Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Jack Hopkins Show podcast. I'm your host, jack Hopkins. Today on the podcast, we are joined by someone who has worked at the highest levels of American national security. On both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, stephen A Cash is the executive director of the Steady State, a nonprofit made up of over 280 former senior national security officials who are fighting to protect constitutional democracy and the rule of law. Over his career, stephen has served as a prosecutor, a CIA operations officer, a senior advisor at the Department of Homeland Security and a senior staffer in both the House and the Senate. He helped shape some of the most important national security laws after 9-11 and has continued that mission in both government and the private sector.

Speaker 1: 0:53

Today we're going to talk about the state of American democracy, how national security professionals are stepping up into the civic arena and what it takes to defend the rule of law in an age of disruption. I've got to tell you this is the most chilling podcast episode I've ever done, so let's get right into it with Stephen Cash. All right, stephen, welcome to the show. Happy to be here, jack, you know, I think especially with someone with the very interesting and kind of interwoven background that you've got. Before we dive into the steady state, let's just talk a little bit about your background, and I'll kind of let you start where you want. Your background is fascinating. It was a pleasant read and I'm sure that anybody listening is going to enjoy it as well.

Speaker 2: 1:43

Well, I'm happy to tell you and it's been more than a pleasant read, it's been a pleasant life. I'm a happy guy and I've been very, very lucky from the very beginning. I grew up right outside of New York my dad a lawyer, my mom a teacher in the city university system. I thought I'd be a lawyer my whole life. I thought I'd be a lawyer my whole life and that didn't happen. And let me shut off the phone, oh, that's quite all right. But I started at the Manhattan DAs. I went to law school at Yale.

Speaker 2: 2:10

I knew I wanted to be either a prosecutor or a defense attorney. I knew that from the get-go. I wanted to be in court Temperamentally. I realized pretty quickly that I was more of a pitcher than a catcher and if you're a prosecutor you're the pitcher. And I also felt that, like I'd worked as intern for a public defender and you work really hard as a public defender to make sure that an injustice is not done and it seemed to me I could accomplish much more justice by being the prosecutor. I just have to do justice.

Speaker 2: 2:39

And I ended up at the Manhattan DA's office under Robert Morgenthau, a legendary prosecutor. It was perfect office for me because it was an office that really emphasized do the right thing Pretty much. That was always the answer to almost every question you can ask and I loved it. But at the time New York seemed to be falling apart. I was burning out a little bit. I'd been seven or so years as a prosecutor, ended up in the Rackets Bureau, got married and we're thinking like how are we going to manage, like having kids, and my wife and I put together a list of the cities we would want to live in and there was only one city on both lists and it was Washington. I applied my memory is I applied to almost every government agency that had an office of general counsel. In alphabetical order, there used to be something called the yellow book, you know agriculture, blah, blah, blah, sure.

Speaker 2: 3:28

All the way I got to the C's Central Intelligence Agency I put in an application. Next thing I know I'm interviewing down in Langley. I had never, to my knowledge, met an intelligence officer. I don't think I'd met a military officer in my whole life. Knew nothing about it. Basically I'm not even a big movie watcher, so I guess I watched James Bond. They made me a job offer To illustrate how ignorant I was about the whole process. They actually give you a conditional job offer which is we're going to give you a job if you pass the polygraph. I don't even know if I read that paragraph I was like okay.

Speaker 2: 4:01

I got a job offer. So I gave up my rent control department and my job and then took the polygraph which thank goodness I passed. But I had no idea and I showed up at the agency and I fell in love with the place. I wasn't sure what it was going to be like. I remember that first day you know I'm a sort of slightly lefty, maybe civil liberties guy and I remember telling my wife I have no idea what's going to happen today. It may be terrible, in which case I'm going to resign before I start and you will probably want to strangle me and we'll move back to New York. But that's not what happened. I really fell in love with the place, intellectually stimulating, really consistent with the values that I brought to the table. It was very different from the Manhattan DA's office and it's just do the right thing, but it was resonant with that.

Speaker 2: 4:48

And the one problem was I'd been a prosecutor and I didn't like being a lawyer at the Central Intelligence Agency all that much. It was a flexible time. I told my boss that I was like this is not for me and I didn't know what to do. And he said go talk to this guy. He sends me down to the basement. Talk to this guy. He sends me down to the basement. Talk to this guy. It sounds like a movie. And I talked to this guy, who turned out to be a very senior operations officer, who said listen to me. He said you don't want to hand out towels at the basketball game? I said yeah, that sort of captures it. He said I need you to talk to this guy. So I go talk to the second guy who is the chief of the counterterrorism center, although I didn't know that when I was walking into his office until I saw the sign and we talked for a half hour. He basically says so, sunni or Shia? And I said what do you mean? He says which one are you more interested in? And I said well, actually I know a little bit about it Shia. It's the most legalistic, probably part of a religion in the world. Part of a religion in the world, and I'm a lawyer at heart and I find Shia Islam really interesting the rule of the juror consult and the like. And next thing, I know I'm working in the counterterrorism center.

Speaker 2: 5:51

I burnt a few bridges with the Office of General Counsel. I didn't do a good job of telling them what I was doing, as I was finding myself in the detail and you know, I sort of ended up getting the training. I am certified as a case officer. I never served overseas. I was at headquarters based. I don't call myself a case officer. I'm very close with many people who I do consider real case officers. They've recruited people overseas.

Speaker 2: 6:14

I didn't do that, really loved the agency, was there till 2001. And then had a chance to go up to the Hill. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was looking for somebody to be the terrorism referent that's the term they use and the designee for Senator Dianne Feinstein of California. If I knew nothing about CIA when I joined the CIA, I knew even less about California when I ended up as the designee to the. You know I'm from New York. You know America ends at the Hudson River. I don't know anything about this California thing, but she turned out to be the hardest and perhaps the best boss I ever had A brilliant, wonderful woman, really, really tough.

Speaker 2: 6:51

And I got up there right before 9-11. All hell broke loose, and pretty quick. We were drafting the USA Patriot Act. We were drafting the creation of the Director of National Intelligence. We were creating the Department of Homeland Security. Wow, it was an amazing time to be there. It was a terrifying time.

Speaker 2: 7:07

One of the things I've done in recent jobs is I give talks to new people coming into the intel community and it's sort of striking the people now coming in. You know we always ask so, what do you remember of 9-11? And they're like I don't remember anything. I was one Really, and in fact this last group that came into the Department of Homeland Security my last job a bunch of them weren't born yet. Yeah, wow, which is really hard to get my arms around because part of me it feels like yesterday. Yes, I came out of the agency. I worked in the counterterrorism center. We were scared, we were angry, we were, you know, there was an element of guilt, guessing ourselves. Did we screw up? Is this our fault? I mean, it's a pretty solemn responsibility.

Speaker 2: 7:45

So I was up on the Hill for a number of years. I ended up as chief counsel to Senator Feinstein. I left, went into the private sector, probably important from a family point of view, but I'm a govey at heart, which is why what's happening now is so profoundly disturbing, and we'll talk about that in a second. I'll come back to my involvement with the steady state. But when Senator Biden won and I thought there'd be an opportunity to go back in, I did and I came in to be senior advisor to Ken Weinstein, who's the undersecretary for intelligence at DHS A different era Ken had been.

Speaker 2: 8:18

He's a mainstream Republican. He was a Democratic senator's staffer. I had worked with Ken when we created the DNI and we created the, the Patriot Act, and we created DHS. He worked for Bob Mueller. He was his chief staff, opposite spectrum on the political opposite ends of the political spectrum. But the chance to work for Ken jumped at that. He's a true patriot, a great American, and I don't care if he's a Republican, I'm an intel guy. Sure, which leads me to thinking about the steady state.

Speaker 2: 8:52

Well, just quickly to round that one out, I ended up going to the Department of Homeland Security. I was senior advisor to Undersecretary Weinstein and I helped him run the counterintelligence functions of the department, helped him run the counterintelligence functions of the department as well as what's called the intelligence enterprise, which is the intelligence parts of the different components of the department, such as customs or ICE or Coast Guard and the like. Frustrating DHS is a difficult place to work, as a number of people said to me. You know, steve, it's not the Central Intelligence Agency, things don't work that way here. But we had this election and I resigned on the 20th and I made public my resignation letter.

Speaker 2: 9:32

I went back in for that job because I think helping create an appropriate domestic intelligence function in a rule of law democracy is the hardest trick in the intel book. It almost never works. We are generally the bad guys. I tell people that if you look at the old videotapes or films, I guess, of dictators taking power, they're standing on a balcony or yelling at the crowd picturing Mussolini. Behind the dictator are always two guys it's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or their equivalent, and it's the domestic intel guy. And the domestic intel guy puts dictators on the balcony, keeps them on the balcony.

Speaker 2: 10:08

But we needed a domestic intel function in the face of a very complicated world in which overseas threats are no longer just overseas, and I wanted to be a part of trying to do that and I was grateful for the opportunity to come back in Faced with a presidential candidate who was making it absolutely clear, among other things, that he was planning on using the tools of national security, including domestic national security and law enforcement against his enemies. I couldn't in good conscience do that. I couldn't sleep at night. And you know, I know it doesn't really fit with the movies In the movies, the CIA guys sort of icy water. You know, I know it doesn't really fit with the movies and the movies are CIA guys, sort of icy water. You know, hard guys.

Speaker 2: 10:49

Sure, we don't care about rules, we don't care about laws, we don't need no stinking badges, different movie reference, but you get what I mean. It's just not true. Cia people, nsa people, fbi people they really do care about the rules. They really do care about the rules, they really do care about the Constitution. And I got to tell you, up until I resigned I've been doing this for almost 30 years. I never lost a minute of sleep thinking we were doing something that was wrong, that was not consistent with our values as Americans and with the Constitution, thought about it a lot. In fact, people inside talk about that, like, what do I do? What do I do? When do I resign? Well, I hit it when do I resign? And I went into my boss. I said I can't do this and he understood. Let me stop there and see if you have questions for me. But I'll come back and what it's for.

Speaker 1: 11:38

You were on a beautiful roll there, I didn't want to stop you. Would it be safe to say there was no quote-unquote rule book or playbook for a Donald Trump to come along?

Speaker 2: 11:52

That's a great statement, that is absolutely safe to say, and I think you know the structure of our safeguards on the intelligence and law enforcement community have an underlying assumption which we never, never really questioned, which is that the people at the top, including the president, agree that we should be a rule of law, constitutional democracy. So we're really set up for the idea that, while we may have disagreements within our bubble of democracy, none of us are questioning whether we should have democracy, whether we should have a constitution, whether people like me and my colleagues, some of whom have some pretty scary skills, should abide by those rules Never questioned. So we're not set up for it. And it is. You know, it's funny I'm going to steal your quote there because it's one of the reasons there is a steady state, because up until now we were we meaning national security veterans, people who have spent their career don't want to get involved in domestic politics, don't want to be. You know, maybe we go off and teach, some of us go off and play golf, but basically we're pretty confident that the system will continue puttering along. The CIA will do its thing, the FBI will do its thing, all within a ecosystem in which everybody's sort of buying the rules, and that doesn't exist anymore.

Speaker 2: 13:09

I don't even remember when we I was at the agency when we switched from Bush to Clinton, no, clinton to Bush. It was like a non-event, like yeah, there's a new president. Okay, I do remember like Bush apparently had a different schedule for his PDB briefing. It was going to be either earlier or later. Like the big issue was like, are we going to be able to accommodate going down to the house at a different time? We have to change all the car schedules. Yeah, that was it. So it was a little bit. You know, you put you really put your finger on it and that's one of the reasons the steady state was created. So it dates back to 2016. It wasn't even called the steady state.

Speaker 2: 13:44

There Trump gets elected and I was out. A lot of people had been out, we'd aged out, but there was a core group of people who had worked together. A lot of us had worked Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and that happened to be a period of time where the agency and the State Department and NSA worked together really well. I think it's a proud period of American history in terms of the sort of how the apparatus worked and we were really concerned and we decided to get together and offer our help. And it was strange because, first of all, most of us never even thought of doing this. I mean, if we get involved in politics after we retire or leave, it's sort of like we run for school board. I didn't even know what the politics of most of the people I worked with at the agency. I couldn't tell you what party they were in.

Speaker 1: 14:28

You don't talk about it at work that's fascinating to me and I think it is probably to most people.

Speaker 2: 14:34

Yeah, and it's just not discussed. I think a lot of people back then they also didn't vote didn't even get registered. I always, when I first joined the agency, I remember meeting a really a legendary case officer who, like he's this kind of guy and he served in country X, country Y, and you ask him any question about country X, he could, like, give you the intricate politics of the, the parliament would do this and this person and that person, and then we're talking and it was like it was pretty clear he was not quite sure who his Senator was. Like I don't do that, I've been living overseas for 12 years and I don't focus on this. So we created the steady state. We didn't even have a name yet. We offered our services to the new incoming administration, first to Michael Flynn, who didn't respond, then got fired, and then to McMaster, who didn't respond, and then we sort of faltered a little bit because people started hearing that there were blacklists of people who were not supporting the president and our people were still young enough so some of them were thinking of going back in at some point. Some wanted jobs and we had some who were old enough, that had kids who were now working in the national security community and we sort of ran out of steam until the breaking of the Ukraine scandal and that hit close to home with a lot of our people. We worked all. All of us had focused on that area of the world, many specifically on those countries and the outrageous behavior that was becoming public essentially extorting a foreign leader for political gain within our democracy Right Just unheard of and we sort of decided that we had to pull up our big boy and big girl pants and take some risks and we went really public. We created a website, we endorsed candidates, we spoke. We were just coming in, so we didn't do podcasts. It was podcasts were weird and strange, yeah, but we did. It was COVID, middle of COVID, during the election. So we did do a lot of sort of panel discussions, spoke at schools, wrote op-eds and the like, and then Biden wins.

Speaker 2: 16:32

What had gotten us to actually come out of our shells was the concept that there was this existential threat to America that, coming in the person of Donald Trump, it was enough to get us out of our safe space and, by the way, a safe space that in general, is good for America. You don't want people with tradecraft skills involved in American domestic politics. You want us to stay as far away. We think about clandestinity. We think about covert action. We think about all the things that the statute lets us do in covert action, including involvement in political doings overseas. You don't want us anywhere near that. So this was hard for us to say. This is bad enough that we're going to step out of the space where we normally should be and do some.

Speaker 2: 17:22

We're still nonpartisan the term that I am increasingly using is postpartisan because we're back, and we're back because the existential threat has returned worse than ever, more significant, and because we think we bring something specific to the table. First of all, we know what we're talking about, and we know what we're talking about from the perspective of what budding autocrats look like overseas. Most of our careers have been spent focusing on Trump equivalents in various countries overseas. So, as we like to say, we've seen this play before and we know how it ends Right, and this is tracking exactly what we've seen in places like Hungary and in Serbia, in Russia and so on and so forth, and so that got us motivated and we sort of came back.

Speaker 2: 18:09

We were able to obtain some much needed resources, so we have staff. I'm the executive director now. We have around 280 members. I'd say a third of them are former agency, a third of them are former State Department, mostly former chiefs of station and division chiefs and or ambassadors and for your listeners who don't know, the ambassador leads our mission overseas. He's the president's personal representative to a foreign country, and ambassadors in that world is a big deal. The country team includes the, if there's a CIA presence, the chief of station in that country.

Speaker 1: 18:46

So this is a 280 people with an immense amount of knowledge and experience that is relevant to this moment.

Speaker 2: 18:54

It's straight on, relevant, and so we can bring to bear that expertise in a couple of very important ways. One is that we can say from our experience that what we're seeing here is not just politics. This is what we've seen. You should be scared, is basically our message. This is the big time, this is it. The balloon is up. Second, we can help educate because and this is look I'm really happy to be here with you, jack, but I have an ulterior motive.

Speaker 2: 19:21

People listen to you and these are people who may not have intricate knowledge of the national security community and the 18 elements of the IC and ambassador and country team and agent and officer, blah, blah, blah. Well, they got to learn this. This is the president, who is. The only good thing he's done that I can think of is he's forcing America to go back to school and learn about our own country and learn how it works, and the media and, increasingly, people like you. You have an awesome responsibility here.

Speaker 2: 19:52

It's not the old days where the New York Times and Washington Post just printed a story. Here's what happened in Germany or in Italy. You are the people who are responsible for that last mile of knowledge to get into people's heads so they understand what's going on and can be good citizens and, hopefully, save us. My hat's off to you. There's a reason we're all doing this and there's a reason why this president is looking at your industry too, and I'm lumping you with all of the journalists in the media. I can't believe I'm saying this, but both you and I have to worry about what we say on this podcast, and we're both taking risks, and if you'd asked me about that five years ago, I would have said are you crazy? You can say anything you want, you know. You know, call Joe Biden names, call him anything you want. Nothing's going to happen to you.

Speaker 1: 20:37

But that's not where we are now, and if I may, if I may interject there, I just want to say that's something I'm always very much aware of, and I think it's important for a couple of reasons. One, though, that I think maybe some people don't think about the reason it's important for me to be mindful of that each day is because I want to reinforce the idea that, even though I'm mindful of that and feel that apprehension, it's important to do our job anyway.

Speaker 2: 21:09

Yep, yeah, look, you're saying it perfectly. It's more than important to do our job. It is our obligation as citizens. This is we're in very troubled waters and they're going to get rougher. The risks are going to get worse, I think, and I'm hoping enough people hold fast, right, and that's what we're looking for here. What we could do is we can help people with knowledge and help people know that there are people out there who know something, who care, and I think it's reassuring when you see, it's certainly reassuring to me, because everybody must think am I crazy? Am I the only one who thinks this is nuts? What's going on, right? And then when you see a bunch of people who are former ambassadors, former flag-ranked officers, former senior CIA, people who disagree with you know we don't agree on almost anything in terms of domestic policy, I think you couldn't get any consensus with us.

Speaker 2: 21:59

We're all saying the same thing. It's reassuring, it gives you, it lets you hold fast, because other people are holding fast. So that's why this is important.

Speaker 1: 22:07

Yes.

Speaker 2: 22:08

So what are we now? We're around 200, as I said, 280 people, and we are using social media to get the word out. We're on Substack, we're on Blue Sky, we're on Twitter unwillingly, because it's so unpleasant there. We are reaching out to people like you, and I hope this will not be the only time that you reach out to us.

Speaker 1: 22:28

Not at all.

Speaker 2: 22:29

And take a look at our list and tell me what you're interested in. Absolutely, we. You know. Just this morning we did a online press conference in which we had a former very senior agency person, we had the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, we had a former ambassadorial rank State Department person, all talking, and we had the former chief of staff to the DCIA, all talking about politicization of intelligence, one of the symptoms of the sickness we're seeing, and one near again, near and dear to our hearts and we could speak to.

Speaker 1: 23:04

Do you think right now, as you look from the lens that you, with your background, would look from at our current intelligence services, do you think that it's anything that even resembles the structure and protocol, ethics, moral guidelines that you operate from and I'm not so much asking from the position of what Trump wants, but just within the ranks, how much of that do you think remains or does not?

Speaker 2: 23:34

I'm ever the optimist. I'll tell you what does remain and add a cautionary and then talk about what I'm not as sure. What does remain is the structures. Basically, the rules are still there. The National Security Act of 1947, still there. Executive Order 1-2-3-3-3, still there. The basic structure of the IC, the CIA. Go on the website. Not much has changed and they've gotten rid of all the DEI stuff. I'll come back to that in a second. But the structure is there. Why a cautionary tale?

Speaker 2: 24:03

One of the things we've seen with autocrats overseas is they keep those structures. The words, the laws, the terminology of the state stays the same One. It ends in an element of surrealness. So you have this civil rights division at the Department of Justice. It's going to keep that name, except, as far as I can tell, it's not really doing civil rights anymore. So it's a sort of Orwellian doublespeak. Keep the structure. The optimistic part of that is that something for people who are hanging on for dear life can hang on to. And so again, ever the optimist there. You know I hate to use this word, but if there is a deep state, the deep state, and I prefer to call it the steady state, obviously.

Speaker 1: 24:46

Yes.

Speaker 2: 24:49

Deep state is there because it's people who share the basic democratic values and don't care who the president is and if the people in the agency and in the rest of the community or anything like the people I work with when I was there or did oversight of when I was up on the Hill, we got this president's going to have a really hard time in destroying it and destroying those ethics and that approach. That said, he's moving quickly. He's done a lot of damage. He is very, very dangerous. One of the things we talked about this morning at the press conference was, you know, sort of what's the implications of the way we are seeing politicization here? In my view, we haven't seen before. Yeah, people complain. Did Dick Cheney yell at people to try to come to his view of Iraq and Al-Qaeda? Yeah, but you know, suck it up until analysts get yelled at a lot. Right, it's part of the game. You know, maybe he went over the line. This is different. They fired people and you know you have to imagine how that plays out and I admit I'm lucky. We started off by me saying how lucky I am in my career. I'm lucky. We started off by me saying how lucky I am in my career. I'm okay. I don't have to have a job, I don't have little kids or a mortgage. I'm not a 32-year-old analyst who's terrified of getting fired or getting fired publicly and then having the proud boys look up their house. It's a lot easier for me. I get it and that is going to have profound effects that are going to take years to fix.

Speaker 2: 26:13

When I'm hearing people are afraid who can you talk to? Can I trust the person in the office next to me or in the cubicle next to me? Can I talk to my boss? You know, the first thing they tell you it's not unusual to. The agency is like if you're worried that something is off the rails, hitting the guard rails, however you want to say it, go talk to your manager. Go talk to your colleague. Go talk to the inspector general. Go talk to the officer general counsel. They give you a bunch of stuff. I don't know if I would do that now. Is the person in the office next to me doing what? And looking to get my job or kick me out? So it's going to have profound effects on those basic ethics in there. Quick story when I started the agency, they put you through the EOD enter on duty, which is basically filling out insurance form. The CIA sounds sexy, but there's a hell of a lot of eh not?

Speaker 1: 27:05

so sexy. You know the insurance form.

Speaker 2: 27:07

And you're sitting in this auditorium. That part's sexy, it's called the bubble. It's this mid-century modern rounded top auditorium. It's like out of a James Bond movie At one point.

Speaker 2: 27:18

Between the various 50, 60 people in the world in the room going to all the different places in the agency, everybody goes in through and in comes what appeared to me to be an old, hard-bitten case officer, who I realize is probably 10 years younger than I am now, so it makes me feel bad. He opens up, introduces himself and he says and this is my memory of it he says right now in Moscow they're doing an EOD just like this, probably less insurance forms, but a bunch of people sitting in an auditorium and they're getting lectured to and they're, you know, you're all going to leave tomorrow and go out to your first assignment, so you're going to get training as an analyst, training as an operator, training as a logistician, training as a commo guy, whatever it is you're doing, training as a lawyer, he said. And then he stopped and he said so those people, your colleagues, they're all going to learn basically the same thing. The tradecraft's pretty much the same, logistics pretty much the same. Are they your colleagues? And there's dead silence. Nobody's going to talk to this guy and he lets that sit for a while and then he says let me tell you this they are not your colleagues. You just swore an oath to the Constitution. You're going to keep that oath. This place is going to help you keep this oath. This place wants you to keep that oath. You're going to follow the law and you're going to protect America In Moscow. They're going to protect the leadership of the party.

Speaker 2: 28:38

And then at that point we were sort of amidst it. They don't care about the Russian constitution, they don't care about the Russian laws. Never forget these people are not your colleagues. That obviously stayed with me over 30 years, you bet. I don't know if anybody would say that now as an example. It's a little out of the intel world, but I can't help it. I still am a lawyer at heart.

Speaker 2: 28:59

The president just announced who he's going to nominate for the circuit court. He's a personal attorney Bove I never know how to pronounce his name and the president said that his primary objective will be to carry out what is necessary and good to protect America. That's not the job of judges in a constitutional democracy. It just simply isn't. And he has said similar things about the intel community.

Speaker 2: 29:31

Tulsi Gabbard just yesterday put out a whole bunch of stuff excoriating analysts for being deep state treasonous. I don't know if it's deliberate or not, but that isn't what we do. I wasn't an analyst but I've done a lot of oversight of analysts and worked closely with them. It's not what we do. We try to report the truth. Our collectors try to collect pieces of truth. We hand it over to the analysts who try to assemble it into a coherent package that a policymaker can understand. So a policymaker has that element to inform them. It's our best effort to describe reality to people who have to make policy decisions. That's not what this president and this DNI is asking. Is it safe to say?

Speaker 1: 30:00

that, throughout the classified document scandal, that we'd be remiss to not think that some of America's most sensitive secrets are now in the hands of some of our most lethal enemies.

Speaker 2: 30:16

We certainly should be thinking about it. I want to go back to something you said at the beginning, which is are we set up for this? I thought it was a very insightful question and I answered it first in terms of civil liberties, but as somebody who's worked in CI for a bunch of my career, we're not set up for this either. Expectation is that we set up very elaborate mechanisms to protect, to compartmentalize, to vet people coming in, to continually vet them. I mean, I don't know how many polygraphs I've had now, all designed to keep those secrets where they should be, which is secret. When you have senior people in the chain of command, including the president, who's apparently contemptuous of all this, it sort of pulls the rug out from under the whole mechanism.

Speaker 2: 31:02

Now, do I know whether and what secrets have gone to who? I don't know. Have I seen anything that would make me trust this president to keep them safe? No, I don't. He's casual at best, hostile at worst to the idea of protecting these secrets, and that is not something I ever thought about. I mean, I don't care if you were George Bush or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. Not even a thought about that. We do our best. We've been penetrated. But when we are penetrated, it's an Aldrich Ames, it's a Hanson, it's somebody that the Russians have run against us. You know, are we sometimes careless with our camo and somebody gets something? Yeah, there's spills all the time. This is different.

Speaker 1: 31:46

This is really different. How much of this, to the best of your knowledge, is the result of years, perhaps decades, of, for example, vladimir Putin or Russia laying the steps forward to Donald Trump appearing on scene? How much of it is closer to that, rather than just this radical New Yorker who burst on the scene and then starts the wrecking ball and the?

Speaker 2: 32:13

short answer is I don't know. Let me make both arguments on that. Yeah, yeah, the Russians have been very, very aggressive since the revolution and before, in fact, in what they call active measures, what we would call covert action. And, unlike us, I think the Russians are pretty good at having really long views. They're very much aware of history and sort of the long game. So just sort of no question. We have plenty of unclassified stuff that knows what the Russians before them, the Soviets I'm not sure if there's a meaningful difference between them at the moment did to change the environment in the United States.

Speaker 2: 32:49

And they weren't the only ones who did it. The Germans did it during the Second World War, italians did it, the Japanese did it, everything from Lord Ha Ha and the Brits and sort of radio German radio into the United States to talk about racial disparity and the like, always been done. So you can't discount that. I mean, we have an actor that knows how to act and we've seen situations that appear to be what that actor would want. So are they responsible for it, Maybe? On the other hand, the Soviets and now the Russians are also very good, and always have been very good, at sort of taking the ball on the half mounts. When something happens, they move, and they move quickly. And you know, in part because they're free from a lot of the restrictions we are, and that's a good thing I don't want those restrictions lifted. So when somebody like Trump comes along, who's facilitated by a whole host of things the lack of civic education in the United States, increasing economic disparity, a hostility to science there's so many factors that contribute to this that's not one that the Russians are going to miss. They're going to, they're on it.

Speaker 2: 33:53

Now, what will they do with it? It's hard to know. You know Hunter Biden, laptop, the you know indications of the kind of things the Russians would do. That makes sense to me. So you know there's an interesting dynamic going on. You know there's an interesting dynamic going on and when you're talking leaders of countries it's overly simplistic to think of.

Speaker 2: 34:12

You know is so-and-so a recruited spy or an asset, this person or that person or the other. You know everybody's trying to get ahead in their context. You know Vladimir Putin is, donald Trump is, and everybody's trying to. You know Aretha Franklin, if she wasn't dead, would probably hate me for using this, but I always call it the who's zooming who issue. You know everybody's trying to zoom everybody, but what we don't have here is a government that is buying into the rules as we set them, not the Russians as we set them. Set them, not the Russians as we set them. So you know, and I think that you know, it's not accidental that Trump has expressed his appreciation of what he would call the strength and efficacy of people like Viktor Orban or Vladimir Putin, even our friends in North Korea.

Speaker 2: 35:02

You know, if you go there and particularly if you ally that with a apparent complete unwillingness, and particularly if you lie that with a complete willingness to lie. That's sort of a superpower in our context. And again, I go back to your framing this whole thing with that first question, which is we set up for this? We're really not set up for our political players to blatantly lie to us the way we're seeing. Yeah, do politicians shade the truth? Yeah, are they imperfect humans? Absolutely. But we're not really set up. The people aren't, the media isn't. I mean, look how hard it is for our major media to say that is not true.

Speaker 1: 35:46

Yes, yes say, that is not true.

Speaker 2: 35:47

Yes, yes, you know Donald Trump says sign this bill into law, when in fact Barack Obama signed that bill. We have a picture of Barack Obama signing that bill. It's a bill, doesn't matter. You know you go to journalism school. You know the paradigm for journalism school probably during my lifetime. You know it's. It's Watergate. You know cultivate a source. The source will tell you what's hidden. You know you go down into a garage in the dark and they'll hand you something. Blah, blah, blah Pentagon Papers. Same thing.

Speaker 2: 36:16

All of the great stories of American journalism are cultivating sources, doing really good analysis, you know, and explaining to the American people that what's going on here is this, that and the other thing we're not particularly good at. Like, what do you do if you know the president just says whatever he wants and his people say whatever they want at any time? You end up. You're not taught to write that way. You end up, you know, sounding like you're running for Snopes or something, and I've all reporters like doing fact-checking all the time. Yeah, so, but yeah, you asked exactly the right question. It's going to come back all the way through everything that happens. Are we set up for this?

Speaker 1: 36:54

What are your thoughts on, because we have one coming up sooner than we think. What are your thoughts about future free and fair elections? What are your concerns?

Speaker 2: 37:04

Well, I think it's concerns. We won't have one, and I think that's a real concern I don't want to put percentages on it, but it is a not insignificant percentage that in one way, this will not be the 2026 election will not be free and fair, and then 2028. And that could come in any of many, many shapes and forms from the dictator's playbook Destroy civil society, Destroy the fundraising capabilities of your opposition, Bring, or threaten to bring, criminal prosecutions against your opposition, Penalize media that covers your opposition or covers you negatively. All of those things are happening now. I have no doubt that the polls well, I shouldn't say that I have little doubt that the polls will be open, but will it be a free and fair election? Now, I said little doubt.

Speaker 2: 37:50

I also think it's entirely possible that the president could declare some sort of state of emergency. We have seen a little bit of a tryout on that, interestingly in a different context, but a court yesterday issued a decision about AIPA and the question of what's an emergency. The president is clearly toyed with invoking the Insurrection Act and has gone pretty far in invoking the quote invasion language in immigration law to take action against people that he says. Well, this is an invasion and there's been talk I don't know from who about suspending habeas corpus, all of which are cut from that cloth. So I think we have to worry about that, and I think I think we have to worry about that. And I think one of the places to worry is the various declarations of extraordinary power or emergency power, Again right out of the dictator's playbook. I mean, that's the first and most important law that Hitler passes after he comes into power.

Speaker 1: 38:42

Do you see? I know it's easy to see, for any of us it's easy to see what we are looking for, right. We can match patterns that aren't necessarily there but we want them to be. But it has appeared to me several different occasions that there's just an ear pathway that Trump has been taking that does very closely mirror that of Hitler's. Mirror that of Hitler's. And we know, or at least it's been reported, trump has always had this weird fascination with Hitler, much like today Orban or any of the other dictators or autocrats. Do you see any kind of mapping there that says look, he knows how it's been done before and so this is part of his fantasy? Not so much that he's brilliant enough to think that this is the way to do it, it's just that he's naive enough to just say you know my fantasy is to be. What are your thoughts on that, because we hear it brought up a lot.

Speaker 2: 39:43

I have found every attempt that I've made to understand Donald Trump as a person has completely failed. I've never met anybody like him in my life, yeah, and I don't have a pattern to match him to Great point, so I don't know what I will say is the path he is taking and this comes. This is a real steady state thing, because I think what we would say, and if you look at the kind of analysis that our people put together, if you decide you don't want to be bound by the norms and the rules and restrictions and guardrails of democracy, you inevitably take this path. This is where you go. So it is not. You know it's, it's.

Speaker 2: 40:22

There's not a lot of different ways to get to be a dictator, it's not the same. But once you start saying I don't want there to be opposition, you don't have to have Hitler or Orban as a model to say I would like my political opposition not to have money, you don't need them to say you know something? You should shut up journalists. I can't believe that. That journalist I mean just from the podium in the White House they talked about I'm forgetting his name from CBS, who just gave the Wake Forest speech. You know he should be arrested. Right, he should be arrested. You don't have to be a rocket scientist or a great student of history that you know. Hey, I don't like these people who are standing between me and what I want to do, right, so you sort of inevitably get there.

Speaker 2: 41:07

Now are there people within the Trump orbit who have clearly studied Orban, hitler, putin, I mean any good history major who's done European history, has spent some time in college thinking about how did Hitler get to be Hitler and how did Mussolini get to be Mussolini. So I don't know what to take from that. Not quite sure there's a parallel in that one. I think a dictator the path of a dictator to want to be, is a little bit predetermined. There's just some things you gotta do to succeed. But I also said that I have very little ability to understand donald trump in the way that I think I basically understood george bush and things that I understand anybody who's a politician. But this, this is beyond anything. I don't understand the anger, I don't understand the willingness to lie. I just I don't get it Right and the element of shamelessness I find when I see him talking I often wonder, like, is he uncomfortable saying what he's saying? Right? Apparently not. I mean he's calling.

Speaker 1: 42:19

Joe Biden a scum the day after he's diagnosed with what will be terminal cancer. Really only a certain path you can take. I suppose if we look at it through the framework of it's the 1940s and you want to rob a bank, it may look like you're doing it like one of the other big names of the time, because there's really only so many ways to rob.

Speaker 2: 42:41

That's exactly right. There are only a few ways to rob a bank. That's a perfect way to capture it, I mean, yeah, so it's not surprising that we are where we are, and I do think it's valuable, armed with that idea that you just outlined of the bank is, if we're the bank, what's likely to happen next? Yes, and we're seeing a lot of it the ignoring of judicial orders, the contempt for the courts as well, the mobilization, and this is important. I know you had Juliette Kayyama on the other day. She's fabulous and something she said to you really struck me, which was you asked her a series of questions and she said I think the big change here is violence, the possibility of violence, and that is one of the things that really strikes me the pardoning of people, the use of the pardon as effectively, I think, inevitably an advanced pardon. Yes, it's not explicit, but if you pardon the people who, for instance, conspired to kidnap the governor of Michigan, you sort of are saying you can kidnap the governor of Michigan.

Speaker 1: 43:47

I'm so glad to hear you address this in the way that you are, because I think that's one of the things at least on mainstream media and I haven't really looked for it on social media. But I think the thing a lot of people are missing is that this is not out of any heartfelt feelings Trump has about the people he's pardoning. It's about the meta message that he is sending with the pardons to the people he will need in the event that he invokes violence. He's communicating in that mob boss way.

Speaker 2: 44:24

It's exactly in a mob boss way, and you know who knows whether he intends it or not. You know it could be as, and you know who knows whether he intends it or not. You know it could be as simple as you know there's us and them. I pardon the people who are us and I don't pardon the people who are them, and I don't even think about what the ramifications are that are, and maybe he does, but look it is. You know there are a bunch of people out there who demonstrated an incredible willingness to use violence and weapons on January 6th, that have made a fetish of a certain amount of paramilitary aspect of which is not unknown, but generally on the fringes but it's no longer a fringe in American politics. You know many of them. You know sort of fetishizing weapons and a sort of quasi paramilitary. I mean the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the arm patches, all that stuff. You know they look more like the Wagner Group people in Russia than they do a civic organization, right, and these people are not to be trifled with.

Speaker 2: 45:22

I think we're going to see people killed. I do too, when they talk about pulling the security detail from. Uh uh, you know this person or the other person I don't want to mention specific names for obvious reasons. I mean, I think that it's a. You know, it's pretty close to being explicit and you know it's exactly like. You know it sounds like an episode of the sopranos without the north jersey accent. It's a Queens accent, right, I agree. So a little bit different, but pretty much the same.

Speaker 2: 45:53

And again, I go back to your point Are we set up for that? I mean, we're not really set up for our president to use the pardon power as a sort of forward-looking mechanism to encourage behavior. We just don't. I can't think of a single instance of a pardon that was used for that purpose. It is what constitutionally. I know a lot of people made these jokes, but one reason that we're not set up to it I keep coming back to that is I don't think the founders ever thought that there would be a president who would be uncaring about that. I think they understood the concept Well. I shouldn't quite say that because there's a few that are coming to fore now. The emoluments clause is actually because they were worried about a president who was beholden to a foreign power and so that whole clause does have something to do with that.

Speaker 2: 46:40

But the balance of powers that came out of the founders was again based on an understanding that everybody's playing the same game. You know, it's sort of like you got rules of baseball. You can come up with the rules of baseball, you can tweak the rules of baseball, but everybody's playing sort of the same game. You know four bases, you hit the ball. If somebody shows up, you know, with a big knife or a sword or decides like I'm not going to run to home base, I'm going to give myself points if I tip my hat to the umpire. The umpires are not set up to impose a rule there. I mean there's no rule that says you can't shoot the opposite team's pitcher. I mean I'm pretty confident there isn't Right.

Speaker 2: 47:29

And I don't think the founders imagined they would have to say explicitly I mean, the pardon power is an interesting one because it's almost the least bounded within the constitution of any of the powers, perhaps the most they didn't feel any necessary to say explicitly you can't give one for a bribe. I mean, maybe they sort of implied that in the high crimes and misdemeanors part of the impeachment clause. But I think if you'd ask them like, why don't you have a rule that says he can't take a bribe in return for a pardon, they'd say, are you crazy? Or that he can't pardon people, so they understand that he wants them to violate the law and hurt people in the future. No president would ever do that. Why would we put that explicitly in the Constitution?

Speaker 1: 48:06

You know, there are a whole bunch of stuff we don't.

Speaker 1: 48:08

What you just outlined there makes me think of a book I read in the 90s. It was a business book by a gentleman by the name of Harvey Mackey, and it was called how to Swim with the Sharks Without being Eaten Alive, and a quote that has stuck with me for this entire time. He had a principle if you don't like the rules of the ballpark you're playing in, then change ballparks, because the rules of the ballpark you are in, those are the rules. Now, what we are looking at, however, is much to your example, somebody who has come along in the ballpark we are already in and they've, by force, are changing the rules, and yet we are stuck in and bound to the original rules of the park, and we are trying to navigate and counter this seeming takeover by the original rules, and it's introducing some complexities that are trying, at best.

Speaker 2: 49:12

Yeah, and we don't have the language even. I'll give you the example. I've started using the term postpartisan to describe actually the state state, that's me talking, not the whole organization there. And what I mean by that is, up until now, to use your arena stadium idea, your arena stadium idea. We all have different policy views and we fight it out on this ball field within the rules, and that's partisan politics, because we organize ourselves into two teams. So the partisan is like the Yankees want to beat the Red Sox, the Red Sox want to beat them. That's partisan. And so if you're rooting for the Yankees or the Red Sox, you're partisan because you're saying I want the Yankees to hit more home runs or I want the Red Sox to hit, but if one of those two stop hitting home runs and start shooting the opposition with guns, you're not really being like hey, I don't think the Red Sox should shoot the pitcher because I'm a Yankees fan. That isn't why you'd say that, right, right, right, you're not being a Red Sox fan to say don't shoot the pitcher. So I think we're really postpartisan. And again, we don't have the language to talk about. Within the steady state and with others.

Speaker 2: 50:23

We've had a lot of discussions. People have asked like what are you guys doing? Aren't you partisan? Well, I would say no, we're postpartisan. We're not saying we want the Republican Party to win or lose. What we are saying is right now, many of the people in one party seem to be arguing that we shouldn't be following laws, we shouldn't be following the Constitution Not all of them, and I suspect that the ones who are not are. There's a lot going on in people's hearts. I would imagine. This is a very tough position that I think Trump has. The president has put his own party in and I hesitate to throw till I've walked in their shoes kind of thing, because he has the ability and willingness to do things to people and it may not be just limited to, you may get primaries Right.

Speaker 1: 51:07

That's a great point, I think, without either one of us stating what those possibilities could be, I think anybody listening knows what they are, and so to be that individual who, either directly or indirectly, has had that communicated to them, that's a tight, tough spot.

Speaker 2: 51:25

And it's not what they ran for office for. So I have a certain amount of sympathy. On the other hand, they ran for office to have some courage as Americans. So I'd like to see them thinking about, particularly in my area, national security, but everywhere else, and thinking about our system of divided government. So the abandonment of the concept of the Appropriations Clause, the Impoundment Act I'm happy to get a little technical, but the idea that when we spend money it's the Congress that decides to spend money, when the government gets authorities to do something it's a command from Congress, that the president's job is to take care that those commands be faithfully executed and it's not that Congress just sort of says oh yeah, I guess you don't have to have a USAID or International Institute of Peace or whatever it is. These are fundamental. Again, going back to the baseball mentality these are the rules, these are the rules of the game, so that's pretty important as far as the framework of the steady state?

Speaker 1: 52:23

what are pathways forward for dealing with some of these new rules, if you will, that have been introduced into the rule book that had existed for 200 plus years, but now we find ourselves with wait a minute, this was never in that. What are the suggestions, the ideas, concepts, philosophies of the steady state to deal?

Speaker 2: 52:45

Well, the first is to embrace and celebrate those rules and explain them, not only the ones that particularly the ones that are in our space, but across the board. Americans need to know what the Impoundment Act is. Sorry, if you hated social studies in high school, you need to learn this. And that goes back to what we were saying at the beginning. It's why I'm here talking to you. In our world, we need to explain those rules over and over and over again to help people understand why they're so important. Second, we have to support and empower people who are trying to take those rules and enforce them. You know your question leads to is there a third level of this where we abandon the rules? And you know, I think the answer is no. If we abandon the rules, if America abandons the rules, and it's a free-for-all, I don't think we survive that, and you know that is not worth even contemplating right now. I know in the movies that's sort of what happens. I think what we have to do is the hard work of learning the rules, enforcing the rules, explaining to people why it's so important to have the rules. And I would add something and I think it's happening which is that remember up until now to go with our big metaphor here of rules not rules.

Speaker 2: 53:58

You know we have been fighting with each other constantly over policy issues. You know, yankees, red Sox, yankees, red Sox. We've got to put that aside for a little while. One of the things we joked about is a lot of the people in the steady state have been on opposite sides of tables on a lot of national security issues and, like sure, we really want to go back to when we really could fight like hell with each other. Like I don't like this. I mean, I really don't agree with mr x over here on the proper role of the dni. Or should fisa be expanded? Or was the usa patriot act? Did it go too far or not far enough? I'm happy, happy to have those arguments.

Speaker 2: 54:32

I mentioned Ken Weinstein. We argued over that stuff. Stop In the early 2000s. I want to go back to that. Happy to do it, but it's going to be hard and I think it's one of the things that we've tried to do. We're willing to talk to pretty much anybody, both on the political spectrum, to the left of many of us, to the right of many of us.

Speaker 2: 54:52

We did back in the 2020, we did some things at schools. And look, these are schools. Some of them wouldn't let CIA recruit on their campus. I get it. First of all, why don't you meet us? I think we're not quite as bloodthirsty bad guys as you think we are.

Speaker 2: 55:08

But even if you do think that the existential threat we're facing is greater than any of the intermediate threats that we're facing and this comes to fore in trying to figure out how we deal with the Middle East, because the world is going on. I mean, I don't care what Donald Trump does. The events in the world continue and we need to respond to them or not. World continue and we need to respond to them or not, but we're going to need to come up with some sort of truce in right and left, issue by issue. And listen, I get it. Everybody thinks their issue is the most important issue, and that makes sense to me too. But I think we're going to have to work across that.

Speaker 2: 55:45

In my world, I see the threat in the national security context. People close to me are environmental experts. In their world, it's the destruction of so much that we've done to protect the environment. I have other people who are in the healthcare world. From their world, it's that we're abandoning science in healthcare, each of which could have catastrophic consequences. By the way, we could destroy the world in a lot of different ways. So you know, we're human beings, we're really good at that, but we're going to have to realize that this is not about national security, or the environment, or health or social services, or social security or Medicaid or Ob, and I think that's part of if it's having any impact at all.

Speaker 1: 56:37

I think it's only because it's generating some pushback, meaning it's a radical enough different way of thinking in the moment that it's having a jarring effect. And what I'm speaking about specifically. I've been taking the opportunity to call out people within my own party, in the Democratic Party. The meta message there is look, we have a problem as a nation. We are going to have to solve it as a nation. If we limit where we are willing to look for solutions or who we are willing to borrow resources or intelligence from not the type of intelligence we're talking about, but just prefrontal cortex analytical type intelligence, right yeah. If we cut that off to only we say, okay, we can only look here, it can only be the steady state, the 200 people, 280 people in the steady state. I'm guessing if that were the approach there, it would be a much smaller group of people right now. Oh yeah.

Speaker 2: 57:45

If we only let in people that we agreed with on everything having to do with national security and other stuff, it would be like it would probably just be me. I'm not sure I agree with anybody on everything Perfect, but you are right and there's a history here too which I think we should hearken back to, particularly appropriate right now, at the beginning of June, which is, I mean, take a look at the Second World War. We were allies with Russia. For God's sake, if you took the I don't remember if it's like 26 countries that made up the Allies totally, I mean, many of those countries had gone to war with each other not so far in the past and some of them would go to war with each other after the Second World War not too far in the future. But the idea that Germany and Japan and Italy presented an existential threat to the planet's organization, flawed as it was.

Speaker 2: 58:39

We're still in the middle of a colonial era. We can always talk about that, but we need to think about it that way. This is different and that you know, the steady state is in some ways, a microcosm, because what I'm saying in a different context is just as this came out of this. The steady state came out of us feeling there's an existential threat. We need to go to a non-safe space In the larger scheme. We need to work with and collaborate with people that we're not all that comfortable with sometimes because we're facing this. It's the plot of a lot of different movies, so we should be able to watch some of the buddy movies.

Speaker 2: 59:15

Any number of World War II odd group of guys, all of whom hit each other, or melded together, or I guess the Marvel. It's sort of the point of all the Marvel movies. So we've got to learn a little bit from that.

Speaker 1: 59:29

I don't know if you were aware, but within the last couple of months I had Congressman Don Bacon on yeah.

Speaker 2: 59:35

I saw it. I wasn't able to listen to it. I saw you had him.

Speaker 1: 59:38

Yeah, you know. Look, clearly he's a Republican who has voted with Trump on countless occasions, but he's also someone who is not afraid to post counter to Trump's position or to criticize Trump, especially on Ukraine. That's been. Congressman Bacon is a big Ukraine supporter. So, you know, when I have people like that on, I catch some heat. But it's important for me to say, look, you know, this thing, this little thing that Congressman Bacon is doing. If he weren't doing that, that's the one thing we would be saying well, they could at least, you know, do this or do that.

Speaker 2: 1:00:19

Somebody else. Oh, I know what happened. Hold on my computer, just came back to life, gotcha. But I'm staying on the iPad, which is okay, perfect.

Speaker 1: 1:00:28

I shut it off. Okay, bingo. So my philosophy is look, when there's somebody who actually does something that if they weren't doing we would be saying, well, they could at least come out and say this. Or if they do it, then let's welcome that aspect of them into the fray and say you know what? We don't agree on 95% of the issues. Maybe I don't like you for this reason, but look, the fact that you're willing to do this much, it's important.

Speaker 2: 1:00:58

Yeah, it is important, completely agree with you. And look, I mean within the steady state I think we've managed to live that. I think it's a little bit more difficult in the larger world. Luckily I'm not playing that much in the larger world, but you're absolutely right, we have to be willing to cross the boundaries. The strange bedfellows are important. Sure, one of the things we're planning we actually have we're hoping to do we did it once before, back in 19, and we're going to do it again is we have a former senior Russia hand two of them actually from the agency who is willing to sit on a stage with a former FSB guy and talk about what they're seeing. Interesting Opposite can't get more opposite than that. No, no, and I think that's important. Now I have to say it hasn't been that hard in the steady state.

Speaker 2: 1:01:48

One of the great things about the intelligence community is by virtue of the fact that its job is to describe reality People tend to be. You know, let me hear your perspective because I need to get as much information I see people just like to collect as much information as they can, and we don't do it in a coercive sort of way. We're the opposite of law enforcement. You know we recruit people, sure sure. I used to say when I was a prosecutor your relationships well, your relationships in the agencies are based on holding people's hearts and heads, while when you're in law enforcement it's holding other parts of the body Right and it's a different relationship. So I think for us it's sort of easy. Yeah, it mimics a lot of what we know from our professional life.

Speaker 2: 1:02:37

For me, one of the silver linings of all this and I've been working with the steady state now for almost six years, with a big jump gap in the middle it's been a great pleasure. I admire these people, I like these people. It has been a really positive professional experience for me. So I have no complaints there. I welcome it. I'm sorry it's this. I would have rather we had some other organizing principle other than perhaps the end of our lives as we know them. But since we're there, might as well enjoy it. It's a great bunch of people smart, patriotic, careful in their thoughts, caring in their approach.

Speaker 1: 1:03:14

I've got a question for you that you can either answer from just your personal perspective or, as best you can, from the perspective of the steady state as a collective unit that maybe get mentioned periodically and very briefly, I should add, in the media about the threat that this crypto situation represents to the nation and national security, just because of the I guess for a lack of a better word the secrecy or the inability to know where what is going and when.

Speaker 2: 1:03:47

Yeah, I'm not an expert on cryptocurrency, but I'll make two observations. Certainly, because it obscures ownership and movement of funds, it is going to complicate the ability to observe the ownership and movement of funds in order to help put together that picture of reality. You know, I think that's inevitable. As societies change, economies change. That's always going to happen. I mean, there was a time that everybody dealt in just gold coins, untraceable. You could cut them up, you can melt them, stuff like that. So I'm not as worried about that. I am worried that it represents such a radical change in how the nuts and bolts of economies work that a whole bunch of societal guardrails and norms are not going to be applicable anymore. Right, you know, I said that's one area.

Speaker 2: 1:04:42

The second area is I haven't been convinced that it's not just one big scam. Still don't quite now. Maybe I'm just missing it, but I don't quite understand why. It is not magically, just not true. But and this leaves I guess I said two points.

Speaker 2: 1:04:57

The third point the fact that none of us, I think, really understand what's happening and the whole thing may explode, the bubble may pop at some point doesn't mean that right now the movement to those funds cannot be affecting things, including, I mean, the president, had a, you know, at the White House dinner in which people apparently paid him personal funds to be able to have access to the presidency to advance crypto schemes, including ones that he and his family have an interest in. I don't quite understand what they actually are going to do with all that, but I suspect some people are going to get very rich quickly and some people are going to get very poor quickly and you know, five or ten years. It all may, you know, be like, you know, dutch tulips in the sun, but you know it's real in the sense that people are affecting other people's behavior by the movement of this cryptocurrency. I'm emphasizing that it's crypto. Crypto it's still currency. Right now, people are acting based on it.

Speaker 2: 1:05:59

Um, and as long as people are acting based on it, as long as people will change their behavior because you paid them money, whether it's change your behavior like I'll take your job, I'm willing to dig a ditch. If you give me five bitcoins or something, then it's working, even if it's magical, which I mean. I guess in some sense, money is magical, uh, paper money, but that's that's a fundamental shift there. I mean, there's been some interesting writing on how the introduction of paper money sort of just rocked particularly england, you know as it became important because they just didn't have the language and the concepts to think about how paper money works. So maybe we're there too.

Speaker 2: 1:06:35

Yeah, that's an interesting idea actually With this is the absence of a sense that we have leaders in the country who are taking on what is, at the very least, an interesting intellectual problem in good faith on our behalf. I mean, I don't. I mean, the White House said that the president's participation in this is in his off hours, so who's he representing? Is he whose interests are being represented, whatever he said or did there? Is he helping America navigate what inevitably is going to be difficult areas? Or is he helping the Trump organization navigate those or something else that I don't know? That's really worrisome. And again, going back to your first statement, we've never been in this position. I mean, there hasn't been a president who you know, even the ones that I didn't agree with their policies. George Bush really cared about America. Everything he did was to help America. I may have disagreed with what he did on some things, but that's what he did. Clinton wanted to help America. I didn't agree with some of the stuff he did, but this is different. It's fundamentally different.

Speaker 1: 1:07:36

It is Stephen. I have one final question. Sure, this is for you in the steady state. What do you need people to know about the steady state and how can people find out more about the?

Speaker 2: 1:07:48

steady state. Glad you asked that. So what you should know about us is other than the basics. There are a bunch of us, and we are formers from a world that you may not know a lot about. We are in the business of educating and informing. So look to us, I will the one if you come, if your listeners don't come with anything else. You got 280 people who've been ambassadors and chiefs of station and this and that for 40, 50 years. They're all scared, and if they're scared, you should be scared. Yes, so more practically, what can you do? Where can you find us? Well, we have a website thesteadystateorg. We put up everything that we do. This will be linked on our website I don't know, maybe our YouTube channel, I haven't figured that one out yet on our website, I don't know. Maybe our YouTube channel? I haven't figured that one out yet. Fantastic One of the problems with the steady standings we're all a little bit on the retired side, so all this computer stuff is a little difficult for some of us Sure, I can see where that is.

Speaker 2: 1:08:41

We're very active in social media. We're on Blue Sky, we're on Twitter, we're in LinkedIn, we're on Substack All of that things and stack all of that things. And then, finally, an offer. We have people all over the country, if you are in an organization and I don't care if it's a veteran of foreign wars post or a college Democrat or a college Republicans or the ladies auxiliary or the men's auxiliary of whatever who care and would like to hear from us, reach out to me and we'll see what we can do. Wow, happy to do it. The only other thing I'd leave you with is we're scared, but I think there's an element of confidence. We've been through bad times as a country. We survived. I think we can survive this time. I think this is as grave a danger as we've been in since the civil war, but you got 280 people who are in abandoning ship and holding fast, and I think that's something to you know. If we start scurrying, then you really got to worry.

Speaker 1: 1:09:38

We're not abandoning ship. Well, Stephen, on behalf of this country, I say thank you to you personally and to the other 279 people who are part of the steady state, of the steady state, and I want to say that any of you have an open invitation. Anytime any one of you want to come on and do a podcast episode.

Speaker 2: 1:10:03

You shoot me a message and it will happen. Be careful what you ask for, it will happen. Jack, this has been a pleasure and you've really made me think. Well good, I mean, I told you at the beginning one reason we're doing this is because you are the last mile of that education, getting to people and informing people. But there's another reason. It's really good to have questions thrown at me in ways and in forms, and sometimes in substance, that I haven't thought about before. And now I have to go back to my colleagues in the study and say, you know what this guy said, like what about that? We haven't thought of it that way. So this is really helpful to me. Well, thank you very much.

Speaker 1: 1:10:37

You've made me think, and I know that anybody watching or listening to this episode is going to do a whole lot of deep thinking themselves. So thank you it was an honor and we'll communicate soon. You got it.