“Applying Intelligence to Business Strategy” with Jonathan B. Smith

Andrew Hammond: Welcome to SpyCast. The official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Dr. Andrew Hammond, the museum's historian and curator. Each week, we explore some aspect of the past, present or future of intelligence and espionage. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five-star review. It really helps other listeners find us. Coming up next on SpyCast.

Unidentified Person: I think it's important to just understand humans, like, you don't have to agree with their point of view. You have to acknowledge their point of view. [ Music ]

Andrew Hammond: Okay, well thanks ever so much for coming to speak to me at the Spy Museum, Jonathan. And it's great to see you again.

Jonathan Smith: Great to see you, Andrew.

Andrew Hammond: I thought that it would be interesting just to introduce our listeners to who you are, so there's a number of different hats that you wear. One of them is how I know you. You're on an advisory board at the International Spy Museum. So if you could just tell our listeners a little bit more about some of the things that you've done in the past, and why you're interested in this field?

Jonathan Smith: Sure. Well, I identify myself as an entrepreneur, and I grew up as an entrepreneur. I actually was sitting at the board table at like four years old, with my grandfather and my dad, and coming out of school in 1992, my dad ended up going bankrupt, so I became a corporate person for about five years, and realized that wasn't for me. So I went and took myself on an entrepreneurial journey, taught myself search engine optimization. In 1999, had a meeting with Cheryl Sandberg, and Eric Schmidt and 400 engineers at Google in 2003. Actually had an offer to go to Google at the time, chose to continue to be an entrepreneur, so that's how much I want to be an entrepreneur, and use those skills, those skills and search engine optimization to actually get a 100 million dollar contract in Abu Dabi. So actually use search engine optimization and found the right people in Abu Dabi, we had a floating security barrier to stop a water-borne IED attack. So it was called Whisper Wave, and we took a commercially-available product, modified it for military purposes and actually sold more of it in the middle east than we did in the States. So, and from there, I became an EOS implementer, so I actually help about 30 entrepreneurial teams at any time, get what they want from their business, unlike the-I call myself the 12th man on the team. And one of those teams I work on happens to be Chris Voss' team at the Black Swan Group and I had the privilege of getting trained in the Black Swan skills. So I am the commercial perspective amongst the hostage negotiators at the Black Swan Group.

Andrew Hammond: Just a few things I want to peel on there, for our listeners that may not know what they are, so SEO, we're talking about Search Engine Optimization.

Jonathan Smith: Search Engine Optimization.

Andrew Hammond: You just give them a couple of sentences on what that is, in case they don't know?

Jonathan Smith: Search Engine Optimization is the process of tuning your website so that it gets better results in Google. So basically you want to improve the search rankings, and you can do that organically by changing your site, or you can also do it with search engine marketing, which would mean you'd pay for an ad that would get you higher in Google.

Andrew Hammond: And at yours, can you tell them briefly what yours is? It's pretty fascinating.

Jonathan Smith: EOS is the entrepreneurial operating system. There is a book called Traction, written by Gina Wickman, that's the basis for the system. And I say it's a strategy execution system to help businesses get what they want, and in the case of the Spy Museum, museums, to get what they want, and what we do is we joke that we manage human energy and try to get it all a line moving in the same direction to go achieve whatever vision that the entity is looking to achieve.

Andrew Hammond: Can you tell the listeners of a few of the companies that you've worked with?

Jonathan Smith: Sure, well, I've worked with the museum. I've worked with JLo Beauty, I worked with the Orthodox Union, which is, they decide what's kosher in the world. I work with a whole host of other companies, so it tends to be healthcare related, professional services related, construction, because I live in New York City, so those are the groups that I tend to work with, just by nature of what businesses are there.

Andrew Hammond: So I think that it could be interesting now to just discuss a lot about some of the places where you've worked in the past. So I know you've spent a lot of time in the middle east? Can you tell us more about that?

Jonathan Smith: I was mostly in the GCC, that we worked, and so the Gulf Cooperation Council, and countries in the Persian Gulf. And so it was really interesting. We built this product. It was actually a wave dispersion product, so it was designed to reduce wave action. And after the U.S.S. Cole incident, the U.S. Navy called us from NAVFAC and said can we use this product to stop a water-borne IED attack? Like what happened in the Port of Aiden against the U.S.S. Cole. So they call us, I can't remember, it was in 2000 sometime, or just like two days after the Cole was attacked, and they-and they didn't hear from them for a year. So, I went and built a website and figured out basically I used a longtail strategy, so that longtail strategy means lots of different search words that I optimize the site for, meaning, made the site show up in higher rankings across a large group of words. And what happened by doing that is people were searching on Google, and they, in fact, were calling us from all over the world. I mean, all over the world. Including North Korea, and Iran, and all sorts of interesting places. And my dad and I had a joke that we got a call to go present at a conference in Dubai, we had never been to Dubai, neither of us had been to the middle east at the time. And we flipped a credit card to decide whose credit card it was going to go on, to go to Dubai, and I was the loser, well, maybe the winner. I got to go to Dubai. So I landed in Dubai, at like two in the morning. Of course, my car that was supposed to be there didn't show up. And worked my way through the airport, it was blisteringly hot, even at two in the morning. I did a presentation to about 200 people from various militaries in the middle east, and at the end of the talk, someone came up to me and handed me a card, and said "You should call these people." And those people were from the International Golden Group, they ended up being our partner in Abu Dabi.

Andrew Hammond: I think it a bit interesting now to focus to the main thing we're going to discuss today which are some of the similarities between case officers and entrepreneurs. So, by case officers, I mean that small subset of CIA officers who are sent out to spot, recruit and run agents, people that are going to steal secrets, people that are going to pass on information. They generally do so out of embassies overseas, but we spoke before, and there's just so many areas of overlap, so one thing I think that we could do just to approach this at the beginning is, think about the term entrepreneur. You know, I looked up a whole bunch of different definitions of it, and the main things I could pull out, that was common across all of them were a particular attitude toward risk, adventure, and ability to see an idea, and materialize it, and operationalize it, and the ability to organize things to make the idea happen, but you came up with a really good way to approach this, and there are some similarities and differences, so let's go through some of the similarities. So you said to identify a problem. Could you tell us a lot about more, about what that involves, being an entrepreneur, identifying a problem?

Jonathan Smith: Yeah, so like, we take the case of Whisper Wave, and how we ended up in the middle east. It was fascinating to just put things on Google, and see what would come back. So instead of deciding where we were going to go, we let the search engine tell us where we were going to go. And ultimately what we figured out was that our product, the product that is this floating security barrier, was most attractive in the middle east. And for a couple reasons. They had high value critical infrastructure. They had the high risk of terroristic threat, and they were willing to protect it. And so we allowed the market to decide as opposed to determining, we thought we were going to-you got a, I can't remember even what it's called at this point, the Department of Homeland Security, we got a Safety Act designation for the product. I went and worked on that. We were on the GSA schedule. We did a whole bunch of things in terms of government contracting that worked to some degree, but the vast majority of our work ended up being in the middle east, and we would have never known that. But for the fact that Google kind of directed us there.

Andrew Hammond: But let's talk about figuring out a solution. So how did you come up with this idea for Whisper Wave?

Jonathan Smith: My dad actually came up with the idea. So, I always say he was a product of the space race. So in the early 60s, they put a ton of money into kids who were math and science experts. So he's really an engineer, he happened to go to Yale and Harvard Business School and he came up with the idea. And I was the one who marketed it, and basically I said I did public affairs, marketing, business development, you know, tended to be more of the business guy. Even though he went to Harvard Business School, he preferred the engineering, he just let-leaned into that.

Andrew Hammond: And just bringing this back to the case officer, for a case officer, there's part of, okay, here's what I've been taught, these are potential types of people to look for, here are some potential vulnerabilities, but they may also come from left field, like you guys had to do, maybe someone that you never expected or it may be them that approaches you, so you have to kind of be able to pivot between both. So it seems like a nimbleness, or a fleet-footedness, something that's similar between both of them. Would you agree?

Jonathan Smith: I agree. I call it structured flexibility.

Andrew Hammond: Structured flexibility. Write that down for me.

Jonathan Smith: I have a structure, like I think it's going to work a certain way. We plan for the mission accordingly, like, as Mike Tyson says, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the nose [laughter]. I can't tell you about case officer work, but I would imagine, you walk in, you have a certain plan, and that may not be the way things go down. So from an entrepreneurial standpoint, we had a plan. We thought we were very clear who we were going to deal with. We're the Army Corps of Engineers, then the Department of Homeland Security, but the, I don't know, there was a different plan [laughs]. A pivot, that happens, so, I think you have to be open to being prepared. So structures like being prepared and going through your notes, sort of like I have notes sitting in my lap here, but the reality is, the flexibility is being flexible enough, and if I go back to the Black Swan concept of stay curious, I'm just going to get into conversation, and I'm going to stay curious, and the Black Swans will show up.

Andrew Hammond: I spoke to one case officer, and he was saying that sometimes you have to just force situations where interactions are going to take place, like you have a soccer game, or something where people come from different embassies, or from across the settee, and they play and that's a bit to meet people that you otherwise wouldn't. you have to get there and grow your own opportunities to some extent. You don't just sit there with an idea of here's what I'm going to do if an opportunity comes, you have to go out and harvest them, and not me take a lot of work in and a lot of energy.

Jonathan Smith: So, in entrepreneurship, we would do things like I can remember one of my clients wanted to meet with a professor up in Boston. He had no meeting with the professor. He got on a plane. He called the professor that morning and said can I take you for lunch? Do you happen to be free? I happen to be in Boston. He had no other agenda [laughter], but he wanted to talk about particular professor, and that's what he did. So I think that's pretty similar. Like, you're going to go make your own luck.

Andrew Hammond: And so I'm just thinking like so you go and make your own look, you're an entrepreneur, and for a case officer, they have to do the same, but then they are somewhere in the meadow, or they have to survive somehow with a more corporate type of entity, the CIA, has its rules, it has its procedures, it's embedded in the U.S. code, all of those types of thing, but then on the other hand, they have to be an entrepreneur, and they have some latitude, but they can't just do completely whatever they want. So I think that the case officers all occupy quite an interesting space, they're expected to go entrepreneurs, and grow their own luck, but they're also expected to, you know, tie into the Chase Morgans of the world, and the CIAs of the world.

Jonathan Smith: So one of the things, my advantages is, I did spend five years in corporate. So there's this huge opportunity to use asymmetric tactics if you're dealing with corporate. You can trip them up by understanding what the rules are that they have to play by, and therefore, make them work to your advantage as an entrepreneur.

Andrew Hammond: So it's almost like be an institutional insurgent or something like that.

Jonathan Smith: Like a friend surgency-

Andrew Hammond: Friend surgency [chuckling] okay. So tell us about the role that your network or your contacts played in being an entrepreneur, so for a case officer, this is important. You go to a foreign country, you're living in a capitol city, and you have to like, spot develop assess recruit before they can give you information. If you don't know anyone, and you don't meet anyone, it's pretty hard to do that, so you have to be able to almost like be the spider, and see where the web is, and all the different places where you can go to gather the information, tell what kind of role does the network, or the rolodex play in being an entrepreneur?

Jonathan Smith: So it is fundamentally one of the most important things that you have. So when I came back from Abu Dabi, which was like in 2013, and became an EOS implementer, I happened to live in D.C. at the time. I happened to have no network. No network in D.C., but I was an entrepreneur, I understood how the system worked, I was a good salesman, and I could run a good business, but the network was lacking. So my wife used to laugh at me that I used to go to for breakfast at the Tower Club, because D.C. is an interesting market where I didn't fit. I'm not in politics. I'm not in the intel community. I'm not in the military. I'm not in the-

Andrew Hammond: The museum world?

Jonathan Smith: The museum world [laughter], I should probably call that out first. But I'm not in museum world. I'm not in the-I'm not in diplomacy. So people didn't understand me. So I just started networking with people down here. That's where I ended up meeting Chris Voss, at just over breakfast, because I happened to be out there. We say in the entrepreneurial world, you are not going to sell something by sitting at home looking at a screen thinking about it. You have to go out and meet people. So, from there, I actually got adopted by some West Point guys, adopted by some West Point folks, Craig Cummings, and his crew down here, and they let me hang out with them. They were more entrepreneurial, and you know, today, I'm you know, sort of at the center of influence in New York City, I'm pretty focused there, and as we got two calls for business opportunities, so-

Andrew Hammond: What was your strategy, like you come here, just like a case officer goes to, I don't know, Jakarta, [inaudible 00:17:47] or if you don't know anybody at all, it sounds easy in theory, but like how-what was your strategy, or was it just a sort of where you took it one step at a time and developed it from there?

Jonathan Smith: I said it was like 240 coffees [laughter], I got nothing in return [laughter], it just was, it takes absolute grit to go figure it out, and I eventually started to figure out. People saw I was around, and then people started introducing me to other folks, and I had a couple of-got a couple of hits, and got lucky and got a couple of business opportunities and you know, I was always frustrated with the fact that when I needed help no one would help me here. But I had been in Abu Dabi, and we had a picture of ourselves, with Shiff Mohammad [assumed spelling], in Abu Dabi, so if there was ever a problem we just picked-take the picture out, it was kind of like a PBA card over there. So I was just going from there, and then also worked for Prince Knife in Saudi, so the most powerful people in the country to coming here, and I couldn't get like almost basic meetings. It was quite humbling. I wanted to quit many days. And I think my dad and I always had a core value of sheer will. We win because of sheer will. Just getting up every single day and going out and trying. Eventually it will work. [ Static Sounds, Typewriter Sounds ]

Andrew Hammond: This was another interesting touch point with case officers, so case officers, the batting averages, it's not by any manner or means caused them success. It's falling down, falling down, falling down, and then eventually being successful. So tell us a bit more about that, a bit more about dealing with the setbacks, dealing with the days where you feel like quitting, or just giving up, and you know, tell us a little bit more about that.

Jonathan Smith: I think you have to have a strong network, and a strong family support, and you have to accept the fact that it's very difficult. Because it looks easy when everyone out there is saying "I won this huge deal," and "Look at how great I am, I raised this money." And the reality is, there's lots of days of drudgery to get to that point, so it sort of ties into what you were describing with the case officer, having to deal with the bureaucracy, and then also being out in the world, trying to source assets, and it's very, very hard. It's very lonely [laughter], so that's why we tend to, you know, I belong to the Entrepreneur's Organization, and I'm affiliated, I don't belong, but I'm affiliated with the Young President's Organization, these are other people who have walked the entrepreneurial journey, who can share their experiences and understand what you're going through. That's helpful.

Andrew Hammond: Okay. So talk about that experience of having to be out on your own, so that can be some more to case officers as well. You're out there, you may not have a lot of support, it's very different from the army where there was a whole big logistical chain connected to you, you could literally be just winging it, and tell us more about that, being an entrepreneur.

Jonathan Smith: To me, I was born this way, so it's built into my DNA, I think. I still have a crew that I run with, but I prefer to run with a crew of ten folks, and a loose affiliation, like almost a federation of folks, that we rely on each other, because it's very lonely to be alone. Very difficult if not being with other folks who understand, so every year, I end up having an apprentice. And I have an apprentice because I'll end up with deals that I, for one reason or another don't fit for me, and I want someone I can send them to, and then I can help train them, and they hopefully teach me some new skill. So actually my first apprentice was Mark O'Donnell, who happens to be the CEO of EOS Worldwide, today. And my second apprentice was a 29-year-old kid who is buying his first house this week in Florida. So very proud of Ben. And I've had a number of other apprentices. I always have one, because then I have someone to talk to. I actually talk to my apprentice and vented prior to getting on this podcast today, because I needed someone to just calm me down and make sure that I hopefully do a good job.

Andrew Hammond: And could anybody listening to this podcast become an entrepreneur? Is it possible to make an entrepreneur, or are you born that way?

Jonathan Smith: No, I definitely think you can make an entrepreneur. I think anyone, again, I'll go back to my sheer will. Do you really want it? You asked me about D.C., when I lived here, and I think I applied to like 100 jobs when I came back. I think I got an offer to go to like somewhere run a man camp in Africa, and I was like, I'm not going to do-because we had done that in the middle east, and I didn't want to do that. And at some point I realized that like, I just wasn't employable. So I think it's possible for anyone. You have to have the net worth, and the staying power, to go through the ups and downs. You know, that's the biggest risk. Someone comes in with two weeks of cash, like that's not going to work. You should probably get a job. But if you have 12 months, or 18 months in cash, and you really want to do it, I think it's a possibility.

Andrew Hammond: And I think it's interesting, you spoke previously, and you mentioned the case officers, and entrepreneurs, they build credibility not on their pedigree, but based on their experience. You tell us a little bit more about that?

Jonathan Smith: Yeah, in general, like, so when the entrepreneurs are going to say we have something called Gestalt Protocol. So Gestalt Protocol says that if you're going to tell me something, I want you to speak from experience. Don't tell me this book says you should do it this way and therefore you should do it this way, because that just feels like someone is telling you. But if someone tells you, when I was starting and I hired an attorney here's the mistakes that I made. So like, in general, what I find is I have more respect for folks who have done it than for someone who has learned it in a book because it doesn't necessarily work that way. Like I said, structured flexibility. The book gives you the structure, but then you're going to have to go make decisions.

Andrew Hammond: I find it quite interesting, beyond entrepreneur, touching on this point, like to some extent, like people, or it seems to me, the people don't really care like what school you went to, or you know, if your family is blue-blooded, or you're the child of first generation immigrants, it's like, well I've done this deal, or I didn't do this deal, or I've had this experience personally, or I haven't. All that other stuff doesn't matter quite as much.

Jonathan Smith: Yeah, I have one client in particular who cannot read. He has dyslexia. He reads at like a fourth grade level. He has a reader, someone that goes with him and reads for him, because he's not capable of reading. He has a 50 million dollar business.

Andrew Hammond: Wow.

Jonathan Smith: And can run like a D11 bulldozer, like no one's business, and run all kinds of crazy equipment. So a lot of the entrepreneurs are neurodiverse, and having the degree doesn't mean that you have the skills to actually make the business work.

Andrew Hammond: Mm-hm, and this is also the same with case officers, right? If you're great at recruiting people or spotting or running agents, then you know, some extent no one really cares where you went to school or what your pedigree is, the pedigree is what you've actually achieved and done in your career.

Jonathan Smith: Hundred percent, like when you say don't tell me, show me.

Andrew Hammond: I think the importance of listening and just truly trying to understand someone else is really important for case officers, is this also the case for entrepreneurs?

Jonathan Smith: I think it's important to just understand humans. Like, if people like you, they're six times more likely to want to work with you. Right? Or make a deal with you. So to the extent that you listen, everyone is starving to be listened to. So I often play with the tactical empathy skills in all sorts of different venues. I did it once, and I happened to have my air pod on, and I walked into a store, and I was talking to my assistant, and she's like, even when you go to the UPS store, you talk about the guy, and you said, how long have you had this store? It looks beautiful, you haven't had it that long, but you know, you guys look like you're really making it, and he's like, the guy wouldn't stop telling me about his store. So I think it's almost a way of life, it's like, you know, to the extent that you can listen and stay curious, you'll get more out of life.

Andrew Hammond: And for the Black Swan Group, the listening and tactical empathy and hostage negotiations, can you, like what's the importance of listening within that company, Black Swan Group, or within the work that you do with them? There's been a hostage negotiator, it's not about just, okay, talk, for example, I'm being playful, but it's not just okay keep talking terrorist, and then as soon as there is a gap, I'm going to like interject and tell you what I think and you know, we play that game, that most people play every day with at least one person, where you know, neither of them are really listening to each other, you just wait for a gap, and then jumping in, and spouting whatever that you have in your head, they do that in turn, but you can't really do that if you're a hostage negotiator, or if you want to engage in tactical empathy, I'm assuming?

Jonathan Smith: Yeah, so hundred percent. You cannot-we call that listening to rebut. So like, I liken that to someone having their hand raised while you're speaking, as soon as you're done, they jump in, and start responding, not on what you just talked about, what whatever their agenda is. That never feels good. It's kind of like when you tell someone you feel sick, and they're like, oh, when I was sick last time [laughter], like no one ever wants to hear that. No one cares. And so like, my, I have a partner in Black Swan Group also, Troy Smith. And Troy actually, he says people don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care. And so one of the-so I am not a hostage negotiator by training. I am a entrepreneur, who happened to learn these skills, and I always think that's important. I am an entrepreneur who was trained as a coach with the Black Swan Group, but from a commercial perspective. And to the extent that people feel heard, they will be more likely to engage with you. And we actually talk about the levels of listening, and these five levels of listening. So listening for the gist is just listening literally like you're on your iPhone, and you're saying "Yep, I heard you, I heard you," so that's one. Listening to rebut, that really annoying "Oh yeah, yeah, when I was sick, this is how I felt." Listening for logic is listening for the logic of what that other person is saying, so instead of listening to respond, you're listening for why they logically said what they said. So that's level three. Level four is listening for emotion. So can you listen and hear what emotion is behind what they're saying? And then the fifth is actually listening for their point of view. So that means you don't have to agree with their point of view, you have to acknowledge their point of view. So and what we say, you cannot stand listening for point of view, or listening for emotion for that long. The best you'll do is listen for logic, and then you, I say, I liken it to doing yoga, and occasionally you get into like a meditative state, but not every time, so the ideas, you know, how do you just continue to focus on your breath? Just continue to focus on the logic of what that person is saying.

Andrew Hammond: And I think it's quite interesting, this other part, where case officers and entrepreneurs, if you're lying, or exaggerating your successes and so forth, you've mentioned that as an entrepreneur, you very quickly get found out. Tell us a little bit more about that phenomenon.

Jonathan Smith: Well, like everything in life, you know, people want to deal with people who are, who are credible, and again, tactical empathy. So I have this-since I work with these 30 teams, sometimes I'll ask someone, so you know, this is what you're going to do for the quarter, this is your goal that you're going to set? And they go well yeah, I think I can get that done. And I say-we call that a counterfeit yes. So I want to susus out what the counterfeit yeses are. And I'll literally label them. I'll say "that sounds like a counterfeit yes." So I'm actually telling them they're lying to their face. And the reality is, they don't feel like I'm telling them they're lying. They're like, yeah, the reality is I have these 15 things to do, I'm just not going to get that thing done. So, in my experience, there's a fake it until you make it in entrepreneurship, to a point. Like, you can tell a good story, but you've got to be able to back that story up. And sometimes we have to just put it out there, just you know, to sort of set a target. And you're not sure how you're going to get to the target, but the target can't be so crazy that you're never going to achieve it, or you don't have the relationships you're claiming to have, you don't have the ability to finance the deal the way that, you know, I understand that you are optimistic in thinking about getting it done. But you know, definitely we know the people who are out there, who are posers. [ Static Sounds ] [ Typing Sounds ]

Andrew Hammond: On the podcast before, we've had case officers on before, and they've said that, you know, one type of case officer as the larger than life person, the person who can go into a room, everybody wants to be their friend, everybody wants to be in their company, they're like, there's an energy that emanates from them, very charming and so forth. And then there's another type of case officer that is the gray person, the person who one sees, the person who flies under the radar. So if you want to compare it to fictional people, it's James Bond versus George Smiley from the le Carré novels and people have said that there's room within case officers for both. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Does that same thing apply to entrepreneurs, where the specific personality types that work, or is there really more actually entrepreneurs tend to be "x" or tend to be "y."

Jonathan Smith: More like case officers. Sometimes I'm like that person is larger than life, I can't believe what they just accomplished. I don't know how they did it, but they did it. So who am I to, you know, who am I to decide? My cousin is a cardiothoracic surgeon, and he said he stopped trying to decide who was going to live and who was going to die. Because he was wrong most of the time [laughter], so I don't try to figure out who is going to make it, and who is not going to make it. We just, you know, there are some of those larger than life people who accomplish things, and you're like, I don't know how that person just did that, but they are just-have a unique capability. So we just admire them.

Andrew Hammond: Are there any personality types that wouldn't make for a good entrepreneur?

Jonathan Smith: People tend to be just too risk averse, you know, who are unwilling to take chances. Who are unwilling to get out of the house, and say, but I can't tell you what the outcome is going to be, you know, people who want a very prescriptive process. We'd rather have them later on, when we want a project that is more based on like a system, we call it a system of record. So like a system of record, so like here is exactly how it works every single time.

Andrew Hammond: And your interest in this particular field, so you're on an advisory board that the Spy Museum, tell us more about where this interest comes from?

Jonathan Smith: Well, my grandfather was in the military and I don't know all exactly his history, but he was very active in World War Two, so I sort of grew up with him, and he told me all his stories, so I was always, you know fascinated with international business or international intrigue. I ended up becoming an entrepreneur, but still, you know, believe in having supporting our country and I've done actually a bunch of work with the State Department, we actually called it global entrepreneurship program. So, when undersecretary Clinton had a program to use entrepreneurship as a form of state craft, so we met all sorts of interesting people and the search engine optimization sent me to Dubai. And so I got-I have an international perspective. I like the International Spy Museum, and somehow, I got lucky enough to get the call when another implementer, it wasn't a good fit, another U.S. implementer, and got to meet the team, and I think I met the team in like February 2020, just before COVID happened, and rode the COVID wave with the team. And-

Andrew Hammond: And you mentioned an international perspective. Can you tell us a little bit more about the joint civilian orientation conference, like what did that involve? How does one get selected? Why did you sign up for it, and so forth?

Jonathan Smith: So Joint Civilian Orientation Conference, JCOC, is the Secretary of Defense's only outreach program. So they only have one. And I just happened to get lucky to get selected. So the Army sponsored me. Actually I got wait-listed, and three days before I was supposed to be in Doja, and they said, "can you come?" and I said of course I can come. There is a whole selection board that you go through to actually get selected. There's forty people that were on my-I was in JCOC 84, four people who were in the program, we traveled for a week with Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. We flew out of Andrews Air Force Base on a C17 and spent the week traveling the country and we were a different member of the military each day. So we went to Nellis Air Force Base in Vegas, with the Air Force. We went to San Diego, and with the Navy then we went with the Marine Corps, then we went up to Joint Base Lewis-McChord with the Army, and then we were with the Coast Guard, and then we came back here and went to Walter Reed. So it was just like an incredible experience, with leaders from all over the country. You don't say no if you get asked.

Andrew Hammond: And just let listeners know more about the purpose of this, so that people like yourself get their heads around the whole defense enterprise?

Jonathan Smith: Yeah, so you have to not be involved in a Defense Enterprise. You basically go and the intent is to introduce you to the Department of Defense, and the hope is that you will be an ally in your community with the Department of Defense. So it's a public affairs mission, and they had folks from all walks of life on the trip, including like the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange.

Andrew Hammond: Oh really?

Jonathan Smith: Someone from Disney, and someone from Nike, and lots of not-for-profits, etc.

Andrew Hammond: And is this similar to the FBI Citizen's Academy? I know you went to that too.

Jonathan Smith: The Citizen's Academy is similar in nature. It's a public affairs mission. That was ten weeks. I did it with the New York Field Office.

Andrew Hammond: And the FBI Citizen's Academy, tell us more about what that entails.

Jonathan Smith: Oh, it was Fantastic. I went every week, and we were briefed for three hours by FBI agents. About different squads, or different divisions of the FBI and how it worked. We got to actually shoot at the FBI range, so we got to shoot at Thompson.

Andrew Hammond: Oh really?

Jonathan Smith: It was one of the things we got to shoot, and we got to see what the SWAT kits looked like, and we learned about you know, all the different missions of the FBI, and it was fantastic.

Andrew Hammond: Did you also touch on counter-intelligence?

Jonathan Smith: Oh yeah, that was like three weeks on counter intelligence or something, they were all different. Different groups that we met with. And so like each night, one of the nights I remember, there was like the healthcare fraud group, and then the art guy came in one week, and you know, counter-intelligence came a bunch of different times. They actually talked about the illegals. The illegals.

Andrew Hammond: Yeah. Yeah.

Jonathan Smith: They talked about what they did with that, and the agents who had been involved in that came in and spoke to us. It was fascinating.

Andrew Hammond: You know, the whole purpose of gathering all of this intelligence for American government, for example, so that policy-makers, people like the President, the Secretary of State, can make decisions. As an entrepreneur, like, I guess the information inputs that you're getting are very important, and you know, let's just call it intelligence, or information, where are you getting it from? It could be word of mouth. It could be reading publications, and you have to be sensitized to risk an opportunity, and all of these other things that policy-makers have to think about, albeit the inputs are slightly different. Tell me a little bit more about that, as an entrepreneur, how you think about information, and how you think about "intelligence" if you want to put it like that?

Jonathan Smith: So, one of the things that I have is I have, so it was Chris Voss, and we were talking, and he-he said, oh, I told him like before I go into a meeting, I get a briefing from my assistant. And one of my assistants failed to give me some bad information. She's like, well, I thought you didn't want to know that. I'm like, yeah, I want to know that person is getting sued, and they're under investigation, that would probably be helpful [laughter]. So what we did was we created a process from that. I actually have a calendar that is a target brief. I have a target briefing calendar, so prior to a meeting, I could sit in someone's, like in the entryway, and I have a target brief on whoever I'm going to meet.

Andrew Hammond: Okay.

Jonathan Smith: So, I literally have a calendar. So, I think that's really important. One of the really interesting things about a company is I want to know what glass door looks like. Because glass door is going to tell me what the culture looks like in that organization. The CEO is going to tell me it's great. I want to see you-glass door of 2.2, or is it glass door of 4.5? It's going to tell me a lot. And then, actually, when I meet with the team, I can actually see it. So, does the intel match up with the energy in the room? So I use it all the time.

Andrew Hammond: It's interesting you say the motto was stay curious, because one of the main things that has come out with the case officers that I've interviewed previously, as curiosity, that's almost uniformly one of the main traits that they bring up, like a case officer has to be curious because of the range of targets, that you may try to recruit, are the whole mixture of human types of human beings, types of interests, types of background. I spoke to one case officer who said that he wanted to recruit someone who was really interested in opera, so they went out and had no interest in it whatsoever previously [laughing] and taught themselves all about the history of opera, and Russian opera, like, just so that they can talk the talk. So a common theme is curiosity, or someone else said you have to be an inch deep, but 20 miles wide, you have to be interested in everything. You have to be able to potentially drill deep on any subject under the sun, so that's another interesting crossover of what we've been discussing. Curiosity for entrepreneurs, and for case officers.

Jonathan Smith: Yeah, and one of the things I find is if I can speak their language, like if I can speak opera, or whatever the language is, I often switch languages. Not literally languages, but I switch and I'll speak from a medical CEO's perspective, if we're with a medical company versus a financial services CEO perspective, and I will change the language that I use. Because I've learned it over time. And people when you use their language, they tend to lean in. They're like, oh, you understand me. So it's fascinating. And you know, it makes a lot of sense. People don't want to know how much you know, until they know how much you care. Back to that point. So-

Andrew Hammond: Okay. Well, thanks ever so much. It has been a pleasure to speak to you Jonathan.

Jonathan Smith: Thank you.

Andrew Hammond: Thanks. [ Music ] [ Static Sounds ] [ Music ] Thanks for listening to this episode of SpyCast. Please follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next week on SpyCast.

Unidentified Person: It is the largest combatant command in the unified command structure of the United States.

Andrew Hammond: If you have feedback, you can reach us by email at spycast.spymuseum.org, or on X at into SpyCast. If you go to our page at the CyberWire.com/podcasts /SpyCast, you can find links to further resources, detailed show notes, and full transcripts. I'm your host, Andrew Hammond, and my podcast content partner is Erin Dietrich. The rest of the team involved in the show is Mike Mincey, Memphis Vaughan III, Emily Kiletto, Emily Renz, Afur Anoqua [phonetic spelling], Ariel Samuel, Elliott Peltzman, Tré Hester, and Jen Eiben. This show is brought to you from the home of the world's preeminent collection of intelligence and espionage-related artifacts, the International Spy Museum. [ Music ]