Mike Baker (Ex-CIA Spy): China Is Preparing & We're Not Paying Attention! Here's What Happens If They Takeover! 5 Spy Tricks You Can Use To Get What You Want!

Mike Baker (0:00)

China is at war with the West already. We just don't see it. And when I look at a map like this, I see a lot of problems. Here is one issue. Over there, Putin is threatening nuclear weapons. And then this regime has been engaged in assassination plots on the President-elect. And then over here, this is looming, right? It's a major issue.

Steven Bartlett (0:18)

Who's the real enemy of the West, in your opinion?

Mike Baker (0:20)

I've talked to a number of experts, and their take is, it's that.

Steven Bartlett (0:24)

How do you think this ends?

SPEAKER_3 (0:29)

Ex-CIA officer Mike Baker spent decades in the field mastering the spy skills you need to achieve success in business and everyday life.

Steven Bartlett (0:36)

And offers unique insights into the looming geopolitical threats that's facing the West. When you left the CIA, you start being a spy for companies. Why?

Mike Baker (0:45)

Because in its core, the CIA's responsibility is to get intelligence. Because without that, you cannot make these smart strategic decisions. And if you can sell the idea to somebody, that they should commit treason on their country and betray their family to gather intelligence and protect US national security interests, then that's an incredible skill to use in selling and business. And there's a lot of ways you can do this. And people are capable of it more so than they realize. But there's a lot of similarities between what I used to do in the spy world and what you do in business. There's targeting, manipulation, psychology of how people think, identifying weaknesses and leverage, how to close the deal. The most important thing I took away was what I referred to as getting off the ax. And that's how you get companies to stay with you for 20 years.

Steven Bartlett (1:26)

Let's go through all of them.

Mike Baker (1:28)

First of all, you start with them.

Steven Bartlett (1:37)

Who are you? And give me a couple of sentences on the journey of your career and what it's exposed you to.

Mike Baker (1:47)

I'm a dude who's been very fortunate in life. I started with the CIA at an early age, not necessarily expecting to start with the CIA and the operations directorate.

Steven Bartlett (1:59)

And you joined the CIA at 22 years old?

Mike Baker (2:02)

Yeah, basically, early 80s, beginning of the 80s.

Steven Bartlett (2:06)

How do you sort of encapsulate your mission into a couple of sentences during that time?

Mike Baker (2:11)

This is going to sound really weird. To do whatever I was instructed to do to further the mission objectives. So and what I mean by that is that's not just me or another officer or somebody else in there. That's their job. So the CIA doesn't set priorities. It doesn't set tasking, right? That's done by the White House and those in the White House, in the government at the time, the administration at the time, for setting the priorities, tasking. And that's in part obviously guided by intelligence provided by the intelligence community. So it's a symbiotic relationship. But the tasking comes into the agency and the agency says fine, get on with it. And that could be a collection of intelligence on a particular subject. So you could be talking about, we need to know what Putin's plans and intentions are. We need to know what's the breakout time for the Iranian regime to actually reach weapons capability for the nuclear program, whatever the tasking is. It comes into the agency, the agency then, fine, let's get busy with it. And there's other elements of the intel community, all working very hard to accomplish that same thing. So it could be NSA is also working on that. It could be military intelligence is also working on that.

There's a lot of moving parts, but my part was at the agency.

Steven Bartlett (3:39)

So did you have to spend a lot of time overseas? And if so, if you are overseas, what were you doing overseas?

Mike Baker (3:44)

Yeah, I spent my entire time.

I never had what we would call a headquarters tour. So I spent all my time overseas traveling.

Steven Bartlett (3:53)

What was your day to day like? Because it's just a world so far away from anything that I know. So I'm like, you spend all that time in the CIA overseas. When you wake up in the morning, are you undercover? If you're in a foreign country, presumably they don't know that you're part of the CIA.

Mike Baker (4:08)

Well, no, we have different types of operations and different types of things. I mean, so you could end up living in a foreign country for two or three years, right? And you've got a home there and you're working there. And other times, it could be a short one-off operation where you're just dropping in to do something in particular, maybe to meet an asset or whatever it might be.