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there's two types of training that you go through with the agency in general there's the there's your intro training which is whatever your skill set is whether you're going to be a targeter field officer Tech officer whether you're going to do break an entry whether you're going to do whatever you're going to do right hacking you will go through like a a prolonged training and most of those lengths are classified but my training was the farm just like you've seen in the TV shows right so I went to the farm and then they teach you everything you need to operate independently in the field at that training course and then from there you'll continue going through training that's more like specific where it's needed so if you're going to go into the desert if you're going to go into the jungle if you're going to go into a position where you know you'll only be in contact with uh your support element like once every month or once every two weeks or something if you're going to create a deep cover Alias different trainings right so those are much shorter um but it in essentially all of our training mimics this process of what's known as just in time training meaning you're taught a skill and then you're immediately put into an exercise where you use that skill so it's completely different than what you used to in college or anything like that right if you could imagine uh like if we had weapons right now I could basically teach you how to put a gun together and take a gun apart right and then the next step would be to force you to do it while I'm keeping a clock and you have real like real risk if you don't do it in less than 2 minutes you don't complet you don't continue the training right a real risk scenario spikes the adrenaline forces you to to process the information that you had plus the skill set that you have in front of you and then you have to perform that's called Just in Time learning okay if there's no real risk it's basically like college and you're like uh right I can handle a 40 on this test I'll just make it up on the next exam yeah right there's no Stakes you you just you can plan it out over the course of a semester and be like yeah I'll be fine and what and where did you go to first when they shipped you overseas and what was your main objectives when you when you they sent you where do they send you first so we're this is now we're getting into like more classified areas right because our our personal operational background is where we start running into classification problems where we start you know stuff is confidential stuff is classified stuff can't be shared but what I can say in general is not everybody gets shipped out right away okay um some people will be uh deployed into positions where they're going to like learn a special skill like maybe you're going to go work with joint military Ops and you might honestly go to like paradise you might go to like Southern Florida and just practice jumping out of helicopters and amphibious assaults that might be your first tour other people will say at langle he'll stay at headquarters some people might go you know take a tour with FBI or take a tour with NSA and just you know be a joint leaon learn that side of the operation um and then other people will go and do different types of field Ops some long-term field Ops some short-term field Ops some special operation field Ops uh different stuff like that so for me let me think for me it was it was uh more of a traditional route so uh traditional overseas assignment traditional domestic assignment traditional overseas assignment traditional domestic assignment and then it was actually in 2012 um there was some big developments in like the the world of counterterrorism and counter nuclear proliferation where my my military background kind of came into play and I was all of a sudden like fleeted out of this traditional world and into special ops covert action world wow and that was kind of how I ended my career as a program manager doing covert action with uh joint US military and other domestic intelligence uh Community Partners okay and then we had our first kid the long story short we left because we my wife and I left because we had our child and when we kind of did the math looking at how other parents in the agency end up yeah we were like I don't know if it's worth it to like potentially sacrifice our marriage and the childhood experience the parenting experience for a career working for a secret intelligence organization but so haven't you said that like said previously where you were like generally like the countries that you were in correct yes so I specialize in Asia okay Asia and what's nice is that when you specialize against the target that's an Asian Target um think just I mean it doesn't take a rocket scientist to think of the different targets that are in Asia they're they're actually all over the world so I've had a chance to travel in Latin America Central America Europe Africa you know Asia chasing these these bad guys all over the world wow yeah it's been a lot of fun and so your job was basically to just like find yourself in the same environments as these bad guys yeah basically yeah the uh so the way that our Ops worked because my wife and I were a tandem couple she she was what's known as a targeter so her job was to find Targets and the way we Define a Target is somebody who's in possession of secret information that the American government wants maybe that secret information has to do with you know nuclear weapons or maybe it has to do with troop movements or maybe it has to do with you know artificial intelligence who knows but she knows what American intelligence needs and she finds the people who have who we think have access to that information and then my job is to build an OP where we where we meet that person and collect that information or prove whether or not they have what we think they have so a lot of that is it's just social skills it's social skills across cultural barriers dealing with people who have no reason to trust you as an American unless you put on a disguise and pretend that you're not if you like this short clip make sure you click here to see the next clip or here to see the full podcast [Music] episode So Fresh So new