Overview
#038 – In this next episode, I was joined by Randall Stickley, a Lead Intelligence-Targeting Analyst supporting federal law enforcement and national security clients. His prior work includes intelligence specialist and supervisory roles addressing drug crises, corporate threats, and national security issues, as well as supporting Fusion Centers. Randy is also an instructor and active member of multiple professional organizations, which you’ll hear more about in our conversation. And he holds a dual Bachelor of Arts in National Security and Political Science from Fairmont State University, along with advanced certifications.
You’ll find this episode fascinating to hear about Randy’s career path, his perspective on what it takes to be a successful analyst, the lessons he’s learned from being an instructor, and much more, including the book he recently published.
Find Randy’s recent book here: Rethinking Thought: A Practitioner’s Guide to Critical Thinking in Intelligence Analysis by Randall Stickley and Akshata Kumavat
Highlights from This Episode
- Early Mentorship Shapes Career Trajectory – Randall’s exposure to law and intelligence mentors in high school and college (e.g., Dr. Noone, Dave A.) played a pivotal role in guiding his path into intelligence work.
- Targeting Analysis Is Universal – Regardless of title, all analysts are engaged in some form of “targeting”—digging into data to find actionable insights.
- Open Source Intelligence Is Underappreciated but Powerful – Randall’s foundational work in OSINT taught him how to build intelligence from publicly available information, supporting real-world operations.
- AI Is Not a Replacement for Human Analysts – AI tools are useful for ideation and automation but flawed databases and hallucinations limit their reliability; human pattern recognition and ethical judgment remain irreplaceable.
- Writing Is a Core Intelligence Skill – Analysts must learn to communicate complex ideas clearly and concisely. Many new analysts struggle due to atrophying writing skills in the digital age.
- Reading with Purpose vs. Casual Reading – Randall distinguishes between casual reading and “close reading” to derive insight, patterns, and subtext—a critical skill for any analyst.
- Public Speaking and Communication Are Crucial – Citing Toastmasters and his own training experience, Randall emphasizes the need for intelligence professionals to confidently brief and communicate.
- Bias Awareness Is Essential – Randall’s book and IALEIA presentation focus on overcoming cognitive biases—he cites research identifying over 180 human biases that analysts must confront.
- Career Paths in Intel Are Diverse and Non-Linear – Many professionals move between public, private, and academic roles; some eventually pivot to completely new careers based on values or lifestyle.
- Write What You’re Passionate About – Whether publishing a book or presenting at a conference, genuine passion for a topic will be visible and impact your credibility and influence.
Memorable Quotes:
- “Be a communicator, not just a desk-bound analyst.”
A call to action for analysts to build professional networks and collaborate across silos. - “You have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.”
Said while describing the unpredictable and sometimes morally gray nature of intelligence and security work. - “All analysts have that targeting component within their duties.”
A reframing of the “targeting” role as something integral, not sinister, to intelligence work. - “Feedback isn’t about red ink—it’s about growth.”
Said while reflecting on the painful but necessary process of learning analytic writing.
RESOURCES MENTIONED
- 📚 Books:
- Rethinking Thoughts: A Practitioner’s Guide to Critical Thinking and Intelligence Analysis – by Randall and Akshata Kumavat
- On Killing – by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman
- Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy – by Mark Lowenthal
- Vigilance Is Not Enough – by Mark Lowenthal
- Intelligence Analysis: A Target-Centric Approach – by Robert M. Clark
- Deception Point – by Dan Brown
- The Anatomy of Story – by John Truby
- 📚 Training Courses / Professional Orgs / Certifications:
- IALEIA (International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts) Certification
- DHS Analytic Writing Course
- Bureau (FBI) Analytic Writing Course
- CIA Kent School
- Department of Homeland Security – Intelligence & Analysis training programs
- International Association of Crime Analysts (IACA) events
- Toastmasters International
- 👤 People:
- Dr. Greg Noone – Former Navy JAG and professor at Fairmont State University
- Akshata Kumavat – Co-author of Rethinking Thought: A Practitioner’s Guide to Critical Thinking in Intelligence Analysis
- Mark Lowenthal – Noted intelligence author
- Robert Clark – Author of Target-Centric Approach
- Lt. Col. Dave Grossman – Author and speaker on psychology of killing
Use CONTROL + F to search the transcript below if you want to learn more!
Transcript from this episode
*Note: this transcript was generated using automated software, and may not be a perfect transcription. But I hope you find it useful.
Travis: Welcome to the Security Student Podcast...
Randall: Hey, thank you very much, Travis. Yeah, it's been a little bit of a communication slog, but that's the nature of folks in our profession. We have things that happen, family lives that pop up, and gosh darn it, people can't seem to keep their stuff together, and they have to do something squirrely and keep us busy. So I'm just happy we finally got here, man. Absolutely.
Travis: So I think one good place to start would be, could you share a bit about how you got interested in security and what's led you to where you are today?
Randall: Yeah, I've told this story many times before. I've spoken at conferences, I used to teach intelligence work to a wide array of folks, but I always go back to, I remember in high school, I grew up in West Virginia, I know some folks say, oh, the accent's not there, and then other folks are looking for my banjo and making sure I have shoes on. But when I was in school, you had to basically figure out what your career path was. I think in the eighth grade, we had to figure that out, and it's like, I don't know what music I like today, let alone what I'm going to do for the next 40, 50 years.
So we had to do this entire project starting then, and you follow that whole trajectory, culminating in what was called a senior project, your senior year of high school, where you basically had to shadow somebody who was in the field that you were wanting to go into. I wanted to be a lawyer. I wasn't sure what kind of lawyer. I thought prosecutor at one point, but I played sports with some guys, and one of the dads was a lawyer.
I had a great opportunity, and a lot of cool experiences following that gentleman around. But I did my report and everything, and as I'm going into college, I thought, okay, political science degree, political science degree, then go to law, but political science degree first off. And I remember very distinctly, I went to a football game at my alma mater because small town in West Virginia, Europe, fledgling freshman in college, of course, you're going to go to your alma mater as a football game on Friday night. Bumped into that same dad, and he and I got to talking, and I said, I don't know, I'm going to get my poly side degree. And he said, I have a political science degree, you can do one of two things with that. All right, so yeah, what is that? He said, go to law school or drive a cab.
Or pour coffee. Yeah, so that kind of scared 18 year old Randy, and I happened to have a campus visitation day at one of my picks to go to college, which happened to be in my backyard. It was a Fairmont State University, a lot of great experiences that campus. But during my campus visitation, I, you know, had I knew some folks that were going through the poly side program, I caught up with them. But then they had this national security and intelligence table for a program.
It's one of the few undergraduate programs of the type on the coast for that particular area. And it caught my attention. I'm a history guy, you know, I, I could tell people I have early on set 70 year old man because I love World War Two history and military history.
So that caught my attention as just a rudimentary, you know, hey, what is this? And the gentleman that was the head of the program, he was, he's now retired, but at the time he was an active Navy Jag. His name was Dr. Greg Noon, great, great human being one of the smartest people I've ever met.
And I remember the first words out of his mouth was, you play football, oh, you love rugby. And I was like, has nothing to do with this degree program. But he eventually gave me some insight on like how marrying those two degree programs works in your favor because they're interdisciplinary, they're holistic, and they prepare you for jobs in the US government.
Now at that point, I hadn't really considered things outside of the big kind of US government roles, you know, your political roles, your politicians, your lobbyists, maybe some staffers and, you know, a few jobs in the secret squirrel agencies. But I got to understanding and talking with him. And then I met another one of the smartest human beings I've ever met, his name was Dave Abrazino.
I learned a lot from that gentleman about what a career in intelligence, security, advisory, anything of the like, where basically you take in information, you lend your experiences, your insights from an objective standpoint, and offer solutions, recommendations, or any kind of actionable insight that's going to help that client, that customer, that stakeholder, whomever it may be, achieve a goal. Now, where that kind of lines up with me, I've always been a kind of a snoopy person. I don't like people that are, drawn amongers by any sense of the word. But I do like knowing a little bit about everything. Call it a naturally inquisitive mind, call it being snoopy.
I just see it as a professional tool from my perspective. So I would say going back into college is when that started. And I had a lot of great experiences learning from, you know, Dr. Noon, Dave, and a whole another cast of, you know, very talented professors who had experience either in federal US law enforcement, national security, and an intelligence community type initiatives, international studies, and my global security, there were a lot of these folks that came to a little perceivably po-nong town in northern West Virginia. But that campus had a lot of caliber and a lot of power behind it, where anytime I go talk about it, I'm still a big cheerleader for Fremont State.
I always tell folks, it's pretty much one of the unofficial farm schools for, you know, the Beltway in terms of hiring folks that have the skill sets and the knowledge to go work for a lot of these intelligence security agencies.
Travis: Wow. Yeah, I was completely unaware of that. I know there's a handful of programs out there, but I was very unaware of that one in particular.
Randall: Yeah, I mean, Mercyhurst up in PA has a really great program. I've, you know, been in contact with folks that have been instructors or directors of that program, very fine folks, you know, very talented and capable.
But it's just, you know, you expect to hear that like, oh, if you want to study this, you know, and I'm all about defeating Stigmos and by no means is this going to be my hillbilly allergy moment. Definitely West Virginia. But many people have this misperception that West Virginia is, like I said, full of pumpkins, full of all the random jokes you may have.
And I know every West Virginian joke, so anybody that's in the listener core, if you have it in your head, I've heard it. But I wanted to defeat that perception from my own mindset because a lot of my family, they were not of the bumpkin status. They were very educated people, but a lot of them had to work in industries that, you know, was like, Hey, we need to make money, or we need to do this for our families. So the fact that I was one of the folks from quite honestly either side of my, you know, biological lineage that went and studied something that, you know, I actually had an appetite for and this happenstance had to be good at. It was rewarding. And it kind of helped me realize, you know what, I don't have to go anywhere to be good at myself.
You know, I think the expression was I can do bad all by myself. So that that was a big plus that I didn't have to go to Mercyhurst, the Citadel. I think there's a couple on the West Coast. I know there's one in Utah, but that one's relatively new. So there are a lot of those and most of them are definitely in the Masters or even kind of doctoral program realm.
Travis: Yeah. And that's something I've kind of seen too. I think you don't necessarily, I think this is true of the security industry in general, but I don't think you necessarily need any type of crazy pedigree from any type of college. It really just comes down to the individual person, like you said, having that natural sense of curiosity and continual learning and an interest in their work. And then eventually running into someone like your friend, he mentioned, who's a bit of a mentor who could kind of guide you on the right path. At least that's really been my experience in the security industry. It's more about the person and then finding someone who can point out the path to you that is so hard to find because security is such a niche, unique field.
Randall: You hit it right on the head. I'm a big proponent of building those networks and building, I hate saying building liaisons. I feel like that's such a sanitized word whenever you're talking about building up somebody or helping someone expand their skills.
I see it more as mentorship and camaraderie. Dave wasn't just one of my first professors. He was one of my first professional bosses.
He ran a small program where you had, I think at the time it was only 10 of us, that were what he called the best and brightest from any of the interdisciplinary programs at the college. We were given the opportunity to work in the realm of open source intelligence, which is anything for you or any of your listeners that aren't too aware of what it is. Any of that information that isn't necessarily obfuscated by foreign governments or hidden behind some kind of password type paywall. We would use that information to support law enforcement, national security clients.
I was very fortunate in my earliest stages of my career to have a portfolio that I knew nothing about. I remember in the interview, Dave said something along the lines of, we have two teams here, the home team, the away team, which one of you more inclined to? Well, the away team. That's what I thought the cool stuff happened was always international. He's like, okay, let's talk about where internationally. I said Syria at that point in time. That's when the Obama administration was taking a hard line against the Assad administration doing the red line in the sand, so to speak, speech. I thought, yeah, I'll work on Syria. That'll be fun. First week on the job. Randy, yes, sir.
Mid-East North Africa, emphasis on North Africa. I went, what? I knew nothing about it.
I expressed my concerns because I was a green baby analyst. I had no idea. I knew of North Africa. I knew the history, but it was like, what the hell is even going on there right now? All of the optics were on what's happening in Syria, Iraq, and Iraq.
Iran, and to an extent at that point, North Korea. Dave worked with me. Dave gave me a lot of harsh truths and realities when it came to my work. Intelligence or security work, as you know, if you have to write something, isn't prose and isn't going to be Shakespearean works of art. It's very bottom line of run. It's very nitty-gritty.
I've always fancied myself a writer, however, learning to write from the intelligence and security standpoint. That was like going into a woodchipper sometimes. Dave was very open about it. He said, your first few papers are going to come back with more red ink than black. That was a harsh truth. That was a real gut punch, but I'll tell you, I wouldn't have traded anything like that in the world because I learned a lot from that man, and I still hold a lot of those lessons and a lot of the mentoring and candor of how I conduct myself professionally to what he taught us all from that period. I had the opportunity to work for him for three years, so it was a good long while to learn at the feet of the master, so to speak.
Travis: And feedback is such an important part, of course, in intelligence because you're serving those stakeholders, but then it's a skill that we all need. Working as a consultant today when I get feedback from my boss or our senior consultants or a client, yeah, there's definitely an art to learning to accept feedback and incorporate it the right way. Randy, I was also curious, I wanted to ask, so in your role today as a lead targeting analyst, could you tell us at least generally what types of projects a targeting analyst gets to work on?
Randall: So, of course, there's, and I want to emphasize this, the T word in my title does have a negative perception depending on which agency or even which sector you're talking to. Talking from US federal law enforcement and that's pretty much their bread and butter, right? It's focused on those larger scale actors that pose some type of threat, but in all sense of the word, I would argue all analysts have that targeting component within their duties, because it's all about digging into data and finding pertinent nuggets of information that reveals a little bit more about what that specific subject or target, and that could be a target entity, could be a target person, an asset, or even an address in some cases. But whenever we talk about what that looks like on a day to day, there's a lot of things, obviously just the nature of the field that I'm in currently, it's a no-no to talk about it outside of the house, but whenever you work for multi-agency collaboratives, there's this whole thing, and I use this term a whole lot, you know, there's a fusion process. I mean, I know there's fusion centers from the Homeland Security standpoint, I'm very closely affiliated with that side of the house, but then you have from the federal side and kind of the NatSex side, it's where can I use these MOUs, these memorandums of understanding or these memorandums of agreement to find, like I used a little bit earlier, those pertinent nuggets about a certain target or a certain subject in their comings and goblings that will hopefully paint this holistic picture of the illicit activity that they were perpetrating, whether that's narcotics smuggling, gun running, human trafficking or human smuggling, or even something as simple as some type of money fraud.
Those are the kinds of things that we work on, you know, from a day to day, and that involves fusing information from seemingly disparate entities or agencies, ones that you may look at paper and go, those two wouldn't work together, but they may capture a data point that agency acts hadn't considered in some type of collection or official database management that was built, let's say 15 years ago. So it's always important to lean back on those MOUs, MOUs, or better yet, go talk to somebody. That's another big proponent. I wouldn't even say from the lead perspective, I would say just from an analyst's perspective as a whole, but specifically targetters, be a good communicator, be the person that isn't afraid to go knock on a door, to go hit up a cubicle or catch somebody in the hallway. I want to be a little bit closer, you know, professional friends, just in hallways where I notice a name tag and I'm like, hey, I was on an email chain with you, I wanted to pick your brain about something.
That's, you know, it's not just sitting at your desk being the introverted analyst who's going to, you know, look at the shoelaces on their feet, you know, for 18 hours. You want to be the person that actually can go that, go to a person, make the right call, and have that extensive roll of decks. I know for some people, the roll of decks is an antiquated thing, but that's that fancy little communication ring that used to sit on people's desks. I know it's a little weird, a 31-year-old saying that, but I have been ingrained with the fact that you have to have a thick professional roll of decks.
Travis: Absolutely true. Yeah, and you mentioned one important thing too about just being a better communicator. And for me, one of my latest projects has been, at least for the last year, has been getting involved in my local Toastmasters group, which for me, there is nothing more dreadful than that one day a week after work where I have to go to this meeting and then likely somehow give some type of prepared speech or some informal or some informal talk in front of the group. It's the most dreadful thing, but I have noticed that it's helping me significantly, at least when it comes to just noticing different quirks that I might have in my talking, in my body language, in my movements as I'm talking with groups of people. And for me, it's been something that's been incredibly helpful. And I think too, one of my colleagues made a point when I was talking to them a couple months ago, that the more that AI and machines have a greater role in the work that we do, those human skills are going to become increasingly more important. So I think that's just such an important area for all of us in security.
Randall: So I was going to ask you, I used to train people and to an extent I still do, but one of my hats that I wore was I was the kind of lead intelligence trainer for an organization that taught folks basic, analytic tradecraft kind of conduct for an analyst in the law enforcement of the Homeland Security sphere. So I'm wondering, one of the big things I used to preach to people was having that candid admission of shortcomings.
That's one of Sherman Kent's big principles of ethics and intelligence. What have you found was your biggest like, heck, sure, your hiccup whenever you were doing your Toastmasters? I know mine. I'm happy to share it candidly, but I'm curious, Travis, have you found something from point of introspect?
Travis: I have a few. One is some of my filler words, for example, unfortunately, I have to go through this process of editing all of my podcasts also. So I have this dreaded feeling in my stomach every time I hear those filler words.
So I do have these filler words, while I'll say, yeah, or I'll say, and then at least when I'm out presenting in front of people, I think one of my bigger challenges, when I'm in front of those small groups, I tend to talk faster than I should. And that it does two things. One, I think it takes away from my message makes me look a little more anxious, but it also influences the speed of my hand motions and my body language. So for me, the thing that I have to focus on is slowing down the cadence of my voice. And also that you could of course use that to add emphasis to the different topics that you're talking about. But what that does for me, it also slows down my gestures and I think just gives me the appearance of being more confident because I'm not too quickly going through my ideas. So that's really one of my big things that I've been focusing on.
Randall: No, that's fantastic, man. I mean, when I used to train these folks, some of them would either completely clam up and I would never laugh or chide or admonish anybody before, because we're all human. We all react to those types of things in a certain way and you hit on a really critical concept there that, yeah, there is automation. Yeah, there is stuff to supplement how we do our processes on the back end. But there is an innately human side of security, of intelligence that, yeah, it involves you putting yourself out there and getting up and doing a brief or going into a meeting and being a representative of your shopper, of your agency.
You can't just cower and hide behind the door of the cube that long. So I used to make folks really uncomfortable with it, specifically if we taught in person because I'm Mr. I Hold Eye Contact and that was my thing.
One of the things I used to freak myself out on was staring people dead in the eye. Now, I look like one of those animatronics from early Disney rides. I look like I'm just reading my hand.
I'm like a hall of presidents animatronic, really. I get up there and I'm eyeballing everybody in the room because, one, it stops me from looking at that one single person. Two, it gives that illusion that I'm not just talking to, let's say, this one person from Northcom in the room. I'm talking to that person from Northcom, this person from JTTF, this person from DEA and just so on and so forth.
So it gives a little bit more holistic and like, hey, it's an inclusive tight meeting. But then, and you said something perfectly where those filler words, mine is the uh. And it's a double-edged sword for me because I tell folks the uh, if you sparingly is a great point, like myself, I don't like to talk with notes. I do a lot of extemporaneous talking, which again, shout out to Paramount State for teaching me that word. But it's all about speaking from experience, speaking from knowledge. You know, you're coming right off the top of the head. So a lot of my points and my notes when I go to talk, yeah, they're well formed in the kind of cerebral processes.
But then as they come out, everything kind of gets bunched up in the back of my glottal. So I have to text myself and go, uh, now a lot of folks see that as being unprepared. But that, you know, a short little second, even a fraction of a second of me using that uh, is a good way to springboard myself forward. Now if I start using them too erroneously, I catch myself and I gotta take a beat.
So those, those are about two biggest ones. I mean, I'm a, I'm a hand gesture folk, you know, focused person myself. That's always been me. If you tell me to tell a story with my hands tied behind my back, I'm a mute.
Travis: And that's something for me to work on too. I feel like, you know, it's so funny when you go to, when you do something like Marine Corps Bootcamp, it's like, if you talk with your hands, you are going to have someone screaming in your face. So it's funny going, like having that experience a million years ago, and then now, and then now realizing, oh, if you don't use gestures, it actually looks like you're less confident, like you don't know what you're talking about, like you're completely lost.
So for me, it's interesting to have these, you know, such extreme experiences. And Randy, I wanted to ask you, I won't, I won't linger on it for too long, but how do you see AI tools affecting the work that Intel analysts do?
Randall: This is a really big issue right now, specifically with a lot of, and I'm speaking from not only the realms that I've been in, but also the discipline of open source, because that was my bread and butter starting out in this profession. I see it as a great supplement in some cases, but there's a lot of agencies, and this could be a misperception on part of leadership, not really talking with their folks in tech. But there is a huge issue with, you know, connecting normal AI models or learning language models into databases.
I know for many of us that are casual users and our personal lines, like I play around with chat, GPT. I like, I like to try and stump it every now and then. And I found actually at the last conference that if you say please and thank you to it, you'll break it. There's an article that came out, I don't know if it was a Business Insider article, but one of my colleagues from the Delaware Valley Intel Center basically said, yeah, if you give it like a polite command and then say please and thank you, you'll break the algorithm. So good to know that's how we break the terminators. Just being polite.
Yeah, just like thanks, Arnie. But no, I don't see it becoming such a widespread tool because ultimately, data is as good as the entry. There is no such thing as a database with 100% clarity and free of impurities.
I've come to find that out. You know, the expression for databases is the same as intelligence. You put in good, you get out good, you put in crap, well, you're going to get the same. So if you have a learning language model or an AI that's going to start extracting things from databases, and it may have been written poorly, or there may have been a lapse in somewhere in the code that helps kind of learn and ingests a lot of the data points from that database that, oh, by the way, may have a skewed data point in it. Entire process is skewed, and that's where you have to have that human element. Yes, we humans are flawed.
Don't get me wrong. I literally wrote a book with a colleague of mine, and I speak at conferences all the time about, you know, the dangers of us as analysts because we're full of biases, we're full of impulsion, we're full of our own kind of experiences that sway how we perceive things. However, we're really good at pattern recognition. We're really good at seeing things that aren't like the others. There's a notion in, I know the Gen Zers and Gen Alpha's like to use the term the uncanny valley, which is that, you know, it's not just the thing that, you know, the Gen Zs thing is cool to say. It's actually something that was learned over thousands of years of biological evolution for humans that we would see things that weren't necessarily of, you know, the soup de jour, so to speak, in terms of what our gene pool looked like. It was a defense mechanism. And over the years, we've galvanized that to basic pattern recognition where this doesn't necessarily look right.
Why is that not over here when this should be here? And I think that's ultimately going to be our saving grace as more agencies develop their own AI, you know, augmented tools or their own language models, whenever they talk about building these interfaces. So I'm cautiously optimistic for some folks, but you can never remove that human element from the intelligence or even the security apparatus in my humble professional opinion.
Travis: And I totally agree, at least in all of my experimenting with chat GPT, with GROC, a lot of the times I'll just use it for ideation, or maybe I'll use it just out of curiosity to check something that I'm researching. For example, maybe I'm trying to do thread assessment research about this type of attack against transportation centers in the United States, and maybe I'll go to chat GPT and ask it, hey, give me a list of these recent incidents. And you always get something that's completely erroneous where I'll see something that's like, you know what, I've never heard of this incident.
And then you go and research it, and you go to find, oh, this incident never happened. Chat GPT made up some completely erroneous thing. And then same, even if you just upload, even if you just upload a big PDF and ask a questions, many times you'll get some erroneous response. That's not, that's not, that didn't come from inductive reasoning of the machine reading your PDF. So there's just so many mistakes that it can make. And there's so much work that you have to do to verify the information that you're getting. I just completely agree. The human side of spotting those trends and being able to think analytically, it's just very hard to replace that.
Randall: Now, I will tell you, it's fascinating from, and outside of what I do in my nine to five, I do a lot of casual research, I do a lot of my own writings, I publish on my LinkedIn just to kind of keep folks abreast. I know there's a bunch of folks that think they're the next Aristotle when it comes to security intelligence work on LinkedIn. But I like to think I offer a little different perspective. And one of the things that I do kind of toy around with on chat GPT is checking it's like web scraping ability. You know, I can, usually the normal chat GPT prompt or the write for me prompt will pull some really interesting results.
If you give it a general, I don't want to give something too vague, but say you give it predictions or forecasting of economic trends within the next five years in Bangladesh, it's going to pull different news articles. And again, that leads up to you to start refining those. And I know some entities and organizations that are working on tools that do just that, but they take it a step further and it produces a product based on that, which is great. But again, going back to the skills needed for an intelligence professional or a security professional, the ability to write, I'm finding more and more that if you have folks that either A, don't have the hunch and the kind of predisposition to write, or B, they don't go through any of the big analytic writing courses either from the private sector or the public sector, they're behind the ball because writing skills, I'm, and this is again, not from a bullet call, but it's just purely observation that writing skills are beginning to atrophy within folks that are making their way into this field. So that's something that we really need to keep an eye on because words matter. We have to say what we mean, mean what we say, specifically when we're dealing with things such as intelligence, such as security, you know, for security's sake, it could be product, proprietary tech, or from an executive protection standpoint, somebody's livelihood on the line.
From an intelligence world and intelligence standpoint from government, you know, you could be talking about intelligence estimates that contribute to, let's say, capabilities of large scale war on the European continent. I mean, there's a lot of gravitas behind our words, and it's important that we have the effective tools and folks that know how to use them.
Travis: And when I was first entering security, I had no idea how important writing skills were going to be, because from where I started in the security industry, from being a reservist MP in the Marine Corps to doing residential security, at least from like way back when. Yeah, I had no idea that when I eventually come to work as a consultant that 95% of my time is going to be spent writing, preparing presentations, providing technical reviews and feedback to other consultants, to designers.
So I was curious, Randy, how did you go about developing those writing skills? Where do you, where do you think you really got the most bang for your buck? Was it in training courses that you were doing? Was it in the political science program? Where do you think it was?
Randall: It was more on the job. I remember, you know, having the kind of rare opportunity to start in the Intel field when you're still going through your undergrad, you kind of grow with it and it grows with you. Many folks, you know, think they're great writers and they go through a DHS, analytic writing course, a bureau, analytic writing course, maybe you're somebody that just got on with the agency and you go through the Kent School and there's various schools for this type of discipline. But if you're somebody who's learning on the job and you yourself are still learning as an adult how to conduct yourself in that professional arena, I like to think that myself and many of my colleagues that I worked with, you know, kind of had an unfair advantage where it galvanized with us, it grew with us. So I would often say if you have the ability to learn on the job and, you know, have supervisors, bosses, directors, you know, some agencies far too large to have a director sit with you. But if you worked in a small shop like mine, having your director, who is your supervisor, sit there and give you the ins and outs on something to help you grow as a professional, that's 100% better than going through any writing course.
This is coming from a guy that used to teach an analytic writing course. So, and I try to impart the same thing to folks that joined the team. You know, we have a new analyst here recently who they're a fantastic analyst, came with some experience prior to joining the shop, but they looked at me and went, you know, why are you so patient with this?
I'm like, because the more you learn, you know, that mistakes are okay, that we're going to have a misstep here and there, perfectly fine. That's why there's a review process. And I'm not somebody who just changes your paper, sends it out. That beats the process.
They've learned nothing, they've gained nothing. So, I want to make sure that folks on the team are able to spot where they may have made a misstep or a mistake before, and then they can start to move on from that and correct it on their own, therefore making them not only a more effective writer, but a more effective member of the team.
Travis: I could also see that too, just looking at my personal experience. First, I feel like you had the ideal scenario there, because you're being paid to learn and you're being mentored by those people who have been doing it for a decade plus or multiple decades. And I feel like another thing that's worked well for me when it comes to becoming a better writer, partly just forcing myself to write more blogs on the WordPress, on LinkedIn, and some of these other informal settings. I feel like that forces you to really be more precise in your writing.
And you also have to at least just think about something like social media. You do have to apply a lot of those same principles that you might be using in the writing that you're writing for your stakeholders, where you're putting your bottom line upfront, where you're supporting it with evidence, where you're writing it in a logical flow that's going to make sense, where you're trying to appeal and get a specific point across. So for me, I felt like doing some of these small things, like informally writing blogs on different security topics, of course, reading and seeing how other writers out there, whether it's something technical in intelligence that's identifying trends, or whether it's something that's less technical, that's just going to give you a new way to think about the way that you structure your writing or to give you more creative ideas. So I feel like there's just so many factors out there that could help us become better writers.
Randall: And you nailed it on the head. I think many folks have lost the art to read. Reading, you know, casually is great. I actually picked up a book here recently, and so far it's a really great read.
Highly recommended. It's Mark Lowenthal's newest book, Vigilance is Not Enough. Really good, actually drawing a quote from, I think he was first director of national intelligence, Negra Ponte, who basically said, yeah, the idea of, you know, vigilance and intelligence is not enough for overall national security.
So it's a really good read, overall cap of US national security up through the 2020s. But there's a difference between casual reading and reading with a purpose. Have you ever been told that distinction?
No, but I'd like to hear more. So casual reading, you're turning off the brain, you're going to start visualizing stuff. And again, I'm reading nonfiction because I'm always trying to learn something new. So some might argue I am reading with a purpose, but I turn my brain off to kind of visualize, you know, just kind of candid, you know, okay, what am I missing here from this piece of historical data or what exactly, what am I misperceiving or, you know, not seeing with the clearest picture? And I kind of sit back and, you know, visualize that. But reading with a purpose, sometimes folks call that close reading, you may have heard that term, but you're not just reading the content of face value.
You're kind of putting your brain into overdrive on that one. You're reading it with the assumption that there's a message to this. What's the subtext? What am I missing?
What's a potential avenue moving forward that if this book or this passage doesn't answer it, how am I going to find it? There's a lot of work that we did even when I taught folks how to close read, like, you know, tear apart this. It was a poorly written product. I won't say which agency put it out there, but it was a poorly written bulletin. And we had folks close read it. And a lot of folks would say, we really couldn't find anything like pertinent to pull from a close reading.
And that was kind of the lesson is that, yeah, congratulations, this is how you can't find good information from close reading from a cracked product. You know, words matter. You know, grammar matters.
I don't know if that's a shocker to many folks. But, you know, English is our language and we have to make it work. So, no, there's two different mindsets there. And I'm a big proponent of you have to know how to casually read, not listen to an audiobook, not listen to podcasts after podcasts, which I will admit I am guilty of someday. So just turning your brain off and getting back into some of that casual reading. Is going to set some great foundations for you being able to start looking at things from a deeper subtext.
And I'll tell you, I think what ruins that Travis. I'm always somebody kind of looking for the root cause of something so we can ultimately defeat it. When you were in middle or high school, did you have to do like heightened analysis of like literary work in your English classes?
Travis: I'm confident that I was assigned something like this. But to say that I read the book and produced any type of noteworthy homework assignment, that would be an extreme exaggeration. I was a terrible student until I realized that basically until I realized that nonfiction existed.
By being assigned all these fiction books in school, I had zero interest until I started reading nonfiction and then I just started reading a thousand times more. So I might be a bad example since I wasn't a very good student in high school.
Randall: Well, well, no, I mean, that's totally fine, man. I didn't like reading things that were, I was told you have to read this and you're going to love it. I'm like, if I have another piece of Hemingway grown at me.
Travis: Yeah, if I have to read Jane Eyre or some other bizarre book that a 16 year old male in California might not be interested in.
Randall: The one that gets me is, and this is just a total tangent, when I was going into high school, I think it was my going into my sophomore year, take that back. My mom, who again, very well educated, but went into a workforce where she was like, I didn't need to go to college. She was like, we had to read old, we had not old man to see. Lord of the Flies. She said, you had to read Lord of the Flies sophomore year. You're going to read Lord of the Flies. I'm like, but I don't want to read it.
But no, you're reading it. And I was reading like Angels and Demons. I was reading Dan Brown books that really bothered my attention. So I was like, I'm reading. No, you're reading Lord of the Flies. English class came and went that year. Not a lick of Lord of the Flies. It wasn't until my senior year, someone said, we're getting into Lord of the Flies. I went, are you kidding me? And I had to read into what was the allegory to the boy's descent through the nine layers of Dante Alperi's Divine. I'm like, oh, good God. Someone shoot me. And again, that's, yeah, that's close reading, but that's close reading gone way too far. Because it's all ornamental. It's not operational, if that makes sense.
Travis: Yeah, I can completely understand that. And then I feel like one thing that I thought that I'm finding useful, at least today, I could think about a book that I'm reading right now. Right now I'm reading a book called The Anatomy of Story by John Truby, which, okay, how does this relate to security at all? But it's really fascinating learning about all of the intricate aspects that go into establishing these stories, like the ones you're talking about, of all the different character plots, of having a moral argument of your protagonist and your antagonist and the archetypes that go into it. And I feel like reading something that's completely outside of our field, I find myself writing a lot of notes in the margins about, hey, this would be a good idea for a podcast. Or maybe I could, maybe I could take some of these things such as being able to write a one sentence premise about a speech that I'm going to give in Toastmasters or about some idea that I have to present in front of my colleagues. So I feel like when it comes to reading some of these things that are outside of our field, at least for me, it's been really useful in just generating ideas for the work that I find myself doing day to day.
Randall: No, like, you know, one of the things is if you read a book and you didn't take anything from it, you didn't take anything from it. It's okay. All right. But there's, you know, my wife loves to give me all kinds of gripe and I actually turned away from my desk to look. I know I'm staring at 60 books on my bookshelf just in my office.
And there's hundreds more strewn around our house. She's like, we got a downsize to then in writing. I mean, you know, I'm not only in book senses, you know, working on books, but, you know, working on papers, working on working groups and stations. I use every one of these as a point of reference. You know, it's like, I can't get rid of that one. It's like I'm a crazy cat lady. Except my crazy cats are books. Right.
Travis: I could relate. My garage has, I have these two big bins that are just filled with books because I don't know, maybe I want to go back and read one of them. And periodically I will. I'll think, hey, this book had a really interesting diagram and I need to go back and find that. So yeah, I can completely relate. And I feel like that's a good transition to Randy. Could you share a bit about some books that have been influential to you?
Randall: So if we're going to talk, if we're going to talk nonfiction, one of my favorite reads that I will always go back to, I have a couple of nonfiction wise. There's one called deception point. That's Dan Brown. That's actually one of the ones that really got me to start thinking about ulterior motives and underpinnings of, you know, not necessarily thinking about what the message is and what is the message of the intention.
Because ultimately they're two different things in some cases. So that was one of the first ones. It's not necessarily one of his biggest hits because angels and demons, Da Vinci code, those, those kind of overshadowed everything else. The rope, that's a great one. I'm going to go old school, great Gatsby. It's just one of those hyper stylized books that you never think is going to translate well to film. In my humble opinion, it never has translated well to film because it's that casual reading.
You have such a hyper stylized view of what kind of madness 1920s America was combined with what a lot of these rich, uppity, yuck types living in that post World War One era. So, and then the third one is actually a Stephen King book. It's actually called 11 22 63. That is purely about a gentleman who finds a wormhole. It's Stephen King. So it's going to be a little off the wall.
But a wormhole in a restaurant that spits him out into the past and he comes up with the idea to change the future and he wants to stop JFK's assassination. Wow. That's why the title is 11 22 63. That's the date. Awkward shot JFK. Well, again, I'm not going to draw that one up. But you know, if you read the papers, it may be a little different. We don't know.
Travis: Yeah, that's a longer podcast.
Randall: I need to get my full head out for that one.
Travis: That's my next guest Oliver Stone.
Randall: But if we're talking like professional books and things that I would I reference all the time, one of the ones I used to have like an analyst reading list for folks when I taught just because they were like, you know, what are some good readings that we could expand our professional competencies with? I'm actually going to add vigilance is not enough to that list that, you know, I'm only a quarter way through the book, but anything that Mark Lowenthal writes, you know, really grasps my attention. Likewise, he had a book called intelligence from secrets to policy. I believe I have the eighth version. And he's on version 10 by now. Wow.
Okay. But it's a really good book about how information becomes intelligence and how that intelligence fuels, you know, the advisory process, the kind of client agency process and so many other facets that govern how we utilize information to generate those actionable insights. Intelligence analysis, a target-centric approach like, you know, Dr. Clark, another good one, talking about more of an alternative view of the intelligence process.
And then third one, final one is actually a bit of a curveball. It's actually a book called on killing. Oh, Grossman. Yeah.
That, that was recommended to me by my very first boss by Dave Averzino. I'll never forget it. I hadn't really hit too many grave topics in my subject matter yet. You know, my first shop, North Africa was my main bread and butter, but what's in North Africa, but Libya and what had just happened a year prior to me, except well, even a year, I'd say seven months before I took the job was what happened in Benghazi.
So that became my baby for three years. And, you know, Dave suggested to all of us that, you know, if you're not comfortable with something that you write, having a negative implication on somebody else, either from their, you know, term beyond the bars of a cell or something that's a little more chronic and fatal. It probably shouldn't be in this field. And he ended reading Grossman's book and I'm going to tell you something. You talk about something that it's not profound, but it shapes, you know, young 19, 20 year old me to be like, wow, there is that commitment to duty. There is that commitment to it's either us or them. And in terms of security, it may as well be them. It was hard read, good read, but hard read.
Travis: He's a very enthusiastic speaker too. I remember I saw him a while ago. I attended Gavin and Becker and Associates. They host, I think it's annually or bi-annually a threat assessment academy. And at least when I attended, he was one of the speakers, I think on like the final day of the course. And he's just incredibly enthusiastic and such a fantastic speaker.
I feel like I probably don't agree with everything he says about video games being someone that's probably played too many tens of thousands of hours on video games in my teens and early 20s. But he is a fantastic speaker. So for anyone out there that gets a chance to see him speaking live, I feel like there's a ton you could learn about, learn about, about enhancing your communication skills and being able to. I guess really project your enthusiasm and just bring the audience into the conversation. So I think he's an amazing speaker.
Randall: I've never heard him speak in person, but I would really love that opportunity because it's one that I always recommend to folks and it's stuck with me. I think it's probably in the 20, 13 onward. So definitely something if you guys can get your hands on it or like Travis said, fine, we're gross and maybe speaking. Definitely hear the guy. I mean, I'm even a fan boy and I want to hear him talk.
Travis: And I think that's a good transition, Randy. You recently wrote a book or published a book in the last year. Can you tell us about your book and maybe a little bit about what inspired you to write it? Yeah. Yeah.
Randall: I mean, one of the things that I'm really big on, I think, you know, you and your listeners can tell is I'm very much about like the stuff behind the scenes that makes up an analyst. I'm not about the tools, the flashy stuff, which again, as an analyst, the flashy stuff might be a new coffee mug or a new computer screen.
But I'm really into what makes the analyst tick. And at one point there was a colleague that reached out to me on LinkedIn. And again, another, I work with so many fantastic people and I've built such great relationships with a lot of these folks that, you know, it could be, I might be doing something right. I don't know.
I'm my own biggest critic. But this person reached out to me and said, Hey, you instructed my foundations of Intel training. I saw you just got a certification from the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts.
I want to know about the process. So I set up a call with this person. This person turned out to be someone who's one of my closest colleagues and partners just throughout the profession now. Her name is Akhjata Kuma Bhat.
She's a Hamilton County Sheriff's Office as an intelligence manager. And we got to talking beyond the certification. And she was like, you know, the conference, this would have been the 2023 conference.
She's, Hey, that's coming up. Do you think it would be worthwhile to put something in together? And I thought, you know, I'm kind of skittish about putting things in and working with folks that I don't really know that well. Because you always run the gambit of having personality clashes.
Somebody does more work in the other or styles are way off. So I was like, you know, let's do a tentative. Yes, I've never spoken at IALEA. I've spoken at, you know, the Fusion Center conferences, International Association of Crime Analysts and a few other state things, but never one at the international scale for that entity. We got in. We were able to present. We put together a presentation on, you know, reframing what we consider to be the most troublesome biases for analysts in this profession. There's, you know, not to get in the weeds, but in the 60s, a group of psychologists got together and postulated that with the human condition as it stands at that time, there were 180 known biases that human beings have to fight against. And this wasn't from an intelligence standpoint.
This was purely sociological that we had to override. And that's a lot. I mean, if you think about biases, I'm sure you can name probably 10, you know, just off your head. But many people weren't aware of that. So we had to come up with, okay, what are the big seven and we had a great presentation. We had really good turnout was an 800 person conference.
We had about 400 between the two presentations attend. Yeah, yeah, it was fantastic. Our first time doing it together, we had a great kind of stick and rapport whenever we presented together. And I remember one of the things that we did in the last one of the last nights, we were both there. We went to one of the hotel bars. It was in Vegas.
So of course the drink was ungodly expensive for no. We started talking and she was like, let's work on a paper. And you know, this is one of those things I have my notebook. I'm an ardent note taker. I'm jotting down oats and scribbling and we kept coming up with this caveat and then this and then this and then this.
And I start kind of reframing everything and I went, you know, screw the paper idea. This is a book. And one of the big epitaphs that we carry with it, by the way, the books name itself is rethinking thoughts, a practitioner's guide to critical thinking and intelligence analysis. I know it has a very long kind of Wes Anderson kind of movie name, but you know, I'm a firm proponent of, you know, titles of intelligence products and intelligence works have kind of a verbal contract with the reader.
And we very much wanted that verbal contract to go along with everyone that purchased the book. But our big epitaph was in this field, you have to read, you know, seven, eight books that teach you how to think. And a K and I would argue that we all have the skills to think. We all have the analytic mindset.
You know, biologically speaking, yeah, how a sapien translates to the idea of thinking man, clever man, innovative man, depending on what Latin translation you use. So why do we, you know, have to teach people through seven, eight different publications exactly what that is? So we break things down to, and this is a case, you know, biggest thing is a pragmatic level. You know, I'm much more the theory guy. I'm much more the, you know, what makes the sauce good type guy. A K, you know, not only is she an Intel manager as well, but she's in a former capacity. She was a litigator in Bombay. Yeah, you know, I said that.
I used to think I was the smartest one in the room, but now when you're next to a lawyer. So we've done that. We've had some great success. We actually won an award at this year's IALEA for service based on the content, you know, and kind of composition of the book. We're really proud of that.
It's kind of a big badge of honor for she and I. Nice. Congratulations. Yeah, thanks, bud.
Appreciate it. We didn't do it for the adaboy or the adagirl. We did it because it was a value.
It was a value added product that needed to be produced. So, you know, we got that and I know where she would, you know, want me to plug it here, but we already have a second one that's well underway. You know, throughout the process, she took a little bit of a creative hiatus because much congratulations to her.
Her and her husband had their first baby. Nice. Awesome.
Yeah, it's fantastic. She, in fact, the funny story about that is, you know, it was like as the book was getting published, like as we were hitting send to the folks that distributed with Amazon, she was, you know, she was ready to go. Like the baby was ready to be here. And I said, you do realize whenever that child's born, you better post a picture on LinkedIn of you holding that baby in a copy of our book. And she went, oh my God, that's a great idea. And I was like, no, no, no, don't do that. Don't do that.
Don't use the baby as promotional material. Of course we kid, but it's a great relationship. It's a great partnership. And I'm looking forward to getting the second book out the door. I think it's going to be something that aligns a lot with what we talked about here today, but still maintains that focus of critical thinking and analytic thought is the forefront, the bread and butter of everything that we're doing.
And I'm using the collective way here at Travis. I don't meet intelligence folks. I mean security analysts, crime analysts, administrative business, Intel, the whole gambit of folks that utilize grain matter processes as part of their bread and butter. It's definitely something that's going to be timely and useful from that perspective, especially with the rising tide of things like AI, the persistent use of open source, as well as, you know, false flag operations, counter Intel, misinformation, disinformation, and so forth.
Travis: I think that's such an interesting topic and so timely. I don't know if people out there are aware, but there's really a lack of trust in journalism and news media and institutions going back for about the last 20 years. So being able to think critically about the topics that you're discussing and trying to ideate on at work for the information that you're consuming for the AI tools that you might be using that are trained on the same potentially bias and unobjective news articles and other white papers. Yeah, being able to think critically is going is is and will continue to be just one of the most important skills out there.
Randall: Absolutely. And, you know, at the end of the day, technology comes technology goes it falls out of vogue, you know, very quickly. But what we do and how we analyze that data, it's not going anywhere. So definitely something that everyone should have a kind of forkbot on or to be cheeky here. They should definitely rethink their thought process.
Travis: And when it comes to the writing process, how did you all go about structuring your ideas about staying on task for writing such a book? Like, I imagine this probably took over a year, at least, if not a couple years.
Randall: Yeah, no, it's year and a half, year and a half. And she and I have such a good, you know, text communication, phone calls, emails, where it was, hey, I've just done this. Can you take a look at this? And then she'd bounce back, hey, great, but I want you to take a look at this. And one of us have a master copy where everything would be put in a, you know, master manuscript that would be sent to the editors and all that business. The biggest challenge for me was one, trying to separate the time that I was writing to get up and walk away from the computer, because again, in a very computer centric profession, I think it's important to get away from the angry glowing cube that sits on your desk. So, trying to find that time to get up and, you know, still have your nine to five in mind, but then, hey, what's my wife doing?
Hey, what's our precocious pit bull doing? You know, can we go for a walk? I still got to go to the gym. I'm a little bit of a gym rat, so, you know, got to make sure we go to that. So there was a lot of fine tuning there, but then in the middle of all this, we decided to move.
Travis: That's fun. Yeah. Yeah.
Randall: So moving from, and it wasn't a huge move. It was, you know, West Virginia to Virginia, but it's still organizing everything and then getting stuff set back up. And then once you're done with all that, kind of taking a moment to breathe and then realize, crap, I still have that project I'm working on. But I wouldn't have traded it for anything. It was a great process. It was definitely something that she poured a lot of blood, sweat and tears into. I definitely poured some blood, sweat and tears. I'm also half ginger, so I think I gave up part of my soul as well. If you had one. Yeah. But, you know.
Travis: Oh, I was going to ask, Randy, when it comes to just the writing process in general, would you have any advice for others out there who are considering writing a technical book or a quasi technical book? Yeah.
Randall: Understand. Do your homework about what has been done before. I tried to and we strive to make sure that rethinking thought wasn't retreading ground that all the greats have done from low and fall to fewer to can't to, you know, Dr. Clark or anybody in between.
But it's important to recognize those folks as, hey, these tenements are here. But our big push was we're not talking about a highbrow psychological concepts. We're talking about down dirty, get your elbows, you know, roll your sleeves up to your elbows and get into the muck and mire of exactly what makes you as a person tick. You don't need 18 pages of prose to explain one concept. So that's that's something I would highly recommend folks to do is do your homework, do your due diligence and also make sure it's something that you're passionate about. You know, if you're going to write something, if you're, and I know it's not for anybody here, but if you're somebody who's definitely into writing Louis Lamour style Westerns, and then all of a sudden someone says, hey, let's write a Jane Austen style love story in the Sierra, you are not going to like that process.
I'm here to tell you those are two different styles of writing different, you know, sets of content. So be sure you have a passion about it. And even if it's not a burning passion, just something that grasps your interest, because ultimately you're going to be tired, especially if you have a job, you have kids or you have other responsibilities. You're going to be tired, you're like, I'll put it off till tomorrow. I'll put it off till tomorrow.
You need something that's going to bring you back and go, I thought about this the other day, I'm going to go add that. Some people say scheduling and putting deadlines on stuff I feel that put that makes it too much like an actual job. Rather than it being a passion project, if you're a professional writer and you depend on book sales, then absolutely, you know, come up with a schedule.
But if you're doing it like a K and I where, you know, we're doing this from a greater professional need across the industry, you know, make sure it's a passion project, have fun with it, make it at your own and try not to put too many parameters on the bad boy.
Travis: And you said one thing too, and I recently heard this theme come up in a book about professional communications and was that if you're not passionate about a topic, you really should not even try speaking about it, writing about it, presenting about it, because it's going to come out in, it's going to be visible in your writing if you're not passionate about it. If you're speaking about it, oh, then it's really going to come out in the way that you speak your body language. You have this visible enthusiasm when you're talking about a topic that you're sincerely passionate about like one where you're going to, yeah, I'm sure stay up and wait, stay up late or wake up many early mornings to write the book that you just completed. I feel like if you don't have that level of passion, it comes out in your writing, it comes out in your speaking, and it's not going to wake you up at 5am so that you could write for a couple hours before you start your day job.
Randall: Yeah, no, absolutely. And for me, it wasn't do it early in the morning. It was in this, this is partially my crossed the bear demon on my shoulder, however you want to look at it. But I try to do things toward the end of the day. Just while everything has kind of had a moment to rummage around this giant noggin, I have all my shoulders and, you know, have time to kind of marinate still or what have you. It gives me a little more time to be like, okay, that wasn't a great idea, but here's something from that. And it's kind of my own relation process.
Travis: That's interesting. And I think everyone has to learn that too. We have to learn what time of day are we able to do our best work when it comes to writing, and also how could we squeeze it into the rest of our life. So that could be a challenge in itself.
And Randy, I also had a question too. For others out there who are maybe they're a, maybe they're very junior in their career as an Intel analyst, or maybe they're exploring a potential career as an Intel analyst. What does the typical growth path look like for someone that's entering the Intel field?
Randall: So more often than not, it also depends on which agency or which part of this industry you go into. Many folks, you know, if you go in through one of the big federal agencies, you're probably going to go through one of their analytic writing schools or something that's going to teach you how to think like their brand of analysts.
That's the only way I can really articulate that. So I said it earlier, you go to CIA, if you go to, you go to the Kent School, if you go to the CIA, they have their own, you know, analytic writing school. The Bureau, you go to Quantico, DHS, you go to one of their various DHS-INA trainings. So there's a whole litany of folks that will teach you from their agency or their industry's perspective. But one of the things I will always tell folks whenever they join this field is the notion of get comfortable with being uncomfortable. I mean, you said, you know, you made an allusion to you being in the core at one point, you know, that's very part and parcel to you. You know, having a bunch of the, you know, DI's come and fire hose your renew just for stepping a toe off kilter.
Travis: Yeah, I could very, I could very visibly remember someone using that exact phrase when I was at MCT at Camp Hamilton. Yeah, one of our instructors said, if you learn anything here, make it be being comfortable, being uncomfortable. And I've never forgot that phrase since.
Randall: And you know, that's, that's very part and parcel to Intel too, because we're not always going to have portfolios or subject matter or situations that we feel are necessarily comfy and cozy. Some of this stuff that we work in and in security too. I mean, I'm not just going to speak from the Intel perspective.
I was in a security operations center as an Intel analyst in a private shop one time and I lived that life. And there were some things that we had to do again, completely legal, but from a morality standpoint, you know, it wasn't necessarily comforting. But again, that's when you have to think back on your ethics. That's when you have to think back on maybe some of your Dave Grossman lessons and really understand that this is part of the job. This is part of the mission. And if you're to be an effective member of that team, yeah, you have to be able to think and provide value, but you have to have that mission oriented mindset. Otherwise, you're kind of a hanging chat or a loose cannon that really adds no value and could provide a little internal damage from a morality standpoint.
Travis: And looking back to your studies in political science, if you had to give advice to future Intel analysts, what do you think is the right educational path? Does political science give you the critical thinking skills? Are there better types of programs that you think are out there?
Randall: You know, I think the program is what you make it. Honestly, it's the same thing in your professional field. Like you can have a really, you know, cool, pristine, what you would perceive as your dream job.
And you may become disillusioned, bored and unhappy with it because it may not be all that was cracked up to be, but that's also because I didn't made it what it, you know, what it could be. A lot of this field, and you know, I even have this conversation with some colleagues last night, you know, there's a few of us that are in volunteer type roles, volunteer type leadership roles with the Fusion Center World, with IALEA, with a couple other different entities and organizations supporting, you know, the intelligence industry. And a lot of what I do, you know, outside of that, building those partnerships for not only my nine to five job, but it also helps build out those connections that makes, you know, the world and the industry a little more comfortable and pleasurable for those of us that are in it.
So, yeah, my job's really cool, but it's also the excuse me, the kind of extracurricular stuff that I love to do as well. I'm a big elbow rubber. I know one of my colleagues hates when I use that phrase. It just sounds filthy, but it's like, you know, dude, that's what you do.
You got to go rub some elbows. You got to shake some babies, kiss some hands and ultimately, you know, build those connections and build those networking packages that ultimately is going to help you have a more cohesive and transparent network. So that's a big part of this, especially as, you know, you go through college as well.
Build those friendships, build, you know, get involved with, you know, how was the founder and involved with Model UN at Fairmont State? And I'm going to tell you, I'm proud of them. They are still kicking ass and taking names. They still get ranked and it's all these bigger universities, you know, West Virginia University, Texas A &M, and then international schools from Switzerland, France, and even Germany send people. But there's little Fairmont State still getting distinguished delegation commendations, you know, left, right, and center. So get involved. Just get out there. It's what you make it. You know, you're the biggest proponent of your own happiness, in my opinion.
Travis: Those are some very good points. And I think when it comes to networking, another really big benefit too is just being able to see what training, what professional development, what professional development, what projects your peers are involved in, because I could think of so many times over the years where I've talked to people just learning about educational and professional development programs that are out there where you talk with someone. And you have the same conclusion. You realize, yeah, you know that one Intel project management course out there by this company actually didn't learn anything about project management.
And it was all the same Intel stuff from their basic Intel, you know, day and a half course. There's such a huge benefit in being able to get people's feedback on individual professional development paths and courses. Because I think it's easy for someone that's new to a field to fall for the very aesthetically appealing marketing campaign of a cool website of a personality out there. And I think it's just especially people out there who might be spending their GI bill money.
I feel like there's so many, there's so many ways that that money can be wasted. But by networking and by learning about other people's experience and pursuing professional development and people that are doing the work that could tell you, hey, this skill is so low on your list, you should not be spending money on this type of course. I felt like networking in that way is just so valuable in helping people that are new to a field directed their energy in the right direction. Yeah, absolutely.
Randall: And, you know, I don't want to belabor that point any further because I think it's much more impactful that you stated that the way you did. But then also just, you know, that you only have one shot at your professional career. You can reinvent things later in life.
I know plenty of folks that have left the security and intelligence field and became professors or, you know, one of my dearest friends in West Virginia, Dakota went from being a really good analyst in the first shop I worked in to he is effectively Andy Taylor back in our Andy Taylor.
Travis: Is it Andy Taylor? And what's the city Mayberry?
Randall: Yeah, that's it. Yeah, I was making sure I was right. I forgot my reference right now. He is literally like the star cop for Morgantown PD. It's like, you know what? I can't be mad at the guy because he's what he loves. He's making the most of it. Another good friend of mine. He was a really good analyst for Iran, which if you know anything about open source in Iran, those two words usually don't go together. But he was excellent at writing reports and drafting reports on, you know, crisis and, you know, different issues that came from Iran.
And now he's junior agent with the Bureau in Florida. You know, it's, it's just, you know, you may like it for a minute, but then you realize, I don't want to do that. And I'm actually waiting for me to have that moment in my life where I'm like, yeah, you know, I've been doing this for a while and it's like, you know what?
I think I'm going to go be an underwater basket weaver, you know, something great. I have a quarter life crisis or midlife crisis whenever either one of those come up.
Travis: Yeah. And there's something special about those people too, who have these interests that jump from one place to the other, because over time you eventually become almost like this, like a wannabe renaissance man where you have all of these unique interests that contribute to the work that you're doing in the moment.
So there's definitely an advantage to that as well. And let's see. Randy, were there any other topics that you wanted to discuss? Anything you had a burning desire to talk about or anything we might have skipped over?
Randall: You know, nothing quite comes to mind from my perspective. I just wanted to offer, you know, my sincerest thanks for taking the time to sit down, have a chat. This is, you know, I often talk with folks that have been in, you know, purely Intel roles like myself. So to have somebody that came from kind of a security consultancy background want to hear a little bit more about this and, you know, some of the areas where we can find those common points, build a bridge and, you know, share a few laps, I'm always willing and open to have those types of conversations. So I appreciate your time today, man.
Travis: Thank you. And for me, it's also very informative. I've talked to a couple other Intel analysts on the podcast, but for them it was just 100% private, not working with any outside groups. So I think this would be a very unique topic for people out there who are less familiar with your flavor of Intel and analysis.
So for me, also very useful. And then, of course, I think for many consultants out there too, it's important to think about these things because we often work with organizations who have security operation centers who are trying to be more proactive in their approach to security. So I feel like really the topic of Intel analysis, you almost can't get away from it no matter what types of organizations you're dealing with.
So I feel like it's always a relevant topic and really for all people in the security field. So Randy, I really appreciate you sharing your time with me today and I'll be sure to leave in our show notes links to the books that we discussed, of course, your book as well, and then also some of those professional organizations. So Randy, I really appreciate your time.
Randall: Yeah, no, I appreciate yours as well, buddy. I hope you have a great holiday weekend.
Travis: Thank you
