87: General Michael Hayden | National Security in an Age of Lies

Transcript for General Michael Hayden | National Security in an Age of Lies (Episode 87)

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFillippo. Today, we're talking with General Michael Hayden. He was the Director of the CIA and the Head of the NSA, National Security Agency as well. This has got quite a few secrets in his closet I would imagine, Jason. This guy knows a lot of stuff.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:00:21] He knows where the bodies are buried.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:22] Definitely. Probably some literal truth to that as well. This shows a bit off the beaten path for us here on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Today, we'll discuss why it's imperative that intelligence agents, and if you run a business, your subordinates and team members to be able to tell uncomfortable truths and how we can make this process smoother. We'll also uncover how intelligence agents and operators at the highest levels of government and in politics create and maintain relationships and handle sensitive conflicts. And we'll get an inside look at the game of espionage and why it's a crucial force for those of us that live in a democracy. I find this geopolitical stuff quite interesting. I think you will as well, and if you want to know how I managed to book all these great people, manage my relationships using systems and tiny habits including some of the tiny habits and systems I actually teach to the military and defense agencies and intelligence agencies. Check out our Six-Minute Networking course, which is free over at jordanharbinger.com/course. That's jordanharbinger.com/course, and don't forget we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of all the key takeaways that I discuss here with General Hayden. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. All right, here's General Hayden. So welcome back to the show. Thanks for coming on today. I know you're a busy man.

General Michael Hayden: [00:01:42] This is great. Thank you.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:01:44] And this show never really touches politics per se, but when I was doing the research for the show, I thought, “Okay, we'll talk about The Assault On Intelligence and we'll talk about the book, having read the book.” But then of course, everything yesterday was just upside down. What is going on with your security clearance and what's going on with the security clearance thing? What's happening right now?

General Michael Hayden: [00:02:05] I know of nothing actually going on with my security clearance. We had the event about three weeks ago in which it was suggested from the White House Press Room that I was in a small group of about a half a dozen folks who were being watched, looked at, and then you had the announcement yesterday with regard to John Brennan's clearance being lifted. But neither I change to the best of my knowledge anyone else on that list has had anyone in government speak with them. So to what we have is the lone event of John having his security clearance lifted by the president by order of the president. And Jordan, I mean president has absolute authority over security clearances, but then again there are processes that normally surround the granting or removing of clearances and certainly neither that the granting or the removal has ever in my life experience and done without cause. And yet yesterday, you had the spectacle of John's clearance being removed because -- and I'm paraphrasing here now, he created some unhinged tweets, which of course if that were the requirement to keep the security clearance, we'd have a lot of folks who would need to be reinvestigated.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:37] Yeah, yeah. I think that's probably accurate, and it really, it came in pretty good timing. I mean The Assault On Intelligence is the title of the book that you've just written, American National Security in an Age of Lies, and a large part of the book is dedicated to “Look, this is how the government is kind of not necessarily being supported in their intelligence gathering efforts and why this is dangerous.” And I talked about this with a friend of mine about the security clearance debacle here with John Brennan, and people were like, “Oh yeah, that's weird. I don't know, I don't get it.” And I thought, “Well, there's a reason that this is dangerous, but I think you're probably the perfect person to explain why sort of willy-nilly granting or revoking security clearances of CIA directors and other high level government officials is generally not a good idea.”

General Michael Hayden: [00:04:26] So we could put this Jordan in three baskets, okay? Let's just start with the one we just touched on, which is an essential sense of unfairness to John Brennan, all right? So, so let me explore that just for a second. There are a lot of former intelligence officials who maintain their clearances, and in all cases they do it because the government thinks it's a good idea. They either want to call on them, or they're there in new jobs where the security clearance is required and so on. So now that John has been removed, John is no longer eligible for jobs for which he would be otherwise wonderfully qualified. So there's a certain sense of unfairness here. All right, that's basket one. Basket two are the kind of remaining survivors in the list. You saw the Sarah Sanders yesterday mentioned about another eight or nine names. Mine included that, you know, this is not particularly referential to me, but in essence that announcement said “We're putting you people on notice, we're watching you. You better be careful what you say. Otherwise you could end up like Brennan.” That is an assault on free speech, that is an attempt to coerce. That is an attempt to use raw presidential power to degrade a necessary national debate.

[00:06:04] Frankly, I don't think it's going to work. I'm going to say think what I want to say right I think, and I don't think I will be influenced in a way these other folks by this kind of threat hanging over their head, but just the attempts for them, it's got to be off putting for most Americans. So that's the basket two. Basket three is the biggest and maybe the most important. If you realize the president yesterday just messaged the entire American intelligence community, if you persist in saying things I don't like or with which I do not agree, I can punish you, and I probably will, which is a horrible message for him because the intelligence community needs the freedom to go in there with some confidence to tell them things they believe to be true, whether he wants to hear them or not. And I think he's made that more difficult to do, or simply made it a far more courageous act on the part of the intel guys then they should have to mount. So that's what the deal is, that's what I would've told your friend, Jordan.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:16] Yeah, that makes sense to me, General, because I think whenever we have to go to our boss, regardless of whether we're making auto parts or international policy, we don't necessarily want to go in and say, “So here's the problem. All that work we all did, or all of that money we all spent, or all of that analysis we all did turned out to be wrong. And here's this other thing that's going to kind of be embarrassing to everyone, but it's the truth.” You don't want people to go, “Shoot! If I say that, it could ruin my whole career, but it will save a bunch of money, trouble, lives, whatever. But I really, I've been working 20 years in this career. I really can't lose it.” You want them to go, “This is what I have to do. I have to tell the truth right now,” and people will be accepting of that because this is my job.

General Michael Hayden: [00:08:01] Right. Now, there’ll be a lot of your listeners saying “Oh, come on now! That's your job, you just have to go in there and say it.” And of course that's right, right? But why would a president want to make that harder to do? Why would a president wants to make that less likely to happen? Jordan, we have a -- this happens enough in my old world that we actually developed a phrase for it. It was called “The phenomenon of the unpleasant fact.” And so you're going in there to a policymaker and you feel as if you have to tell him something that cuts against his politics, his preferences, his policy, his personality, I don't know. But you know, it's not going to be a happy meeting, but you go in there and you do it. But the Jordan, when you're going to go in there, there is a hesitancy and I not being judgmental here, there is a hesitancy because you better get your act together. You better be able to defend yourself because you're going to really hit some headwinds in there.

[00:09:04] And so what happens sometimes is that you don't go in there early enough to convince the first customer that he's wrong about something, and you don't go in there in time for him to begin to make adjustments, and you've made the problem even worse. And so this is not confined to President Trump. Remember, President Obama and ISIS being the JV team? Remember that?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:31] Yeah.

General Michael Hayden: [00:09:31] So who's the guy who goes in there and says, “Hey boss, I've been thinking, let me give you another way of looking at this problem.” And so I suspect that number one, the president should have been pushing back, but number two, they probably didn't pound the desk early enough to say, “Boss, you got to listen to me.” President Trump has made that even more difficult by what he did yesterday. I get it. Intelligence officers should be courageous and always do the right thing. But you know, demanding that absolute courage be a core element of their job description means from time to time some folks aren't just going to meet that standard.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:12] Yeah, it's a little depressing when it comes down to it because we want to be ahead of all of this Russia stuff. We want to be ahead of the terrorism stuff here and we want to be ahead of the cybersecurity issues that we have. We don't want people to be dissuaded from talking about this, or researching it, and it has even further reaching effects I think, because whenever we dissuade people from doing something, the ripple effect really goes deeper and theirs, look, I don't have a concrete example of this, but an analogy I might draw here is going to be something along the lines of, “Well, do I want to research cybersecurity?” Because if every time somebody brings up cybersecurity, nobody wants to hear it and nothing gets done. And then the person who rings the alarm bell, the loudest gets fired. Maybe I'll just go into a different field. Maybe I'll research, maybe I'll research a co bilateral relationships with Australia. It's not controversial, nobody there ever gets canned, it's easier.

General Michael Hayden: [00:11:11] Yeah. Well, I had a question I used to ask and then I started to be self-referential, but it's kind of the reverse of pushing bad news away from you. And so my folks would come in, we'd have an ad hoc staff meeting. They bring up an issue and show me what the problem was. And one of the questions, Jordan, that I would routinely ask was, “Did I do that? Is that my fault?” And I know sometimes it was, “Well, yeah.” I go, “All right, tell me more.” Or even when it's, no, I can say, “Well fine, but we still have to fix it.” But you get the tone that I'm trying to describe here, Jordan. You're not pushing the bad news away. You're willing to hear it. You're not going to kill the messenger.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:12:05] Yeah. That's sort of reminds me of, “Oh man, no one's going to get this, this reference.” But Steve Urkel, Jason, you remember that show? Where he's like, “Oh, did I do that?” When he runs the car through the garage door, or he does some mistake?

Jason DeFillippo: [00:12:17] Oh yeah, yeah, I definitely remember that, yep.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:12:19] Yeah. But I think the problem that we have right now, or I don't know if this is the entire problem of course, but in this sort of like post truth world. Intelligence agencies, you find yourselves, well I guess your former agencies in the bunker with journalism, academia, the courts, law enforcement, and science also, everything's evidence-based, right? So you share this broader duty with these other truth tellers, hopefully truth tellers, to preserve our ability as a society and as a country to make important decisions based on the best judgment of reality as we can see it.

General Michael Hayden: [00:13:00] Right. And look, and we all freely admit, we can all get that wrong, but at least the departure point for our decision making is the pursuit of objective reality rather than some op priori narrative of how the world ought to work. And so this brings us almost full circle to how we began our conversation. What's going on here? And from the point of view of John Brennan and Jim Clapper and others. John uses language that I have chosen not to use, all right? He has made this more personal than I think is effective, but fundamentally Hayden, Clapper, Brennan, McLaughlin, Morrell, Bash, I mean I could go on, Phil Mudd with former intel folks who are now getting general public commentary. Their view, their purpose isn't to bash the president or bash the administration, their purpose is to answer the question and so you know when I am asked something on air, I just try to give an objective answer.

[00:14:08] I'll give you a give you one, Jordan. For most people will sound like I'm opposing the president. “General, do you think Kim Jong Un is going to give up his nuclear weapons?” “Oh my God, no. He would be crazy to give up his weapons.” And then I would go on to describe why that is actually the consensus of anybody who does this for a living. Now, that comes across as perhaps attacking the president or at least attacking his policy, when in reality all we're trying to say is that that's not going to happen. But it comes out, it comes out negative. And here's unfortunately as a president who does not like voices speaking against his preferred narrative. That's why you get fake news, enemy of the people and I'm taking these security clearances away.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:15:05] You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, General Michael Hayden. We'll be right back after this.

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:04] What do you think we should do about that? I mean, the sort of saying, “Well, we need to convince the administration to change their mind.” What do you do if you're a CIA or NSA officer or if we're at home and we have to tell our boss at the auto parts store that an inconvenient truth. How do we handle this? How do we prepare ourselves for that? Just tactically.

General Michael Hayden: [00:18:26] Yeah. So I frankly, you got to be true to yourself though, you're not required to be suicidal or stupid, all right? And believe me when you're going in there to the president, and I've done this with an unhappy story, all right? You don't want to be in his face, or presenting it in a way that makes it politically embarrassing for him. So Jordan, it's more art than it is science. I mean, it's science with regard to, you've got to have accurate observations, but how do you get those accurate observations inside the head of a human being who is thinking otherwise before you started? And there, as I said at the art form sometimes requires you to say, “Mr. President, I get that point. I've got a lot of folks who agree with Mr. President, but just for a minute, sir. Let me give you another way of looking at that problem.” You see what I mean? Or “Mr. President, I get that, but you know, I think we, week, this week, we may be underselling the impact of fill in the blank, Jordan, of X, Y, or Z. You want to go to where he is and try to carefully walk him to another place. And again, that requires a certain interest, curiosity, and openness on the part of the person you're trying to communicate to. And I'm afraid certainly in his public persona, President Trump, isn't it constant model of openness and willingness to accept alternative views.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:11] Do you think if we're stuck in a corporation where our superiors find ourselves well, we find our superiors being closed minded. Do you think it's best to try to move away from that position? I'm trying to give something practical here for the listening audience because I think a lot of us find ourselves stuck talking with say a superior or boss, who just isn't going to change. And what do we do in that position? Is it better to move away from working with those types of people wherever possible?

General Michael Hayden: [00:20:37] Well, Jordan, I can give you the answer that's always right. It depends, but it depends on yourself, on what it is you're doing, okay? So I don't mean to downgrade anyone's professional life. If what you're doing from your point of view is a job and you work in order to live rather than the other way around, you might be willing to accept frustration. You've done the best you can. You'll take your paycheck. If on the other hand, what it is you do is to defend the nation. Wow! Isn't that a hard question? And I write about this in the book, actually the most difficult part of the book to write, Jordan, the one that I impose the most rewrites on myself was the part that talked about the really good people who the president brought in early in the administrator, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster, and others. And point out how hard it must be for these very talented, very experienced, very objective people to work inside this white house. And would there comes a point when they would have to make the judgment that they were no longer a guardrail on bad behavior, but had become enablers or legitimize years of that very same bad behavior just by staying on. And at that point, the choice might be, I got to go because I can no longer lend my authenticity to something I believe to be inauthentic.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:20] Well, that certainly makes sense and also has to be extremely tough decision, that's for sure. Especially in the moment, and it reminds me of a conversation we had also on the show with Timothy Snyder, who's a historian.

General Michael Hayden: [00:22:34] Oh yes, I actually quote him in my book.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:37] Ah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, actually you do, and that's probably what reminded me to put this in my show notes here. And I think one of the things that he said, I'm paraphrasing here, was essentially to abandoned facts, you're abandoning freedom and you can't criticize power because if nothing is true, you have no basis of comparison, right?

General Michael Hayden: [00:22:56] Exactly, right. It actually I use another quote, I used that passage from his book and that passage ends up with post-truth is pre-fascism.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:08] And that's scary, that's really scary. Especially when we're talking about some of the issues that are facing the nation lately, and you recently actually had of course come under fire for tweeting a picture of, I want to say it was Birkenau and you said this is kind of where we're heading.

General Michael Hayden: [00:23:24] No, actually what I said was, “Other governments have separated children from their mothers.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:30] Oh, that's true, yeah.

General Michael Hayden: [00:23:32] Okay. And what I was describing, I walked that real siding in that iconic picture several times in reality, and that's where families were separated upon arrival. And I just wanted to draw the point, “Hey, man. I wasn't saying what was happening on the Southern border at the time compared to the Holocaust, but that there were echoes there in terms of what it seemed like our indifference to separating families. Then I got, you know, I got to go on the air because you're right, Jordan, a lot of people thought I'd overshot the mark. And I said, “Hey, look, I'm not saying that we're perking out in 1944, but the know it's beginning to feel a lot like Berlin in 1933 with post-truthism, tribalism, the isolation, and condemnation of minorities, the emphasis of blaming everything on the quote unquote, the other those sorts of things. And so I know I was genuinely serious genuinely as I think you and I are still now worried about course of events. And in a later tweet, Jordan, by the way, overwhelmingly the tweets that followed it were supportive, but the ones that weren't supportive were really not support, all right? Very, very attacking. And I said something later that day is “Okay, I get your concern. When should I send up the flair shoot?” Should I wait for the White House press office to become the minister of ministry of propaganda? Should I wait for somebody to March through a mid-sized American town yelling blood and soil and Jews will not replace us? Should I wait?” Obviously you get the point.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:27] Yeah.

General Michael Hayden: [00:25:28] I'm saying here you're a Jordan, all those things that already happened, so why shouldn't I send up a flyer?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:32] The reason that some people I think attack you up, well of course, did they disagree with you. But I think others do it because they don't really want to believe what people are saying. It's easier if some creepy guy on YouTube who runs around with his shirt off and sells vitamins is saying that this has happened, because we can easily discount it. But when it comes from people who are extremely well-informed and who have had storied careers of being well-informed over a period of several decades at the highest levels of government, it gets more scary because then we can't go, “Eh, that General Hayden guy, he's just one of those kooks. He's a social media guy, just trying to get his book sales.” It's harder to make that argument. When somebody spent years at the helm of the CIA and the NSA and in the military and in other areas of diplomacy, it's harder to just discount that as kookiness.

General Michael Hayden: [00:26:23] Yeah. And it heads back to where we began, Jordan, the Hayden's, Clapper’s, Brennan's, Colome's, et cetera of the world. I mean these aren't the Chicken Little characters in a storybook. I mean intels are capable of getting stuff wrong, but we are somber, serious folks. And I think that's why we're going through the current drama because I think the president, his administration, some of his supporters are made uncomfortable that folks who frankly don't traditionally say a whole lot of anything. Frankly, you’re usually pretty serious about what it is they say and not instinctively extremist in their language are talking a lot and they seem really concerned. And that may be what's energizing a lot of what we're seeing now.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:23] Yeah, I think that that's a good point. It is a little scary when people who are normally men and women of few words are like, “Okay, fine. I'm going to sit down and give an hour long lecture at the Commonwealth club and have it televised or something, because this is -- or testify in front of the Senate because this is important enough where I'm going to kind of throw myself onto the firing line and then get possibly fired. And in many cases like James called me actually get fired for doing it.

General Michael Hayden: [00:27:50] Yeah man, look, this wasn't in any of our career plans.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:54] Yeah, generally getting canned or losing your security clearance is kind of a hit to the old resume.

General Michael Hayden: [00:27:59] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:00] Yeah, you mentioned earlier fractionalization or tribalism, I think is the word that you use and in the assault on intelligence, you mentioned the concept of bubbling and social media. Can you explain that? because I think that's happening to all of us in a way where we maybe don't even notice.

General Michael Hayden: [00:28:18] Yeah, so we spent 25 minutes here, Jordan, pretty much talking about you being the president, right? But in the book, and I spent a lot of time in the book talking about us. I mean the big us, the 330 million us, and I talk about our having moved as a society and others have too, not everybody, but we're not alone. We’ve moved into what has been called a post-truth world in which decision making is based less on fact and evidence and data and more on feeling preference, motion, tribe, loyalty, grievance, all right? And so data just hasn't been as important in terms of our making decisions on a variety of things, so that's one reality. The second reality and probably closer to related is that most of us now get our data, but that word in quotes the social media, we are all subjected to a tsunami of information from a tsunami of uncurated information.

[00:29:35] And I am certainly a lot older than you are, but I think even your generation wasn't trained to absorb data that way. Most of us, certainly I'll speak for myself, I was trying to absorb data 30 minutes at a time on the evening news, and 45 minutes at a time reading the morning newspaper, digestible doses already curated for my review. And now we're just overwhelmed with information, with all of it seemingly equally appropriate, equally legitimate. And what happens, and I did spend an awful lot of time researching this for purposes of the book because it's really important, is that the algorithms that drive social media actually drive us away from common ground and into our self-preferences. I’ll explain what I mean. So you go online, and whatever it is you're using Facebook or whatever, knows as much about you as you do yourself. And the business model for those enterprises is to keep you online, is to keep you on the site. I mean, they make money by the number of clicks, and so they're going to show you some things that are going to keep you there, things that you like. And the longer you're there, the more it provides things that reinforces your original instincts. In other words, Jordan, they don't drive you to the public square for a discussion. They drive you into the darker corners of your own self-identified, self-defined, ghetto. And so because we get our information that way, we find ourselves hardening in our positions rather than this common dialogue.

[00:31:25] I was listening to a woman whose name is [indiscernible] [00:31:30] Turkish by birth in North Carolinian by choice. She was an expert on this and she compared it to a Dorito, all right? I mean a Dorito is frankly a delivery mechanism for salt and fat. And when you consume something fat, what do you crave? Right, more salt and fat. And that's what the algorithm in most social media platforms, that's what it does to us. It gives us more of the salting fat that we tasted in the first place, except you don't have any calorie count or warning label about the salt content. And you're driven into this bubble, into this community whose members thinking right the way you do. And so we're driven away from dialogue and more in the direction of almost religious like beliefs.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:30] Right. So we're in the Dorito bubble where all of the food is Doritos and even the ones that are vegetable flavored are still just Doritos.

General Michael Hayden: [00:32:39] Yeah. And so that a real no fooling problem. And there was a fellow named Roger McNamee who was an early investor in Facebook and a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg. And just before I went final on the book, he began writing some really harsh articles about the unanticipated ill effects of the algorithm that Facebook uses. And here, Jordan, he wasn't suggesting, we needed to better police to trolls and we better keep Russian political advertisements off of the net. No! He was saying the basic issue is the basic issue. It's how it works. It's the basic algorithm, it's the business model. And that was actually quite stunning and I was glad to be able to include it in the book.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:31] Yeah. That's a little scary because that sort of maybe does a head fake to the idea that there's no real solution to this.

General Michael Hayden: [00:33:38] Yeah, and to end this segment where I began, the president recognize this as a candidate and exploited it, but he didn't create it, all right? And so if we're going to get better at this, if we're going to be more databased in our decision making, it's going to be something that we're all going to have to contribute to. Donald Trump is a fact from what it is we just described, he's not caused.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:06] That's very interesting and again, unfortunately says that, “Hey, look, this isn't a problem that expires when administrations change.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:34:16] You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, General Michael Hayden. We'll be right back after this.

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:16] [Past Event] [Omitted from the transcript]

Jason DeFillippo: [00:36:24] Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com/advertisers. We also have an Alexa Skill, so you can get inspirational and educational clips from the show in your daily briefing. Go to jordanharbinger.com/alexa, or search for Jordan Harbinger in the Alexa App. Now for the conclusion of our show with General Michael Hayden.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:49] And I think a lot of people don't realize why the fractionalization is a problem, but you'd written in the assault on intelligence that the more polarized the society, the more vulnerable it actually is. Can you flush that out a little because I think most people don't realize the gravity of that particular fact.

General Michael Hayden: [00:37:07] So if you have picture what I just described, Jordan, as a three layer cake with the biggest layer being the society we just described, all right? This post truth world, the second layer being the administration, I mean it does matter that the president as a candidate recognize and exploited this, and frankly, by many of the things she does and almost everything that he says he makes that first layer worse than it would otherwise be. And then there's a third layer, this is the first time now we've been doing this over 30 minutes. This is the first time I mentioned in the Russians. There's a third layer of the cake, it's the smallest. If you want me to put a number on it, it's 15 percent of our problem, the other 85 percent is us. But you now have the Russians there who see what it is we are doing to ourselves, and frankly opening ourselves up to manipulation by them because they want to divide and distract us, because they view us to be a permanent global competitor with them. And although, I give some credit to the Russian effort in terms of the professional talent that was required, we really make it easy for them because of our own internal divisions.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:31] It sounds like when you were working in Bulgaria, and I think I read in your last book, when you were working in Bulgaria, there was an apparatchik, so some communist party official who said something along the lines of, “Well, the truth is whatever serves the communist party.”

General Michael Hayden: [00:38:46] Exactly. We were arguing, I got frustrated. “Oh for God’s sakes Colonel, what does truth mean to you?” “It's just truth.” “Truth?” “Truth is what serves as a party.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:57] When people say things like that, do you just look at them sideways and think “How is it possible that you actually believe what you're saying?”

General Michael Hayden: [00:39:04] So if you think about this, and again, I treat this in the book as well. This is -- I hope people enjoy reading the book because I enjoyed writing it and researching it. I got out of my bubble. I mean it's obviously about intelligence, but it brings in so many other things. And so during what you just described is this the manner of fought in the West since the age of enlightenment. In the enlightenment Western man embrace this evidence-based path to decision making at the expense of other ways of doing it. And that's a common heritage for all of us in the West, but it is a peculiarly strong heritage for us in the United States because the founders of our nation, we're all scholars of the enlightenment. We hold these truths to be self-evident and so the essence of our country is based on enlightenment values.

[00:40:09] No, as I just said. You mean the French were children of the enlightenment too. Germans were children or the alignment to, so we share that. But France and Germany didn't shape their identity as a nation based upon the values of the enlightenment. I mean, let me put it to you this way, Jordan. Germany and France were nations long before the enlightenment came on, we became the idea of the enlightenment and our foundation documents before we were even a true nation. And so if we are backing away as a society, from enlightenment values, that affects your French, it affects the Germans. But it directly assaults who we are, or who it is we thought we were. And so when you have a bunch of goons market marching through Charlottesville saying blood and soil, blood and soil. There are some countries on Earth that identify themselves through blood and soil. Germany is one. And they're good countries, but it's not how we have identified ourselves, Jordan.

[00:41:20] We have identified ourselves as a creedal people, people who are formed by their belief in certain values. You can live in Germany for four generations. If you are German by blood, you're still not German. You come to America after a couple of years, if you understand the documents, prove you understand the documents, pledge allegiance to the document, you're an American. And I think fear that this post truth world, this tribalism, this blood and soil, this American identity is something other than our ideals, that's an assault on the basic foundations of who we are, and that's why people like me get along.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:04] Yeah, I mean that is kind of a little scary when you think about it, right? Because it seems like our foundation being based on those enlightenment values of truth and things like that, the value of truth. When we look at things like Russian information warfare, which is so-called domestic alt right, and conspiracy sites, and things like that on the left and the right, are we less prepared to deal with this? Because we sort of have this underlying assumption that, “Hey, look, at least there's going to be a basis in truth to some of this,” even if their spin and the Russians are like, “Are you kidding?” We're just going to print up craziness and a certain percentage of you are going to believe it because that's what we've been doing with our own people for a thousand years.

General Michael Hayden: [00:42:46] Yeah. So you know what I mean? The right answer is a little this little that. But to a degree, I've not seen in my lifetime, other times in my life, we seem to base our beliefs on our tribal identities more than on raw data. I mean, picture if you will, Jordan, a really controversial call it an NFL game on Sunday. I can pretty much predict for you what everyone thinks is the right call based upon the color of the Jersey they're wearing, okay? And unfortunately that dynamic now is far more a part of our political dialogue than it should be and maybe then it has never been. I'll give you one example, as part of the research for the book, since I spend most of my life talking about talking with people, talk like me. I went to my [indiscernible] [00:43:43] Pittsburgh and have my brother get a bunch of supporters of the president in the back of a sports bar where I paid for all the beer and pizza and walked in. There are about 40, 45 folks, and said, “Hey!” “Hi. Good to see you.” “What do you guys thinking?” Well they told me and at one point I actually said, “Oh, come on folks. How many of you actually believe Barack Obama wiretap Trump Tower? And Jordan, a surprising number hands went right up in the air. I go, “Really?” I said, “I used to run NSA. I actually know kind of how this works.” Not only would the NSA not do it, I don't think they could make the plumbing even work that way to do it. And then I paused and said, Why do you believe it to be true?” And one person in the front row got up, put arms out, shrug shoulders and said, “Obama,” to which an awful lot of people in the room nodded their agreement. That's post-truth decision making. That's decision making based upon tribal identity rather than data.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:44:52] The answer was Obama and then shrug.

General Michael Hayden: [00:44:56] QED. Thus it has been demonstrated, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:44:59] Oh that's so sad somehow. I mean not somehow, that is just sad. That's ridiculous. Ugh! I mean I don't consider myself particularly partisan in any given direction and I stayed, like I said, I stay away from politics most of the time on the show. But I at least do a -- I like to think a lot of people at least want to put out an effort to find out whether something is complete baloney or not and that that just, ugh, that's maddening and scary at the same time. I know that a large part of your job or was when you were head of CIA or NSA was just simply convincing politicians that you need to get certain things done. But how do you balance the rights of us as citizens? Privacy and telling us the truth and things like that, with your responsibility to protect us by getting all of our and everyone else's information so you can make informed decisions and form courses of action because that's got to be a pretty tough call, speaking of tough decisions that you can't base on emotion.

General Michael Hayden: [00:46:01] No one can guarantee you perfect liberty or perfect security. In the real world, people have to make difficult decisions and difficult tradeoffs. And so I guess the first answer I gave to, Jordan, is that line between the privacy and safety or liberty and security. It's a bit of a moveable feast, and I’m not saying it's arbitrary, I'm saying where that line should be depends on the totality of circumstances in which you find yourself. So quite legitimately on the line was one place on September 10th, 2001, and was in another place on September 12th, because we found ourselves in circumstances we hadn't anticipated. It didn't mean we were a despotic people under a despotic government. It didn't mean anyone had a secret plan in their right-hand desk drawer that they could finally spring on the American people. It meant that a prudent citizenship had decided they needed to make different kinds of trade-offs because they valued both their life and their liberty, their safety and their privacy.

[00:47:19] So what happens, Jordan, is where that line is, is always in a gray area. And so no matter where the line is, there are going to be people arguing about it. You make the best decisions you can. Let me fast forward, okay?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:33] Sure, we're actually pretty good at this, and there haven't been any really major terrorist attacks, certainly from outside the United States. The last successful terrorist attack was about a year ago, recall Halloween West Side drive, bike path, rental truck, eight people killed in Southern Manhattan. And when I talk about that to audiences, I say, “You know what comes to mind to me, and I think a lot of other folks like me, when we see that, is the concept of limits.” And I go on to develop -- we're actually pretty good at security and you've put a lot of money into this and given your security agencies, certain authorities and so you know, that might actually give you a sense of the range of what the bad people are able to do to us now.

[00:48:28] Now look, they want to do 9/11 again, that big slow moving complex multi-axis or plot. It creates mass casualties against an iconic target. And frankly, what if it is they are able to do, might be the lone wolf self-motivated running a truck and killing eight people, which is a tragedy but not a catastrophe. And then I pause, Jordan, and say, “The concept of limits may come in in another way as well.” Unlike folks, I'm a security guy. I got a lot of controversial programs in my resume, but frankly, I don't know what I would ask your approval to do any more than we're doing right now. That would give me a belief that I would actually have a better chance of stopping that kind of attack than I do now. In other words, I say we are kind of in a stasis here, a new equilibrium that's about as bad as they can hurt us right now, but there isn't much more I could do to make that less likely. And Jordan, that county describes this issue, I can't drive eager these to zero, and I decide where it is I want to be based upon the totality of where we are. And I'm telling you as the surveillance guy, I'm not asking you for any more authorities because I can't turn those authorities into more safety for you.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:06] That's interesting. So it's like espionage then is essential to democracy in that way because of course frightened people don't make good Democrats. We've seen that in other countries.

General Michael Hayden: [00:50:16] Exactly right. So to give you a sense, after 9/11, we really did kind of push the throttle forward and we did a lot of things that remain controversial to this day. But the Jordan, one of one of our motivators, one of our motivators in doing that was the absolute firm belief that if a second 9/11 happened, there would be no stopping the American people in their demands for security, whatever the price. In other words, if a second major attack happened, it would be deeply harmful, not just to our safety but to our freedoms as well.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:01] Yeah. That I think that sort of goes along with some of the statements that people were making around September 11th that at the time I was kind of too young to understand like, “Oh, the terrorist win if we take away our freedoms.” And I was 21, so I was thinking like, “I don't care.” I don't do anything wrong. I had nothing to hide. I had that kind of argument in the back of my head.” So I fully understand that, and as citizens, I think a lot of us, I look speaking frankly for myself, I've greatly prefer to criticize intelligence agencies for not doing enough when I feel scared, while reserving the right to criticize those same agencies for doing too much when I feel safe again.

General Michael Hayden: [00:51:40] Yeah, I know that comes with the job. We know that, and that's why you want to be able to stand up and explain to the people who are coming at you from the left and explain to the people who are coming at you from the right. That I can't make either you groups totally happy. We have decided let's do the processes of government, congress, the president, of course. This is where we're going to be, and then you've got to kind of man up and say, “And I own it.” So to be clear, Jordan, so your listeners understand. I'm the electronic surveillance, renditions, detentions, interrogations, and targeted killing guy. And as you can probably tell from my tone, I'm at peace with everything that we did and I'm quite prepared to discuss it calmly with anyone who thinks they don't agree with one or another or all of those things, I can make my case. This is not an argument between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. This is a discussion, as I said before, within a free people as to how they want to achieve two things, both of which they would like to have in full measure, freedom and security, but which in the real world, they have to balance.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:53:01] Yeah. The sticky truth, right, is that we ask intelligence agencies and defense agencies to do basically an impossible job AKA basically protect us from the future, and then we go get sushi and watch the NBA finals and we're like, “Well, you sweat it out. How to do that?” Just don't do anything that I might get mad about later on.

General Michael Hayden: [00:53:21] Right. We are, as you probably know, very good friends with the other English democracies. It's called the Five Eyes community ourselves, the British, Canadians, the Aussies, the New Zealanders. We meet every year, the FBI, NSA, CIA, [indiscernible][00:53:36]. This relationship is very close, and we had a delay the meeting after 9/11, we were busy and security concerns. But finally in late spring of ’02, we were meeting on the South Island of New Zealand. So we had again, those five countries, those three agencies in each of the countries represented. Not everybody has all three, actually 13 agencies in the room. And Eliza Manningham, who was the Deputy at the time that later went on to become the head of Britain's MI5, they're kind of FBI. Eliza summarized it really well. She said, gentlemen, as you could say gentlemen, because she was the only woman in the room, “You know gentlemen, we were all that accustomed to serving our nations by dealing with those who are guilty.” Now we're being asked to deal with the not yet guilty. And that was really a very good summary of the tasking that implicitly had been given to us by our populations.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:54:44] Yeah, I think that those relationships are interesting as well for purposes of this show here, we teach a lot about networking and relationship development and you do have these multinational relationships with counterparts across the world. Yes, we have the Five Eyes organization, but how do you maintain those relationships? It seems like there has to be more than just an annual meeting with a meal at the end to maintain trust and accountability in intelligence agencies like that because this is serious stuff that requires the highest level of trust and discretion.

General Michael Hayden: [00:55:18] Yeah. So in terms of the Five Eyes community, particularly in terms of signals intelligence, Jordan, so that's NSA, the British equivalent as GCHQ, the Australian [indiscernible][00:55:30], ASD. If you're picturing the signals intelligence organizations of those five countries, I think, Jordan, it is not an exaggeration to say it's not that they cooperate, it's that they are integrated operations. Okay, so it's not like each of them does their own work and then at the end of the day they tossed out through transom, in many instances that which it is they discover and create is the product of the joint effort from the very beginning and so typically in terms of signals intelligence, these five countries frankly are indivisible. I would tell you the story. It is really, really, really difficult for NSA to be doing something about which GCHQ does not become aware. Simple because we [indiscernible] [00:56:23] just in the same workspaces doing common things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:56:28] What do you do them when you fundamentally disagree with somebody across the pond? It has happened at some point. I mean it seems like whenever you're dealing with someone who's foreign or anyone for that matter, you're dealing with serious topics like politics and defense. How do you deal with a disagreement at that level? I mean you can't really -- there's obviously, I would hope not so much politicking involved and you can't exactly run it by a bunch of other people for opinions either. How does that stuff get handled?

General Michael Hayden: [00:56:54] So number one, those five countries I listed probably have the greatest convergence in their foreign and security policies of any five countries you could name. And so if you're going to get really, really integrated, these are the five guys you want to do it with because at the political one strategically, the really fundamental disagreements are rare. But you ask a fair question and we've got partners beyond the Five Eyes alliance, and there you might be surprised how steady the intelligence relationships are, even when the political waters are really, really choppy. And so with regard to the war in Iraq, under president George W. Bush at the political level, there are many of our partners who really very much opposed to the war that the level of intelligence cooperation hardly caused a ripple. And the reason that is, is not that anyone was disloyal, the reason they're there was hardly a ripple is that the Intel guys know that you're all going to be there even when the political leaders are gone, and you're going to be dependent on these relationships remaining healthy.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:58:08] Right. So unfortunately that I think, isn't that one of the reasons that guys like Vladimir Putin think, “Oh, well the CIA is really in control of the country,” because that's how it works over there. The KGB or FSB, they're the ones who are going to be around Medvedev or whoever, whatever president is transient. But the people who are really pulling the strings were always the security agencies. How are things then different?

General Michael Hayden: [00:58:31] Yeah, they are different because we don't have the [indiscernible] [00:58:34]. We don't have the KGB chief running the country. I mean --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:58:37] Right, there’s that, yeah.

General Michael Hayden: [00:58:39] Yeah. So look, and this is important when President Trump and people around him, his supporters or his surrogates make accusations about the deep state. They are describing the world as Vladimir Putin believes it to be. They are describing America in terms of Vladimir Putin wants to use. That America is controlled by its security services and its espionage agencies, which is not true that. But when the president talks them way, he reinforced, since he validates, he gives legitimacy, to this view of Vladimir Putin. So it's not just incorrect, it's actually pretty destructive.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:59:23] Yeah, I can see why that would actually play right into the hands of Russians and propagandists and that particular argument and that particular element. I mean that's unfortunate -- the unfortunate truth is that it just drops right into right into their narrative.

General Michael Hayden: [00:59:43] Exactly, right. And so you know that’s again back to you talked to, or isn't it an odd, you got the Intel guys out here talking. Well it is unusual, but this is another reason because they recognize that they aren't a deep state, that they well, bureaucracies through bureaucracies, okay? So Jordan, you know, I tried to make NSA a different kind of place than I found it, and I discovered it was a big shift with a small rudder. I get that bureaucracies are hard to change. That doesn't make them the deep states though.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:00:16] So we'll wrap with the last two here, which is, is there anything we can do as civilians and citizens to help defend important institutions and try to get things back on track or do we leave this up to the people in charge?

General Michael Hayden: [01:00:30] So no, you've got a role to play and it is part of that first layer of the cake, Jordan, the part we're all participants in. And so I would make an appeal no matter how much we just agree not to demonize the opposition and not to attack the legitimacy, the authenticity, the seriousness, the sincerity of those with we disagree in. And frankly, the events in the last 48 hours were the president's attacking the legitimacy of folks rather than arguing the point that the folks might be making is an example of appealing to the darker rather than the better angels of our nature. So I don't need to demonize one another as we have these very, very serious discussions, and that's something all of us can contribute to in particularly you who communicate to such a [indiscernible][01:01:27] people.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:01:28] Well, thank you. I appreciate that as well and I appreciate your time. All right, just want to ask as well, what do you think is the greatest threat to our nation right now? Because of course people are yelling about China. People are yelling about Russia. Where do you fall in in that particular analysis?

General Michael Hayden: [01:01:45] I will tell you the thing that most scares me right now is the United States of America. We are the most destabilizing force in the world. Oh look, I'm not saying that we're mining legions to cross borders and conquered territory and nothing of that, but we are a very power, the world's most powerful nation. Everything we do matters. And Jordan, for 75 years we have been operating internationally based upon some core beliefs. Democracy was a good thing. Alliances are a national advantage. Trey, the freer, the better. Immigration on balance is a net plus for the United States, and everything I just described for you, Jordan is now being debated. And so what you got is the most powerful country on Earth, confused about its own self-identity and its own future course of action. That's going to make the rest of the world very nervous.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:02:58] General Hayden, thank you so much for your time today, really, really appreciate it.

General Michael Hayden: [01:03:02] Thank you. Always a pleasure.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:03:05] All right, Jason, a little bit of a different flavor for us, but I thought that was interesting. I mean he is always got something to say.

Jason DeFillippo: [01:03:11] Yeah, I liked him as a person. I did not really much care for his -- some of his policies when he was in office, but I respect him now that we've had a chance to talk to him a couple times now, and he's really got his pulse on things because I think you're going to have that after you've run the CIA and the NSA, you know?

Jordan Harbinger: [01:03:29] Yeah, I can imagine what it's like being in the news and under fire all the time and having so much responsibility for the country, for making the right decision. It just seems like, I don't know, I don't know if I want that on my shoulders, but I guess that's why I'm not a general either.

Jason DeFillippo: [01:03:44] Right, right. You're a general pain in my butt.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:03:47] That's right.

Jason DeFillippo: [01:03:47] That's good enough.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:03:48] That's right, Lieutenant. Great big thank you to General Hayden. The book is The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies, and interesting read, more political than, of course, we got here on the show. If you want to know how I managed to book all these great guests, manage my relationships using systems and tiny habits. Many of which I actually teach to defense agencies, intelligence agencies, the military. Check out our Six-Minute Networking course which is free over at jordanharbinger.com/course. That's jordanharbinger.com/course. The problem is that we as small business owners or as just operators here in general, we're not able to make up for lost time when it comes to relationships and networking. The number one mistake students and entrepreneurs make is postponing this and not digging the well before they get thirsty. Once you need relationships, you are way too late to forge them. So that's what we're trying to prevent here with Six-Minute Networking. These drills are designed to take just a few minutes per day. It's the type of habit that we can ignore, only at our own peril. This is the stuff I wish I knew a decade ago. It's not fluff, it's crucial, and it said jordanharbinger.com/course. And speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from General Hayden. I'm @jordanharbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. I'm doing a lot more on Instagram these days, some instructional videos and stuff like that. And don't forget, if you want to learn how to apply everything you heard today from General Hayden, go check out the worksheets, go grab those. They are also free, of course, and they're in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast.

[01:05:20] This episode was produced and edited by Jason DeFillippo. Show notes by Robert Fogarty. The worksheets are by Caleb Bacon. Booking back office and last minute miracles by Jen Harbinger. And I'm your host, Jordan harbinger. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which hopefully is in every episode. So please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. Lots more great stuff in the pipeline. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you listen and we'll see you next time.