The Team House - 20+ Years in the CIA & 16 Years as CSO of Microsoft | Mike Howard | Ep. 321

Episode Date: January 12, 2025

Mike Howard is the former Chief Security Officer (CSO) at Microsoft for 16 years, with previous careers at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for 22 years and in my youth, a few years with the Oakland, California Police Department.https://www.mikehowardauthor.comOrder Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured—————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 50% OFF!!!Mando ⬇️https://shopmando.comPromo code "TEAMHOUSE" for 40% off your starter pack.____________________________________Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]0:00 startBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to and we really appreciate that so go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house special operations covert ops espionage the team house with your hopes jack murphy and david park hey folks welcome to episode 321 of the team house i'm jack murphy here with Dave Park and our guest on tonight's show is Mike Howard. He is a retired CIA operations officer. We're really excited to have him on the show tonight. I'll kick it over to Dave for a shout out to one of our sponsors. Hey, if you sleep hot at night, you know just how disruptive it can be. Whether you're having trouble falling asleep or waking up sweating in the middle of the night

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cooling pillows. I mean, they're awesome. Their linens, they're betting. Great stuff. So, Mike, thank you for coming on the show tonight. You know, you got introduced to us by Rick Prado, which is Apropos, because we're here smoking cigars. And he's one of, he's one of my two or three go-to guys for cigar recommendations. It's racist. Because he's Cuban. Okay, I'm leaving the show now. I can't be on a racist show. I know. So, Mike, tell us a little bit about, you know, how you grew up and how that took you

towards governmental service. Okay. Good. First of all, thanks to both you, Jack and Dave, for having me on. It's an honor and I'm just looking forward to this conversation. I really appreciate your backgrounds and everything you did to serve our great nation. So thank you for that. Well, I grew up.

I was born in Waltham, Massachusetts. I'm an Army brat. My dad did 20 years in the Army. He retired as a Sergeant First Class. He had kind of an unusual career. We, I barely know Waltham. California is what I consider home. He went from Waltham to move the family to Fort Lewis, Washington State,

and then eventually ended up in Fort Worth, California. and that's the area that I call home on Monterey Peninsula. He did a tour of Vietnam, 6768, and then an unaccompanied tour to 71 to 72 to Germany. But like a lot of the NCOs on the block, and it was later in life, I realized how unusual it was, he was basically stationary there in Fort Ord. So that was home.

And I'm half Japanese, so my mother, He met my mom when he was stationed in Japan back in the day, and obviously she immigrated to the U.S. And we grew up in a nice little suburban community called Marina. We lived on base for a little while, and then they built this city called Marina. And a lot of the GIs wanted to move off base, so they went there with their spouses and raised their kids there. in terms of and I had a really normal middle class upbringing you know used to used to get everything I was the only child I had a brother that he died when I was five years old when I was five years old he was four years old we were we were actually back in Germany later when I was a kid I can get into that a little bit but in terms of how I ended up with the you know thinking about the government it's it's it's it's I guess I it's unusual. I was one of those kids always knew what I wanted to do. And I think it's because I probably watched too many cop shows back on as growing up. I'm 68 right now. It'll be 69 in August.

So I was born in 56. So I grew up with, you know, a Dragnet, all these shows from the late 50s, the detective shows, cop shows. And I just, I watched them. I think at one point, my mom told me that what I was, I don't know, I don't know, a little bit. And my dad came home from work. and he said something to me, and I wasn't listening to him. I was just watching focused on some cop show. So that's all I always wanted to be. And when I, like, birthdays and Christmas, you know, I always wanted to, you know, detective guns or,

or Army, you know, toys and all this other kind of stuff. Were you interested? Were you, I'm just wanted to interrupt real quick. I just wanted to ask, were like, were you into like Bruce Lee and things like that? Because I see the karate, Akito stuff behind you. Yeah. That came later in life when I realized that I had no physical skills.

like playing football or basketball, and the only thing that I was ever good at was that. And that was age 14, but I'll kind of progress to that. But yeah, so I always know what I wanted to do. And even in the eighth grade, I was a library assistant or junior high school. And I always remember the librarian, Francis Brown, her husband was the resident agent for the FBI for Monterey County.

And she gave me all this information that he would provide for me. And he actually, I asked if he would come to school and speak to the students and all that kind of stuff. So I was always into it. I even got to the point one time in my life when I was probably 10-ish. I asked my mom for a map of the U.S. And in my little simple brain, I would write to, I don't know, let's say Alaska State Police,

do you know Alaska? Hi, my name is Mike Howard. I'm Tia and I want to be a police officer someday. Could you send me any information? And holy smokes, I was getting letters and packages all the time with patches and information. I even wrote to Scotland Yard and I wrote to the Texas Rangers and the Mounties. And so I was always kind of really, really into that thinking that, you know, I was always going to be a police officer someday. I tried my hand at football, you know, when I was in junior high school, sucked at that.

Played tennis. I was, I loved tennis, but I was kind of, I played on the freshman high school tennis team. But I was kind of like on the C team. But then I, some friends of mine, I grew up in that town called Marina, some friends of mine said, hey, you know, at this junior high school, which I had gone to, Los Arbalas Junior High School, they said every Tuesday and Thursday, there's this thing called the Marina, Judo, Jiu-Jitsu, and Karate school. And we're taking it's pretty cool, right? And I had taken a judo course in Monterey, but they were really tournament oriented. give a crap about folks like me that just I didn't have an innate talent for that so we my mom took me out of that one but I tried I went into this one and it was like the greatest thing since

sliced bread we had a head instructor John Chowhoun and several other other instructors and they they taught unlike today I think in a lot of martial arts schools they taught not just the techniques of martial arts but the philosophy and I remember as a kid you know 14 year old kid he asked us our very first lesson. We had geese and white belts. So what's the first lesson in martial arts? You know, in our little pea brains, he said, oh, you know, you get to defend yourself and fight and blah, blah, blah.

He said, no, you run away. When you looked at each other like, oh, we don't want to do this, because that was the Bruce Lee craze, right? That was the beginning of the kung fu craze and all that. And we wanted to do that. And he said, no, you run away because what we're going to teach you, you could kill somebody. So you run away until you can't run away,

and you have to defend yourself. And that started this long arc. I probably did martial arts from age 14 until, oh, fairly active into my 50s, you know, when I was at Microsoft running their executive protection unit. But it was the only thing physically that I ever took. It was like fish and water. I loved every aspect of it.

And being half Japanese, obviously, I loved that, the history of it, you know, the samurai and the warrior, the Bushido Code. as well as learning all of that. So that was a seminal part of my life. Then went off to college in San Jose State. Always wanted to go there because they had arguably one of the best criminal justice programs in the country.

So I majored in criminal justice with an emphasis in law enforcement and then my minor was sociology because I really kind of dig the way how people think in population wise and how that affects what's happening in the world. Right. And I went through three and a half years and it was senior when this thing, I don't know if you guys know California in terms of the politics, but back then there was something

called Proposition 13 that was going to come around the pike, right? So Prop. Part 13 was initiated by a legislator in California called, it was a Howard Jarvis Act. And what it effectively would have done, it would have cut property taxes, which, in California fueled a lot of the public safety. So fire, police, emergency services, et cetera. So I had a professor in college who was my favorite professor. He's deceased now, God rest him.

Tom McNerney, he'd been a former Oakland police officer, detective, was injured on the job. They were surveilling an auto burglary theft ring, and he got out in front of one of the cars blasted at it, and the guy hit him, and, you know, shattered his leg. He survived, but he left on disability and went to teach it sound as a state. And he was one of the coolest professors, too, because I'm kind of getting aside, but it's worth noting.

He tried to bring a lot of realism into class. Like, he would bring prostitutes, and he knew from back in the day and opened into the classroom to talk to us impressionable college students about what is like to be a hole on the street. every year there was a guy named Mel Wald who was with the San Francisco Police Department. He wasn't a cop, but he was in the S&M community. And he was San Francisco Police Department's liaison to the S&M. So if there was some auto-exfixiation kind of thing and homicide came in in San Francisco and they had to determine whether or not it was that or whether it was a murder,

they bring Mel in. So every year, Tom would bring Mill over and Mel would bring one of his slaves. And they would have the full, now mind you, but the first time he did this, I was, I think it was a junior or maybe sophomore in high school. And he's bringing in, I swear to God, he, Melo brought in like, dildos and it's a slideshow and restraint devices and explaining how all these things work. And we kind of looking at each other. And we're getting credit for this, you know. And he would, but he tried to bring the real. into the office.

And I thought that was so cool. But he told all of us as seniors, he said, look, this proposition is going to pass. And those of you wanting to go into police departments, realize that if you wait until this thing passes, you probably, they won't be hiring. There'll be a hiring freeze, which he was right. So I left college with a semester left,

which was obviously consternation to my parents. But I left to join the Oakland Police Department. I applied to a lot of departments in California, but got picked up by Oakland, and I finished my degree on the job. And hence started my three years. It was 77 to 1980 when I was in Oakland. And it was, it was a job of a lifetime. I loved every aspect of it. Oakland at that time had about a thousand officers now. I think they're down to 600 or something.

I mean, they're really woefully understaffed. And but it was Oakland still Oakland. There are some nice areas up in the Oakland Hills, but in around Lake Merritt, kind of the middle of West Oakland. But it's all where I worked in West Oakland, there were pimps and prostitutes, gangs, ghettos, they call them the hood now. There were just a lot of stuff going on. So I got a, in one year, in my first year as a rookie, I probably learned as much as, A lot of folks that have been in smaller departments, though 10 years.

Yeah. And, you know, I can remember, and stop me if I'm joining on too long. Mike, I just want to ask you because, you know, you, when you were growing up, you had this fixation with police. Was there, because I know that, and there were a lot of cop shows from, you know, the 60s and 70s, SWAT came out and stuff like, was there a certain type of policing that you thought you wanted to do? Like, did you want to be a beat cop?

Did you want to be a detective? Did you want to be a special tactics guy? Like, was there something in your mind you wanted? Yeah, I always wanted to be a detective. You know, I thought, and because when I was growing up, that was before, obviously, SWAT. I remember SWAT as a teenager, but I always wanted to be a detective.

I thought the coolest things were to be a detective. And then eventually my goal in life was eventually to leave the police department after retirement and become a private eye. And I always, that was kind of the goal. Yeah. And at one point, I toyed with joining the Bureau being an FBI. And even when I was a cop in Oakland, you know, the Bureau has a program where if you do three years in a professional capacity, whether it's law enforcement or basically you can be a school teacher, you then can apply to become an FBI agent.

But, yeah, I always thought I'd stick with a, I always know, I always wanted big city, though. I always wanted a big city department. I never want to work for a small town, not taking anything away. from small town cops. They're risking their lives too. But I just think you learn a lot more when you're doing what we did in the big city on a daily basis. You're making car stops every single day. I mean, you're doing, you know, I remember they had a program in Oakland. I don't know if they still haven't where once a year they were bringing officers from different parts of California, smaller departments to ride with us. And I had this one guy who was sergeant. So this is my

starting my second year. And he wrote with me, I mean, great guy, nice guy. He was a sergeant from, I think, someplace in Northern California. He'd been on 10 years, and we're rolling on Saturday, and we're rolling to, you know, 459, burglary in progress, or 187 murder, or 211 robbery in progress. And we're just, at one point, we're, there's a burglar in this one kind of factory area, so we set up a perimeter, and we're getting ready to call in the dogs and the helicopters. And he looks at me, and he said, you guys do this all the time? And it just always struck me, right? This dude has been 10 years. And again, in my youth, I'm thinking, wow, he's asking me that.

And I said, yeah, this is kind of the SOP, right? This is what we do. But it also gave me an appreciation of the education I got, the street education I got while being with Oakland. Officer safety was paramount. How you make a car stop, how you approach a car, how you arrest the suspect, search a suspect, approach the suspect. I remember that even to the days when I was in the agency at one point,

when we were actually, I'll talk about later, training, you know, foreign liaison personnel, but I'll always remember those lessons from Oakland and how they drummed officer safety into you from day one. They told us in the academy, you may never fire a weapon, but you'll pull your weapon out every day and guaranteed you'll be shot at or people are going to try to stab you and shoot you and that kind of stuff. And they were right. I mean, usually your weapons out a couple times a day.

and unlike today in some jurisdictions where every time you pull your weapon out, you have to fill out some stupid form, you know, there, you know, back then you could actually, you could be a cop. I think in a lot of places in this country, you're not allowed to be a cop anymore for political reasons, obviously. But yeah, so I did that for three years thinking, hey, this is my career. I'm going to do this, or maybe I'll go to the bureau. But then one day, on my off day, I'm an avid reader, and I picked up a book called piercing the by a guy named Joseph Prisico. And it was all about the formation of OSS in World War II and how we'd learned from the Brits, you know, Special Operations Executive and all those folks that taught OSS what they needed. And then how OSS penetrated first Nazi, occupied Europe and then Germany. I was reading it and thinking,

this is pretty cool stuff, right? And I was a fan of I spy and James Bond and all that stuff as well growing up, like probably all of us were. And back then, believe it or not, the CIA had a presence in most federal buildings. So I went across the Bay Bridge one day from Oakland, San Francisco, on my day off, and went and go sought out the CIA office. And at that time, getting towards 1980, Reagan, you know,

was taking office, Reagan was rebuilding military, law enforcement, intelligence capabilities after basically been decimated under the last regime. and they said we could use someone in your capacity as a former law enforcement. And so, you know, I did all the forms and it took a little bit over a year to get through the background, the polygraph, all that stuff and entered what they call the Office of Security. And I didn't know anything about it other than what they told me. And Office of Security provides security for CIA facilities and personnel. originally I was going to be one of those guys they called Casey's cops.

So William Casey was the director of CIA at the time. He had run European operations for OSS under Donovan in World War II, made his bones making money on Wall Street, big-time Republican. Reagan tapped him to be campaign manager. And so when Reagan got in, Reagan asked him, what do you want? He said, I want to be Secretary of State. I said, well, I've given that to George Schultz. So what else do you want?

I want to be head to CIA, but I want to be in the cabinet, right? So Casey was the first DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, who was a cabinet official. And one of his ideas was to get a bunch of former cops and other people and go snatch and grab bad guys around the world, right? Which sounded good to me, but I guess it didn't sound good to Congress at the time. So I put the K-Bash on that one. So I ended up with Office of Security, which was great. I mean, we did investigations. I mean, it wasn't the sexiest thing in the world.

The best part was what they called operational security work. This is when you would protect defectors. You know, if our guys bagged a defector and they brought them into the U.S. or some other place, we would be armed to protect that defect over a period of time until while they were being debriefed. And I guess one of the one of the main aspects of that was, what they used to call a confrontation. This is in Washington, D.C. So back then, if we had Vladimir from the Soviet Union as a defector, the Soviets under the protocol rules had one shot, legitimate shot to convince Vladimir to come back to Mother Russia. And this took place at State

Department. And we would have, you know, the asset in a safe house. And the idea was to provide, you know, escort, armed escort to State Department. But the trick was because we knew they would try to surveil us back to the safe house. So, right, counter surveillance back to the safe house. And it got hairy to the State Department because, you know, how it goes. You guys, you know, I'm preaching to the choir. They say, we really want you to come back, Vladimir. But, you know, anyway, here's a picture of your aunt this and your brother this.

And they're okay. I'm sure there'll be no retribution. We wouldn't do anything to them, but I don't know what the neighbors would do. You know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. And we worked with the Bureau a lot on that, and it was a lot of fun. We had a Libyan defector one time. He was pretty cool, stole a mig and glued into Greece.

So we did, yeah, you know, we did. And he was, all he wanted was pan pizza, by the way, every night when we had it. So what do you want? You know, I want the pen pizza. Again, pan pizza did great, you know. But that was a lot of fun. But then, Office of Security at the time was one by, by well-meaning people who are woefully ignorant of the real world.

The first time I did operational security work, I was in what they call WFO, Washington Field Office, and we're going to protect the defector. Remember, they usually get former cops or one of our colleagues was a former U.S. Marshal, so they usually get folks like us familiar with firearms to be on these details. And I remember the ASAC, assistant special agent charge, opened up the drawer one day, and he gave us, we were carrying model 19s, right, Volvers, Smith, and he gave us these baggies. And a baggie had like five rounds.

And we kind of look at us, well, these are, this is what you're going to load into the thing. He actually said thing. And I said, well, there's six. He said, no, no, you can't have six in there because it might go off if you have six in there. And I was going, oh, my God. These were leaders, right? Can I ask you real quick? How was that?

Was that challenging? Because the CIA generally cannot be armed within the United States, right? Like, you know, the Jason Bourne, like, CIA officers were not everywhere. And I know that, like, the CIA has their police, like their gate guards and people like that. But for you guys who are running these protected details and whatnot, were you, like, federal law enforcement? Like, how did that work for you? tricky? You know, at the time I didn't know.

I assumed that there was some special dispensation. You know, I actually can't tell you to say if there was. I think it was from a legal standpoint. I think our legal folks were able to work with DOJ to say for these

things and for like these things protecting the DCI, you can be armed. But you're absolutely right. We normally couldn't be. And And but that led me to and some others to join the DCI. We call DCI security staff. Sometimes we call it DCI slave staff because we were carrying bags as well as protecting the dude, you know.

But we were, so William Casey was the director and we were on his detail. So kind of, you know, the secret service of the CIA. We traveled domestically with Casey and deputy director John McMahon, who was a great guy, all over the world. And, you know, we went to the, we were credentialed at the White House, so we work with the Secret Service all the time. We'd go to Capitol Hill, Pentagon,

State Department, DOD all the time. And it was a great, it was a great two years. Casey was very interesting fellow because Cold Warrior and he loved the agency, especially loved the DO, the operations side of the house. He tolerated us. But, and I remember for two years, he could never, I would jump with my wife all the time.

He could never remember my name. Like, my name is Mike, but every morning he said, good morning, Bob, because he talked like, good morning, Bob, morning, sir. Two years, I'm Bob, right? But he, but he loved the, he loved the cold warriors, you know, the operations officers working in the field.

And it was a, you know, we got to see the world. And it was, you know, was treated very well. We blew out of Andrews in a, in a special plane with a VIP package. And, you know, it was a really great experience to work with a lot of different. It was kind of my first inkling of working with foreign liaison because if we went to South Korea,

we worked with Blue House and some of those other folks, the Korean CIA and et cetera. So my first experience working with foreign liaison personnel. And I loved it. Now, we were the leaders of Office of Security at the time, routinely called as cowboys, cry babies, and gun nuts because they didn't know anything about guns. They grudgingly had to do this in terms of protecting the director because that was the mandate from on high. But they didn't really want that responsibility.

But it was a great time. And then I think I was talking to Dave earlier, but one day towards the end of our tour, there's four of us. And all of us were former law enforcement. My best friend Scott Kfer, former LAPD Bomb Squad and two other guys all law enforcement. And we were working on a Saturday. And Claire George, who was since deceased legend in the agency, mostly Europe, but was the director of operations at the time, the DO.

Always wore these cool-looking Italian suits with the hankies and all that. But just an old-fashioned coal warrior, but a great guy. He came up just one day and said, hey Casey's guys, how are you guys doing? So yeah, he said, well, you know, there's a thing that we're performing up called CTC. And CTC is Counterterrorism Center and I think you guys would be good for it. And we thought, wow, interesting. So we got some entrees into this one particular unit and met with a guy named Bill Servanak.

we'll talk about in a little while, who's a mentor to many of us, and ended up making the jump to the dark side. And it was, as we call it. And it was probably the best career move I ever made, at least in terms of the agency. Because while I enjoy my time in OS security, you know, the main part of the agency, when I say Maine, I don't denigrate any other part of the agency. We all work together to protect our country, but, you know, the, to me, the heart and soul are the operations folks, you know, the ones actually go up and spot assist, develop, recruit assets or run covert operations or whatever, special activities. And so we went to a unit that was under this Bill Servanac, and Servanak had been a Marine in World War, in Vietnam. He fought in the Battle of Way. He was one of our paramilitary guys. and he'd been a, I think it was a captain when he left the Corps. And then really great career, big guy, early, but just had a heart of gold.

It taught me so much about leadership. And we worked for him, and our job was to go around the world to train foreign liaison detail, protective details in effective operations, whether it's motorcade, shooting, self-defense, first aid, you know, searching for bombs, advanced work, all that kind of stuff. Mike, yes, go ahead. I'm sorry to interrupt. I got to do another ad read before we continue on, but I want to hear more about the dark side.

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Use the code team house at shopmando.com. That's S-H-O-M-A-N-D-O.com. Please support the show and tell Mando that we sent you. So thank you. Real quick, why, before we move on, I had made a note, and I think we skipped it, you said that there was a really important leadership lesson you learned when you were a cop. Oh, yeah, right. Sorry.

Yeah, no, I'm sorry that I missed it. Yeah, no, so I'm a cop in Oakland. And in Oakland, you know, you have this big bag you carry with you in your car, including a big copy of the penal code because, you know, part of the, It's a six-month academy, and there's obviously a huge section on law. And, like I said, we have a lot of prostitutes on my beat, San Pablo Avenue, which went up all the way up from Oakland to Berkeley. And we were always chasing these folks all over the place. We drive when they run into these ready hotels, and we have to chase them and all this other kind of stuff.

So one day I see these three gals, and by this time, you know, they know me, I know them by name. I got to the point where if I pulled over a car and there was like a, a, uh, a hooker and a trick. If I shine my spotlight from back of their head, I knew who that trick was, I knew who that hooker was. I could just tell, right? Because you bust them enough times.

But I remember, I was thinking, okay, so 647 PC, a penal code in the state of California, was prostitution. And so I thought, is there something else I could get them on, right? So I'm reading the penal code, and I find something.

It says when two more people are gathered together to commit a criminal act. You know, they're in violation of law. I said, aha, my little 21-year-old brain, very, you know, enthusiastic cop. And I get out of the car and they said, you know, officer hours and said, okay, you guys are under arrest. And they said, yeah, 647, right?

Because they knew the penal code as well as we do, right? They got busting on it all the time. I put them in the back in the cage and I said, nah, it's like 408 or whatever, 407, 408. And they said, what the hell is that? I said, yeah, you know, and I read it to him. So I take them to, actually, at that point, we used to have what they call Patty Wagon's, they come around and pick the prisoners up to keep the officers on the street, and then they would take the prisoners to jail.

At that time, we were under this DOJ program, which was actually pretty cool, where it was kind of like, I don't know, it was like, it was like, what's the word I want to try? It was an incubator thing for what's now, what they have computers and cars. right? We call it Digi-com and it had a little screen and you can send little messages to each other in the car, right? And I got a, I got a, now we call him text, message from my sergeant, Dave Nishihara, great guy. And, you know, ironically, I'm half Japanese and he's Japanese, right? And he asked to meet me at a particular intersection. So I go there.

And we used to call him Nish and say, hey, Nish, what's going on? and he said, you know, those two hookers you got, you bag? I said, yeah, I said, you got to cut, we cut them loose. How come? I said, because I cited the penal code. He said, Mike, that is the riot act, right? That's unlawful assembly. You know, right?

And I'm thinking, my ego is deflated thinking I was very ingenious and inventive. And he said, okay, look, two things. You should have thought this one through. a little bit more. I'm not going to write you up. He said, but if you, I said, because he said, I know why you did what you did. You know, you're doing it for all the right reasons. You just stepped in it, right?

So it cut these gals loose. But he said, you know, you've got a great record so far, blah, blah, blah. But he said, look, if you have questions, just call me, contact me, whatever. Just ask, right? So when I speak on leadership, to me, that was a lesson in what I call forgiveness, right? Because if I think about it, the trajectory of my life in terms of me being able to take risks, which I did later in life, whether it was government or business, might have taken a different turn, right? Because had he not slap my hand, but then forgiven me and said, okay, go forth and do no more harm.

harm. Maybe in the agency I would have thought about doing a particular operation or something that I'd say, nah, I'm not going to do it. Or in business, I'm going to try this new initiative, but nah, because it might fail or something, or they may get mad or something. It might be too risky, right? I'm not a risk of a person by nature, but my mom was a worry ward, so I'll probably have a little bit of that. And I think to me, I carry that. That's how. I can remember it at age 68 when that happened to me when I was 21 years old. I can remember the the power of forgiveness and understanding. And so I tried to put that to work every time, you know, when I started becoming a leader first in the agency and at Microsoft is to remember that if

well-meaning people are doing good things, yes, there are times when you have to discipline and there are times when people are going to have to be taken the task for doing something egregious. but there are also times when the art of forgiveness needs to come into play in order to rebuild somebody so that they're willing to take calculated risk that might help the cause, the enterprise, the, you know, whatever you're involved in. So that was the lesson I learned from Nishihara. So take us to this new unit that you guys are standing up where you're going to train foreign liaison. And did they send you guys to the farm for that?

Did they put you in the DO pipeline? Or how did that work for you guys? Yeah. So back then, I know they don't have it now. They had categories. So, you know, your mainstay case officers were category Bs, the spot assessed adult recruit and report. And then your CAT Cs were, like Rick and I were,

at one point CAT Cs called Special Skills. officers. And that could be anywhere from coming in like you guys from special ops to law enforcement, whatever, right? And so you're a special skills officer. They brought us in cold. We hadn't gone to the farm yet. You know, they brought us in because they knew, because we had done the work, right. We could train the foreign personnel. And what they did along the way, because the secondary, actually, I always told you that was, that was the secondary part of the job. The first part of the job was to spot assess and develop these students, because usually they're the best of the best of their presidential security details,

to help spot assess develop for them for the station and point out to the station in the month or two months that were there, hey, this person has potential, this person is a little disgruntled with career trajectory, but very smart. So our job was to help assess. So they put us eventually all through the farm, but through a program they used to call OCA, OPS course, Accelerate. So it was like 10 weeks, kind of a condensed version of what, you know, they get in the farm for field tradecraft.

But we do all the same things, you know, you do all the spotting, assessing development exercises, counter surveillance, you know, all that kind of stuff. And because we used to joke with our cat, cat bee colleagues, he said, you know, we do what you do, but you can't do what we do. You know, that's the difference between the two of us. but yeah so they would do that and it was it was a lot of it was a lot of fun number one traveling I did a lot of work in Africa my first trips were always my first trip was to Zaire to train president Mabutu's detail

being a dictator but he was our dictator obviously you know because we had the war going on in Angola and I trained his unit and did a lot of what they call francophone Africa so Gabon and and Conno Creek, Guinea, and we did Nigeria, and then end up going to South Africa during apartheid, which was very interesting, being, you know, African-American.

And so we traveled on a dip passport. We used to joke, I slapped that dip passport right on my forehead, right, as we entered the country, just so they would. But they actually considered me, I was told by the state embassy folks, well, you considered an honorary white person. I said, well, thank you. I always wanted to be the one. That's up.

Mike, I want to ask you, when you did these jobs in Africa, did you work with Willie Merkerson at all? Willie Berkerson. Man, that's the name from the past. I didn't work with him there. I worked with him later on in life in the agency when we were in recruiting. I did a gig in recruiting, and he was in recruiting. You know Willie? Yeah, yeah, I've met Willie, and me and my colleague are kind of like writing his biography, I guess you could say.

Oh, cool. Yeah, I was just curious because he was in Sudan when they were evacuating the Falasha Jews and all that kind of stuff. Right, right. Yeah, Willie, I haven't heard that name. Wow, I literally have not heard that name in a long time. Oh, he's, yeah, he is an incredible guy. And as I understand, the last I understood it, they were re-looking at his distinguished service cross from Vietnam, to see if it needs to be upgraded.

So we'll see what happens there. So apartheid South Africa, yeah, that must have been an interesting experience. It was. I mean, I have to imagine, you can imagine, I had a little trepidation going in there. I went with a former Secret Service guy, Mike Mastervito, who was one of our contractors in our unit, and he had started Intel Division for Secret Service. But we were in South African Airlines, and I'm thinking, oh, we're going to Nazi Germany, right? but it was because we were actually there to train the folks in Swaziland,

which is just south of South Africa. We were trained the rural Swazi police. Obviously, we had to work through the station in Pretoria. And I remember we considered South Africa, just like Russian, China, a denied area, simply because obviously their embargo and everything else we had on that country. So under surveillance from the time we were, were there. And I was actually, I was seeing a gal that was at the embassy there in Pretoria. And I remember going to her house and South African police were, you know, they made no bones about the fact that they

were there just letting us know, right, that they were there. But what struck me as interesting, like when the embassy folks would take us out to like a shopping mall to have lunch or whatever, and they must have thought I was Jesse Jackson or something because, man, the general managers would come by and, is there anything going to help you with? Are you okay? Yeah, I'm fine, man. I'm just having dinner. And it was funny in that aspect because, you know, they had all joking said,

look, you're an American black. They know that they want to put the best foot forward to show that they're not, you know, racist or whatever. But then you look right outside the window and you see all the, all the black Afghunters and they couldn't go into that restaurant. They couldn't go where you were. And at one point, I remember, the embassy said, we're going to go to this concert in this area called the gray area. The gray area was where whites, blacks, and Indians, there were a lot of Indians in South Africa still are with mix.

And there used to be a band called Johnny Clegg and Savuka. Johnny Clegg, and if you guys have never heard Johnny Clegg, you should listen to some of his stuff. It's awesome. It's kind of a blend of rock music and Zulu. and his band was a mixture of both and he learned Zulu dancing and he would incorporate it into his concerts. But they said, look, we're going into this gray area.

We're going to see the concert. There's a chance that the South African police will come and bust us, which they didn't that night because it's illegal, right, for races to mix. So we went there, we saw the concert and but again, it was kind of like, okay, that's an interesting point of reference. And then the embassy, it was Easter, and they said, we're going to a nearby country, Lesotho,

to a hotel there on, you know, the Easter holiday. You guys are visiting. Want to come with us? So we did. So caravan. We're getting in the hinterlands of South Africa before we get into the Lusutu. They had to stop for gas.

And it was kind of like what you see back in the 60s in the south, right, during Jim Crow. There's white and colored. Well, I can't read Afrikaans, but I know white and the other, right? So I jokingly said, I put the passport right here and went into the white bathroom, you know, and did my thing, you know, and then get back into the car. But again, it was just, it was an interesting frame of reference. And I went twice to South Africa. But it made an impression, obviously, on us.

And it also taught us that as a country, we were doing the right thing in putting an embargo on them for what they were doing to their own people. and they were killing them, imprisoning them without a cause, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I did a fair amount of work in Africa. But then, you know, they knew that I loved, my bosses knew I wanted to go to Asia, it being, you know, half Asian. So I spent a lot of time in Asia. We trained Lee Kuan News unit in Singapore. We train the, we helped prepare the South Korean forces, combined forces, before the 86 Olympics.

We trained at this, they used to call it the 707. So you guys were appreciated. South Koreans, yeah. They were, yeah, you guys know, yeah, so we trained at their compound and did all that stuff.

And that was combined with the police Intel 707. And so, you know, did a lot of work in Asia. And at one point, Bill Serfantak, I mentioned again, again, he's kind of like, he's kind of like Sergeant Nishihara, another person that really made an impression on me in leadership.

I had never been a leader. I never really thought about leadership. I was really enjoying just individual contributor and just doing the job. And one day he calls me in. He calls Scott K for what I mentioned before. And he said, look, I'm going to make you guys team leaders. And so now we're going to lead the teams overseas to do all this kind of stuff. But he said, you know what?

One thing you guys need to remember. and I always remember this. He said, up until this point, you have the right to be selfish. When he meant by selfish, he meant selfish in a good way. It means you want to grow your career, you want to be promoted, you want to, you know, obviously you want to be recognized and just move up, move up the ranks and get paid more, all that good stuff. And that's all fine. That's great.

We all want that. But he said, now you've got to flip that around as a leader. You've got to learn to be self-less, right? So now it's not about you first. It's about your team, right? It's about the troops first. It's about what they need. You know, what are their personnel issues?

What are their professional issues? How do you mentor them? How do you get them to where they want to be? How do you discipline if you have to discipline? That all is part parcel. I said you've got to flip that switch. And kind of knew what he meant. And obviously over a period of time,

I really understood what he meant. And to me, it's one of the things that people in, leadership positions some people don't ever get, right? They still haven't made that switch. It's still all about them first and not about the troops first. And so, and Colin Powell had a great phrase. The field is right until proven wrong. And I always thought, you know, coming from General Powell, that was an awesome statement.

And that's, it's really what serving act back in the day was talking about, you know, that if you equip your team, you train them, you mentor them, and you let them do their jobs, You don't micromanage them. You pull the reins if you need to pull the reins. Otherwise, you let them do their work. And as he said, you know, look, if your troops do a good job for you, you'll get promoted. You'll get all the things you want, right?

Right. But that was the first leadership position I had. And once I had a taste of it, I realized, yeah, I like leading. You know, I like the responsibility. Yeah, you guys know your leaders, it's two-edged sword, right? there's a good part about it, but then there's the other part. Right. And you just got to take the good with the bad. So I did that for two years.

And then I wanted to go, I wanted a PCS assignment to the permanent change of station assignment to Asia. And I ended up working in Asia Vision just on a rotation to the Philippine desk. And I worked the Philippine desk for a year, which was, again, you know, a lot of the lives. folks at that time in the agency considered us knuckle dragers right because you know you guys do all the shooting and all the driving and cars and blah blah blah so sitting at a desk with a guy named Ken Degler who was a branch chief and he was a he was a category B straight case officer but he was great

had a lot of patience with me I thought I knew how to write cables I didn't know how to write cables for shit he taught me how to write cables and ops reports and you know the meetings at headquarters that I was never privy to because we were always in an outside building and that other unit was serving that. So getting back to the main shed and just kind of understanding how that works was a great education. But that was the time when we had two bases in the Philippines, Subing Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base. And our main opponent there was New People's Army. There was an arm wing of the Communist part of the Philippines.

And I remember getting and I spent a year there prior to PCSing to Philippines in 89, but I remember, I was like, and you guys remember this, is when Nick Roe got killed. And, right, you remember that. And I remember got a call one night from Ken. He said, you know, Nick Roe was just assassinated, right? So he was working for JustMag, joint U.S. military assistance group. And he got killed by the NPA.

And so when I flew into Manila, you could cut the fear with a knife, right? Because they had killed, they killed, you know, Colonel Roe there in the heart of Manila, At the same time, they've been killing airmen and naval personnel outside of Clark and Subic, you know, left and right, as well as killing Philippine military, police, government personnel in Manila and other parts. And the NPA were very good. They had the sparrow units. They were very good at what they were doing. And so my first job, I was, that was before Prado. Prado got there the year later.

I was working with a different group, but I was with liaison branch, they called it. So you work with Philippine liaison. We were declared to the Philippine government, which meant that we were probably blown in terms of the MTA because we knew they were infiltrated. Right. So we were the only ones allowed to be armed full time in the station. But our station chief, Ted Grohl at the time. I met him one time when we took Casey to Bangkok. He'd been in the COS there and now he was COS.

And they said, okay, you're working liaison branch. You'll liaise with the Philippine National Police. You'll liaise with the NECA, the National Intelligence Coordinating, H. their version of CIA. But they also, because of my background, they wanted me to figure out security for the embassy because they didn't have their own embassy. They had the RSOs, right?

But they didn't have their own station security personnel. And the RSO shop at that time was really good. Guy named Phil Jarnland. He really wanted to liaise with us, the agency. And once I got to know him, we hit it off very well. So we sent out, we called for a first-accounted surveillance team to help protect our, and it wasn't their bread and butter, right, to do protection. But everyone on the counter-suffilance team, at that point, Bill Servanak, why mentioned,

had been moved to another organization, which they were the counter-surveillance organization for CIA and for under CTC. And I asked for them to come out. So Servinac and a bunch of guys came out, and they were all, we had former South African Special Forces and, you know, all these other folks in there. And so their job,

my job was to kind of oversee their activities until security, the old office of security, could come up with a group of shooters that could come out and actually do the protection piece. So my first year was really a lot of that. And, of course, at that point, it was almost like they put air, everything it could into that one year, the man upstairs.

You had, you know, I was under two coup attempts, you know, under the president there. And then we had earthquake. We had, you know, all kinds of things going on. At one point during one of the coup attempts against President Aquino, they sent 200 Marines in from Subic to ring the embassy. And I remember we had an OP on top of the embassy.

And one of the coolest things that I saw, remember during that time was the rebel Philippine jets were strafing a nearby island that we could see from the embassy. And all of a sudden, you know, Aquino asked, wished for help. And so they scrambled jets out of Clark. And the jets just kind of did one pass, two pass, and then all of a sudden, Philippine just took off, right? And so that was, you know, I was doing a lot of that sort of non-traditional case officer work. Though we did have to extract the case officer behind, you know, enemy lines. He was with some of his assets, the family, and couldn't get through. So we brought in, you know, we kind of loaded up, armored vehicle weapons,

and we figured out a way to get to him and figure out a way to get back to the embassy without, you know, getting shot and noticed. And that was kind of the first year. The second year, New Regime, and that's when Prado came in, a guy named Dave Nolton. I don't know if Rick mentioned Dave. Dave had been a lurp in Vietnam. And he's deceased now, but the dude was a character, man. I mean, the guy was, if you looked at him with his pictures of college, he looked like Charles Manson, right?

Druggy and all this other kind of stuff. The dudes, his daddy at one point had been common out of West Point. His brother, I guess he had been an 82nd airborne. Dave was black sheep of the family. Busted in the 70s for stealing cars, given an ultimatum, go to jail, go in the army, went the army, got into the Lurps, did a lot of bad shit in Vietnam, you know, in terms of fighting bad guys, hero in my opinion. became Joe Sergeant for a little bit, left the military, went to University of Miami.

That's when he started looking like Charles Manson, you know, dope and all this other kind of stuff. And somehow, I don't know how the hell he passed polygraph, but he got into the agency, right? And when we met him, he had taken over from the previous, so we worked in liaison branch. So he was the new chief liaison branch. Brato was there. And not taking anything away from the old regime, but this was like a breath of fresh air because they were people that spoke my language, right? they were all, but you know, you know, Prado's background. We all thought alike.

We spoke, you know, we understood each other. And we weren't averse to kinetic stuff. And it was really cool. And he was, again, another, both Prado and Dave, really, I think, lent a lot to my leadership, you know, career, acumen, whatever you want to call it. But then I really got involved in a lot of sort of the line case officer stuff. running assets and, you know, got away from that security stuff.

And really, really, we were taking it to the NPA big time. We had, we were able to, because you know how it is in embassies or even with joint operations. It's sometimes hard to wrangle all these people together, even though you have a common enemy. But we were able to get Air Force OSI, NIS, now NCIS, diplomatic security, RSO shop, and the agency and the Bureau to work together on combined operations. We run counter-servalance operations on choke points in Manila, where we knew the bad guys would probably set up if they're going to try to attack Americans coming in.

We'd have decoys. And we even had a program, which is really cool. One of my assets was a former, it was a member of the military intelligence in the Philippines. And at that point, the Philippines military, they were trying to run what they call a returning program, whether you take NPA shooters that wanted to come back into the fold and become good citizens or whatever and try to rehabilitate them. But they didn't have the money and the resources, blah, blah, blah, but we did.

And so what we would do is use the building military as a cutout to our asset. And we would put these guys back on the streets to see, because we couldn't spot bad guys because they were so embedded. but they could. And at one time, they actually were able to find a group setting up, doing some surveillance setting up for a hit. So that was really cool. We were able to stop that kind of stuff. But we're doing all that kind of stuff. Plus, I think I sent you a picture, you know, where we had a new SIGAN boat that was going to hopefully do some D-Fing with bad guys up in Indian country. So Proud and I went up there and we were able to go with the Philippine Navy SEALs and try to you know, and we had the tech, tech guys on there trying to work their stuff.

And the one thing I remember about that was not so much, you know, just going after bad guys was we had all these, you know, new buoyancy compensator devices and all this cool stuff. And we get on the deck the next morning and it's all these, I don't remember, do you remember a show called Seahunt? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So you remember Lloyd Breezer's head on the steel tanks?

Yeah. That's what they had. Steel tanks, you know? And so we were looking at each other. other like okay yeah and so we put the steel tanks on and go diving and stuff like that but it was a it was a it was probably two or three tours crammed into one tour just because of everything went down plus mount pinatubo went down we had everything you were with wreck when the volcano exploded and what you had to go to clark and remove some equipment or something yeah I mean the

the damn the ashes had actually crushed a couple of the buildings there yeah we had to go there I think this is kind of an interesting piece of history it sounds like because like when we think of the modern agency, you know, we've talked to people who were GRS and paramilitary, CTC, you know, these things. But it sounds like back then there weren't like these super clear divisions of because some of the stuff that you did sounded more like GRS, which, you know, doesn't go into ops now, right? But you guys, because you were special skills, you know, you had more of this flexibility to move in and out of these different roles. Yeah, no, you're 100% right. In fact, we like to say that the first group of people we brought in from the Office of Security after the counter surveillance team was released, you know, and they brought in the was kind of the, eventually the impetus for what became GRS, you know, to bring in armed personality. to protect folks.

But you're right, there was a lot more autonomy back then to be creative. I think because there was there was a threat. We needed to take care of that threat. Now certainly there was bureaucracy. I remember Dave, so believe it or not, even in a danger post, we were considered behind Bogota. So we were the number two danger posts at the point

in the US and in the world. So back then, the agency, gave you browning high powers, fine weapon, right? And shotguns. But first of all, most case hours, the only time they ever shoot is in the farm. They never shoot anyway. And they don't. So it was kind of like, you might as well give them a hammer and they could just throw the hammer

because they're never going to deploy their weapon fast enough. But then Dave said, you know, this is bullshit. We need shoulder weapons. So he went to head corps, well, cable to headcores. We want MP5s. And it almost damneder took an act of God. But we got the MP5s into town. It brought us some folks from ground brass to train us over at Clark.

And then we carried those. And we were driving armored cars. And, but it was, it was that kind of thing. I can't say it was cowboy, but it was cowboy like. Right. Right. We knew our lane. We were credentials by the locals to carry everywhere where they give us, you know,

credentials. So whenever a corrupt cop would stop us and try to take bribes, we just show them this and they leave us alone. Yeah. But yeah, you're absolutely right. There were not these clearly defined things. We made it up as we went. I mean, we didn't go too far off the reservation in terms of doing something that would be harmful or that would be foolhardy.

Right. But we were certainly given the autonomy to make the right decisions. Yeah. How would you assess the effectiveness of these operations against the NPA? because they're still around today up north, but today, nowadays, I mean, I don't think anyone sees them as like a credible threat to the Filipino government.

What do you see that as far as, you know, their strength when you got there and, you know, when you left? Sure. Again, you know, so I remember we had at one point, we were talking to thanks to NIS, now NICIS, we talked to a former NPA hitter, and he killed Buku people back in the day, right? But I remember him saying, you know, we just, we saw these cars coming around every so often, but we didn't know, like we see these cars look like Americans.

It didn't look like regular, you know, embassy people. We might see him one day, and then we wouldn't see him the next day, and then we'd see him, you know, another day. That was the counter surveillance, right, that we were doing in Manila, which we then expanded to, with, OSI's help to Clark and then to Subic, right, to that methodology of keeping them off base, because what they were used to was uniformity of embassy folks and Navy personnel, Air Force personnel, leaving their house at a certain time, going through a certain place.

And unfortunately, that's what got Colonel Roe was that he was going, unfortunately, the same time, same place, and they hit him on that day. And so our job was to keep him off balance so that if they saw what they thought, might be security or somebody one day, they never know when they see it again. And so we had a particular schedule. So to answer your question, once we started really got rolling on that. And again, it was a joint operation. We there was never any American ever hit again in Manila. And the numbers of naval personnel and Air Force personnel and Clark went down considerably. I mean, when we had a Marine Expeditionary Force come in one time in Subic, and I was staying at Subic for, you know,

a couple weeks working with NIS. And we were patrolling the streets, armed, you know, looking for NPA folks. And they knew it. They knew we were looking for them. So, yeah, the, obviously now, back then it was the NPA and the CPP Communist Party of the Philippines. They still had a separation, a separatist group in Minda now, right, which now, of course, the Islamic threat takes precedence now in the Philippines over the communist threat. So do I have empirical evidence that our efforts stop them? No, I don't have empirical evidence. I know I have anecdotal evidence saying that we didn't get, there were no Americans killed

in Manila. Yeah. Yeah. I hope it worked out. What was the next stop after the Philippines for you? So after that, I went back and I became, oh, I became Servant X deputy in that counter-surveillance group. So that was another taste of leadership.

And, you know, I learned to do the headquarters thing and staff meetings and this and that. But it was good. It's great education. And then from there, I took kind of this detour, which a lot of my operations colleagues said, that was stupid, Mike, because you're going to hurt your career. So a gal named Sally Werner, who I had worked with, I'd met before, she was GS-15 case officer. She was working in our officer personnel in what they call a career development branch. and so she called me one day and she said,

let's go have lunch. You know, Jose Rodriguez, right? Obviously, right? And Jose was actually in charge of all that at the time. And they had a conversation with me and they said, look, we want to start up something good for DO officers. We're like career development. There's been no career development track.

You kind of apply for jobs and blah, blah, blah, you know, and, you know, we want a more streamlined organized. And so would you be willing to come on board to help us formulate that? And, you know, part of me said no, because I wanted to stay in operations. But a part of me said, which I'm glad because it really helped me out later in life,

said, you know, I'll give it a shot. And again, there were a lot of naysayers because that didn't ever happen back then, you know, operation and operations. Just like leaving, to your point, what you said earlier when we were talking before the podcast, leaving Office of Secrets, and going into the operations director, it just didn't happen.

Right. So I said yes. So I took a rotation to personnel and it ended up being very eye opening for a number of reasons. They were interested in mentoring. So we helped put together, brought us some experts. We put together the first mentoring program within the DO, which is really good because, you know, you know, it's like special operations or like law enforcement. We're fearless. We, you know, nothing can ever get us down. But there are times we need to talk to somebody. Or you need some counseling.

You need to bounce something off of somebody. So having a mentor, and it was voluntary. You want to sign up for a mentor, sign up for a mentor. Usually as officer senior to you to help you in your career or other issues that you're dealing with. We all sign up for it. And to this day, I still have mentors and I still mentor people. And so that was number one.

The other thing we put together, a career development program that was computerized that would help officers determine, you know, okay, what is your ideal career path and what would it take to get you there? And we would, you know, try to help kind of formulate, what are the things you need to do? What assignments do you need to have? What experiences do you need? Even to the point of, you know, from a political standpoint, like, who do you need to get to know? And who do you, you know, that kind of stuff, how to influence, how to let people know about you, that kind of stuff.

And so I did that for a better part of a, like a year and a half. And it was gratifying. And then so I decided, I'm going to ride this puppy a little bit longer. So then an opportunity came up to go to the IG Inspector General's office as an investigator. And I said, okay, I'm going to try that. So because I had friends that were from OS that were up there. So I went there and I did that for a year. Now, I like doing the cases.

It was fraud waste and abuse. We work with DOJ a lot. So kind of the internal affairs of CIA. And you got to Mirandize people. And actually, it was funny. One of my instructors in Police Academy in Oakland was a guy named Sergeant Lyman Hubbard. It was a great guy. And then, you know, when I left the department, went to the agency, you know, I lost track of Hubbard.

And one day I saw him, this is before I went to the, you know, to the IG. I saw him in the parking lot and found out he joined the agency. His dad actually had been one of the Tuskegee Airmen back in the day. And he worked in Latin America. And he actually ran the farm at one point. But when I was with the IG, there was some investigation. And he was one of the people brought in to be interviewed. So I said, hey, Sergeant Harvard.

And then I had to remember, oh, I got to be professional. And I'm supposed to be impartial. But I did that for a year. But one thing I found out, in that job was I was an individual contributor. Now, I had a boss. He's a well-meaning great guy, but he was not a great leader, right? Didn't fix things that needed to be fixed.

Wasn't high on building up teams, et cetera, et cetera. And so I realized at that point, because I had no power, authority to do anything, just do my job. I realized at that point, I will never be an individual contributor again. I'll always take a leadership position where I can try to influence things in the right direction. So the next job I took was in the Office of Military Affairs, OMA. It was created after the first Gulf War, and there were some disconnects between the DOD military and the agency. So it was a pretty cool setup.

You had two 06s. So you had an Army colonel, I named Colonel Quirk who became Brigadier when I was there. And Marsha Backell, who I remember when I was in the Casey days, She was a Navy captain. She used to run the ICA Intelligence Community Building there in D.C. So they ran their shops. And one part of the shop was our, they were DCI representatives.

So we had DCI representatives out of OMA and all the major military commands to, you know, help coordinate, you know, obviously between the agency, station and DOD. So Colonel Quirk and his folks ran that. And then Captain Barkel and her team ran the education program. So let's say you had defense defense attitudes that were going overseas, right? They would come to OMA and get kind of a briefing dog and a pony show and this is how these are how stations work. And this is kind of what case officers do.

what the agency does, and they bring in all different parts of the military to go through this education. I was brought in as the XO. The organization was run by a DO officer, Tom Silio, who had been with our national resources, our domestic arm. Number two was a DIY intelligence analyst, a senior.

And then, but they didn't have, they kind of didn't have anybody to kind of write or hurt over day-to-day things like admin or finance or this kind of stuff. And so not that I was an admin and finance person, but they wanted somebody to coordinate and make sure everybody was talking to each other. And it was a great job.

I enjoyed the heck out of it. I learned a lot, learned a lot obviously about military. You know, I'd worked with the military in the past, but, you know, you get really in-depth. And we even went to DIA to brief some of the DIA folks on what we do in the agency. But it was, it was a really,

really good assignment and I really enjoyed doing that. And I did that for a better part of a year and got things together and got everything coordinated. Then I had the urge to go back to operations. And then I went back to the DO and I took over what they then called the other world branch. So this was all non-Islamic terrorists. So, you know, Red Army faction, PKK out of Turkey, Tamil Tigers. all these other different groups. They kind of worked that for a year as the branch chief.

And then my last assignment in the agency was I was able to, I talked to the chief of NR at the time, national resources. So national resources for those of you who don't know, I know you guys know, but it's the domestic arm of the agency. So the agency has no remit to conduct intelligence operations per se, the way MI5 does, say, in Britain. MI5, people think, well, yeah, there's like the FBI. No, they are CIA, but they're domestic.

They can do everything MI6 can do, but they do it domestically. We can't do that here, right? So what we do is we work with the Bureau on possible targets, and we work with business, right? If there are business people that are willing, let's say, in their travels, and they have access to different information to give us information, or personalities, we kind of report on that.

So there was an opening in Pittsburgh. And at that point, Pittsburgh had five states underneath it. And I took the job. So I took a domestic assignment and went up to Pittsburgh and got there in 2000. And it was, yeah, I love it. Great assignment. Nice office. Great team of people.

We worked, did a lot of interesting things. But obviously, the similar moment was nine. 11. Yeah. I was there when 9-11 when I was in the office. I actually invited some CTC folks on a TDI to visit the station and kind of brief my team on because I didn't have any really C-T folks there. Talk to them about C-T issues. And I remember welcoming the C-T folks, CTC folks and then went back to my office. And you've heard all the stories, the same things like, hey, boss, check out CNN. So we check it out. First plane hits and then second plane hits and then we know. So, I evacuated the station, called Washington, evacuate the station. And then I contacted my colleague at the FBI, Jack Shea, who was a special agent in charge. I said, Jack, need help. He said, yeah, I sent half my team over to the bureau. And they kind of worked that case because one of the planes went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

So that was kind of what we dealt with for kind of the rest of my tour. did go to what's called into Washington along with other domestic chief station to testify in front of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on what we're doing post-9-11 and to work with the Bureau and that kind of stuff. So that was an interesting experience. And then I was going to leave Pittsburgh.

I put in for two onward assignments. Mike, Mike, before we move on from there, because I'd like to ask your sort of impression in your experience at NR. Because, you know, speaking to people in the past, you know, the agency working with the FBI in NR, you know, sometimes there are issues, there are difficulties in culture, there are difficulties in the way the agency does things. Who has what lane?

You know, whose lane is what? Yeah. But you came from a law enforcement background. So do you feel that it was easier for you than it was for like some case officers who maybe never had, who didn't have that background? Absolutely. I think for sure, again, we spoke the same language. Once Jack and his team knew my background,

then there was kind of this respect, but I respected them as well, right? Yeah. And, you know, Jack was really good because he understood from an intelligence analysis capability, unlike what they have now, they didn't have that, right? And so they needed that. We actually helped them post-9-11.

CTC actually sent people to the Bureau to help them start what is now their intelligence division, right? Intelligence directorate. Yeah. Yeah, to your point. And I always thought, you know what, this BS about, you know, it's not always BS. Yes, you're right. There's been some of this, but at the street level, usually not so much. Okay.

And to me, if you can just remember how it was on the street when you were working with, another organization and then when you become a leadership position that shouldn't change yeah i get it the bureaucracy and blah blah blah but the mission stays the same you're going after bad guys you know and the whole thing is let's get the bad guys this cut out the bullshit um but yeah it that was never an issue with me right but i could see how it could be an issue if you come in straight from the case officer world and you know we used to say case officers were kind of the jet jockeys of the deal or the agency. And the shit doesn't stink.

And they know everything and they speak languages and they may look down on some of their law enforcement brother. And that will come across. Right. And that's not the best way to get the mission accomplished, right?

And I think like, I think, you know, like we've heard in the past, like sometimes, you know, like the CIA's job, like they don't break American laws in the United States, but they're always breaking, you know, other country's laws in those countries. And so then you take that person who's been overseas, you know, working, you know, in that type of environment and then bringing them in the U.S.

And sometimes the FBI say no, like that's we, like we can't do that here. Right. You know, and so I figured that with your background, you had a, you know, had a firm grasp on what the legalities were. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, but, you know, the, you know, your psychological profile when you come into the agency is they're looking for people that are straight-line. going to follow agency rules and be willing to break the laws of other countries. Right.

I mean, that's just the way it is. But yeah, I mean, to me, I don't know. Maybe I got a simple brain, but it was never that complicated thing. I knew my lane. I knew what I could or couldn't do. But I also knew how much I could push it to hopefully get the job done with our brethren. Oh, can I ask you guys something? I don't know if this has ever been done before, but if I were to walk over there and grab

a ball of bourbon so I could fill up. again. It has been done without an announcement before, so absolutely. Yeah. I'm trying to follow protocol. Yeah, absolutely. Who do we have coming up next week, check? Do you remember? On Monday. On Monday. That former CIA woman, Michelle Rigby Assad, she's going to be on the show on Monday. And guys, make sure please like and subscribe and then also check out our Patreon and... And take a look at We Defy the Live. lost chapters of special forces history. It's up on Amazon now.

Cool. Okay, back. All right. All right. So then came the other, probably the big seminal moment of my life. I had put in for two onward assignments. One, they had just opened up Chief of Station in Wellington, New Zealand, and then the deputy chief in the Philippines. Because I had spent so much time in the Philippines, both PCS and TDII, I didn't want to, I didn't want to go back there. So I put in for, I put in for both. And the East Asia Division personnel officer calls, hey, you got both in which one do you want? I said, I want to Wellington.

And then about, I don't know, I was always elated. Just couldn't wait to go. Then I get a call maybe two weeks later from Washington. And I get this, you know, hey, Mike, how many, how many, how many, how many, here we go. and he said you know the assignment in Wellington? Yeah, I said, you don't have it anymore. And I said, okay.

So somebody came out of the war zone, right? And knew the DDO at the time. And whispered in his ear and said, I like to go to Wellington. They said, well, Mike's got that place. They said, well, they took it away from me. So at that point, I was married to a gal named Karen. who was a retired agency, right?

She just retired. And we talked it through and, you know, do I want to go back to Washington and do that again? By that time I had 22 years. And I could have gone back and written it out, but there's really nothing more I really wanted it to do, wanted to stay in the field. And so I reached out to my friend, Steve Einsel,

who I had met in the Philippines back in the day. We did a lot of ops together. He was the special agent in charge of the NIS office in Manila. Great guy. He's born and raised in Nebraska, cowboy, just, you know, and we clicked. In fact, I forgot this part. Remember, I told you they only gave you the Browning High Powers, right, in Manila. And when I got to know Steve, he said, that's it, that's all you have. So that's all we have in the house. And at that point, I was living off compound. We had security guards because we were a liaison branch.

So again, because you're liaison brats, you're supposedly, you're known to the filming government. You figure they're penetrated. But the security guards are worthless. You know, they would run away if the bad guys came, right? But they were just window dressing. And so one Sunday, because Steve and I lived in the same neighborhood, he knocks on my door. His big ditty bag and he plops it on the floor. And I end zip it.

And holy smokes. There's a shotgun, ammo, oozy, lots of ammo. And he said, that's for you. I said, you know, he got it from their army because they were allowed to carry shoulder weapons and all these kinds of things. Remember, these were the days. This was a year before Dave Nolton and Prado showed up

when you get the MP5s. And so I'll always be in debt for him because you know he's breaking the rules doing that, giving someone in another agency their weapons, right? And so he was the only one. So go back forward now. He's the only one I knew that had left government service, went to work in the private sector,

for Crowe, you know, the private security firm, and then started his own consulting firm out of Nebraska. So I reached out to him, and I told him what happened. And he said, Mike, I got, I know of a position of chief security officer at Rigley in Chicago, but I'm a California kid. I ain't living in Chicago, right? So he said, let me introduce you to a headhunter. And again, government guy, I don't know, Jack.

about headhunters. I said, how much does that cost? Because I'm not getting paid that much, right? Even as the GS-15, they don't get paid that much. He said, they get paid by the company. So he introduced me to a guy named Jerry Brennan. And I guess he told Jerry my background. Remember, I'm still undercover. So I have to be careful what I say and blah, blah, blah, but I cannot, I cannot control what Steve said to him about me. And so he called, we, We talked to each other. Great guy. We're friends to this day,

and a lot of us that were Chief Security Officers owe our careers to Jerry. He's very well wired. And we talked and he said, look, Steve told me about you. I have, there's two things. There's a position of Chief Security Officer and some company in Los Angeles,

to this day I can't remember because the next thing he said was, there's a position in running the executive protection program as a director at Microsoft. I remember that. And I said, okay, but he said, I am not, unfortunately, I'm not being paid by Microsoft to staff that position. I just know about it. And knowing your background, what Steve told me, I thought might be a fit.

But then he says, but, you know, this is the name of the personnel person. Her name is Suzanne. I always remember her name to this day. Great gal. And she's the one staffing it in their HR department. But you could have to make up a story. Can you make up a story about how you found out? about this job. I said, did Steve tell you I work for? Of course I can make up a story about how I

got to make up a story about how I made some bullshit story about how I, you know, found out from secret service contacts about this, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I called her. And we had a great, really nice conversation. And she said, do you have a resume? I said, no, I don't have a resume. I can send you something about my skills, but I can't send you a resume. And she said, okay, so I did that, right? Because I can't give anything classified, blah, blah, blah. And so they flew me out to Redmond, Washington, Suburban, Seattle, where Microsoft has his campus. And I went through a series of interviews with everything from a general manager who was going to be,

who at the time it was interesting. So Gates never wanted security until you probably heard about this infamous incident where you got slammed with a pie in Europe on a trip. And the board of directors said, no, no, because that could have been asked. It could have been anything. Right. You are going to have executive protection. So they started this executive protection unit.

And my friend to this day, Charlie McNerney, who was a GM. And he wasn't security. He rolled up in an organization under a VP named Rick Divenuti, who under Rick, they had a lot of different verticals. One of them was IT security, that was the physical security. They just gave it to them, right? And Charlie realized, I don't know anything about this world. And the unit itself was dysfunctional. And I'll tell you why in a second.

But he said, he probably told Rick, we need to get somebody that knows what they're doing. And so I talked to him and Rick, the VP and HR, and ended up talking to both Steve Ballmer, who was the number two of the time, his admin assistants, who were the gatekeepers, and then Bill Gates' admin assistant, Christine Turner, who definitely helped the keys to the kingdom, right?

And then I go back home to Pittsburgh. And mind you, you know, because I'm still working, right? So I'm taking a red eye back from Washington State so I can go straight to work, you know, so nobody knows anything about it. Then about a month later, and by, oh, they had me staying at the like a courtyard Marriott or something like that and at the first time. So then the second time that I get a call from Suzanne. She said, okay, we want you to come back and we want you to meet with Gates himself one on one. obviously on floored right

and and so he gave me a couple weeks and I studied everything I could about him right read everything I could about Gates all I knew was what everybody knows he created Microsoft and Windows so I fly out there and I remember calling my then wife Karen and they put me up this place called the Woodmark which is like this fancy hotel

you know in summertime because they always recruit in the summertime because the Seattle weather sucks so they recruit you in the summertime thinking Oh, this way it's got to bring up in September. You know, I was like, what the hell happened to the sun, right? And so I called her. I said, something's up because they got me.

I'm not in the courtyard anymore. So I meet with Bill for 45 minutes. And it was really an interesting conversation. He had my sort of qualifications there. And we started talking. One of the things I remember him asking me was he said, so I've had all these secrets. service people coming in and, you know, applying for this job and they've shown me their books

and they've this president and that president and blah, blah, blah. So why should I hire you? And I said, the difference is I can do what they do. There were times when we were working with Casey that we had to have that kind of full package look, you know, with the earpiece and all that kind of stuff, motorcade. But a lot of times we're sliding in our countries covertly, right? And we're still on him. He may not know where around. And sometimes he does know we're around. And I said, that's what we can do for you. We don't have to be onerous. We can give you whatever protection package you deem necessary,

but that we feel that we can protect you. Right. And then he started doing this. I remember he started doing this. He started in this rocking motion. And had I not known, had not read about it, I would have thought, I'm talking to you, man. What's going on?

You're doing all this rocking stuff. And what I found out was it was, it was kind of, an offshoot of Asperger's or something like that, but it meant he was into the conversation. Like, he was really into it. The other thing I found out about Bill was that Mike Howard was the only thing in his world for 45 minutes. Forty-five minutes in one second, I didn't exist. So as soon as the interview was over, I go, well, thank you. And he just on his way, right? He's gone. And I don't know whether or not, I mean, I did my best. And I don't know if I had gotten, But on the way to the airport in my rental car, I got a call from Suzanne, an HR person.

She said, he likes you. And I said, well, is there anybody else in contention? And she had to play the party. She said, well, that's a couple more people, but he really likes me. At that point, later on, I found out I was the only one, right? And then I get the notification from Microsoft about a week later. Hey, want to hire you as director of executive protection. They've sent a package to our townhouse in Pittsburgh with, you know,

the best of Seattle and salmon and this and that and the other thing. And then, you know, obviously all what they were going to compensate me for. So started a whole new career. Now, mind you, I didn't retire. I needed to stay another, what was I? Maybe I was 45-ish or something, but I needed to stay another five, six years to get full retirement. And of course, just like when I moved from operations to going to HR back in the agency, I got the same, you can't leave.

You know, you're throwing away. I could take everything I'd put into the system, but I wasn't going to get pension. Right. But there was something in me that said, you know, this was the right move, right, to do. And it was a risk. It was a leak.

I didn't know anybody at Microsoft. I didn't, you know, I knew I could do the job. I knew you put me in any enterprise. I could figure it out at some point. I'll figure it out. But I went there and the unit was well-meaning people, but broken. They were the only armed unit within Microsoft.

You know, a lot of executive protection units in corporations are armed. And I didn't know that because I didn't know anything about the private sector. They were armed. We had our own little gym downstairs. You could practice martial arts, go shooting, you know, and qualifying all this kind of stuff. But holy smokes, there was no direction. Security in itself had no direction. when I came on board

my boss Charlie took me to a staff meeting with you know so you had Rick Devenuti or the overall VP of the organization we belong to all the other general managers and then there were directors like me that reported to the GMs and he said I want you just sit in on a staff and just see what it's like

and the person that was in charge of security overall security at the time remember executive protection was a slice security was at the table. I didn't know him. Again, nice guy, but I remember divinity going around and, okay, typical staffing. So, hey, Sally, so what's going on? And Joe, what's going on, Charlie? And he goes to, I won't name him. So who are you again? Said, oh, I run security. Oh, you're the guys that drive around in those white cars because we had white vans at the time says Microsoft, you know, corporate security.

And I thought, holy smokes, this dude is not a player, right? He doesn't even know his name. And your only point of reference are you the people are running around in their white cars. Right. And so, okay, so that was one point of reference. And then I get to the executive protection. And first trip I took with them, I got to know everybody. And, you know, they had some decent backgrounds.

And we get to Las Vegas, actually, was. they call it CES now a consumer electronics show but back there was called Comdex and Bill used to do all the keynotes so we'd fly them in and so he finished his keynote and we're

we have him at MGM Grand and there's a they call it the mansions is where all the high rollers live and stay and we're with all the strap hangers so you've got you know, PR and legal and all these folks.

And the PR folks say, hey, Bill may want to walk the casino floor just to stretch his legs. We usually give him a baseball cap. That's his disguise, but everybody knows who he is because, you know, he's the rock star of nerds, so all the nerds know who he is. And I swear to God, when we'll let you know in 15 minutes. And he goes in and comes back, the PR person said, okay, five minutes Bill's going to come out. my guys, I had three guys with me, they, they lit out. One guy, I got a plant right here.

I kid you not, went right behind the potter plant. They like hid. And PR didn't hide. The admin folks didn't hide. Legal didn't hide. And so I asked us, so what's going on? You know, because we walked, we, every year walked him around and he was, you know, the rock star, signed autographs. And they said, he doesn't want to see us.

He doesn't want us to be around. I said, that makes no sense. And I said, the reason why he doesn't want to see you around is because you're running away from him. He has no respect for you, right? So I started setting up with Christine Turner, his admin, one-on-ones with Bill. And just walk him through, you know, on a quarterly basis, you know, kind of setting the benchmark. And so, like, this is what we want to do. This is our MO.

Like, one of the things he would drive from his house in Medina, which all the kind of, it was a millionaire, billionaire place in the suburbs of Seattle. He'd drive, before I got there, they gave him an armored Lexus, and he would drive from there to Microsoft Campus, but take the same route every day. And so I said, you should change your routes. He says, I don't need to change my routes. I don't always go at the same time anyway.

Okay, so fine. So I said, give me a month, and I'll come back. So we set up an OP at this Tully's coffee shop. And obviously, same time, give or take, you know, a few minutes. to go by the same, our O.P. And so we took pictures. He's a data-driven person. So a month later, we could show on the pictures.

And we say, this is you. So all we want you to do is every couple of weeks, take these other alternate routes, right? He said, where are you guys going to be? I say, we're going to do what I talked about when I interviewed you. We're going to be around, but you won't see us. We're not going to be having a tail car. So we set up different, you know, choke points along the way.

So as his car goes by, we know they're going by. So it's not onerous. He doesn't feel like we're on him, but we are on him. Right. And so he bought off on that. But I think one of the things, he respected credibility. And he did like people afraid of him. And that's what happened with the executive protection.

They were so afraid. They were afraid of Christine Turner. Oh, she yelled at us. Yeah. She's the ad. She's, if she's only at you, It's because Bill yelled at her. Right.

So the idea is to recruit her on our side to advocate for, unless we stepped in. If we stepped in it, then we own it, then we should take the hit. But otherwise, if there's a misperception about our role, make sure Christine understands it, then she could be our advocate. So Christine and I ended up having a really great relationship. And it took a better part of a year. Well, we got the organization in tow to the point where Bill, before he left, left Microsoft to go do foundation work,

his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation full time. He had a party just for, you know, kind of with, you know, in private sector we call it Cost Center, the salespeople, the people make money, and, sorry, profit center, people make money, the Cost Center, folks like security that don't make money. And he had a meeting a party at Microsoft campus for all the folks that supported him,

like legal, person that. security, took pictures with all of us. And I remember he sent me and a note, he's not one for flour. He just said, hey, thanks, Mike, for showing me that you can do security and let me do my business. That was paraphrasing, but that meant a lot to me. It was kind of a de-icing on the cake in terms of all of our efforts. Right.

And then around that time, I got a call from Charlie and he said, Charlie's, he said, we want to put you in charge of all of us. of security at that point, right? You've been the chief security officer. And so that's when I took over all of Microsoft security, the physical security side of the house. The logical IT side of the security was separate. But we had a joint committee so we could force multiply

on different issues affecting Microsoft. And so now it was again a time of looking at our organization. At that point, we had 19 people. people, right? And Microsoft had 41,000 people at the time, but within another year or two, we had grown to 80,000. When I joined there in 2002, we had no footprint in China, no footprint in India. In two years' time, we were starting to grow. And I realized that we were then called corporate security. We were very U.S.centric. We had an operations center at Redmond that was woefully inadequate. From the technology perspective, for a company that's technology savvy,

we had 60 different pieces of technology bolted on. None of them synced with each other. It was, it was ridiculous. We had some people around the world, but there was no common strategy. They just kind of did their thing. And so, you know, it takes a while to get the lay of the land. So I got to know everybody. And at one point, I had 19 direct reports, which is too many. But that was the way I got to know folks. You know, I waited. I believe in leadership. Don't just come in and just, you know, start making changes.

You have to get the lay of the land and then figure out where you're going to go. And we had to come to Jesus moment with the 19 folks because with my background, I realized we needed to globalize our organization. We needed boots on the ground overseas, obviously. We had them, but there was no synergy between our folks. Microsoft businesses and headquarters. And we needed a common strategy. But there were some people that were fighting that because back then, if we had like a threat of violence case against an executive in London,

we'd fly investigators over from the U.S., which was dumb. You know, you needed investigative personnel. We need to replicate what we had in Redmond out into the region. So you'd have investigative personnel, crisis management personnel, technology folks, you know, that kind of capability. So number one, we don't have to be flying back and forth. Number two, you have people that work there, that work with the regional BPs and presidents and businesses.

So they get to know the businesses, they get to know them. They speak the language in many cases around the world. We don't speak that language, but we hire people like in India, we hire former Indian military intelligence or whatever that speak the language, understand the culture. So, but some people were fighting that. They wanted to keep it U.S.

centric. And we had a, it was fun. It was a come to Jesus debate, knock down, Rockamsacken debate, but ultimately I called a ball and we changed our name to global security. And it was a, it was a fun ride. We ended up, you know, I believe, and I think a lot of my fellow CSOs would tell you at one point we were the number one global security organization in the world. We ended up building three global security operations centers, one in Redmond, Washington, one in the UK, one in Hyderabad, that had the best of our products as well as partner technology, but more importantly, they were interconnected, right? True interoperability. We were, if Redmond went down, for instance, the catastrophic incident, earthquake or whatever, either Hyderabad or the UK could access any camera on, on Redmond, campus. You could dispatch radio over IP, and we would do demos on this too, to visitors. We would, let's say there's a fight going on in Redmond campus, right? But we can't respond at the Redmond G-Soc. The, let's say, Hyderabad or London, they know, because of the technology

we have, they know what units are working in Redmond, just like we know what units are working on the campuses around the country. They could dispatch radio over IP that unit to go take care of triage that situation. We could lock down doors. We could do all that stuff, true interoperability. And it was the biggest ask I made to Steve Balmer. And I remember spending months, we did a zero-based study of our technology to determine that this is what we needed.

And we went up to Steve Balmer, who was then the, The CEO made the ask. He approved it. At that point, it's like 25 mil. And I remember because I'm a government guy, right? So I remember my bosses at the time, I said, you know, this is, when I proposed it to my bosses for this thing is going to cost $25 million. And I, I kid you not, they said, okay, that's a lot of money. But you know, in the true scheme and things at Microsoft, that's a rounding error, right?

Right. And it just always struck me like, okay. It's interesting because, you know, when you look at the world of like a corporate security or personal security, right, when you think of like musicians or these people, like you think they don't have enough money to actually do security right, right? I mean, they hire people that they know or whatever. But to have the sides of the team they want, the resources, like a lot of them, they're never going to pay that much money.

And then you look at different companies as they scale. and here you are really at the top of the pile and you're making this $25 million ask and like you say like security is a it's a cost you can't show profit and a lot of companies don't want to they don't want to bite that bullet but here you are with this company that's like

let's do it right how do you sell that to them like how do you say we know that there's no profit and if nothing bad has happened in last five years people will say no do we really need it Right. No, that's excellent question. And the way we approached it is, look, for instance, part of the ask was to get, we had, I don't know, thousands of cameras around the globe, right, for our campuses. And we did, before we did all this stuff, we kind of looked at the cameras and said, okay, so you have an incident where someone gets assaulted and you check the camera coverage, the camera's broken, right? And part of this effort was, was to use technology to ping these cameras on a regular basis. If you get the right cameras to see which one is working, so it's not a manual process.

To me, it's not a scare tactic, but it's like, okay, we are your security experts, and we've also gone through third party that is recommended that we engage in this activity. You could say no, but these are the risks if we don't, If we can't respond properly to a crisis and someone gets hurt. It's not the number one thing that someone gets hurt. But obviously brand reputation and all this other kind of stuff takes a hit.

Plus legally, you know, somebody could sue you because you were told that these are the possible risks, but just decided not to do it, right? So that was part of it. But what happened, and it's really interesting you mentioned that once we got the G-Sox up and running and we proved ourselves in the Arab Spring when we stood up seven crisis management teams in the region, evacuating people out of Harnsway, safe houses in Egypt for our personnel, all this kind of stuff.

And we were able to manage it with our operations centers, keeping everything coordinated, all the information flow from the head shed on down, so we had one version of the truth. When we had a crisis management team together with the different verticals in the company legal and HR, our real estate facilities. And, you know, they would say, well, I heard this. We heard this.

It said, no, no, no. We have one version of the truth that we're sending up to the CEO. And that's based on intel, not based on conjecture, not based on who you heard from Uncle Joe or whoever. It's based on intel that's been vetted as much as it can be vetted. And that's what we're sending up. So we proved our bones in that. And so to your point about profit, we were benchmarked by a lot of people because we actually were able to turn ourselves into a virtual profit center. And so we approached, when I approached, I was in D.C. one time, and we have a Microsoft Government Affairs group out of D.C.

And they're all former, you know, D.O.D. military. And their job is obviously, sell you know our stuff to the navy the air force marines army whatever and i met with this guy who was a former commander in the coast guard we just happened to shoot the bull and i mentioned the gsock and you know he came out to take a look at it and he said you know what so we kind of cocked this idea so we have an executive briefing center at microsoft and traditionally they would take say their clients as well as other sales groups bring their clients go to the ebc we call it executive Center and be subjected to some boring-ass PowerPoint about PowerPoint, you know. You know, it's like, okay, that's dumb.

But he said, what if we were to show the power of our Microsoft technology and some other partner products in a real live environment? And even if they're not security people, right, you could just show the power of that technology and how you can, it's all about integration, right? Not one-off silos when it comes to technology. So we toyed with that and my technology team and I and my leadership team got together. We put together this pretty cool dog and pony show where we walked them through our journey from the standalone center that had 60 different technologies. We even had a room we call it the bubble boy room.

We'd show like from Seinfeld. We would show this poor guy. He was monitoring our executive protection stuff back in the day when I got there in 2002. And because the ATVAC system was so screwed up that they had like a list bubble around us. So we call them the bubble boy room. And we would show them all that and the sticky nose and all the stuff, the antiquated stuff. And then we showed them, you know, what we have now. Everything's computerized.

Everything's streamlined. And we would do this dog and pony show where what I described to you, we would simulate an incident where Redmond is out. And whatever the incident is, whether it's India or UK, they could hear India, UK, radio over IP, dispatching our team to triage an event. And plus the fact that we could, you know, it was all mobiles. We could take our laptops, you know, and maybe nowadays that's not so innovative. But back then, being able to just take your laptops and go to a conference room

and often set up, your G-Soc is up and running again if your building's been messed up. Right. We had a car crash, some drunk driver crashed into our building where our GSOC was. Fire and firefighters came and put it out, but we had to take our GSOC folks and go to, and that was one of the things we showed. But what we started doing, so then the government affairs folks started bringing clients from DOD. And so my ask was, let's say the Navy Department decided we're going to then, you know, We like what we see at Microsoft. We're going to purchase a three-year license for software because that's how it was back then.

And I don't know how it is now. And let's say that it was like a $5 million or $10 million, whatever it was. My only ask was, would you give us if, and that was the big gift, if you believe our demonstration, our participation helped you seal the deal, would you at least give us credit for what we call soft dollars, right? meaning we could capture that as helping with the sale. And he said, no, no problem. You know, they still get the real money.

Right. And their bonuses and all that stuff. And so we noodled on that for a while. And we came up with a program. We call it revenue influencing. And we started expanding that to not just the government sales, but, you know, office, windows, you know, all these different groups within the company would come in.

And we would then ask the question after, you know, did you make the sale? Yes. Would you give us credit? Yes. And so at one point, we'd been credited with millions of dollars with the sales, helping with the company. And we could capture that. And at that point, we were in the finance organization.

My boss was the chief accounting officer. And he'd come over from Dow. So he had a good appreciation of security. And he told me, he said, I've never seen anything like this where you guys are actually helping the company money. Right. You know, and I told my team, look, it's great we're doing this because now we feel like we're contributing above and beyond security. Right.

We're contributing to the core competency because my mantra was always we're business people first. Business just happens to be security. But we also got smarter. If we brought in a team from Windows and they bring their clients, we hear their conversations. We understand, you know, kind of what the clients are looking at, what office team is looking at. that makes us smarter as business people, right? Right. And so the other thing is that, as, you know,

they use that term a lot, business enablers, but it gave us a lot more credibility within the C-suite because we would purposely target different BPs within the company every year to come to the G-Soc, go through the demo, knowing that they would evangelize with us. Right. Wow.

That ripple effect, right? And you got to check these guys out. And it worked. It worked. And then we expanded it overseas. We had Microsoft Technology Centers. We asked the technology centers, could we do these dog and pony shows there? So we were able to expand that. And it was a really cool and fun time. The other part of it was, there are a lot of people, even in corporate America today, that don't, they really think security is just the guys in the white vans. My current wife, Janice, I'll tell you about her in a while. We met in college and we separated and then we got back together 41 years later. But when I told her I was Chief Security Officer, she actually thought I was like Paul Blart, you know, I'm a detective because she didn't know what a CSO was. Right.

You're like, oh, that's nice. You have stars and all that kind of stuff, you know? Because people don't, when we were briefing these folks on first, besides the GSI, we briefed them on what we did and people don't understand. Yeah, we patrol campuses. We also are involved in kidnapping, you know, so kidnapping and extortion issues. We're involved in threats of violence against our employees. We evacuate people out of harm's way. We have our own technology team. Of course, we have executive protection. We have crisis management groups. We've got, you know, and they didn't realize we did all of these things. If a Microsoft

employee is kidnapped, we work with our K&R provider to try to get them out of harm's way. I've got a really great story if you want to hear about one of those things. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So Libya, I didn't even realize we had an office in Libya when Gaddafi was still, you know, in charge. Why, I don't know, we're selling software there, but anyway, we had a general manager there. We later found it was part of the anti-Kaddafi resistance. And his sister was in Seattle as part of it, right? So kind of get where the story's going.

And one day we find out that he's been kidnapped. Nobody knows where he is. And of course, you know, the C-Street, everybody, they go high order. And we're tasked, obviously, with finding him. And we get our Carson's management team together. We're trying to work this out. And one of my guys, Mike Foyens, he's a former French foreign legionaries, tons of experience in the international realm.

He and I primarily kind of worked this with a lot of folks. But, and they're all, you know, you get all these people from the company that say, you know, I know somebody. Why don't you talk to somebody? And they'll get them out right away. Okay, we'll talk to them. And they find out their information like three or four years old, right? Yeah. And finally, the headshed just said, just let them do their job because it's going to take time.

But what we found was we found, we spread the word out amongst our, you know, least offices about what happened. This one woman in our office in Jordan in Amman said, I have a neighbor and a friend, somebody I know that used to be the Jordanian ambassador to Libya. And we said, oh, well, that's interesting. So we asked, do you think he'd be amenable, you know, to us talking to him about us? So we approached him. And we asked him, you still have contacts in the Qaddafi government. I knew. Would you be willing to go in? So he did. He went in for us and did some digging and stuff like that. And eventually on up where the person was. And we eventually, through some negotiations, we were able to get that person out. Wow. And, but it was the wildest thing. Who knew

that we had an office in Libya? And of course, this person would be part of the Qaddafi resistance. He's lucky he wasn't killed. Right. He was beaten up in, you know, tortured pretty bad, but we got him out. It's like that Russell Crow movie. Which one? What's the name of that Russell Crow movie? Proof of Life. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It was kind of like that. Mike, tell us then, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. Well, I was just going to ask, you know, coming out off of that, talk to us a little bit about your second retirement from your second career and kind of what came after. Sure.

You know, once again, you get to a point, and a lot of it had to do with Janice. So I met Janice in college in San Jose State in 1977. She's Japanese. I'm half Japanese. And when I went to take her on my first date, her dad was cleaning his gun. So as I like to say, he liked this side of me, but he didn't like that part. Right. So we kind of went our separate ways after that night and I went to open all that other stuff.

And then we both married other people. She was a she was pilot, air traffic control, and then became flight attendant for American. Married another flight attendant. Great guy. I never met him. And then I married a gal named Karen from the agency CTC. We didn't know it. We didn't keep in contact.

And unbeknownst to me in 2014. Janice's husband died of a heart attack in their house in Florida. And my wife passed away in 2016 of stomach cancer while I was still CSO. And so my wife, Karen, was Catholic. But she came from San Diego County. That's where her parents or relatives are. So I did a eulogy in Seattle, flew down to San Diego to do a second eulogy. My friend Scott, who I've mentioned several times,

my best friend. At that point, he had retired from the agency also, but he's working for Will Hurd. You know, Will is retired. His former agency officer, but younger generation, like if I'm Kirk, he's like Ricard generation, you know, and he was Congressman of San Antonio, Republican, but really cool guy because he crossed the lines and Scott was doing some work for him. And Scott told him about Karen passing and said, could you do anything? He said, yeah, absolutely. So they flew a flag over the U.S. Capitol in Karen's honor with a certificate from the architect of the capital honor of Karen Howard for service to her country. So he presented to me the next day, the day before the eulogy. I did the eulogy.

And then I posted it on Facebook. And we were Facebook friends, but just on the periphery, like never dropped. And she saw that. That's the first thing she pulled up. So it must have been Providence with all the algorithms, anything that could come up. And she reached out to me and we got back together again after 41 years and we're married now, right? That's incredible. But that's a long way of going about the fact that in about 2018, I figured, you know what, there's more to life than this.

I think we built up Microsoft global security to where it needed to be. We're being benchmarked by peers and governments and a lot of other folks. I had a good succession plan and at some point you know, you need to D.D. Melon, you need to get out at Dodge so you can allow other people to you know, to rise to where they want to be,

you know, and grow and take over. And so financially we were able to pull the plug and we moved to Las Vegas. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do exactly.

It just kind of kept it nebulous. And then COVID hit. And I knew we wanted to get involved in the community. And we always were interested in, like, helping at-risk youth and doing things like that. We started getting involved in different community things. But then COVID hit. And I tried my, I decided, okay, so I'd always thought about writing a book on leadership. And I went to, you know, on Apple TV, this app called Masterclass.

And you can look up, you know, different authors. and I looked up different authors and kind of figured out how they like to write. And I took an old PowerPoint I used to give on leadership and I turned it to what I thought was a really good book on leadership. And a gal that I knew that I brought into Microsoft to do some productivity training for me, Laura Stack. They call her the productivity pro.

She lives in Colorado. I reached out to her and I said, do you know anybody that could help me with book writing and stuff? She said, yeah, this is a gal named Judith Briles. and they call it the book shepherd. She works with independent writers and stuff. I'll introduce us. So she introduced us. And as soon as I sent my manuscript to

Judas, she said, you don't know how to write, do you? But that dashes my dreams, you know. And I said, I write all the time, and I used to write cables in the agency and I write business stuff. She said, I'm talking about books, right? And what I learned is, you guys know, you've written.

Usually your first manuscript ends up on the floor anyway at some point or part of it, right? Just part of the process of writing. But we work with each other for a better part of a year to come up with my first book, which is the art of Ronan leadership. And we called it Ronan for a number of reasons. My wife actually came up with the idea because Ronan means masterless samurai. I think you guys know, but some folks out there may not know.

And my theory is that, or thesis, is that as you grow in leadership, you're learning for different people. You always have mentors and you never stop growing. The day you say you've looked at management, the leadership thing is the day you stop growing as a leader, right? You're always learning. But at some point, you're going to chart your own path. You've learned for different people. You know who you are with emotional intelligence and all this kind of stuff. And then you're going to chart your own way of doing things. And Janice was thinking, well, what about Ronan? Because I got a Ronan tattoo here. I'm really heavy into the samurai stuff. And I think, thought, yeah, I'm a master of a samurai. That would be kind of a kind of cool thing. And then one day

as we're kind of finessing the book, I look behind me and I have the book of Five Rings by the greatest samurai that ever lived, Miyamoto Masashi. And the book of five, I said, okay, so I have these teaching points in the book. And as I started thumbing through, I said, well, this part of Musashi's would fit here. So we kind of added that. So that became kind of the whole Ronan leadership thing. So we published the book. book and people really liked it. And I realized I really liked writing. I really enjoyed the process of not the first time we should tell me I didn't know how to write. Right, right. That first year was kind of tedious. Take this out, take this out, take this out, take this out, you know. But as we get to

know each other, we're just great friends now, we collaborate on a second book because the feedback on the first book was we love the first book, which was at a 50,000 foot level. But let's talk about like how do show us tell us how to build teams and how to get a budget and how to build strategy and blah blah so the next one was the art of rona leadership uh strategies and that was more uh about the sort of the down-to-earth kind of thing right so i thought okay yeah i love leadership stuff and i started you know a small podcast and a blog and but then kind of in the back of me i said I wanted to do fiction. So I started watching the masterclasses from Daniel Baldacci and, you know.

Dan Brown. Yeah, all these folks. Yeah, exactly. And Lee Child and all this kind of stuff. And I'm thinking, I'm going to try my hand at it. And I had a story that it came up with a story that took place in the Philippines. You know, obviously things I'm familiar with the NPA. I put pen to paper.

And then I realized I really love writing because I love crafting something. out a whole cloth. And then that became one of my main verticals in life now is to write. I'm getting ready to publish my third. It wasn't going to be a series, but now it's the third in a series. A guy named Jack Trench, who's a former CIA guy. So that was kind of one part of it. The other part of it was, you know, going back to the police thing, we had supported the Seattle Police Foundation for years when I was at Microsoft. And we knew the chiefs there very well. And we came here.

I asked the chief of police at the time, Carmen Best in Seattle to introduce me to the then-Sharef Joe Lombardo, who's now our governor. So Janice and I went to go meet with Joe. And Joe mentioned about this Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Foundation that they have, similar to Seattle Police Foundation. I was never on the board with Seattle Police Foundation, but we always supported it. So we met with their executive director. I got on the board and eventually ended up, this is, I'm finishing up my second term as the board president for the LVMPD Police Foundation. So we provide, you know, equipment and all kinds of things that the department needs. Yeah.

If you remember the recent bombing obviously at Trump Tower when Sheriff McMill got up there and they were showing the drug. drone coverage of that the Tesla, right? Yeah, that all those drones are because of the foundation's efforts with through donors to give them the technology and they're probably one of the most technologically savvy and advanced police department in the country. So that was the second vertical. And I guess the third one was because we feel for at-risk youth, we start our own foundation. Mike and Janice Howard Foundation and so we're supporting several

charities that deal with at-risk youth, whether it's to help support them with arts, like supporting folks who can't, who are musically gifted, but they can't afford lessons or instruments. We kind of help them with that. Another thing called Club Christ, which they have four different locations soon to be expanded,

because Metro is actually getting behind this, where we'll take an apartment building or apartment, a building, room and it's a place for kids in really bad neighborhoods to go after school. They get some computer study. They get some snacks. They get some computer time. If they want, they can get some, you know, Bible learning or whatever.

But at the end of the day, keeps them off the streets. So we're kind of supporting that. So that became, that's kind of my second life. I never thought that I thought I would just, you know, I don't play golf. so I don't know what I was going to do, but that's now become kind of our life here. But I would say, you know, the writing is probably the preeminent thing. I love being an author and I love writing. And it's just, it's a passion for me.

And I can take a lot of the experiences that I had in life and hopefully put it to paper in a fiction form. Tell us the titles of your books and where people can find them. Sure. The art of Ronan leadership, the art of executing Ronan leadership strategies are the two nonfiction, full circle, which you see behind me, my first fiction, and blood promise. All of them you can find on either Mike Howardauthor.com. There are links. And Barnes & Noble.com, you can find them there. But the easiest way to find them is just on Amazon. Just look them up on Amazon. But if you go to Mike Howardauthor.com, you've got the links. It'll take you straight to the books. That's fantastic. Do we have questions? We have a couple questions.

I don't know if we have any on Patreon, but I'll get to the ones here. We have. M. Corbyn, thank you very much. How could the agency present itself in advertising to more effectively convey a message and recruit more gentlemen of your caliber? Wow, that's quite a question. It's kind of hard because you're a clandestine, you know, organization. But one of the things they could do is, you know, get maybe folks like me and other folks that have had, you know, great careers and we love the agency.

And not just, you know, people with gray hair like me, but, you know, all the demographics put together a panel, you know, which I don't think there's ever been done and just, you know, or a video and just talk about your agency experiences, whether or it's. was, you know, someone like me started in 1980 or someone that started in, you know, the 2000s. Right. And just talk about the benefits of it and, as well as, you know, the things that you have to sacrifice. I mean, you, you know, there, like any profession, special operations, law enforcement, what heavy intelligence work, you know, it takes a heavy toll, you know, a lot of it is all encompassing. There are heavy divorce rates and things like that.

there's always that side of it. But to me, to be able to evangelize not just the experiences that I had in the agency, but the sense of fulfillment I had in serving the country. People ask me a lot, so what did you like better, Microsoft or the agency? I like the money better at Microsoft, obviously. But when it comes to fulfillment,

there's nothing more fulfilling than, serving your country, in my humble opinion. I got, to me, that was, well, we're sort of serving the country at Microsoft because we obviously, Microsoft supplies a lot of the software and data centers, infrastructure for the government, nothing like serving your country. But I would say that's one way if the agency would be willing to just reach out to former folks and be able to talk about, or even you could have a mishmash of former folks like me, again, all agents, demographics, but also there are folks that are not, that we're not,

that are not hired to be undercover. You're an analyst, for instance. You're not, have them come on. And talk about their experiences of being the agency. But just get out there. And you have to get out there in ways that are different than just go to cia.gov. Right. You need, get out on Instagram, get out on whatever platforms that you have to evangelize where you can

get the most bang for your buck. I think one of the things people would be surprised at how. how many different types of jobs there are in the agency that, you know, everybody thinks of, like, the case officer and maybe even the analyst. But, you know, like when you start getting into, like, DS&T or the tech side, when you start getting into, you know, products or whatever, like, there's so much there, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, part of my education was to, you know, when you go to a certain location, you see

what the DST can do, you know, you know, look through walls and all the, all the, all the kind of fancy, you know, stuff that they do or the explosive stuff or, you know, but it's not just the kinetic stuff, the intelligence part of it, the analyst part of it. Yeah. Or even like, you know, the security or, you know, there are so many careers there that it shouldn't keep people from applying because I think, I'm not going to be Jason born. Well, hell, I'm not Jason born. Right.

You know, there is no Jason born. I'd be fired. You know, there's no Jason born, right? Look, they have janitors at the agency, right? Like, they have somebody cleans up at the end of the day. I mean... They have a store. Yeah.

That they sell stuff, which we didn't have. We didn't have a store. Yeah. But yeah, to your point, you're right. There's a lot, there are a lot of careers there. But, you know, and like any organization, you need a lot of people to keep the trains running. So anybody could find a good career at CIA if you looked hard enough. Yeah.

Yeah. M. Corby, thank you very much. What could go wrong with the venture capital firm funding a business that's profit model is AI smut like Civiety is doing? Wow. What could go wrong? Well, I mean, I think the answer is pretty clear. Look, you know, I'm not an expert on AI. I've been using it now in different ways, but at the end of the day, AI is still, in my opinion, in its nascent stages, right? And so if you're going to invest in an AI platform,

you better have done your due diligence to the point where you really have a good handle on pros and cons, the risks and the rewards and that kind of stuff. I think the problem with a lot of VCs is that, you know, they want to get on the AI bandwagon because they're reading in the news, the Wall Street Journal, and they're seeing, you know, Microsoft investing in AI and blah, blah, blah. And so this sounds good. Again, the bright, shiny objects that are out there are not always the best things to invest in.

And to put your money into. So, I mean, the pitfalls are obviously, it could be reputational. It can be legal if it goes south and certainly it could be financial if you've invested X number of dollars into this thing. So I love the aspects of AI that I'm seeing, like even on like, you know, the iPhone here, the new iPhone, they got some AI things embedded in. Those are little things. It doesn't cost that much. You got to be real careful. And again, I'm not an AI expert.

Yeah. This is a new world to me, too. It's like any other kind of investment. That's the way I look at it, that you go into it with eyes wide open, not thinking that you're going to make a. quick hit and understanding that the pitfalls of this thing goes south, right? And if you've, if you've thought through all those things and you're still willing to put the dollars, go do it, you know? Then at least your conscience is clear because you've done your, as much due diligence as you believe is necessary to make you feel comfortable investing in that.

Otherwise, I'd stay away. Mike, I have a question for you because I think you're really, I mean, you're at a place where you can, you have good visibility on this. You know, when you think of a company like Microsoft or any of these tech companies, you have physical security, right? And all the things that that comprises. And that probably includes, like, insider threat and a bunch of other stuff, right? But then you also have your cybersecurity.

You know, you have the people watching, you know, what's going on in the system and stuff like that. But those two things have been held separately for so long. But with, you know, with things like social engineering, with a lot of these things, Like there's a place where they bleed together, right? And how does that fusion happen? And how does like the physical security and the cyber security? Are they kind of, is there a place where they mesh and where they get on board? Yeah.

No, great question. There is. The security world has been wrestling with that for years. There was a time when I was CSO earlier in my career, there was this notion of this Uber CSO that would have everything, right? And there are some CSOs that have both physical and IT, logical security, but that's not the norm. So the way you tackle that is, again, Microsoft's not perfect. And I don't even know if this structure is in place not, but the then head of IT security and I,

we helped, along with some others, created what they call the Information Risk Management Council at Microsoft. So it was made up of physical IT and then some of the business units that had security elements in it. And we would meet on a regular basis, number one, to talk about what our strategies were for that particular fiscal year or whatever. So just completely transparent and what we're planning to do, where, what country, blah, blah, blah, and then see where we can deconflict. That's kind of number one. So you have to have and then come up with a common strategy. to tackle security threats writ large at Microsoft, right? So to the point where if we fired somebody and they have a,

for some reason they didn't turn their badge in, right? And then they try to badge in somewhere, you know, so we know about it, but shouldn't IT security also know about that? Right, right. So what's the technology that connects the two together, right? Those are the things that need to be talked about. And so to me, the remedy is you either have one Uber CSO that takes care of everything that has both verticals, or you have some kind of committee, some infrastructure that make sure that you are openly sharing information,

strategies, technologies, because you don't want to be redundant, too. If I'm asking for a particular technology, and IT is looking for another technology, that's stupid, right? I used to call it strategic integration. We coined that. So make sure that every vertical that you have, you know what everyone's doing so that when you're going for an ask or you're doing something,

you're doing it in a unified manner, like a unified command company. But companies, from what I understand, are still wrestling of that, which it amazes me to this day. day that they can't even put together a simple committee to deconflict. Right. Makes no sense.

But again, I think it goes back to something you said earlier about, remember you said about bureau and agency and sometimes, you know, they don't talk to each other because they've got different cultures. And it's kind of the same thing, you know, where, you know, this is my piece of the pie. And if I give up that piece of the pie, you know, I give up some power. And, you know, what if they look better than I do because they found that there's some flaws. in my security thingy, but that's the whole idea of being transparent

because nobody's perfect. You know, when we had these meetings, we say we're doing X, Y, and Z, and maybe IT says, you know, but that doesn't make sense in terms of the total totality of what we're trying to do. And we have to think about that and think, well, maybe you're right.

Maybe we've got to refine this, rethink this, right? As opposed to, well, this is our stuff and we're always right. And who are you to tell us that we can't do this? So that's, hurdle, but structurally, it's easy if people are willing to do it. Right, right. Makes sense. And Josh, thank you very much. Any thoughts or experience with

ASIS, the Aussie CIA? The who? Asis, the Australian, like, intelligence organization. It's funny. Janice and I just took a Christmas cruise through Australia and New Zealand. And I last time I've been in New Zealand was in the 80s. We, we worked with them. They're very capable. But one thing I remember, they're very late back, right? It was like a Friday and like 4 o'clock. And we said, okay, so what are we going to do next?

He said, hey, mate, we're off duty, you know, we're gone, you know. Okay, let's go. But no, they're very capable service. And their counterpart used to be called ASIO. They're kind of like the domestic. They're very switched on. They know what they're doing. And they certainly have their share of threats.

And they're really great partners to work with. I had limited exposure to them. Yeah. But I enjoyed working with them. And I respected the hell out of them. That's awesome. Dee, did we have anything on Patreon? No.

Okay. Mike, where can people find you, aside from just your books, but are you any social media presence or anything? Yeah, I mean, so I do, I have a blog, ROTOM Leadership Thoughts on LinkedIn. You can just look that up there. Mike Hardauthor.com is the best place to find me. I have a, I have an Instagram account. then I post a lot of reels on Instagram. But my car author.com is kind of the one-stop shop.

I kind of made it that way. So if you want to find any content that I have, whether there's blogs, podcast, or what have you, you can find it right there. And I want to tell our listeners out there that we will be back on Monday with Michelle Rigby Assad, former CIA officer, author of Get Off the X. And then on Friday, we will have Asha.

who she served as a military intelligence officer and then had a position in the Biden administration. So we're looking forward to having both of those folks on here next week. Mike, thank you so much. We really appreciate you spending a Friday night with us. Yeah, this has been awesome. Thank you so much. And I'm glad that we could share our drinks together.

Absolutely. And thank you for what you guys do. I think your podcasts are preparing for this. I'll watch your podcast. You have such a great range of people, and I know it's not easy to do this. And so I can learn a lot from you, too, in terms of my own podcast.

So I appreciate you putting me on here, and I love the questions, and thank you so much. Is your podcast active right now? It is. Where can people find that? Same thing, my coward author.com. Okay. But you can look it up.

It's called Ronan Leadership Podcast. Okay. Have you put it out on all the, like Spotify, on the platforms and stuff like that? Yeah, it's out there, but it's growing. You know, someday I'll be you, but it's growing. So everybody check out Ronan Leisure Podcast.com. Yeah. Or Ronen Leisure Podcast.

Or just go to MyCardt, other.com, and you'll find the link to it. Okay, great. Yeah, and if there's ever anything we can do for you, when your next book comes out, whatever, we can plug it for you. Just let us know. I will. I appreciate it. It should be coming out another couple weeks. Awesome. Awesome.

Yeah. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it, man. Is it available for pre-sale right now? It will be in about five days. All right, everybody, make sure you go buy the book on pre-sale. Yeah, I'm going to go check out the first novel, get caught up to speed. All right. Thank you, brother. Appreciate it. Thank you, Mike. And have a nice weekend out there, everyone.