November 28, 2025 • 55 mins
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
-The SOFREP Team
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Anthony Vinci, PhD, is a technology and national-security executive, entrepreneur, and former U.S. intelligence official. He earned his doctorate in International Relations from the London School of Economics, after earlier studies in philosophy at Reed College and the University of Oxford. Vinci served as an intelligence officer in multiple global theaters before being appointed the first Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director for Capabilities at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, where he led major initiatives in artificial intelligence, geospatial intelligence modernization, and public-private technology partnerships. In the private sector, he has founded and led technology companies focused on geospatial analytics and artificial intelligence, and has held senior roles at major firms including Bridgewater Associates. He continues to work at the intersection of emerging technology and national security and serves as an adjunct senior fellow with leading national-security research organizations.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Root for us.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
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listening to self web Radio, Special Operations, Military Nails and
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Speaker 3 (00:41):
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(02:05):
I'm totally not surprised to be right here talking to you.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
But I'm acting like it. So what's up.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
This is softw REP Radio and welcome to your first
episode or video. If this is the first time you're
tuning in, if you've listened and you're a veteran.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
Of SOFTWAREP Radio, welcome back.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
You know who I am, and you know how this
is about to go, and you probably know who my
guest is already. But first, before I introduce you to
my guest, say it with me. The merch store soft
reap dot com forward slash Merch Go check it out.
We've got lots of cool items. The holidays are upon us.
You might want to get a little something for yourself.
Spoil yourself, go ahead and spoil me, spoil someone else
(02:43):
around you, get them a little something. And then second
is our book club and that soft rep dot Com
Forward slash Book hyphen Club. So it's the gem for
your brain reading a book. Knowledge is power. You hear
it all the time. We can't stress it enough around here.
We have so many folks that come on the show
that write books, that read books. It's just so powerful
(03:03):
to hear their message. So please go read a book
and check out the softwarep dot Com Forward slash Book
hyphen Club where it's curated for viewers like you, from
people like Brandon Webb and in the special operations community. Okay,
So the book that I would like to probably hopefully
try to get into the book club if my guest
(03:23):
will work with us Anthony Vincey, who is written his book,
let me just read this to you correctly. He is
the author of the book The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, The
Future of Espionage and the Battle to Save America. He
served as the first Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director
for Capabilities at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
Also known as an MGA. Earlier in his career.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
He served as an intelligence officer in Iraq, Africa, and Asia.
After leaving the world of intelligence, Anthony became an executive
at a private equity firm. Is now the CEO of Vico,
an AI company, which is what is AI staff wor
again automated interface, but it's actually artficial intelligence.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Yeah, I forget that, dude, I forget I'm living in
AI days.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
He has a company.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
It's a democratized democratizing intelligence analysis and super empowering analysts.
Anthony is also an Adjective Senior Fellow at the Center
for a New American Security. He received his PhD in
International relations from the London School of Economics. I want
to welcome you to the show, not butcher your bio,
but it's nice to have you here.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
Thanks for having me man, super excited.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
So intelligence you were Is that army or was that
a military branch that you were in with this intelligence?
Speaker 5 (04:49):
Well, I was a civilian intelligence officer. I was with
DA and I was I was a case officer. So
that's somebody who.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Goes out in the field and recruit spies and them
to provide information.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
So did you like go from I want to be
on the baseball team to a spy, to the civilian
spy sector. I, you know, I.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Like a lot of a lot of other guys, was
of a generation where nine eleven happened when I was young,
and as soon as that happened, I was like, I
want to get in a game. My dad was a marine,
my brother is a marine. I just sort of assumed
that I would be serving. And I realize that, you know,
the intelligence world was the right one for me. I'd
(05:33):
already lived abroad, you know, I knew what it was like.
You know, like, this is this is how to get
in that game, and this was important for the country
at that time.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
That's amazing.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
So did you just like google how to apply to
this DA?
Speaker 4 (05:47):
Is that what you said? Or CIA? What was the
acronym you threw out.
Speaker 5 (05:51):
There, DA Defense Intelligence?
Speaker 4 (05:54):
Yeah, okay, okay, yeah.
Speaker 5 (05:58):
That's literally the way you do. I mean, that's what
most people do. You just sort of google and you're like,
how do I go do this job.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
I talked to some friends as well who were kind
of knew a little bit about that world, and they
sort of pointed in different directions and were like, here's
here's the place, and you literally put your application in online.
How old, oh man, I was in my mid twenties. Wow, yeah,
(06:28):
I think it was probably twenty seven when I applied.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Yeah, that's crazy, that's that's incredible. It's like, you know,
I mean, hey, I believe it. You speak other languages
as well.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
At the time, I spoke a little bit of Arabic.
It's it's completely gone.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
It's oh I see, I see, I see. That's what
they all say.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
That's what they all say now in Hillah, yeah yeah,
in Sila, yeah, awesome, Mama lakam you see it's okay. Yeah, yes,
I love that. And so you know, Chukrin see here,
it's good, it's good. I just have questions, you know
what I mean for you dude and my listeners like
Rad ask him questions, bro.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Crack the egg? You know? How do we crack the
egg and scramble this? So? As a DA.
Speaker 5 (07:16):
Operative, Yeah, intelligence officer.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
Are you looking for? I mean, are you literally like?
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Okay, I'm thinking of like the Saint with Val Kilmer,
where he was like I am Saint so and so
and he's like, you know, different load outs, different faces,
mission impossible, you know, you know, is that.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
Something that worth I'm thinking about you like I would.
Speaker 5 (07:37):
I like to think about it like this.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
You want to know what's going on in you know,
southern Afghanistan or Iraq or China. And you know we're Americans,
we we grew up here. We probably don't know that
many people there. How are you going to get that information?
Speaker 5 (07:58):
Right?
Speaker 1 (07:59):
And you to get that is you want to get
a local guy. Yeah, you want to get somebody who's
got that placement and access.
Speaker 5 (08:05):
He lives there, he knows people.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Maybe you know, back during the kind of global war
on terrorism day, maybe this guy you know had friends
who were involved with with with terrorist groups someone like that,
or maybe he works at a government agency that you
want to get information from.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
You got to go get one of those guys.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
You're not going to walk in yourself, right, And so
what you do is you learn how to find those
people and recruit them to come work for you.
Speaker 5 (08:36):
You know, you're essentially convincing them to commit treason you know,
on their own, right.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Yeah, it's like you got to get human intelligence. So
humid is what you're going after there by somebody human
intelligence and there's like oh sit, there's like you know,
open sourced intelligence where you can find all the information
about somebody online and they're like, how did you know
all this about me?
Speaker 4 (08:57):
It's like, well, you wrote a daily journal every day.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
I knew you were going to be on vacation for
eight days because you post it every single day.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Some people say about human it's the it's the int
or the intelligence of last resort. So you know, first
maybe yeah, you try to look it up online, some
open source intelligence. Maybe you use signals intelligence, you know,
and or geo intelligence like you you use imagery.
Speaker 5 (09:20):
Maybe from satellite.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
But if you really can't find it any other way,
the only way to get in that room or to
get that piece of information is to get another human
being to do it.
Speaker 5 (09:30):
Then that that's where somebody like me came in.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Okay, now let's flash backwards to World War Two.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
Okay, you have people inside of our.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
Own you know, allies that are like not they sympathize
with what Hitler is doing in World War Two, and
they're like, oh, it's no big deal.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
You know, it's not affecting us.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
And you got people inside try to like you know,
thwart any type of like you know, problem against him. Now,
you probably haven't understanding of World War two stuff. I mean,
I mean, you know, there's spy versus spy. You know,
they're like trying to get in and you know four things.
Do you have any conversation about that?
Speaker 5 (10:12):
I mean, look, this is the nature of intelligence, right.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
We have guys on our side who want to collect
information on the other guys. They don't want us to
collect that information, so they have counterintelligence. They're trying to
find you know, like I was saying, I recruit a
spy to go spy on your government agency.
Speaker 5 (10:32):
They're trying to find that guy. So it's just back
and forth. It's that spy verse.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Spy, like you said. And that's been going on. That
goes back way further than World War Two. That's been
going on since the dawn of humanity. Some people, you know,
some people called intelligence the second oldest profession, and.
Speaker 5 (10:50):
So in World War two.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Special about that for America though, is that I think
of it as the big Bang for American intelligence because
we did really have centralized intelligence before that. We kind
of had military intelligence. During the war, we would spin up,
you know, reconnaissance and intelligence function, we would turn it,
we would turn it off during peacetime.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
We didn't like to have intelligence.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
And in World War Two we created something called the OSS,
which was really our first spy agency.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Right, and again that was in conjunction with like kind
of the British right where you know, the whole thing and.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
The guy out of Australia.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
I think who created the OSS, who was like a
dual spy, and it was like, what side is he
really on? Well he was buried with like American honors,
So there's kind of that, you know, I can't remember
how the spy. Forgive me for forgetting. I've actually done
a book interview about him. But yeah, you're right, the OSS, Okay,
And now that led to what we know is like
(11:53):
the CIA.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
Yeah, I mean we look, we were so.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
We had such a distaste for intelligence in America. There
was this guy, Henry Stimpson. He was the Secretary of
State in the Secretary of War. He sort of said,
sort of notoriously said, gentlemen, don't read each other's mail.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
Like that was how we felt.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
We felt like it was distasteful, it was ungentlemanly to
spy in a way. And actually after World War Two,
Truman shut down the OSS and he said he didn't
want there to be an American Gestapo.
Speaker 5 (12:30):
So for a couple of years there in the beginning of.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Cold War, we didn't have any spy agency. You know,
we kind of had some stuff going on in the
army and the State Department.
Speaker 5 (12:37):
That was it.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
And then nineteen forty seven they set up the CIA
because we realized, you know, look we're going up against
a big boy now. We were in a Cold War
with the Soviet Union and they had the KGB, and
those guys don't mess around, and we need our own,
we need our own permanent, peacetime professional agency.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
And that was a CIA, right, just take a lot
everything under their umbrella that was just not military per
se related.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
You know.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
I've also we've all seen like clear and present danger
from Tom Clancy where you know, Willem Dafoe and his
men are just like cut off. It's like, just let
them get out of it by leave them there. Like
they send these guys in to do a mission and
then they just canceled the mission. Rambo's the same thing,
Rambo First Blood Part two. He goes in to get
the POWs out. It's all like under the CIA guys
(13:27):
and all this discrete, you know, clandestine, and then all
of a sudden the very end, it's like, yeah, just
don't pick him up. He gets there and gets the
mission done. He finds the POWs. They didn't want to
find that. They didn't want to find the intelligence.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
We the OSS did both intelligence collection. They also did
special operations right and the and the OSS was in
many ways kind of the precursor to the Green Berets,
and Aaron Bank was a member, and then and the Seals.
They had the first maritime unit well before the Navy.
(13:59):
They were willing to, you know, use scuba gear before
anybody else. And the CIA kind of continued that because
they had both intelligence collection this is by law, and
covert action. And in covert action, you're doing those things
that other agencies can't do. You're you're doing things that
are deniable by the government. And some of them can
(14:23):
be direct action. Some of them could be you know,
influencing other people, say politically, you're influencing.
Speaker 5 (14:32):
Some of them could be supporting, you.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Know, opposition groups in other countries. There's lots of types
of covert action. They had that piece as well as
information collection, and really intelligence is about information collection and analysis.
That's the vast majority of what's done you know, president
needs to make a decision. Somebody's got to give them
information to make that.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Decision, right, You would think that they would want to
have this, you know, briefing, daily briefing given to them
or what Hey, here's what's going on on the the net.
You know, you might want to think about it. They're
doing this over in this country or they're trying to
do this to our country. Do you have any concern
about that or just gentlemen's game, sir. Yeah, you know,
let's not look at their mail. It's like what we
got their mail? Hmm, hold the light.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
I mean now we're now we're seemed to be perfectly.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
Comfortable completely Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess covert
operations would be like you know, in Afghanistan when Masuri
Sharif was being under you know, uh suppression by like
see what thirties. I think the first casualty was Mike
Span who was a.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
CIA you know, uh KIA.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Killed in action during that Masri Sharif, that would be
the same. That's that's he's he's on the ground, you know,
under that guy's and we all know about him because
he was k iaight unfortunately, and you know I mean,
you guys are are putting yourselves in the line of fire.
You know, you're doing things to make sure that guys
(15:59):
like myself can have this podcast, you know, under the
guise of the American flag freedom right, so we can
do the things that we want to continue to do
and our neighbors.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
And I don't think anybody's really ready.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
I asked this question around my circle here in Salt Lake,
you know, to people around me. I'm like that, I'm like,
are you ready for a hypersonic missile to come blow
up the car wash while you're standing there?
Speaker 4 (16:20):
Are we ready? Do you even have? Are you ready
for that?
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Because like what's going on in like Ukraine and how
of a sudden super missile comes in and just blows
up the park. You know, people are just having a
normal day and then the sounds and the tonightis and
the ears and then the ringing and then like all
of them when the smoke settles and the calamity, It
is like, are we ready for that?
Speaker 4 (16:39):
Here?
Speaker 3 (16:40):
I don't think so, you know, we're just walking around
kind of like, oh, we believe in guys like yourself
or the Navy seals that run the sites, or the
green berets do their jobs in the closeness of night.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Yeah, Look, there are guys down range in the military
and intelligence who kind of take the ultimate risks, right,
And a lot of intelligence guys it might just be you,
it might be one guy.
Speaker 5 (17:04):
Right, You're just out.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
There and there's there's maybe there's no backup, right, and
and if something goes wrong, you only have you know
your wits and your planning to kind of get out
of that. And that can be really scary, and it
takes a lot of courage, It's true. It takes a
lot of bravery. Military obviously has the same and there's
(17:26):
there are a lot of guys in the intelligence community
served in the military before they came and.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
You know, you see you say these guys are down range.
Don't you think we're all kind of downrange today? With
the internet and you know, I mean a little bit
of this.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
I think that there's a there's there's a war going
on also right versus like the missiles and the guns
and the trenches. There's these keyboard wars that are going
on right now that maybe people aren't paying attention to
where they're collecting data or there's bad actors in the
world that are trying to gather information based off of
your post.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
You hit the nail on the head. There used to
be they called it in the Cold War the fold
of Gap. You know this that the Soviet Union would
invade Europe through the folder Gap is kind of a
region in Central Europe.
Speaker 5 (18:14):
Now that fold of GAP's on our cell phone.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Right, We're all the edge, we are all the perimeter,
and they are.
Speaker 5 (18:22):
Trying to collect information.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
And when I say they, I mean China, Russia, Iran,
North Korea, places like that there, and they are trying
to collect information from people, but they're also trying to
change their minds. You know, they've realized that the American
citizen is the soft underbelly of this nation.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
Right.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
We are the ones who vote, We're the ones who.
Speaker 5 (18:48):
Run for Congress. We're the ones who work in the military.
We are the ones who work at a company.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
That maybe builds technology like AI for the military.
Speaker 5 (18:58):
We are the soft underbelly.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
And so for decades we kind of got used to
this idea that it's like presidents and generals and kernels
and people like that were the targets, and now we're
all the targets, and that.
Speaker 5 (19:13):
Is a massive change and really the core of.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
What my book's about and what I wanted to write about,
because I don't think people realize what's really going on.
Speaker 5 (19:26):
You see stuff in the news.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
You hear oh tiktoks of danger or oh there is
another hack of a healthcare system, and it's just these blips,
but they all add up to something, which is we're
all being targeted, and now we need to all protect
ourselves because we're all being targeted.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
I mean, what about these companies that you know, I've
been I've done it where I've spit in the tube
and I've sent it off to see how the family
all reacts to each other's DNAs, you know, and then
you hear that, you know, all that information.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
Could be just sold to somebody else as a business.
It's much at all, you know what, Yeah.
Speaker 5 (20:03):
It's much worse than that.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So you spit that to and first it can be stolen,
maybe somebody can hack in and take it from the company.
But what's even worse is that most likely that company,
even if they were American, probably sent your spit to
China to have it tested there because they can operate
like everything else. Right, They're just it's just cheaper to
(20:28):
do things in China on purpose for some of these
things they're they're subsidizing businesses like this, and so they
most likely do actually have a lot of people's DNA
sitting over there, and there are companies like BGI Genomics
is a big Chinese pharmaceutical and biotechnology company. And not
(20:50):
only are they collecting DNA from people all over the
world there there there is evidence that they're they they
are are in contracts with the People's Liberation Army with
the PLA, so.
Speaker 5 (21:06):
That information.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
That DNA your genetics is possibly going directly to the
People's Liberation Army and who knows who else, most likely
their intelligence community as well, because in China, their intelligence
community can ask for any information they want from any
Chinese citizen or any Chinese company, any to them they want,
(21:29):
and there's no recourse. They can just go in and
take it and say, yep, that's mine.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Interesting, you know what I mean, because like I guess
you could start thinking about like if they can just
I mean, what like we all sign up to Instagram
or we all sign up to the local website and
upload our credit card information, and you know, it's just like, oh, hey,
buy now with three taps of your thumb on you know,
on a I don't even want to say their website,
you know, because I don't want to give them any
(21:57):
like respect about that. But you know they're not doing
proper humans a arryan, you know, workforce. They're using underage
kids to make your clothing, and it's fast clothing. But
yet you side right up and you just say, oh,
it's only six bucks versus thirteen dollars locally, let me
just buy it for six bucks and have it sent
to me.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
But they have all that information from you.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
You could have shopped locally and supported the local neighbor
that sells the same thing. But you know, they do
sell it so much cheaper because they just want to
gather the info which we just give thinking it's just
a normal thing.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
We just give it away and we don't think about
it as a security concern, whereas we don't. Most of
us don't think like intelligence officers, and for decades or
centuries of the American life, we didn't have to, and
now we kind of do. Weirdly, we have all learned
(22:54):
to protect our computers, right we have.
Speaker 5 (22:57):
You know, we teach five year.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Old CyberSecure, and we say, you know, you have to
use a password, and you have to you know, and
if you see a weird email, don't open it.
Speaker 5 (23:06):
It might be it's a different sing.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
So we've learned to protect our computers, but we've never
learned to protect ourselves, to protect our own minds. We
don't even think about that as a security issue, but
it is right there. We need to start thinking about
it that way and training people, even training kids, to
(23:29):
think about, Hey, when somebody's collecting your information, when you're
giving away information, it might not just be you know,
to sign up for an email list you want to
be on. It might it might be going somewhere bad
and those people might not have your best intentions at heart.
And it's even worse than them just trying to maybe
steal some money from you. They might be doing this
(23:52):
to harm your your community or harm your country.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
I mean, they might try to figure out what makes
us tick in a bio way to use you know,
bio on us that we could not you know, vaccine,
vaccine against or you know, thwart or use any type
of like over the counter medication to stop It's just like,
what do you do you know, it's like, here comes
a super a superflu And I say that because there's
(24:18):
a movie and it's called The Sword of the Stone
and it's a Disney cartoon and it has Merlin and
Arthur and he pulls the sword. But during that he
battles mim Okay, Merlin battles another wizard mime and they
try to battle. He turned into fiery dragons, and then
they turn into a mouse and an elephant, and then
(24:39):
at the end, he turns into a biological cold and
she's in bed with a thermometer and.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
She's He's like, I've turned into the cold, bro. You
can't get rid of that, you know what I mean.
And so.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
To kind of bring it full circle, you know, biological
warfare obviously it's wizards, Okay, it could be out there,
you know, it has to be something on the intelligence circuit, right.
Speaker 5 (25:09):
Well, if you want to get dark for a.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
Second, yeah, I do.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
During apartheid in South Africa, the South African government had
a program a biological warfare targeted specifically at black people that.
Speaker 5 (25:24):
Would affect black people and not white people. So they
went there. Now this was decades ago.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
They didn't have the capability to genetically engineer a disease,
but they they kind of showed that it's possible for
a country to do this, and it is extremely scary
to think of today where people have seen how bad
and a pandemic can get economically, how many people can die,
(25:53):
And we do have the engineering capability to engineer diseases,
and we are talking about a country like China that
is sitting on the genetic information of millions of people,
and it is conceivable that that would happen. That isn't
science fiction anymore. That's within the world of possible.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
Now.
Speaker 5 (26:16):
I don't know if that's happening, and hopefully it's not.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
But this is where you know, the intelligence community and
the military and people like this come in is to
try to protect us from those threats. But we also
need to protect ourselves and be careful about where we
send information, like our own genetics.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
We all need to be our own little internal intelligence
officer inside.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
We all need to be a little bit.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
More cautious with our personal details, finances and things that
we post up online or what seems so innocent. You know,
you open up a cruise ship app and you're entering
your information and is their site secure?
Speaker 4 (26:58):
Yeah, you know, and it's the small guys that can
get hit.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Think like a spy, you know, be kind of a
citizen intelligence officer. That may be necessary. And look, I
don't think.
Speaker 5 (27:13):
That it's like we all need to be sitting around
paranoid all the time. Sure, but you know we're all raised.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
You grow up and you're taught Okay, this is a
bad neighborhood. Be a little more careful. Don't leave your
valuables in the car. Put your wallet into your front pocket, right, Like,
we're all raised in a way to protect ourselves.
Speaker 5 (27:33):
And by the way, in the Cold War we're raised.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
You know, people were raised to hide under their desks
and say of a NUCA missile coming in, and today
kids are taught to hide in case of an active shooter.
Speaker 5 (27:44):
So KRULDN realize there are bad things. We know there
are bad things.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
In the world, and it's just prudent to say there
are other bad things. And maybe that's collecting information, and
maybe that's trying to convince me of something. Maybe when
I'm on you know, something like TikTok, which is Chinese
owned and they not only can, but but it's been
proven do use it for censorship and other information control.
(28:11):
Then you should be prudent and we should be aware
of these kinds of threats and act accordingly.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
I mean even video games. I can think of a
very popular.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
Game out there, and I usually like to like invest
in a company that has video games, and if you
have to like buy in on the video game for
points or bucks or you know, any of that kind
of thing, I'm like, well, if they're going to collect
money from everybody, I'm what's their stock value?
Speaker 4 (28:36):
That's my first thing. So this one company I looked up.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
You know, my daughter was into this game and it
was very popular, and I was like, what are you
spending money on there? She's like, oh, this game. And
I was like, oh, what's that game called? Right, That's
all I wanted to know. And I walked away and
I'm like, why she spending you know, twelve bucks to
get points on this game to build her load out?
So I google it and I'm like, oh, it's only
owned by three people, not in America, out of China
and or you know, in that area of Asia. And
(29:02):
I was just like, well, how do I buy stock?
I'm like, is this an open traded It's like no,
it's privately owned. I'm like, wow, you know they're getting
three people have access to this huge video game platform
and they're just collecting everybody's data, your strokes, your keystrokes,
everything that you're doing through that game. Nobody really reads
I think the user agreements, the privacy agreements, and if
(29:25):
they are I mean, are they honestly the real thing?
Speaker 4 (29:27):
But still, I mean you're doing it.
Speaker 5 (29:29):
You just did it right there, right, You did some
due diligence I did.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Yeah, you thought like an intelligence officer, you kind of
learned something and you dug into it and that that's
what people will need to do. And we can do
that for anything, right, and we can go and say, hey,
there's a new we're so used to this technology as
American owned, right, and like it's safe in some way
and it's regulated and it's not me.
Speaker 5 (29:53):
But all of a sudden, yeah, all of a sudden,
like some of it's not right. And so it just
take can you know that one minute to say.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Let me, let me dive a little deeper into this
and see and see what's really going on and are
people talking about.
Speaker 5 (30:09):
This being a problem. Is it a thread? Is my
information going somewhere? I don't want it? Are they are?
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Is it known that this is maybe a state owned
enterprise by the Chinese government, and so it's and just
literally it might take a minute, may take five minutes.
You put it into chat GPT and then you can
make a decision. And that doesn't mean not doing anything.
We're all going to buy Chinese stuff, right, like it's
impossible to live.
Speaker 4 (30:32):
I'm not against that, right exactly.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
I'm just saying, but now you're making an informed decision
like a president would, right, And you're saying.
Speaker 5 (30:40):
Okay, I know this.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Now I can assess the risk and I'm willing to
live with it, or maybe I'm not.
Speaker 5 (30:46):
And we need to do it for our kids too, because.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
They make intelligence exactly.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
So I gathered the intelligence and then made a decision
and just was like, well, I told my daughter. I
was like, hey, do you ever think about this because
the other things I've invested in there seem to be
openly traded or on the stock market, you know, and
I find that to be a little bit you know,
they've probably follow some type of ethical code.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Yeah, yeah, there's some transparency, like you could be kind
of sure they're going to follow some rules. They probably
have some level of cybersecurity and you know, government regulation, right.
Speaker 5 (31:21):
And so you you made that assessment, right, and you.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Because because there's going to pick that open sourced intelligence
or the intelligence were given somebody through these apps or these.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
You know, social media platforms.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
And it's even the current big dogs social media platforms,
all the main four whoever you go to, you know,
all of them out there. It's like they're all gathering
our information. And it's not just China, it's America. It's
like these guys are in America and they're gathering information,
you know, for their new glasses that you are going
to wear now and that's going to zoom right into
(31:54):
your career cerebral cortex.
Speaker 4 (31:57):
All this information just flooding in. You know.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
It's like, you know, we're just getting pegged for all
of our info.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, I mean, look, the same thing does happen. American
companies take information and that's how that whole economy works.
Speaker 5 (32:12):
In social media.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
But there is a big difference between an American company
and a Chinese one when it comes to this.
Speaker 5 (32:18):
You know one, Look, they're also American citizens.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Primarily running these companies, and they have to abide by
laws and if they do something wrong, they can be
brought to court.
Speaker 5 (32:29):
That's not the case in China.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
CEO of that company does something that is very illegal
in America, there's nothing we can do about it. That
guy lives in Beijing or Shanghai or something, and there's nothing.
Speaker 4 (32:41):
Coming all China.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
In China, it's like what's yours is theirs, and what's
theirs is theirs in China. So the Chinese are like, hey,
I don't see many people in the provinces running you know, cryptomind.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
All the people that live out in the different areas
that are enfranchised from the rest of the big dogs
in China, there's not a lot of folks don't realize
that the people are struggling to just maintain a life.
And then there's the people at the very top that
just are running the whole show and just gathering all
the information. Like you said, they can just go to
Company A and say give us all your information. So
(33:16):
everything over there really just works for you know, the
government of China.
Speaker 5 (33:21):
Yeah, exactly. I mean you bring up a good point. Look,
this isn't about Chinese people. No, Chinese people are like
American people.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
They're just living their life, working at a job, doing
their thing. It's the government, it's the regime, it's the
Communist Party, and that that party is I believe bad
for the Chinese people. I mean they commit you know,
atrocities on people, and this is well documented. These are
not good people and they do you know, they want
(33:50):
to do worse to us.
Speaker 5 (33:52):
You know, think of what they're doing to their own
people and.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
What they would do to us if they consider us
the the you know, they consider us in some way
as an enemy.
Speaker 5 (34:01):
And so but that.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
Also gets at how how it is different there. Everything
is controlled from the top down, right. I mean that
there there are other sources of power. I mean, province
is not power, and you know they're big companies.
Speaker 5 (34:17):
But like really, at the end of the day, Jijingping.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Can do whatever he wants and he can dig down
deep and tell anybody to do what he wants. And
we don't have that here. And that's a big difference.
And the and there is a separation. Sure, maybe you're
on this, maybe you're on Instagram or you're on you know,
you're on x or you're on you know, social media
company here, but the government, our government can't just go
(34:43):
and walk in that door and say give me all
your data, and I want you to do I want
you to take this person and kick them off, and
I want you to silence this.
Speaker 5 (34:51):
They don't have control. We don't do that. We have
a separation. They don't have that separation.
Speaker 4 (34:55):
Then what do you think about our current president Trump.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Only a social media platform like that with his truth platform,
where he does capture everybody's information on there.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Yeah, look, I think there's a slippery slope where I
think everybody believes in freedom and speech in this country,
and the last thing any of us want to happen
is for our government to control what we're saying. I
know I feel this way. I think everybody does. It's
fundamental to who we are. And so we want to
(35:31):
look at our government and know that it's not trying
to control what we say, what we do at a
really deep, fundamental level as citizens. And so we've just
got to hope that the system, the laws in place,
the checks and balances in place, ensure.
Speaker 5 (35:53):
That any actions by.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Anybody in the government, president, or anybody else don't range
on those basic rights.
Speaker 5 (36:02):
And if they do, that we stop that from happening.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
You know, by making it illegal, forcing a divestia, sure,
you know, forcing some separation. And to me, that's just
like core to who we are as a nation.
Speaker 4 (36:20):
That's very good to hear, very good to hear.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Now, you know with all of these different things like
medical records, financial records, the data breaches that happen here
and there that.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
People just seem to blow off. You know, oh, hey, don't.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Forget that so and so's credit checking company, you know
that tells you your credit score has had a breach.
Do you want to join the class action and get
twelve cents back? It's like, well, wait that twelve cents back?
What got breached?
Speaker 4 (36:47):
Right? And so what's that being used for?
Speaker 3 (36:50):
And you know who took that and what are the
actors like? And you know, I guess we are just
so trusting with our devices that are in our hand.
Living in the US or wherever you may live, you
may feel just confident in your hometown of wherever that's at.
Speaker 4 (37:05):
Even if you're in England.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
You may feel like you have some freedom, right, freedom
of looking on your phone and now there's now there's
this thing on your phone and you're in your country,
but that thing's not in your country. It's on your phone,
but it's coming from a third party like uh, North
Korea or you know, Russia or China or like you said,
you know, any of the different acts of evils whoever
(37:28):
they decide to call them today, you know, but it's
it's right here, so you feel kind of safe, you're
in your own home. You're like, what's the worst that
can happen?
Speaker 5 (37:36):
That's that's the trick, right, that's the mind trick.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
It's almost like we can't even comprehend what that means
that there can be this threat coming through this little
black box in my hand, but it does, and it
can change how you think about the world or how
your kids think about the world. And I think there's
something else going on as well, which is like for
(37:59):
a long time we looked at those breaches, like you're saying,
you know, somebody took you know, this financial data that
we saw his crime, right, so we just think about
it as like some hackers, you know, like visualize, you know,
like some guy in a hoodie, you know, hacking away
just trying to make it, you know, make some money
by stealing some credit cards.
Speaker 5 (38:20):
Like that's where we at in our mind.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
And that's how we treated it, and and so we
we monetized it. We're like, okay, you get hacked, you
get twelve cents back, Like you're saying.
Speaker 5 (38:30):
That's not how it is now.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Always it's not just a financial crime, right, it's not
just hackers. These are nation states doing it, and they're
doing it for national security reasons. They're trying to harm
the country. They're trying to you know, disrupt an election.
They're trying to have fellows citizens be angry with each
(38:57):
other because that they know that we'll make us weaker.
They're trying to steal, you know, information to create technologies
that would be used in a war against us. Right,
So these are not financial crimes anymore. These are national
security crimes that affect all.
Speaker 5 (39:16):
Of us, and we need to start thinking.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Differently about it as individuals, but also as companies and
also as a government.
Speaker 5 (39:24):
You know, we can't let the stuff slide anymore. We
have to look at it.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
And say, no, these our citizens are being targeted. We
need to go after this and we need to stop
it from happening. And a fine, you know, just finding
a company for gradual it's not going to cut it. Like,
it's not just like oh, they lost some money for people,
but we can ensure it.
Speaker 5 (39:43):
It's fine.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
It's like, no, they harmed us, and we need to
stop them. We need to deter them from doing this again.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
I love it. No great conversation. I hope that you know,
if you come away from this, you know, podcast episode,
that you know.
Speaker 4 (39:58):
We our listener, our viewer.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
It's just to be a little more cognizant or aware
of your hey, your situational awareness around you.
Speaker 4 (40:07):
Okay, always looking around, making sure you're good, be.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
What you're uploading, situational awareness and and and then see
what you're joining and the information you're giving. And I
know that like places are legit. And I'm not saying
stop you know, doing business with your local bank and stuff.
But you just got to be aware that if you're
just opting into some crazy chat, gpt app or some
(40:31):
type of filter that says I'm gonna make you look
like a lion's face, okay, just kind of just grow
your beard out and be a lion. Okay, you just
got to grow it. Let it go, grow your own maid.
But you get what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Right, Yeah, I think I think that's exactly the takeaway.
And look The takeaway is also that it's everybody, and
it includes soldiers, includes retired military right there. Especially they
(41:07):
especially want to target people like that. And I know
people are seeing into this right now, Like they look
at you as somebody they probably cannot defeat in the battlefield.
Speaker 5 (41:21):
They want to try to defeat you in before the
battle even happens by changing your mind.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
A win for them is China doesn't even fight for Taiwan,
We just give it up.
Speaker 4 (41:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
That's called cognitive warfare, when you try to win a
fight without even fighting by changing people's minds. And this
is ultimately where it's going for them, is how do
I win that battle over Taiwan or whatever it is
before it even happens, so I.
Speaker 5 (41:52):
Don't have to fight you on the battlefield, or.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Maybe I win it against your kids, right and I
change their minds. So when they grow up and they
turn eighteen and they enlist, they don't want to fight
in Taiwan either, or when they become a colonel or
general one day and have to decide a war plan,
they say, you know what, I don't want to fight
this war, right, Like that's the win for them, And
that's just a really different way to think about the
(42:16):
world in a way none of us are used to
thinking about the world.
Speaker 5 (42:20):
But that's the new world we live in.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
And you know, President Biden said this when he was
in office, was you know, the next war is not
going to be a bullet shot. It's going to be
a keystroke. You know, it's just going to be that
kind of warfare. Somebody's going to just trigger somebody with
a keystroke and then it's just going to be set
and then off it goes, you know, online per se,
whatever that keystroke is.
Speaker 4 (42:42):
But I kind of believe in that.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
You know, I can see that, and I know that
like in Ukraine right now, it is very bullets on target,
but it's also very propaganda coming into.
Speaker 4 (42:51):
My feed and your feed, and like, this.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
Is what's going on, and it's showing us what it
thinks we need to see because this is a supercomputer
right here, and I am not a supercomputer.
Speaker 5 (43:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
There's this author William Gibson, he wrote this book called Neuromancer,
is kind of a science fiction author, and he has
this great quote he said, he said, the future is here,
it's just not evenly distributed.
Speaker 5 (43:15):
And so when we look at Ukraine, you're.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Seeing that future. Yeah, look they're in trenches in the bud.
That's a real war over there. There's a lot of
guys dying. But they're also showing the future of that war.
These guys are flying drones against each other. They're updating
those drones all the time. They're most likely doing cyber
attacks and information.
Speaker 5 (43:35):
Attacks and all these kinds of things.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
So we're seeing both right, and we're seeing that you know,
unevenly distributed future, and that is going to be our
future probably next war we fight, it is going to
be that keystroke. It's going to be robot. We're still
gonna have guys on the ground, you know, they're gonna
be guys like you know what I did, you know
when I was in Iraq, out.
Speaker 5 (43:55):
There collecting information, recruiting sources.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
They're gonna be soft guys out there, you know, doing
doing their thing on an island somewhere in the South Pacific.
Speaker 5 (44:06):
But a lot of it is going.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
To be these drones, and those drones or those AI
systems were made by somebody here who went to an
American college maybe and works at a company in the
Bay Area or in Austin or something, and that person is.
Speaker 5 (44:23):
Being targeted, right because.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
They they want that whoever that that guy or gal is,
they want that person to not make that software right
where if they do make it, they want them to
they want to take that software and use it themselves
as well.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
Like the family that was escorted out of the US
and they had to take their kids who didn't know
they were Russian spies and the parents. There was that
trade between Russia and the US for like a prisoner
swap and they gave up this family that had been
captured and like send them back to Russia.
Speaker 4 (44:55):
And the kids were like what Yeah, yeah, the.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Whole time, you know, living a fan, living a in
the US, you know this is current, that's like, this
is happening.
Speaker 5 (45:05):
You know, there's this there's this kind of story where.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
It talks about if the US and the Russians and
the Chinese each wanted to get some sand from a
beach somewhere right the US, we'd we'd get you know,
we'd get this satellite and it'd be a billion dollar
satellite and we'd send it up into space and it
(45:32):
would use a special sensor that you know, Nobel Prize
winning physicists made that would scan the beach and understand
the chemistry of the sand. The Russians they would send
in a submarine and they would have their spetsnas like
special operations guy in the middle of the night swim
up to the beach and grab, you know, a little
sample of the sand. The Chinese, they would invite a
(45:55):
thousand Chinese tourists to go to that beach and they
would suntan all day, hang out, go swimming, get back
on the plane. And when they landed in Shanghai, the
Chinese MSS their CIA would come in, take their towels,
shake out the sand from the towels, and they would
have more sand than the rest of us could to
collect it, and it would cost almost nothing. Right, And
(46:17):
it's just a different mentality of how you collect information
and how you do things, and like to your point,
you know, people don't They're going to come in and
just think about it in non traditional ways that we're
not used to.
Speaker 4 (46:32):
Right.
Speaker 3 (46:32):
There's always someone out there trying to think of another
way to be devious, and so we have to keep
training guys like yourself and others to be also as devious.
Because as I've talked to undercover FBI agents who helped
thwart Russian spies inside the FBI. The dude had to
become the same thing. Yeah, he had to like learn
(46:53):
and live the same path for five years. You know,
he's like talk about spy.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Yeah, this is the fun thing about being an intelligence officer.
Speaker 5 (47:01):
Right, you are, You're a paid criminal. You're paid to
You're a criminal on behalf of your country.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
You're not taking more laws, right, You're thinking about devious
ways to get things, to steal things information usually from
other countries, and think are clever ways to do it,
and you're doing it to give your own country an
unfair advantage.
Speaker 5 (47:26):
Right, This isn't a fair game. If we're in a
fair fight, we've already lost.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
The idea is to get information unfairly, give us an
unfair advantage by having people who go there and are
our devious people.
Speaker 5 (47:39):
You have to be like that a little.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
The balance, though, is you also have to have a
huge amount of integrity because you can never turn that back.
Speaker 5 (47:47):
To your own country. And that's a lot of people
don't realize. This is when.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
You're recruited as an intelligence officer. The number one thing
for being recruited is do you have integrity? If you
don't have that, then you're not allowed to play in
this handbox.
Speaker 5 (48:00):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
You're going home, right, because again, like the gentleman that
cred oss Or was a.
Speaker 4 (48:05):
Big part of that in the very beginning. You know,
they all.
Speaker 3 (48:07):
Thought that he fought for multiple sides. And they're like, well,
I is he fighting for the Russians? Is he fighting
for England? Is he fighting for America?
Speaker 4 (48:14):
You know? And again when I mentioned that he was buried.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
With American honors, et cetera, you know, for his service,
that's what he should be recognized as, not the other things.
But through history it's like, well, was his loyalty to
the US the whole time? Well, he had to do
things that seemed like it wasn't in order for it
to be.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
Yeah, it's true, they these these there is a long
history of people you for whom you may not even
know the real story. But some people do know the
real story. And they were out there protecting the nation.
Speaker 5 (48:52):
And and and.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
I think, I think you're you're, you're you're talking about
some of them. I six guys and the and the
Potish who helped us olled this. We didn't know how
to do it.
Speaker 5 (49:02):
We didn't have.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
We didn't have a history of this, and we you know,
President Roosevelt at the time appointed this guy, Bill Donovan.
They called him wild of Donovan and and he he
was he was a lawyer. He is an amazing guy.
He was a Republican who worked for Roosevelt. They disagreed
with each other politically, but but Roosevelt knew Donovan was
(49:24):
the right guy, and he said, I needed to make
our intelligence agency was called the COI at first, and
Donovan was was was also a bit of a devious guy,
and he put it together. He learned from the British.
They helped us set it up, and he went out
there and he didn't think like he didn't.
Speaker 5 (49:46):
Think like a normal person at that time. He was like, well,
who do I need?
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Yeah, I need some guys who went to Yale and
were lawyers and whatever. But you know, also need I
need this guy who's in prison because he's the best
guy at cracking safes in the world, and I'm going
to go get him out of prison and I'm going
to have him come teach me how to do it.
Speaker 5 (50:07):
He would recruit magicians who.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
Could do slight a hand and teach this guy, like
he would recruit people who knew how to do this stuff.
Speaker 5 (50:14):
And and give them a chance, and they made us
better at it.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
And he created that whole culture that we still have
today in special forces and in the CIA and another
intelligence agency, which is like, get the job done, now,
get it done with integrity for your own country. But
do you got to do get do the mission when
you're out in the field.
Speaker 4 (50:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (50:35):
It's like that show Catch Me if you Can with
Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. You know, no spoilers here,
but if you haven't seen it. Towards the end, they're like, well,
we want to work, We want to hire you. You know,
you know how to do all these checks.
Speaker 4 (50:47):
We need you, or.
Speaker 3 (50:48):
Like, you know the people that worked at the Pentagon
that made a fake parking pass because they got tired
of walking so far away to the Pentagon, so they
made a pass and they were just getting away with
like parking in the animals parking or something like that.
And then one day someone's like, how come this guy
keep parking here?
Speaker 4 (51:05):
And they said where'd you get this pass?
Speaker 3 (51:07):
And he's like, ah, I guess I made it, And
they're like can you make more?
Speaker 5 (51:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (51:14):
Can you make more. You see.
Speaker 3 (51:17):
He's like, oh, yeah, no problem, no problem, you know, okay, cool, Yeah,
The Dirty Dozen was you know, a good movie, right,
I need these guys do this job.
Speaker 5 (51:26):
Yeah. I think that's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
And there's a place for those people still, you know,
in the intelligence world for doing that, for creating cover
documents and things like that still has to get done.
Speaker 5 (51:39):
We still need devious people.
Speaker 1 (51:41):
Who are good at something and obsessed oftentimes obsessed with it,
like this is what they love doing, and you get
to do it. I mean it's just the coolest job ever.
Like you get to do these things and you're somebody like.
Speaker 4 (51:53):
Me, cool job.
Speaker 5 (51:55):
I love to live abroad, I love to travel.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
I love the idea of doing operations, figuring out heart problems,
and you get to go do that every day.
Speaker 4 (52:04):
You know.
Speaker 1 (52:04):
The dirty secret is you spend still half your time
doing paperwork like every other job, but like for that
other half when you're out in the field.
Speaker 5 (52:11):
It's it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (52:12):
And there are people who do that in technology and
all sorts of things, and it's like, you know, look,
you could go make software at any company in this
country if you're a great software developer or you have
a degree in math or something.
Speaker 5 (52:26):
You know, you could be making.
Speaker 1 (52:27):
Ad tech that sells more, you know, widgets to people,
or you could go work at the NSA or the
CIA Ordia or any of these agencies and you could
be making software. But you're doing it for a higher cause.
And trust me, it's going to be way more interesting
than making software that sells more widgets, just.
Speaker 4 (52:47):
An analyst, quote unquote.
Speaker 3 (52:51):
Now, listen, you've been a great guest on the show,
going back and forth just all about the spy game
and talking about just your book, you know, and I
want to just read iterate that. You know, Anthony Vincey,
who is here with us today, is the author of
the book The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, The Future of Espionage
and the Battle to Save America. So I want to
(53:11):
plug that again and make sure that that gets said.
Speaker 4 (53:13):
Clearly out here.
Speaker 3 (53:14):
You know, you've put time and thought into writing this
and having it out there, you know, so make sure
that if you do pick up Anthony's book, that if
you buy it online, then you leave a review where
you buy it when you've picked it up, put down
a great book or you know what I could have
done this better or whatever, just put it in the comments,
(53:35):
so that way, you know, I'm sure he'll check it
out or you know, everybody that's involved with the book,
and it's a good thing.
Speaker 4 (53:40):
To do for the author. That way they get some feedback.
Speaker 3 (53:42):
So my big push is just to leave comments where
they buy their book, and if they can't buy it local,
then buy it wherever they can. That's my first that's
my other thing. And with that said, we've had you
for just about an hour. You have served our You've
gone into different places that I probably don't want to
(54:05):
think about, and so thanks for doing that, Thanks for
figuring things out, Thanks for being OCD about whatever it
is that you're passionate about that. You know, the agency
loves you to have your gig and to write your book.
So you know, I know you're a PhD and I
didn't want to call you a doctor, so I'm not
going to call you a doctor. But a PhD is
(54:25):
pretty badass, bro, And I just want to let you
know that, you know, congratulations on that, And if you
ever want to be back on SOFTWAREP Radio with me,
you know you have an open platform to talk about
your book further or any stories else that we may
not have even touched. Base on that you want to
talk about, you can bring it to light here. I
just want to let you know you have an open
door here at Software Radio.
Speaker 1 (54:46):
Thank thanks so much, thanks for having me on, and
thanks for what you do. You know, it's important to
get these stories out there, and it means a lot
to people, especially you know, young people are trying to
figure out what to do with their lives, and so
I appreciate what you do.
Speaker 4 (54:58):
So thank you well, thank you so much, Thank you
so much.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
And with that said, and behalf on, behalf of Anthony
and my team here at soft REAP and Brandon Webb
and everybody.
Speaker 4 (55:08):
Who has helped support me, be on this and be
the host.
Speaker 3 (55:12):
I want to say thank you and to everyone out
there that listens and comments and reaches out to emails,
continue to do so. I love to get that information
and I digest it and then who knows what I
do with it next I might call you out. So
with that said, be kind to somebody. Watch what you're downloading,
watch what you're uploading, be aware at all times, and
(55:33):
from all of us here at softwarep this is RAT
say in peace.
Speaker 2 (55:52):
You've been listening to self. Rep Ladi
Root for us.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
If it doesn't work, you're just not using enough. You're
listening to self web Radio, Special Operations, Military Nails and
straight talk with the guys and the community.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
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(02:05):
I'm totally not surprised to be right here talking to you.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
But I'm acting like it. So what's up.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
This is softw REP Radio and welcome to your first
episode or video. If this is the first time you're
tuning in, if you've listened and you're a veteran.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
Of SOFTWAREP Radio, welcome back.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
You know who I am, and you know how this
is about to go, and you probably know who my
guest is already. But first, before I introduce you to
my guest, say it with me. The merch store soft
reap dot com forward slash Merch Go check it out.
We've got lots of cool items. The holidays are upon us.
You might want to get a little something for yourself.
Spoil yourself, go ahead and spoil me, spoil someone else
(02:43):
around you, get them a little something. And then second
is our book club and that soft rep dot Com
Forward slash Book hyphen Club. So it's the gem for
your brain reading a book. Knowledge is power. You hear
it all the time. We can't stress it enough around here.
We have so many folks that come on the show
that write books, that read books. It's just so powerful
(03:03):
to hear their message. So please go read a book
and check out the softwarep dot Com Forward slash Book
hyphen Club where it's curated for viewers like you, from
people like Brandon Webb and in the special operations community. Okay,
So the book that I would like to probably hopefully
try to get into the book club if my guest
(03:23):
will work with us Anthony Vincey, who is written his book,
let me just read this to you correctly. He is
the author of the book The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, The
Future of Espionage and the Battle to Save America. He
served as the first Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director
for Capabilities at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
Also known as an MGA. Earlier in his career.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
He served as an intelligence officer in Iraq, Africa, and Asia.
After leaving the world of intelligence, Anthony became an executive
at a private equity firm. Is now the CEO of Vico,
an AI company, which is what is AI staff wor
again automated interface, but it's actually artficial intelligence.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Yeah, I forget that, dude, I forget I'm living in
AI days.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
He has a company.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
It's a democratized democratizing intelligence analysis and super empowering analysts.
Anthony is also an Adjective Senior Fellow at the Center
for a New American Security. He received his PhD in
International relations from the London School of Economics. I want
to welcome you to the show, not butcher your bio,
but it's nice to have you here.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
Thanks for having me man, super excited.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
So intelligence you were Is that army or was that
a military branch that you were in with this intelligence?
Speaker 5 (04:49):
Well, I was a civilian intelligence officer. I was with
DA and I was I was a case officer. So
that's somebody who.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Goes out in the field and recruit spies and them
to provide information.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
So did you like go from I want to be
on the baseball team to a spy, to the civilian
spy sector. I, you know, I.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Like a lot of a lot of other guys, was
of a generation where nine eleven happened when I was young,
and as soon as that happened, I was like, I
want to get in a game. My dad was a marine,
my brother is a marine. I just sort of assumed
that I would be serving. And I realize that, you know,
the intelligence world was the right one for me. I'd
(05:33):
already lived abroad, you know, I knew what it was like.
You know, like, this is this is how to get
in that game, and this was important for the country
at that time.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
That's amazing.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
So did you just like google how to apply to
this DA?
Speaker 4 (05:47):
Is that what you said? Or CIA? What was the
acronym you threw out.
Speaker 5 (05:51):
There, DA Defense Intelligence?
Speaker 4 (05:54):
Yeah, okay, okay, yeah.
Speaker 5 (05:58):
That's literally the way you do. I mean, that's what
most people do. You just sort of google and you're like,
how do I go do this job.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
I talked to some friends as well who were kind
of knew a little bit about that world, and they
sort of pointed in different directions and were like, here's
here's the place, and you literally put your application in online.
How old, oh man, I was in my mid twenties. Wow, yeah,
(06:28):
I think it was probably twenty seven when I applied.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Yeah, that's crazy, that's that's incredible. It's like, you know,
I mean, hey, I believe it. You speak other languages
as well.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
At the time, I spoke a little bit of Arabic.
It's it's completely gone.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
It's oh I see, I see, I see. That's what
they all say.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
That's what they all say now in Hillah, yeah yeah,
in Sila, yeah, awesome, Mama lakam you see it's okay. Yeah, yes,
I love that. And so you know, Chukrin see here,
it's good, it's good. I just have questions, you know
what I mean for you dude and my listeners like
Rad ask him questions, bro.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Crack the egg? You know? How do we crack the
egg and scramble this? So? As a DA.
Speaker 5 (07:16):
Operative, Yeah, intelligence officer.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
Are you looking for? I mean, are you literally like?
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Okay, I'm thinking of like the Saint with Val Kilmer,
where he was like I am Saint so and so
and he's like, you know, different load outs, different faces,
mission impossible, you know, you know, is that.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
Something that worth I'm thinking about you like I would.
Speaker 5 (07:37):
I like to think about it like this.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
You want to know what's going on in you know,
southern Afghanistan or Iraq or China. And you know we're Americans,
we we grew up here. We probably don't know that
many people there. How are you going to get that information?
Speaker 5 (07:58):
Right?
Speaker 1 (07:59):
And you to get that is you want to get
a local guy. Yeah, you want to get somebody who's
got that placement and access.
Speaker 5 (08:05):
He lives there, he knows people.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Maybe you know, back during the kind of global war
on terrorism day, maybe this guy you know had friends
who were involved with with with terrorist groups someone like that,
or maybe he works at a government agency that you
want to get information from.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
You got to go get one of those guys.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
You're not going to walk in yourself, right, And so
what you do is you learn how to find those
people and recruit them to come work for you.
Speaker 5 (08:36):
You know, you're essentially convincing them to commit treason you know,
on their own, right.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Yeah, it's like you got to get human intelligence. So
humid is what you're going after there by somebody human
intelligence and there's like oh sit, there's like you know,
open sourced intelligence where you can find all the information
about somebody online and they're like, how did you know
all this about me?
Speaker 4 (08:57):
It's like, well, you wrote a daily journal every day.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
I knew you were going to be on vacation for
eight days because you post it every single day.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Some people say about human it's the it's the int
or the intelligence of last resort. So you know, first
maybe yeah, you try to look it up online, some
open source intelligence. Maybe you use signals intelligence, you know,
and or geo intelligence like you you use imagery.
Speaker 5 (09:20):
Maybe from satellite.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
But if you really can't find it any other way,
the only way to get in that room or to
get that piece of information is to get another human
being to do it.
Speaker 5 (09:30):
Then that that's where somebody like me came in.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Okay, now let's flash backwards to World War Two.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
Okay, you have people inside of our.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
Own you know, allies that are like not they sympathize
with what Hitler is doing in World War Two, and
they're like, oh, it's no big deal.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
You know, it's not affecting us.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
And you got people inside try to like you know,
thwart any type of like you know, problem against him. Now,
you probably haven't understanding of World War two stuff. I mean,
I mean, you know, there's spy versus spy. You know,
they're like trying to get in and you know four things.
Do you have any conversation about that?
Speaker 5 (10:12):
I mean, look, this is the nature of intelligence, right.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
We have guys on our side who want to collect
information on the other guys. They don't want us to
collect that information, so they have counterintelligence. They're trying to
find you know, like I was saying, I recruit a
spy to go spy on your government agency.
Speaker 5 (10:32):
They're trying to find that guy. So it's just back
and forth. It's that spy verse.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Spy, like you said. And that's been going on. That
goes back way further than World War Two. That's been
going on since the dawn of humanity. Some people, you know,
some people called intelligence the second oldest profession, and.
Speaker 5 (10:50):
So in World War two.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
Special about that for America though, is that I think
of it as the big Bang for American intelligence because
we did really have centralized intelligence before that. We kind
of had military intelligence. During the war, we would spin up,
you know, reconnaissance and intelligence function, we would turn it,
we would turn it off during peacetime.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
We didn't like to have intelligence.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
And in World War Two we created something called the OSS,
which was really our first spy agency.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Right, and again that was in conjunction with like kind
of the British right where you know, the whole thing and.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
The guy out of Australia.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
I think who created the OSS, who was like a
dual spy, and it was like, what side is he
really on? Well he was buried with like American honors,
So there's kind of that, you know, I can't remember
how the spy. Forgive me for forgetting. I've actually done
a book interview about him. But yeah, you're right, the OSS, Okay,
And now that led to what we know is like
(11:53):
the CIA.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
Yeah, I mean we look, we were so.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
We had such a distaste for intelligence in America. There
was this guy, Henry Stimpson. He was the Secretary of
State in the Secretary of War. He sort of said,
sort of notoriously said, gentlemen, don't read each other's mail.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
Like that was how we felt.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
We felt like it was distasteful, it was ungentlemanly to
spy in a way. And actually after World War Two,
Truman shut down the OSS and he said he didn't
want there to be an American Gestapo.
Speaker 5 (12:30):
So for a couple of years there in the beginning of.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Cold War, we didn't have any spy agency. You know,
we kind of had some stuff going on in the
army and the State Department.
Speaker 5 (12:37):
That was it.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
And then nineteen forty seven they set up the CIA
because we realized, you know, look we're going up against
a big boy now. We were in a Cold War
with the Soviet Union and they had the KGB, and
those guys don't mess around, and we need our own,
we need our own permanent, peacetime professional agency.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
And that was a CIA, right, just take a lot
everything under their umbrella that was just not military per
se related.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
You know.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
I've also we've all seen like clear and present danger
from Tom Clancy where you know, Willem Dafoe and his
men are just like cut off. It's like, just let
them get out of it by leave them there. Like
they send these guys in to do a mission and
then they just canceled the mission. Rambo's the same thing,
Rambo First Blood Part two. He goes in to get
the POWs out. It's all like under the CIA guys
(13:27):
and all this discrete, you know, clandestine, and then all
of a sudden the very end, it's like, yeah, just
don't pick him up. He gets there and gets the
mission done. He finds the POWs. They didn't want to
find that. They didn't want to find the intelligence.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
We the OSS did both intelligence collection. They also did
special operations right and the and the OSS was in
many ways kind of the precursor to the Green Berets,
and Aaron Bank was a member, and then and the Seals.
They had the first maritime unit well before the Navy.
(13:59):
They were willing to, you know, use scuba gear before
anybody else. And the CIA kind of continued that because
they had both intelligence collection this is by law, and
covert action. And in covert action, you're doing those things
that other agencies can't do. You're you're doing things that
are deniable by the government. And some of them can
(14:23):
be direct action. Some of them could be you know,
influencing other people, say politically, you're influencing.
Speaker 5 (14:32):
Some of them could be supporting, you.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Know, opposition groups in other countries. There's lots of types
of covert action. They had that piece as well as
information collection, and really intelligence is about information collection and analysis.
That's the vast majority of what's done you know, president
needs to make a decision. Somebody's got to give them
information to make that.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Decision, right, You would think that they would want to
have this, you know, briefing, daily briefing given to them
or what Hey, here's what's going on on the the net.
You know, you might want to think about it. They're
doing this over in this country or they're trying to
do this to our country. Do you have any concern
about that or just gentlemen's game, sir. Yeah, you know,
let's not look at their mail. It's like what we
got their mail? Hmm, hold the light.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
I mean now we're now we're seemed to be perfectly.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
Comfortable completely Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess covert
operations would be like you know, in Afghanistan when Masuri
Sharif was being under you know, uh suppression by like
see what thirties. I think the first casualty was Mike
Span who was a.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
CIA you know, uh KIA.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Killed in action during that Masri Sharif, that would be
the same. That's that's he's he's on the ground, you know,
under that guy's and we all know about him because
he was k iaight unfortunately, and you know I mean,
you guys are are putting yourselves in the line of fire.
You know, you're doing things to make sure that guys
(15:59):
like myself can have this podcast, you know, under the
guise of the American flag freedom right, so we can
do the things that we want to continue to do
and our neighbors.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
And I don't think anybody's really ready.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
I asked this question around my circle here in Salt Lake,
you know, to people around me. I'm like that, I'm like,
are you ready for a hypersonic missile to come blow
up the car wash while you're standing there?
Speaker 4 (16:20):
Are we ready? Do you even have? Are you ready
for that?
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Because like what's going on in like Ukraine and how
of a sudden super missile comes in and just blows
up the park. You know, people are just having a
normal day and then the sounds and the tonightis and
the ears and then the ringing and then like all
of them when the smoke settles and the calamity, It
is like, are we ready for that?
Speaker 4 (16:39):
Here?
Speaker 3 (16:40):
I don't think so, you know, we're just walking around
kind of like, oh, we believe in guys like yourself
or the Navy seals that run the sites, or the
green berets do their jobs in the closeness of night.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Yeah, Look, there are guys down range in the military
and intelligence who kind of take the ultimate risks, right,
And a lot of intelligence guys it might just be you,
it might be one guy.
Speaker 5 (17:04):
Right, You're just out.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
There and there's there's maybe there's no backup, right, and
and if something goes wrong, you only have you know
your wits and your planning to kind of get out
of that. And that can be really scary, and it
takes a lot of courage, It's true. It takes a
lot of bravery. Military obviously has the same and there's
(17:26):
there are a lot of guys in the intelligence community
served in the military before they came and.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
You know, you see you say these guys are down range.
Don't you think we're all kind of downrange today? With
the internet and you know, I mean a little bit
of this.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
I think that there's a there's there's a war going
on also right versus like the missiles and the guns
and the trenches. There's these keyboard wars that are going
on right now that maybe people aren't paying attention to
where they're collecting data or there's bad actors in the
world that are trying to gather information based off of
your post.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
You hit the nail on the head. There used to
be they called it in the Cold War the fold
of Gap. You know this that the Soviet Union would
invade Europe through the folder Gap is kind of a
region in Central Europe.
Speaker 5 (18:14):
Now that fold of GAP's on our cell phone.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Right, We're all the edge, we are all the perimeter,
and they are.
Speaker 5 (18:22):
Trying to collect information.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
And when I say they, I mean China, Russia, Iran,
North Korea, places like that there, and they are trying
to collect information from people, but they're also trying to
change their minds. You know, they've realized that the American
citizen is the soft underbelly of this nation.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
Right.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
We are the ones who vote, We're the ones who.
Speaker 5 (18:48):
Run for Congress. We're the ones who work in the military.
We are the ones who work at a company.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
That maybe builds technology like AI for the military.
Speaker 5 (18:58):
We are the soft underbelly.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
And so for decades we kind of got used to
this idea that it's like presidents and generals and kernels
and people like that were the targets, and now we're
all the targets, and that.
Speaker 5 (19:13):
Is a massive change and really the core of.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
What my book's about and what I wanted to write about,
because I don't think people realize what's really going on.
Speaker 5 (19:26):
You see stuff in the news.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
You hear oh tiktoks of danger or oh there is
another hack of a healthcare system, and it's just these blips,
but they all add up to something, which is we're
all being targeted, and now we need to all protect
ourselves because we're all being targeted.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
I mean, what about these companies that you know, I've
been I've done it where I've spit in the tube
and I've sent it off to see how the family
all reacts to each other's DNAs, you know, and then
you hear that, you know, all that information.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
Could be just sold to somebody else as a business.
It's much at all, you know what, Yeah.
Speaker 5 (20:03):
It's much worse than that.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So you spit that to and first it can be stolen,
maybe somebody can hack in and take it from the company.
But what's even worse is that most likely that company,
even if they were American, probably sent your spit to
China to have it tested there because they can operate
like everything else. Right, They're just it's just cheaper to
(20:28):
do things in China on purpose for some of these
things they're they're subsidizing businesses like this, and so they
most likely do actually have a lot of people's DNA
sitting over there, and there are companies like BGI Genomics
is a big Chinese pharmaceutical and biotechnology company. And not
(20:50):
only are they collecting DNA from people all over the
world there there there is evidence that they're they they
are are in contracts with the People's Liberation Army with
the PLA, so.
Speaker 5 (21:06):
That information.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
That DNA your genetics is possibly going directly to the
People's Liberation Army and who knows who else, most likely
their intelligence community as well, because in China, their intelligence
community can ask for any information they want from any
Chinese citizen or any Chinese company, any to them they want,
(21:29):
and there's no recourse. They can just go in and
take it and say, yep, that's mine.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Interesting, you know what I mean, because like I guess
you could start thinking about like if they can just
I mean, what like we all sign up to Instagram
or we all sign up to the local website and
upload our credit card information, and you know, it's just like, oh, hey,
buy now with three taps of your thumb on you know,
on a I don't even want to say their website,
you know, because I don't want to give them any
(21:57):
like respect about that. But you know they're not doing
proper humans a arryan, you know, workforce. They're using underage
kids to make your clothing, and it's fast clothing. But
yet you side right up and you just say, oh,
it's only six bucks versus thirteen dollars locally, let me
just buy it for six bucks and have it sent
to me.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
But they have all that information from you.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
You could have shopped locally and supported the local neighbor
that sells the same thing. But you know, they do
sell it so much cheaper because they just want to
gather the info which we just give thinking it's just
a normal thing.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
We just give it away and we don't think about
it as a security concern, whereas we don't. Most of
us don't think like intelligence officers, and for decades or
centuries of the American life, we didn't have to, and
now we kind of do. Weirdly, we have all learned
(22:54):
to protect our computers, right we have.
Speaker 5 (22:57):
You know, we teach five year.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Old CyberSecure, and we say, you know, you have to
use a password, and you have to you know, and
if you see a weird email, don't open it.
Speaker 5 (23:06):
It might be it's a different sing.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
So we've learned to protect our computers, but we've never
learned to protect ourselves, to protect our own minds. We
don't even think about that as a security issue, but
it is right there. We need to start thinking about
it that way and training people, even training kids, to
(23:29):
think about, Hey, when somebody's collecting your information, when you're
giving away information, it might not just be you know,
to sign up for an email list you want to
be on. It might it might be going somewhere bad
and those people might not have your best intentions at heart.
And it's even worse than them just trying to maybe
steal some money from you. They might be doing this
(23:52):
to harm your your community or harm your country.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
I mean, they might try to figure out what makes
us tick in a bio way to use you know,
bio on us that we could not you know, vaccine,
vaccine against or you know, thwart or use any type
of like over the counter medication to stop It's just like,
what do you do you know, it's like, here comes
a super a superflu And I say that because there's
(24:18):
a movie and it's called The Sword of the Stone
and it's a Disney cartoon and it has Merlin and
Arthur and he pulls the sword. But during that he
battles mim Okay, Merlin battles another wizard mime and they
try to battle. He turned into fiery dragons, and then
they turn into a mouse and an elephant, and then
(24:39):
at the end, he turns into a biological cold and
she's in bed with a thermometer and.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
She's He's like, I've turned into the cold, bro. You
can't get rid of that, you know what I mean.
And so.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
To kind of bring it full circle, you know, biological
warfare obviously it's wizards, Okay, it could be out there,
you know, it has to be something on the intelligence circuit, right.
Speaker 5 (25:09):
Well, if you want to get dark for a.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
Second, yeah, I do.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
During apartheid in South Africa, the South African government had
a program a biological warfare targeted specifically at black people that.
Speaker 5 (25:24):
Would affect black people and not white people. So they
went there. Now this was decades ago.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
They didn't have the capability to genetically engineer a disease,
but they they kind of showed that it's possible for
a country to do this, and it is extremely scary
to think of today where people have seen how bad
and a pandemic can get economically, how many people can die,
(25:53):
And we do have the engineering capability to engineer diseases,
and we are talking about a country like China that
is sitting on the genetic information of millions of people,
and it is conceivable that that would happen. That isn't
science fiction anymore. That's within the world of possible.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
Now.
Speaker 5 (26:16):
I don't know if that's happening, and hopefully it's not.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
But this is where you know, the intelligence community and
the military and people like this come in is to
try to protect us from those threats. But we also
need to protect ourselves and be careful about where we
send information, like our own genetics.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
We all need to be our own little internal intelligence
officer inside.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
We all need to be a little bit.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
More cautious with our personal details, finances and things that
we post up online or what seems so innocent. You know,
you open up a cruise ship app and you're entering
your information and is their site secure?
Speaker 4 (26:58):
Yeah, you know, and it's the small guys that can
get hit.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Think like a spy, you know, be kind of a
citizen intelligence officer. That may be necessary. And look, I
don't think.
Speaker 5 (27:13):
That it's like we all need to be sitting around
paranoid all the time. Sure, but you know we're all raised.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
You grow up and you're taught Okay, this is a
bad neighborhood. Be a little more careful. Don't leave your
valuables in the car. Put your wallet into your front pocket, right, Like,
we're all raised in a way to protect ourselves.
Speaker 5 (27:33):
And by the way, in the Cold War we're raised.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
You know, people were raised to hide under their desks
and say of a NUCA missile coming in, and today
kids are taught to hide in case of an active shooter.
Speaker 5 (27:44):
So KRULDN realize there are bad things. We know there
are bad things.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
In the world, and it's just prudent to say there
are other bad things. And maybe that's collecting information, and
maybe that's trying to convince me of something. Maybe when
I'm on you know, something like TikTok, which is Chinese
owned and they not only can, but but it's been
proven do use it for censorship and other information control.
(28:11):
Then you should be prudent and we should be aware
of these kinds of threats and act accordingly.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
I mean even video games. I can think of a
very popular.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
Game out there, and I usually like to like invest
in a company that has video games, and if you
have to like buy in on the video game for
points or bucks or you know, any of that kind
of thing, I'm like, well, if they're going to collect
money from everybody, I'm what's their stock value?
Speaker 4 (28:36):
That's my first thing. So this one company I looked up.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
You know, my daughter was into this game and it
was very popular, and I was like, what are you
spending money on there? She's like, oh, this game. And
I was like, oh, what's that game called? Right, That's
all I wanted to know. And I walked away and
I'm like, why she spending you know, twelve bucks to
get points on this game to build her load out?
So I google it and I'm like, oh, it's only
owned by three people, not in America, out of China
and or you know, in that area of Asia. And
(29:02):
I was just like, well, how do I buy stock?
I'm like, is this an open traded It's like no,
it's privately owned. I'm like, wow, you know they're getting
three people have access to this huge video game platform
and they're just collecting everybody's data, your strokes, your keystrokes,
everything that you're doing through that game. Nobody really reads
I think the user agreements, the privacy agreements, and if
(29:25):
they are I mean, are they honestly the real thing?
Speaker 4 (29:27):
But still, I mean you're doing it.
Speaker 5 (29:29):
You just did it right there, right, You did some
due diligence I did.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Yeah, you thought like an intelligence officer, you kind of
learned something and you dug into it and that that's
what people will need to do. And we can do
that for anything, right, and we can go and say, hey,
there's a new we're so used to this technology as
American owned, right, and like it's safe in some way
and it's regulated and it's not me.
Speaker 5 (29:53):
But all of a sudden, yeah, all of a sudden,
like some of it's not right. And so it just
take can you know that one minute to say.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Let me, let me dive a little deeper into this
and see and see what's really going on and are
people talking about.
Speaker 5 (30:09):
This being a problem. Is it a thread? Is my
information going somewhere? I don't want it? Are they are?
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Is it known that this is maybe a state owned
enterprise by the Chinese government, and so it's and just
literally it might take a minute, may take five minutes.
You put it into chat GPT and then you can
make a decision. And that doesn't mean not doing anything.
We're all going to buy Chinese stuff, right, like it's
impossible to live.
Speaker 4 (30:32):
I'm not against that, right exactly.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
I'm just saying, but now you're making an informed decision
like a president would, right, And you're saying.
Speaker 5 (30:40):
Okay, I know this.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Now I can assess the risk and I'm willing to
live with it, or maybe I'm not.
Speaker 5 (30:46):
And we need to do it for our kids too, because.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
They make intelligence exactly.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
So I gathered the intelligence and then made a decision
and just was like, well, I told my daughter. I
was like, hey, do you ever think about this because
the other things I've invested in there seem to be
openly traded or on the stock market, you know, and
I find that to be a little bit you know,
they've probably follow some type of ethical code.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Yeah, yeah, there's some transparency, like you could be kind
of sure they're going to follow some rules. They probably
have some level of cybersecurity and you know, government regulation, right.
Speaker 5 (31:21):
And so you you made that assessment, right, and you.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Because because there's going to pick that open sourced intelligence
or the intelligence were given somebody through these apps or these.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
You know, social media platforms.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
And it's even the current big dogs social media platforms,
all the main four whoever you go to, you know,
all of them out there. It's like they're all gathering
our information. And it's not just China, it's America. It's
like these guys are in America and they're gathering information,
you know, for their new glasses that you are going
to wear now and that's going to zoom right into
(31:54):
your career cerebral cortex.
Speaker 4 (31:57):
All this information just flooding in. You know.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
It's like, you know, we're just getting pegged for all
of our info.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, I mean, look, the same thing does happen. American
companies take information and that's how that whole economy works.
Speaker 5 (32:12):
In social media.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
But there is a big difference between an American company
and a Chinese one when it comes to this.
Speaker 5 (32:18):
You know one, Look, they're also American citizens.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Primarily running these companies, and they have to abide by
laws and if they do something wrong, they can be
brought to court.
Speaker 5 (32:29):
That's not the case in China.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
CEO of that company does something that is very illegal
in America, there's nothing we can do about it. That
guy lives in Beijing or Shanghai or something, and there's nothing.
Speaker 4 (32:41):
Coming all China.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
In China, it's like what's yours is theirs, and what's
theirs is theirs in China. So the Chinese are like, hey,
I don't see many people in the provinces running you know, cryptomind.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
All the people that live out in the different areas
that are enfranchised from the rest of the big dogs
in China, there's not a lot of folks don't realize
that the people are struggling to just maintain a life.
And then there's the people at the very top that
just are running the whole show and just gathering all
the information. Like you said, they can just go to
Company A and say give us all your information. So
(33:16):
everything over there really just works for you know, the
government of China.
Speaker 5 (33:21):
Yeah, exactly. I mean you bring up a good point. Look,
this isn't about Chinese people. No, Chinese people are like
American people.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
They're just living their life, working at a job, doing
their thing. It's the government, it's the regime, it's the
Communist Party, and that that party is I believe bad
for the Chinese people. I mean they commit you know,
atrocities on people, and this is well documented. These are
not good people and they do you know, they want
(33:50):
to do worse to us.
Speaker 5 (33:52):
You know, think of what they're doing to their own
people and.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
What they would do to us if they consider us
the the you know, they consider us in some way
as an enemy.
Speaker 5 (34:01):
And so but that.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
Also gets at how how it is different there. Everything
is controlled from the top down, right. I mean that
there there are other sources of power. I mean, province
is not power, and you know they're big companies.
Speaker 5 (34:17):
But like really, at the end of the day, Jijingping.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Can do whatever he wants and he can dig down
deep and tell anybody to do what he wants. And
we don't have that here. And that's a big difference.
And the and there is a separation. Sure, maybe you're
on this, maybe you're on Instagram or you're on you know,
you're on x or you're on you know, social media
company here, but the government, our government can't just go
(34:43):
and walk in that door and say give me all
your data, and I want you to do I want
you to take this person and kick them off, and
I want you to silence this.
Speaker 5 (34:51):
They don't have control. We don't do that. We have
a separation. They don't have that separation.
Speaker 4 (34:55):
Then what do you think about our current president Trump.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Only a social media platform like that with his truth platform,
where he does capture everybody's information on there.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Yeah, look, I think there's a slippery slope where I
think everybody believes in freedom and speech in this country,
and the last thing any of us want to happen
is for our government to control what we're saying. I
know I feel this way. I think everybody does. It's
fundamental to who we are. And so we want to
(35:31):
look at our government and know that it's not trying
to control what we say, what we do at a
really deep, fundamental level as citizens. And so we've just
got to hope that the system, the laws in place,
the checks and balances in place, ensure.
Speaker 5 (35:53):
That any actions by.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Anybody in the government, president, or anybody else don't range
on those basic rights.
Speaker 5 (36:02):
And if they do, that we stop that from happening.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
You know, by making it illegal, forcing a divestia, sure,
you know, forcing some separation. And to me, that's just
like core to who we are as a nation.
Speaker 4 (36:20):
That's very good to hear, very good to hear.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Now, you know with all of these different things like
medical records, financial records, the data breaches that happen here
and there that.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
People just seem to blow off. You know, oh, hey, don't.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
Forget that so and so's credit checking company, you know
that tells you your credit score has had a breach.
Do you want to join the class action and get
twelve cents back? It's like, well, wait that twelve cents back?
What got breached?
Speaker 4 (36:47):
Right? And so what's that being used for?
Speaker 3 (36:50):
And you know who took that and what are the
actors like? And you know, I guess we are just
so trusting with our devices that are in our hand.
Living in the US or wherever you may live, you
may feel just confident in your hometown of wherever that's at.
Speaker 4 (37:05):
Even if you're in England.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
You may feel like you have some freedom, right, freedom
of looking on your phone and now there's now there's
this thing on your phone and you're in your country,
but that thing's not in your country. It's on your phone,
but it's coming from a third party like uh, North
Korea or you know, Russia or China or like you said,
you know, any of the different acts of evils whoever
(37:28):
they decide to call them today, you know, but it's
it's right here, so you feel kind of safe, you're
in your own home. You're like, what's the worst that
can happen?
Speaker 5 (37:36):
That's that's the trick, right, that's the mind trick.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
It's almost like we can't even comprehend what that means
that there can be this threat coming through this little
black box in my hand, but it does, and it
can change how you think about the world or how
your kids think about the world. And I think there's
something else going on as well, which is like for
(37:59):
a long time we looked at those breaches, like you're saying,
you know, somebody took you know, this financial data that
we saw his crime, right, so we just think about
it as like some hackers, you know, like visualize, you know,
like some guy in a hoodie, you know, hacking away
just trying to make it, you know, make some money
by stealing some credit cards.
Speaker 5 (38:20):
Like that's where we at in our mind.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
And that's how we treated it, and and so we
we monetized it. We're like, okay, you get hacked, you
get twelve cents back, Like you're saying.
Speaker 5 (38:30):
That's not how it is now.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Always it's not just a financial crime, right, it's not
just hackers. These are nation states doing it, and they're
doing it for national security reasons. They're trying to harm
the country. They're trying to you know, disrupt an election.
They're trying to have fellows citizens be angry with each
(38:57):
other because that they know that we'll make us weaker.
They're trying to steal, you know, information to create technologies
that would be used in a war against us. Right,
So these are not financial crimes anymore. These are national
security crimes that affect all.
Speaker 5 (39:16):
Of us, and we need to start thinking.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Differently about it as individuals, but also as companies and
also as a government.
Speaker 5 (39:24):
You know, we can't let the stuff slide anymore. We
have to look at it.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
And say, no, these our citizens are being targeted. We
need to go after this and we need to stop
it from happening. And a fine, you know, just finding
a company for gradual it's not going to cut it. Like,
it's not just like oh, they lost some money for people,
but we can ensure it.
Speaker 5 (39:43):
It's fine.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
It's like, no, they harmed us, and we need to
stop them. We need to deter them from doing this again.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
I love it. No great conversation. I hope that you know,
if you come away from this, you know, podcast episode,
that you know.
Speaker 4 (39:58):
We our listener, our viewer.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
It's just to be a little more cognizant or aware
of your hey, your situational awareness around you.
Speaker 4 (40:07):
Okay, always looking around, making sure you're good, be.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
What you're uploading, situational awareness and and and then see
what you're joining and the information you're giving. And I
know that like places are legit. And I'm not saying
stop you know, doing business with your local bank and stuff.
But you just got to be aware that if you're
just opting into some crazy chat, gpt app or some
(40:31):
type of filter that says I'm gonna make you look
like a lion's face, okay, just kind of just grow
your beard out and be a lion. Okay, you just
got to grow it. Let it go, grow your own maid.
But you get what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Right, Yeah, I think I think that's exactly the takeaway.
And look The takeaway is also that it's everybody, and
it includes soldiers, includes retired military right there. Especially they
(41:07):
especially want to target people like that. And I know
people are seeing into this right now, Like they look
at you as somebody they probably cannot defeat in the battlefield.
Speaker 5 (41:21):
They want to try to defeat you in before the
battle even happens by changing your mind.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
A win for them is China doesn't even fight for Taiwan,
We just give it up.
Speaker 4 (41:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
That's called cognitive warfare, when you try to win a
fight without even fighting by changing people's minds. And this
is ultimately where it's going for them, is how do
I win that battle over Taiwan or whatever it is
before it even happens, so I.
Speaker 5 (41:52):
Don't have to fight you on the battlefield, or.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Maybe I win it against your kids, right and I
change their minds. So when they grow up and they
turn eighteen and they enlist, they don't want to fight
in Taiwan either, or when they become a colonel or
general one day and have to decide a war plan,
they say, you know what, I don't want to fight
this war, right, Like that's the win for them, And
that's just a really different way to think about the
(42:16):
world in a way none of us are used to
thinking about the world.
Speaker 5 (42:20):
But that's the new world we live in.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
And you know, President Biden said this when he was
in office, was you know, the next war is not
going to be a bullet shot. It's going to be
a keystroke. You know, it's just going to be that
kind of warfare. Somebody's going to just trigger somebody with
a keystroke and then it's just going to be set
and then off it goes, you know, online per se,
whatever that keystroke is.
Speaker 4 (42:42):
But I kind of believe in that.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
You know, I can see that, and I know that
like in Ukraine right now, it is very bullets on target,
but it's also very propaganda coming into.
Speaker 4 (42:51):
My feed and your feed, and like, this.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
Is what's going on, and it's showing us what it
thinks we need to see because this is a supercomputer
right here, and I am not a supercomputer.
Speaker 5 (43:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
There's this author William Gibson, he wrote this book called Neuromancer,
is kind of a science fiction author, and he has
this great quote he said, he said, the future is here,
it's just not evenly distributed.
Speaker 5 (43:15):
And so when we look at Ukraine, you're.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Seeing that future. Yeah, look they're in trenches in the bud.
That's a real war over there. There's a lot of
guys dying. But they're also showing the future of that war.
These guys are flying drones against each other. They're updating
those drones all the time. They're most likely doing cyber
attacks and information.
Speaker 5 (43:35):
Attacks and all these kinds of things.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
So we're seeing both right, and we're seeing that you know,
unevenly distributed future, and that is going to be our
future probably next war we fight, it is going to
be that keystroke. It's going to be robot. We're still
gonna have guys on the ground, you know, they're gonna
be guys like you know what I did, you know
when I was in Iraq, out.
Speaker 5 (43:55):
There collecting information, recruiting sources.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
They're gonna be soft guys out there, you know, doing
doing their thing on an island somewhere in the South Pacific.
Speaker 5 (44:06):
But a lot of it is going.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
To be these drones, and those drones or those AI
systems were made by somebody here who went to an
American college maybe and works at a company in the
Bay Area or in Austin or something, and that person is.
Speaker 5 (44:23):
Being targeted, right because.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
They they want that whoever that that guy or gal is,
they want that person to not make that software right
where if they do make it, they want them to
they want to take that software and use it themselves
as well.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
Like the family that was escorted out of the US
and they had to take their kids who didn't know
they were Russian spies and the parents. There was that
trade between Russia and the US for like a prisoner
swap and they gave up this family that had been
captured and like send them back to Russia.
Speaker 4 (44:55):
And the kids were like what Yeah, yeah, the.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Whole time, you know, living a fan, living a in
the US, you know this is current, that's like, this
is happening.
Speaker 5 (45:05):
You know, there's this there's this kind of story where.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
It talks about if the US and the Russians and
the Chinese each wanted to get some sand from a
beach somewhere right the US, we'd we'd get you know,
we'd get this satellite and it'd be a billion dollar
satellite and we'd send it up into space and it
(45:32):
would use a special sensor that you know, Nobel Prize
winning physicists made that would scan the beach and understand
the chemistry of the sand. The Russians they would send
in a submarine and they would have their spetsnas like
special operations guy in the middle of the night swim
up to the beach and grab, you know, a little
sample of the sand. The Chinese, they would invite a
(45:55):
thousand Chinese tourists to go to that beach and they
would suntan all day, hang out, go swimming, get back
on the plane. And when they landed in Shanghai, the
Chinese MSS their CIA would come in, take their towels,
shake out the sand from the towels, and they would
have more sand than the rest of us could to
collect it, and it would cost almost nothing. Right, And
(46:17):
it's just a different mentality of how you collect information
and how you do things, and like to your point,
you know, people don't They're going to come in and
just think about it in non traditional ways that we're
not used to.
Speaker 4 (46:32):
Right.
Speaker 3 (46:32):
There's always someone out there trying to think of another
way to be devious, and so we have to keep
training guys like yourself and others to be also as devious.
Because as I've talked to undercover FBI agents who helped
thwart Russian spies inside the FBI. The dude had to
become the same thing. Yeah, he had to like learn
(46:53):
and live the same path for five years. You know,
he's like talk about spy.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Yeah, this is the fun thing about being an intelligence officer.
Speaker 5 (47:01):
Right, you are, You're a paid criminal. You're paid to
You're a criminal on behalf of your country.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
You're not taking more laws, right, You're thinking about devious
ways to get things, to steal things information usually from
other countries, and think are clever ways to do it,
and you're doing it to give your own country an
unfair advantage.
Speaker 5 (47:26):
Right, This isn't a fair game. If we're in a
fair fight, we've already lost.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
The idea is to get information unfairly, give us an
unfair advantage by having people who go there and are
our devious people.
Speaker 5 (47:39):
You have to be like that a little.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
The balance, though, is you also have to have a
huge amount of integrity because you can never turn that back.
Speaker 5 (47:47):
To your own country. And that's a lot of people
don't realize. This is when.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
You're recruited as an intelligence officer. The number one thing
for being recruited is do you have integrity? If you
don't have that, then you're not allowed to play in
this handbox.
Speaker 5 (48:00):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
You're going home, right, because again, like the gentleman that
cred oss Or was a.
Speaker 4 (48:05):
Big part of that in the very beginning. You know,
they all.
Speaker 3 (48:07):
Thought that he fought for multiple sides. And they're like, well,
I is he fighting for the Russians? Is he fighting
for England? Is he fighting for America?
Speaker 4 (48:14):
You know? And again when I mentioned that he was buried.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
With American honors, et cetera, you know, for his service,
that's what he should be recognized as, not the other things.
But through history it's like, well, was his loyalty to
the US the whole time? Well, he had to do
things that seemed like it wasn't in order for it
to be.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
Yeah, it's true, they these these there is a long
history of people you for whom you may not even
know the real story. But some people do know the
real story. And they were out there protecting the nation.
Speaker 5 (48:52):
And and and.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
I think, I think you're you're, you're you're talking about
some of them. I six guys and the and the
Potish who helped us olled this. We didn't know how
to do it.
Speaker 5 (49:02):
We didn't have.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
We didn't have a history of this, and we you know,
President Roosevelt at the time appointed this guy, Bill Donovan.
They called him wild of Donovan and and he he
was he was a lawyer. He is an amazing guy.
He was a Republican who worked for Roosevelt. They disagreed
with each other politically, but but Roosevelt knew Donovan was
(49:24):
the right guy, and he said, I needed to make
our intelligence agency was called the COI at first, and
Donovan was was was also a bit of a devious guy,
and he put it together. He learned from the British.
They helped us set it up, and he went out
there and he didn't think like he didn't.
Speaker 5 (49:46):
Think like a normal person at that time. He was like, well,
who do I need?
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Yeah, I need some guys who went to Yale and
were lawyers and whatever. But you know, also need I
need this guy who's in prison because he's the best
guy at cracking safes in the world, and I'm going
to go get him out of prison and I'm going
to have him come teach me how to do it.
Speaker 5 (50:07):
He would recruit magicians who.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
Could do slight a hand and teach this guy, like
he would recruit people who knew how to do this stuff.
Speaker 5 (50:14):
And and give them a chance, and they made us
better at it.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
And he created that whole culture that we still have
today in special forces and in the CIA and another
intelligence agency, which is like, get the job done, now,
get it done with integrity for your own country. But
do you got to do get do the mission when
you're out in the field.
Speaker 4 (50:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (50:35):
It's like that show Catch Me if you Can with
Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. You know, no spoilers here,
but if you haven't seen it. Towards the end, they're like, well,
we want to work, We want to hire you. You know,
you know how to do all these checks.
Speaker 4 (50:47):
We need you, or.
Speaker 3 (50:48):
Like, you know the people that worked at the Pentagon
that made a fake parking pass because they got tired
of walking so far away to the Pentagon, so they
made a pass and they were just getting away with
like parking in the animals parking or something like that.
And then one day someone's like, how come this guy
keep parking here?
Speaker 4 (51:05):
And they said where'd you get this pass?
Speaker 3 (51:07):
And he's like, ah, I guess I made it, And
they're like can you make more?
Speaker 5 (51:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (51:14):
Can you make more. You see.
Speaker 3 (51:17):
He's like, oh, yeah, no problem, no problem, you know, okay, cool, Yeah,
The Dirty Dozen was you know, a good movie, right,
I need these guys do this job.
Speaker 5 (51:26):
Yeah. I think that's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
And there's a place for those people still, you know,
in the intelligence world for doing that, for creating cover
documents and things like that still has to get done.
Speaker 5 (51:39):
We still need devious people.
Speaker 1 (51:41):
Who are good at something and obsessed oftentimes obsessed with it,
like this is what they love doing, and you get
to do it. I mean it's just the coolest job ever.
Like you get to do these things and you're somebody like.
Speaker 4 (51:53):
Me, cool job.
Speaker 5 (51:55):
I love to live abroad, I love to travel.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
I love the idea of doing operations, figuring out heart problems,
and you get to go do that every day.
Speaker 4 (52:04):
You know.
Speaker 1 (52:04):
The dirty secret is you spend still half your time
doing paperwork like every other job, but like for that
other half when you're out in the field.
Speaker 5 (52:11):
It's it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (52:12):
And there are people who do that in technology and
all sorts of things, and it's like, you know, look,
you could go make software at any company in this
country if you're a great software developer or you have
a degree in math or something.
Speaker 5 (52:26):
You know, you could be making.
Speaker 1 (52:27):
Ad tech that sells more, you know, widgets to people,
or you could go work at the NSA or the
CIA Ordia or any of these agencies and you could
be making software. But you're doing it for a higher cause.
And trust me, it's going to be way more interesting
than making software that sells more widgets, just.
Speaker 4 (52:47):
An analyst, quote unquote.
Speaker 3 (52:51):
Now, listen, you've been a great guest on the show,
going back and forth just all about the spy game
and talking about just your book, you know, and I
want to just read iterate that. You know, Anthony Vincey,
who is here with us today, is the author of
the book The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, The Future of Espionage
and the Battle to Save America. So I want to
(53:11):
plug that again and make sure that that gets said.
Speaker 4 (53:13):
Clearly out here.
Speaker 3 (53:14):
You know, you've put time and thought into writing this
and having it out there, you know, so make sure
that if you do pick up Anthony's book, that if
you buy it online, then you leave a review where
you buy it when you've picked it up, put down
a great book or you know what I could have
done this better or whatever, just put it in the comments,
(53:35):
so that way, you know, I'm sure he'll check it
out or you know, everybody that's involved with the book,
and it's a good thing.
Speaker 4 (53:40):
To do for the author. That way they get some feedback.
Speaker 3 (53:42):
So my big push is just to leave comments where
they buy their book, and if they can't buy it local,
then buy it wherever they can. That's my first that's
my other thing. And with that said, we've had you
for just about an hour. You have served our You've
gone into different places that I probably don't want to
(54:05):
think about, and so thanks for doing that, Thanks for
figuring things out, Thanks for being OCD about whatever it
is that you're passionate about that. You know, the agency
loves you to have your gig and to write your book.
So you know, I know you're a PhD and I
didn't want to call you a doctor, so I'm not
going to call you a doctor. But a PhD is
(54:25):
pretty badass, bro, And I just want to let you
know that, you know, congratulations on that, And if you
ever want to be back on SOFTWAREP Radio with me,
you know you have an open platform to talk about
your book further or any stories else that we may
not have even touched. Base on that you want to
talk about, you can bring it to light here. I
just want to let you know you have an open
door here at Software Radio.
Speaker 1 (54:46):
Thank thanks so much, thanks for having me on, and
thanks for what you do. You know, it's important to
get these stories out there, and it means a lot
to people, especially you know, young people are trying to
figure out what to do with their lives, and so
I appreciate what you do.
Speaker 4 (54:58):
So thank you well, thank you so much, Thank you
so much.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
And with that said, and behalf on, behalf of Anthony
and my team here at soft REAP and Brandon Webb
and everybody.
Speaker 4 (55:08):
Who has helped support me, be on this and be
the host.
Speaker 3 (55:12):
I want to say thank you and to everyone out
there that listens and comments and reaches out to emails,
continue to do so. I love to get that information
and I digest it and then who knows what I
do with it next I might call you out. So
with that said, be kind to somebody. Watch what you're downloading,
watch what you're uploading, be aware at all times, and
(55:33):
from all of us here at softwarep this is RAT
say in peace.
Speaker 2 (55:52):
You've been listening to self. Rep Ladi
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