YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Bustamante

lines on the record: 255
first: 2022-08-08
most recent: 2022-08-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The president is the commander in chief for the military, but the executive, the president is also the executive for the entirety of the intelligence community. So he's the ultimate customer. If you look at it like a business, the customer, the person spending the money is the president and the director is the CEO. So if the director doesn't create what the president wants, there's going to be a new director. That's why the director of CIA is a presidential appointed position. Sometimes they're extremely qualified intelligence professionals. Sometimes they're just professional politicians or soldiers that could put into that seat because the president trusts them to do what he wants them to do. Another gaping area that causes problems, but that's still the way it is.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're 100% correct in how the agency and how officers and managers at the agency handle the PDB. There's a ton of competition. Everybody wants to be the first on the radar. Everybody wants to be on the first page. The thing that we're not baking into the equation is the president's interests. The president dictates what's on the first page of his PDB. And he will tell them, usually the day before, I want to see this on the first page tomorrow. Bring this to me in the beginning. I don't want to hear about what's happening in Mozambique. I don't really care about what's happening in Saudi Arabia. I want to see one, two, three. And regardless of whether or not those are the three biggest things in the world, the presidents, the executive, he's the one, he's the ultimate customer. So we do with what the customer says that has backfired in the past. If you haven't already started seeing how that could go wrong, that has backfired in the past, but that is essentially what happens when you serve in the executive branch. You serve the executive.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, it looks like the Expensive book report you can ever imagine. It's got its own binder, it's all very high end. It feels important. It looks important. It's not like a cheap trapper keeper. It's somewhere between, I would give it probably between 50 and 125 pages a day. It's produced every day around 2 o'clock in the morning by a dedicated group of analysts. And each page is essentially a short paragraph to a few paragraphs about a priority happening that affects national security from around the world. The president rarely gets to the entire briefing in a day. He relies on a briefer instead to prioritize what inside the briefing needs to be shared with the president. Because some days the PDB will get briefed in 10 minutes and some days it'll be briefed over the course of two hours. It depends on the president's schedule.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only way CIA can create, the PDB is by being the single source of all source intelligence from around the IC, the intelligence community, which are those 30-some odd and always changing organizations that are sponsored for intelligence operations.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little bit of both, to be honest. So, yes, there are absolutely lines, more so than the lines. There are lines that divide what our primary mission is. Everything's got to be prioritized. That's one of the benefits and the superpowers of the United States, is we prioritize everything. So different intelligence organizations are prioritized to collect certain types of intelligence. And then within the confines of how they collect, they're also given unique authorities, authorities are a term that's directed by the executive branch. Different agencies have different authorities to execute missions in different ways. FBI can't execute the same way CIA executes, and CIA can't execute the same way NGA executes. But then at the end, excuse me when it's all collected, then yes, CIA still acts as a final synthesizing repository to create what's known as the president's daily brief.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source