gather intelligence in a world where you're not even convinced that the intelligence is do or die. Do you know what I'm saying? I do. Yeah, I think, I actually think that there are many existential threats confronting the nation today. And we have the opposite problem, which is the threat landscape is so bad and so complicated. How do we triage when there's so much to be concerned about? So if you look at the Cold War, and the Cold War, it was pretty straightforward. It was Soviet Union was look at the Cold War, and the Cold War, it was pretty straightforward. Soviet Union was number one, number two, and number three.

But how do we rank the threats, the existential threats facing the nation? That's much harder today than it was in the Cold War. And how do we then deploy resources so that we have the right people and the right resources targeted on the right threats, right? So I think we have, in some ways, a much different problem today. Too many existential threats facing the country today. You've listed a bunch of them already. And what's supercharging all these threats is new technology, right? So now it's not just great powers have to mobilize troops and we see them coming, which we're seeing on the Ukrainian border, but it's we can be attacked from far away through cyberspace from people sitting at home using their laptops.

That's never happened in human history before, the ability to really damage another country from far, far away with such ease, right? Where power and geography don't protect us. This is a completely new world and it's driven by technology. And the question is, is whether or not we're doing it to them. Because here in the States, we had over Christmas and to this day, a profound shortage of cream cheese. And it was because hackers in Bulgaria or Iran or Russia or wherever decided to do a ransomware or an infrastructure probe on some cheese manufacturers and crippled

the cream cheese industry for a couple of months. I've been reading up on this. I just wrote about it. That's why I know. And what we like to think is that we respond in kind as opposed to Biden sitting down and saying to Putin, well, here's the 10 industries I really don't want you to touch. Don't even think about it. That we, too, have our people who can sit at the laptops and respond in kind. That there's this dark shadow war going on in the cyber. Is that true? Do we have that skill?

And are we using it, as far as you can tell? Yes. And yes, we do have that skill. We have very sophisticated cyber capabilities and increasingly the government is talking publicly about the fact that it's using them. Right. So part of the challenge is what's different about cyber is when you use it, you can lose it. So if I have an F-16 and I use it, the other side can't turn that F-16 around and use it on me. Right. But with a cyber weapon, once it's in the wild, other and I use it, the other side can't turn that F-16 around and use it on me, right? But with a cyber weapon, once it's in the wild, other people can use it against us. So it's a little bit

of a different battlefield, but we're much more forward-leaning, right? So the Pentagon has a relatively new strategy the past few years, and it's called defend forward, right? It's much more forward-leaning. It's about let's take the fight to our adversary systems rather than just doing perimeter defense here at home. And I think that's right. That's a welcome change. I was talking to a very smart guy years ago who explained to me without any hesitation at all that there would be a war between Israel and Iran. There had to be a war between Israel and Iran. Iran was to be a war between Israel and Iran. Iran was getting nuclear capabilities.

It was building a reactor. The only way to keep the Iranian nuclear threat from harming or threatening Israel was an actual war of bombs. And then about, and there was a date at which he was convinced that this war would take place. It had to take place.

He said he was utterly convinced of this. And then of course, there was a thing at which he was convinced that this war would take place. It had to take place. He said he was utterly convinced of this. And then, of course, there was a thing called Stuxnet, this mysterious thing that came from somewhere. We know where it came from. It came from Israel. But are we – I guess the question is how many Stuxnets have we not heard of? And I guess my answer to that is tons. But I suspect it's not. And going forward, don't we need more of them?

It's a great question. I think one of the concerns is the more we do, the less we control. And there's a worry that we don't understand the escalation dynamics when we wage a cyber attack on something. So what we've seen is we're much more hesitant to do it than the Chinese are, right, which have stolen our intellectual property for years. We're much more hesitant to do it than the North Koreans are. And we're much more hesitant than the Russians. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Arguments on both sides, right? We're in uncharted territory. But what we've seen, I mean, you're right with Iran, we haven't seen a war, but there's been very active, well, shall we say,

lots of activity by our friends, the Israelis, and some in concert with the United States, to keep that country from getting the bomb, short of war. And that's where all the activity is, is the gray zone short of war. Cyberspace looks a lot more like intelligence than it does warfare. And yet, if you go to the policy levels

of American governments, certainly the ones I think that are there today, you find fatalism and a certain kind of acceptance that eventually Iran's going to get the bomb. And I guess that kind of goes back to my first question, which is how often or how dangerous do you think, or maybe I'm just inventing a problem that doesn't exist, that the policy assumptions drive intelligence gathering. I think to some extent that's true. So intelligence agencies aren't free to just muck about and find things that they want to. They're supposed to answer policymaker questions, but they're also supposed to raise uncomfortable

truths with policymakers, right? And so, you know, it's an art and a science. I mean, I will say, you know, and I've spent three decades talking to folks inside the intelligence community. When they say speaking truth to power, they mean it, right? They take it seriously. They want to serve every president just like the military does. They don't take sides and serve one president and not another. And their job is to tell them the ground truth as they see it. Now they get it wrong sometimes, but that objectivity that they don't have a dog in the policy fight is really important.

Is it Stuxnet, if I believe, was introduced into the Iranian centrifuge array with a chip, some coat that they hid in a toner cartridge, right, in a printer or something like that. I mean, that's how they imported it, from what I understand. Am I basically right, as far as we know? Basically. So what we know, and I have to be careful, right, for classification. So what we know from what's been publicly reported is that Stuxnet was like a Mission Impossible movie, right? So there was a way where it still hasn't been said how that this malware was injected into the servers that run the centrifuges. A human had to be involved, presumably, right? So there was some human involvement.

But made it look like, just like the movies, made it look like the centrifuges were spinning at regular speed when, in fact, they weren't. And they were spinning too fast and spinning too slowly. And eventually, they blew themselves apart. It was a remarkable, remarkable piece of code. It was absolutely. And the brilliant idea that somebody said, look, they got to print off some stuff. So let's put it in the chip and the cartridge and the toner or the ink or whatever. And that's how we inject it into the system, which is fine. But then to the same people who are aware of this, then turn around and say,

oh, and by the way, your router is made in China. Your webcam is made in China. Your drone is made in China. All of these things are, in other words, is there any sort of, you know, with these vast tentacular organizations of intelligence gathering that you've been describing, where there's actually somebody who looks at what we are buying and says, let's see if they hid a back door in this, because frankly, China would be stupid not to put a backdoor in nearly everything that they sold to us. But yet we just sort of blithely assume and march along as if they hadn't. And again, that's one of those truth to power thing where you have to say, Mr. President, this contract here is compromised because we know who's making it. We know there

are ties to the Chinese intelligence and Chinese military. Kill this contract. Get this company out of our system. I mean, is that a paramount concern? Yes. Supply chain security, especially for our defense systems, is a big issue. And part of the challenge is our supply chains have gotten so long and they're so opaque that we don't know how bad it could be. Right. So you think about, you know, the F-35. How many suppliers are there? And at what point, if in anywhere in that process, was that supply chain potentially compromised by China? It's a huge issue. Lots of people in the government are working on it now. But it is a hard problem to solve because our supply chains are so interdependent. Amy, it's all hopeless, isn't it? I'll read the book. I haven't read the book yet. I haven't

received my copy yet, but I've read Harvey Clare's review, and you and I have talked about this before when you were still working on the book. The technology has changed so quickly. Policymakers, maybe more now than is usual, but we have an older generation in charge in Washington. It's these people were not raised, they don't, I mean, let's face it, Nancy Pelosi is 81 years old. She has to have staff help with her tapping messages on the iPhone. They're not going to be quite with it. I don't mean to pick on Nancy Pelosi. Meanwhile, China has a sense of morale. It is able to recruit. It's able to tell the best and brightest coming out of this university or that university or this or that engineering program, you in intelligence. Vladimir Putin has created a totally corrupt regime, but it has this benefit. He controls hundreds of billions of dollars. He can threaten people, but he can also reward people. He can pay people. He can set up little shops in Moscow to cause all kinds of problems with us and make sure that all the engineers, all the Russian kids in that shop are really well paid and taken care of. Is

there any particular advantage, permanent advantage? Second World War, we produced more materiel. We could produce ships. We could produce aircraft. Cold War, you'd argue that our model was more appealing in the third world. Over time, they'd rather live like us than like the Soviets. What kind of underlying advantage do we have now, if any? Well, I'm at root an optimist. Yes, I know. You're cheerful. This is what I don't understand. How can you write that book and then smile? And I'm an optimist.

Well, I eat a lot of chocolate as I write the book, so that does help. That's good. But I'm an optimist because Well, I eat a lot of chocolate as I write the book, so that doesn't help. It's good. But I'm an optimist because I believe in America, right? When we think about the best of our country, our free markets, our free peoples, our values, those are enduring. And so would you rather live in China or would you rather live in the United States? I'll take the United States any day. You look at the innovation, look at the COVID-19 vaccine, right? Look what we did with all of our messiness and all of our disorganization. We produced the best vaccines in the world faster than any other country in the world, right? And so when I think about, you know, technology, we still have incredible advantages. We have to harness those advantages better in the government. That's a challenge. It used to be that technology was invented inside the government and then it became commercialized. Now it's the opposite. New technologies are coming out of the private

sector and the government has to figure out how to harness them. But we're always, I think we have more allies than China does. China has customers, right? We have allies. That's a big difference. And I think that we have values and values are enduring. And so I think, you know, it feels overwhelming now. It feels like a juggernaut of the authoritarians at this moment and that the good guys are losing, but it's not going to be that way in the long term. In the long term, I think our values and our freedoms and our capitalism will enable us to win. I like hearing that. All right. Your book is called Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, the History and Future of American Intelligence. I am now going to, this afternoon, go to the bookstore and order it. I feel like I need to

order things in the bookstore because they'll probably buy two copies and then they'll put one in the window. We are thinking about launching in the next couple weeks a Ricochet members-only book club. So that would be a great title. So I'm saying this diplomatically because, of course, I want everyone to go buy your book. But, you know, spy novels are fun. All right? So thrillers are fun. All right, so thrillers are fun. And I know that they're probably made up.

A lot of them are made up and a lot of them are crazy and you don't just type into the thing and see the overall inside the thing and whatever. But it's gotta be some of them where you're like, holy moly, this person's kind of got it right. And I heard years ago, I don't know if it's still the case, that people in the intelligence community

had a kind of a grudging admiration for a thriller writer named David Ignatius, who was a Washington Post reporter, still is, I think. He seemed to understand Middle East intelligence gathering and deception pretty well. All right, so stipulate. I'm buying your book. Everyone should buy your book. But if I'm going to want to buy the book that I'm going to, you know, the fine novel book. The book that you want to read? Is that what you're calling it?

Yeah. No, the book that I was going to be in the movie, right? What, what, who do you like? Who, if you're going to, I mean, maybe it's a busman's holiday for you, so you don't read it, but who do you think, you know, this person, I mean, obviously it's a book, it's a little fictional, but who do you know? Who's, who's got it close to right? Well, actually, I think my favorite nonfiction book that reads like a thriller that you can't believe it's real is The Billion Dollar Spy by David Hoffman, who is a Washington Post reporter. And it's a real no kidding story of espionage in the Cold War.

So I think, you know, Tom Clancy once said the difference between fact and fiction is that fiction has to make sense, right? So there is a kind of, right? That's a beautiful line. There's a kind of comfort. You're punting. I get it. There's a comfort that we get. So, you know, I take your point that, you know,

fiction is usually riveting and more riveting than, you know, nonfiction books by professors from university presses. But I will say this. I think the real world of the intelligence community is fascinating. And one of the things that I really wanted to do, because I wrote this book in part for my students, is I wanted insiders to share

what it's like to be them. So I interviewed a number of former and current intelligence officials, and I asked them questions like, when did you tell your kids what you did for a living? And how did that go? What were the ethical challenges you faced? Because we never hear about those, right? What were your best and your worst days in your job? And they were fascinating discussions. And so I put that in the book because I want people to understand, I said, you know, I'm an outsider, but I want that insider view to come through. And I think there's no more interesting thing than hearing how people work in the real world, serving their country in silence in the intelligence community. I love that answer. Okay. So the answer is you don't need to buy a spy novel, just buy your book. Right. That is the

answer. I like that answer. It's a new world and you can find all about it in Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, the History and Future of American Intelligence by Amy Segar. Thanks so much for joining us today. It's been very instructive and also heartening. I have to tell you the truth. I feel somewhat sort of kind of better about our capabilities. I feel better.

I feel worse. Thanks so much for having me. I feel worse. Peter feels worse. Yeah, that's right. All right. That's pretty good for intelligence. I feel worse.

Amy, I have lots more questions. So just get ready. Two out of three ain't bad. I'll take that. All right. Thanks for joining us, Amy. Take it easy. Thanks so much. Bye-bye. Thank you, Amy. Thank you.

Congrats again on the book. I do feel, you know, Peter feels worse because Peter didn't get enough sleep. And part of the problem that Peter's going to have in 2022 is making sure that he does get enough sleep so that he can look at his little device and say, oh, good. I may feel tired, but I shouldn't be because my device tells me that I slept well. Well, it's wellness, right? And there's a wellness revolution going on.

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Well, before we go here, big dust up. Boomers versus the new media. Neil Young pulled his stuff from Spotify because they wouldn't deplatform Joe Rogan. The Surgeon General says that Joe Rogan should be censored. I don't listen to Rogan. All this stuff makes me think that I probably should, just so I'm up on what it's saying. But

other artists have fallen into line. And they're saying, we want our stuff taken off Spotify, too, unless you do something about that guy you paid $100 million for. And Spotify, unless you, unless you do something about that guy, you paid a hundred million dollars for and Spotify. And every one of these cases has been saying, I'm leaving the pop culture stuff to you guys.

I don't even, I can't even tell the difference between Neil Young and Neil Dunn. I just feel like these guys, I mean, all of them have at some point faced people in their, you know, heyday, which Neil,

Neil Young was many many years ago wanting them to shut up and stop talking about politics and take their music off the radio and you know i can go back i'm sure i can find some some equally if you believe that joe rogan's nutty i don't really he's nutty but he's fascinating good at what he does um if you believe that uh being nutty is a crime, Neil Young, how long is it going to take me to find some crazy stuff that Neil Young said? Maybe let a thousand flowers bloom.

Well, he had a whole album about how Monsanto was poisoning the planet, which is GMO, which is sort of, he didn't trust the science, exactly exactly it's the same as the rest it's you know it's of a piece with howard stern who apparently has turned into a cranky old boomer who's raging against those people who are fighting the uh the state and the powers that be however you define it it's not an unusual path for people to take it take as they they creep towards the tomb but it's just the idea that Spotify would say,

we need Neil Young more than we need Joe Rogan goes a lot to how the whole cultural edifice of the boomers is built on sand. And the sand has been subject to the tides for decades. No one really, really cares. I mean, look, Gutfeld's on top, right? Gutfeld's new. I mean, it's not a spring chicken but he's not exactly uh a geriatric sword hitting the hitting the geritol new ratings show

that uh he's beating the old guard so rob you're a tv guy does this mean that the uh tonight show as a as a cultural edifice is no longer the powerhouse that it was when when carson had it i don't know the audience is completely fragmented so i mean i you know greg's a good friend of mine so we talked about this for a couple years was he was preparing it and he was like he's a nice guy he's nervous that what do you think is going to happen i mean i know what's going to happen he'll be number one um because everyone else is splitting the other half of the country. So, you know, Fallon and Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah and those people are competing for half, and the other half is going to you.

So the math really works. Right. So there's a rise of new paradigms, like Ricochet's desire to be a national public radio for people on the right and center right. And Rob, I think you have some news that you might want to tell people. Oh, yeah. This comes under the heading of things we're doing for members. So if you're not a member, you can easily have this be part of your life by joining. We do a bunch of little conversations, usually in the evening, much more personal, not so much political and topical with people that are in our orbit.

I just did one this week, a really fascinating one with Eric Erickson, who's an incredibly interesting guy. And we talk about everything, and not just politics, a little bit about Georgia, but in general, just about life. And I'm doing one with Ayn Herson Ali coming up next week, and that will be fascinating because there's a lot about her that we don't know, and it would be nice to talk to her. Those are member conversations. I call them no dumb questions, not because I'm not allowed to ask dumb questions. It's just that every question that I ask is by definition not a dumb question, even if it is a dumb question, because sometimes

you never ask dumb questions, and those are usually the things I want to know. And the third thing I want to say to people, we have so much great writing on Ricochet, as you guys know. So many of our members write really, really beautiful stuff. And again, usually it comes from the most personal part of their lives, the things that they know about their lives, their families, their experiences, their histories. And it's the most edifying thing I read. And we have a friend of the company and a friend of ricochet michael graham

and he runs a thing called inside sources which is basically his newswire uh and has some astronomical dozens and dozens and dozens of tens and tens and tens of millions of um of readers across the country in small newspapers that still are read and are trusted by their readers that is true about small newspapers. Important people remember, you may not trust the Washington Post, New York Times, or the LA Times, or something like that, but if you have a local paper, those local papers are trusted by their readers. And he agrees that there's lots of great writing in Ricochet.

So if you write a post on the member feed, there's going to be a new little click box as you join, and it'll be a little click box there for each post. And you can click and say, look, send this along to InsideSource sources because I want that on their wire. And his only rule, it's gotta be about 600 words. And if it's chosen, you don't get paid sadly, but on the other hand,

you become an official pundit and a national figure. But you need a headshot and a bio. The best things are going to be a mixture of personal experience and credibility and politics. So why do you know that Joe Biden's messing up more than anyone else? And I think that is something that we at Ricochet excel at. That's what I love to read. You can go to any other website and join it. Which ones give you the opportunity for national syndication? Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. And it's Insight Source. Really great stuff. And he approached us with this because he is a fan, not just of Ricochet, but of the members at Ricochet, of which if you are one, we are thrilled to be members along with you. And if you are not one,

today is a perfect day to join. Absolutely so. This podcast today was brought to you by Bold and Branch, by ByJu's Future School, and by Beam. Support them for supporting us. Join Ricochet today, as Rob noted. The benefits only start with what he said. There's so much fun to be had there in the member feed, in the podcast. It's just go there. Join. What's stopping you? Nothing should at all. And give us those five-star reviews at Apple Podcasts if you possibly could. It's been fun. Gentlemen, we'll see you next week. Peter, Rob, we'll see everyone in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, boys.

Next week, fellas. Nobody does it better. Makes me feel sad for the rest. Nobody does it half as good as you. Baby, you're the best I wasn't looking But somehow you found me I tried to hide from your love But like heaven above me The spy who loved me Is keeping all my secrets safe tonight

And nobody does it better Though sometimes I wish someone could Nobody does it quite the way you do Why'd you have to be so good The way that you hold me Whenever you hold me There's some kind of magic inside you That keeps me from running

But just keep it coming How'd you learn to do the things you do nobody does it better makes me feel sad for the rest

Nobody does it half as good as you Baby, baby, darling, you're the best. Maybe you're the best. Maybe you're the best. Maybe you're the best. Maybe you're the best. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Thanks for watching!