Trump's Cyber Czar on China's Infiltration of America - EP 41 Joshua Steinman

**Joshua Steinman** (0:00)
I have both been interrogated in training exercises, and I have been the interrogator, and those training exercises were meant to train you to be an interrogator. Then I also went to a school where, and people have talked about this a lot, the school's called SEER, Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape, S-E-R-E.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:20)
Okay.

**Joshua Steinman** (0:21)
And I've been to a SEER school where, you know, they sort of like drop, actually it was here, and I'm pretty sure it was here. It was definitely in California. It might have been like outside San Diego. I think it was outside San Diego.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:32)
Okay.

**Joshua Steinman** (0:33)
In like the mountains. And they like drop this off, and it's like a week later, you know, you like evade, and they capture you at some point. And if you, and I was like one of the people that managed to not get captured, and then like day three or whatever, they blow this enormous whistle. And they're like, okay, now you need to, you know, we're going to the next phase of the training program. So show up at this play, at this X, you know, within the next three hours, and we'll collect you, and then we'll move to the, like, pretend you were captured section.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:02)
Oh, well, I saw, if you evade it, I saw Mr. Beast is maybe like trying to do the Hunger Games.

**Joshua Steinman** (1:07)
Yeah, yeah, I saw that, yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:08)
You should get into that, man, you. I'll pass. And is it scary, or in the back of your head, you know it's like a drill?

**Joshua Steinman** (1:18)
It's both, right? Like this is part of the reason, I think, why they exhaust you in the training.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:24)
So you start to get a little loopy.

**Joshua Steinman** (1:26)
Yeah, basically. So I think, you know, the exhaustion confuses you as to like, is this real, is this not? And then there are definitely things that they do in the training that are meant to confuse you, right? And I probably shouldn't disclose more than that, but it's like they'll do things and you'll think like, oh, okay, everything's fine now, and then it's not. And so it's definitely like, there's, in some of the training programs I've been in, been at, there's like a game within the game. And then like at the most, at the highest end ones, there's a game within a game within a game.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:04)
Wow.

**Joshua Steinman** (2:04)
Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:05)
Can you say how you evaded capture or is that, is that the step?

**Joshua Steinman** (2:09)
Oh, I mean, you know, I think the, the meta answer is I followed the training and they teach you how to do it.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:20)
Okay.

**Joshua Steinman** (2:21)
And I had grown up spending a lot of time in the outdoors. I had been like a amateur mountaineer. I'd summited a few mountains in like Alaska and in Baja, California and a few other places where I'd done like, you know, pretty extensive outdoor kind of, you know, adventuring and done some navigation courses and been a, you know, scout. And a lot of it is like if you were to apply your mind to like, how do I escape, it would just all make sense. And a lot of it is just, you know, you can sort of see like, scouting programs are sort of backwards derived from like what you'd want out of a good operational member of the military. And so having had all those experiences, you'd be like, ah, I see why I was taught how to read a map at age seven.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:14)
Yeah, okay. I always, when I'm in a hotel, I always seem to get sucked in to watching Naked and Afraid, which I never watch at home, but only when I'm traveling and then I can't sleep and I'm just watching this marathon. And it's always people that are like, I'm an expert wilderness survivalist. And then every single episode is the same. It was like day one comes, it like rains, there's some bugs and then they're just starving for like 20 days and they can't catch anything. Yeah.

**Joshua Steinman** (3:41)
I mean, the reality is you just never want to be in those scenarios. That's it. You never want to be in those scenarios. And the training is designed to acknowledge that. And then the training is designed to say, okay, even if I'm in the worst scenario ever, I know how to get out. It's not gonna be pretty, it's not gonna be nice, it's not gonna be fun, but I know what it's like.