We Need To Talk with Paul C. Brunson - Former CIA Spy Reveals How To Read Anyone

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

How do CIA spies detect lies, build trust fast, and navigate high-stakes relationships? Former covert officer Andrew Bustamante reveals how the tools he used in espionage can transform your personal life - from how you read people to how you love them. From growing up in a turbulent family, to commanding U.S. nuclear missiles at 24, to being recruited into the CIA, Andrew’s story is a journey through power, secrecy, love, and identity. But beneath the training lies a deeper lesson: the same psychological skills designed for national security became the ones that saved his marriage and founded Everyday Spy, an online education platform that provides people with useful spy skills for everyday life. As Andrew says: The CIA’s real superpower isn’t guns or gadgets - it’s learning how to systematise natural curiosity. In this conversation, he shares how those skills can change the way you connect, communicate, and build trust in everyday life. You’ll learn: ◽How to tell if someone is lying  ◽Why he cut off his girlfriend, friends, and family for the chance to join the CIA ◽The CIA method for building instant emotional trust ◽How to recognise when a relationship is starting to decline - and how to fix it ◽The hardest conversation of his life (and what it taught him about love) ◽His take on Jeffrey Epstein and possible CIA connections ◽How easy it really is to launch a nuclear missile - and what that reveals about power Part life story, part relationship masterclass, and part psychological thriller, this episode will change how you see honesty, loyalty, and the hidden motivations that shape every relationship. Andrew Bustamante. We Need To Talk. Follow me here: https://www.instagram.com/needtotalk  https://www.tiktok.com/@weneedtotalkpod Support Andrew here: Instagram: https://g2ul0.app.link/Ps9x0EkXMXb TikTok: https://g2ul0.app.link/1nNEZWvXMXb  YouTube: https://g2ul0.app.link/19tVZShXMXb EverydaySpy: https://g2ul0.app.link/wG0st3xXMXb Find Your Superpower: https://g2ul0.app.link/qqQlh5v0PXb Shadow Cell: https://g2ul0.app.link/GwDAB7DVMXb  (00:00) Intro (02:13) How Can You Tell If Someone Is Lying? (05:27) Is Every Relationship Transactional? (19:42) Andrew's Checklist for Profiling Someone (24:12) Was Jeffrey Epstein a Government Asset? (29:13) Shopify Ad (30:16) Love Better Tour Ad (31:14) Andrew's Upbringing in Pennsylvania and Mixed-Race Heritage (33:45) Andrew's Relationship With His Biological Father (37:48) Andrew's Journey to the CIA (39:47) Life at a Military Academy (46:51) Andrew's Time as a Nuclear Missile Officer (50:21) Nuclear Proliferation (52:58) How Andrew Became a CIA Agent (1:12:21) Romantic Relationships Within the CIA (1:16:22) How Andrew Met His Wife During His Time at the CIA (1:21:44) Why Andrew Proposed to His Wife (1:26:55) Why Andrew Decided to Leave the CIA (1:32:09) Getting a Job After Being in the CIA (1:39:18) Is 'Sexpionage' a Real Method of Spying? (1:41:59) A Skill Andrew Learned in the CIA That Applies to Everyone (1:45:11) What Andrew Thinks the Future of the World Looks Like (1:46:46) What Is the Biggest Threat to the World? (1:47:59) What Is Andrew's Identity Today? (1:51:51) Most Memorable Conversation (1:56:06) Paul's Takeaways Sponsored by: Shopify: https://www.shopify.co.uk/needtotalk   Get Your Tickets to the Love Better Tour: https://bit.ly/lovebetter-YT Glasgow - https://g2ul0.app.link/FMk3N4PhrXb Birmingham - https://g2ul0.app.link/pJIj4XShrXb Manchester - https://g2ul0.app.link/4SQwKDXhrXb Brighton - https://g2ul0.app.link/BO71HSZhrXb London - https://g2ul0.app.link/gm6iB91hrXb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Can you tell me the truth about Jeffrey Epstein? Who even knows, a body double or a fake death? I was a former CIA officer. We still don't know anything about what really happened. Andrew Bustamante is an ex-CIA spot.

We are taught to manipulate relationships to extract information and collect secrets that they don't tell other people. They identified that they had been penetrated by a mole. It was a moment that changed everything. I became a target for a hostile country. And I realized I may not come home. I was like, I am done. I have so many questions for you.

That's why we need to talk. What's the checklist to better understand people? Do you believe that every relationship is transactional? How can you tell if someone is lying? One of the tools that we use is something called feeling questions. How did you feel when you saw your child on your wedding day? The day that you got a divorce. When you ask those feeling questions, they're trying to sort through.

I felt sad. I was with another girl, but I don't want to tell you I was with another girl. It goes into the creative cortex of the brain. before it goes into the logical cortex, their whole face responds with the emotion they're feeling. When you look forward a year, what does this world look like? I wish I had a optimistic answer, but the biggest threat to me is... All right, everyone, before we begin, I have to tell you a secret. Truly, one of the biggest honors of my life is making this podcast.

I absolutely love it. I love the conversations, and I love speaking to all of you when I see you either. in the DMs or on the street. But I do have a small favor to ask, and that is, please, subscribe to the channel and hit the bell icon. What it allows us to do is bring more and more incredible conversations just like this to you. All right, without further ado, let's get into it.

Andrew Bustamante, we need to talk. Okay? We're going to talk about so many things that you are going to think that I'm a nuisance because I have so many questions for you. So, so many questions for you. But can we start with all of the skills that you developed, right? How can you tell if someone is lying?

There's an idea out there that you can tell if someone's lying just by looking at their face. It's something called micro expressions. Yes. Microexpressions aren't really true. They don't work in the field. They work in an interrogation setting because you can control the environment that the person is in. But they don't work out on the street. They don't work around the dinner table.

They don't work when you're on a date because the person isn't being controlled by the environment. So you have to use a different strategy to find out if someone's lying to you. The strategy that we use is we vet the content of what they say against the way that they say it. Okay. So one of the tools that we use just as an example is something called feeling questions. When you ask somebody a feeling question, you're talking. talking about feelings. How did you feel when you broke your leg for the first time? How did you feel when you saw your child? How did you feel on your wedding day? How did you feel the day that

you got a divorce? When you ask a feeling question, it goes into the creative cortex of the brain before it goes into the logical cortex. It's different than if I ask you, what's two plus two? That goes right to the logical cortex. If I say, hey, do you remember when you were eight? That's the logical cortex. When I say, how did you feel when it goes right to the creative cortex, which 10 times faster than the logical cortex. Okay. So if I ask you a feeling question, I already know you are genuinely responding to my question.

But if you're trying to lie, you're forcing the question through your logical cortex at the same time. This is good. This is good. So when you ask those feeling questions and you see the struggle on someone's face, you see the struggle in their body language,

and they're trying to sort through like, I felt sad, but I don't want to tell you. I felt sad. I was with another girl, but I don't want to tell you I was with another girl. I liked her more than I liked you, but I've got to find a different way of saying it. You can see that struggle, whereas when you ask somebody honestly, and they answer honestly, their whole face responds with the emotion they're feeling. I see.

I see. So the key is to almost baseline with a variety of these feeling questions, maybe throw a logic in there, one or two, and then you hit him with the actual... question and you see what the processing time is. And the question should be a feeling question. Correct. But you want to see what the processing time is. Because an honest response to a feeling question requires almost no processing time. Okay. It's almost instant. In body language and in verbal response. Okay. Right. Whereas what you're really trying to identify isn't the lie? You're not trying to identify if the fact is true or not. You're looking for the struggle in the response. And then once

you see it once, that doesn't make them a liar, but it shows that they're sensitive to that line of questioning. I see. And now you can break the pattern with a different question, or you can dig into it deeper with a follow-up feelings question, and you can really start to hammer them, and you can start to look for those signs of deception. We use that with my boys. I'm going to use that with my sons tonight.

So does this connect with, in the research, I saw here that you've talked about all relationships are transactional. That seems like that. That connects. So is that your belief that every relationship, love, romantic love, platonic love, relationships with parents, with children, your children, it's all transactional? It's transactional.

Our relationship, Andrew, is transactional? Is it? Oh, no. That we were cool. Oh, no. Why does transactional mean that we can't be cool? Why does transactional have to mean we can't actually feel love? It doesn't mean that.

When you take it through to its logical conclusion, things can be transactional and. Okay. Transactional and. And arguably, it is the transaction of the relationship that makes it more reliable. Because when you transact, your natural instinct is to transact in order to get something of superior value in return. Yes. Right?

So it's this idea that I'm going to invest my time in you because I care about you, yes, but more importantly, it's because you benefit me in some way. And it's the benefit that you return to me that keeps me investing in you. By bringing it to the forefront, by bringing it to the prefrontal cortex, the logical mind, now we can identify that it's happening and we can identify what it is that we value from the relationship, which allows us to. optimize the relationship. Okay.

With my wife and I, because we both went to the same school of training, now we can both continually optimize our relationship because we can speak transparently about the idea of the transaction, right? It doesn't mean we don't love each other. If anything, it means that we can love each other more because we objectively know we're getting something from this relationship that we would not get if we didn't have each other. So with you and your wife being transparent,

What's an example of a conversation that you've had where you feel like you're getting superior value and she feels like she's getting superior value? So we just got back from a family trip to Vale. We all went to Vale to see the leaves change. It was one of my few weeks off of the road where I was able to be with the family instead of traveling away without them.

And we're up in Vale and it's in the mountains in Colorado. It's beautiful. My wife is a homebody. So we have a very nice condo. she's staying in the condo and she's drinking her hot tea and she wants to watch Netflix, but it's fucking gorgeous outside. And the kids, my son, is a carbon copy of my wife. So he's got his hot tea right next to her.

Brilliant. I love it. Very British. Love it. And my daughter is just looking at me like, what are we going to do? Because I'm not, she's not about to sit inside and watch Netflix. She wants to go to the pool. She wants to go to the park.

She wants to go for a hike. Yes. So I take my wife and I'm like, we got to go, girl. We got to get outside. And I fight. It's like a struggle to get her put on your hiking boots, put on some warm clothes. I know you're worried about the time. I know you're worried about what we're going to eat for dinner.

Just trust me. Let's get out the door. And of course, I'm getting my son out the door too. Ten minutes after we get to the park, everybody's on cloud nine. Okay. Right? Everybody's happy. My wife is over the moon.

She's in awe of the aspen trees, whatever else. It's a great day. We get home at about 7.30 at night. We feed the kids real quick, and I'm like, we should watch a family movie. It's been such a great day. You guys wanted to watch a movie earlier. Let's watch a movie now. And my wife's like, no, bedtime's coming up.

We need the kids to go to bed at a normal time so they wake up at a normal time so we can have a good day tomorrow. And I fight her. And I'm like, no, it's been a great day. Like, if they go to bed an hour later, that's not going to be a big deal. Right. she is keeping me from making a mistake that's going to damage us in the future. Okay. I am getting her to have an experience in the present that she would have otherwise missed.

And that has always been our chemistry. Even in our shadow cell operation, she kept me from taking reckless risks. And I kept pushing her to find newer and more interesting targets. So I push her risk tolerance. She pulls back my unnecessary risk taking. And that is something that we give each other. Nobody has ever been able to pull me back off the brink. Nobody has ever been able to hold me back from what I want to do.

And even though I can fight and argue with her and I can accuse her of, of, you know, being a wet blanket and being a party pooper and all this stuff, she takes that criticism. And she already knows it's the right choice. Yes. So then the next morning, when everybody wakes up happy, and I'm like, shit, girl, you were right. She's right. But it sounds like you're saying, Andrew, though, that it's not only acknowledging that because that was a transaction, you're absolutely right, but it's also verbalizing that.

So is that what your partner is aware of what value you're bringing? Is that why you do that? It's really so that they're aware of the value that you see in them, right? That's the most important part of a transactional relationship is acknowledging for them what you see is of value. We all see value differently. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because I can't argue against that, but I will say that that is not what society teaches us at all. I agree.

Yeah. That's a big part of why CIA teaches it to us because CIA knows psychologically it's sound. You go on a date. What am I getting out of this date? Do I just get a pretty girl on the opposite side of the table? Do I just get a handsome man and an interesting conversation? Do I just get an interesting man and no interesting conversation? Am I checking my watch all the time because I'm missing my show to be here with this dude?

Right. And then I want to brag about it on Instagram. So I'll take a selfie with him because I want all my friends to see my hot boyfriend. But I know he's empty and I know he's shallow and I know he's a deadbeat in terms of conversation. there's no benefit to you. If the only benefit to you is the selfie, you can get that benefit from somewhere else. But if you don't ever stop to ask yourself,

what am I getting out of this? You don't have any idea how to objectively compare this against someone else. CIA is ruthless about making high-performance teams. Everybody is psychologically analyzed, everybody is vetted. They literally will assign teams together because they know how much content, you will have, how much alignment you will have, and they have empirically categorized

what the right recipe is for conflict and cooperation for this operation. I see it. I see it. I believe this is a look at you that I have not seen before. It's true. Which I love for many reasons. But also I think this concept is very important. We do have a lot of women who watch.

We need to talk. We love our fellas, but we have a lot of ladies out here. a lot of them have questions around the relationship. And I think this is giving crystal clear clarity on how to look at the relationship. But another question on the transaction, what about the longevity or the future benefit? So what if you're receiving what you feel is a premium today, but you don't know if that premium will be in place tomorrow or, you know, next year, et cetera? Do you cut that relationship then if you can't project out the benefit?

I already know how this is going to sound. I already know how this is going to say, he's cold. CIA made him cold. So CIA teaches us that all relationships have a natural life cycle. Wow. There is a cycle of introduction. There's a natural cycle of growth. There's a cycle of peak and there's a cycle of decline.

When you're trying to optimize a relationship, you want to take the introduction and the increase, the introduction and the growth, and you want to steepen that curve as much as you can, as fast as you can, to get maximum benefit, to get the premium. But you're always looking for the peak. Because when the peak happens, you start to see a return, a negative, not a negative return on investment, but a decline in your ROI. Okay. So you go from getting 250% to getting 230 percent. Right. Which is still more than the two of you alone, but it's not as much as the peak. Yes.

Right? When the reason it's important to see when that peak happens is because that's when you know you need to change something. And if you can have the kind of conversation with your partner where you can say, I'm not getting what I used to get out of this relationship. I'm still very happy, but I used to get so much more than what I'm getting right now. I would like to make some change to get back the things that value me. that I value now. To get us back on that steep incline again. Okay.

Right? Those kinds of what my wife and I call, those hard conversations are invaluable because my previous peak with you might be 250%. And then we have a decline. We dropped to 230. We have a hard conversation.

I tell you what I need now. I'm a 45-year-old man. I need something different than when I was a 35-year-old man. I'm a father of two children who are 12 and 8. That's different than when my children were eight and six or eight and four, right? Life changes. I want to be able to tell you,

here's what I need now. And then I need you to see the value in me that you make the change. Okay. And now our peak is no longer 250. Now our peak is 270, 310. I see it. And then we have the same conversation again when it changes again. As aligned as we were at 27, we are not so aligned on the same categories at 45. So we've had to realign. So we've had to realign. on other categories. And that's how we keep that natural life cycle healthy. Because we all will decline. You can't ignore it.

You can't pretend it's not going to happen. But you also sure as hell can't accept it. Yes. You cannot accept. When your partner gets bored with you, your partner lets themselves go after they promised you they'd be healthy. And they'd, like a partner that's getting fat isn't a problem because they look fat. They're a problem because when they're 65 or 70, their health may fail.

And now you're going to live the last 15 years of your life alone or caring for them. You have to intercept that with a hard conversation and say, if you see the value in me that I see in you, this needs to change. And if it doesn't change, as soon as this relationship is 180 out of 200, it doesn't serve me anymore. And then it's time to go. And then it's time to go. Wow. There's another relationship out there that will give you 250%. I can't argue against it.

Really, I can't. Because the way that I see that you're looking at this is a different POV from how I approach it, but I think it's very, very legitimate, right? And what I mean by that is that you're using the transaction as an indicator, and then you're marrying that with a hard conversation based on that indicator. Indicator satisfaction, in essence, and then you're marrying the hard conversation. I agree. I think this is the number one issue with relations.

is the inability or partners, the inability to have these hard conversations and harder the conversation, the higher quality of the relationship. But even that in itself, people don't want to have. You know, so how do you coach? How do you tell the person who knows they're not getting the benefit in the transaction? They know that satisfaction is low. They know they need to have the hard conversation. How do you equip them to have that conversation? You can't have a hard conversation on the you understand the perception and perspective of the other person. There is something that you value about the relationship. There is something that they also value about the relationship. And there's no guarantee that the two things are the same. So if you're coming into a relationship and all you're thinking about is what you value, you're missing 50% of the problem. You have to look at what they value.

If you can't understand what they value, you have to ask them. Okay. Why are you in this relationship? What do you value? You might be shocked. Even if you think you know and you ask the question, you might be shocked what they answer. Maybe what they love about you is that you say nice things to them. Maybe what they get out of the relationship is a sense of peace and comfort.

My wife swears that she gets better sleep with me in the bed than without me in the bed. I get horrible sleep with that woman in the bed. But it's so valuable to her. How am I going to say no? I'll just spend a couple extra hours in bed if I need to, right? But you have to understand what the value is so you can speak to that value in the hard conversation with them. Hey, if you want to continue sleeping with me in the bed, I need you to come out with me more on date nights on Friday. I know it's easy for you to stay home.

And I know it's easy for you to turn on Netflix. And I know it's easy for you to stay in pajamas. But I think you're beautiful in a dress and boots. And just let me take you out once a month to start. And that would mean a lot to me. Yes. And now she knows exactly how to fulfill my value, and she knows that I recognize what she values. I even knows, she even knows I recognize that she values staying home and watching Netflix, which will do three Fridays a week a month.

Yes. Right. But you have to have that hard conversation. When you can do that, the most powerful thing, whether you want to call it motivational or manipulation, when you show somebody you understand their point of view. Yes. They cannot resist. They can't reject it. I am walking away from this conversation with many thoughts, many skills, but I am definitely going to commit to better understand the perception, the perspective of everyone I'm dealing with.

So if you're coaching me on how to do that, because I truly want to become a master at this, what should I be doing? Is it literally looking at their body and thinking, what are they feeling in this moment, et cetera, but what? What's the checklist that I should be going through? So there's, we can get into great complexity if we choose to, but I'll keep it very simple for you. Because I would imagine that based on your experience and where you are in your life, you already do the big things already. You have to listen more than you talk. That's a challenge for a lot of people. You have to listen more than you talk.

You have to ask open-ended questions. Because when you ask an open-ended question, you are inviting the person to talk. more than just a short, simple answer. What's happening is you're giving the other person the impression that they're interesting. Okay. And people love to be interesting, and the more interesting they feel,

the more they're willing to share. Yes. So all that time that you're receiving the information, you are actively getting a picture of what that person is. You're building what we call an assessment. You can layer into that assessment verbal cues, how fast they talk, how loud they talk, what their vocabulary is.

You can layer in physical body movements, body language. Are they leaning forward? Are they looking uncomfortable? Are they looking cold? And then you can start to imagine, oh, here's this person. It's the end of the day, and it's a Friday, and I know they have two kids. They must be wondering about their kids. And I know they have a long drive to get home.

You start really picturing and thinking these things. And then you can validate your ideas by asking an open-in-a-question about the thing that you're assessing. I see. Right? And then do you just allow that rabbit... trail to go. Like, you just continually, and is that what you would do with targets? Is you would just sit down and just continue to profile them profile? The superpower at CIA is not about guns or tech or gadgets.

It's about systematizing natural curiosity. Okay. Just naturally finding something curious about the whole world around you. Even when you're sitting across from an extremist, Islamic kidnapper, you can still be curious about them. You can still be genuinely curious about why they do what they do, what they eat for breakfast, what are they going to have for dinner,

what's their favorite type of coffee. I see that you're wearing this brand of sandal and not that brand of sandal. You can ask an infinite amount of questions because it doesn't matter what they theologically or ideologically believe. At their base between their two ears, they're the same pink computer that runs you. Yes.

And it's all about being so naturally, so intentionally curious that you gain what we call informational superiority in the relationship. Okay. Do you think that this is an issue we have just in society in general? Is this, there's little willingness to want to listen to the other side politically in particular. You see it on social all the time. You know, with podcasts, people will say, why are you platforming this person, etc. Do you think that the antidote is truly we should be curious about everyone? I would actually change your statement just slightly. I would say that the problem isn't that we don't listen. Okay. The problem is that we're not curious. Okay.

Right? And if we could be curious, I think what we would find is that we have a whole hell of a lot more in common with each other than we have at odds with each other. If we just wonder, why does that person wear a red hat? why does that person wear a rainbow shirt? If we really were curious about why, we might find that at the end of the day, they are both trying to protect their loved ones. Well, shit, how do we, you can't argue with that.

Everything else is just methodology. Right. And that's what's missing. What's missing is we've stopped being curious. We now assume that we know instead of assuming that we don't know. And CIA trains all of us but just assume that what you think you know is wrong and then let the evidence lead you.

Yes, yes. All right. So this gets to a very delicate subject. Pass on this, but I'm very curious about this if you want to go there is Jeffrey Epstein. Right. So what I find interesting about this entire case is I read more and more about how he was potentially a government asset. And his objective was to help facilitate the collection of information and pass that information on to the government. And it was done primarily through sex.

How likely is that? I don't think, I think what you just said is all likely, with the exception of what we're all focused on, that we think the end goal. was to compromise people through sex. Okay. I am increasingly of the assessment that what happened is the sex that he was engaged in was his criminal act.

And that sex or the opportunity for sex is what kept him compromised to his clients who were criminals in other ways. Criminals of tax evasion, criminals of organized crime, criminals of political corruption.

So when you swim with snakes, all the snakes have different skin. Inside the United States, we don't like sex trafficking. We don't like it. We don't like the abuses of children. But we don't really prioritize those in our list of federal crimes. We do prioritize political corruption. It's one of the highest things that you can convict for. If you can find a politician and convict them for political corruption,

your career as an FBI agent is made. Okay. They're morally outrageous to us. Yes. But there's a reason that you don't see many people going to federal court for major offenses against children. Yeah. And what adds to that is the fact that we still don't know anything about what really happened to Epstein. Exactly.

That type of obscurity usually indicates that he is protected. His case file is protected. And one of the few ways that you can protect a case file to the place where even, the president can't disclose it is if he is a classified, documented, protected covert informant CI. Yes. CIs have to be protected because for every one CI that you have right now, there's thousands that are also out there.

Plus, if you violate a covert informant today, it's going to prevent people from saying yes to it tomorrow. So in the best interest of all the future reporters that you're going to have, you have to stay hush on the current one. Yeah, look at that. Look at that. So you don't think he took his life? I don't know that we have enough evidence,

and I also don't know that we ever will. It's reasonable that he killed himself. It's also reasonable that he could have been killed. It's also reasonable that he could have been somehow something else. Who even knows? A body double or a fake death? I don't even know because we don't get an autopsy report. This is true.

This is true. So that is a thing. Body doubles, fake deaths. This is something that happens. Absolutely. That's how you evacuate high value assets from their country without them knowing they've been evacuated. The whole witness protection program that you've seen in movies exists in the United States, but it's 10x whenever we evacuate a senior Russian general of their submarine force because that person is going to give us decades worth of intelligence on the submarine. missions, activities, capabilities of Russian subs.

So when we evacuate or exfiltrate that person from Russia, we change their identity, we change their name, we can put a dead body in its place, we can create an accident that makes it look like they died to throw their own government off the case to at least prevent their government from accusing us of espionage. I see. Because every time you have a spy case, you have a global diplomatic incident. Yes. So we have, everybody tries to cover their tracks, right?

Whether it's the Russians poisoning people in the UK or whether it's, you know, the Romanians faking a death of a Russian asset on their soil to give that asset to the Israelis. I see it. Well, complicated. Complicated, but so fun. It's so interesting because everything you're doing, you're doing in plain sight and nobody knows what's happening. Yes.

And I think these are the skills that I definitely want to. get into with you because it feels like you've developed almost beyond a PhD level of gathering human intelligence. You know that feeling when you've just committed to starting something big and then it hits you. How am I going to pull this off? When I started my matchmaking business, I remember sitting at the kitchen counter one night with my computer and 15 tabs open trying to figure out how I should market and sell our services.

It was pretty overwhelming and that continued for a lot of the first year. And I look back now and think if I'd only had our sponsor Shopify on board, I'd have had a much softer start to entrepreneurship. Shopify helps you sell your business, but also makes you look and feel like you've been doing it for years. It is hundreds of templates to pick from and AI tools that help you with writing product descriptions or enhancing photos, sort of like having a full-time team before you've made your first hire. If you're starting something big, visit shopify.com.uk. Slash need to talk to sign up for your one pound per month trial.

That's shopify.com. dot UK slash need to talk. Let me ask you something. When was the last time you really thought about how you love? Not who, how. Most of us don't. We're moving fast, doing life, hoping love just shows up and sticks. But that's not how real connection works.

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won't stand a chance. Find Ollie's sleep solutions for the whole family at Ollie.com. It's O-L-L-Y.com. You were growing up in rural Pennsylvania. Only brown child, what, in your school or in your area? In my family. In your family.

So my mom was Latino, but my stepdad who was raising me was Caucasian, and my two half-sisters came out very Caucasian. So I'm in a house where I'm the brownest. My mom is trying, she's of that generation where she's trying to kind of erase her heritage and assimilate to American life because that's what we didn't. That was 1985 in a nutshell for all for all non-Caucasians. They were trying to pretend that they were Caucasian to be accepted, right? And then we're in a rural Pennsylvania schoolhouse.

Like we had one other black kid, a black male, and we had me. And that was the color of our school. But we only had, you know, 500 graduating students. So it was very small. But 500, so two out of 500 are two students of color. Yep. Right. How do you think that that experience impacts who you then later become in life as an adult?

I, dude, I tried to explain this to my wife who grew up as a Latina in Florida, where everybody was Latin. Right. Everybody's Cuban, everybody's Venezuelan. I know it's not really. I'm overstating it. But I thought I was white. That's how it manifested. I was surprised to look in the mirror and not see a white kid.

I was surprised to be growing a beard and a mustache at 13 when everybody else wasn't. And I didn't understand why I couldn't get a date to the prom or I couldn't ask a girl out to homecoming dance because I looked so different. But I felt like I must look like everybody else. Right. And it was the strangest thing. And it's a surreal feeling. It's an absolutely surreal feeling to be surprised by who you are when you look at yourself in the mirror. And it flipped the script when I went to CIA because I started to realize that brown people, brown people around the world are ignored.

Just like I was even ignoring my own ethnicity trying to belong to this community that I was growing up in. And if there was racism in my community, I was blind to it because I just thought I was white. I don't even know how to describe it better than that. Look at that. So I would imagine that what complicates your identity is also the fact that you didn't grow up with your biological father. Absolutely. So that story to me is just, it's surreal. If you can describe, if you're open, to describe me what happened to your father.

So I didn't know the story of my father until I was almost 10 years old. And I don't know why my mom chose to wait that long or why anybody in my family chose to wait that long. But what I found out later is that my father was killed in a violent crime in California at the same time that he and my mom were going through a divorce. Okay. And he was murdered in a bar after insulting a drug dealer because my father had tried to get a job, couldn't get a job, re-enlisted in the military, which was the job that he hated. And they were at a bar celebrating his re-enlistment and everybody was getting drunk.

And the story goes that a drug dealer came in and was like, hey, it looks like you guys are trying to have a good party. And instead of just saying no, my father, whose jeans run in me so I can kind of connect and relate to this, decided that it was the time to lambass the drug dealer, make fun of him publicly and ridicule him. Drug dealer went outside, grabbed a knife, came back inside and stabbed my dad 12 times in the back at the bar. He was immediately arrested. He was sent to prison. You know, justice was served. but my father died that day. I was just barely born.

I was a few months old, living with my mom in a different state. My mom and dad didn't even know where each other were. My mom was filing for divorce by posting an ad in the newspaper at the time. So because she was listed as next of kin and he was enlisted in the Air Force, when his death was announced, the Air Force gave his death payments and whatever else to my mom. And that is what bridged the gap for my mom to raise me as a single mom. I mean, she was 20 years old when she had me. She was 20.

Goodness. So then you find this at, you find this out at the age of 10. What is the grieving process for a situation like that where you haven't met him, but he is your father? It doesn't exist. It does. It's, oh my gosh, I love your questions already. So you can't conceptualize this at 10 years old. At 10 years old, I was like, oh, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you can't conceptualize this at 10 years old.

this guy I never met with stories I've never heard of was murdered 10 years old you don't know what that means you don't get that right right he was killed and and then that's how my mom raised me

for a few years until she married my dad and my dad is the the only male role model right in my family my stepdad and he is the one that's feeding me and he's the one that's raising me and clothing me and he's the one giving me all the daddly lessons and he's a Caucasian guy from me

Indiana, a Vietnam vet, and he's all I've ever known. So it's like trying to grasp something that you've never known. It wasn't until I was in Colorado at the Air Force Academy at the age of 19, where I took the initiative to find my father's grave. Okay. And I found out that his grave site was in Denver, and I was in Colorado Springs. So I go to Denver on a weekend as a college sophomore for all intents and purposes, and I find his grave site. And that's... That's when the emotions came. And it was just this. It's only happened to me twice in my life where you are like vomiting emotion.

You can't hold it in. You can't control it. You feel so ugly because it's just coming out. And you don't even know what's coming out. You're swearing and you're cussing and you're crying and you're, I mean, it's nonsensical. I am not usually that emotional of a person, and it was so frightening to not have any control over myself for who knows how long it lasted. Yeah, and you can see how that shapes your identity, especially at that age at 19, we know, we're trying to figure out, we're going from boy to man. Yeah.

You know, trying to figure out who you are and what you're about and what you value in this life. So I'm curious because that happens at 19. You talked about your stepfather, military, right? how do you then become shaped as a young man? Because what I'm really curious about is going into the CIA, I have this, and maybe this is a myth, that those who enter the CIA have been the most elite student, you know, straight A student, captain of the football team, you know, or whatever it may be. But was that your background? No. And it is a bit of a myth.

And a lot of it persists because of what happened in the olden days in the 70s and 60s and 1980s. CIA recruited only from certain schools, only from certain families. It was a very small organization. And you had to know somebody who knew somebody to get in. So there was a very elite recruitment process. I mean, we're talking about training class sizes of seven students twice a year. Oh, my goodness. It was tiny.

Okay. After 9-11, my training class was 250 students, and it was one of four classes that year. So you're talking about something going from 14 students a year to 1,000 new graduates per year. So the agency completely transformed with the Global War on Terror. It needed diversity. It needed people of color. It needed languages that it didn't even know existed before. Sure.

Right. The whole world changed. So I was not anywhere close to valedictorian. I had language, I had a risk tolerance, I had a very detailed background because I was in the military for so long. So that's how I got into CIA. The entire recruitment process for CIA is a game of one step and they don't tell you any additional information. And if you do the one step, then they tell you the next step and then they tell you the next step. So you never know what's ahead of you.

Yes. That was a thrill for me. It seems like you thrived in an environment where you didn't need to be. certain, which is wild to me. But I never knew that person. Okay. That's what was happening is I was never given the ability to go into uncertainty. Because for me, I grew up in a household with a Vietnam vet who was my stepdad, and my mom

was trying her hardest to erase all past cultural and religious heritage that was Latino. She was anti-Catholic. She was anti-Mexico. She was anti-Spanish. That's why I don't speak Spanish. Wow. So she was actively putting up walls to make sure that you can't go in any of these directions. And all that was left was the direction that my parents set for me.

So you have to be willing to experiment to discover your ability in the face of uncertainty. What I learned growing up was that if I didn't want to go in the direction that my parents sent me, the only other option was to lie. So that was my life. My life was following the rules or completely disregarding the rules and fabricating the truth. Those, it was ones and zeros for me. Complete and utter conviction to your lie or do the truth. And this is even prior to CIA.

Correct. So this was my coping mechanism to have a little bit of autonomy as a 17-year-old, 16-year-old kid. So into university? All the way into. And I went to university. I went to a military college only because it was a full-ride scholarship on the opposite side of the country. That's it. It got me as far away from my family as I could get, and it was paid for because my family

wasn't, they didn't save anything for college for me. They didn't assume that I would ever get into college. They just assumed I would enlist in the military. And it wasn't until I got there that I realized I just signed up for a military school. That means more rules, more expectations, which is how I coped with that as well. So say in college at university, what's an example of a full-on lie that you told? So in a military academy, you have three meals a day. Two of those meals come with a formation.

Formation literally means every student in the school goes out into the main field and stands in formation and takes accountability. They count every person, check in every name, make sure that you are wearing the right uniform, standing in the right spot. And then they march you to breakfast. And then you leave breakfast and they do it all again for lunch. And they march you to lunch twice a day, five days a week, without fail, for four years. right? It took me about three months before I was like, this is not going to work for me, right?

I have no problem with marching and going to go into a meal at a certain time, but you're just wasting my study time, my exorcite. You're wasting everything by making me stand in this formation twice a day. Sure. So I started experimenting with just not showing up. Like, what if I just don't show up? What if I don't show up and I tell somebody I, I won't show up.

Well, that didn't work because then I had to come up with an excuse. And the excuse had to be verified and it was complicated. So then I was like, well, what if I just don't show up and don't tell anybody? Because now if I don't show up and I don't tell anybody, it makes the person taking accountability have to decide, do they admit that there's someone missing and they don't know why that person is asking? Or do they cover up for me? And I started to find that they would cover for me.

And once I found that one person would do it, I realized this is something everybody's going do because nobody wants to fill out the paperwork and admit that they didn't know where the missing person was. So then I just started skipping formations. And I skipped them as freshmen and I skipped them for the rest of my, my military academy career. For the rest of the three years, you were there. So when you get caught, when you get caught breaking the rules of the academy, you get,

they file a form that punishes you. And you go on something called a tour. And a tour is one hour of your life that you're spending marching from point to point on a, on a, on a field. When you hit a hundred demerits, you're called a centurion, because it means you're going to spend a hundred hours marching back and forth. I became a centurion with a hundred demerits my junior year. And I was like, there's literally not enough time for me to pay this off before I have to

graduate. How am I going to do this? So I just didn't do them. And I thought to myself, if I just don't do it and don't. say it. Somebody else has to account for it. And the only way that this is going to work against me is if the person says that I didn't show up and they didn't find me, which makes it their responsibility. So I gambled my entire graduation on the fact that nobody would ever turn me in. And they didn't. And they didn't. You already, what is surprising me is how you're willing to

partake in high stakes at an early age, which is interesting. I just saw it as survival. I didn't see any other option. So you're at the academy doing this, which, by the way, is an esteemed place. I think people need to know. This is the Air Force Academy, which is very challenging to get into the Air Force Academy. So you graduate and then you enter then the Air Force as a commissioned officer, I believe. And then where do you go from there as a commissioned officer?

So I was an athlete at the Air Force Academy. I was a boxer and I was a fencer that got a sport fencing. Okay. and I scored very high in athletic scores and very low in academic scores. So 90% of Air Force Academy graduates, if they meet the minimum standard of vision and fitness, they almost all go into pilot training right away. That's what the Air Force Academy is built to do.

It's built to create pilots. So I graduate in 2003. We've had a two-year war now in Afghanistan and Iraq. Everybody's going to pilot training. I don't want to fly. I actually apply my senior year. I apply to be Air Force Office of Special Investigations, which is their intelligence group. I'm like, make me intel.

I speak Chinese. It's what I studied at the Air Force Academy. I have high scores in all these humanitarian, like humanity studies and not in any of my aerodynamic, thermodynamic physics. All of those scores are below average. It's like, I'm just a shoe in for something cerebral, not something aviational. Yes. And it was a numbers game. It was the Air Force saying,

no, you're going to go learn to fly. So they sent me to pilot training. I learned how to fly. I did well enough flying, but I hated flying. I mean, you're stuck. Nobody realizes how uncomfortable pilots really are. Tiny uncomfortable seats flying for hours on end

and the rules. There are so many rules. How fast you go, the altitude, how often you make reports in and who's flying in what direction and what I, oh my gosh, dude, it was just... And for you, who hates rules, right? You're like, this is terrible.

How do I escape this? Yeah. Yeah. So how do you escape it? And then what do you end up doing in the Air Force? It's really interesting. Nobody has made me see it the way you're making me see it right now. I approached, I had just had my second good check flight.

And when you go through pilot training, you go through flight exercises, and then a series of flight exercises takes, you into a maneuver series where you do steep turns or flips or whatever else in rolls, and you do these maneuvers to check off, we call it a check flight, it checks off that you have the skills required. Well, I had done three previous check flights, and I was doing my fourth check flight, and all of my check flights were getting high scores. I was technically proficient at the skill.

Yes. I just didn't like the skill. Well, after I finished the fourth check flight, and it was another good performance, I was like, if I keep doing this, I'm going to end up a pilot. Right. And a pilot is a 10 year commitment in uniform. And I was like, I am accidentally shooting myself in the foot here. So I went to the commander of my wing and I told him I wanted to self-select out of pilot

training. That's the fancy way of saying I want to quit. So I go to the commander and I say, I want to self-select out. He tells me that it's virtually impossible. If it happens, the Air Force is going to kick me out. of the Air Force and they're going to pin a $300,000 bill on my back to pay for the time that I wasted in pilot training and the time that I went to the Air Force Academy. And I was just like, well, I'm 24 years old.

I'm like, if you put $300,000 on me, I'm bankrupt. Absolutely. I can get out of that with just the filing of a piece of paperwork and start my life over again. So the threat was kind of empty. So I self-selected out of pilot training. And because of my check flights, because of my history of performance, they reclassed. classified me into a different category and they put me into nuclear weapons instead.

Look, it's fascinating. And I never realized, like, it's, it really is. There is something about the high stakes where I know that I have everything to lose, but I feel like I have no other options. Yeah. This is a theme at just, you said, 24. Just 24. Look at that. Yeah.

So now you go into, so it's nuclear missile, what is it called exactly? So I'm a nuclear missile officer and we're part of the nuclear weapons cadre. All right. And that's really the people who wear the keys around their neck and babysit warheads that could mean the end of all of mankind. That's really the job. So literally your responsibility is to, is it to launch on command? On command nuclear weapons. Correct.

All right. So one, I mean, I could spend all day here, but I'm not because of time. But one thing I want to know is so you're 24 years. years old, how many nuclear missiles are you responsible for? At 24 years old, I made a deputy missile crew commander. So I am the second, the deputy, underneath a missile crew commander, and we are a crew of two. So I have one person who is superior to me sitting next to me and we're the two people that have to turn the keys at the same time.

The two of us command 10 missiles. Those 10 missiles each have three warheads. We have 30 warheads under our command at 99% readiness all the time. And we are one crew of 10 crews that's in one squadron, and there are four squadron on our one military base. Okay. So there's 240 warheads, of which 30 of them are ours. Okay. So this is what I've always wanted to know about nuclear weapons and countries in particular is it feels like we're in this constant arms race, you know, country to country, right?

But how many nuclear missiles are necessary to destroy the world? So roughly, how many nuclear missiles does say the United States have? 2,500, I think. So 2,500. And who's number two to the U.S.? Russia. Russia's number one, actually. Oh, Russia's number.

They have about, I think they have 4,500. So 4,500. And then China's behind us with 900, 900, 1,200. Okay. So what's the difference of adding another 100, 1,000? And what is the difference? It's a great question because it's all extra icing, but that's all it is. It was my familiarity with nuclear proliferation that made me even more suitable for CIA

because one of CIA's main mission is called counter proliferation, intercepting nuclear fissile material, preventing the development and the spread of nuclear devices. Fair enough. One more question on nuclear missiles is who authorizes the launch? because I hear conflicting statements, and I'm sure it differs depending on the country. So if we're looking at, say, the United States, let's look at the UK and Russia. Who actually gives authority to launch a missile? It's a hierarchy.

So the highest echelon in the hierarchy is the president, of course. The president has what's called the nuclear football. It's a brief case that somebody carries near the president at all times. And if the president decides to send a nuclear order, then the football is opened. And inside the football are materials so that he can create and validate an official nuclear message. And that message is sent worldwide or sent nationwide to all of our nuclear capable devices. And then people in the silos like me get that order, decipher it, decode it, put our keys in, turn the keys. No questions ask.

None. So you're telling me that literally the president of the United States can decide on his own or her own, but in this case, his own, to launch a nuclear weapon and that nuclear weapon will be launched. He doesn't have to consult, talk to anyone. No generals, none. Correct. That is mind-blowing. That is what happens when you are the commander in chief. So then you go from this position of incredible responsibility at a very young age.

And you said that's what made you a perfect candidate for the CIA. So how in the world do you apply to join the CIA? 90% of CIA is not undercover. It's overts. All of your analysts, your translators, your tech people, your cybersecurity people, offensive and defensive cyber operations people, logisticians, you name it. People who maintain the trucks, people who do security. All of that, they're called overt CIA. They get a paycheck from CIA.

They sign their mortgage and they sign their mortgage. Their employer is the CIA. It's overt. It's only the 10% of CIA that's covert that has a different level of challenge, right? And I wouldn't say that I was a perfect fit for CIA. I would say that I was convenient for what they needed at the time. I was recruited in 2007 at a time when they needed ethnic diversity, they had an issue with nuclear weapons, and they needed Chinese speakers.

So I was a natural fit. The third way is that you are actively recruited by someone else. You are pulled into the organization. You're invited into the organization. For me, I was applying to leave the Air Force and go into the Peace Corps. Just like any bad breakup, I wanted the exact opposite. I should say the Peace Corps is the exact opposite of what I was doing. So I was like, if I'm going to spend two years of my life pointing nuclear weapons of people,

and I'm going to spend four years of my life helping orphans, building microfinance, and banging hippie chicks and tents. That's what I'm going to do with my life, right? So I'm applying online to the Peace Corps, and a screen pops up in the middle of the application that says, you may be suitable for other jobs in the national security sector. Are you willing to put your application on hold for 72 hours while we let a recruiter reach out to you? And 27 years old, the next best thing?

I mean, I was always looking for the next best thing. I was always looking for Mrs. Better. Yes. Right? So I click on yes. I'll put myself on hold for 72 hours thinking nothing is going to come of it. And then the next day I get a phone call from a 703 area code and it's a recruiter for the national security infrastructure. Okay.

And that's what it's called the national security infrastructure. That was my first call. Okay. So at that point, do you understand what the national security infrastructure is? No. I mean, it could be anything. That could be FBI. That could be Homeland Security.

that could be Customs and Board. That could be Coast Guard. It could be anything. It could be NSA. It could be CIA. But there's no way that's going to happen to me. I already tried to get into intelligence when I was at the Air Force Academy. And they said no.

So surely I have no chance of going into intelligence. Okay. But they call you and they say, what, we want to meet you in person. Yeah. They say that we think that you'd be a good fit for job openings that we have in the national security sector. If you're interested, we will overnight you airplane tickets to come interview. with us in Washington, D.C.

Oh, my goodness. 2007. So physical plane tickets are still kind of a thing, but I've never been important enough for anybody to overnight me anything. And, of course, the person's not telling me

their last name. They're not giving me any details. It's a random, unlisted phone number. So I'm just kind of like, maybe this is real, maybe it's not. Go ahead and send me the phone.

Send me the tickets. Your personality, you're like, sure, let's do it. Let's do it. So they sent you the tickets. And the tickets fucking arrived. And the tickets arrived. And then there was a date of the flight that she didn't tell me on the phone.

So I'm like, okay, now I've got to get to the airport on this date to actually use these tickets. So I do what I've got to do and I lie to my boss and whatever else to get some time off. And I'm on a plane. I don't even know what to wear. So I pack clubbing clothes. Why? What? Because I'm like, if I'm going to, if I'm going to, if I'm I'm going to go do something. I'm going to be me. Yes. I'm going to be the me that I think I want to be.

So I wear my Paisley shirt that I only button to here. And so I pack and I get on the plane and I land on the other side and in the packet with the plane tickets was a rental car reservation and a hotel reservation. So I go to the rental car counter for sure. It's actually a rental car. And I go to the hotel that's on the address and it's actually a hotel and I actually get a room. walk into the room and there's another envelope. And the next envelope tells me where I'm supposed to be for an interview, what time, what building the next day. The next day.

So you still have no idea what it is. But what's your thought? Because you're a smart guy, right? So at that time, what are you thinking? It's real. I'm thinking it's real. Okay. And I'm thinking it's definitely sanctioned by the U.S. government, right?

Because what's happening here, if this was fraudulent, it would be very difficult to pull this off. So I'm like, this must be sanctioned by the federal government. And it's making me think that it's definitely sensitive in nature. But it was fun. But it was fun. And that was the dopamine hit to just keep me moving. I can see it. I can see it because you never know what's going to happen the next step or the next day.

So I'm curious. Did you wear the clubbing outfit? You did? To the interview. Because I didn't have anything else. I didn't have anything else. And I was still in that space where you're like, I'm going to be me. I'm going to be me.

And this is who I want to be. And I show up and it's a nondescript building. And I walk into a waiting room in this nondescript building with a handful of other people who were probably just like me, staying in different hotels with different car reservations. And every single one of them is dressed like a government employee. I would imagine. suit, dark suit, yeah, tie.

Yep. Yes. And a bright colored tie on a dark suit with a white shirt or for the women, full pantsuits, all the colors dark, the most, the most adventurous anybody got was a pinstripe. Look at that. And there I am looking like a fucking reject for a nightclub. So then you go into the interview. I go into the interview. In that interview, what happens and do you then realize it's the CIA?

or still no. This is going to sound possibly ridiculously sexist. I walk into the interview and it's a middle-aged, overweight white woman. And I can see on her face that I'm probably the nicest thing to walk into her office in a while. It wasn't until the end of the interview. It was about a three-hour interview. It wasn't until the end of the interview that she was like, my name was Andrew Gregg at the time. She was like, Mr. Gregg, we think that you would be a good.

good fit for the Central Intelligence National Clandestine Service as an undercover intelligence officer and those words I was like the the 2% chance that I had in the back of my head I was like maybe it's like James Bond stuff I didn't even want to I didn't even want to listen to those words for fear that it was going to be like an invitation to the IRS and then when she said it it was just like like like a wave of like yes I I can't say yes fast enough like you're telling me like Like, I'm going to dress like this all the time, and I'm going to have beautiful women in cocktail dresses and Lamborghinis and high-speed boats, and I'm going to stay monocle right away. That's exactly what I thought.

So then what's the next step? Then right away, she was like, it looks like you're accepting that this is the path you're going to take. We built a cover story right then and there because I had to start lying to people immediately. Why did I take that plane trip? Why was I in that city? Why was I gone for those days? and then I needed to have a cover that was going to be consistent for the entirety of the application process. But I didn't have any experience creating a cover story.

But I think based on her knowledge of me, she knew that I could fabricate fairly easily. So she needed to guide my fabrication so that it was more professional than just your typical lie. Now, what about relationships? Because you have family, your friends. Were you in a romantic relationship? I had a girlfriend. You're a girlfriend. So I cut them all off.

Everyone. Yep, every one of them. I loved my girlfriend. She was a wonderful, wonderful girl, but she wasn't as wonderful as a career at CIA was going to be. So I stopped talking to my friends from college. I basically just walked out on my girlfriend and never came back one day. That's essentially how that worked.

Was this on command or on suggestion from them, or no, you just decided to cut them all out. Yeah. The suggestion that I got from the recruiter was you should start wrapping up any relationships that are not serious to you. Because I think that they account for the fact that if you're seriously engaged, if you're married, if you're close to your mom and dad, if you're taking care of an aging parent, like, you're going to continue that responsibility.

But for me, it was an invitation to reset my whole life. Is there any sense of loneliness? knowing that you cannot tell anyone about what at that moment was the greatest opportunity of your life? I'm going to say no, but I'm going to caveat that by saying there was no loneliness that I felt in that moment because I felt like I had found my home. I'm just going home now. Like the people I care about are there at CIA. I just have to get there.

everything else I have to give up to get to the place where I want to go. So I'm on this journey alone to get back to my tribe. That's what I felt like in the moment. In hindsight, after actually getting to CIA, that's when I started to realize when you are part of CIA and the people you meet are part of CIA, they only ever know you as a CIA officer. They have no idea the soup that you came from. Right. So when I cut all those people out and I started my life all over again, it kind of meant that my life started all over again at 27. And everything before 27 didn't exist.

Wow. It was like he hit delete on everything prior to 27. And it's, it's anybody who's ever had a bad relationship where you burn all the photographs or you delete all the pictures or you like scratch their face out of all of your whatever. Like we at some point, you regret that you did that. Yes. because you've eradicated, you've erased this history that you can't even refresh. And there's plenty of positive things that happen

that you want to refresh. And now you are exclusively dependent on your memory. Right. To recall those things. And I don't have a very good long-term memory. So it was a very abrupt, it was one of my first moments in life that I would learn to regret,

that I just terminated everything. and then via con Dios. Look at that. Look at that. So that interview process, I would imagine, continued for what many months. And how long was that? Nine months. Nine months.

So nine months to different tests, et cetera. And then you are then brought into the CIA. Correct. So immediately do you go to training? Is that it? You go to training, but training has different types of phases. Training lasts in general between 12 and 18 months. of which a classified number of months are the most intense field tradecraft course,

your actual skills of learning how to be a technical undercover officer overseas. The rest of the time, you're learning all the other skills that you need, how to defend yourself, how to drive, medical first aid, triage. You're learning how to write an intel report. You're learning how to format them. You're learning how to use the different clandestine systems. you're learning how to file for funding, you're learning how to file receipts,

you're learning how to take care of all the odds and ends that go into supporting an operation. Okay, okay. Is you wanted to be James Bond, are you learning to fight, are you learning to shoot weapons? Is that part of it too? So it's funny,

one of the first things they say to us in the second interview, what have you studied about the job since the first interview? and it was sheer dumb luck that I went home from the first interview and I went to my local library and I got the library card and I got a couple of books out from the library, which in hindsight is a complete break of operational security because now there's a record of me getting books about CIA out after I come back from a trip where I'm interviewing.

Yes. But I didn't know that then. But I get these books out and I start reading about what the job is. And it's a really boring job. and I'm going through book after book, three or four books. I'm like, is this really what the job is? Like, this is like being a misalier again. It's rules and structure and process and secrecy all around really boring topics.

There's nothing in here about having sex with four girls and cocktail dresses in Monaco. Right. Maybe they left that out. So I happen to do a little bit of research to know what the job is. So when I get to the second interview and they ask me, what have you, what's studying? have you done to prepare. I didn't know it at the time. It's a filtering question.

Because two out of every four people that show up didn't do any research. And they can just end the interview right there and be like, you can go home now. I just happened to accidentally be prepared. And I was like, I'm glad you asked that question because it sounds like we do these four or five things and that's not what's in the movies.

And that was my second interview. So by the time you actually get to the first day of training, you've accepted that. Okay. You're not going to live a James Bond life. you're going to live more like the office. More like the office. So specifically, what is the responsibility of the CIA?

CIA's mission is to collect foreign secrets that enhance national security in the United States. We have to go out there and collect secrets that diplomats don't tell other people. We go out there and collect secrets that the generals don't tell other people, that doctors and scientists and military technicians and engineers, That's what we're looking for, is those kinds of secrets. And CIA's job is to collect those secrets specifically from humans in something called human intelligence operations or human operations. So everything CIA officers are taught to do are the technical skills to build relationships

and essentially manipulate those relationships to extract information from people who have been trained and trusted not to give secrets away. Look at that. So this is the job of a spy, you know, and I would imagine what your sense. saying is done in countries all throughout the world. So every country, in essence, has a spy force. Yep. But you're, you said that it's foreign, correct? So then to get into your time at the CIA and what you've learned is that, so you were there, but you become, is it a staff office worker? Yeah. I completed all my training, but very similar to how I went through my

recruitment process, I tried to do it my own way. And while I had the skills to meet the standards, when the last day of training comes, it's a panel of people who subjectively decide whether or not to grant you the status to operate or not. It's literally seven people. After going through in pissing vinegar for my entire training to prove that I could do it myself, I had three people say yes, and four people say no. Wow. And I was not certified. So as a result of that, I was reclassified as a staff operations officer, an S-O-O, which basically

meant that I could do all of the administrative support to operations, but I would never be trusted to go out in the field alone and do anything. Okay. And why do you think you got that verdict? Because I was not the right fit. They, CIA knows that for people to succeed, They have to follow the rules. They have to do what they're told.

They have to stay within this little box of espionage modus operandi, the norms, because everybody works inside this box and that's how you know you can trust each other when you're thousands of miles apart. I came in fed up of the rules. I came in thinking that I was recruited because I was special, not because I was going to follow the rules. So I thought that I was doing myself a service by trying to. to differentiate myself as an independent thinker,

as a creative problem solver. Right. The things that you read about that you hear and you think are important, the movies make you think these things are important when what they were looking for was somebody who was going to conform to the standards of intelligence collection. Yes. Some of my instructors loved my creativity.

Love my kind of radical approach to how I did things. Others really, really did not like it at all. At the end of the day, in the split decision, it was what the numbers came out to be, which was my first kind of wake-up call that CIA is not an empirical organization. It's a subjective organization. And to succeed there, it's not about being the best categorically. It's about being the best at building relationships. Yes. Like so many things in life, right?

Or you could argue like everything? Like everything. Like everything in life. I felt an injustice. I felt an unfairness that a couple of guys on a board could decide that I'm not good enough. Right. Even though all of my numbers prove that I'm good enough. I'm a good enough shot.

I'm a good enough driver. I'm good enough at manipulation. I'm good enough at recording. My memory's strong enough, et cetera. I know I'm good enough. You say I'm not, and that's the final verdict. There's no appeal process. There's no nothing.

I just have to accept it. So it just felt like this incredible injustice. But I had fallen in love with a girl at CIA who was a rock star whose career was the exact opposite of mine, a woman who conformed to every rule, a woman who succeeded everywhere she went. She had the mightest touch in a career field that was brand new. And no matter how many times I tried to cut the dice so that I could leave CIA but not leave her, I couldn't find the way. So I was stuck at this organization in this job that I didn't care for very much because I didn't trust it and it was an injustice to me. But it was what I had to do to stay in her life. To get the girl.

To get the girl. So you did get the girl. Can we talk about the girl? Okay. So one is that we always, well, not we always, but many of us hear that the CIA is. the most expensive dating agency in the world. Yeah. Right.

So there's a lot of dating and marriage that happens internally. Correct. Why is that the case? It's actually quite logical if you really start to think about it. CIA is actively recruiting from all over the nation, the smartest, highest achieving, hardest working, most risk-tolerant, sacrificial, patriotic people it can find. And it's putting you through between nine and 16 months of 10. testing before they let you in the building.

Well, you get all those fucking people together and you put them on an operation that's high stakes, high adventure. They travel the world together. They stop bad guys together. They get shot at together. I mean, that pressure chamber creates sparks. Yes.

And what do you expect these people to do, right? And what CIA has learned over the years is that when those sparks start to fly, every one of those people want to get back to work. But they have this sexual energy right now in this moment. So let them get the energy out and they're going to get their ass right back to work 12 minutes later. So let it happen. And CIA has learned that when people date intramurally, they work longer hours. They come to work earlier. They're that much more willing to conform to the rules of the organization because they want to keep everybody happy so they can keep their dating experience going.

And when the push comes to shove and the step between dating and marriage becomes serious, everybody's also asking the question of how will getting married affect my career? Sure. And if they think that getting married is going to impact their career negatively, they won't get married. And then if they choose marriage anyways, CIA already knows that five years from now, they're most likely going to get a divorce. and when they get a divorce,

they're only going to be loyal to the agency again. Look at that. So it's this incredibly unhealthy culture, but at the end of the day, it benefits CIA's needs. Yes. They bring in great people and they keep great people. And the activity, to your point, it sparks and it forces those relationships together

and then it is approved and endorsed, whereas in most workplaces, it's not. Correct. Although we know that, I think it's roughly Forbes, It's a study around this. Roughly 43% of people go on to date and or marry someone they've worked with, which is incredible. That is incredible.

But I would imagine it's higher if the CIA. And the divorce rate is really depressing. Like, CIA knows that its own rate of divorce inside the agency is over 60%. Is it? So people who get married inside the agency, you are, the odds are you will get divorced while you're still inside the agency. And I can't imagine how hard it is to be married to someone. You know, you're in the agency, but someone outside. How do you do that?

They do it. Your entire life is a fabrication. Exactly right. And the stress builds over time and your partner never understands your priorities and they can't, they don't have the need to know about what you're working on and your biggest successes you can't share with them. So imagine saving the lives of 5,000 people at a soccer game in, in, at the World Cup, you can't even tell your spouse that you did that. You can't even tell your spouse that there was an intervention that saved you. those lives because you don't know what that person's going to say to their mother-in-law or post on

Facebook or tell their kids. And it's so all of your biggest successes you can't even share with your spouse. But you can share it with the girl in the office next door who's in who's with you on the operation at 4 o'clock in the morning. And those sparks happen too. Yeah. Is that how you and Ji, is that how you and Ji came together? Was it a. Yeah.

It's funny because no, that's not how it's together. Yeah. We actually met on the first day of training, the very first day of orientation. I mean first day, first day where they're teaching you about your health insurance and your life insurance and how to... Fun stuff. Yeah. And here's how you submit a leave request. Like that day is when we met.

And all of CIA's orientation happens in a room called the bubble. It's a big auditorium that actually sits outside of the front door. And it's a historic, beautiful place. can look it up on the internet. It's called the bubble at CIA. And I walk into the front entrance of the bubble. And there's this cute girl dressed kind of frumpy sitting by the door to the auditorium. But it's a massive auditorium. And she's sitting at the entrance to the auditorium. Well, I walk right past her assuming she's cute. She's got to be an instructor, though, because she's sitting there. And I work my ass up to like the second row from the front

in between two other girls that are also in the second row to the front and I'm like, this is my jam. The truth is that she was going through an anxiety attack. My wife suffers from general anxiety disorder. She has waves of depression and it affects her gastrointestinely. So essentially every 45 minutes or so

she had to run to the bathroom and throw up. She was so out of her element being at CIA. It was something she'd kind of promised herself she would never do. Right. So here she is, coping with her experience in a completely different way than I'm coping with my experience.

And we both become aware of each other. She becomes aware of me as I walk past her and she notices me because I'm her type. I notice her because she's my type, but I assume that I can't talk to her. And the long story short is, this is good. The long story short is we end up in this emergency meeting where nobody gets to choose where they're sitting and we end up seated right next to each other. getting this emergency briefing from the group director, this is a big important person about this operation that's going on. And when the group meeting lets out,

and she taps me on the shoulder, and then kind of starts to tell me like, hey, I'm actually going through an anxiety disorder right now. And I get sick a lot and I didn't want to make that part of whatever. And for me, my sympathy just kind of immediately went to, is there any way that I can help you not be in such pain all the time?

Yes. that can I say that is incredibly sweet it really is the fact that she was so quickly vulnerable with you is fascinating but it shows how safe she felt with you the fact that you responded with how can I help to soothe the pain right you're trying to hold space for her that was such a compelling first connection you know so would you say very quickly thereafter you two started dating seriously. Yeah, what happened is she says that her anxiety needs

time to manifest. So she didn't have that time to manifest. That's why she approached me. She was like, I could talk to you right then and there because it was a surprise. If I would have known you were going to be there, I would have gotten sick. But there you are. I have no choice. I might as well take advantage of it. And then she also

complimented, or she also commented on the fact that I didn't find her gross or weird or any of that. I kind of accepted it right away. which wasn't me being skilled, it was really just the first thing that came to my mind. Because I hate throwing up. And here this poor girl, I'm making this girl throw up. And I'm like, there's got to be something I can do to help.

Even if it is that I have to stay away from you, just tell me what I can do to help. So it was very natural. But she told me what we could start to do. And we started having lunch together at the agency. We started having what was called, she called them tea times. So we would take tea breaks. Our eight hour work day turned into a 12 to 14 hour work day because we would have two or three dates a day at CIA.

Look at that. We would try to solve the encryption puzzles that were in the main courtyard. We would walk through the library and walk through the map in the cartography rooms. And we explored CIA inside and out because we both had access. And it was a place where she felt safe with me. And that was probably another six weeks to eight weeks of dating on campus before she finally invited me to her place where we had like, chicky-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-yxed. noodle, sir, because she was confident that that wouldn't come back up again.

Wow, look at that. Look at that. Her whole objective was not to throw up, basically. That was, for a long time, that was her whole objective. And the first time that we got intimate, she brought that up. Like, right at the beginning of, like, as we start getting hot and bother, she's like, I feel good. If I start to not feel good, I'll tell you.

And for a brief minute there, I was like, throw up is not going to be sexy. like do I really want to keep pushing through with this? Because I don't really want to be naked and see somebody throwing up on the floor beside me. Right. Right. But she was just irresistible to me. So I was like, let's see what happens.

Let's see what happens. And then after multiple subsequent intimate moments where there was no nausea, we knew we were kind of on the right path. Look at that. And then she gets called on an assignment, on a high risk assignment. And she's supposed to be gone for three days.

So she tells me, hey, I'm going on assignment. I have a need to know that the assignment is something that's outside of my need to know. So she tells me I can't tell you the details. But I can maintain clandestine communications with you. So we have a secret message system that we use at CIA, and we're able to keep communicating on the same encryption channel, even when she's gone. Oh, wow.

Okay. So she leaves. I don't really hear from her at all except for a message every now and then on this channel inside the building. And then about two days into the three-day trip, she sends me a message and says, hey, I've been extended. I've been extended by another five days. I'm like, that's awesome. You must be doing a great job to be extended in this hostile zone.

And she was in a very dangerous place in Central America. But, Andrew, can I stop you right there? So, but this is your girlfriend. She's in a hostile environment. You know it's high risk, that's all. But it's interesting that she's extended. And the first reaction was, that's great. Good for you.

But really, but it's a different world for me. It's a different world. Because my natural inclination is, oh, no. You know, she's there for now. Come back. But that was it. It was good for you. Because I have absolute confidence she can take care of herself.

She might throw up on the way. Right. But she's not going to get kidnapped by a cartel. She's not going to end up being part of some suicide bombing at a church. Like she's so far ahead of the threat because she's so good at what she does. Wow. Right? And she is absolutely charting a name for herself

in one of the hardest agencies to build a name for yourself, especially as a female and a Latina. Yes. In 2000, what is this, nine? This is most impossible. So I'm like, you go and you do you for five more days. Three days after that, I get another message from her. I've been extended two weeks.

So I'm watching as this timeline without her is expanding. And then the thought hit me, what if she doesn't come back? What if one day she's not ahead of the curve? What if one day something terrible happens?

And then I tried to think what I would do next and I couldn't picture it. Like I literally had a void in my vision. I couldn't even see what I would do without her.

Without her. And when that happened, I was like, holy shit, I think I have to marry this girl. Because how can this feeling happen unless I'm supposed to be with her? I have to spend every possible minute that I can with her because if I lose her, everything will be blank. So it was a moment on a day that changed everything. And from that moment, I started to be blank. I started planning my proposal.

You did. So when she returned there, so how soon did you propose? It was about three, three and a half months. Okay. But it was a massive covert influence campaign because she's a fucking genius. And she is sn-she is nosy and she is a research hound. She's a spy. It's like, how do you plan that?

So I had to mount the biggest lying campaign of my life. And I had to start over-exaggerating how much I hate marriage and I'll never be married. And marriage is for idiots. And I used my mom and her second husband as an example. I was like, you see how ridiculous this is? And look at your parents. They don't even like each other. So I'm ramping up all this anti-marriage stuff.

Yes. And I'm literally erasing the cookies from my laptop every 15 minutes to make sure that when she looks at my history, she doesn't see anything. Goodness. So it's this incredibly difficult thing. I'm not working with any of her friends. I'm only working with maybe two of my friends to try to help me iron certain things out so that they can happen on their computers

instead of on my computer. But it worked. So then you propose, and I would imagine it's amazing. I saw a photo. Was that at the mall? At the cherry blossoms. The cherry blossoms, yes.

In Washington, D.C. Yes. Beautiful, beautiful place. Yeah, absolutely credible. Yes. So you proposed. Obviously, she said yes. She said yes.

I had arranged for her parents to be there surreptitiously and my mom to be there surreptitiously. And then my wife, who is like the ultimate introvert and who gets anxious around any kind of crowd, it never occurred to me that I'm going to propose to her in front of the Jefferson Memorial with tens of thousands of people watching. Right. It just didn't. That part didn't click. I was thinking about the leaves and the beautiful cherry blossoms.

But not how popular the place is. So did she say yes immediately, though? She said yes immediately. She shook her head and she was in shock for a few seconds, but then when she finally pulled her hands away from her face, she said yes. She said yes. She kissed me and all that good stuff. So you're married, you're still within the CIA, though. Correct.

Is that what leads you to leave to exit? Was it family? Was it marriage? What was it exactly? That's exactly it, yeah. So we got married in 2010, and then we immediately. immediately, almost immediately, got called into a high-stakes operation together as a married couple. We actually wrote a book about this operation. It's called Shadow Cell. We are very humbled. It's a New York Times bestseller. It's been a very successful book.

Yes. But we, we as a married couple of a targeter and a staff operations officer who has also been trained as a field officer, CIA sees an opportunity to put us on assignment together, which it doesn't often do. But it saw an opportunity to put us on an assignment together to do something that hadn't been done before, to create a new type of operation when CIA identified that they had been penetrated by a mole. So it needed us to create new operations

outside of the reach of a mole. Yes. So for the first few years of our marriage, it was like a movie. It was a blank check for, from CIA, traveling around the world together, doing incredible things all over, incredible adventures, incredible sites, incredible food, all over the world at our discretion, building our shadow cell team and our shadow cell operations because we're fighting against a mole

that's trying to work against us. I mean, it's just... It's a movie. And we were living it. And we were celebrating that every single day. the kind of peak in our shadow cell operation fell out from underneath us because I became a target for a hostile country. And when that country identified me and started to surveil me, both my wife and I realized I may not come home. When I successfully evacuated and got back

to her, we knew that my time in the cell was over. I couldn't go back to the country. I couldn't continue to operate because I was a risk to everybody. Yes. And that changed my career trajectory. So I went from being kind of laughed at at the agency to being somebody who did something significant, but then I was I was kind of lost. What do I do now? So I ended up going into a training category and I started training other people how to do

what we had done. Okay. I only say that because that was our time to catch up again, to breathe. And when we had a breath, we got pregnant. And we were both absolutely ecstatic to get pregnant. I was through the roof excited. It was everything I had ever wanted to become a dad, to become a husband, to work at CIA. You had it all?

I had it all, right? But my wife, immediately, she had a completely different response because she's like, what is a child going to do to my career? What is a child going to do to my anxiety? What is a child going to do to our relationship? she had a much more mature response than my response. I was like, whatever, dancing, you're getting around, right? She was actually thinking responsibly.

But fast forward a year, we have a baby, and CIA doesn't care about our baby. I remember going to my supervisor at CIA and asking for light duty. And I was like, dude, just give me a light duty assignment for two years. Let me get my son into a daycare. Yes. So that I can come back to work. And my supervisor said no. He said, that's not how it works here.

We need you now. You do this now. Your son is not our problem. It was so humiliating as I drove home that day. I was reflecting on the fucking words that came out of my mouth. He was everything I had ever wanted. Right. And somehow I had become so perverted in my relationship with CIA, my employer,

that I was putting them before him. It was the greatest blessing. ever to have that supervisor look me in the eye and just tell me that they don't they don't accommodate for children and when I came back to my wife that night and I told her the story I was like babes I'm done I am done you decide what you want to do but I know now without a shadow of a doubt this is not going to wait that you're done but can you just walk out of the CIA not in 2014 there was no process for it back then they CIA has an attrition had in attrition rates that was about 1.7% annually,

meaning 1.7% of all their clandestine cadre would leave in a year. But the vast majority of them were retiring. And when they retire, they come right back to work the next day as a contractor. So they had no way of processing a mid-career professional who was successful out. So they actually, when I put in my resignation,

they asked me to hold my resignation because they didn't have any way of taking it. So instead, they put me on a leave without pay status. And that's their way of letting me leave because they tell me if you don't come back to work for three months, we will just assume that you've resigned. And we have a process for that. So that's exactly what I did.

And about four days after I started that process, my wife did the same thing. She started the process. She was like, I'm not doing anything without you. So look at that. So you both left the CIA to save you. your family. That's really what you did. We believed we were saving our marriage because we didn't want to be part of the 60%. We believed we were saving our, we were investing in our son and we were investing in

what would become our future daughter. That's what we believed we were doing. But it was hard because for six months, we had no job, no employment, no anything because we were former CIA officers. There's no resume that lets us say that. There's no reference that validates that. We were undercover. Our resume was fraudulent. And it was so fraudulent, we weren't even allowed to write it. The alias document team at CIA had to write our resumes. There were typos, there was bad grammar. There were breaks in time that didn't even make sense. Yeah, that's true, because you can't tell anyone anything. So then that leads me to, well, how can you tell everyone now? when we left, we applied for what was called a cover rollback.

And a cover rollback is when you basically make it somebody else's problem to scrub your entire operational history so that you can go from being a covert officer to being an overt officer. Okay. An officer that's actually accredited with CIA credentials and CIA acknowledges that you work there. It, on average, it takes between one and two years, depending on your operational history. Well, when we left in 2014, we were like, the only people to have ever done it. We had one other friend in our peer group who was doing the same process to try to save

her marriage because she was married to like an attorney or an accountant in New York. So you were the first two to apply for this rollback. So in essence, were you the first two CIA agents to go overt? In that year. In that year. In that year. Okay. So we submitted our applications and then we went out and we went on our own.

It took two full years before we got an email back from CIA saying, your cover has been rolled back. You are acknowledged that you can discuss your operational career, your connections with CIA, et cetera, et cetera, with the exception of your particular operations and their sources and methods. Okay. So we were given our kind of carte blanche approval. And at that point in time, now CIA will acknowledge that we are really officers. If you ask them for a proof of employment, they will give you a proof of employment. And that's what gave us permission to say that we were over at CIA officers. It took so long that I was already employed.

I had been employed for a year and a half and I was doing very well in the company I was in. But I still felt this guilt because I lied to my boss and my boss's boss and all my coworkers to get the job. Yeah, your entire resume was a lie. Yeah. So I felt this conviction like I needed to come clean with somebody. So my boss, I was working for pharmacy in the United States CVS, right? Yes. And I was in their business management.

I was in their admin roles. Okay. And I went to my boss, Tony, and I was like, Tony, I have something to tell you that's a little bit awkward. And Tony was the one who hired me. So Tony was the one who went to bat for me with everybody else. Yes. And I handed him my resume. I'm like, Tony, this is my most current resume.

and this one is real because the first one I gave you when you hired me was fake and it was fake because I was an undercover CIA officer and Tony was like what? And he looks at my resume and he sees all my CIA stuff

that's approved now and he was like, is this for real? And I told him I was like it's real. I was under a legal obligation to lie at the time and I just wanted you to know because I don't want you to get in trouble for going to bat for me.

I don't want you to pay consequence for my fraudulent application. And Tony was like, this is the coolest thing that's going to happen to me. We don't have to tell anybody. So good. That's not tell anyone. Yeah. And Tony's probably super scared of you now.

Yeah. But that's amazing. That's amazing. So that must have been a sense of freedom. Yeah. To have the CIA roll that back for you. And I'm sure that's what allowed you to be able to write Shadow Cell, obviously. you launched, is it Everyday Spy?

Correct. You launched that with GEHE, correct? And so what is Everyday Spy? Everyday Spy is our business. It's an online learning platform. It's the first educational platform that teaches spy skills to everyday people. And our mission is to share spy education

that breaks barriers. We want to break professional barriers, personal barriers, anxiety barriers, depression barriers, mental health, physical health barriers. And it's what we're dedicated to because CIA changed my life and her life when it trained us, when it trained us how to think

and it trained us how to act and it trained us how to make decisions. It trained us how to improve our memory. It trained us in self-defense. It trained us how to drive better. It gave us so much of which only a small amount is still classified, right? That nobody had ever done it before.

No CIA officer had ever tried to teach people how spies think and how spies make decisions. Yes. And the way that we got out of my in-laws' makeshift garage and got a job at all during that period where CIA still had us undercover, that whole fraudulent period of getting the job, all we did was use our spy skills. She targeted an executive. I bumped into that executive. We manipulated the executive's feelings about us and our skills. convincingly to get to a place where we short-cutted the hiring system and got hired immediately

with no interview, no background check at a salary that we negotiated. And it clicked because as you're going through corporate life, I don't know dick all about being a corporate person. But I knew how to be a spy. And I knew how CIA had taught me to shortcut the corporate experience by convincing people I knew what I was talking about. So that's all I did is I just convinced people that I knew what I was. I was talking about, and it kept making the company better because the company would make decisions

and put people in place because it trusted me, and I put people in place because I trusted them, and I knew I couldn't do it myself. Yeah, it's incredible. It's incredible. Hey there, real quick, if you're enjoying this conversation, take a second to hit subscribe and tap the bell icon. It's a small click that makes a big difference. Thank you.

All right, I'm going to get back into it. What are the methods, right? Because I've read, and probably half of it is a myth, maybe more of it, but the methods that are used. So, for example, sex espionage. You know, is that actually done? Sexpionage is used. It's just not used by the United States. Prior to 2001, a lot of operations are complete.

They're not documented. They're not known because it was a wild west. It was directors and small teams. and Friends of Friends and the Good Old Boys Club from all the Ivy League universities. It was them doing whatever they thought would house America. It didn't become professionalized, really,

until after 2001, after the Cold War, after the attacks of 9-11, when the other branches of government started holding CIA accountable. I see. Yeah. I see. And the methods, the techniques are diverse.

Sexpionage is used by the Russians. It's used by the Israelis. It's used by the Chinese. It's used by the Pakistanis and the Indians. It's used by many, many countries. The big differences in the United States, we protect our citizens so that nobody is forced to have sex against their will. When you're ordered to do something, that is against your will.

So that is one of the carve-outs at CIA where we will not order someone to have sex. The Russians absolutely will do that. And the Chinese can skip steps up the organizational ladder if they go, have sex with an American diplomat and steal a bunch of secrets, right? But that's a bridge that our American security apparatus won't cross or hasn't crossed yet. So I noticed in there you said to give the order. So does that mean that you can be a spy in the United States government and still conduct sex spionage, but on your own, your own volition? If you choose to, you can. And what's funny is in our training, they warn us not to do that.

They tell you you always have the option, but we strongly recommend we warn you not to do it. Because the American cultural norm is to equate sex with emotional connection. And it's built into our ethos. It's not built into the Chinese ethos. It's not built into many European ethos. Sex can be completely different than emotional connection. And that's a problem for CIA because sex and connection start to create questions of predictable behavior and who you're loyal to. And the last thing they want is for those questions to exist between you and some foreigner.

Yes. Which has been the most effective skill that you've learned as a spy that you believe is applicable to everyone? It's a skill that we call perspective and perception. So you've heard people tell. you and you've heard people talk about walk a mile in someone else's shoes. Yeah. If you put yourself in their, in their shoes, sit in their seat for a while. These are terms that we toss around, but we don't ever actually do them because most people

don't know how. Like how do you actually think like somebody else? It's almost a ludicrous idea. CIA actually teaches us how to do that. It teaches us how to empathize, sympathize, and rationalize like our target, which gives us a a chance to literally put ourselves in their place mentally and get out of our own perception of the world. If I put myself in your shoes, I have to imagine what you're seeing.

I have to imagine how you must feel in this room at this time with that green jacket on. How does the air feel on your bald head? Very different than it feels on my, my, you know, my hair. Yes. And all of these objective realities that I can imagine help me to experience life. through your eyes. You're coming off of a long trip, leaving tomorrow for another long trip.

You've already had one interview today. I don't know when the last time was you eight. I can start thinking like you think and imagine where you must be in this moment, and you're not doing that for me. And that gives me an advantage. I see it. It gives me an advantage

and it gives me an opportunity to build an artificial relationship with you because I'm going through the motions of sympathizing with you. but you feel like it's real. Yes. So I'm creating something artificial that feels real to you, which puts me in an advantage for this relationship moving forward.

But is that manipulation? That's a great question. What CIA teaches us very early in our training is that you have to consider manipulation as one side of a coin. The other side of the coin is motivation. Okay. When you manipulate or when you motivate, you're doing the same thing. You're getting someone to take an action.

Ideally, an action that you want them to take. But just like a coin, whether it's a pound coin or a quarter coin, the value is actually in the metal. The value is not in the face. Heads or tails doesn't matter. The value is in the actual metal that makes the coin. The same thing is true with manipulation and motivation. When you manipulate someone, you get them to take an action that benefits.

you and is not in their best interest. When you motivate someone, you get them to take an action that benefits you and is in their best interest. I see. Regardless of what you're doing, you get the benefit of the action that they're taking. Okay. So CIA teaches us, try to motivate first, but under no circumstances, do you lose your benefit? So if they can't be motivated to take action, you must know how to manipulate them as well. Interesting. So you've gathered all this incredible intelligence. When you look forward a year, two, three years, what does this world look like?

I wish I had a positive, upbeat, optimistic answer. But what I'm seeing is that we are at the beginning of some of our most painful years. And we need to be, we need to have a hard conversation about it. Yes. because if we handle these next difficult years the right way, we're going to be right back on the increasing curve again in that natural cycle of a relationship. And we'll turn what was 250% into 310%.

We can always turn this ship around. But we can't just imagine it's going to change on its own. We have to become more engaged. We have to learn how to identify facts from falsity. And these things all require effort, just like any good relationship requires effort. It doesn't happen automatically. You have to care enough to invest

because you see the benefit of the transaction. And if you don't see the benefit of the transaction, find someplace else where it does exist. Okay. You can go to a different country. You can find a new partner. You can change your politics. You can disappear off the map

and just meditate in a Zen retreat somewhere. There's lots of things you can do that benefit you. but if you just sit around worrying, that's not the transaction you're looking for. That's not the ROI you want. And so you said that we could be entering some of the most difficult years. What are the top two, three threats

that you see in the next, you know, in the near future? So the biggest threat to me is the geopolitical tension between the east and the west. It's like two cars going towards each other on a highway. They're going towards each other at the speed of both cars. It's not like one car is stationary. Instead, they're both on a head-on collision.

The same thing is true about the paradigm between East and West. The United States and the West used to be the dominant power, and now as we lose ground and the East increases, that's the reason that we are going to risk reaching equality, parity. Okay. In reality, equality is not what we want.

Nobody really wants equality, because once you have equality, competition takes over. Competition means confrontation. It means threats. It means potential violence. So competition is confrontation. The closer we get to parity between the East and the West,

the bigger the chances that we're going to go to war. The bigger the chances that your children and mine are going to have to learn Chinese, which they don't have to learn right now. Wow. Incredible. Andrew, I have to end at this place. We started talking about you. and what is staying with me

is you fighting for your identity as a young man. Now, as a father, as a husband, who are you? What is your identity now? I, in all honesty, I worry that I don't know. I worry that I have gone from somebody who set my identity

based on what other people told me to be, to somebody who has based my identity off of the people I love the most. And I'm still not any more independent and individual than I ever have been. And that I'm, I identify as a father. I identify as a husband. I identify as a, as a uncle.

I identify as a goofball. I identify as all these things that my family sees me as. But when I stand on my own two feet and I look at myself in the mirror, I still don't know. And it's especially confusing because in addition to all of it, I have this professional life too. Yes. And, you know, just like you, millions of people have seen us.

They have their opinions. They have their ideas. They have what they like. They have what they don't like. How much of them gets to have a say and how I see myself. And it's a humbling thing to admit to. But my next personal journey is really to figure out who I am, why I'm in a relationship with myself.

and how to maximize that, that ROI, even back to me. I know how to how to give it to everybody else, but how do I, how do I sleep with myself at night? That's very honest. It's a very honest answer. It's an answer that I believe many of us are struggling with. You know, a dilemma, should I say, many of us are struggling with,

but are not transparently talking about it. And I think it's honorable for you say that. That's why we need to talk. You're good. You're good. You're good. This guy. You're good.

You're good. Is there anything that we have not discussed? So much. That you believe is important for this particular conversation. I think the only thing I would add to this particular conversation, because I can't wait for the next one. I hope that we have a next one. The only thing I would add to this is just I am so happy. that these kinds of conversations can happen now

because you can facilitate it at scale. What if we democratize better relationships? What if we democratize information? What if we democratize math and science and physics? And people can learn this stuff on YouTube. They can learn it in books that are at public libraries. So having a platform where we get to have a conversation

that is hard and transparent, hopefully that is giving somebody the courage to do the same thing. And without you doing this, this conversation wouldn't have happened. Yeah, look at that. No, this is, I completely agree on the importance of these conversations. And not just a conversation. It's also a conversation between men. Yeah.

Conversation between fathers, you know, a conversation between husbands. I think all of those scenarios are equally important. And it's just been an honor, a true, true, true honor to have you here. I can't wait for part two, part three, part four, blah, five. So the last question, everyone gets this is when you think through your life, you've had some incredible conversations, some hard conversations. Which one stands out to you as the most memorable? Who was it with?

And what did you learn? Don't let me end us on a downer. I'm going to tell you the truth. To tell me the truth, yes. My mother had a conversation with me when I was about nine years old. I was complaining about my stepdad to her. It was a time when he was trying to force me to read more because he didn't think I was doing well enough in school

or he thought he wanted to keep me busy. So I didn't bother him. And she defended him. And she was like, you should read. You should do what he tells you to do. It's a good idea. You don't need to spend your somewhere outside. And I asked her, why are you defending him?

Why do you always defend him? Why don't you ever take my side? And she looked at me and she said, Andrew, I love him more than I love you. And I was shocked. I was just stunned. And I was like, how can you say that? How can you say that you love him more than you love me? I'm your son.

And she repeated. it back to me and she was like, you're my son and that's exactly why I love him more. I have to choose every day to love him. But I love you automatically. I have to put work into loving him. It doesn't take any work to love you. So she's like, I have to put more into that relationship. I love him more than I love you. Never to this day have I ever forgiven that conversation. It sounds like, it sounds horrible, it feels horrible, the message that it carries with it is horrible, but I can understand her perspective because my mother was raised in a household of transactional relationships that were unhealthy. Women subjecting themselves to male wishes, women subjecting themselves

to religious standards, that's where she grew up and that's why she ran away from all that. But even though she ran away from it, she was still wired that way, so she sees everything as as counting coins. At least she did when I was nine. So had that conversation not happened, I would have never really known where I land in my mom's priorities. But because that hard conversation happened, I was able to adjust my behaviors for the rest of my life so that I never over-relied on my mother. I never put too much at stake in that relationship. I never risked really being disappointed by her because I never really put my full faith in her

after that conversation. I still love her. I still think she's a successful and wonderful person, but I know I can't let it ride with her. Wow. It's a hard conversation at nine. At nine, you know, you got having hard conversations, honestly. I mean, that's, that's as hard as it gets. at nine, for you to process that in that way at nine as well is extraordinary.

I think that a lot of my success, what's the success I've had, I have to give credit to my mom and dad because had they given me any other option, I wouldn't have become a convincing liar. I wouldn't have become someone who is willing to take huge risks. I wouldn't have been someone who commits so radically, so early on. I would have been a different person. But they gave me no other option. And that turned into the life and the career that I've had. That's what brought me this amazing life.

That's what brought me my amazing kids. Yes. Yes. You're right. Without having walked through that storm at a young age, you wouldn't be in the sunshine today. Yeah, for sure. Well, I'd tell you what, I definitely, definitely loved speaking with you.

I knew I would. And we're all richer for it. So thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Like, honestly. thank you. Thank you, man. I really appreciate you making time. Well, first, can I say, I see why he

was a CIA agent. He read me like a book. He looked at me, he was like, you're hungry. And I was hungry. And I was legitimately hungry. It is the real life, Mr. Mrs. Smith, the real life, James Bond, Jason Bourne. Like, he is the real deal. And it's a privilege to be able to talk to someone who has lived that life and is able to talk so openly about it. I am going to now profile every single person. Like, Scott, I'm profiling you right now.

But to truly put myself in the shoes of the person that I am talking to, negotiating with, interviewing. And it's something that I do do, but I think that I will do it. to a deeper degree now. When he sat down, what I didn't pick up was how much profile he was profiling he was doing of me. So he is the first person that when he walked in and I typically give a tour of the set, that he analyzed the photos.

What he was doing is he was building a profile of me What do you think he thinks? This is so meta. I think he thinks that I think that he thinks. Oh my God. No, here's what I honestly believe. I don't think he can see life any other way than how he was taught to see life as a spy.

I believe that's how he views life. So he surveilled me prior to us sitting down. And as we continued the conversation, he was, that was surveillance. And he only knows how to act on his surveillance. That's what he did. But I've walked away now not thinking that that has to be nefarious. Yeah. It doesn't. It doesn't.

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