You're listening to the CyberWire Network, powered by N2K. Now a word from our sponsor. The Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute is currently seeking qualified applicants for its innovative Master of Science in Security Informatics degree program. Study alongside world-class interdisciplinary experts and gain unparalleled educational research and professional experience in information security and assurance.
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Dr Andrew Hammond, the museum's historian and curator. Each week we explore some aspect of the past, present, or future of intelligence and espionage. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five-star review. It really helps other listeners find us. Coming up next on SpyCast. I think it's important to just understand humans. Like, you don't have to agree with their point of view. You have to acknowledge their point of view.
Okay, well thanks ever so much for coming to speak to me at the Spy Museum. Jonathan, it's great to see you again. Great to see you, Andrew. I thought that it would be interesting just to introduce our listeners to who you are. There's a number of different hats that you wear. One of them is how I know you're on
our advisory board at the International Spy Museum. If you could just tell the listeners a little bit more about some of the things you've done in the past and why you're interested in this field. Sure. Well, I identify myself as an entrepreneur. I grew up as an entrepreneur. I actually was sitting at the board table at four years old with my grandfather and my dad. Coming out of school in 1992, my dad ended up going bankrupt. So I became a corporate person
for about five years and realized that wasn't for me. So I went and took my cell phone and entrepreneurial journey, taught myself search engine optimization. In 1999, I had a meeting with Cheryl Sandberg and Eric Schmidt and 400 engineers at Google in 2003. I actually had an offer to go to Google at the time, chose to continue to be an entrepreneur. So that's how much I want to be an entrepreneur and use those skills, those skills and search engine
optimization to actually get a $100 million contract in Abu Dhabi. So I actually used search engine optimization and found the right people in Abu Dhabi. We had a floating security barrier to stop a waterborne IED attack. So it was called Whisper Wave and we took a commercially available product, modified it for military purposes and actually sold more of it in the
Middle East than we did in the States. So and from there, I became an EOS implementer. So I actually help about 30 entrepreneurial teams at any time get what they want from their business. I'm like the I call myself the 12th man on the team. And one of those teams I work on happens to be Chris Voss's team at the Black Swan group. And I had the privilege of getting trained in the Black Swan skills. So I am the commercial perspective amongst the hostage negotiators at the Black Swan group.
Just a few things I wanted to pull on there for listeners that may not know what they are. So SEO, we're talking about search engine optimization. Search engine optimization. You just give them a couple of sentences on what that is in case they don't know. Search engine optimization is the process of tuning your website so that it gets better results in Google. So basically you want to improve the search rankings.
And you can do that organically by changing your site or you can also do it with search engine marketing, which would mean you'd pay for an ad that would get you higher in Google. And at EOS, can you tell them briefly about EOS as it's pretty fast and anything? EOS is the entrepreneurial operating system. There's a book called Traction written by Gina Wickman. That's the basis for the system. And I say it's a strategy execution system
to help businesses get what they want. And in the case of the spy museum, museums to get what they want and what we do is we joke that we manage human energy and try to get it all online moving in the same direction to go achieve whatever vision that the entity is looking to achieve. Can you tell us those off you have the companies that you have worked with? Sure. Well, I've worked with the museum. I've worked with J.
Low Beauty. I worked with the orthodox union, which is they decide what's kosher in the world. I've worked with a whole host of other companies. So it tends to be healthcare-related, professional services related construction, because I live in New York City. So those are the groups that I tend to work with just by nature of what businesses are there. So I think that it could be interesting now to just discuss a lot about some of the
places where you have worked in the past. So I know you've spent a lot of time in the Middle East. Can you tell us a lot a bit more about that? I was mostly in the GCC that we worked. So the Gulf Cooperation Council led countries in the Persian Gulf. So it was really interesting. We built this product. It was actually a wave dispersion product.
It was designed to reduce wave action. After the USS Cole incident, the US Navy called us from NavFAC and said, can we use this product to stop a waterborne IED attack, like what happened in the port of aid against the USS Cole? So they call us, I can't remember. It was in 2000 sometime, or just like two days after the Cole was attacked. And they, then we didn't hear from them for a year. So I went and built a website and figured out,
basically I used a long tail strategy. So that long tail strategy means lots of different search words that I optimized the site for. Meaning made the site show up in higher rankings across a large group of words. And what happened by doing that is people were searching on Google and they, in fact, were calling us from all over the world. I mean, all over the world, including North Korea and Iran and all sorts of interesting places.
And my dad and I had a joke that we got a call to go present at a conference in Dubai. We had never been to Dubai. Neither of us had been to the Middle East at the time. And we flipped the credit card to decide whose credit card was going to go on to go to Dubai. And I was the loser. Well, maybe the winner. I got to go to Dubai. So I landed in Dubai like two in the morning. Of course, my car that was supposed to be there didn't show up.
And it worked my way through to the airport. It was blistering the hot even at two in the morning. I did a presentation to about 200 people from various militaries in the Middle East. And at the end of the talk, someone came up to me and handed a, be a card and said, you should call these people. And those people were from the international golden group. They ended up being our partner in Abu Dhabi. Well, I think it would be interesting now to focus to the main thing we're going to discuss
today, which are some of the similarities between case officers and entrepreneurs. So by case officers, I mean that small subset of CIA officers who are sent out to spot, recruit and run agents. People that are going to steal secrets. People that are going to pass on information, they generally do so out of embassies overseas. But we spoke before and there's just so many areas of overlap. So one thing I think that we could do just to
approach this at the beginning is think about the term entrepreneur. You know, I looked up a whole bunch of different definitions of it. And the main things I could pull out that was common across all of them were a particular attitude towards risk, adventure and ability to see an idea and then materialize it and operationalize it and the ability to organize things to make that idea happen. But you came up with a really good way to approach this
terms of similarities and differences. So let's go through some of the similarities. So you said to identify a problem. Could you tell us a lot about more about what that involves being an entrepreneur identifying a problem? Yes, so we can take the case of Whisper Wave and how we ended up in the Middle East. It was fascinating to just put things on Google and see what would come back. So instead of deciding where we were going to go, we let
the search engine tell us where we're going to go. And ultimately what we figured out was that our product, the product that's this floating security barrier was most attractive in the Middle East. And for a couple reasons, they had high value critical infrastructure, they had a high risk of, of terroristic threat and they were willing to protect it. And so we allowed the market to decide as opposed to determining, we thought we were going to,
I mean, I got to, I can't remember even what it's called at this point. The Department of Homeland Security, we got a safety act designation for the product. I went and worked on that. We were on the GSA schedule. We did a whole bunch of things in terms of government contracting that worked to some degree. But the vast majority of our work ended up being in the Middle East. And we would have never known that but for the fact that Google kind of directed us there.
Let's talk about figuring out a solution. So how did you come up with this idea for Whisper Wave? My dad actually came up with the idea. So I always say he was a product of the space race. So in the early 60s, they put a ton of money into kids who were math and science experts. So he's really an engineer. He happened to go to Yale and Harvard Business School. And he came up with the idea. And I was the one who marketed it in basically. I said I did
public affairs, marketing, business development. I tended to be more of the business guy. Even though he went to Harvard Business School, he preferred the engineering. He just let lead into that. And just bringing this back to the case officers. For a case officer, there's part of, okay, here's what I've been taught. These are potential types of people to look for. Here are some potential vulnerabilities. But they may also come from left field. Like you guys had to
do. It may be someone that you never expected or it may be them that approach is yours. So you have to you have to be able to pivot between both. So it seems like a nimbleness or a fleet fittedness is something that's similar between both of them. Would you agree? I agree. I call it structured flexibility. Structured flexibility. So I have a structure. Like I think it's going to work a certain way. We plan for the mission accordingly. Like as Mike Tyson says, everyone has a plan
until they get punched in the nose. I can't tell you about case officer work, but I would imagine you walk in, you have a certain plan. And that may not be the way things go down. So from an entrepreneurial standpoint, we had a plan. We thought we were very clear who we're going to deal with more of the Army Corps of Engineers than the Department of Homeland Security. But the, I don't know, there was a different plan that it pivot that happened.
So I think you have to be open to being prepared. So structures like being prepared and going through your notes, sort of like I have notes sitting in my lap here. But the reality is the flexibility is being flexible in us. And if I go back to the Black Swan concept of stay curious, I'm just going to get into conversation and I'm going to stay curious. And the Black Swan will show up. I spoke to one case officer and he was saying that sometimes you have
to just force situations where interactions are going to take place. Like you, you have a soccer game or something where people come from, from different embassies or from across the city and they play in that's a way to meet people that you otherwise wouldn't. You have to, you have to get there and grow your own opportunities to some extent. You
don't just sit there with an idea of here's what I'm going to do. If an opportunity comes, you have to go out and harvest them and that may take a lot of work and a lot of energy. So an entrepreneurship, we would do things like, like, I can remember one of my clients wanted to meet with a professor up in Boston. He had no meeting with the professor. He got on a plane. He called the professor that morning and said, can I take you for lunch? Do
you happen to be free? I happen to be in Boston. He had no other agenda. But he wanted to talk to that particular professor and that's what he did. So I think that's pretty similar. Like you're going to go make your own luck. And so I'm just thinking, like, so you go and make your own luck. You're an entrepreneur. And for a case officer, they have to do the same. But then they're somewhere in the middle, or they have to survive somehow with a more
corporate type of entity. The CIA has its rules, it has its procedures, it's embedded in the US code, all of those types of things. But then another hand, they have to be an entrepreneur. They have some latitude, but they can't just do completely whatever they want. So I think that the case officers occupy quite an interesting space or expect it to be entrepreneur and who has a bigger unlock, but they're also expected to tie into the chase market of the world
and the CIA's of the world. So one of the things my advantage is is I did spend five years in corporate. So there's a huge opportunity to use asymmetric tactics if you're dealing with corporate. You can trip them up by understanding what the rules are that they have to play by. And therefore make them work to your advantage as an entrepreneur. So it's almost like being an institutional insurgent or something like that. Like all of like a friend's urgency.
A friend's urgency, okay. So tell us about the role that your network or your contacts play and being an entrepreneur. So for a case officer, this is important. You go to a foreign country. You're maybe living in a capital city and you have to like spot, develop, process, recruit people that can give you information. If you don't know anyone and you don't
meet anyone, it's pretty hard to do that. So you have to be able to almost like be the spider and see where the web is and all the different places where you can go to gather the information tell what kind of role does the network or the role of X play and being an entrepreneur. So it is fundamentally one of the most important things that you have. So when I came back from Abu Dhabi, which was like in 2013 and became an EOS implementer,
I happened to live in DC at the time. I happened to have no network and no network in DC. But I was an entrepreneur. I understood how the system worked. I was a good salesman and I could run a good business. But the network was lacking. So my wife used to laugh at me that I used to go to for breakfast at the tower club because DC's an interesting market where I didn't fit. I'm not in politics. I'm not in the intel community. I'm not in the military. I'm not in the museum world.
The museum world? I should probably call that out first. But I'm not in the museum world. I'm not in I'm not in diplomacy. So people didn't understand me. So I just started networking with people down here. That's where I ended up meeting Chris Voss. Just over breakfast because I happened to be out there. We say in the entrepreneurial world, you're not going to sell something by sitting at home looking at a screen thinking about it. You have to go out and meet people. So from there, I
actually got adopted by some West Point guys adopted by some West Point folks. Craig Cummings and his crew down here and they let me hang out with them. They were more entrepreneurial. Today, I'm at the center of influence in New York City. I'm pretty focused there. Last week,
I got two calls for business opportunities. What was your strategy? You come here just like a case officer goes to, I don't know, Jakarta, Addis Ababa, some other, if they don't know anybody at all, it sounds easy in theory, but what was your strategy or was it just a narrative where you took up one step at a time and developed it from there? I said it was 240 coffees.
It just was, it takes absolute grit to go figure it out. And then I eventually started to figure out people saw I was around and then people started introducing me to other folks and I had a couple of hits or got lucky and got a couple of business opportunities and you know, I was always frustrated with the fact that when I needed help, no one would help me here. But I had been in Ababa, we had a picture of ourselves with Shafemah Ahmed in Ababa. So if there was ever a problem,
we just picked the picture out. It was kind of like a PBA card over there. So I was going from there and we had also worked for Prince Knife in Saudi. So the most powerful people in the country to coming here and I couldn't get like a most basic meeting. So it was quite humbling. I wanted to quit many days and I think my dad and I always had a core value of sheer will. We went because of sheer will. Just getting up every single day and going out and trying. Eventually it'll work.
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and then eventually being successful. Tell us a little bit more about dealing with the set box, dealing with the days where you feel like quitting or just giving up. Talk to us a little bit more about the... I think you have to have a strong network and a strong family support, and you have to accept the fact that it's very difficult. Because it looks easy when everyone out there is saying, I won this huge deal and look at how great I am. I raised this money and
the reality is there's lots of days of drudgery to get to that point. So it sort of ties into what you were describing with the case officer having to deal with the bureaucracy and then also being out in the world trying to source assets and it's very, very hard. It's very lonely. So that's why we tend to... I belong to the Entrepreneur's Organization and I'm affiliated, not I don't belong,
but I'm affiliated with the young presidents organization. These are other people who have walked the entrepreneurial journey, who can share their experiences and understand what you're going through. That's helpful. Okay. So talk about that experience of having to be out on your own. So that can be similar to case officers as well. You're out there, you might not have a lot of support. It's very different from the army where there was a whole big logistical chain connected
to you. You could literally be just winging at tellsleth about more about the being an entrepreneur. To me, I was born this way. So it's built into my DNA, I think. I still have a crew that I run with, but I prefer to run with a crew of 10 folks in a loose affiliation, like almost a federation of folks that we rely on each other because it's very lonely to be alone. You're very difficult to not being with other folks who understand. So every year I end up having an apprentice.
And I have an apprentice because I'll end up with deals that I, for one reason or another, don't fit for me and I want someone I can like, I can send them to. And then I can help train them and they hopefully teach me some new skill. So actually my first apprentice was Marco Donnell who happens to be the CEO of EOS worldwide today. And my second apprentice was a 29-year-old kid who's buying his first house this week in Florida. So I'm very proud of Ben. And I've had a number
of other apprentices. I always have one because then I have someone to talk to. I actually talked to my apprentice and vented prior to getting on this podcast today because I needed someone to just calm me down and make sure that I hopefully do a good job. And could anybody listening to this podcast become an entrepreneur? Is it possible to make an entrepreneur or you borrow that way? No, I definitely think you could make an entrepreneur.
I think anyone, like, I'll go back to my share well. Do you really want it? You ask me about DC when I lived here. And I think I have like like a hundred jobs when I came back. I think I've got an offer to go to like somewhere around a man camp in Africa. And I was like, I'm not going to do it because we had done that in the Middle East. And I didn't want to do that. And at some point I realized that like I just wasn't employable. So I think it's possible for anyone. You have to have
the net worth in the staying power to go through the ups and downs. You know, that's the biggest risk. Someone comes in with two weeks of cash. Like that's not going to work. You probably should get a job. But if you have for a month or 18 months of cash and you really want to do it, I think it's a possibility. And I think it's interesting. You spoke previously and you mentioned the case officers and entrepreneurs, the belt credibility, not on their pedigree, but based on their experience.
You tell us a lot about more about that. Yeah. In general, like there's some, so when the entrepreneur's organization, we have something called Gestalt Protocol. So Gestalt Protocol says, if you're going to tell me something, I want you to speak from experience. Don't tell me this book says you should do it this way and therefore you should do it this way because that just feels like someone's telling you. But if someone tells you when I was starting and I hired an attorney,
here's the mistakes that I made. So like in general, what I find is that I have more respect for folks who've done it than for someone who's learned it in a book because it doesn't necessarily work that way. Like I said, structured flexibility. The book gives you the structure, but then you're going to have to go make decisions. I find it quite interesting being an entrepreneur
touching on this point. Like to some extent, like people, it seems to me that people don't really care what skill you went to or, you know, what if your family's blue bloodied or you're the child of first generation immigrants, it's like, well, I done this deal or I didn't do this deal or I've had this experience personally or I have an older or other stuff doesn't matter quite as much. Yeah, I have one client in particular who cannot read. He has dyslexia. He reads it like a fourth grade
level. He has a reader. Someone goes with him and reads for him because he's not capable of reading. He has a $50 million business and can run a track like a D11 bulldozer, like no one's business and run all kinds of crazy equipment. So a lot of the entrepreneurs are neurodiverse and having the degree doesn't mean that you have the skills to actually make the business work.
And this is also the same with case officers, right? If you're a great recruiting people or spotting or running agents, then, you know, some extent no one really cares where you went to skill or what your pedigree is. The pedigree is what you've actually achieved and done in your career. 100% like we say, don't tell me, show me. I think the importance of listening and just truly trying to understand someone else is really important for case officers is also the case for entrepreneurs.
I think it's important to just understand humans. Like if people like you, there's six times more likely to want to work with you, right? Or make a deal with you. So to the extent you should listen, everyone is starving to be listened to. So I often play with the black, some color, the tactical empathy skills in all sorts of different venues. I did it once in a, I happened to have my airport on and I walked into a store and I was talking to my assistant.
She's like, even when you go to the UPS store, you talk about the guy and you said, how long have you had this store? It looked beautiful. You haven't had it that long, but you guys look like you're really making it. And he's like, I wouldn't stop telling me about a store. So I think it's almost the way of life. It's like, to the extent that you can listen and stay
curious, you'll get more out of life. And for the blacks one grip on the listening and tactical empathy and hostage negotiations, can you like, what's the, what's the importance of listening within within that company, blacks one group or within the work that you do with them? He's been a hostage negotiator. It's not about just okay talk, for example, I'm being playful, but it's not just okay to keep talking terrorists. And then as soon as I go up, I'm going to like
interject and tell you what I think. And you know, we play that game that most people play every day with at least one person where, you know, neither of them are really listening to each other. You just wait for a gap and then jump in and spout whatever it is you have in your head. They do that in turn, but you can't really do that if you're a hostage negotiator or if you're, you want to engage in tactical empathy, I'm assuming. Yeah, so 100% you cannot. We call that listening to rebut.
So like I like in that to someone having their hand raised while you're speaking as soon as you're done, they jump in and start responding, not on what you just talked about, but whatever their agenda is, that never feels good. It's kind of like when you sit, tell someone you feel sick and they're like, Oh, when I was sick last time, like no one ever wants to hear that no one cares. And so my, I have a partner in Black Swan group also Troy Smith and Troy actually, he says,
people don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care. And so one of the, so I am not hostage negotiator by training. I am an entrepreneur who happened to learn these skills and I always think that's important. I'm an entrepreneur who has trained as a coach with the Black Swan group, but from a commercial perspective. And to the extent that people feel heard, they will be more likely to engage with you. And we actually talk about the levels of listening,
these five levels of listening. So listening, listening to for the gist is just listening literally like you're on your iPhone and you're saying, Yep, I heard you. I heard you. So that's one listening to her butt. Is that really annoying? Oh, yeah, yeah, when I was sick, gist is I felt listening for logic is listening for the logic of what that other person is saying. So instead of listening to respond, you're listening for why they logically said what they said. So that's level three.
Level four is listening for emotion. So can you listen and hear what emotion is behind what they're saying? And then the fifth is actually listening for their point of view. So that means you don't have to agree with their point of view. You have to acknowledge their point of view. So and what we say is you cannot stay in listening for point of view or listening for emotion for that long. The best you'll do is listen for logic. And then you I say it's like I like in it
to doing yoga and occasionally you get into like a meditative state, but not every time. So the ideas, you know, how do you just continue to focus on your breath? It's continue to focus on the logic of what that person is saying. And I think it's quite interesting this other part where case officers and entrepreneurs, if you're lying or exaggerating your successes and so forth, you've mentioned that as an entrepreneur, you very quickly get found out. Tell us a little bit more about that
phenomenon. Like everything in life, you know, people want to deal with people who are who are credible. And I can tactically have the guy. So I have this since I work with these 30 teams, sometimes I'll ask someone, so you know, this is what you're going to do for the quarter, this is your goal that you're going to set. And they go, well, yeah, I think I'd get that done. And I say we call that a counterfeit, yes. So I want to suss out what the counterfeit
yeses are. And I'll literally label them. I'll say that sounds like a counterfeit. Yes. So I'm actually telling them they're lying to their face. And the and the reality is they don't feel like I'm telling them they're lying. They're like, yeah, the reality is I have these 15 things to do. I'm just not going to get that thing done. So in my experience, there's a fake it till you make it an entrepreneurship to a point. Like you can tell a good story,
but you got to be able to back that story up. And sometimes we have to just put it out there to,
you know, sort of set a set a target. And you're not sure how you're going to get to the target, but the target can't be so so crazy that you're never going to achieve it or you don't have the relationships you're you're claiming to have or you don't have the ability to finance a deal the way you know, I understand that you are optimistic in thinking about getting it done, but, you know, definitely we know the people who are out there who are posers.
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On the podcast before, we've had case officers on before, and they've said that, you know, one type of case officer as the larger than life person, the person who can go into a room, everybody wants to be their friend, everybody wants to be in their company, they're like, there's an energy that emanates from them, very charming and so forth. And then there's another type of case officer that is the great person, the person no one notices, the person who flies under the radar.
So if you want to compare it to fictional people, it's James Bond versus George Smiley from the Likhariin Hotels. And people have said that there's room within case officers for both. He doesn't have to be one or the other, is that same thing applied to entrepreneurs where the specific personality types that work or is it really more, no, actually entrepreneurs tend to be ex or tend to be why. More like case officers. Sometimes I'm like, that person's larger than life,
I can't believe what they just accomplished. I don't know how they did it, but they did it. So I'm who am I to decide? My cousin's a cardiothoracic surgeon and he said he's stopped trying to decide who was going to live and who was going to die. Because he was wrong. So I don't try to figure out who's going to make it, who's not going to make it.
We just, there are some of those larger than life people who will accomplish things as you're like, I don't know how that person just did that, but they are just have unique capabilities. So we just admire them. Are there any personality types that we didn't make for a good entrepreneur? 10 people who tend to be just two risk averse, you know, who are unwilling to take chances, who are unwilling to get out of the house and say, but I can't tell you what the outcome is going
to be. People who want a very prescriptive process. We'd rather have them later on when we want a project that is more based on like a system, we call it a system of record. Like a system of record says, like, here's exactly how it works every single time. And your interest in this particular field, so your own advisory board at the Spine Museum tell us a bit more about where this interest comes from. Well, my grandfather was a, was in the military and I don't know all, all exactly his
history, but he was very active in World War II. So I've been, I sort of grew up with him and he told me all his stories. So I was always, you know, fascinated with international business or international intrigue. I ended up becoming an entrepreneur, but still, you know, believe in having supporting our country. And I've done actually a bunch of work with the State Department. We actually call it global entrepreneurship program. So when under our Secretary Clinton,
I had a program to use entrepreneurship as a form of state craft. So we met all sorts of interesting people when the search engine optimization sent me to Dubai. And so I got, I have, I have an international perspective. I like the International Spine Museum. And somehow I got lucky enough to get get the call when another implementer, it wasn't a good fit. Another EOS implementer and got to meet the team. And I think I'm at the team in like February of 2020 just before COVID happened. So
I'm and and and road the road, the COVID wave with the team. And and you you mentioned an international perspective. Can you tell us a little bit more about the joint civilian orientation conference? Like what did that involve? How does one get selected? Why did you say not for and so forth? So joint civilian orientation conference JCOC is the Secretary of Defense is only our reach program. So they only have one. And I just happen to
get lucky to get selected. So the Army sponsored me. I actually got wait listed. And three days before I was supposed to be in Doha. And they said, can you come? And I said, of course, I can come. There's a whole selection board that that you go through to actually get selected. There's 40 people that were on my, I was in JCOC 84. Four people who are in the program, we traveled for a week with the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. We flew out of
Andres Air Force Base on a C-17 and spent the week traveling the country. And we are a different member of the military each day. So we went to Nellis Air Force bases in Vegas with the Air Force. We went to San Diego and with the Navy, then we went with the Marine Corps, then we went up to joint base, a little from Accord and with the Army. And then we were with the Coast Guard. And then we came back here and went to Walter Reed. So it was just like an incredible experience with
leaders from all over the country. You don't say no if you get asked. And just that, let Alistair knows a little bit more about the purpose of this, so that people like yourself get their head around the whole defense enterprise. Yeah, so you have to not be involved in a defense enterprise. You basically go and the intent is to introduce you to the Department of Defense. And the hope is that you will be an ally in your community with
the Department of Defense. So it's a public affairs mission. And they had folks from all walks of life on the trip, but including like the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange or someone from Disney and someone from Nike and lots of not-for-profits, et cetera. And is this similar to the FBI Citizens Academy? I know you went to that too. The Citizen Academy is similar in nature as a public affairs mission. That was 10 weeks. I did it with the New York Field Office.
And the FBI Citizens Academy, tell us a little bit more about what that entails. Oh, it's fantastic. I went every week and we're briefed for three hours by FBI agents about different squads or different divisions of the FBI and how it worked. We got to actually shoot at the FBI range. So we got to shoot at Thompson. Oh, it was one of the things we got to shoot. And we got to see what the SWAT kits looked like. And we learned about all the different missions of
the FBI. And it was fantastic. Did you also touch on Kevin's or intelligence? Oh, yeah. There were like three weeks on counterintelligence or something. So they were all different different groups that we met with. So like each night, one of the nights I remember there was like the healthcare fraud group. And then the art guy came in one week and the counterintelligence came up on you different times. They actually talked about the illegals.
Was it called the illegals? Yeah. Yeah. They talked about what they did with that. And the agents who had been involved and that came in and spoke to us. It was fascinating. You know, the whole purpose of gathering all of this intelligence for American government, for example, so the policy makers, people like the president, the Secretary of State can make decisions as an entrepreneur. I guess the information and puts that you're getting are
very important. Let's just call intelligence or information where you're getting it from. It could be word of mouth. It could be reading publications. You have to be sensitized to risk and opportunity and all of these other things that policy makers have to think about all be at the end. Put so slightly different. Tell me a little bit more about that as an entrepreneur. How you think about information? How you think about quote unquote intelligence if you want to put
it like that? So one of the things that I have is I have, so it was with Chris Voss and we were talking and he he said, Oh, I told him like before I go into a meeting, I get a briefing from my assistant. And one of my assistants failed to give me some bad information. She's like, well, I thought you didn't want to know that. I'm like, yeah, I want to know that person's getting sued in there under investigation. That would probably be helpful. So what we did was recreate a process from that.
I actually have a calendar that's a target brief. I have a target briefing calendar. So prior to when meeting, I could sit in someone's like in the entryway and I have a target brief on whoever I'm going to meet. So they literally have a calendar. So I think that that's really important. One of the really interesting things about a company is I want to know what what Glassdoor looks like because Glassdoor is going to tell me what the culture looks like in that organization.
The CEO is going to tell me it's great. I want to see if it's a Glassdoor of 2.2 or it's a Glassdoor of 4.5. It's going to tell me a lot. And then I actually want to meet with the team I can actually see it. So does the Intel match up with the energy in the room? So you use it all
the time. It's interesting that you say that the motto is the curious because one of the main things that came out with the case officers that I've interviewed previously as curiosity, that's almost uniformly one of the main traits that they bring up like a case officer has to be curious because the range of targets that you might try to recruit are the whole mixture of human types of human beings, types of interests, types of background. I spoke to one case officer who
said that he wanted to recruit someone who was really interested in opera. So they went out and had no interest and it was not whatsoever previously and taught themselves all about the hashtag opera, Russian opera, just so that they can talk the talk. So I call a common theme of curiosity or someone else said you have to be an entity but 20 miles wide, you have to be interested in everything,
you have to be able to potentially draw deep on any subject under the sun. So that's another interesting crossover of what we've been discussing curiosity for entrepreneurs and for case officers.
Yeah, and one of the things I find is if I can speak their language like if I can speak opera or whatever the language is, I often switch languages, not literally languages but I switch and I'll speak from a medical CEO's perspective of a medical company versus a financial services CEO perspective and I will change the language that I use because I've learned it over time and people when you use their language they tend to lean in. They're like, oh you understand me. So it's fascinating and
it makes a lot of sense. People don't want to know how much you know until they know how much you care back to that point. Well, thanks, Arosobl. It's just been a pleasure to speak to you. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of Spycast. Please follow us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next week on Spycast. It is the largest combatant command in the unified command structure of the United States. If you have feedback you can reach us by email at
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