The Team House - CIA propaganda officer Joe Goldberg on disinfo ops, narrative building, and more. Ep. 54

Episode Date: August 8, 2020

Joe Goldberg is a former CIA officer who specialized in disinformation and propaganda operations. In this episode we talk about his recruitment into the CIA, a massive deception operation he ran against Libya by producing a fake video, CIA anti-communist campaigns, then going to work in corporate intelligence with Motorola and looking for several billion dollars that got "lost" in Turkey. Joe was also on the ground for a political campaigns in Ukraine during Euromaidan, in Taiwan, and parts of Africa. He is also the author of the espionage novel Secret Wars: An Espionage Story which can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Wars-Espionage-Joe-Goldberg/dp/1500345415/ Help Dave recover from being attacked on the subway: https://www.gofundme.com/f/david-parke039s-medical-bills Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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Everyone is there of someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Hey everyone. Welcome to the team house. I am Jack Murphy. I am here with our guest tonight, Joe Goldberg. Joe is, I know how crazy it sounds, but Joe, was a CIA propagandist. He was a disinformation expert. And we're going to get into all of that with him. But first off, I know a lot of you are wondering, you're like, hey, Jack, where is Dave, my co-host? Dave, you know, some of you already know because I mentioned it on Twitter and I sent out a message to some of the supporters of the show to let you guys know. But for the rest of you,

haven't heard yet, Dave got attacked on the subway. This was Wednesday night, about like 10.30 at night. Dave takes the subway from where he and I live in Brooklyn to Manhattan, the L train, and he got attacked. Somebody came up behind him and hit him in the head with a rock as he was sitting there on the subway reading. And he went unconscious for a couple moments, woke up, and this guy was still on top of him, slamming him in the back of the head with a rock. And, you know, Dave, Tough guy doesn't take any guff. He managed, even after getting knocked out, to get back up and tackle this guy and bring him down to the ground. And at the next subway stop, his attacker ran off and disappeared.

Dave got up and somehow he managed to stumble his way to the police department and let them know that he'd been attacked. And the police got him to the hospital. And once he was there, the doctors looked at him. They said his skull is fractured in several places. His orbital bones busted up. He's deaf in one year, and he had TBI, traumatic brain injury. They downgraded the TBI from like, if it was level one, they downgraded it, you know, two or from two to one, whatever it was.

His injuries are not life-threatening. I talked to him on the phone yesterday. He sounds like Dave. Good old Dave sounds like the same guy, so I'm hopeful that he's going to make a full recovery. I had some texts with him today. He's on bed rest, basically, in the hospital. The doctors are trying to figure out what's going to need surgery and what's just going to heal on its own. But they're already talking about discharging him.

So I'm going to go down to the hospital tomorrow to try to see him, provided they're accepting visitors. and because Dave uses Veterans Affairs, VA, for his health care services, he's going to have some pretty expensive medical bills to pay for. So I went ahead and I started up like a GoFundMe campaign for Dave today. And you can find the link down in the description of this video if you're interested in donating to help Dave's recovery. And that has nothing to do with this podcast or the show or any of that kind of stuff. it's that's for Dave to pay his medical bills his rehabilitation that's what it's for um and you guys just in like a matter of a few hours you've already raised like close to six thousand dollars so I'm overwhelmed by your generosity it means a lot to me uh but it means the world to Dave

it means everything for him and he just wanted me to let you guys know that this is what had happened to him he wants to be here uh if you're trying to get in touch with him he's not blowing you off he's just in a hospital bed and he's got some things he's got some bigger things on his plate right now so that's the that's the deal with dave and i'll keep you guys updated and let you know how things are going with him um but he'll he'll be back as soon as he can and you know he's you know i'm still trying to wrap my mind around all of this probably david is too um but nypd is actively looking for this guy and uh as far once i have more information i'll share it with you guys but that's kind of all I got right now.

So, you know, unfortunately, kind of doing the show solo, but we have a great guest. Joe, I've talked to a few times in the past, and we were just having a good conversation before we started up the show. Joe, I want to start off, kind of the way we start with most of our guests, is I'd like you to tell us a little bit about your upbringing, where you came out of, and how exactly does one become a CIA

propagandist. Like how do you get that job that you find an ad in the personnel section and the newspaper? How does that work? Before I started to say it's horrible the story about Dave and I'm sure all the subscribers and people follow you are giving them all the support they can. I'm definitely hit the GoFundMe page when this is all done to help them out. That's just that's a thank you. How did I start? I was actually at the University of Iowa. I has a political science degree and a master's degree in communication theater arts, division of broadcasting and film

and a minor degree in history. And I wanted to go to law school, kind of waiting around for my lousy old scat scores that come up. Got accepted to a few schools, but I had still a chance to use the University of Iowa career placement place, and the CIA came on campus to interview. This would have been in 1985.

Excuse me. And so I put my name at the top of the list. I was trying to figure out a way to put my politics degree and my communications desire to get a creative thing together. I thought, this is cool. They kind of always wanted to be in a public service job there at the beginning. And so they came on campus. It was the middle of Iran-Contra, the war in Nicaragua. And so when they heard that the CIA guy was coming on campus, the interview, there were people all over the Union,

the University of Iowa Union, where the interviews were in camouflage. and they had the signs and they had the mannequin bodies and they were dragging around of bloody things. And I kind of followed them in by a little distance. And he went up to, they were following them and they were chanting. He just walked up the stairs. They had to kind of, they actually weren't just dragging mannequins. They were actually kind of dragging real people.

The guy had to stop, of course, he's going to drag his friend up the stairs. And so that came in. He was a great sense of humor from the point of view of that's this part of the territory. I wanted an interview to feel, and it took a while. They actually kind of lost my app, but nine months to a year later, I got the phone call saying,

come to D.C. and meet some people. I met a few different offices, and I got brought into the Director of Intelligence. All the names are different now, but it was Global, it was Graphic Services Branch, to the Visual Media Branch. And I was the media analyst. I had a degree in television, broadcasting, communications,

and TV was becoming an action intelligence tool. You're inside a building that is full of people went to Yale and Harvard and they write papers and they read reports and cables that come from overseas. And I'm like, you know what? You can watch a news story about what's happening in South Africa and get real-time intelligence with this thing called Tiananmen Square. You know, that's happening on TV type of thing.

That was a little bit later, but, well, about my thoughts at that time. But these things are happening. and, you know, I... Take us back for a moment because, goodness gracious, there are probably millennials watching this who have no idea what the media environment was like back in the 1980s when you came on the job. I mean, you were still in that analog error,

although live television was coming around. I mean, could you just describe what the media environment looked like at that moment? Yeah, we were transitioning. CNN had been on the air for about five, six, six, years, MTV been on there for about five, six years. It was, we were going, we were, the, the VHS beta wars were just being decided in the Supreme Court. I watched some stories about these things called CDs and DVDs and digital technology. How crazy that's going to wipe out this whole

vinyl record industry and that's how bad it's going to be. And that's where we were. We were at this movement and that's kind of where my expertise or thought process came. in was how do you go from here to there because it was it was new it was how do you how do you because I wouldn't expect people who have read documents for the books and sit around in meetings and long tables and paneled offices to get messages across and someone's taking down the minutes of the meeting down the minutes and there's all these pictures of all black and white white guys on the wall and you're saying you know I can show you this real time and actually I picked a I had a project that I actually saw, I think, is still in there, like in the museum, that

I call it the video, you know, there's a PDF, the presidential daily, and I created the vid, the video daily, which was pulling down major sources, stories, and pop them through, it was then a fledgling closed circuit TV inside the agency, but because here's what you need to be learning about. And, you know, Ronald Reagan was a video guy, right? His predecessor wasn't. So how do you use that stuff, do it influence or help out the decision makers making informed decisions about the country. So there's black and white printers at my desk and big old beast, you know, cathode ray tube televisions that one of us was always sort of watching me and my partner because things were happening, breaking news, real breaking news.

Now, Tenements, I remember when I was doing, I was actually in the China ops class during Tenement, and the guys were coming every morning and they were like, all, they've been up all night. And we were saying, what's new? What's new? And they said, CNN is getting better reporting than we are. Because CNN was broadcasting live on satellite phones from Tiananmen Square where agency people would have to go meet their sources or reserve, go back to the embassy, type by type, blah, blah, blah.

And that takes time where you go watch it. This was new. You could actually watch a revolution live. on television and get the intelligence live at that time. And that was, that's, that's as revolutionary as Star Wars was for movie making. It was, oh my gosh, we can actually see these things. In fact, just digressing. There's a thing called them CNN effect at the time where it was bad being seen in was the eyeball,

old CNN was the eyeball of the world. And you wouldn't want to be shown to be a bad person because it's going to be beamed around the world and they're going to show how lousy you are. Well, that flipped, of course, when people realized, hey, you know what, I can use that. Here's my revolution. Come talk to me. I want to be seen around the world. But there actually was a limiting effect by satellite television back then to say,

we don't want to appear there because that's bad. That's bad PR. Then they figured out, no, it's good PR. I can use it. So the smallest little dictator could get live coverage by doing something. So that was, we were in this crazy time. And what was it like when, I mean, you got the job? Do you receive training on how to be a CIA propaganda officer?

Propaganda things. At that time I came in, I was a media analyst. I mean, if the things were happy, this was Qaddafi, this was narco-terrorist, this was hostages in Beirut, things well beyond most of your listeners. But then that's stone eyes and bearskin. What was the title of your job? Because I do, I keep using that title propagandist, because I think, think it's funny, but. Well, I had this crazy career. So I went in to the DI overt to be a media analyst.

And that's what I did. But I had this sort of had, I mean older, crazy abilities to see things, memorize things, just know things. And the operations guys had come over who were doing things saying, hey, we need this. And so I'm like, oh, I know where that is. I can get that. And no, you should try to do this. And they were like, you, I think they were impressed because what they did is during a hiring freeze a year, exactly a year later to my onboard date, I got moved over to operations into the propaganda psychological group. It was within the TV branch. Was it called TV branch? I guess what's called TV branch. But I had a degree.

I didn't run the group. There were other people who were senior, but I sort of had the TV degree. And we had experts, of course, who did the actual production elements of. I was sort of like a producer and idea person and wrote some stuff. And that's what I wanted to propaganda operations. That's when it was Wild Wild West. Let's figure some stuff out. Let's cause these people paying as much as I possibly can.

But I was a propaganda operations. I was a propaganda officer, P.O. It was in television. So I went from D.I. That was the title of the job. I was a propaganda operations officer. Yeah. And by the way, just to the sake of things, I had to go undercover.

That was crazy because I, Everybody knew I was agency and suddenly I had to go undercover, like, try to explain that. I don't want to work for the agency. I'm going to work for the State Department or something. That was crazy. Because that rolls into the end of my career stories, I'm sure you're going to ask me about. So I went undercover at that point to be a propaganda officer, sort of running people around the world doing crazy. I mean, do you go to a propaganda school or do you receive like mentoring from some of the other people in the office?

How does that work? Oh, that's a good question. I've got that question. Yes. The answer is no propaganda school, although Sherman Kent School had some really good training on writing and analysis and processes. And the training OTS, the training division, not technical services, but the training services, they had some things that I ended up being a trainer in propaganda in the training division for there for a while on propaganda operations. But it was really sort of a common-sensical understanding how people were. reactive media and just throwing some things out there when there was just all these sort of Neanderthal tools that we had for us it was like you know cutting edge but

it was Neanderthal tools to try to figure out how do you get a message out and sort of figure out if that message is actually being effective or is that really important it's just the fact that it's out there and we have ability to spread the process actually works I was big on effectiveness. What's the point of doing something if it's just... Right. You want to move something. Yeah, exactly. What's the point? It was my biggest question. How much money do you have? How much time do I have?

What's the point? Those are my three questions all the time. So what were you looking at at that time frame? I mean, this is still the Cold War still going on. Can you talk about some of the tasks you got some of the things that you guys were concerned with that you were looking at? Oh, yeah. I mean, I mean, kind of when I walked into the first day at the, in PPS, the, there was a lot of stuff about Berlin Wall. Reagan, Reagan decides to get in front of this thing called the Berlin Wall of Gorbachev and say, Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall, and that kind of changes your daily schedule for the next couple months. So you are, you are now working on how can we

affect or push the Reagan anti-Brulyn wall stuff. So there's a, there's quivers in your, that you have, you don't know if how effect there's are going to be, which one you're going to use, but there was the fall of the Berlin, you know, the Soviet block was falling apart. All right. So what can we do to help that out? Like I said, when I was training, I used to start my training as my job was to cause the Soviets pain. That was sort of like what I thought it every day. And the end, and the narco terrorists and state-sponsored terrorism, which was brand new. Gaddafi and those guys were brand new. It was not, it was not just this other sort of stuff, you know, Habibud al was running around. There was hostages in in in Beirut. So there was some of the some of the

Palestinian groups have KGB support didn't it that? Yeah, I didn't do as much. Let's see, what did I do with the Palestinians? Probably not as much as I thought I did. I was more on the on terrorists terrorism state sponsor more than anything. Although I'm sure I did something back then. I can't remember 30 years ago. There was things were just flying and they and it takes a while. And you're looking back at Rose Covered Glasses. I'll look how important I was, bring all these things.

You know, some things are more important. Some things aren't you're killing time. You're reading Fivis reports trying to figure out a foreign broadcast information service report. Trying to figure out what's news. And then you come up with a crazy idea where someone says, we need this. You say, okay, I'll go do it.

And I had a team of people who could. They were great. You know, suddenly, when I started, when I still have DIY, like I told you, earlier, you know, Achille Laurel was taken. All right. So ground branch is right around the corner from my office. They would come in and they would watch my TV

and I'm popping pictures of the Achille Laurel deck plans in real times. They're showing them on TV because I'd get it faster than they can. Oh, cool. Grip it off and hand it to them. So there's like a helic, like a news helicopter overhead. It was the actual plans of the ship. Someone had pulled them out of the ship registry or something. And there they were drawn and they were scrolling across the deck plans.

And I had this little printer on top of my TV, and I could take real-time prints off of it. So I'm popping. They're over my shoulders. We're going to take that, take that, take that, take that. And so I top it, and I figured they're getting just a little bit fast when they went through their own sources because they're literally right around the corner or within feet. And so, you know, you feel like you're good. You're in your good mood.

And then, you know, there were revolutions happening and they were happening on television. And so I pushed the video at that time as a video zealot. I carried that over into the operations side where in the D.I. I was sort of tired of watching things happened. I was tired of watching hangings and shootings of Americans and, and just, I watched a space shuttle blow up about 2,000 times. That happened just after I got there. And the space shuttle commission was on. So there's all this sort of stuff. So I wanted to do something about it. So I was glad the operations guy said, hey, come over and let's do something. So that's why I was glad to go over and sort of change careers into the,

how can I stick my thumb in their eye. And I didn't have any peer. I wasn't taking somebody's job. It was made sort of me. And it was go, you know, and the agency tests you. It's like, here's this impossible thing I want you to do. Make this impossible documentary or video or get this thing there and show us you can do it. And that's how they know if you're viable or not.

And so you do your best. It's one of their training things, throw into impossible situations and see how you get out of it. And I think we did okay. Is that this type of thing they would have you do? Like you mentioned making documentaries? I was willing to use any tool

that we had artist goals at the time, or at least consider it. Now, and again, I remember, this is TV. There is no internet, Zippo. There's no digital Zippo. There's no, there is broad, podcast television, satellite TV is new. There's Face the Nation, Meet the Press,

there's foreign language broadcasting. There are television newscasters around the world. There are documentary films around the world. There are films around the world. There are TV novellas around the world. Music videos were becoming a thing. And a few others, what could we do? What could I do?

What were they asking me to do that I could have felt that I was making something that had impact? We're just doing it because somebody wants. to show, hey, look, I got some of you can do this stuff. Look how cool we are in our division. So some of those, I tried some of my dent. So I'll talk about some of my wall. I know I'm actually in there, I haven't quite finished it yet. I was listening to Wind of Change, which is about the Scorpions and doing the song for the Berlin Wall. I don't know anything about that. That was a little bit after my time. But yeah, would they use music? Yes, A&C always used music.

We always use images. We always used whatever we possibly could. And as I said to you earlier, Nowadays, I have no clue, I'm sure they're saying, ah, there's this thing called TikTok. How do we use TikTok for our band? How do you use Snapchat? How do you use Instagram? Because those are the tools of today. And before me, it was 16 millimeter film.

And it was micro-fiche. And whatever it was, they had out their tools. I was in the transition period from that stuff to sort of more broadcasting broadband world. And it was somewhat fun. And it sort of took a hit there. actually, I think, Iran-Contra sort of shut us down.

The covert action stuff got a little bit dicey through a lot of stuff that's happening, like late-night, late 80s. The Berlin Wall was down. You know, Oliver North stuff was up. I know, I know, I'll be. So it was sort of shut down a little bit. Don't do anything right now.

I'm like, I don't want to not do anything. So I had to change careers this idea. Somebody already asked about wins of change, and if the agency had a hand in that. I got no clue. If I had a clue, I wouldn't tell you because I don't have a clue. Is it possible? I haven't finished

you. I haven't finished you. I haven't finished you. I got a few more episodes ago. Is it possible? Sure. Think of Argo. All right. Did the agency have relationships of Hollywood? Sure. Okay. It's proven. I had pal. Would it have friends in the music industry? Sure. Did it have friends in the broadcast television industry?

Sure. I mean, those are there were weapons. There were weapons. They were resources at our disposal. So I got no clue, and I wouldn't tell you anyway about wins of change. But the idea of music videos as a tool, it was laid out as a possible thing to do, amongst many other things. Not anything. I didn't sit down on a table go, let's check off the music video boxes. They ask questions and, you know, and then you say, yeah, you can do that. You can do a film. You can do a television program. You can do a video. You can do all these things. It's, they are things that we were, I mean, there was always broad, I mean, television has been around for a while and, and imaging and those types of things, but there was sort of new, a little bit more, um, distribution was a little bit looser. And now it's wide open, but it was loosening up. So, yeah, it was, it was one of the things that I would get asked about, I was always sort of asked about what are the chances, which is a big problem of it, of, it was,

going back into the U.S., which is illegal. So if you get to a movie, TV, music video, by rule, you can't have it blow back into the U.S. to impact U.S. people unless you get a congressional right-off. Waiver or something. Oversight Committee. Oversight Committee reports. So that was where I got asked a lot of questions about that

because I didn't want that. And if we ever did anything, because we had Reagan. All right. So Reagan was a big video guy. If we ever did anything for him, CIA embold at the front. So he knew it came from us case they didn't want to leak it or something. You know, we're not letting him know it's propaganda. It came from us. I was big on that. I just follow the rules. Policy stuff. I know Army psychological operations, they produce documentaries. And you, the people who received these documentaries and watch them in foreign countries, they have no idea that the United States funded them. hope not. They're made by locals. So the United States is really like they're very much, the SIOPS guys are behind the scenes on it. But that's, it's, it's white side propaganda, so to speak, and that it's, there's nothing really nefarious about it. It's just about influence. So you're making an anti-jihadist documentary. Like, hey, don't, don't join a terrorist group. These guys are real bad news. They destroy your family, you know, that kind of thing. But could you

explain the difference between that, what Sciopps does and what you guys did in your office when you were in operations? I did them, Bill. I actually was a big believer in the impact of truth as a propaganda weapon. I mean, I worked on Afghanistan until my brains oozed out. I mean, that was and very proud of the work that I supported the Afghan group. We had somebody dedicated to that in our group and she would come and say, hey, can you help? And I would do my thing. And you know, And you didn't have to make that up. I mean, they were, they, toys were exploding and blowing off the arms and hands and killing children. That's, that's not propaganda.

I thought that was when you guys made up. Oh, that was, yeah, exactly. That whole thing about killing children, we did that all the time. It was like exploding teddy bears or something like that? Teddy bears, exploding toys. I had the video. I mean, it's really. And I actually had this, my favorite video I ever had.

It's got to be, was a Stinger Shootdown video. I think it was one of the first Stinger Shootdown videos. And it was probably up 15 minutes of somebody with their camera, looking at their feet, and all I'm seeing is really bad feet and really worn sandals flipping over, rocks in a path, running around, just bouncing all around. And suddenly the camera flips up. There's a couple guys on the hill, and it's, beep, beep, beep. Al-Hah, Kumar, poof.

And they all, like, cool. You know, a stinger shoot down to do it. But you have to go through 15 minutes of some guy's crappy feet to get there. How do you use that? I mean, by the way, that's where you talk about not the dark stuff, but propaganda is one thing. It's communicating. It's all about communicating.

And everybody receives things different. We can get to that later. But, you know, if I'm supporting our efforts in Afghanistan, and we're dealing with the Mujah Hadim, the Mujah Hadim, how do you communicate what the people were asking me to help them or our group? Like how do you use this device, this thing? How do you communicate this? How do you do this particular process?

And I don't speak anyone with the dialects. And none of us really did. So we need to use imagery and graphics and pictures and things. And to communicate that, that's the easy part. The hard part is how do you get that to the mountains of Afghanistan? They can actually watch it. So you're thinking about what do you do to do that. And so you work up, the guys are really smart.

Say, we can do this and we can do that. And, you know, there's donkeys and there's batteries and there's shock absorbers. And you put them over the mountains. And they punch the button and not they can watch things. So it was really kind of a fun job because not one day was sort of the same. How do you help us fight a war against the Soviets? How do you influence their media here? It's not just that you have to introduce the propaganda.

You have to introduce the technology for them to view it on. Yeah, well, they had to view it. I mean, to say, hey, we need to show them how to use this thing, this mortar, this gun, whatever it might be. And we can't communicate. How do you do that? So we used video and graphics to do it, but you got to get it to them. So you had to create, with their help, of course, they not do it,

the ability to get that to them. So it's actually in good shape when it gets to the point of you pushing a button that's not worn out, stretched, full of dust. How do you get to push the button? So those are, those are, I'm not the technology guide, but I can think of ways to get those things done with their health because they're pros. So, but the point is, how do you communicate to people you can't speak, talk to? Not only can't talk to if they were seeing what three people are me,

how do you communicate to them when you're six thousand miles away from me, right? And that was, that was some of the problems. That was the challenge. Can you tell us about some of the projects you worked on where you were trying to, you were trying to move the chest pieces around the chess board, where it was a little bit more than just influence or training or something like that. Yeah. Well, you know, I wrote the book, and my first book, book two,

if there are any agents out there looking for you? The first book was autobiographical, but any reason to say, me living your death is purely coincidental and the figment of the author's imagination. And approved by the agency. Not approved. Sorry, it was reviewed. Not approved.

review by agency. And I was, there was a, there was a, there was a project that had a deal. I'd say it's a Libya project, because it looks about Libya. And we had, we were trying to get a message, true or not, to certain individuals. And it required total corporate action, basically. And, and it was, it was, you know, make sure to say this correctly. I don't end up in Leavenworth, that we created a fiction, using the type of Argo things that might have been brought up in real world, not just a cover, but as in real world stuff.

And this fiction, we hoped would cause action by the person, or two or three, that would be to our benefit, at least really cause some tension amongst the gang, which I think we're actually de-stabilization. Yeah, make them sort of wonder who's what, where, how, which was good enough for me, good enough for the people who asked me to do it. And so we did. And then, of course, making something is easy.

You know, it was fun and it was this and that. But once you had it, it's like how, once again, like the mooch thing, how do you get it to them? And then the third part is how do you know if it was effective. But getting it to them required. When you say it, what is it? And it was, well, there's this this fictionalized video that we made. Okay. That was getting across them that something had happened that necessarily did not really happen.

But if you watch it the way that we did it, it could make somebody think that this thing would happen differently. And they may be upset about that. And they, or actually in a larger community, it may leak out and create some angst because there was already some question about, whether this particular bad thing had really happened. It was rumor. We were trying to make it something true. So at least, pure true. So we did it.

How do you get it to them? It's videotape. So you take a videotape of some popular movie. It's all we had. How do you get something? How do you create a backstory that makes it real that this thing existed in time and is not made up by me

and a couple other people in a gang of thieves? that this actually looks real, is valid. That's the next step. So you go through a series of finding the mechanism, the tool to get it in front of them. The operations guys, they had people. That's not my department. I need to put something in their hands.

So what was the most logical way that this person may have this particular thing? So they created the backstory. I created the material. You embedded inside a video, a movie, some common movie in this common area, and you crash edit it, which is what some of you would do, basically,

two VCRs, click-click, VCRs. Those are big boxes that have videotapes in them. That, you know, not, you know, it was, you click these two things. So it's a cram, and if it crash edit, it's get this rainbow effect that goes across the screen that shows it's actually sort of... Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children.

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Done dirty. And so if anybody was technologically looking at this, they'd say, oh, that's not a professional edit job. That's somebody pushing two buttons. Right, right. That's some guerrilla stuff. With two cords in their bathroom. it looks that way and then they take it to where they got to go

and I'm done and I'm just kind of asking my sponsors anything anything and I was told that they had sources and methods that said that there was an

impact by this. That's all I know. I got a performance award for it. Yay. But so that was actually And that's why I decided we were going to write a book about this crazy thing. So the background, you know, of this Libya. It's a Libya thing, but it was a background of this thing. I just imagine like this, like some sort of like quasi-CIA Hollywood production.

And there's like Joe dressed up like an Arab shake with a prayer beating in his hand. We had people. And they had to have the right dialects that they spoke. You had to have makeup. You had to have building. and foliage that would match where this was supposedly taken. And we actually, I actually brought in a vehicle that was of the time and date and license plate

that would match that time and freight. So just looking at it, it's for what I was, I'm not an expert on that area. And I did my research and people who were experts look at it and say, no, yeah, kind of maybe you wouldn't do that, slower, faster, bigger, smaller. And by the way, it had to be

not taken by a professional camera. Had to be taken by a certain kind of camera. So you had to go out and get the certain kind of camera that was from that area, bring it back and actually shoot with that kind of camera. So someone would say, oh, this wasn't shot with that. It was actually shot with a Sony, beta cam, beta max with professional lighting.

No, it was shot wrong. The way it's shot, the way it's edited, it all has to appear amateurish. We didn't edit a thing. We ran it straight, which is what the story was. So any editing would have been a tip-off. So it was just start, start the scene, let it roll, end scene, and then look and off it go.

And those are fun, and it's unique. And if you want to, I'm looking back of road color glasses and the like, but it was unique. We were told it was unique. We were told it was different, was you told it was effective, which gives you some sense of, pride, right, that you might have made a difference for that brief moment in time. 30 years ago, ish.

So, you know, it's ancient history. Now, that's the Middle Ages in intelligence world and communications. But, you know, in my time, it was, it was a fun thing to do. And that was probably the, and I did a few other, I mean, there was, you know, I liked, making things that they didn't know was made by us. And I'm in myn overt things. I really liked in the 80s, you know, television, U.S. television was really hot.

U.S. movies, directors were really hot people. And to be able to get your stuff into the areas that you want, you could use that to your advantage. You could use desire to serialized television, or you can use maybe a conference or something to be able to get what you want, into people's hands, which doesn't happen sort of nowadays because conferences are different and don't need it because you have digital. But back then it was you had to get an plane and go

somewhere and stack your stuff on the table and here, here you go and go by. That was not my, I was not the seller. I would support those people and support the people overseas. I would travel around to different areas to support with everything going. I mean, you know, I have nothing to add really. I just say, you know, when I've asked about, um, about what you guys were doing at that time. I was told that your office did some pretty epic stuff. I left. I left for various reasons out of that department.

Brimus, he should kind of shut us sort of down a little bit. And I kind of want to do different things. I've been doing for over three years. And it was, I'll tell you, let me tell you something. The people have careers and lives. I was in that department pretty much from 87 to 90-ish. That was the only only job ever had ever hit the ground running. morning like let's go you know it was it was the job that was fun after that everything kind of

became a job all right you got to you know they're fun it's a job it's nice but that was the one was like let's do it let's pound some people let's think let's think creatively and i got in trouble we're not i got pushed back on policies were against me you know laws are understood ethics i understand my ethics but policy agencies policies are rigid and so I wanted to do some things to simple things. Like, use a narrator. Well, that narrator may be somebody who's employed by another element that we cannot touch, like a professional news organization

or journalism or something. I couldn't use them, even though I wasn't using them in their position as a media person. Because of the church. They had great vocal courts. Yeah. Yeah, they had great vocal courts. I needed them, all right?

But I couldn't because policy didn't allow me to do that. I got flustered. Let's just put that way. Can you tell? Can you give any other examples if you're allowed to of, you know, sort of the surreptitious productions

that were not supposed to have any agency fingerprints on them? I think it's really interesting. The attention to detail you put into that. Well, I think that was the one where I had to go from A to idea to figure out, to find out that actually had an impact.

I got to think about this for a second. What are those? Because a lot of what I did was get pro-US neutral anti-them elements into the electronic media. Whether it be by news, which is kind of where I was coming news, that was kind of my thing. There were longer form things, but that was not quite my expertise we just had as that was somebody else's. I support them, but that was not. I was sort of how do we get people who are communicating to the masses, communicating what I want them to communicate. But what I was told that we should communicate by the perspectives.

And so that requires them telling me, hey, we have an asset in X country. They have access to blank TV station or blank radio, whatever station. How can we use them? What can you do? And so you kind of go, okay, we can, they're on air, we can do some on air. If they're, if they're doing speeches, we can do speed, whatever it might be, tell me, tell me. And the problem, what's frustrating about that is once it's gone, I got no clue.

I have no, no idea, even if they even if they even if our people are monitoring the news. I asked them, can you please monitor, let me know what you're using. I don't know, 50, 50, I can't remember the numbers. But it wasn't all the time, because really they just want. in our materials, money. But, you know, that, that is, that was a program all the time. That was a program. I was popping out news every week, every month. That sort of leads me into something else I want to ask you about, because I've been told that during the Reagan years, really during the Cold War, the CIA had a global disinformation campaign. Like nowadays, it's targeted at a specific

country like they'll have a disinformation campaign for iran for iraq afghanistan whatever it is but back then there was a global campaign targeting communism worldwide and it was shut down at the conclusion of the cold war um i just wanted to hear you know well first off your thoughts on that and if you know you think it's a mistake to shut it down if we should have something like that today well once again i left and i sort of had this ethical body thing that once i've left the position because of compartmentalization that stays when i left the agency i threw away my my card files and i should not have communication with them because i that's them and they need to be protected so i i will say that i didn't follow until 9-11 when things all held brocruce

but the um we i was told of to go after big topics you know the the soviets and narco-traffers and terrorism and state sponsored terror and there was coups all over the place if you're in Angola if you're doing Cuba go to Cuba get Cambodia whatever might be but if the Soviet or

the Polish people because you know solidarity was going on or the German desk or whatever might be because I was I was just reading up on this Prometheism in Poland? Yeah, well, I did some support for some of the stuff that was going on there, but we all did.

I mean, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was a, but it was, but it was, so, you know, if there was a, if there was a big program that the burrber's and milk beer and that gang, you know, we're firing off, all, that's their department. I would get called up in these meetings and say,

hey, we need to do something in this narrow thing. Can you help us at this narrow thing? narrow thing. If not, I'm doing my normal news, cultural impact thing. And so I would get called. And some of them I would shut down with my three questions. How much time do I have? How much money? And what's the point? All right? I'm not Steven Spielberg, guys. All right? We're not going to make here a movie or video and show how creative we are. I don't want to do that. Lots of great stuff on the show. It does that. All right? You need that impact. So because there was a new tool. It was like, ooh, look, I got this tool, this video thing. So, you know, talk about disinformation.

I always fell on the side of I just given up the truth and if that truth happens to be biased, which is whatever we all are to our way, fine by me. If it's if it's neutral, find by me. Are there, were there, of course, real, large, organized distance, information things? Certainly. I mean, the history books show that. I was my peace. All right. And I, you know, there was, there were the things saying go after the Soviets. All right. It didn't say go up the Soviet system or that way. It was go after him. And I had the video thing, a piece of the video thing.

There were certainly other video people overseas doing their thing that I had no connection to and should not have connections to. I was doing my piece as a headquarters base officer kind of traveled around. So, yes, were the big project? Yes, were there subsets? Yeah, that was sort of me. I got caught up in a big project. And part of it also was, I know you were the video guy, but also article writing that the CIA

would place news articles and newspapers around the world. Yeah, well, the article, I mean, the print guys are right around the corner, but then I was the video, the techniques are the same for the kind of the same now. You know, if I want my news thing, my goal, my hope would be replayed. What I would say now would we call viral, but back then, viralism was very difficult. So I would, you would place the so, this is, the Soviets are great at it. They would place a story in a newspaper in India, and that newspaper story in India would get replayed in Romania or East Germany or wherever,

and then you get picked up by regular media, and off it would go. And it became viral after six months or five months, whatever, off the print world. Because that was a technique, and that was stuff. We all had the same tools. You know, I got a newspaper, you got a newspaper, all right? I got propaganda guys, you got propaganda guys. I got case officers, you got kids. And we all had the same tools.

This is how we were applying them at the time. So when video came along, it comes along, it's how do I emulate that to make video go viral? And a short news clip on some news station in X country has a lot less capability of being viralized back then. In fact, it was very almost amazing. Then today we're going to be digitized and sent off to everybody at the same time. Stories are Twittered in the second and off it goes. And it can be viral and mobile.

Our viral took forever and you never even knew how the impact was. So it was the exact same, we were fighting exact same techniques. Then print techniques, which were traditional, with the techniques I tried to have, it's all I had. Emily, although we had people had TVs. Everybody read newspapers, everybody did something, but people watch TV.

People in the Soviet block were clustering in their little apartments, watching U.S. movies, all right, by themselves. You know, there's a program, there's a name for it, just in my age beginning right now, but that's how they, when they were selling them and making, they were dubbing them, this one lady was dubbing them, and that's how they got into the West. I didn't have any of the do with that. They were doing on their own.

That was homegrown, but that was video. That was, there was, people were dying, wanting it. All right. If you're going to do, the Soviets or the, wherever they're going to be, are going to do their video on the world communist Congress, whatever they're going to do, we're going to do one saying it's not any good and put it through our channels too, right?

You're being controlled by them. So the distribution techniques were still, you know, sort of the rudimentary ones, wrap it up in brown paper and ship it off in the new, wherever it goes. You know, there was some limited digital transition, but little. I was more into videotape, which was our weapon. And it lasts until digital comes along.

And then, you know, forget videotape. Who wants a video cassette recorder? Do you think that, you know, if and when the full extent of the CIA's propaganda efforts overseas, which, you know, they were lawful and legitimate and undermining communism? But, I mean, do you think if the full extent of it was declassified that the American public would be pretty shocked to learn how? everybody's shocked and anything they don't know about. I don't know about the full extent of the history of the age.

My mentors were part of that, all right? And when things were dismantled under the Carter administration, I came in just after that, and we were in the rebuilding phase, scaffold, to put it back for Afghanistan, all right, for anything. So a lot of the historical, institutional knowledge, and of the past had been wiped out, as I was told. And I was, sort of the new team that was brought in by a couple of the remaining old team, which geniuses.

People have been at the trenches and up to the neck in swamps, whatever it might be, to move us from then to now. What the extent of the agency's historical propaganda operations are, you know, some of them are horrific. You're talking about Central America in the 50s, all right? You're talking about things that, you know, overthrowing your people. legitimate countries and things that they, and not my department, right?

We can discuss foreign policy and rights or wrongs, another thing, and the newspaper articles and whatever was being done then to support the agency stuff, was done to support the agency stuff that they thought they were doing the right thing, support the foreign policy of the U.S. And that's their time, all right? And people may look back on my time and stories I'm saying now, saying, you're fool, you know, what were you doing back then going after narco? and terrorism and subverting people's thought processes.

You know, you idiot, you know, we need to be open and tell everybody things. I don't want to know. They did it. They're patriots, right? The people who do it now are doing it. They're the patriots. They're the people who are who no one knows, who are up to their necks, who are spending their time and not getting stock options, who are making a difference.

They may be in the military, which has the largest sci-ops operations in the world. And on our little agency thing, whatever it might be. you know, it changes. When 9-11 happens, that changes the perspectives, right? That changes what happens for propaganda operations and the goals. You know, it's all terrorism all the time, all right? And now we're in the 2020s, and the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians and all of them all the time, probably. But the Russians and the Soviets at the beginning of time, but, you know, it changes and the techniques changes. But I hope that there's this large programs to help out the American, or at least what has been decided on the things that our foreign policy leaders

want to communicate about the foreign policy and the issues of the United States of America, which changed radically. You know, I came under Reagan, I left under Clinton. Just because it's different president. And that's, I'm not political. Well, I'm not political for pointing people by job. You know, tell me what to do. you're going to do it in essence.

I mean, I know there's, the agency was changing and has changed from its mission over means world and became politicizing and maybe changing back, but that's always the same things you read. I just know my time. So what ended up leading to you, leaving the CIA and, you know, landing at your next job? How did all that shake out? Sorry, Roman Coke. I got to keep myself lubricated.

Go for it. Keep it coming. I'm actually out of room. I've got like, honey, honey, ding, ding, ding, ding. I really, I went and did classical espionage recruitment stuff in the D.C. area was where I was based, which was kind of funny, interesting. I was slated to go overseas.

I did not come in as a C.T. A career trainee. I came in as a TV guy. All right. So I, I don't know, I'm impressed, whatever the word might be. So they put me through operations classes to go through the quick career training process to get overseas. And I wanted to go, I think overall, especially as a prop. Don't sneeze on me.

Especially as a, it's allergy season. Believe me, I'm dying here. That's why I'm drinking. That's why we're socially distanced. Yes. That plus it's pollen, the drag weed. And I would have gone overseas. I'd like to have been a propaganda officer overseas.

We had slots. But there was just personal reasons. My wife, you know, there was building a family. Do you want to raise a family in the American compound in Delhi? Or do you want to stay in the U.S.? Stay close to the family? My wife was very supportive of my intelligence world. She lived it.

You know, most every spouse lives the life. We, we lived it at our home with visitors. But just for me, it made sense that I had to family over everything else. So it was time. And I had it. a way to, I had a plan for kind of several years to do in a way to get out. I remember talking to some old timers, I mean, real, you know, black turtleneck old timers and saying, here's what I want to do. And there's like, well, I said, like, if I get out and they looked at me like I just said,

there's Martians at the door, who gets out of the CIA? I mean, once you're in, you're in. And sort of the Casey hires, which I was there under Casey, I wouldn't consider my, I like, I was hired him to Casey. What do we consider myself? I said, but Casey, I plan on sort of staying in, but situations and circumstances say, I need to, do you go?

A lot of people, when I was getting, get on the resume, get the hell out. Look, I was worked for the CIA, and it's on my resume. Look, how I am, and I'm on staff on the hill, and all this sort of stuff. And I looked at this guy and said,

if I stay in, he looked at me like, what? Leave? You know, why would you leave this? And that mentality was prevalent, and you get it because you're doing these things that are unique and challenging and and that old school those old school guys right that you mentioned i mean that kind of was that generation right that once you're in you're in for life well they walk up and say you know

do you see this it's an agent orange scar well okay guys who are literally right i don't like use the word literally, but they were in the swamps of louse up to their neck doing their jobs. No one knows their name. And right now there's a whole bunch of them crawling through the back streets of wherever doing their jobs. And there's military people doing the same who were never going to know. I don't want to know them. We shouldn't know them who are doing for us. All right. And I wanted to support them in my time. And I'm not going to the big story I had was I was doing some stuff with the narco against the Narcos. And I did some stuff with Gulf War I. And I was, that's when I was in the field.

And I was collecting telecoms. I was talking telecoms. I was talking telecom stuff. And, you know, I got another word for that one. But it's, you don't want any, you're not looking for it at a boy, though I have a big ego, as you can tell. But when someone comes up and says, you know, that thing you did save lives, I'll take that. I'll take that. I'll take the end day of the week. And that one project did, they told me. I didn't know. I would never know it. It wasn't asking. But after the fact that he was saying, the thing we did, that saved lives. And it's okay. And when you're told that you collected one of the largest amounts of intel on the telecom situation in Gulf War I, you take that. You don't get a lot of plats on the back because you

don't want anybody you know one, but you take what you can get. And so those kind of three things were sort of highlights of the of this crazy career inside. But I was standing on the shoulders of the people who came before me. And they, they trained or taught and I'd learn, listen. You know, when you're talking like a Dewey Clerge, all right, the great Dewey Clerge who mentor,

I'll say his name out loud. I mean, he was a great guy, um, uh, crackily voiced great. You know, I know the Iran Congress.

I know that. But to me, I know. I know all that. Okay, now we're living in a world we realize everybody's not perfect, all right, like John Allen,

right, historical hero or George Washington, Thomas Jefferson. Everybody's flawed. But for me, him and a few other people, you know, they took you into the wing

and they taught you stuff. I'm sure there's people doing it now. If I would have stayed in, I'd be at 30 plus years, I'd have been doing that to the people who followed me, gladly because they did it for me back in the 80s.

So, I don't remember what your original question. was, but. It was, what was your plan? So you get out of that, you decide to leave the agency. How does it work out? My plan was, well, I had to go to court. I needed a job. I needed a health care. And in the corporate world, Motorola was seen as, or was, the benchmark for intelligence inside the corporate world. Bob Galvin, the CEO of Motorola, brought in Jan Harry, former CIA analyst, to start inside Motorola's corporate strategy office, an intelligence organization.

Bob Galvin was on the presence for an intelligence advisory board, the PIFI app. And so all these CIA people would brief him, and he go, wow, I need that. So he brought in Jan Harry, and he created a global CIA-like unit, in the sense of analysts. not ops, but analysts certainly, to follow the competitors around the world, major issues around the world, patents around the world, technologies around the world, competitors. And that was handed down throughout time to one CIA officer to another, all right? Everybody who ever ran the corporate group of Motorola is former CIA, and I was the last one.

I went in, I got hired to Motorola from the agency to, I just looking for an inn, I went into a business unit to learn the business, and they didn't have an intelligence system. So I set it up there inside the Motorola Group. And corporate intelligence, business intelligence, what it's being called, was becoming hot. Jan Herring, Ben Galad, and for other big names, they started this association of intelligence people. It had momentum. And so the world of competitive intelligence inside corporate worlds was becoming a industry, along a finance. and HR and things like that.

So I was in on that, I got into Motorola in 1994, you know what the agency, 93. And I went into the business unit, stayed there for three years, and then I went into corporate, where I stayed until Motorola will dissolve as a corporate entity. And I stayed, I was number two there sort of for,

well, I was number three for a while, number two for many years, and took over like 2005, six, and then we had the group until the, you know, corporate dissolved. and I got dissolved. Maybe I didn't do a good job. Maybe I wasn't able to change with the culture of corporate world.

I always wonder about that. Did I not help out art and users in the time of 2008 chaos well enough and then show our value? So I don't know that. I know that. But so I went to Motorola and did it inside the corporation for 16, 16 years. Me and my reputation, that's a lot of these other things. Inside the corporate world, I ran the national international, of intelligence people. It was called Skip.

It was on their foundation. Did that for many years. Wrote articles, a lot more on ethics. This is a big thing for me. And then made a lot of great friends that Motorola made my reputation. And then Motorola dissolved, I needed to get a job. So I fortunately had contacts in the political world. I didn't want to work U.S. politics.

U.S. politics is crazy. so I wanted to work overseas, which is what I knew. I had actually contacted the Obama administration. They said, hey, if you get laid off, Obama campaign, not the administration, the campaign. They said, you know, if you get laid off, we're running, people are calling about how the 2008 campaign, that magic dust, that social media dust that they sprinkled on this 2008 thing, bringing lots of calls around the world. Can you answer the phone for us? So I did, the moral dissolved.

got a job doing overseas work running international political campaigns or business managing business development for our national political campaigns for about 10 years. Ukraine, I was in the middle of a revolution in Ukraine for several years, Niro Medan. I think the last one I really did was Thailand with President Tsai. Holy shit. I didn't know you were knee-deep and all that. I'm going to ask you about that.

But before we move on, there are some viewer questions, actually, that some of the people watching this live have for you. Brendan G. asks, is it broadcast media that has the most influence, social media, or a combination? Which new media will help us against RT slash CCP propaganda? Yeah. Well, of course, the quick answer to make my life easier would be, they all have an impact. In fact, I was a lot of good, I read stuff,

all right, so I was just to be doing. And I actually just read something from one of the, the, the recent poll, or if it was the, the DNI just put on a couple of different reports

on Russia and China and Iran. They did one today. Yes. And they used the words, somebody used the words, traditional and social media. And traditional media is traditional media. Broadcast TV, radio

print, right? And social media. I was interested in the fact they used traditional media. Because social media is so much easier and cheaper. And it's easier. And it's pervasive. But I see what they mean by

traditional media from 2016. So the question is, what do I was like, what do I think is the most impactful. I'm worried this. I want to go off on some tangents, what I'm known to do. They're all important to segments of the population

inside the U.S. who use those for their news. 20% of people in the United States at certain age groups use social media to get their news, which means they're probably less informed about politics to those who might use a variety. Most people, like 40-some percentage, The survey just came out two days ago.

I haven't read the whole thing. I read the summary. It's the 2020 Gallup and Knight Ridder Media Trust Media Democracy Survey, 20,000 surveys. And they brought up, and I teach this. I teach now, my end of my career is teaching, is most people use only a few sources for their news, for the information. Despite all the crap, we're just overwhelmed, we're going to go to. of those. So what's the most impactful? The one that people use. So if you watch CNN and look at Daily Beast or Fox, you watch Bike Park, whatever it is your sources, that's where the messages

are going to be. And they know that. Believe me, I guarantee you. The enemies of the U.S. that are listed have read this survey and downloaded. They know how Americans use their information, what we think about partisanship and bias, what we think about how many sources we use, well, how much distrust we put in media or trust we want to put in media and we're hoping that it does because still Americans want the media to solve it. Right. We have a firm belief in our democracy that it helps the media in our democracy. It's ingrained in us. Although it's partisan and now we have this thing, that Americans believe it was the last one.

You know, diversified news stats and things. But we're overwhelmed by speed, by messaging, by life to be able to filter it out. So what's the best one to use? It's the one that people use to get their information. So I used to say back when I was at Motorola. It's kind of what,

and what we said in political campaigns, but they took a lot of stuff from that for the campaign. campaigns. It does no good to create a messaging campaign and run it on TV, the people you're trying to get to watch or on TikTok, on Instagram. There's no good. You're over here, they're over there. All right. So you need to know what your target, how they get their information. I used to ask my, I worked for the CEO's base in a motor, what do you like? How do you like it? You want PowerPoints? You want more documents. You want pictures. How do you want to receive your

information? Because I don't want to give you a PowerPoint and you want to read five pages. I'm talking to a wall. And second question is, when do you want it? I'm not going to give it to you on a Monday morning when you're over one, but you want it on Friday where you're reading it in the car on the way home. Those factors are important on the effectiveness of messaging. All right. And my early life was just throw stuff out there and maybe it'll stick I'll never know. Now you can know because you can see likes. shares, whether they're true or not, because likes and shares and all this stuff can be botanized, right? They can be made up in numbers and things. But the world is sort of starting to figure out how these are humans and not computers. But it only makes sense to use the stuff. If it's social media,

I'm all in. If it's cable television, which is probably the biggest one, I'm all in. Local news, which is still everybody's favorite means, but to understand democracy and how they vote. It's the local news service, which is under attack by conglomeration, bankruptcy, pandemics. I mean, local newspapers, local news is waning. So if you want to get, how do you counter RT, how do you can't our CCP?

I'll say the one thing I told you earlier, one of the first things I say, I tell to my classes, the weakest link in these systems, are people. People are biased. People have backgrounds. Bias isn't bad. Bias can be good, bad, and be indifferent.

I don't really care. But everything is biased. Every entity, every industry, every person, every school, every podcast has a bias. And it's good or better or whatever. And once you understand that, you can say, okay, now how do I interact with that? How do I teach people to be critical of a method?

such coming to me. There's going to be no tech, you cyber people who are listening and you, you technology people, I don't get, go do your thing. I don't get it. You're smart. You're the, you're the firewalls, you're all that stuff. I just like pushing buttons and I get what I want instantly. I don't get it in three seconds. I'm going crazy. You do your things. The weakest link in this chain is humans. All right. And they know that. We know it too. It's not as if we're just sitting around doing nothing. We're doing the same thing, although we're in a democracy and they quite aren't. So it's a little bit easier for to get to us. So if you want to tell us, if you want, I'm picking things just because they're, the Podesta emails, Pizza Gate, Comey, back in 2016.

If you want to do those, you're going to clutter that airwave with that message to influence the ability to people look at other things. And what happens and shame on them and they don't say much about it is all the major media, that mainstream media, which I don't really like that. They're doing their job too. They're picking it up. And I don't think they were as critical as they should have been. when they decided to run breaking news or whatever across the bottom, not everything's breaking news, breaking news across the bottom and say,

let's run this story from 24 hours ago about this topic that everybody knows about and fill up the airwaves and the few journalists we have working for us, are going to go do their job, but we're going to fill up airtime saying what they want us to say. Saying a story that could be true, could not be true, but has not been verified, but it's dominating the newswaves. So I think Fox, CNN, MSM, take your pick. I don't care.

I'm not, partisanship, you guys can kill me on. I don't really care. But they all are filling time. They're picking up their stories that the Chinese or the Russians or the Iranians, more Russians in the range, probably, because they all have different reasons why they're doing their stuff. The Russians are probably bigger. They want to go a little more cultural, little wedge,

more wedge and split like they've done since the beginning of time, we're allowing them to do that because we're not, I'm the same media literate, which I know is another buzz board that people don't like us, but we're not critical enough. And it's the basic tools. You know, where did it come from? You know, memes, the danger of memes nowadays, the viralism.

So I know there's questions coming up. I can talk forever on this, but I might be answering other questions as you're going along. But the best, my main tool is educate people. All right. Get off of Facebook. All right. Go read something.

If you're, if you don't believe it or it's just coming to you, be insatiably curious and do your job as a person and go find out if it's true or not. Yeah. The personal responsibility aspect. It's all about. And they know that we are not personally responsive. They know that we are quick,

that our attention spans are down to seconds. It used to be seven minutes. I made every video back in my day at seven minutes because that's as long as people can, now it's less. So they know that. They know if they pick this, whether it's fake or real or if it's a wedge issue or it's us versus them,

they can just use our innate anger, pain, hate against us. And we'll allow it to have. We're allowing it to happen. Matt. asks, and I think you partially at least already addressed this, can you discuss how your department would monitor and assess your products? How do you determine if your products were effective? Back in the CIA days? I think that's what he's referencing. Yeah, and I said to it, and I kind of

answered it. Yeah, I think so. That's always the frustration. And I would, I dreamed of the guy who said, hey, by the way, that saved lives. Or they call you in and they give you up to the dining room and you get an award saying, hey, congrats you, did it a lot on telecom. You know, usually it's back then, certainly, it was throw it out for me in my world, see if it sticks. Now, if it's in the print guys, they could probably see if it got replayed, if it got picked up by a news service, if it was on the newspaper, they could clip it out, they could do some counting, and they can do circulation and they can do all that sort of stuff.

When I'm running videos, it's a little bit more difficult. So you have to put the ego hat down and say, I believe I'm having an impact. I'm not to get the data. Nowadays, I'm sure they do. Now I'm sure that the digital, they've got metrics, they can IP address it. They have a whole lot of understand.

But back then it was, do your best to get the rest. Matt also asks, and maybe you know what this is, has Joe applied Hallin's spheres to his work? No. First of all, I've heard it, and I'm not even sure if I remember what it is, I'm getting old. I'll tell you, that brings up a question about my own limitations and laziness and so whatever. I was a brute force guy, and even all the way through is how do you got, you're giving me a project. There are, you know, messages getting to the next message and how it's being interpreted and it's being reinterpreted in different ways and being spread.

the theories of frame theory and all these other set of things that you know about cognitive theories, those theories. And I don't think, first I didn't have time. You know, time was very limited reason. How do I make this and get this project done and then sort of move on to the next one to get the next project done? I wasn't very theoretical. And everyone wasn't theoretical then. Motorola was answered CEO's questions or leadership's questions.

Political campaigns are a different story. So I've never really, although I teach it in school, my work career has never been spheres or circle or things. I just shame on me. All right. I'm just not that smart. I just get it. So I am actually going to look it up.

I should write this down. Halland's spheres. It rings a bell. It does ring this gray hair and bald spot. And, you know, it rings a bell. So Joe's first book, which fictionalizes the Libya operation that we were talking about earlier, it's called Secret Wars and Espionage Story. You go and find it on Amazon right now.

Go give it a read, check it out. But you also have a second book that you wrote, which fictionalizes some stories from when you were working for this corporate. corporate quasi CIA organization at Motorola. Yeah. It was, so you want me to tell my Motorola story, the second story. Yeah, I'd love to hear some of that stuff. First of all, I was a rookie writer. I needed better editors.

I'm actually talking to somebody about now about re-editing it and putting it, reissuing it. I had the time to go back and look how I can handle the fact how bad I was. This book, too, was better. And I shifted from the corporate world more to CIA stuff. But first of all, working in the corporate world, I was big on ethics and big on getting the job done, answering the leadership to questions. But every once in a while, at least once.

So a crazy thing comes up where, you know, hey, I got a CIA guy on staff, go find this. And, you know, I got a tool. Look at me. I have a puppet. I see a guy. And it was back when Motorola was seeking out, I don't think I'm under a number. disclosure on this. They can come and get me. I know they are. I know they took all my files, but that's my. They, searching for money when Motorola gave a lot of money with Nokia to the

Uzon family in Turkey for a big GSM cellular deal. And the question that makes things short, it was they basically get the money, those guys are a mob, and they took the money and didn't give it back and pay back. And it was like, Joe, can you go find the money? Where do they take it? Where do they put it. Okay, I got a staff of analysts here and a corporate library. Now you want me to go across halfway across the world and go find a few billion dollars. No problem. Yeah, I had to sit down for a second think about that. And it's a whiteboard moment. And so I called it my four-reignancy contacts, some of whose names I've mentioned and things. And we started an operation. I had to get sources close to these people through my contacts.

all right, contractors and consultants, you know, we had to fund them. I told my guy, I told my people who tasked me, I need money, money and time, all right, because this isn't tomorrow, all right, and they're still probably doing the lawsuits in cases. I don't know. I did some research for a book two on it, because it was a couple of years ago. So I had to create a little mini intelligence operation. I had, we were encrypted, we were co-warded, or we had co-courted, or we had co-courced. where we had code names for people,

had to travel to locations and meet for trying to figure out how do you get to finding a couple billion dollars in these people. So it took, we had a lot of stops and starts, a lot of fakery going on for people. Oh, yeah, I can help you. I didn't have the resources to vet them enough to know if I'm being taken for loop, even my experience, people who are working for me,

if they're being taken for a loop, and we get sort of close and back, close and back. And in the end, I was told, we found it, and we had to prove it, and to prove it would require true espionage deception operations, to get inside the facilities, to get to the computers that can prove this. and I knew my company would not go for that.

I wanted to. I'd been on this for a year. I was salivating in blood, and I want to get it. It's been nonstop for a year, nonstop. So I went to the people who tasked me, the lawyers, and said the company, and they said, you know, you can't do that. I knew they would.

And they were right. How did you even know where to begin looking? I mean, well, I had to rely on people who knew them and knew the culture and knew the finance. a world and who knew people in and around. You had to create a beltway. You had to create, you take the concentric circles and you start moving in, right? And I started way out here, no circles.

And you start, I got my people who knew Turkey and other places, and you just start getting closer, all right? And sometimes I step back, but we got, we got to it. I know we got to it because they shut me down. But I didn't shut down. What I did was I told the network, which was somewhat extensive, but not huge, but there's compartmentalization here too, the pull off, right? No more proactive work, just be ready.

And they took it, the Motorola went to the courts. That's how they decided to do the court way to get it back and was very successful. I think, but the court people wanted some supporting documentation if what we were talking about was true, because that gives them another place to go to, to go after stuff. And so three months later, the phone rings, hey, Joe, do you think you can get some of that stuff legally to what, in some way, or at least not through the ways I was talking about, which would have been things of mythology, of books and movies. And I said, well,

ha, funny you should call. Let me find out, but I had him still alive. So I made a couple phone calls, and we were able to get some documents through, no one would go to jail that proved it. Or the bona fides of the fact that this is what the stuff was. And we handed it over, I handed it over, I'm glad I handed it over some of my sources,

because I really gave me heartburn. Not the deep sources, but my main consultants. It's the main consultant to show that I wasn't just making the stuff up. I had to do that because it was like, how can you possibly? Here's the guy you ran my operation for me. So I got him in front. Everything's good. And they took that.

Eyebrows went up and said, okay, that was it. Game over. Networked down. Go write a book about it someday. So that was not your usual go find what Nokia is. could put on the next phone or what the patents are doing or whatever are what's happening to this trademark stuff. That was a different inside world.

I think it's pretty rareish. I was there for 16 years. That's one. I did some other stuff, but that was the one biggie. How often does that happen? I think it's really interesting doing this for a corporation. And although what you were doing is technically more like being a private investigator than an intelligence officer. If you got arrested over in Turkey or somewhere like that, the government's

not necessarily going to make that distinction. Well, two things there. First of all, your analogy of PI and intelligence is very correct. The skills of an intelligence person in corporate or anywhere are very similar to private investigators, very similar to journalists. Same sort of skills at curiosity, writing, sources, methods, confidentiality, same interpersonal skills. Almost the same. We had, occasionally, we'd have to hire a private investigator to go, does this facility really exist? Does this person really live with this house?

Now, go walk by the house. Let me know if it's really there. But we would never, ever do espionage. It's not the same thing. Corporate intelligence is what we were doing, what any real company is doing, and espionage, never the, never the bubble should meet. All right. It's there are things that are illegal. There are things that are unethical and a company, a company's policy that you will not do. Some company along the spectrum of policy, companies are different. Along your own personal ethics, you're different. The law is there. Foreign laws, US laws, you know, foreign practices act, whatever it might be, they're there. All right. So we would not do not confuse corporate intelligence.

with espionage. It is not. And those who are doing that are wrong. It's really interesting that you draw this very hard line because in the world I'm a little bit more familiar with the special operations veterans, the guys who go out to go work in private security, it comes up quite often that a corporation or a company will hire a bunch of former or green berets or rangers or whoever on the premise that, hey, these guys do whatever it takes to get the job done. And they start asking these guys, these guys to do things that are completely illegal, things like kidnapping. And a lot of times these soldiers, these veterans are young guys. And they're still psychologically in the military. And it's like, hey, you are not under the auspices of the United States government. If you go and do that,

it's completely illegal. Like you will probably end up in jail. So like at least in my little corner of the world, I see that, you know, my peer group gets sucked into that stuff fairly often. And hence the difference, first of all, one is real-time, physical security, real-time. I mean, crisis management team. I do crisis management sort of the side. Like Crowl, back when Crowler's Core Control Risk. I mean, they're there to protect individuals. So if you need to go in and get a hostage-taking situation to get somebody back part of the game, all right, no problem.

If you're going to kidnap somebody to blackmail, whatever, that's, I don't know nothing about that. We're more information, people, collecting information, pretty much the DIA. I had this journey into the ops world back in there, but we're collecting and analyzing. Now, post 9-11, I was actually called in that day of next day. We were in as a Motorola. Yeah, we're called that afternoon to the Motorola Crisis Center, which was across the university. compound, they want to talk to some government people. So I got I'm on the phone with people wondering what's it mean to businesses that day. And so we're running down possible influences on U.S. business or our business and would roll up supply chain issues

and whatever might be and our broad overseas presence. What it would mean for us from the point of view of a security issue problem. So then I created a program based upon that on doing political risk analysis of our presence overseas and had to do with personnel. Number one risk we had was kidnapping of Motorola personnel overseas. So that's when your guys would come in and say, come and get us. But we had, there was legitimate physical threats to our. That's a rescue mission. That's a rescue mission or whatever might be.

So your world that you talk about, I don't know, I know what they're saying. If there's an intelligence person and it's a whole new world because you have data mining, a lot of stuff that you can do a lot from your desk. But if you know, a good corporation that's in the box would use the tools they need to use, such as I did back of the day and the corporations use, and my box within that was we're going to do everything legal and ethical the best we possibly could.

Yeah, that means saying no sometimes. That means say, as I used to train on it, there's nothing worth your job, there's nothing worth your reputation of the company's reputation. right there's just nothing right if you want to if you want to if you want to if you want to fall on the sword for him go ahead but for people i'm talking to in the corporate intelligence world who are hardworking people who are fully undervalued and getting laid off who are giving information like the di so the ceos of our company can make informed decisions about the businesses and hiring

people and resources employment we can do that that's what you're there for just go do that if you get these crazy things sometimes sometimes crazy things happen You're not stealing the competitors technology if they're selling phones. Go buy it. Now sometimes you get access to stuff and you have to decide. Remember when I first, in my little quick monol story, my first, I was brand new business unit I was doing infrastructure, cellular infrastructure, towers, base stations. And I walk up to my desk and, you know, the motor group did bid and out.

They did bids, all right? So they had books that every customer would get from all the people we're bidding on a system and they would be opened by the customer and they read them. And you're not supposed to have access to those. I show up on my desk and there's a book from one of our competitors. That one of our people has gotten from one of their customers who decided to share it with our guys saying, hey, you know, here's what your competitor is doing. And they put it on my desk and it's loaded with stuff.

I know it's loaded with stuff. I know it's loaded of stuff. So I had that moment. All right. I'm sitting in 3G8, my little cubicle, all right? And I'm like, what do I, you know, here it is. Here's good intel. And so I picked it up and walked in the lawyer of the group's office at here. I don't want to see this.

I didn't open it and look at it. You do something with this. It's not mine. It's, I don't want to see it. It's what you're supposed to do. Not everybody would do that. And maybe I did it, maybe I was wrong. But at that moment, that was the right thing to do.

It's when I taught ethics back of the day, what do you do if you're at a convention and some back with fax machines or somebody left their stick inside a computer at the business center that had their stuff on it, a competitor's stuff, what do you do?

You know, if you're, now that gets a more dicey because they've lost custody, you know, so there's a little bit more leeway there, especially if it's traded, trade. So,

but you have to make the decision. And you're hopefully your company has some guidelines. If not, go talk to the lawyers, because they don't know, with a prison. But those are decisions all the time. That's what's happening in corporate intelligence. It's gray. Big navigating the gray zone. It's a, you know, I think that the army is part of the out process and they need to give these young guys. I don't know. Well, ethics training,

maybe it's a little bit late for that, but like legal training. Like, hey, if you're going to take a job with a private security firm, like you might want to have an attorney review that contract before you sign it. You know, making sure that they understand that you were operating under Title X authorities with the military. When you get out, you are no longer under those title authorities. And that sounds very like pedestrian to you, Joe. I mean, you're a smart guy.

You worked in this world for a long time. A 25-year-old ranger getting out of the military, like mentally, they don't get it. Right. But there's probably either people doing it who's a market for it, that for out for deep programming, whatever it might be, people who are coming

who are highly trained, effective defenders of our democracy in the military who are now going into a world which is to make money. And that took me a little bit to thinking I wasn't one of those people. I was still an operation.

You got a mission. It took me a while to figure out that my job is to help Motorola sell radios. So those cell, sell if it's in a base station, if it's in the phone, our job, my job is helping make money, raise corporate dividends and help the stockholders, not defend the Constitution, not that it was make money. And that took me a while, even for me, the transition. And I actually thought for myself for a little bit, back in a little bit, back in a cubicle 3G8. You know what?

I may want to go back to the government because I don't know. This isn't, this isn't for me. That shows how bad it was for a second. But, you know, I see stay in and you learn and you adapt. So maybe there is this transition for people to understand and because there are hard concrete differences between what you were doing, what you're going to be doing, and how you're not what you're going to, but how you actually implement and the programs that you want to do.

We've had some very smart corporate intelligence people in my career and other companies who made huge mistakes. And they were trained. And there was old, back in the old days, Procter and Gamble. was in trouble because one of their contractors went diving into a dumpster, literally. I said literally again, sorry.

They went into a dumpster stealing, trying to get documents on the garbage. Trustpassing. That's wrong. That's illegal. That's not what we do. To go into a garbage is illegal? Yeah, it's called trespassing. Oh, on their property.

But once the garbage is like out on the curb. Yeah, but that's, yeah. Even then, I think I would say it's, I'd probably don't do that. I know it's out of their control. There's better ways, all right? because you can get caught and what happens when you get caught. But they got, right? And so Procter Gamble's in trouble.

They're getting big, nasty headlines. Well, their CEO was on the board of Motorola. We get a phone call saying, go to Cincinnati. And so we pack up, because we were a benchmark, pack up our stuff, and we go talk to them great people. They just made a mistake on how they control their third party contractors. They didn't have a policy on that because the third party contractor went off the reservation. right and but the company was wall street journalized for making for being corporate spies and all those

others are a nasty PR that no company wants because they didn't have a policy and that's because and this person knew better they knew better they made a mistake a big mistake but that's the way you go i'm getting more than that people if any of my friends are watching from the old days they know exactly what i'm talking about and who i'm talking about they're all friends on the people who made the guy made the mistake they're friends of mine all right is made a mistake so i i'm going to ask if i can get you to stick around for the bonus segment to talk about the uh campaign the current presidential campaign i'm really interested to hear your thoughts narratively speaking um because this is a subject of expertise of yours where you see this campaign going um but before we do that

um i did want to kind of like wrap up this part of the show um because you mentioned that you were knee-deep in a couple revolutions in Thailand and Euro-maiden in Ukraine. Like, how did that, what was that next phase of your career working and ending up in those situations? Well, the main revolution was Ukraine. We were working for, well, we were working for Yulia and then a few others. And we have to be there for Euro-Madat. all right and you take how you take your your candidate who wants to be president in the middle of a revolution

to uh have him come out the other side of revolution as the leader the person who was seen as the number one um and joe this is legit this is not a CIA operation no this is talking about man and the company i work for these are our clients i'm sure this it's public i'm sure i know it's public knowledge, but I still just always hesitate about some things. I know, I know. It's just people who connect those dots, including me. I mean. I know.

So if I got to go back my mind here. So how do you benchmark the messaging going on in the middle of chaos? All right. So in December of 2014, the lawyers will ever tweet, meet in your own maid on, You know, Yanukovych is a thug. Actually, the fact that we lost the 2010 election because Yuli didn't listen to us is directly related to what's happening in Ukraine right now.

I have a direct line to it. It's just disappointing. She should have won that election. It's just, anyway. So, you know, so we were actually looking at data mining, you know, who were the influential Twitter people and bloggers who are, in what words are they using? Because our candidate was a policy walk.

You want to talk about, bureaucracy and new constitutions and things like that. And these people are talking about freedom and transparency. Right, right. And revolution, May Don. And so our message is, his message is over here. And the core of the things are right there. Once again, you've got to communicate what they are.

So we tell him in no uncertain terms that you can't go back to the old way of being backdoor deals, which is another phrase behind this backdoor deals, which all these people were born up, grazed in. You got to be the guy who's talking about. transparency because by the way here's your competition one was uh klitschko the boxer and one's the nazi and you're like how do you how do you differentiate because klitsko's like this and you're not you know he's a revolution being strong and muskler is a good thing to be so we you have to change the messaging you know you got to you got to publicly reject the backdoor deals all right

and say we're for freedom and by the way you need to do them in three different languages because you speak Ukrainian, half the country speaks Russian, but you got put out in English, right, which is very minor, very low speaking, but you want to get picked up. You want that viralism. You want to become the New York Times tweet of the day. That's how you get the people behind you. So you do that. And you poll. You do flat out in the middle of a revolution kind of polling, and you bring in the data people and you say, okay, these are the messages that people truly are interested in, we need to make sure that you believe them and you are into that and you are to go for that versus the other guys who are still doing their rah-rah, whatever kind of

things. So this is all over. You're the likely person who was like coming out of the other side of the revolution as having still leadership. Well, I mean, all revolutions are messy. Yanukovych left. Yulia was in prison. They let her go. And they let her go. and they had an election, and our guy actually did not win, but he got the position he really should have had, which is like prime minister. He's a policy walk. He's a guy and a guy.

And so I don't know if he would have been a good president, but he's a good guy of all. You know, you're on the side of the angels. You do the best you can. And he had the job he should have had, and he's caught up in Ukrainian politics. He's Ukrainian in corruption, Ukrainian world. but we're we're hashtagging all over the place all right you're twittering this is 2014

twitter still is kind of relatively sort of a new thing 20 in 2008 it wasn't right right is it like a bit really like the Arab Spring was the first time that it really got used for revolution look and and know research those guys talked to a few the Tunisia people about youth people how they used Twitter and talked to all of them about how they used Twitter and talked to all of them about how they used a WhatsApp to and Twitter to organize their revolutions. We worked in Serbia for the good guys. And when the bad, when the idiot, bad guy says, I'm not rich, come to my house, I'll show you.

Well, first of all, he's a lying sack of crap, because we know he's rich, he's got all these. How'd you become rich as Prime Minister of Serbia when you were a grave digger was actually your job? So if some idiot, if he wants to say out loud, I'll come to my house. We're like, all in. So we start tweeting out to the students of the Vulgarian University. Everybody show up in front of his house before 5 o'clock.

All right. We'll take him up. We're not doing anything. Yeah, we're there, pal. And so you use Twitter to mobilize the genuinely protest or a group of people who can get good pictures on in front of the guy's place because he's stupid. I said a stupid thing, which all politicians do every day of the week. But we are able to use at that point social media to our advantage. And we're using TV.

TV is still the number one means by which people get their information about candidates and messaging. And it's different there because they don't have, most countries don't have political campaign commercials between inside programs. They block out sets of time based upon representation. You get this many minutes based upon you're big in the parliament or not, and you make a three minute, five minute, whatever it is. You have three minutes at the end of a program. There's a block of all the political ads,

and you can do what you can have three minutes. You can do five, you know, six, 50 second thing you do every one. Three one minute things. You can do one three minute thing. You can do whatever you want. But this is about a time you get. And so you need to adapt your messaging process and the support behind it because you're going to be firing out.

Facebook and Twitter stuff back, as I kind of had back then. YouTube was starting to grow, growing quicker. It wasn't around in 2008. Harley has a campaign tool at all. 2012 more. This is in that time frame. So, you know, you have to support one media with the other processes. It's not just, I'm used traditional media.

It's undoing that. Obviously, it's print and radio and yard signs, where it might be in the U.S. but there is controlled media by usually the ruling government, ruling party coalition, and how you use that to your advantage. What was it like trying to run a political campaign in the middle of a bizarre war? I mean, a bizarre, you know, like, geez, I hate to use the term like neo-soviet, but I mean. Well, it wasn't like, when campaigns stopped, I mean, it was all revolution.

This is, this was a tragic, horrific event of, you know, killing innocent people on the street, having the burk cut, or whatever, those guys are called. I walked through the barbed wires. I was standing in the middle of these things, watching the people around. And it's, so you're not campaigning. You're supporting the pro-democracy.

We were the EU people. Our candidate was EU, all right? And he didn't sign the EU document. They did the customs union thing. Then, you know, our candidate and everyone else sort of against that, right? polling was pro-EU. And so the campaign stopped for president. The campaign began for who's going to be the person that comes out the other side being seen as the best person who handled the revolution. That's where we changed our messaging and focused on for good or for bad. And it ended up okay

overall, but still Ukraine. All right. It's still they had their problems. But I don't, I, you guys who, the people who were with me in Ukraine are probably watching this, I don't remember all polling exactly, but I don't remember ever seeing a poll about being fearful of Russia invading if Yanukovych loses the election. I don't remember seeing that. That was post, that was made up. I mean, the invasion just came along. The country was split in two, almost 50, 50. The middle, the Chui Center was kind of both ways, but pretty much your Ukrainian or you're Russian. And then the sort of the people who looked west who were sort of in the middle. But I don't think, I don't remember seeing that fear of Putin and Russia and the countrywide research at that time was a fear,

although maybe we weren't able to poll there. I don't know. I don't have to pollster. Those guys are miracle, magic, wizards. But I just don't remember anything at that time. Oh, we're ready to watch out because something's going to happen military-wise. It wasn't anybody's concern. Concern was transparency. Concern was coal and heat in the winter and food and somebody who meets my, who's going to support me ethnically. Oh, you're a Russian, I hate you, you're a Korean, I hate you. People are going to get what they want.

All politics is personal, all right, and it's the same everywhere in the world, and people wanted low bread prices, and they wanted heat in the wintertime, all right? And they wanted their leadership to match their needs. I don't remember reading about possible military insurrection being a problem. We didn't really low on the list of things. So your candidate was running for president, and he ended up as prime minister.

Yes. And that's part of the parliamentary system that Ukraine has, that it's on coalition. Poroshenko became president. And I argue it, Poroshenko owned the TV station, by the way. And when they were showing Euro-Madon, they had a big stage in the middle of Medan. And I know I call it Maydown, but I know there's an accent thing there. And he would show the live speeches and everything. And then when our guy came on, they cut other programming.

Because we were the number one rival for him for the presidency thing. And our guy would go nuts. Oh, he cut us again. Like, you know, I was not happy either because everybody else is getting live, free time, you know, or free media. And they cut us off because he owned the TV station or controlled the TV station. And he made good chocolate. And then you mentioned Thailand also. You were there for one of the kids?

Because of Taiwan. Taiwan. Yeah. which was the most difficult geopolitical campaign. We're engaged in help setting a strategy. And once the strategy was set, they decided to run it on their own,

the whole actual campaign. So we went in with a few people and talked about how to do this mystical new sort of messaging and how to do a little bit different campaigning for the non, what is it, what's the, the Chiang-a-shek party, KMT, richest party in the world of money.

So, plus you had, you know, you had the Taiwan Straits, you had the two countries, one policy. It was, it was, we were, we spent days talking to people, experts, historical, trying to figure out in our own little American minds, the complexities. Yeah. Of the Taiwan-Chinese relationship politically, the history of people just trying to get the microphones in the government to speak, whether DPP, DDP, Democratic People's Party, the good guys, the people in the party are. And they, and how the new Taipei was different,

this Taipei and now this city was more like Chicago, this thing was more like Houston. But that's campaign, but just it is by, it was by far. mode number two, the geopolitically most complex strategy to try to figure out. Because there were real circumstances, because China controls the economy of Taiwan that comes down to let's have tourists. All right. Let's send our people there. And the Taiwanese were in a bind.

There are a, I'm not Taiwan, but at that time it was Taiwanese, but they had to deal of this big country that really wants them. It doesn't see them as a country and how they can run a legitimate political campaign. It's not going to be stolen or corrupted to make sure the KMT wins like they sort of always do. We just happen to be there for a good moment of political chaos, political shift, kind of like the bombatown, I guess the U.S., but I didn't make anything to do with that. Of from, you know, we're tired of this KMT thing. Let's give these new people a chance.

And so we helped set some strategy for that. That was the last one I did. That's fascinating. And there's so much more, I think we could talk about there that, you know, both Ukraine and Taiwan, there are. The Diet Coke left. There are countries that, you know, are wanting to be absorbed by neighboring countries. And was it difficult for you to make this transition when you're advising different political campaigns even here?

I mean, I think you mentioned maybe working in the States, too. I mean, you're going through radically different cultures from Ukraine to Taiwan. That's the number one. I worked in Africa a lot and Eastern, Central Europe, places that were not, places that didn't necessarily have a more sophisticated political assist campaign system that required consultants and social media and other techniques and tools. And, you know, I would, and the first thing they would always say was, we are Nigeria. we're different. And I would say, absolutely. I guarantee you, I know nothing besides what I've read on Wikipedia or whatever, how the Nigerian political system works and the 34 whatever regions and tribes and tribalism, huge, religion huge, which makes geography huge, oil huge. No clue. You do.

Educate me, us. on those processes. Make sure we don't make mistakes on understanding what is right on. Right down to the types of translating words that in English that may not translate well to a particular language. They would roll their eyes and say, oh, in our language, that means, you know, spork. You know, and like, I don't know that.

But you don't know that. So you'd be an ignorant American. I don't want to be really stupid, my words. But you needed to understand their cultures, but you can't. And the best way to do that because you're not them is to ask as many people as possible and make the mistakes and you know, you can't do that. And, you know, there are some bad actors.

And there are people who are stealing elections and you're trying to avoid that. There is danger in some of these people to run for their parties. And you try to be on the side of the angels saying you're the right person to help run your country. And I'm going to be with you. Maybe to U.S. election standards and we're doing, you know, foreign corrupt practices. We're following the rules, but we're trying to wear the money comes from. But maybe U.S. standards, you may not be an angel, but for your standards, your degrees you're going to get.

And we're going to support you because you're on the side of the angels for your country. You're trying to do the right thing. And sometimes it's chaos. It's chaos. Chaos sometimes is good. Do you ever worry about your own physical security when you're working on campaigns like this? We had some security teams with us in places. Because we had one of our first elections, somebody shot at our media facility,

who are consultants inside the country who was a media facility. And we did. But some, but, you know, you try to stay out of the press. You don't want people know when you're there. When you're in Africa, I'm not trying to be specific. But when you're in Africa, and they invite you to go to the big rally, you don't go. Because you're going to stick out. You're going to be the American consultant in a big rally of people.

You don't want to do that. You don't want to be in the paper. That's the worst thing you can possibly happen. And you end up in the paper because you know that the government is monitoring your communication. So using Dropbox as much as you can in other places. And occasionally they get it wrong. And I ended up in the newspaper, the wrong name in my background. And I think they called the LMS, Henry, Harry Goldberg worked on the Obama campaign.

Because they were trying to get people were leaking. All right. We're doing it. By the way, we want to know what they're doing too. This is Apple research. So, but they had the government on their side. Some, many of our people do not communicate, those people would not communicate on email. And even Skype was worrisome at times. It was Dropbox and the like, what's that perhaps, because they're in fear of, you know, what might happen to them, or at least giving away sources of nothing, that's or money or donors. And this is your private consultancy that you, run now, right? That's what I did for about 10 years. And that kind of wound down. I was tired of traveling and the brand was no longer good. And so I pretty much, I wrote and now I teach, so I teach mass communications, social media, multimedia, and some community colleges here at University of Iowa. I teach, I took my ring off, University of Iowa. I teach international political campaigning for a week, special course. And I teach intellectual.

of political risk for another special week-long course for usually third or fourth-year student. I'm on the political science board there. So that's aggravates my time. So I've done government, actually before government, I was a market research person at a media market research company. So I did market research. I did government work. I did private sector work. I did consultancy as a political campaigning. I did consultancy in crisis management and the like and now I teach retires. So I kind of what's left. Cowboy?

I don't know. I haven't done military. I don't know what exactly occupation I got left. That's that I have done governments. I guess that concludes military, but I'm not sure what I got left here. And Joe's book, again, Secret Wars and Espionage story that you can go find right now.

What is the second book you said, it's been like professionally edited, you're really just looking to place it, to place it with a publisher? What's call? I called this. It was actually going to be a corporate intelligence book. Actually, Kevin Mower, who wrote Noeasy Day and Noam.

I had breakfast with them one time. I was talking about writing the sequel to Secret Wars, which takes place back in 86. It actually got a finalist in some historical fiction categories for some awards. But one of the comments I got to make this one wants to read historical fiction. We want contemporary Brad Thor and Mark Graney and Josh Hood and J.T. Patton, J.T. Patton and all the contemporary thriller writers, and mine's historical, which I kind of have a thing for historical because I'm a history guy. So Kevin said, don't write a historical thing. Don't write a sequel. I was telling my Motorola story.

I wanted to read that story. You wrote that and I hadn't signed No Easy Day. Tell the corporate story. So I tried to tell the corporate story and I wrote it and it's boring. It's just there's nothing really exciting. even Joseph Finder and paranoia couldn't make it interesting and they tried to make a movie out of it. I mean, it's just not, you know, look, I wrote a report. And look, I did my cash box. Yeah, you didn't assassinate an entire terrorist. There's no bloods.

There's no blooding from this or spilling. So you have to bring in the agency stuff. So I created this agency element based upon some of my experience, background and fiction. And so now it's more of a, I would say it's more of a mission. impossible kind of book of a corporate element than it does a corporate element of the mission impossible kind of element yeah well like what if you got the okay to go ahead and you know steal the documents yeah well that would have been a different story i that would have been uh actually there's probably

a sequel to the secret wars because their main character or it's a spy devils which is book too because it could start with that you got the documents and all hell breaks loose which is kind of a little bit of of uh the current book and actually the sequel i'm breaking out but pick a story. As crazy story, and I fact that this was wind of changed. Somebody said, as crazy a story that you can think of,

it's happened. The crazy person in some vault in the basement of the agency, you say, hey, I want to know about Greek communist front groups in the 1950s,

and you go, oh, go talk to Ben, and he'd walk in and Ben and go, oh, okay, and he's pasty, because that's his thing. There's these people who are patriots,

and they know about it, and hopefully they're long term and they're the knowledge and that's kind of people and I'm one of those weird guys that wants to read that stuff too well please do please buy stick awards should have been written better it's a good story it's a good story but technically I needed to go back and make some changes writing wise but it's it's it's as close to I always felt it was as close as I could give I'm going to prison well guys um I'm going to ask Joe to stick with us for a few moments to do the bonus segment because I want to ask him about the 2020 campaign and where he sees it since he's a campaign guy and this is his area of expertise. He's going to have some real

insight, I think, on it. But in the meantime, I just want to let you guys know, I will keep you up to date on, you know, Dave's status and, you know, we'll get word from Dave as soon as possible. And I'm going to go check up on him tomorrow. As far as tonight's show, thank you everyone who came by watch this live. We had like 60, 65 people watching live and, you know, many more of you will watch it throughout the week or listen to it. We're on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, obviously, YouTube, all those places you go looking for podcasts. And, you know, please like and share this video, give us a little thumbs up or a comment or a thumbs down if you think we suck, whatever the case is. There's a link also in the description down to our Patreon page if you're

interested in watching the bonus segments we do. And if you want to support the stream, if you like this stuff and you want to keep it coming, we have guests scheduled all the way out to December, right, as of now. So we're very excited about that. Joe, thank you so much for making time for this on a Friday night. Maybe I need to help you know. That's my mind. Letting us steal away some time from your family. And, oh, and lastly, there's also the link down the description to the GoFundMe site for Dave. to help out with Dave's medical bills. So if you guys can do anything there to help Dave out,

I really appreciate it. And for Dave, I mean, there's no thank you for that. There's nothing we can really say to thank you guys for it. But I'll say it anyway, thank you. We really appreciate you guys. Joe, any final thoughts before signing off here? I go back to my sort of maxims of my life. Everything is biased, so pay attention to it.

Everything is personal. Everything we do is connected. So what I did is connected to the people today. What I did then is connected to the people before me. So if you're doing something and you think it's important, it's connected to something before you, can be connected to something after. And nothing was sort of made for us.

So the current techniques that are being used for communicating messaging are new techniques that are being used by the current people and it's up to us as human beings to ask where did it come from who said it, when did they say it

and and to push me critical to push back don't just forward because the headline confirms your bias that's the number one disaster of our democracy I'm going to scroll through my Google search

so I find the search that has a headline that agrees with me. Ah, so it must be true. Be critical. Be insatiable, be curious. That's the only way we can defeat misinformation, wedge thinking, stuff like that. When you see something that really activates you on an emotional level, I think that should be the trigger when you sit back and like, whoa, what is this? Well, and I think last, when I saw the story, people believe, well, we didn't talk about echo chambers

and bubbles and micro bubbles. We're all in our bubble. We're all in our echo chain. Right. I'll ask you about that in a minute. So, you know, if you're going to get these messages, statistically, you believe things are sent to people who you know. And you're not even going to read it.

You're just going to say, ah, I got this from Jack. It must be true. Boom. I'm just going to forward it and share it because he's inside my bubble and my chamber. Well, it may be totally false. And now you're part of the chain that lazily, inadvertently, human naturally forward something on that's just going to perpetuate this continual bubble of people living inside their own lives and not having a chance to think outside to be insatiably

curious just things that confirm their bias and that's what the Russians are doing to us they are just square on and God bless them I'm not the way to put it but it's impressive that they know what the best things to push we know we're pushing on them I hope our guys are pushing hard and doing the right thing. But they're going to do. They're going to, they're going to use the tried and true techniques. They're going to, they're going to be fraudulent. They're going to, they're going to bring up, they're going to put things geographically like our own campaigns are going to do. They're going to mimic and mirror sites and create memes that we, that unless you're really curious, you didn't check that URL or who it came from exactly, or just do a little

bit of Google searching or whatever searching you want to use. If you don't like Google, you somebody else, you just duck the go or whatever, and find, you know, is that true or not? Take, it's the 30 seconds thing. They're going to do it. They are doing it. That's what they said today. You know, in the current information. They're going to, they're going to pit Black Lives Matter versus the police. They're going to put, they're going to go across the spectrum. That's what they are doing it. Because we're human beings and we have our biases based upon how the algorithms are allowing us to collect information because that creates our bubbles. It's the net since you looked at this, Netflix thinks you should like that. Well, that's your bubble.

All right, that's, you're inside it. It's the, I'm a hunt for new shoes and sending the new shoes that have to show up on your, on your social media feed, all right? That's, you're inside it. And then you can, then it starts echoing around. We talked about this before. I'm not, you get a lot more military guys on your thing than I do. And inside that military bubble that you're winging around, there's

Army Rangers over here bubble, micro bubble, there's, there's Navy SEALs over here, And then there's policy people there. The micro bubbles inside. It's even more complex. And the only way out of it, the only way out of it is where the humans is say, are you sure about that? Let me spend a few seconds. Let me, and that doesn't mean don't believe believable things.

Not everything is made as a conspiracy. Not every poll is biased simply because it's against the before. Some things are really what they are. They're in the middle. They say things. They do. Not everything is partisan. And that is the problem. I thought that part of the research study that came out on the night little thing that I promise is what they're impacting us by our partisanship. They see that. We're allowed to be partisan. It's part of our democratic freedoms. We should support the

policies, the programs, whatever we are. If a political party identifies with that, fine. If not, you go, you do what do you want to do. That's freedom. But they are able to go after our partisan nature with information that's going to exacerbate the problems on one side or the other. And we allow it. Shame on us. Well said, Joe. I mean, yeah, I can't emphasize that enough. Like I said earlier on, the personal responsibility aspect of it rather than just taking what's put in front of us at face value means so much. And when you add on to it, the fact that we're overwhelmed, it's a cliche, but you know, there is a, we're getting stuff at the speed of internet. It's just the, we're getting it, not just a lot of it.

We're getting it quickly. And we are, we are trained to just move quickly, right? It's at three seconds, I need it right now. So you might not even bring up the fact that this might be misinformation. This might be a bot. Use bottom meter or hoaxi or sandsy or something. some tool that's free that you can actually say, oh, this, I'm going to run this articles,

these sets of articles, and they'll tell you, this is really impressive. If it's a bot, if it's a human, if it's a whatever, based upon the parameters they had decided friends or retweets or things like that. But there are other things you can do. It takes a little bit of time. Most people are inclined to do it.

So it's up to those who may be a little bit more attuned to tell people, and I tell my classes, You're now the most media literate people in the school. Go out and tell somebody about this and make them and perpetuate it. Because if not, it's, you know, we're just. Yeah, no, they need to, they need to, this class you're teaching a college students needs to be taught to high school students all across the country. And it's funny because when I bring up, I'm going to talk about fake news.

They're like, oh, we had that in college. I go, well, what about this? What about that? They're like, oh, well, we don't have that. So they think that they actually think the less enlightened ones, are protected that they are looking at it. But they're not. They're not.

And neither am I in some cases. I've made mistakes. And it's just because it takes effort. And so actually, the school asked me put together a class at COD College of DuPage on fake news. I don't even want these word fake news, but it's a good brand. It's hot. So it's called like fake news, the search for truth in the modern world. I thought that was have a dicey, dicy class name trying to get people.

I don't know what I'm going to teach yet. I haven't created the class yet. I've still had a few weeks. People sign up, begin up enrollment. But I want to try to hit deepfakes. I want to try to hit technologies. I want to try to hit misuse of data and graphics.

You know, well, this graph says that. Well, the axes are wrong. And the things are slight, you know, you're just looking at things and you're moving. That means, I don't just get that mean because it has that phrase underneath that says it brought to you by the Bureau a really cool news and facts.

Well, who are they? But this meme confirms my bias. So it must be true. It's got a name that looks really cool. And I'm not going to look them up. I'm just going to forward it on. Then that's human nature. And I can't train.

I can't change it. I'll try to teach people to be aware of it. I try to espouse it now because it's frustrating to me. when I scan lots of news. I'm a multiple news person because I try to keep my bubble big. I have biases. I mean, I watch some more than others. I'm always checking the others.

I want to know how they're saying the message. I want to read or look at well done things from the other sides of my biases. Maybe I'll change my point of view or maybe see what they're doing. That might be long or whatever. on both sides. It's a war. But not everybody does that, they don't have to. But just think a little bit, a little bit of curiosity. Facts aren't scary, man.

Facts are, you know, my old John Adams line, no, facts are stubborn things, all right? Now it's my facts are better than your facts. Truth is sort of truth, although eyewitness testimony. It's supposed to be true, the best testimony? Oh, they were doing this. Oh, no, they were doing that. But you were in the exact same place, a different frame of reference. So your eyewitness testimony is your perspective from your spot. And theirs is from their spot. And they both may be true, but they're true through your filter of where you were and your biases. Hands up, not hands up, this, whatever. And then it's, we need to see the body camera footage. Well, that's a different perspective, too. All right. And that's why. not necessarily for body camp footage, but the deep fake of creating fake videos and no one can tell.

It's incredibly dangerous because you can't tell. And you really got to pay attention to them. So this world of what is really true, here's a photograph in the court. What is it is it true? Has it been manipulated? How can you even tell? So that's a problem nowadays. I tell the story I only what's true or not that because I read it from some story.

history, American history guy, that no one only knows what happened at Gettysburg, the most covered battle of the Civil War, because there wasn't any drone watching. Everybody had their own little piece of the battle. And they were interviewing these guys right afterwards. What happened to you, 20th Maine? And, you know, Chamberlain said his thing, and the Confederates said their thing. But that's their piece of the battle. And this is in chaos of war.

You know, more out war. You know, you know, I don't know nothing. But it's your truth. It's your eyewitness, and that's being transported to the digital social media world. My truth, my vision, my perspective. It must be right. And how do you defend against that? How do you counter that?

How do you have a conversation about that? That takes effort. Well, Joe, on that note, I want to roll right into the other segment to talk about campaign 2020, because I know you have some interesting thoughts on where that's going. So everyone who joined us tonight, thank you again. And we'll see you next week. Oh, and I should tease out who the guest is next week. I try to remember to do that.

Hopefully some of the more interesting, younger and more handsome. Quite so overweight. He's a handsome devil. Francis Villanwava. He has written a book about Filipino Special Operations Units. And he spoke to a lot of the same people that I spoke to when I was over there in 2017. So I'm halfway through reading the book too.

So I can tell you his sourcing is good, did a really good job on it. So we're going to be talking to him about the Filipino White Reaction Regiment next week. And they were also trained by American Special Forces and participated in some very, very interesting operations that you've probably never heard of. So that'll be next week.

So thank you, everyone. And I'll see you then. Thank you, Joe. All right. We're all done.