Welcome to the Hidden Gin, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron

Mankey.

Some of you may know that I am an attorney by profession and spent most of my legal career

doing immigration and civil rights work.

What you may not know is that my legal work eventually led to working briefly for about

six years in national security policy.

Now, that's another story to tell, but suffice it to say that work connected me to experts

across the field.

Military and defense folks, policy wonks in government and think tanks, homeland security

officials, diplomats, social media executives, researchers, academics, community and social

workers, let's just say it was a broad reaching and deeply interesting work.

Now many of these connections were virtual, which is pretty common these days, so I was

excited at one point to be invited to present at a conference where I would meet some

of these folks in person, finally.

And one of those people I was looking forward to meeting was a national security expert

and former intelligence operative from another country, someone who was pretty well respected

in industry circles.

By all indications online, he was a fairly serious guy with some intense experience in the

field, and he was often called upon to testify in high level hearings on national security

matters.

I have been following him online for a few years, and vice versa.

And I was pleased when we met to find him to be pretty laid back and friendly.

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