#136 Cliff Sims - White House Myths, Doomsday Bunkers and Holding the Nuclear Football

Summary

Shawn Ryan Show Episode #136: Cliff Sims - White House Myths, Doomsday Bunkers, and Holding the Nuclear Football

Release Date: October 3, 2024

Overview

In Episode #136 of the "Shawn Ryan Show," host Shawn Ryan engages in an in-depth conversation with Cliff Sims, former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Strategy and Communications and White House communications director under President Donald Trump. The episode delves into the inner workings of the White House, national security concerns, personal experiences within high-stakes government roles, and insights from Cliff Sims' memoir, "The Darkest the Darkness Has Not Overcome: Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power."

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1. Introduction and Personal Insights

Timestamp: [00:01] – [01:24]

The episode begins with brief promotional segments for Marc Jacobs fragrances and Amazon holiday deals. Shortly after, Shawn Ryan welcomes Cliff Sims to the show.

Notable Quote:

Cliff Sims: "Cliff Sims, welcome to the show." [01:01]

Key Points:

• Brief camaraderie between Shawn Ryan and Cliff Sims.
• Cliff shares a personal moment handling a memento from a friend involved in Operation Red Wings, highlighting the personal sacrifices made by service members.

Notable Quote:

Cliff Sims: "My best friend was on the recovery op on the Red Wings operation... he snapped off one round for every US Service member that died." [02:12]

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2. Cliff Sims' Background and Achievements

Timestamp: [03:08] – [06:44]

Cliff Sims provides an extensive introduction of his career, emphasizing his roles in national intelligence and the Trump administration. His accomplishments include managing communication strategies for significant legislative successes and authoring a New York Times bestseller memoir.

Notable Quote:

Cliff Sims: "Cliff Sims, you served as Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Strategy and Communications... You were previously Special Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Message Strategy under President Trump." [04:40]

Key Points:

• Cliff's multifaceted career spanning military service, intelligence, and entrepreneurship.
• His influence in shaping key policies and overseeing intelligence agencies.
• Recognition and endorsements from prominent figures like John Ratcliffe, J.D. Vance, and Donald Trump Jr.

---

3. National Security and China's Global Strategy

Timestamp: [07:34] – [15:26]

Cliff addresses a listener's question about countering China's efforts to dominate globally. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing China as an adversary rather than a competitor and discusses strategies to mitigate their influence through economic and national security measures.

Notable Quote:

Sean Ryan: "The first thing I think that we have to do from a principal standpoint is identify that fact... we have to be willing to say call China what they are, and that is an adversary." [07:37]

Key Points:

• China's ambitions in military, technological, and economic spheres.
• The necessity of decoupling from China and rebuilding America's industrial and military base.
• The challenges of implementing "Buy American" policies and fostering national consensus.

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4. Experiences within the White House Communications Team

Timestamp: [18:33] – [37:46]

Cliff discusses his role in the White House, highlighting the complexities of managing communications in an environment constrained by security protocols like "I can neither confirm nor deny." He shares anecdotes about working closely with President Trump, including overseeing speechwriting and video messaging.

Notable Quote:

Sean Ryan: "I was the one that would have to try to navigate that... sometimes there's still... lives could be at stake." [21:28]

Key Points:

• The extensive whitehall communications team and the challenges it posed.
• The origin of the phrase "I can neither confirm nor deny" tracing back to the Glomar Explorer incident.
• Cliff's firsthand experience managing sensitive communications under tight security.

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5. Personal Reflections and Character Development

Timestamp: [108:48] – [123:18]

Cliff reflects on how his time in the White House impacted his character, revealing the allure and potential corruption associated with power. He discusses the internal conflicts and rationalizations that led him to act in ways contrary to his personal values.

Notable Quote:

Sean Ryan: "I was much more susceptible to the allure of power than I thought." [116:25]

Key Points:

• The psychological impact of holding a position of power.
• The struggle between personal integrity and the temptations of political influence.
• The importance of a faith-based grounding to maintain personal values amidst political pressures.

---

6. The Lawsuit and Reconciliation with President Trump

Timestamp: [93:32] – [123:18]

Cliff narrates the circumstances leading to his lawsuit against President Trump after publishing his memoir. Initially sued for violating a non-disclosure agreement, Cliff countersued on First Amendment grounds. Eventually, misunderstandings were resolved, leading to a reconciliation where Trump invited him back to contribute to the administration.

Notable Quote:

Cliff Sims: "I did get sued by the President of the United States. It was not the most fun experience of my life..." [96:23]

Key Points:

• The intent behind his memoir to provide an honest insider's perspective.
• The legal conflict arising from perceived attacks in his book.
• The restoration of professional relations post-lawsuit and subsequent collaboration.

---

7. National Security Topics: Nuclear Football and Doomsday Bunkers

Timestamp: [77:44] – [93:32]

Cliff offers insights into high-stakes national security tools and protocols, such as the nuclear football and continuity of government plans. He describes the solemn responsibility and the tight timeframes involved in making critical decisions that could alter the course of history.

Notable Quote:

Sean Ryan: "The scariest thing that I've learned about it all is one researcher estimated that there may only be a 6 to 7 minute window in which the President would have to make a decision..." [78:24]

Key Points:

• The functionality and contents of the nuclear football, including verification processes.
• The existence and purpose of doomsday bunkers for government continuity.
• The psychological burden of making life-altering decisions within constrained timeframes.

---

8. Reflections on Media and Truth

Timestamp: [123:18] – [141:13]

Cliff critiques mainstream media's portrayal of political events and figures, arguing that sensationalism often distorts the truth. He highlights the value of firsthand accounts and authentic conversations in uncovering reality beyond media biases.

Notable Quote:

Sean Ryan: "I think there's a lot of, you know, I think there's a lot of good about people from outside of D.C. coming to D.C.... but there's these factions that broke off that were all kind of self-serving." [138:00]

Key Points:

• The discrepancy between media narratives and behind-the-scenes realities.
• The importance of personal integrity over media approval.
• The role of podcasts and intimate platforms in fostering honest discourse.

---

9. Faith, Morality, and The Future

Timestamp: [141:13] – [176:12]

Cliff intertwines his professional experiences with his personal faith, discussing how his relationship with God provided him strength and moral guidance during tumultuous times. He emphasizes living with purpose and integrity, regardless of external chaos or political strife.

Notable Quote:

Sean Ryan: "My identity is found in Jesus Christ and who he says that I am, and he says that I'm his." [103:08]

Key Points:

• The integration of faith into leadership and decision-making.
• The challenges of maintaining personal values in high-pressure environments.
• The hope and resilience derived from spiritual beliefs amidst political and social turmoil.

---

10. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Timestamp: [176:00] – [176:34]

Cliff expresses gratitude for the platform to share his experiences and emphasizes the importance of honest conversations that transcend mainstream media limitations. Shawn Ryan reciprocates the appreciation, highlighting the unique value of such discussions.

Notable Quote:

Cliff Sims: "Conversations like this that never happen in the mainstream media could never happen..." [176:00]

Key Points:

• The significance of platforms that encourage unfiltered dialogue.
• The enduring impact of Cliff's insights on listeners' understanding of the White House and national security.
• Closing remarks underscoring mutual respect and the continued pursuit of truth.

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Final Remarks

This episode of the "Shawn Ryan Show" offers a rare and comprehensive glimpse into the complexities of working within the highest echelons of government and intelligence. Cliff Sims' candid reflections shed light on the intersection of power, personal integrity, and national security, providing invaluable lessons for listeners seeking to understand the nuanced realities behind political myths and media portrayals.

Transcript

[Cliff Sims]

Gift the Remarkable with Marc Jacobs fragrances this holiday season. From the iconic Daisy and Perfect to the all new Daisy Wilde Marc Jacobs perfume. Gift sets include everything she needs to.

[Sean Ryan]

Feel special from her favorite fragrance, plus.

[Cliff Sims]

The matching travel spray.

[Sean Ryan]

Holiday gifts don't get much more perfect.

[Cliff Sims]

Than this, so if you're looking for a gift inspiration these holidays, gift the.

[Sean Ryan]

Remarkable with Marc Jacobs. This episode is brought to you by Amazon. The holidays are here, and you know what that means. It's time to get your friends and family the gifts they deserve. Take the stress out of shopping with Amazon's great deals and low prices on a huge range of items, from toys to tech and much more. Whoever you're gifting for, Amazon has great prices on everything you need this holiday season. Shop Black Friday week starting November 21st.

[Cliff Sims]

Cliff Sims, welcome to the show.

[Sean Ryan]

Thanks for having me.

[Cliff Sims]

It's a pleasure to have you.

[Sean Ryan]

It's quite a setup out here, man.

[Cliff Sims]

Oh, thank you.

[Sean Ryan]

It's something else. We were doing a little tour around the room before I got in here, and I felt bad because I didn't bring anything good. Now I feel like when I leave, I got to find something that goes on this wall. I got a couple of things in mind.

[Cliff Sims]

I'll take that White House Breitling emergency that you got.

[Sean Ryan]

Don't know if I'll be able to.

[Cliff Sims]

You look real good in here.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I don't know if I can come off that.

[Cliff Sims]

But, yeah, I would love to have something. Man, this is turning into a museum in here.

[Sean Ryan]

It's amazing.

[Cliff Sims]

You know, there's some really, really cool pieces of history.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, there's a personal story behind all of the things, too. That's what I like about it. It's not just like, you know, that's a cool artifact. It's like, well, there's a personal story behind that. You know, former Blackwater guys that got pardoned, you know? Yeah, things like that. That you go around the room and it's like, man, somebody. Something meaningful to somebody's life here, not just historically, man.

[Cliff Sims]

You know, the coolest, probably most important piece that I've got in here. I don't tell everybody this now we're talking about on the show, but if you look at that flag up there, those rounds. You see those rounds?

[Sean Ryan]

Yep.

[Cliff Sims]

So those rounds. My best friend was on the recovery op on the Red Wings operation.

[Sean Ryan]

Are you familiar with that operation Red Wings?

[Cliff Sims]

Yeah. Yeah. So the hilos that crashed. My best friend was friends with one of the rangers that secured the Hilo crash, and he was on the actual site where the fight happened, where the snipers were. And the Ranger, his buddy, gave him that, a belt of ammunition, 60ammunition, and said that was the only thing that was not burned up in the crash.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Cliff Sims]

And so he snapped off one round for every US Service member that died, and that was like his most prized possession. And then he passed later on, and those came to me.

[Sean Ryan]

That's amazing.

[Cliff Sims]

Yeah. Some heavy stuff in here, man. But anyways, I'm really excited to dig into what you have to talk about. You got one new book out. I think we'll talk a lot about both books and some of the stuff that you saw working in the White House, which I'm sure everybody's going to find really interesting. So.

[Unknown]

But.

[Cliff Sims]

If you don't mind, I'm going to give you an introduction here. I got quite the. Quite the career, so bear with me. I'm horrible at reading out loud, especially on camera, but. Cliff Sims, you served as Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Strategy and Communications, helping to oversee the 18 agencies of the US intelligence community. In this role, you were awarded the Director's Exceptional Achievement Award in recognition of superior accomplishment and valuable service to the mission of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. You were previously Special Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Message Strategy under President Trump. You spearheaded communications for some of the administration's most notable accomplishments, including the successful passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs act and the Senate confirmations of numerous Cabinet secretaries.

[Unknown]

You wrote a memoir of your time.

[Cliff Sims]

Serving in the White House, which became an instant New York times bestseller. In 2024. You appointed by the speaker of the US House of Representatives to serve as a Commissioner on the U.S. china Economic and Scrutin Security Review Commission. You have founded, served as CEO and achieved successful exits in multiple companies in the private sector. You've appeared on Fox News, cnn, msnbc, CBS, and abc. And your opinions on national security, foreign policy, and current events have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, the National Interest, and numerous other publications. You are a senior fellow in the America First Policy Institute center for American Security and a board member of the Polaris for Polaris National Security. What is Polaris National Security?

[Sean Ryan]

So it's a nonprofit policy organization focused on national security. It's founded by some former Trump administration folks.

[Cliff Sims]

Interesting. Interesting. You are a Christian and have participated in Christian mission work on five continents. What continents?

[Sean Ryan]

So that'd be South America. Now you put me on the spot. South America, North America, Europe, Africa, Asia.

[Cliff Sims]

Right on.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Cliff Sims]

Husband to wife Megan, and your six year old son Shep, who you adopted from Colombia in 2020. Congratulations. Your new book, the Darkest the Darkness has not overcome. Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power, has been called the best book ever written in the genre of faith and politics and has received endorsements from former DNI, John Ratcliffe, Senator J.D. vance, Donald Trump Jr. Tucker Carlson and many others. And I find this fascinating. You've been sued by Trump and then.

[Sean Ryan]

That's true.

[Cliff Sims]

He stopped the lawsuit and then asked you to come back, Correct?

[Sean Ryan]

That is true.

[Cliff Sims]

Interesting. That's correct.

[Sean Ryan]

A true Trump world story. Only in Trump world would that happen. Yes, I've seen it all.

[Cliff Sims]

He's got a lot of people gunning for him, but yeah. So we got a lot to dive into. Couple things to knock out. First, I've got a, a Patreon subscription account. They're our top supporters. They've been here since the beginning and they're the reason that I get to do this and you get to be here. So I give them an opportunity to ask a question each show. And we had some pretty good questions for you that have to do with national security and intelligence. Okay, so this is from Stephen Casey.

[Unknown]

What should we do in order to.

[Cliff Sims]

Defang Chinese global strategy of dominance? Asking for a general core. Asking for general core principles and also some practical things, both nationally and individually.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, it's a great question. It's the defining question of our time in a lot of ways. I mean, one of the things that I realized in the office of the Director of National Intelligence and seeing all that intelligence coming in, and there's no question China wants to dominate the globe militarily, technologically, economically. They want to knock us off our perch. They want to set the rules of the road. They want everything done on their terms, and they'll do anything it takes to accomplish that. So the first thing I think that we have to do from a principal standpoint is identify that fact. I was in a US China Commission hearing this past week debating with a witness over whether China wants to follow the rules or not. We were talking about trade rules, and she was trying to say that if China understands the rules, they want to follow the rules. And I said, basically, ma'am, I'm trying to wrap my mind around how you could possibly come to that conclusion based off of their history. And I even cited a specific example of China, the Chinese, stealing the technology of an American wind turbine company, standing up their own company and putting that company out of business to become the dominant market Player. And this is extrapolated across a million different companies and industries. There are still people in this country in very senior positions who are not willing to say that China is not a friend of ours, they are an adversary of ours. Now, does that mean we want to go to war with China? No, but we got to be honest about this is not just a friendly competition among rivals and peers. This is something more insidious than that from their end, their intentions. And so I think the first principle is being willing to say call China what they are, and that is an adversary.

[Cliff Sims]

Who was briefing you this that China wants to follow the rules?

[Sean Ryan]

Well, that was a think tank economist who focuses on trade policy who was saying that.

[Cliff Sims]

Yes, I mean, do they have any information to back that claim up at all or are they being paid to?

[Sean Ryan]

So her explanation was that I had basically spent all of my time looking at national security and not economic security. And she made a delineation between the two things and said that because I'd been looking at national security information, I did not understand that China economically wants to follow the rules even if they color outside the lines in the national security side of things. I mean, it was just like this very tortured explanation from her end.

[Cliff Sims]

Wow.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Cliff Sims]

So call him an enemy.

[Sean Ryan]

Call him an enemy is number one. And secondly, I think we've also got to be willing to call out people in our own country who are undermining American national security interests to further their own economic means. There's a lot of money to be made in China. There has been over the last couple of decades. And we think about things like, let's take Sequoia Capital for instance, one of the largest venture capital firms in America, Legendary venture capital firm. They taught the Chinese how to do venture capital and they set up Sequoia China over there. Now because the political dynamic has gotten a little hot over the last couple of years, they broke off Sequoia China now, where it's a separate thing instead of inside of the same company. But you have to understand that Americans built the Chinese economy up until only about three years ago. Military men and women in this country who put in money into their retirement. The Thrift Savings Plan. You probably got a Thrift Savings Plan.

[Cliff Sims]

I was too dumb to sign up for that. Just being honest.

[Sean Ryan]

A lot of members of the military and government workers are putting their money in the Thrift Savings Plan. Up until just a few years ago, the Thrift Savings Plan was investing in Chinese state owned companies.

[Cliff Sims]

I was ahead of my time.

[Sean Ryan]

All right, so you knew not to Sign up before it was cool not to sign up for it. So they had to pass a law to basically say we shouldn't be doing this. That's just one example. And certainly members of the military didn't do anything wrong and the people that are managing those investments on their behalf. But we've got to be willing to say to Wall street, to Silicon Valley, we got to call these people out and say it's wrong what you are doing. And I'm very hesitant ever to draw comparisons to the Nazis. But it's analogous to would you have, you know, would you have been wanting to be invested in German state owned companies in the lead up to World War II? Would you have ever invested at the height of the Cold War in Russian companies or Soviet companies in the lead up to, you know, the Cold War? In the middle of the Cold War. I mean, there's some real parallels here. And so being willing, but that's not popular to do that, especially for politicians, because those same people that are making a bunch of money off of that are the people that are donating the most money to campaigns in this country. So being willing to take very difficult political stands is another thing that I think is very, very important. And I could go on about this all day, but the other thing that we have to understand is.

[Cliff Sims]

From a.

[Sean Ryan]

Principle standpoint, we didn't get here overnight and we're not going to get out of it overnight. The difference between the Chinese threat that we're facing today and what happened with the Soviet Union during the Cold War is that our economies were not intertwined the way that ours are with China. And the Soviet Union was not in the global economy the way that the Chinese have put themselves into the global economy. Again, we caused this. We brought China in the World Trade Organization, we normalized trade relations with them, we propped up their economy, we invested millions, billions, trillions of dollars into their economy over there. This happened over the course of decades. So we've got to do this over the course of decades to kind of get ourselves out of that. But how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time and we gotta start taking bites every single day. Little bite here, little bite there. Shoring up our supply chains, building our industrial base back, rebuilding our military. All of these different things we gotta be doing at home while being willing to decouple from China and build consensus around the world that we cannot be in business with the Chinese. The countries around the world, our allies, can't be in business with the Chinese the way that we are. Right now, only over time, by taking those little bites, are we going to get to the point that we can truly confront that threat.

[Cliff Sims]

What about just buying American?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Cliff Sims]

Or maybe not even just American, because it's hard to do.

[Sean Ryan]

Now.

[Cliff Sims]

What if you just don't buy made in China?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, it's hard to do stuff. It's really hard to do. And this is also placing a real expectation on a consumer to have you're a regular person out there and you're making 50 grand a year and you're trying to put food on the table and trying to, like, what car are you going to buy? What American car are you going to buy? What? You know, the TV sets that you have in your house, any electronic device that you have, do you have an iPhone? All of those are made in China at this point. I mean, go down the list of these things, it would be a real expectation for, you know, people to take money out of their own pocket to pay a little bit more to buy American. 100% think that's a worthy cause to pursue to build national consensus around these things. My only problem with that is I'm going to look the person who's making $35,000 a year in the eye and say, you should sacrifice and do this while I'm allowing somebody in Wall street and Silicon Valley to make billions of dollars investing in China. Those two. One of those things has got to happen before I'm willing to do the other.

[Cliff Sims]

Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. Thank you. Thank you for clarifying that. And I have no idea what this is. I've never looked into this, but I find it interesting. This is from an anonymous person on Patreon, but do you know anything about a Delta raid on a CIA server farm in Germany referenced by General McKearney?

[Sean Ryan]

I have no idea.

[Cliff Sims]

Me neither. Okay, I would love to know more about that.

[Unknown]

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[Cliff Sims]

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[Unknown]

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[Cliff Sims]

But. Well, Cliff, everybody gets a gift before we start the interview.

[Sean Ryan]

If this isn't what I think it is, I'm gonna be upset.

[Cliff Sims]

Hey. What? Any guesses?

[Sean Ryan]

I want the gummies.

[Cliff Sims]

Oh, there you go, man.

[Sean Ryan]

There you go, my man. My son will very much appreciate those. I can assure you. A gummy bear fanatic.

[Cliff Sims]

Nice.

[Sean Ryan]

So thank you for these.

[Cliff Sims]

You're welcome. Well, those are made in America, so they might not be the healthiest thing, but, you know, they taste good, so. Well, Cliff, I'd like to start with just what exactly could you give us some insight on what Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Strategy and Communications is?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. So in the office of the Director of National Intelligence, there's a pretty small front office that are the closest advisors to the Director of National Intelligence. And they're, you know, some of them have titles like Chief of Staff or Deputy Chief of Staff, and others are Deputy Directors or Assistant directors. That kind of thing. And so I was in kind of that first ring of top advisors around the Director of National Intelligence. And my focus was on a couple of things. Number one, interfacing with the White House. I was. Had worked in the White House previously, so I knew all the senior staff there very well, all the folks on the National Security Council very well. And so I interfaced a lot with our counterparts in the White House on things that we were dealing with. And then from a communications perspective, I have to admit that before I got there, I didn't know how much communicating you can do when all you can say is, I can neither confirm nor deny. Right? And so. But I'll be honest, we were stunned when we walked in the door the first day we get there, and the person's kind of onboarding. He's like, hey, do you want to go and meet the communications team? And I'm like, well, how many of them could there possibly be here? Because again, all they can say is, we can either confirm nor deny. We go downstairs, like, 25 people on the communications team there. I'm like, well, what are you. No disrespect to anyone here, but what's everybody here do? You know, you had a couple of speechwriters over here. You had people that interfaced with the press over there. You had all that. I mean, dude, it was crazy. And really, first kind of insight to like, this ain't right. Like, we shouldn't have 25 people in here that are press and comms people in the office of the Director of National Intelligence. And so, you know, in the event that there was a press issue that we were dealing with, I would be the one that would have to try to navigate that. And it's a. It's a whole new comms challenge. Because often you are talking about, you know, I've gotten phone calls from, you know, major journalistic outfits that somehow found out about something that we may or may not have been involved in.

[Cliff Sims]

And so the Delta raid in Germany.

[Sean Ryan]

Whatever that was, you know, something like, I would get very similar inquiries from reporters and then having to navigate those things, because sometimes there's still, you know, serious national security implications, but also lives could be at stake. So is this something that we need to try to talk a news. If a news outlet is going to publish that, do we need to try to keep them from publishing that and make the case to them of why there could be lives at stake for them to publish this? In other cases, I just had to say ignore it or no comment, because it was Something that we perhaps were involved in that I just couldn't talk about, or sometimes we actually weren't involved in whatever the thing was. But I couldn't say that we weren't because that would expose maybe who was involved, you know. So it's a lot of different things you have to navigate from a communications perspective. My favorite story about intelligence community communications. Do you know the phrase where the phrase I can neither confirm nor deny came from?

[Cliff Sims]

I don't.

[Sean Ryan]

So way back in the Cold War, we find out that the Soviets have lost a sub in the Pacific Ocean. They don't know where it is, but we do. So we got to come up with a way how we're going to get this submarine. And we also have to do it in such a way that the Soviets don't know what we're doing. So some of your former colleagues in the CIA hatch a plan. We're going to build a giant ship, and the ship's going to open up in the bottom, and a giant arm is going to come out of the bottom of the ship, go down to the bottom of the ocean and pull this submarine up. But obviously, that would be quite an operation. So we can't let the Soviets know what we're doing. So we got to come up with a cover story for what we're going to do. So they contact Howard Hughes. What billionaire, kind of eccentric billionaire, kind of the Elon Musk of his day, in some ways. And they say to Mr. Hughes, we want you to be the COVID story for this, and we want you to say that you are mining some kind of rare mineral off of the ocean floor. And because you're such an eccentric billionaire, people will buy this. Howard Hughes says, sounds good to me. Have at it. So they build this ship, the Glomar Explorer. They go out, they find the submarine, bottom of the ship opens up, arm goes down, they pull the submarine up. Breaks in half about halfway up when they're pulling it. So they're able to get some of the ship. Some of it was lost forever. So, you know, did we get good intelligence off of that? Some say yes, some say no. You know, but there's a lot of, you know. You know, a lot went into that. Billions of dollars built this ship, the whole deal. And people thought, well, whether we got good intelligence out of it or not, no one will ever even know that this happened. Until one day, I believe it was the LA Times. Some, through a weird series of events, finds out what happened. And they contact CIA and they say, did you guys build this Ship with an arm to get a Soviet submarine and use Howard Hughes as the COVID story. The whole. They got the whole thing. The first time ever the CIA said we can neither confirm nor deny. The glomar explorer was, you know, the whole thing. That's where the phrase we can neither confirm nor deny came from. Man. So to this day, if one of those requests would come in, somebody would say, just glomar. Glomar explorer. In other words, just say, you can neither confirm nor deny.

[Cliff Sims]

Man. So does. That is the majority of the time being yes.

[Sean Ryan]

I will say sincerely, sometimes it's yes, sometimes it's no. I mean, genuinely. And there's a lot of reasons why you would. Even if the answer is no, that you would still need to say, I can neither confirm nor deny. But yes, it's genuinely not a tell one way or the other.

[Cliff Sims]

Who makes that determination on what the response is gonna be? Is that you?

[Sean Ryan]

It would be on most things, but if it rose, I mean, it depends on how important of an issue it was. I mean, there very often where Director of National Intelligence and I talked about the response to especially operational things, if this is an operational topic, we would certainly talk through what do we do? And more often than not, you just don't even respond to those kind of things. But again, it created some very unique challenges from a communication standpoint that I'd never experienced before.

[Cliff Sims]

I'll bet. So, I mean, so did you have insight into just about everything that's going on?

[Sean Ryan]

Well, I would say not. Nobody really does. Nobody really does, just because the scale of it is so vast and I didn't need to know, you know, everything. But certainly most of the things that were flowing into the office of the Director of National Intelligence, I would have been in the room for, all right.

[Cliff Sims]

What'S going on with the UFO stuff?

[Sean Ryan]

So I actually talk about that a little bit in my new book, really. But it's not going to be very satisfying to anybody. Oh, man.

[Cliff Sims]

Come on.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, you know, everybody who's ever been, you know, wondered what goes on in the White House or wondered what goes on at CIA, or wonder always wonders, like, are these normal people there? Or are these, like, you know, aren't you curious, too, about all these things? And the answer is, yeah, when we got there, the first thing I said is, all right, somebody will out the bodies. Like, I want to see. I want to see the alien bodies. I want to see, you know, and I'm joking about it, but, like, sincerely want to know what's what with this? I mean, how can you not be curious. How can you not be curious about the JFK files? How can you not be curious about. I mean, go down the list of these kind of legendary. You know, call them conspiracy theories. Call them whatever you want. Like, we want to know. So when we got there, we wanted to know. You know, they call it the UAP program, Unmanned aerial or Unidentified Aerial phenomenon, or whatever they call them now, the euphemism for UFOs. So the people who brief on these programs come to the office of the Director of National Intelligence. Now, to be in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, you have to have the highest security clearance that the US Government offers. I mean, these people that are in this office, see, to your point, everything. I mean, they're preparing the President's daily brief every day. So they are seeing the most sensitive intelligence that the US Government has. Well, when we got there, you know, naturally, kind of the senior team wants to be in the room to hear. Let's get the briefing, too. Let's get the briefing with the director. And they kicked everyone out of the room. Are you serious? Kicked everyone out of the room, said, we're here to give the briefing to the Director. And so even the people who saw all the most sensitive stuff in the US Government, that's how sensitive they were about being willing to brief that. And that's about all I can say about it.

[Cliff Sims]

So it is legitimately the top, top, top level.

[Sean Ryan]

They are very, very sensitive about who has access to those programs, for sure.

[Cliff Sims]

Wow. Yeah, that's pretty telling. I mean, that alone is very telling to me. Interesting. Interesting. Well, let's move on. How did you. I mean, you came from. You had a media company. What was the name of the media company?

[Sean Ryan]

Yellowhammer News.

[Cliff Sims]

Yeah, Yellowhammer News. So it sounds like. How did that start?

[Sean Ryan]

So Yellowhammer is the state bird of Alabama. I was based in Alabama. That's where the name came from. But I had worked on a campaign in 2010 that was the first thing I ever did in politics. It was a big year in Alabama, because people don't realize this now. Like, Republicans had not been in control of Alabama politically in 136 years, since Reconstruction. Up until 2010, Republicans took over. And so it was the first thing I'd ever done in politics was manage a campaign during that election cycle. And coming out of that election cycle, I had gotten to know everybody who came into power. I knew the governor and the speaker of the House and the pro tem of the Senate and all these different people. And I Didn't know what I was going to do next, but I figured I was going to keep kind of doing political consulting. And so I started a blog that was basically the inside story of what's going on in Alabama politics. And my thought was, if I can show that I know what's going on, maybe people will hire me to be a consultant for them. And what actually happened was the thing exploded and just blew up into a full blown news outlet. And we had millions of readers and a statewide radio network, and I hosted a daily radio show. It was not nearly as good as the Sean Ryan show, but be that as it may, I had one and that's what I was doing. And in 2015, one of the guests on my radio program was an upstart political candidate for president that people didn't really think had a chance. His name was Donald Trump. They thought it was a joke candidacy. Some people did at the time. And he was coming to do a big rally in Alabama. And this rally is now kind of legendary now as the moment where people realize this is real because like 100,000 people showed up or something. Just like completely nuts in a stadium in south Alabama. But Trump called into the radio show to promote that he was coming to the state. It was the first time that I talked to Donald Trump, and I was 2015, had a good interview. It actually went viral because it was the middle of the summer, and out of nowhere, Trump started riffing on Christmas, saying that, you know, we're not allowed to say Christmas anymore. They want us to say Happy Holidays. And then, you know, when I get in there, we're gonna bring Christmas back. I can't remember what month it was, like June at that time. But I was like, okay. So the interview went viral. And about a year later, Senator Jeff Sessions, who became Trump's Attorney general, I had known him very well because I covered him as an Alabama politician. He called me and said, you know, they're trying to fill out the team up there in the Camp Trump campaign, and I really think you should consider going, taking a leave of absence and go and work on the campaign. And if he doesn't win, you go back to running your company. But if he does, like, who knows where it could lead?

[Cliff Sims]

Wow.

[Sean Ryan]

And so I thought I was going to have maybe a few month experience up there working in Trump Tower for the President. And it really changed the trajectory of my life, to say the least. So that's how I ended up in Trump world. Ended up in the White House, and later ended up as Deputy DNI I.

[Cliff Sims]

Mean, how do you, how was it, how was it leaving your company? I mean, it started from nothing, blew up millions. I mean, radio shows, TV shows.

[Sean Ryan]

Did you say radio News network, like a syndicated network, the online media hub, the whole deal? Yeah, it was, it wasn't hard. And really the reason was I'm all about experiences in life, like money. Who doesn't want money? Right. Like, I'd like to have more money. I'd like, you know, sure. But really I want to have a life that I look back on and it's like, man, that was interesting. You know, went a lot of different directions. You know, I've been the lead singer of a band, I've played college basketball, I've started companies, I've worked in the White House, I worked at dni, I've worked at, you know, all these things are like, wait, what, you did all of those things before you were 40? Yeah, because I want to do interesting things. So when the opportunity came for the President, it's like, do you want to come work in the White House? Yeah, I want to work in the White House. And then the White House counsel said, okay, you got to sell your company. I said, oh, okay. And so, you know, that wasn't ideal because I had the people who were interested in buying the company knew I had to sell it by January 20th on inauguration or I wasn't going into the White House. So I had a short fuse there to sell it. So that wasn't fun. And certainly anything. That's your baby. Like, it's hard for me. I mean, it still exists to this day and there are times when I read things on there and it's like, I wouldn't have done that or I would have covered this story differently or I would have, you know, whatever. And it's hard not to be like, man, that's my, you know, that's my thing. So I still have a lot of affection for it and it was a season of my life that I loved. But it's not hard to tell the President of the United States, yeah, I'll come serve my country in the West Wing of the White House, where the only office between my office and the Oval Office is the Roosevelt Room. Yeah, I'll do that. So, yeah, it was a no brainer.

[Cliff Sims]

That had to be surreal. I mean, what was it about you that you think caught Trump's attention?

[Sean Ryan]

Well, at that point especially, people really don't understand how small the team was. There were, I think at the end of the campaign, there were five Hillary Clinton Staffers for every one Trump staffer. And before that, it was. Even the disparity was even greater. I mean, the Clintons had this giant juggernaut of an operation, and really, the Trump campaign was split into two groups. You had a small group of four or five people who were on the plane with him, going around the country, and then you had a group of us, probably 25 of us, in a war room on the 14th floor of Trump Tower. And that was kind of it. People talk about, like, what was. And there were others. Like, there are advanced staffers and there's others, certainly there's other people out there working on it. But in terms of what Trump would think of as, like, my campaign team, the people that he knows, we're only talking a couple of dozen people here at that point. And so, you know, he gets full credit for the 2016 campaign, because people ask me, what was the campaign? It was one guy on a microphone. That's what the campaign. And that's why they thought he was going to lose, because. But Hillary has all these staffers and they're spending all this money on advertising, and they're doing all these different things in the swing states. And meanwhile, it's Trump going around the country speaking to tens of thousands of people every day. And even on the last, like, the last 48 hours of the campaign, I won't get this exactly right. I think he did 10 rallies in the last 48 hours.

[Cliff Sims]

Wow.

[Sean Ryan]

Like, back to. Back to, like, do a rally, get on the plane, do a rally, get on the plane, do a rally, get on the plane. Up till, like, midnight on election, the night before the election, he's like, in North Carolina or something, doing a rally at 1 o'clock in the morning. It's like his seventh rally of the day or something like that. He was just relentless, taking his message directly to the American people. So how did I catch his attention? I think, one, it was a small team. And then the second thing is, one of my roles on the campaign was anytime that the president would shoot a video message, I was his guy there with him shooting the video message. And Trump is a TV guy, right? That's his background. So he really is particular about, I want to be lit this way, I want to be shot from this angle. You know, the way that the remarks are written are kind of unique to a Trumpian way of doing things. He likes the background to be a certain way. All of these different, like, very nuanced things that are his likes. I got to know those things, and I Was there with him for a lot of those things. So that's how I got to know him personally during that time period. And so when I came into the White House, I was still doing that. Anytime Trump shot a video, I was there with the White House communications office, the military guys, waka that shoot all those videos. You know, it was me and all the military guys shooting those things because I knew his likes and dislikes. And here's how we need to set up the teleprompter and here's how we need to set up the lighting, and here's how we need to, you know, all that. And I'd look at the remarks and, you know, say, well, he ain't gonna say that. Let's get rid of that. Let's do this other, you know, so I got to know him really well and he had a comfort level, I think that I was gonna make sure to take care of him, that he was gonna be presented in the way that he wanted to be presented. So that's how I got to know him.

[Cliff Sims]

Very interesting. So before you went into intelligence, you were in charge of all communications.

[Sean Ryan]

So not all communications, but I was in charge of messaging was mainly. So the delineation there is. I wasn't dealing much with the press directly. I was dealing with, you know, working with the speechwriting team, building, for instance, for the tax, big tax cut that Trump passed, helped develop. How are we gonna talk about this? Okay, what is the messaging that we're gonna use? And then the communications and press teams would push that out in different ways and we'd come up with different ways to get the message out. So I was in kind of in charge of the initial message. But even that Trump's in charge. Trump's his own communications director in a lot of ways.

[Cliff Sims]

I think we've all figured that out. Yeah. So basically you're part of the think tank and strategy before any messaging goes out.

[Sean Ryan]

That's right.

[Cliff Sims]

Okay. Okay. So you were on the campaign trail with him. You had mentioned it kind of started as a joke on your media outlet. People didn't take it seriously. When did you notice kind of a flip? I'm just curious. This is just personal curiosity. When did you notice a flip happen?

[Sean Ryan]

That rally in Alabama was really an eye opening moment for a lot of people, and I would include myself in that. It was held in Mobile, Alabama, which was strategically really smart because you had the Florida panhandle that could get there. You had Mississippi and Louisiana down on the coast that could get there. You could have Alabama that could get there. It was kind of this cross section of a lot of the hardcore Trump base that we know it to be now. It gave them all an opportunity to just, like, go and have what the Washington Post described as a mix between a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert in Talladega. Like, they all just came together and were like, this is our guy. And when that many people show up to something, people just spent their time to come and stand out in the heat for hours to hear what this guy has to say. That's not a joke anymore. There's something real underpinning that. And of course, in retrospect, I think we understand more that Trump had put his finger on an issue set that was completely unappreciated in American politics. You had the immigration message, you had the trade message of how China and other countries have hollowed out America's industrial base in these towns across the Rust Belt that no longer exist anymore because we have allowed other countries to do all our manufacturing for us. And not only, you know, we were, you know, all the economists said, well, that's, you're gonna get cheap goods. But what they didn't talk about was, you're also gonna have a crisis of the family across the Midwest of our country, where young men, men no longer have a place to go to work and find meaning and purpose in their lives. And it's going to decimate their families economically. You're going to see a rise of opioids that we're even seeing today, the drug issues in those communities, all of these things that have happened subsequently. Trump intuitively understood that even as a billionaire in his tower in Manhattan. And I wonder how. And I can really only think of, like, he was a builder, so he's around builders all the time. He was around people that work with their hands all the time and interacted with these people and heard their problems and their concerns and the things that they were scared about. And even if they didn't affect him in some way because he's a billionaire, he understood the importance of those issues. So the immigration issue, the trade issue, the tough on China issue, all of these things now that we kind of identify with Trump, we take for granted now because he talks about them all the time, but no one was talking about these things, and certainly no Republican was talking about these things. So I even growing up as like a conservative and being around political politicians starting in about 2010, and so I, you know, leading up to that point, so for five or six years, had been involved in politics and really kind of paying attention. No one talked about those things. So when I started getting calls to my radio show and getting emails in to readers from our, you know, critiquing our coverage, I started realizing, man, there's something much more powerful here from an issue standpoint, and certainly the personality is larger than life, but from an issue standpoint, there was something there that he hit on that. It just took me and others, I think, some time to really understand.

[Cliff Sims]

Interesting, interesting. What's it like? I mean, what was it like working for him? It's, It's. He obviously pisses a lot of people off, you know, but. But I'm. I'm. I'm genuinely curious. I mean, because there's. There's people that I have a lot of respect for, you know, that left that administration, you know, and I don't know what happened. But let's, let's. One, for example, General Mattis, you know, to see a guy with that reputation, I don't know if you're familiar with his reputation within the military, but very much the. And I don't know what it's like anymore, but, you know, since he left, but, wow, like Marines. Everybody once is dying to work for an individual of that caliber and his reputation, everybody knows about that guy. And so to see somebody like that leave that administration, it just leaves me with a lot of questions.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, well, so it's kind of two questions there. One is, what's it like to work for Trump? The second is we can talk about the Mattis one specifically, because I spent a decent amount of time with him while he was there and kind of, I think, understand some of the backstory of that. I personally don't have a single negative thing to say about having worked for Trump. And I've been sued by the guy at one point, you know, so I've seen every side. I've seen every side of it, and we can get into that, you know, kind of what happened there. But in terms of actually working for him, it is different. It's unlike anything I've ever experienced, and I could see how it wouldn't be for everyone. But personally, I found the characterization as Trump, as someone who's just like, you know, he's just the you're fired guy and is just like, flying off the handle and yelling at people and going, you know, wild all the time, to not be my personal experience, he never yelled at me in a way that wasn't any different than, like, you know, that I found that unusual. You know, you certainly wouldn't Find it on you. Anybody who's been in the military certainly wouldn't find anything that he did, you know, unusual. Me, as a college basketball player, my basketball coach probably yelled at me 10 times worse than Trump ever yelled at me for anything. So I found that kind of mischaracterization. I found that to not be what he's like. The thing I think, that people struggle with, and I could see where somebody, especially from a military background, might struggle with, is how freewheeling it is. It's not regimented. It's not very orderly. There's some kind of controlled chaos that goes on that I have come to the conclusion is a part of his creative process. He didn't like to have a lot of structured time during the day because he wants to have time to. He talks all day to a million different people. He is constantly on the phone getting feedback from a million different inputs. Some of them kind of frontline type people, some of them the names you've heard of type people who are in leadership and everyone in between. If you walked in there today, he would ask you, sean, what are we thinking? What are we thinking right now? What are we hearing out there? What do you think? So what do I need to be talking about? What should we be doing? And then you'd go down a rabbit. Oh, really? You think that? Well, tell me about that. Why do you think that about him? Okay, tell me. Oh, you're interested in General Mattis. You know Mattis, or you know his reputation? Let's talk about Mattis. Why do you think that about Mattis? Let me tell you my experience with Mattis. He would, like, want to engage with you on these things. So I found also the idea that Trump does not like feedback or for people to push back on him to be entirely false. In fact, I found quite the opposite. If you were willing to say to him, I don't think that's the way we should go, Mr. President, he would be interested to know, why do you think that?

[Cliff Sims]

So he does take constructive constraints.

[Sean Ryan]

Oh, he will definitely engage. Now he's gonna make the decision that he's gonna make, but he will engage with you on, why do you think that? And you know, what would lead you to that conclusion? Cause I'm in a totally different place. So he's willing to be persuaded on things. And in fact, I think one of the unique things that he did in his White House that was very constructive was most White Houses are ideological conformists. And I don't even mean that derogatively in a way because if you saw a candidate that you wanted to support so much that you were willing to go spend all your time trying to get them elected, and then you end up in the White House with them, chances are you agree with them on pretty much everything. In the Trump White House, just look at the trade issue. You had Gary Cohn was the chief economic adviser. He is probably best described as like a free trade Democrat. You had Peter Navarro, who was the kind of top trade advisor, and Robert Lighthizer, who was the US Trade representative. These are much more. They might derogatively be called protectionists, but certainly more inclined to use tariffs as a tool in economic statecraft. They're totally different from Gary Cohn ideologically. Those were the people in the Oval Office arguing about trade all day. And so you have a diversity of opinions that you're not gonna get in most White Houses. Now, where it breaks down is when the President makes a decision, if one of those two sides lost the argument, they have to be willing to subordinate their views to the President's decision and execute on his vision. And I do think there were breakdowns at times in the Trump White House where people were not willing to subordinate their own views to the president's views. Which gets me directly to the John Mattis question. General Mattis resignation came at a time when President Trump was trying to get us out of Syria, and he felt strongly that we need to get out of Syria. And General Mattis felt strongly that we had a US national security interest in Syria that merited keeping US Troops there, continuing to engage there in a way that President Trump did not feel inclined to do. And essentially what General Mattis did was say, I can no longer, in good conscience, based on my sincerely held beliefs, execute on the president's wishes because I disagree with him on this policy. Now, I actually respect that because the dishonorable thing to do was what so many others did, which was, I disagree with the President, but I know better than him. And so I'm gonna slow roll his wishes. I'm not gonna execute on his wishes. I'm not gonna do what the duly elected President of the United States has decided to do. That's more nefarious in my mind. So, you know, General Mattis has subsequently said a lot of negative things about President Trump that I happen to disagree with. But on that particular reasoning for resigning, I understand why he did, even if I would disagree with him on that. And I think he did the right thing by leaving rather than not executing on the president's agenda.

[Cliff Sims]

Interesting. Yeah, thank you for. I mean, thank you for clarifying that, because that, that is. That is. That is something that I've always wondered about. You know, seeing so many individuals leave. Is. Is it because he doesn't take constructive criticism? And so that's good to know. I appreciate that. Thank you. Have you gonna go off on a tangent here?

[Sean Ryan]

Let's do it.

[Cliff Sims]

Have you heard. This is a little out there. Have you heard about this? The Trump prophecies stuff? There's a book written about it about these people. All right, I'm gonna leave it out then. But somebody just brung it across my radar the other day. There's a couple of people that kind of called everything that's already happened. And I was just curious if you knew about it.

[Sean Ryan]

I haven't.

[Cliff Sims]

But let's talk about. So you're in the White House now, and it sounds like from what you were saying when you first showed up, the intelligence, in your intelligence role, there was a lot of fat to be trimmed. How much fat in the White House needs to be trimmed?

[Sean Ryan]

Well, in the White House, you know, it's actually not a. I say it's not a large organization. They're much more constrained because the White House has a finite budget for personnel that they cannot go over. And the way that you subsidize that, so to speak, is you'll have agencies detail people to the White House. So I actually found that in the White House itself, there's not a lot of fat to be trimmed. Now, the government, my God, the amount of fat there is to trim is just like, beyond imagination. There's no question about that. But the actual White House itself, it's a pretty small group. And, you know, in the West Wing itself. Have you been in the West Wing before?

[Cliff Sims]

I've never been in the White House.

[Sean Ryan]

All right, so we're gonna make that happen. Hopefully we get an opportunity next year to make that happen. But one of the things that people are struck by the first time that they walk in, and I certainly was, was how small it is. I'll take you around the White House real quick. The main floor of the White House, where the. Well, let's just go. We'll go to the basement of the White House. Ground floor of the White House. White House situation room, White House mess, some bathrooms, couple of small offices on the side over here.

[Cliff Sims]

That's it.

[Sean Ryan]

Main floor of the West Wing. You've got press briefing room, Oval Office, President's private study, President's private dining room. You've got. In our White House, you had Steve Bannon. When we first got there, kind of a couple of offices right there and White House chief of staff, vice president, national Security advisor, press secretary, and a couple of comms offices. That's it.

[Cliff Sims]

That's it.

[Sean Ryan]

That's it. On the main floor of the West Wing, top floor of the West Wing, you've got kind of offices on each corner of it. You had the senior advisor for Policy and head of the Domestic Policy Council. You had deputy chief of staff, head of Legislative Affairs. You had senior advisor, deputy National Security Adviser, Ivanka, and the head of the National Economic Council. That's it. On the top floor of the White House. So in all of that, we're talking, you know, 20 principals in there, kind of the top level people in the West Wing, and then they have some support staff with them. Everybody else is next door in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. And so there are hundreds of people over there. But it really shocks people when they walk in. Especially if your only context is you've watched the West Wing TV show, which is kind of what got me into politics to begin with, was like binge watching the West Wing and wondering what must happen behind those white walls and curtained windows. And the real life West Wing is so small that you wouldn't be able to shoot a TV show in there because the halls are so cramped. You wouldn't be able to fit people in a camera. And like, the walk and talk scenes they do wouldn't work in the real. In the real West Wing. Yeah.

[Cliff Sims]

Interesting. Very interesting. Well, let's get into kind of your experience within the White House. It doesn't sound like it was a great experience. And so, and I mean, people like me are fascinated to know how it works in there. Is it as corrupt as we all think it is? Is it as secretive as we all think it is? I mean, what's the driver to all these people that are trying to achieve power? Why do they want it? And so dive in.

[Sean Ryan]

So I will say my experience in the White House was one of the most amazing experiences of my life, one of the most frustrating and exasperating experiences of my life. In some ways an experience that I would not want to have again. And on the other hand, an experience that I would love to go back tomorrow and let's dive right back into it. So it's like every extreme that you can imagine, both good and bad, I feel like I experienced in there professionally. And then also in terms of what it does to you from a character standpoint, what it reveals about you as a person. I learned a lot of stuff about myself that I don't think I would have otherwise had a reason to learn. On the good end of that spectrum, there are just things that you see in there that. Where else in the world are you going to see some of the things that experience some of the things that you experience? If you think about it, anybody who comes in to meet with the president is at the top of their field. So it's a king, it's a prime minister, it's a president, it's a CEO of the largest companies in the world, the most famous entrepreneurs. You know, all of those. So you're seeing, how do these people operate? How do they run meetings? How do they conduct themselves? What questions do they ask? What do they. What's their demeanor? I mean, everything. I've seen how kings comport themselves in private meetings. I've seen how dictators comport themselves in private meetings. I've seen how democratically elected presidents and prime ministers conduct themselves. And I've seen how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos conduct themselves and everybody in between. And the extraordinary thing about that is you. Well, I remember a meeting that we were having in the Cabinet Room of the White House, and the meeting was. Honestly, I can't even remember the topic, but it's the type of people that I'm talking about. It's people at the tippy top of their field. And there was a moment where I realized that no one here knows what to do right now. No one knows what decision to make. There's not an obvious decision here. It's a tough decision. And no one here in the moment knows what to do. And I found this to be a simultaneously terrifying and liberating realization, because Steve Jobs was right when he said that all of these things in life that you call life were made up by people that are no smarter than you. And so it's terrifying because you're like, holy crap. I thought there were rooms where people knew what they were doing, knew how to, you know, how to tackle these big challenges. But it's also liberating because it's like, well, if they can figure it out, then maybe I can figure it out, too. And so you. That's how you can combat this imposter syndrome. Because the first day I walked into the West Wing, it was like, who am I to be sitting in this office? Who am I to be standing in the Oval Office and tell the President of the United States anything about anything? And I think that's something we all struggle with in different ways. That ended imposter syndrome for me. Not because I'm smart, not because I'm any better than anybody else, but because I've seen the people that I thought had it all figured out and realized that they didn't. That just like me, they wake up every day and are trying to figure it out, too.

[Cliff Sims]

What would. What was. All right. What was one of the big decisions that you were a part of that when you realized, oh, shit, nobody has the answer here.

[Sean Ryan]

I'm trying to think if there was just like a big, dramatic one, did.

[Cliff Sims]

It generally, for the most part, seem like people knew what they were doing?

[Sean Ryan]

Well, I think there's.

[Cliff Sims]

Did you find that? And I'm not saying they didn't know what they were doing. I'm just saying, did it seem like you were at the beginning around people that always had the right answers?

[Sean Ryan]

No. But I would say there's a delineation between, like, excellence and competence and being and just not knowing the answer in that moment and needing to work through some things and incompetence. I found myself around a lot of excellence and competence. People that have risen have a proven track record over their careers of doing remarkable things, thrust into situations where they're trying to figure a problem set out that they've never had to face before. Let's use Jared Kushner as an example. Jared Kushner had never negotiated Middle east peace on behalf of the President of the United States before. He negotiated real estate deals. Some of them went well, some of them didn't go as well. Negotiated all kinds of different things, business wise. Some of them went well, some of them didn't go well. He had a baseline skill set that he had applied to business and been successful in that. But suddenly he's confronted with arguably the most intractable US Foreign policy problem of recent decades, Middle east peace. The place is a total cluster. You know that better than most. And so suddenly he's having to figure out, okay, how do I navigate the dynamic between the Israelis and the Palestinians? How do I navigate the dynamic between the Israelis and countries in the region who are more stable. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, et cetera, with other countries in the region that are far less stable? Syria and Iraq go around the globe there. How do I balance those interests? How do I delineate between what some of these people say publicly and what they really think privately about the Palestinians? For instance, for decades, everyone assumed that any breakout of peace in the Middle east was going to be predicated on the Palestinian getting a Palestinian state. And so every issue started with, if we don't deal with the Israeli Palestinian issue first, we can't get any other things to happen in the region. Jared looked at this same problem set along with the president, who also had. He had a business skill set that he was approaching these things with. And they kind of said, you know what, I wonder if we flip this on its head, if we can get some normalization agreements between Israel and other Arab states, that it would actually lead to momentum that might one day lead to a solution to this Israeli Palestinian problem. And so they didn't. I won't say they solved, but they started making real progress in ways we had never seen before with the Abraham Accords, this series of normalization agreements with Arab states around the Middle east and Israel as kind of the starting point for peace and prosperity in the region. So that's an example of when we got there, none of us knew what to do with Middle east peace. I mean, my gosh, what a giant problem to solve. And over time sat there and worked through those things, immersed ourselves in those issues and took the same skillset that had made us successful in the private sector and applied them with fresh eyes to these tough problems that had caused so much, been such a challenge for other administrations. So there are a million examples of that that if I thought here for a second that I could come up with. But that's one that reshaped the global order in a lot of ways.

[Cliff Sims]

How many of these decisions are you guys going through a day?

[Sean Ryan]

Well, that's the magnitude of something of that magnitude. Or are we going to stay in or get out of the Paris climate accords? Are we going to renegotiate the trade deal with Mexico and Canada? These kind of giant things, those are few and far between. Only a handful of those, at least the conclusion of them will happen in the course of an administration. But you're confronted constantly throughout every single day with the little decisions on any number of those issues that are trying to take you down a certain path.

[Cliff Sims]

How many of these big decisions get pushed to the second term because of reelection?

[Sean Ryan]

I didn't. I don't recall any. Now, at the point that reelection was happening, I was at the office of the Director of National Intelligence. And so I wasn't in the White House on some of these more political issues. I was just dealing with the national security stuff more. But I never heard anyone say, hey, we could get a win for the country here, but let's just wait a second because it's going to cost us something politically. Let's Just wait till the second term to do. I never heard anyone do anything like that.

[Cliff Sims]

Okay. I'm just curious how it works. You know, we. We only hear so much, and you see a lot of things get punted, you know, or you hear a lot of. A lot of talk about how, you know, presidents would be a lot braver, maybe in their second term. Yep. Less fear of reelection, obviously.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, you know, one of the things that I'll say about. About Trump that I think is rare among politicians, is there are different kinds of courage. There's the kinds of courage that you have shown on the battlefield, your brothers in arms have shown on the battlefield. Physical courage manifests itself in different ways. And then there's moral courage, which you've also shown in the things you've been able to tackle on this country and the things you're willing to talk about that a lot of others aren't willing to. To talk about. And the question with any president is, any politician is what kind of moral courage do you have? Because you're inevitably going to be confronted with a decision that's going to cost you something. This is really the heart of the question you're getting at is are you willing to do something that's going to cost you something if it's the right thing to do? One of the early decisions that we had to make in the White House was, are we going to move the US Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem? Every president since Ronald Reagan had promised to do it. We're going to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem. We're going to. We're going to just. We're going to acknowledge the fact that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel, and we're going to move our embassy there as a show of support for the Israelis and for that fact. And every single president prior to Trump reversed course and didn't do it, both Republican and Democrat. And I know why, because I saw the same thing. I was confronted with the same briefing that all of those other presidents got. You make this decision, and it's going to be mass chaos in the Middle East. People are going to lose their minds. Any hope for peace and stability in this region is going to be gone by you doing that. And every president was confronted with this conundrum. Do I do what I said I was going to do? Do I do this thing that's the right thing to do, or do I allow myself to be convinced that it's actually, I shouldn't do that because it's going to cost lives or it's Going to infect our interest in some other way. Trump was confronted with the same briefing, and at some point he said, hold on just a second. I think everyone here is confused about there being a debate over whether we're going to do this. I promised I was going to do it and we're doing it. So the conversation is over with. Start executing on doing it. So the President makes this decision and he announces it. And after he announces it, I'm standing with him in the outer Oval, just outside the Oval Office. There's a little room where his assistants sit there. And he comes out because I'm getting ready to take him to the next meeting that we're going to go into. And he looks up and there's a TV on the wall. And every TV in the West Wing has four panels on it, split in four. It'll have Fox, cnn, MSNBC and Fox Business. So you can see in one look what's the coverage? What's everybody focused on, you know, traditional media wise, at a moment's notice. You can see that all day.

[Cliff Sims]

They don't have the Sean Ryan show streaming in there.

[Sean Ryan]

They haven't got it streaming yet. You guys haven't gone 24.7live yet. We need to get a 24.7live stream of your life and we can get it put on the screens in the West Wing. We can make that happen. But he looks up on the screen and you can immediately see that every single panel is protests Middle East. There are people hanging him in effigy. There are people burning the American flag. There are people chanting, trump, Trump. You will see. Palestine will be free. He is watching this unfold. And it's the most visceral hatred toward a person that you can imagine. I'm watching a giant Trump head get lit on fire over there. I'm watching them stabbing, you know, Trump figure, things like that. The feeling that I had in that moment, I can only compare it to the same feeling that you might have if you see someone trip and fall on the sidewalk. My inclination is to look away because I don't want them to be embarrassed that I saw them fall. You know, when people fall and they look around and see, did anybody see that? I would rather like, act like I didn't see it so that they don't feel embarrassed. Not that the President had done anything wrong, but I had this kind of embarrassment feeling of like, man, look what they're saying about the person standing right next to me. It's just such visceral hatred. And I will never forget Trump's reaction to seeing that, though. He watches it for a minute, and then he looks at me and he goes, all right, what do we got next? Like, what's next on our schedule today? Didn't even acknowledge this hatred, unimaginable level of hatred happening for the whole world to see directed at him personally. And it rolled off his back like water off of a duck's back. And I realized in that moment that Trump, for all the things people can say about him, has a level of intestinal fortitude to do if he thinks something is the right thing to do. And you may disagree with him thinking that that is the right thing to do, you may have difference of opinion there. But if he thinks this is the right thing to do, he will endure any amount of criticism, hatred directed at him if he thinks it's the right thing. And that's why I and a lot of others who worked in the White House would have crawled over broken glass for Trump, because that's a level of moral courage that we were around politicians all day and these squishes who are just like, see which way the wind blows. Oh, people want me to go that way, I'm gonna go that way. And Trump wasn't like that. And it was really a rare thing to see among politicians, for sure.

[Cliff Sims]

I mean, that had to be. Was that an everyday occurrence for you to see?

[Sean Ryan]

I mean, things of that magnitude.

[Cliff Sims]

That's what they covered for four years. More than four years. I mean, it's what started probably a year out. I remember. I remember watching on the news, people shoving eggs in women's faces because they were. They were going to vote for him.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Cliff Sims]

And it was just nasty. It was five years of this, at least, and it continues on today. But, you know, so none of that. That stuff doesn't affect him. Like Kathy Griffin, you know, what did she do? Oh, yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

When she held his head, severed head up, things like that. Yeah. It doesn't affect him. With, I think, would surprise people because people, again, I think they have a little bit of a misconception of Trump because he's also someone who lets no slight go unanswered. You know, he'll attack someone on Twitter for some seemingly, you know, down in the weeds, like, why, you know, why are you raising that to the level of a response? So on one hand, he's like, will punch anybody who's confronting him, and on the other hand, is willing to endure the kind of criticism that I'm talking about. So it's a dichotomy a little bit there but there's some parts of it I think are a sport for him. The reason he would go after the host of Morning Joe or whomever on Twitter, it's the game. You can come after me, I'm going to come after you. Let's play the game. Let's go, let's do it. But on these issues of national security and international importance and things that impacted people's lives, I think he had the courage to do the right thing.

[Cliff Sims]

You had mentioned a couple of big names that had meetings in the White House that sounds like maybe you were previous to.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Cliff Sims]

One of them being Jeff Bezos. What can you talk about those conversations?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, the Bezos one was kind of innocuous. It was like he didn't spend a lot of time with Trump. He came in, I think it was for, like, one of the business councils that we had, you know, put together, and he was one of the people on there, and I met him and that kind of thing. The one that was. That really stuck with me was the Elon Musk interactions, though, because we had a meeting in the Cabinet Room and the President was working on what to do on infrastructure, you know, crumbling infrastructure all over the country. What am I going to do? I'm going to bring together all these people I knew from the private sector who can help bring fresh eyes to this problem and come with some interesting ideas. So he had a lot of his friends there who were big builders, who had done giant projects, built skyscrapers, all these things like, what are we going to do about American infrastructure? And one of the people was Elon Musk. So we're going around the room and people are talking about the things you would expect with infrastructure. Ports, bridges, roads, airports, obviously important things. We get to Elon Musk, and Elon wants to talk about a tunnel that would take people.

[Cliff Sims]

All these people are in one room at the same time? Oh, yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

All in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Yeah. All around the giant table. The President sits in the middle.

[Cliff Sims]

Fascinating.

[Sean Ryan]

The back of his chair in the Cabinet Room. If you ever look at pictures, the back of the President's chair is about that much taller than every other chair in the room. So you can see which chair is the President's. So the same meetings or same room where we'd have Cabinet meetings, we would bring in private sector leaders and things like that, and the President would use it as like a giant conference room, just like you used to see on the Apprentice when the President's sitting at a. Or Trump would sit at a table. And people would kind of surround the table around him. He'd kind of go around the room. He would do the same thing with private sector leaders. And so we get to Elon, and Elon says, I think I can get people from New York city to Washington, D.C. in 29 minutes. And we can do it via a tunnel hyperloop system. He's kind of explaining this whole. The whole thing. And Trump kind of leans back in his chair and he goes, Elon, you know, this guy's talking about bridges, this guy's talking about tunnels. I mean, you're talking about bridges, he's talking about roads. And this guy comes, he says, I've got a tunnel. I'm gonna bring a tunnel. You know, he starts doing this whole thing, like a Trump riff on like, I can't believe you're bringing a tunnel in here. And Trump goes, you know what, Elon? That sounds great. Why don't you just do it? Let's just do it. And it was just kind of a funny, awkward moment where everybody's looking around the room like, did the President just approve a tunnel from New York city to Washington, D.C. does he have the authority to approve a tunnel from New York to Washington D.C. i don't really know. But the thing that I always that stuck with me about that with Elon Musk is the things that you are able to do in life are often directly proportionate to the amount of criticism and ridicule that you're willing to take for doing them. And here's Elon Musk surrounded by some of the biggest business leaders in the world, and he comes with this really out of left field idea. And look, I don't know anything about the idea. Like, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't work. But he was willing to put himself out to the point that after the meeting, other business leaders were kind of poking fun privately amongst themselves about Elon coming in with this harebrained idea that he had. Well, you know what else was a harebrained idea? Tesla SpaceX. You know, go down the list of these things that Elon Musk has been able to bring to fruition. And I think there's a little Trump in that, too. Going back to him being willing to endure all the criticism on all the decisions that he made. Like, I find myself wanting to explain myself a lot when people misunderstand me or criticize one of the. Some of the things that I have done or said publicly or whatever, because I want to say, no, no, no, hear me out. Like, I have good Intentions here. I'm trying to do the right thing. Let me tell you why I think that. And I think that that can become debilitating if you spend all your time wanting to be understood by people where if you're going to truly do anything of any magnitude and significance, you're going to make enemies, you're going to have critics. And if you spend all your time trying to, oh, no, no, no, please understand me. You're not going to be able to keep a relentless focus on the mission, on the thing that you're trying to accomplish. And I think Elon has proven an ability to focus on the mission in the midst of people sniping at him left and right. That I found really stuck with me after I left the White House. Seeing him not just endure that from the public, but even from his peers, so to speak, of like these big business leaders in the Cabinet Room.

[Cliff Sims]

Interesting. Very interesting. I got. I just have some random stuff I want to ask you. Because you've been involved in so much. I wanted to ask you about the football, the nuclear football. What is, what can you tell us about it?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. So nuclear football for people that don't know. If you ever see a picture of the President, chances are a few meters behind the President will be walking a military aide holding a briefcase, a leather briefcase, and it was nicknamed the nuclear football because it's, you know, with him everywhere, in case something happens, we need to launch a nuclear war, he can, he can crack that thing open and get it going. So I was. It's another one of those things I was very curious about when I got there, like, well, what's in the nuclear football? And, you know, actually I was standing in the West Wing one day with the President's military aide, and I jokingly said, let me hold that thing for a minute. And to my surprise, he let me.

[Cliff Sims]

Are you serious?

[Sean Ryan]

So for about five seconds, I held a 45 pound nuclear football at my side. And so I've experienced what it feels like to hold the nuclear football. But before anybody freaks out that I, for five seconds had the fate of the world in my hands. A lot of what's inside the nuclear football remains classified. But what I can say is there isn't a giant red button in there that you just crack it open and like, boom. And we go to nuclear war. The purpose, first and foremost, is to verify the President's identity. So everywhere the President goes, he carries with him a little laminated card called the Biscuit. And on the Biscuit there are codes that are his Verification codes for his identity. So in the event where there was an emergency, where the nuclear football gets cracked open, the first thing that happens is communications are opened up to the national military command center and the President verifies his identity with the codes that are on the Biscuit. Then from there I have heard it described in media as a Waffle House menu of pre planned nuclear strike options. So you can imagine, you know, a bunch of different options of pre planned nuclear strike options. The scariest thing that I've learned about it all is one researcher estimated that there may only be a 6 to 7 minute window in which the President would have to make a decision about what to do if someone were to have launched a nuclear strike on the United States. And the scariest of all potential nuclear strikes is what we call a bolt out of the blue strike, which is there hasn't been anything kind of leading up to this moment at all. There haven't been rising tensions that led to this moment. This is just a, out of nowhere, somebody with nuclear weapons just launches it out of the clear blue sky one day and we're suddenly confronted with there's a nuclear missile flying toward the United States right now. So in a bolt out of the blue scenario, this is where, you know, the researchers say there may only be a six or seven minute window where the President has to decide the future of the world in that. And it's, and it's very, very scary. You know, people do not have an appreciation today the way that I think they did at the height of the Cold War, which even precedes, you know, us really of the danger of nuclear war and just how quickly we could lose everything, everything that we know of as life. For the few people that would survive a major nuclear exchange would not be a life worth living. The living would envy the dead in that scenario. Yeah, it's very, very scary. And I don't think we have an appreciation for how close, how real that possibility is that that could happen.

[Cliff Sims]

People can't even fathom. You know, we have it pretty good here. Yeah, I mean it's just, it's so far out of the realm that I mean, yeah, I would think that there would be just about every possible scenario that a think tank could think of is in that with predetermined decisions.

[Sean Ryan]

Yep, yep. Because you want to try to, for all of these things, you want to try to plan in a non emotional state so that when you're met with a crisis, you can fall back on the great preparation, planning work and make a good decision. In the middle of the middle of a crisis. The thing that I don't envy any president is how do you make a good decision in that window of time with those stakes? Literally humanity hangs in the balance in some ways. And you're trying to decide like first of all, you're trying to take in the information of like, well, what's the strike coming toward us look like? Is it a nuclear missile OR Is it 200 nuclear missiles? And then, okay, what's the response to that? That's going to keep us from ending the planet, but also protecting American national security in some way. I mean, it's just an impossible decision making matrix that you're confronted with. I mean, it's unimaginable. And some of the things that stuck with me the most from my time working in the office of the Director of National Intelligence were the planning for those, for different scenarios. One day when I was at the office of the Director of National Intelligence, we got to go inside one of these so called doomsday bunkers. The government has places around the country. What happens inside of them still remains highly classified. Some of the locations themselves remain classified. But it's basically if there was a crisis scenario in which the government had to be reconstituted outside of Washington D.C. these are the places that we, you would go. And so I was taken to one of those places that was hundreds of hundreds of feet underground. When we got there, a giant metal blast door opened in the side of a mountain and we kind of go inside and we're down to these tunnels that take us into basically an underground city that had everything from like a made to order grill where you could order hot dogs and hamburgers and pizza and stuff in there, to living quarters and office space and computer space. I saw where my computer would be in that, you know, a scenario like that. And some of it was kind of like off of the movies where you see, you know, a room where they're monitoring a much different televisions, things that are going on all over the country. Kind of a watch center there, conference room space where we went in and we kind of talked through some of these different things of, you know, what happens if this in this scenario, what happens in that scenario. Just to be prepared for what they call cog, Continuity of Government COG or coop. Coop, Continuity of Operations. And so the government spends a great deal of time planning for these scenarios so that if we're ever confronted with them, we could have a competent response to them. And in some ways I found myself very surprised about the quality of preparation that we have. And in other scenarios I found myself terrified that were that to actually happen, things are going to descend into chaos and we're probably not ready for those things. So it was an eye opening experience to say the least. It's kind of like doomsday prepping on the highest possible level.

[Cliff Sims]

Wow. What's the, I mean, what's the entrance look like? If you don't mind me asking if you can. I mean, is it, is it, does it blend in with the environment? I'm talking about going back up a couple hundred feet.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. So you.

[Cliff Sims]

Or is it a little thing out in the woods? I mean, what is, what is it?

[Sean Ryan]

There are. The one that we went to. If you had satellite imagery, you would be able to see that it's a facility. Okay. There's a helicopter landing pad there, there's some space up there, but you couldn't even get to it.

[Cliff Sims]

Gotcha.

[Sean Ryan]

You know, we did not fly into it, we drove into it. But by the time that you've driven there, you're so far off of any beaten path, you know, you would never get to the point that you could even see what the entrance look like outside of like satellite imagery. But there are a couple of these that are not classified that I, that I would encourage people to look at. It's really fascinating stuff. You can look up Raven Rock, you could look up Mount Weather. There's a couple of them that come to mind for me. Raven Rock, Raven Rock is in Pennsylvania. Mount Weather is in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

[Cliff Sims]

Okay.

[Sean Ryan]

So you can go look at these things. They're fascinating. Anybody that's interested in this kind of stuff, you can go down a million rabbit holes with them in conspiracy theories and all kinds of stuff.

[Cliff Sims]

Are they all over the country? Are they all within a couple minutes flight time of dc?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, there are places that are in different parts of the country for sure. But the ones that would be used to kind of relocate the US Government are at least close enough where you're far enough out from if a disaster had happened in Washington D.C. that you're kind of away from it, but close enough that you could, you could have a chance of getting there.

[Cliff Sims]

Who would have access to that? Would it be, would it be just the President and his, who he picks?

[Sean Ryan]

Security advisor, intelligence people. There are plans for that too. Who are the people that get to go? I say get to go. I mean, it's a terrible scenario if you're having to go. If you do end up going, it's the people that you would Expect a lot of the senior national security folks would be there with support staff. There's also staff that is there 24, seven, Congress, Senate, some leadership, for sure. There are evacuation plans for them to be a part of those, definitely, because you not only need to reconstitute the executive branch, you need to maintain the legislative branch as well, and the judicial branch as well. So there are evacuation plans for every branch of government that are fully fleshed out. But this is one of those things when we first got to the White House that even Trump was interested in. And there's a way that I'm not gonna say exactly how, cuz I'm actually not sure how sensitive this is. So I'll just kind of stay away from it. There's a way that you can tell who is gonna evacuate in different scenarios. And Trump realized, he noticed this thing and asked what it was and found out that it was evacuation protocol under these kind of scenarios. Who's going here, who's going there, who's not. And so at that point, I was just. I was a communications aide in the White House. I wasn't at the office of the Director of National Intelligence. I wasn't one who would be evacuated. And so for the rest of the day, Trump would point out who in the meetings would get to go if something bad happened. And he would be like, cliff's not gonna be there, guys. So say, make your peace with him now. Make sure to say bye to Cliff before we leave today, because if something happens, he's not going to be there. So you got to get a kick out of that.

[Cliff Sims]

I'm curious to know how important the power grid was when it comes to national security.

[Sean Ryan]

Very much. I think this is one of the areas where we're more vulnerable than people would realize. Industrial cybersecurity in general is an area where we've got a lot of vulnerabilities around the country. Our infrastructure does. And I'm actually getting ready in about a month to chair a hearing on China's preparation for crisis scenarios or potential war and things like that.

[Cliff Sims]

When is this?

[Sean Ryan]

That'll be in mid June.

[Cliff Sims]

Where's this?

[Sean Ryan]

In D.C. the U.S. china Commission is hosting it, so it'll be in Congress, in one of their hearing rooms there. And one of the things that we're kind of learning about is what is China doing to prepare for things like this and where are their vulnerabilities and then how are we preparing and where are our vulnerabilities in this regard? And this is one of the things where Cyber espionage or cyber attacks or cyber warfare. These are things that have existed in theory for a long time. They've also existed, even when they're happening below the threshold of war, in kind of a gray zone for a long time. And the question is, what's going to happen in the event of some conflict? What role is cyber war going to play in that? And the first time we've really been able to see this in some ways is what's happened in Ukraine with the Russians, because the Russians have pretty robust cyber capabilities. And we've seen them have some successes there. We've seen them not be as successful and maybe not done some things that we thought they might have done. But in the United States, one of the areas where there is a lot of focus, but I think needs to be more focus in what are we doing to harden our infrastructure, what are we doing to our power grid to ensure that we're not vulnerable in the event of, you know, war or an attack of some point from a cyber perspective, that we're not extremely vulnerable. Because right now, I think we're more vulnerable there than we would like to admit.

[Cliff Sims]

Yeah, I've interviewed. I'm really into the China threat in the power grid, and I've interviewed a handful of people on the subject. And it sounds like we're extremely vulnerable right now. Very vulnerable. Like it's a good possibility it could happen. Would you agree with that?

[Sean Ryan]

I would agree with that. In the event of conflict, that that would be a good possibility.

[Cliff Sims]

What are their vulnerabilities? What would we do if they shut our power off?

[Sean Ryan]

Well, in some ways I'm not gonna talk about it. And in other ways, I don't know.

[Cliff Sims]

Okay.

[Sean Ryan]

And these are the kind of eventualities that are. People are planning for these things. But the thing that's difficult is how civilization as a whole is so dependent on electricity at this point, how quickly it would affect our food supply, people's ability to get access to food and clean water, and all of these different kind of necessities of life and how quickly we could devolve into chaos here domestically, irregardless of kind of what's going on externally, who's attacking us. So I think you're spot on. This is an area of extreme concern and vulnerability. We need to do a lot more on.

[Cliff Sims]

What about the water supply? Same.

[Sean Ryan]

Same.

[Cliff Sims]

Same stuff, Same.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. Anything that's an industrial control system at this point. There are people, really smart people, who are devoting their lives to this problem, but it needs a lot more focus on the government side.

[Cliff Sims]

Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, Cliff, let's take a break. When I come back, I would like to talk about your book. I think it would be best to start with the lawsuit and then talk about why you were getting sued by Trump and then why he redacted it and then we'll get into the weeds. Let's do it. Perfect.

[Unknown]

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[Cliff Sims]

All right, Cliff, we're back from the break, and we're getting ready to dive into kind of why you wrote the books. And. But first, I think it's important to talk about why you got sued by Trump and then why he redacted that and invited you back on.

[Sean Ryan]

So there's a funny story. When my wife and I left D.C. we were moving back to Alabama, and we were buying a house. And the mortgage guy calls and he says, hey, we're doing our due diligence on the mortgage here. And one of the things we had to search was, is there any pending litigation going on? And I noticed here that it says that you're engaged and you're involved in a lawsuit right now. And now my mind is. I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I am. And he said, well, it says here that it's Donald John Trump, and is that the President of the United States that you're involved in a lawsuit with? And I was like, oh, yeah. But it's. It's no big deal. It's going to be fine. Don't worry about it. It's just a misunderstanding. It's just going to be good. It's going to be good. Long story short, they didn't give us a mortgage. They couldn't do it. They couldn't do it because of the pending litigation. So that was kind of like, ah, man. But, yes, I did get sued by the President of the United States. It was not the most fun experience of my life, but basically, I had left the White House, and I decided to write memoir of my time there. And a lot of it has been like. A lot of it was because of the things we've been talking about in this interview, like misconceptions about what it was really like, what Trump is really like, you know, And I. And I really wanted to give what I was calling the first honest insiders account, because you had books that fit into a few different categories, you had haters. People were gonna leave and just say, oh, Trump's the worst thing that ever happened. And it's, oh, it's so bad. And then next thing you know, they got themselves a CNN or MSNBC contract, and, you know, you get what's going on there. Then you had people that were on the opposite end of that spectrum who really didn't talk about anything meaningful because they didn't want to even be the slightest bit critical or say, we could have done this better, or, we could have done better. They're just totally sycophantic and like, you know, you're not getting an honest look at things there, no matter who it is. And then the third was journalists, most of whom are dishonest. But even the honest ones are subservient to their sources. They're not actually in the room. They have to have somebody tell them what happened in that room. And so it's always a secondhand account. And so what I wanted to do was give a firsthand account. It was an honest look of what the first year and a half of the Trump administration, what the White House was all about. And my intention was not to attack Trump. In fact, my view was if people know what it's really like in there, they're actually gonna have a more favorable view of the President when they get the real inside scoop on it than they do from what they're getting through the filter of the media. But one of the variables was the staff in the White House was not a cohesive unit. And part of that came from when the president wins. Number one at the time, he's not a D.C. person. He doesn't know anybody in D.C. all he knows is, well, I've got this campaign team who's been with me, and now I've got the RNC, kind of more establishment Republicans, the kind of D.C. people. I only have a handful of people on my campaign team. It's not that many people. I'm gonna have to staff a full government. I need to bring these people in. And we're going to try to build a government with these kind of different factions, so to speak. And what happened very quickly was instead of coming together and uniting and being able to kind of work together, there was these factions that broke off that were all kind of self serving. And you had a dynamic where the establishment folks come in and they're trying the best they can to get rid of the campaign people who they look down on. Because a lot of them were like me. I never worked in the government before. I never worked in the White House before. I was an entrepreneur. I was, you know, I was doing things in the private sector. I was from some other part of the country. I didn't, you know, and I went, cause I believed in Trump and like, let's go try to accomplish something here. But I didn't know how to govern. I had never governed before. And they want you to think governing is some kind of superpower, that only the chosen Few in D.C. know how to do this. Sean, you wouldn't know if you came to D.C. you wouldn't know what to do because you're not one of the chosen ones. You know, it's this very egotistical, condescending point of view that these people have toward people who've been successful in the private sector and never done it before. So this just like it was just nonstop fighting. And so the book was titled Team of Vipers, and it was a playoff of Lincoln's team of rivals. And so he famously had this team of rivals. He brought different people together, and they were his cabinet and they worked together. And this team didn't gel in that way. It was constant fighting. And so one of the themes of the book were those dynamics and how they were kind of working. And so when the book comes out, the president has immediately has the false impression that I'm attacking him, that I'm gonna be one of the ones who has now left and is now gonna stab him in the back and say all of these terrible things about him. And so he sued me when the book came out and basically in violation of a non disclosure agreement that we had signed on the campaign. And so I countersued him because I had to. I didn't want to sue the guy, but I had countersued him on first Amendment grounds and saying that, you know, as a government employee, as long as I don't disclose classified information, you know, I'm not bound by, you know, an NDA basically assigned in the private sector that apply to my Simon Government service. That was the gist of it. Pretty soon, the President sees me on tv, sees things being written about the book, sees the things I'm saying, and realizes that I'm not attacking him. I'm not even at the time when we're in the middle of a lawsuit, you know, I'm still very good friends with Don Jr. At the time as become one of my best friends. You know, Jared and Ivanka were my friends. Like, everybody kind of understood what was going on. The President had been given a false impression of the book by some of the people inside of the White House that I criticized that were my former colleagues. And they used that opportunity to try to get back at me by spinning him up to come after me. So realizes that I'm not. We kind of make peace there after that brief legal dispute. And he asked me to come up.

[Cliff Sims]

Is that a phone call?

[Sean Ryan]

I don't want to get into the. Yes, we did talk. I won't talk about the details, but we had a very good and very funny conversation and put all that to rest. Pretty quickly. And he asked me to come back to do a couple of things. One, to run speech writing for the Republican national convention in 2020. And I did that. And then to come back as. As Deputy dni. So it's a full circle kind of. I've been in, I've been out, and I've been back. I've done it. I've done it all at this point. So that's the story of the lawsuit.

[Cliff Sims]

What is it that you wanted to convey in that book?

[Sean Ryan]

What it's really like? I wanted to just tell the truth about, like, you see, this is the most talked about story in the world. Everybody wants to know what it's really like in there. Well, here's what it's actually like in the room with Donald Trump. Here's what it's actually like to work with his staff. Here are some moments that have been covered throughout our time in the White House that were covered wrong. And I'll tell you what really happened. I mean, I'll tell you one of the things that was like a huge revelation to me, and maybe it shouldn't have been. When I started being in rooms that reporters were writing about, that journalists were talking about, I realized how wrong so much of what they're saying about what happened in those rooms was. I mean, I'd see these things about, like, something that happened in some meeting. I'm like, I was in that meeting. And that's not even remotely what it. Like what happened. And maybe this shouldn't be a revelation because, like, I've always felt like there's kind of a pervasive liberal bias in the media, but I didn't have a full appreciation for it. And it's hard to have a full appreciation for it until they're writing about things you actually saw firsthand and you're like, that's just total bs.

[Cliff Sims]

Is there one. Is there anything specific that sticks out into your head?

[Sean Ryan]

Well, so there's one that I wrote about in my book that made me. And this is maybe a small thing, but it illustrates the broader point. Who's the most famous American journalist perhaps of all time? Bob Woodward. Woodward and Bernstein. Watergate. They're the ones who broke the story of all the things that were happening Watergate during the Nixon administration. Well, Bob Woodward wrote two or three books about the Trump era, and there's a scene in one of his books where he talks about. It's during the campaign when Steve Bannon first joined the Trump campaign. And there's this scene where Steve walks into the 14th floor of Trump Tower into the war Room, and there's nobody there except for one person. His name's Andy Sarabian. He was the war room director. And Steve's like, where is everybody? And Andy says, you know, oh, well, this is everybody there. We don't really have a team. You know, basically, it's like this whole scenario of dialogue that happens. And Steve, you know, dramatically says, I want everybody back in here from this moment until the day the election happens. It's this, like, dramatic scene of we're gonna rally the troops and we're gonna have everybody in this room, and it's gonna be a whole thing really dynamic story, except for the fact that it never happened. Andy Sarabian is one of my best friends. Seeing this book, I'm like, did this happen, Sarabian? He's like, dude, nothing even remotely like that ever, ever happened. And Bob Woodward never called Andy Sarabian to ask him if this story ever happened. I don't know where he got this story. There's only two people in the room, Steve Bannon and Andy Sarabian. And one of the two people in the room he never even talked to to find out if this story even happened. I don't know if he talked to Steve Bannon or not. I'm just saying, at least one of the people in the middle of this story. He never even called to ask about this scene. And yet it's a prominent scene in one of his big bestselling books. This is the most famous American journalist in history, and that's how little he cared about getting the story right. Now imagine, you know, the Bible says, if you're faithful in small things, be faithful in big things. If you're not faithful in small things, you won't be faithful in big things. If Bob Woodward couldn't care enough to get that story right, what makes you think that he would get any story of any meaning and substance right? The answer to that is he doesn't give a crap about the truth. What he really cares about is what's going to move books and what's going to get clicks and what's going to drive conversation. And the incentives in the media right now are so perverse that they are not. They are not leading to outcomes that produce truth, that get us closer to truth and understanding, which is why the podcast format has blown up, because it gives you an opportunity to really dig in and, like, have a conversation with somebody and try to try to find common ground or try to find truth. That the current media environment doesn't is not conducive. So I saw that extrapolated across name an issue and topic, especially with Trump because he's such a divisive figure. So the media had a strange relationship with Trump because on one hand, they needed him to prop up their business. He drove interest. People were clicking on things and watching things, and now and he's gone. Those numbers go way down. But they also hate his guts because he doesn't just like, roll over and take. He'll punch them back in the mouth twice as hard as they punched him. And so it's a really difficult dynamic there, but none of it leads to getting closer to the truth, that's for sure.

[Cliff Sims]

It sounds like some of the things that were going on in the White House didn't really align with your values as an individual. What were some of those things?

[Sean Ryan]

One of the things I talked about in my first book was most people who write a book are the heroes of their own story. And I'm not the hero in my book because it was not a book that was like, oh, I saw things that I didn't agree with. And I was standing athwart history yelling, stop. And I was so brave. And so what I learned about myself was I was much more susceptible to the attraction of power than I otherwise would have ever known, because I never had power. I grew up with nothing, you know, in a working class family. I didn't know. I'd never met anybody who worked in the government, much less somebody in the White House. I'd never met anybody who had money. What do people do if they have money? I don't know. I've never met anybody who. Who has money. I've never met a business owner. I've never met an entrepreneur. I've never met a politician. I've never met. Never met anybody. So you only know the universe that you've been exposed to. So if you've lived your whole life and you never had any power, so to speak of, how are you going to respond when that ultimate test comes? Because power is the ultimate test. Somebody wrote about Lincoln's legacy. He said, any man can endure hard times. You want to know what a man's really made of? Give him power. And so what I learned in the White House was I was much more susceptible to the allure of power than I thought. And what does that look like? Well, in the White House, there's an org chart just like any other organization. The chief of staff, you know, president, chief of staff. Everything kind of flows down from there. In the Trump White House, that org chart existed, but the real org chart was Donald Trump in the middle. And anyone that he knows is a spoke off of him. He's like the hub of activity. And most of us would do anything that it took to be and remain one of those spokes. And I was the same way. If I saw an opportunity to stabilize my colleague in the back because they were encroaching on my lane a little bit, I'd do it if that's what it took to make sure to get them out so that I'm going to maintain my proximity, my access, those kinds of things. So it's not that I was witness to things that were oh so horrible that I couldn't believe were happening. It was that my own character was being revealed in these situations that I'd never been confronted with before. So I wrestle with that a lot in my book. One of the great things about working in the Trump administration as a Christian is I was never asked to do anything that violated my sincerely held beliefs. And a lot of the policy things that we were advancing were things that I had been hoping would happen for years and years. And the president rescinded the Mexico City policy which funds abortions overseas with US taxpayer money. He told the Department of Justice that we're no longer going to go after the nonprofit status of faith based nonprofits that speak into political issues, which had been a threat that many churches and faith based organizations were worried about for years and years. He you know, right now at the State Department, whether you like it or not, your pronouns will be in your email signature, whether you like it or not, automatically in the Trump administration, something like that would never happen. A lot of the power of these DEI offices that exist now and imposing all this woke ideology on government workers and bullying them into submission because they're scared to speak up about it. Things like that never would have happened in the Trump administration. There is a My favorite monument in Washington D.C. is the Jefferson Memorial. Jefferson is my favorite founder. He's the most fascinating, interesting person I think from that era to read. And there's a quote inside the dome of the Jefferson Memorial. I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against any tyranny over the minds of men. I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against any tyranny over the minds of man. What that means is any government censorship, oppression or attempt to subjugate someone's freedom of thought and expression, religion, sincerely held beliefs of any kind is tyranny. And then any true patriot will stand up to that. And right now the government that we have in place is trying to impose a tyranny of the mind on millions of Americans and including the government workers who work in this government who would don't want to abide by things like calling a man a woman that is not a woman. And they are being forced to decide, am I just going to go along to get along? Because I've got a family to feed, and these are tough choices. I'm not casting blame on these, on the people who do just put their head down and don't have the means to fight those kind of things, that they're just a career government employee in there making ends meet every month, and they gotta decide whether they're gonna take a stand on stuff like this or not. In the Trump administration, things like that would never happen. The president would never have allowed people to be tyrannized in that way. And yet he's the one that they try to say is an authoritarian wannabe.

[Cliff Sims]

Yeah, yeah. It's the mental gymnastics we're seeing people perform today that's. It's something. How long did it take for you to be in the White House before you started seeing your character shift?

[Sean Ryan]

I don't know. It's really one of those things where I, in retrospect more than in the moment, that I am able to look back and say, I lost something there. So in the moment, I mean, one of the things I found in life is very few people think they're a bad person or think they're doing a bad thing. Most people rationalize the decisions they make, even the bad decisions with something. And so I had a million rationalizations for why I would stab a colleague in the back to maintain access. I'm giving him better advice. They're trying to give him the wrong advice. I'm trying to do the right thing for the President. I'm trying to do the right thing for the country. And in reality, in retrospect, a lot of times, I was trying to do the right thing for me and maintain my position. You know, you're trying to justify all.

[Cliff Sims]

Of your decisions that you maybe weren't particularly happy with. Yeah, okay.

[Sean Ryan]

Definitely.

[Cliff Sims]

I think everybody does that.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I think everybody. That's right. Very rarely does anybody in life say, you know what? I'm a bad person and I'm going to do a bad thing. Right now. Most people rationalize even the bad decisions that they make.

[Cliff Sims]

Yeah, yeah. Was. So there wasn't any, Any. Any one particular thing that kind of made you. I mean, when did you. What was it what was it? Even looking back in retrospect, what. What was the. What was it? What made you look back and go, man, I'm not. I'm not really happy with how my character changed. I'm not really happy with the end influence and what it kind of.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, one of the main things that happens when people. I think there's a lot of good about people from outside of D.C. coming to D.C. people in the private sector, fresh blood in the government. The flip side of that is.

[Cliff Sims]

You.

[Sean Ryan]

Don'T know how your character is going to respond to these things. And so you leave your support system wherever you're from. For me, my church, small group, people that couldn't care less that I work for the President of the United States. You know, the people that, you know, my son goes and plays with their kids, and, you know, they know, you know, all the things about me, good, bad, and otherwise. And Suddenly I'm in D.C. and I don't have that anymore. And so I think part of it was losing those people that were around me who would say, hey, what are you doing? Or like, hey, I think you're looking at this wrong. Or, I think you've lost yourself a little bit in this thing. Like, who's gonna be that person? Certainly in a city like Washington, D.C. to say something like that. You and I were talking off camera a little bit. There are cities around the country that represent certain kind of mortal sins, if you will. You've got Las Vegas for sex. You've got LA for fame, notoriety. You've got New York City for money, greed, and You've got Washington, D.C. for power. It attracts a certain type of person who wants to go to Washington, D.C. because the only thing going there is power. So it attracts the people that are susceptible to that attraction already, and then it gives them, like a junkie, the drug that they are already addicted to before they even know they want it that bad. Like, oh, you came here to get a little power to be a part of this. We'll give you a little bit. Oh, you like that? You want a little bit more? Let's keep going. That's the thing that I didn't have any exposure to. And so for me, it was power. And I never would have said, first of all, who am I to even have? Like, what power did I even have? I'm a White House communications aide or I'm the Deputy DNI or whatever. The president's the one with the power. But it's the proximity to that that is intoxicating. Everything you do Plays out on TV screens around the country and around the world. Every single person you talk to wants to know, what's it like? What's he like? What are you doing there? What's it? And you know, it feeds that ego nonstop. It's constant. Like, so if you don't have anybody around you anymore who doesn't give a crap about that, it's just constantly being reinforced to the point that you just even forget that that's not what things are all about.

[Cliff Sims]

You didn't have anybody to ground you. Well, you know, nobody does over there. Sounds like.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I mean, my wife, I didn't change the way that I spoke to my wife coming home, my wife wasn't like, what's wrong with you? Why are you treating me differently? So it was kind of like siloed in a way. It's professional ambition. And in some, or, or in some ways it's even things that the world doesn't say is bad. So if you're an alcoholic, that's bad. If you're a drug addict, that's bad. Oh, you run around cheating on your wife, that's bad. But if you're really ambitious and you're trying to fight your way up the ladder, you're trying to build a company, or you're trying to do something remarkable, who says that's bad? Nobody stops you and says, don't climb so high. They say, wow, how'd you get there? Keep going like, man, wow, that's amazing. Wow, you made it. You know, and it's not that ambition is bad or that wanting to achieve things or wanting to do things of significance is bad. But there has to be a check on that. And the check in my life is my relationship with God. So the thing that a relationship with God does for you is it is an ever present reminder that you are not the most powerful, you are not the most important. There is a higher authority than you are, and it forces you to be subservient to something other than yourself. Everything in this life that most people go through their day doing is an attempt to get for themselves more comfort, more money, more power, more fame, more, more for me, build myself up. And everything about the Christian faith says, I'm not great. He's great. I'm not important, he's important. And so if you're in a daily, if you have a daily, if you have a relationship with God and you are reminded of those things daily, it helps you keep these other things in check. Your ambition's in the proper place. The importance you Put on your work is in the proper place. That's what I was missing. And I would justify it any number of ways. I don't have time to be in the Bible today. I've got 46 briefings that I gotta get ready for. The President of the United States is depending on me to come in here and be able to talk with authority about these issues. I don't have time for that right now, but thankfully I did that some other time. You know, I've got that filed away somewhere. And, you know, and I wouldn't necessarily make a conscious decision so often like that. But over time, that's what your actions say. That's where I kind of lost myself in it, I think.

[Cliff Sims]

Are these.

[Sean Ryan]

Why did you leave? So I left the White House initially because, you know, I had helped. Been a part of orchestrating other people getting pushed out of there who were my rivals. And the day came when one of my rivals helped orchestrate getting me pushed out of there. So when John Kelly became the Chief of staff at the. At the White House, you know, we. We butted heads pretty strongly. He tried to get me to leave, previously tried to make me the assistant secretary of an agency. And I declined because I said I didn't come to D.C. to work for the government. I came to work for the President. And then I helped run the confirmation for Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State. And through that process, Pompeo asked me if I would come be his senior advisor at the State Department. And so I thought, you know what? Here's a good kind of off ramp. I'll go have a new experience at State being senior advisor to the Secretary of State. And so I resigned from the White House to go and take that job. And then John Kelly is White House Chief of staff, blocked me being able to go ultimately to the State Department. And that's how I ended up out of government before coming back later.

[Cliff Sims]

So in retrospect, do you think that was a good thing?

[Sean Ryan]

Best. Best thing that could have happened. Best thing that could have happened for several reasons. One, it's like going cold turkey. If you're. You're a drug addict and like, you just got. I had one day I was walking into the West Wing, and the next day I wasn't. And there wasn't no going back. It, like, broke that. So that was really helpful, healthy. The other thing is getting blocked from going to take this, like, amazing dream job at the State Department. Was that the book that I wrote that made me wrestle with a lot of these Things never would have happened. The lawsuit with the President never would have happened. Which ended up being a great thing for me to have experienced that for several reasons. Number one, the President attacked me on Twitter in the middle of all of that. And when he tweeted about me, I was actually sitting in a live CNN interview. And the interviewer said, and the President has just tweeted about you. Would you like for us to read it live on the air.

[Cliff Sims]

Man?

[Sean Ryan]

And the President, you know, he attacked me, whatever. And the interviewer said, how would you like to respond to that?

[Cliff Sims]

What was the tweet.

[Sean Ryan]

Cliff Sims? I'm not going to get it exactly right, but this is the gist of it. Cliff Simms, who I hardly knew, wrote a book with made up stories in fiction. He acts like he was an insider, but he was nothing but a gopher. You know, he was a nobody. You know, that kind of thing. Which in retrospect, shout out to the President for, like, I know when his heart's really in wanting to get after somebody. And he didn't. I can tell he did it, but he didn't, like, give it his all. It could have been much nastier. He could have been much more hardcore about it. But the interviewer asked me, what do you. How do you want to respond to that? And in the moment, I said, my identity is not wrapped up in being a Trump staffer or in anything that the President or anyone says that I am. My identity is found in Jesus Christ and who he says that I am, and he says that I'm his. And I meant it. It was the right answer. But in retrospect, I don't think that that was an accurate reflection of where I was at in my life at that point, because it hurt me a lot more than I was willing to admit publicly because my career mattered so much to me. And getting attacked by the President of the United States in that way bruised my ego much more substantially than I would have admitted. And the reason that was such an important experience is God created work. The first thing that we see Jesus, or that we see God doing in Genesis 1 is creating, created the whole world. And it is part of his plan for our lives, that we would reflect his character by being many creators ourselves. And so work is an important thing. But it also says in the Bible that, do anything as if you were doing it unto God, not for man. And so when I left the White House, I had realized I had found my purpose in that job. And I thought that defined me and what I was able to realize is no matter what you are doing, if you do it unto God, you can find purpose in that. I mean, I remember thinking, like, especially even after I left the last day, the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated president, I was standing in the lobby of the CIA, and Inauguration Day is basically a government holiday. It may be a government holiday. Like, nobody's there near empty halls. And I'm walking around in there because I'd never really taken a lot of time to really soak it all in. And I'm looking at the Memorial wall, and I'm looking at the Book of Honor with the names of the people who've given their lives in service to their country there, and the CIA seal in the hallway there. And I'm walking all the way through. I'm looking at the CIA museum. I'm going through stuff I've never had a reason to have look at while I'm there, just to kind of soak it all in. Because I thought that the day that I walk out these doors, that I'm. It's never going to be. Nothing I do will ever be this cool, this important, this great again. And that was ego talking. But it's also not true. Because if you are truly doing anything that you're doing in life as unto God and not for men, it doesn't matter if you're working at the White House or at a coffee house, you can find meaning in that work, because your work becomes an overflow of worship. And it changed my perspective on work, which is why I genuinely think that was the best thing that could have possibly happened to me. Being attacked by the President of the United States in that way and losing the things that I had allowed to define me in my job, because otherwise, what would have ever broken that mentality in me? And so a big part of the book that I've written now is talking about wrestling with that in a way so that other people can have the same perspective that it took me going through that to gain for myself.

[Cliff Sims]

Interesting. So it sounds like your first book became a New York Times bestseller damn near overnight. Mm. And you went on all kinds of interviews. I mean, what. What was it. What was. What was it specifically about? That book that just made it take off like that?

[Sean Ryan]

It was about Trump. It was a Trump insider writing about Trump. So it's the biggest story in the world, and all the people wanted to hear about it, and all the news outlets want to cover it. And, you know, it's really, really hilarious now, reading the Amazon reviews of that book, because it's two camps of people. It's liberals angry because they thought the book was going to eviscerate Trump, and so they bought it, and then they read it, and they're like, he didn't go like, where is it? They couldn't find it. And then it's conservatives who didn't read the book, but, you know, understandably thought that it was gonna be an attack on Trump, attacking me for turning my back on Trump. And, you know, the. Interspersed in there are some people who actually did read the book, who were like, actually, this is a great book. You know, whatever. So it's really kind of. Really kind of funny. But, man, I never would have imagined I would be doing the Late show with Stephen Colbert or going on the View with the ladies of the View, but there I was.

[Cliff Sims]

How was the View?

[Sean Ryan]

Be honest. It was interesting. It was interesting. You know, I normally on interviews, I don't like to meet the hosts beforehand because this is probably unfair. But I saw Jake Tapper one time at CNN interviewing the deputy campaign manager for Trump. And prior to the interview, cameras aren't rolling. He's like, buddy, buddy with the guy, you know, oh, man, we ought to get our kids together and get them to play. And, man, it's great to see you. And, man, you guys are doing great, man. Looking like Trump's doing really well. He's gonna, you know, whatever, like, has this buddy, buddy conversation. And the second that the lights came on, he said, how can you as a father allow your daughters to be in the same room as Donald Trump? You know, stuff something to that effect. It was just, like, jarring. And I'm like, two seconds ago, you were this guy's buddy, and now you're like. So it made me not want to interact with people before the interviews because I was like, are they softening me up here to then just try to give me the okie doke once I get on there? So at the View, I'm, like, sequestered in a. You know, backstage back there waiting for them. I don't want to meet anybody, and I'm just kind of in the room, so they finally bring me out. And it was funny because, I mean, I got cheered, I got booed. I got everything in between that you could possibly imagine on that show. But I really. I think I got the audience early on in the interview because I was talking about the book, and I said, you know, I would compare myself to Eminem in 8 mile when he gives the big battle rap at the end where he basically says, Every terrible thing about himself, and the other person doesn't know what to say because now he's already said all these bad things about himself. How could he, like, attack him in this rap battle? And that's basically what this book is. Is like, I'll tell you everything good, bad, and ugly about me and everything else that happened there. And so it kind of softened up the audience, and they, you know, we had a good time, and the interview was mostly uneventful. I mean, I remember one of the questions being something to the effect of, you know, we get all these former Trump people that come on here and they want to go on an apology tour for working for Trump, and why should we take your apology? And I said, I'm not here to apologize. I'm proud that I worked for the President. I'm proud to work for the White House and American people, and I'm proud that the president that I served was Donald Trump. And they were just, like, befuddled by the whole thing. Like, I can't make. There's like, the cognitive dissonance inside of their own head. It's just like, I can't make it. Don't worry.

[Cliff Sims]

I don't need your forgiveness.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, thank you, God. Yes, exactly. Thank you so much for bestowing your forgiveness upon me, but I'm good. And. But, you know, the thing that I remember more than the on camera stuff was after the interview is over with, we go backstage and Joy Behar pulls me off to the side, and my wife was there with me, and she's probably the most. I mean, they're all really anti Trump on there, for sure. But I mean, she's like, vehemently, you know, very leftist anti Trump. And she said to me, what's a nice young man like you doing working for a guy like Donald Trump? And in the moment, I kind of played it off and, oh, well, I'm probably not as nice as you think I am. And, you know, we just kind of, like, laughed it off. But that kind of, like, stuck with me after I left. Because the real question that she's getting at, I think is important for everyone to think about, how can you love someone with whom you disagree? Or how can you support someone even when you disagree with some of their actions, some of the things that they do? And the answer to that question is really a lot more simple than I had really thought about prior to that, which is, it's easy. I've been doing the same thing with myself my entire life. Paul writes about in the New Testament, the thing that I want to do, I can't do. And yet the thing that I don't want to do, I keep doing. I'm going around, around. He's like, wrestling with, you know, I can't bring myself to do the right thing. But for all of us, how much grace have we extended ourselves and all the things that we've screwed up in the past, and yet you can't find it within yourself to extend that grace to anybody else? People ask me about Donald Trump all the time. He did this, that, or the other that I disagree with. And how could you work for the guy when he did this, that, or the other? And even the things that I disagree with, it's easy. I extend to him the same grace that I've extended to myself so many times that I can't even count it. And thank God that Jesus Christ extended that grace to me, because I definitely didn't deserve it from him. So that whole experience I try to reflect in this new book because I think there were so many faith lessons to take away from working for Trump, but also interacting with members of the media. I mean, I've seen it all. I went on the Late show with Stephen Colbert, and I mean, that's another one where I definitely didn't want to meet before we went out there, because, like, I'm, like, putting my battle armor on. Like, we're gonna go out here, and it's gonna be like, on. And Stephen Colbert in the commercial break, right before I went out to go on the show, comes up to me backstage and shakes my hand and says, thank you for being willing to come on my show. He said, I want you to know if the audience boos you or heckles you, I will stop the show, stop the cameras, and say, we're not going to treat our guests that way. You can disagree with them, but you're not going to mistreat our guests. And I just want you to know, if that happens, that I'm going to have your back when we go up there. I don't agree with Stephen Colbert on anything politically. And we joked and had it out on different things and, you know, whatever, and it was totally fine. But I think that's such a rare thing, especially in people in the media today. Yeah, the first time I went on Good Morning America, it's the first interview I did for my book. And George Stephanopoulos is going to interview me, and I'm waiting, sitting there, waiting at the table for him to come over in the commercial break, and he's walking over and I'm sitting there and they start counting down. The camera's gonna come on in 5, 4, 3, 2. And at 2, the production assistant walks over and pulls the pad in my chair out from under me so that I'll like sit down and look shorter than George Stephanopoulos on TV just to screw with me right before the interview starts. And the first thing Stephanopoulos does is ask some trumped up story about like, we hear you actually got fired from the White House. Instead of, you know, it's just like a picture into. You talk about people's character in the media. I've seen all from the good surprises like the Stephen Colbert who treated me well to, you know, the Good Morning America folks who tried to screw with me when I got on there. So I've seen it all.

[Cliff Sims]

Was Stephen Colbert, was that a rarity? What that approach. They're gonna back their guests?

[Sean Ryan]

Oh yeah. So. So few. So few. I mean that, I mean, really unheard of, honestly. I mean I never had especially, you know, in what's anticipated to be an adversarial interview just doesn't really, doesn't really exist. And frankly, even some of the conservatives that I know. And it reminds me of when I was growing up, I was the lead singer of a band for a while and got to meet a lot of famous musicians and Christian musicians especially. And I met this one band and I won't call them out on here, there's no reason to do that, but that I had really idolized, probably too strong of a word. But like somebody I really looked up to is like, man, that's they made it. And they're like real Christian guys and they're like doing this. And I meet the guy and he's like a raging alcoholic who's bragging about how many women he's slept with that weren't his wife since he's been. And it's like jarring. It's kind of like when you meet your heroes and it's not what you think it's going to be. It's like a jarring thing. And meeting a lot of people in political media, I'm kind of jaded by it now, I guess, and nothing surprises me. But certainly at first when you see these people that you looked up to, it's like, man, they're out there just trying to like fight the good fight, so to speak, every day. And you meet them and they're not what you think. There's a lot of those and that's why the good guys stand out. Tucker Carlson is a great example. People can say what they want about Tucker Carlson. I've spent a ton of time with Tucker off air, offline, talking, texting at his house in Maine, the whole thing. And I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt, whether you agree with Tucker Carlson or not, he's a good person. He's a good man, and he's trying to live a good life. He's trying to do the right thing. He's trying to tell the truth. He's trying to search for the truth. He doesn't think he has a monopoly on the truth. He's curious. I've seen the way he treats his wife. He treats her well. See the way he treats his dogs? He treats his dogs well. You know, I've seen the way he treats his employees. He takes care of them and respects them. Most people that talk for a living have a very difficult time not being the center of attention at all times, and Tucker's just not like that. And it's an anomaly, though. I'm telling you, it is an anomaly. You know, I'll tell folks, Sean Ryan, off camera, great guy, not a jerk. All right. Hadn't let it get. Hadn't let the fame get to him yet. He's still a good guy.

[Cliff Sims]

Yeah, yeah. How long was it before you wrote your next book?

[Sean Ryan]

So this one, see, the first one came out in early 2019, and this one has just come out now in summer of 24, so about five years between the two books. And this one includes more from the White House experience, but also I had not yet gone to the office of the Director of National Intelligence in the first book. So this one includes a lot of stories from in, inside, you know, ODNI and CIA and the intelligence community as well.

[Cliff Sims]

What was your.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean, you had.

[Cliff Sims]

You had much experience within the intelligence world before?

[Sean Ryan]

No, no, none.

[Cliff Sims]

What was it about you that got you that job?

[Sean Ryan]

So I helped run the confirmation for Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and helped get him through the Senate. That was one of the things I did when I was in the White House, was kind of a specialty of mine, was kind of helping run these confirmation battles in the Senate. So I did that for him and got really close to him in that process, and so he gave me the opportunity to come in, in that role.

[Cliff Sims]

Well, I'm curious to know what your first impression of the intelligence agencies were. I mean, you have. Coming in as a civilian, how old were you, if you don't remember?

[Sean Ryan]

87.

[Cliff Sims]

So you've got a lot of assumptions on what it would be like, what it looks like, what the culture is. How did those play out? When you actually saw it for yourself, were you impressed? Were you disappointed? Was it completely different?

[Sean Ryan]

Some of both. Some of both. I mean, our technical capabilities boggle the mind. The ways that we can acquire information boggles the mind. Any corner of the globe in any, you know, from. From hument human intelligence to SIGINT the signal side of things and intercepting phone calls and other things to, you know, what the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency can do and satellites and I mean, it's. It's remarkable. Remarkable our capabilities. And there were definitely some times when there were just like, holy crap, we are good. Holy crap, we are good. So that was. I mean, I had a. I had an. I had that impression to some extent outside looking in. You watch movies and wonder is, can we really do some of these things? And the answer is, a lot of times, yeah, we can.

[Cliff Sims]

You cannot confirm or deny.

[Sean Ryan]

Exactly. Exactly.

[Cliff Sims]

Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to itunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

[Sean Ryan]

So we got incredible capabilities on the other side of that. I was stunned, dismayed, horrified at the power of the intelligence community DEI office, both at ODNI and at the different agencies. I mean, I'll never forget the first time I walked into CIA, first time I'd ever been there. I don't care what your view of the CIA is, how negative it is or how awful you think. If you walked in the side of the CIA the first time, you're like, I mean, this is, this is something. This is like legendary stuff has happened in this building. Good, bad and otherwise, you know, whatever. I turn the corner to walk into the cafeteria and headquarters there and there is a giant trans lives or human lives poster hanging outside the cafeteria.

[Cliff Sims]

What is this?

[Sean Ryan]

And I keep walking up and down the halls and I see all these posters that they've got in there for the, you know, talking about people's identity and, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion, how important it was there and, you know, start talking to people there and how bullied, frankly they felt. I mean, they did, you know, earlier this year there was an internal publication that the office of the Director of National Intelligence put out inside the intelligence community. And it was a cross dresser explaining how being a cross dresser made them a better intelligence officer.

[Cliff Sims]

Are you serious?

[Sean Ryan]

Dead serious. In that same publication, they were talking about the importance of the use of words that we've got to be careful with the words that we use. For instance, when we're talking about Chinese malign influence, we should be very careful that the way that we're doing it is not bigoted toward Asian people. Or when we're talking about terrorism, we should be very careful not to say things like Islamic terrorism or radical Islamic terrorism or jihadist or, you know, all these different terms that they're saying are offensive in some way or another. Now imagine if you are a totally normal professional intelligence analyst and you're sitting at your desk taking all these threat streams that are flowing into you, trying to make sense of this stuff and analyze these things and produce reports so that the most important decision makers in our country can make the most informed decisions that they can. And you're having to spend half your time making sure you don't write anything offensive in your analytical writing. I mean, that is not just absurd, it's dangerous. It's dangerous. So given the opportunity to come back, you know, this is some of the stuff that's happening in the Biden administration right now. I think the Trump administration would definitely, you know, try to fix some of those things.

[Cliff Sims]

I mean, we were talking off camera when we were setting up in here about some of the implications that the DEI in the WOKE agenda had had on intelligence agencies. And, and anybody who's watching this from one aspect, from the left aspect is probably think, you know, we had talked about how many people have left the organization and I'm sure there's 50% of the people out there think, oh good, out with the old, in with the new. The problem with that is all of the experience that you've just lost by implementing something that has no business being in the intelligence world anyways. It just gets in the way of collection. And I mean, what we were talking about offline, I think it's important for people to think about this is, I mean, we just got out of a 20 plus year war and a lot of experience comes from war and we've never been in a war like this. And so we've developed all this experience and capabilities and people that have been on some of the most high profile missions in the world in the history of the US Left because of these policies, because they got in the way of intelligence.

[Sean Ryan]

Yep.

[Cliff Sims]

Intelligence isn't worrying about that kind of shit. It's collecting and then presenting what we found. And all of the, I mean, this isn't. You don't just regain 20 something years of experience overnight, you know, and so many assets are lost now with the military and the intelligence agencies all over, all over various government, you know, roles. And it's really, you know, it's a tragedy because all that experience will have to be regained through more conflicts. And that's going to take a very long time.

[Sean Ryan]

No, I agree. There's a serious brain drain that has happened as a result of that because people just don't want to fool with it. I mean, they just really don't want anything to do with it. So I think there's some things that we need to do going forward to prevent this. And one is even the places where the intelligence community is recruiting talent, a lot of them come out of Ivy League schools. And look what's happening on campus at these Ivy League schools right now. And these people are getting indoctrinated into this kind of woke ideology. It's certainly not the place, especially with the antisemitism we're seeing on these campuses right now. Is that really the place that we're gonna draw from to have a truly diverse workforce? Because here's the thing, diversity is actually important in intelligence, just not the way that they're talking about. It's important. I remember back during COVID when we were trying to analyze streams of intelligence coming in to try to make sense of COVID origins and all of that kind of stuff. It's really helpful to have a Mandarin speaking virologists to be able to decipher that stuff. That's the kind of diversity that we need to operate on the streets of Tehran. Who's going to have a better chance of pulling that off a native Farsi speaker who lives is from there or.

[Cliff Sims]

Me, probably not a blonde haired, blue eyed Alabama boy.

[Sean Ryan]

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. This is the kind of diversity that's actually important in the intelligence, in the intelligence world that we've lost that in favor of this woke stuff. So I think getting more kids that are top students out of state schools and HBCUs and you know, different places with different backgrounds than we have to this point, I think that's another thing that would be really, really important.

[Cliff Sims]

How has. So this talks a lot about your faith as well, correct?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Cliff Sims]

How has that developed since leaving?

[Sean Ryan]

Well, it's the great thing about writing a book is it forces you to think deeply about whatever your topic you're writing about. And so my goal was, let me take some of these cool stories from inside the White House, inside the intelligence community. And let me think about a faith takeaway from each of them, a biblical lesson that could come from them. And so it forced me to really dig into the Bible more deeply than I ever have before to come up with these lessons. I had this kind of like these columns. I had a cool story column and then I had like lessons that I would like to talk about column. And so I was trying to kind of like mix the two of them together, find the story that fit with the lesson. And then sometimes it was like, I've got a cool story, but I don't know what the lesson is. And it forced me to like really dig in and like explore that. And so that really deepened my faith in a lot of ways. Having to. Having to search for those lessons for sure, man.

[Cliff Sims]

How long did it take you to write that?

[Sean Ryan]

A couple of years, I would imagine, in fits and starts. I mean, I didn't write it all at one time, so I would, you know, I'd get a little inspiration and go for something for a little while, write a few entries and then put it away for a while and then come back to it. So yeah, over the course of a couple of years.

[Cliff Sims]

Anything specific you want to bring up? Any specific stories?

[Sean Ryan]

Gosh, I'm trying to think of what would be. Man, there's so many that I could point to. I'll just give you a couple that'll like, help you understand like what the book is like. So the story that I told earlier about going into the doomsday bunkers and that experience, so I walked through like what it's like inside there and all these different things that we saw. And then I talk about how think about the people who actually work in there 247 that work in that facility all the time, that every single day their entire life is devoted to thinking about our impending potential doom and how much anxiety it must take, it must have, those people must have about things if that's the environment that they live in every day. And that sent me down a rabbit hole of understanding how big of an impact anxiety is having on American society right now. 80 something percent of Americans say that they feel anxious on a day to day basis and they're worried about the future. And then that led me down a rabbit hole of like, well, what does the Bible say about anxiety? And how do we live a life where, you know, the Bible says don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow we'll worry about himself. And it also talks about how, you know, if God cares about a tiny raven, what happens to a Tiny raven. How. How much more does he care about what's going to happen to you? Also talks about how God raises up kings and he takes down kings. Our God is sovereign. He's in control of everything. But we also see in the Bible that preparation and faith are not in conflict with each other. So it's not saying, don't worry about the future. Everything will take care of itself. Don't prepare. Moses built an ark to prepare to save his family. The Bible says that even God sent John the Baptist to prepare the way for Jesus. So we prepare, we do the right thing, but we do it in faith, knowing ultimately that our God is in control of everything that happens. So that's an example of how I take a cool inside story of what it's like in the doomsday bunker and then talk about what does the Bible say about anxiety? There are a million examples of that in the book. We talked a little bit earlier about the allure of power. C.S. lewis wrote a lot about power. He called it the attraction of the inner ring or the inner circle. So all throughout life, we are attracted to the inner ring. When you are in elementary school or in school, you want to sit at the cool kids table at lunch. When you get into college, you want to be in not just a fraternity or a sorority, you want to get in the good fraternity, the good sorority. You want to be inside that circle. When you get into your professional life, you want to be in the, you want to be in the good unit. You don't want to just be in the military. You want to be a seal. You want to be on SEAL team too. Oh, and if you can, you know, after we get done with that, you know what? I think I want to go in CIA. I want to go get in that unit right there that's doing that classified mission that I can't even talk about. So in the military aspects of it, there's the way. And in our professional lives, you want to work your way up. I remember for myself when I would often walk with the President in the morning, he would get down from the residence off of the private elevator on the ground floor of the residence, and I would walk with him out to, into the Oval Office and we'd talk about the news of the day, things that were going on that day, whatever it may be. And this is when I was a com staffer before I was at dni and I would get into the Oval and often waiting for him were the CIA Director, the Chief of Staff, the Director of National Intelligence, maybe the Vice president, and they were ready for him to come in and have his intelligence briefing. So I would get ushered out of that room and that door would close behind me and it would eat me up inside because I just like, what's going on behind that door right now? What are they talking about? I want to be in that room, like, always want to be in the room in the know, in the inner ring. And this attraction of the inner ring is something that follows us throughout our entire lives. And if. But. But here's what C.S. lewis says about it. He said, it's like an onion. Even if you peel it, you keep peeling it, one layer to the next, one ring to the next, closer and closer into the inner ring until there's nothing left. Because when you peel an onion, ultimately it's gone once you peel off that last layer. So unless you can conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider, you will remain your entire life. And so I talk about how that, the interplay with that and what God's vision of work and our careers are. These are the kind of stories and lessons that I try to get into in the book.

[Cliff Sims]

Very interesting. You know, earlier we had talked about the attraction of power in D.C. and anybody that wants to get into the White House politics, into upper level government, is seeking power. Do you. I've had a little bit of interaction with DC when it's actually due to this, due to the show. I've made some friends on the. In Congress and Senate, whatever. But in that, in this last round, there's been a lot of veterans that ran and that got in there. Some have done a fantastic job, some have fallen flat on their face. And a lot of us are disgusted with how, how it turned out. I don't feel like. And I knew some of these guys from before, and for the last State of the Union, I just got invited there by Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett. And so I got to a little bit of a peak behind the curb. Not much, but, you know, and I've been there a couple other times for some other stuff, and you can see the change. And some of these guys, I really think they had good intentions, and I don't think it was about power.

[Sean Ryan]

I agree with.

[Cliff Sims]

And then they get in there and it's. I mean, shit, they haven't even been in there two years and it's already. Some of them been there longer than two years. But you see a switch flip in a lot of these guys and it's. It's disgusting.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Cliff Sims]

But so I guess this is kind of two questions. One, I mean, with that being said, do you. Do you think there are a lot of people with good intentions that go in and then get flipped?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, sure, sure.

[Cliff Sims]

So it's not always about power.

[Sean Ryan]

100%. 100%. You know, there are a few different aspects of this. So first of the military guys that go in, first of all, I think that's a great. I would love for more people who have least, you know, shown that they're willing to serve our country and put it all on the line. Those to be the kind of people that go and serve in the halls of Congress. That'd be amazing thing to get more of those folks in there. So great deal of respect for you and all the people who've served in that way. The other side of that is what we talked about earlier, too, that physical courage and moral courage are not always in the same package. Sometimes they are. They can be. But a show of physical courage is not necessarily a guarantee that the moral courage will exist there. And so sometimes it's just people, their character gets exposed, just like I was talking about for myself. You get in there and you learn things about yourself that you wouldn't have otherwise. And people get ate up with it, man. People get ate up with it. I mean, I see it all the time. People who plan their lives around election cycles because they're angling for the next job, to run for the next thing, to climb a little bit higher up the ladder, and it's really, really hard to guard against that. And D.C. the entire incentive structure, it perpetuates that everybody there. I guarantee you, if you were there and they didn't know who you were, the first question would be, who do you work for?

[Cliff Sims]

Oh, man, it was. It was disgusting.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Cliff Sims]

You know, there were some good people. There was a lot of people. It was, oh, this is how it would go. I would get introduced. And this is. I don't like. I don't like parties. I don't. But I went because it's the state of the union. Whether I like the guy that's, you know, doing it or not. I don't. It's history. Right? And it's just cool to witness something like that. And when I get introduced, hey, this is Sean, former Navy SEAL. They could give two shits. Former CIA. They could give two shits. Sean has a top 10 podcast in the world.

[Sean Ryan]

Now they care.

[Cliff Sims]

Now they fucking care.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Cliff Sims]

And now they want to shake my hand. And now they want to be my. My buddy.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Cliff Sims]

And it's in and you know, we were talking about fame and all this other shit downstairs. And I don't buy into it. Cause it's not real. But to see, like, man, it's just. It just makes you look like such a fucking scumbag.

[Sean Ryan]

No doubt.

[Cliff Sims]

You know, when I left the.

[Sean Ryan]

I'd always heard it said, you know, when you leave here, your phone's gonna stop ringing. And I didn't fully appreciate that, because I'm special, Sean. How could these people really like me? Cause I'm, like, such an interesting guy, and they are really into me personally. And the day I left the White House, my phone legit did not ring. Like, for the next 24 hours, no one reached out. No one gave a hoot. And a lot of those people I have not spoken to since. People that I would have spoken to at least every week, if not every day, the second that I was no longer in proximity to the President of the United States, phone don't ring anymore. And again, that's why I think it was, like, a good thing for me to experience this and all of these things. I mean, I'm a firm believer that God is preparing us for whatever the plans that he has for us in the future. Going through that now, being able to go back. Even when I went back to DNI after being in the White House, I was much better prepared for all of these dynamics, having experienced all sides, the good and the bad sides of it, before going back into it. D.C. is a sick place, bro. It is a sick, sick place full of sick, sick people. And not sick in the way that you. You might think. These are people who, honestly, in a lot of ways, they don't know they're sick. They don't know they're ate up with power in the way that they are. They still think that they're good people. They don't think that they've lost themselves to it, but they have, and they don't know it because they can't snap themselves out of it. Because they're surrounded by people who have the same problem that they do. And so that's why I think it's a great thing for people to come from outside of D.C. into it, to serve for a period of time. This is the vision that our founders had. Not that people would be career government employees or career politicians, but they would come in and serve for a season and then go back to their lives.

[Cliff Sims]

Well, on top of that, you're not supposed to be living in D.C. as a congressman, right? You're supposed to live in your district.

[Sean Ryan]

And work in D.C. right, and work.

[Cliff Sims]

In D.C. but it's. Now everybody just becomes a D.C. resident and screw their district.

[Sean Ryan]

Yep. You know, the most politically untenable position that I hold. I can't believe I'm gonna say this, so maybe you should caveat this by saying, I'm not actually proposing this, but as a thought exercise, we should triple the salary of a member of Congress. Now you say that is an insane idea, right? It's an insane idea. Let me tell you why now it'll never happen again. It's a thought exercise. There are two types of people that serve in Congress right now. One type of person is rich, and they don't need the paycheck. So it doesn't bother them that they're gonna have to have two residences, a place in their district and a place in D.C. it doesn't matter that their family is not going to have trouble making ends meet on $180,000 a year, even though the cost of living in D.C. is nuts. So $180,000 or whatever it is sounds like a lot of money, and it is. So don't. Don't get me wrong, not in downtown D.C. but when you're. You have two residences, all the things that go along with it, it makes it where you got to either be rich or it's the best job you've ever had. So now it's the other end of the spectrum where it's like, oh, man, if I can get into Congress, it's going to be the most money that I've ever made. I'm going to have power. I'm going to be able to go to dinner every night where some lobbyist is paying for dinner. So I'm going to have all these experiences that I otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. And what's missing in Congress is the middle of that, which is successful entrepreneurs, people who have shown excellence in the private sector and doing some things outside of the government, but they haven't had a huge exit where they made 100 million bucks selling their company. You know, they've got a family. They don't want to. You know, why would they subject themselves to the scrutiny that's going to go along with that? They're going to have to sacrifice the lifestyle that they have in their small town somewhere with their family, and they're going to be gone from their family all the time. They don't see a pathway. Granted, it is service, so sacrifice is expected. Right. But also, it's very difficult to do this with if you're upper middle class entrepreneur type person with a family of five. How in the world can you see a pathway to running for Congress and representing your people that is not financially ruinous to your family?

[Cliff Sims]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Now, again, it's a bad idea. It'll never happen. But my point is that we're missing a huge segment of talent that has absolutely no interest and no pathway in ever serving in government.

[Cliff Sims]

How do you think this flip happens so fast? This obsession with power, money, greed, whatever it is that. Cause I see it now. I see it now. I knew people before they were in there and now I see them after they're in there. And.

[Sean Ryan]

So the reason that I support term limits is because of human nature. If every single day, every single person that you talk to tells you how great you are and they need something from you and they're asking you for something, please help me with my issue. Sean, we really need. You are the greatest. I'm so glad that you're representing me. Would you please help me with this? And then every lobbyist that comes to you is like, hey, come out to dinner tonight, man. We'll take care of you. It's going to be a fun time. Let's go out and hang out. Let's have a good. You know, every person is, you're so great. You're so great. You're so great. Some point human nature says you wake up one day and you say to yourself, I'm pretty great. I am pretty great. All these people are right about me. And the second that that happens, and it's a subconscious thing, you've been had and that. So I think it's human nature is what we're complaining about more than it is just DC and the only check on human nature. I mean, it sounds like a broken record, but like, I really believe that, number one, a sincere faith in which you truly believe that there is a higher power in this universe than you. It's more important than you. Second thing, I think having people with families up there is a big deal. A big deal. Making policies that are pro family policies.

[Cliff Sims]

I think that's getting harder and harder to do because, I mean, I'm not gonna bullshit. I thought about running the last time a lot of vets were thinking, a lot of my friends were thinking about running. Because everybody, everybody in my circle is very concerned with the way the country's going. And you know what the one common denominator is on why nobody wants to do it? Family. They don't want to put their family through that shit.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. 100% through the scrutiny.

[Cliff Sims]

Through it, you know, and I mean, I think that was designed on purpose.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, no, I agree with that. It's hard for me to. I mean, in some ways it's kind of hypocritical of me because I think about that too. I don't want to. I love the fact that I get to spend so much time every day with my 6 year old years that will never get back. You know, I love the fact that if he wants me to sleep in bed with him every night, I can do that if I want to. If we want to just hang out one day and just go to the trampoline park all day, I've got the ability to do that with him. So I feel hypocritical saying more people with young families need to get out there and do it. But I just think it also changes so much about being a dad. Has changed my perspective on a lot of these policy issues. And it's a much more personal thing. When I'm thinking about the impact that this stuff has on him. I mean, and think about all the wars that we have gotten into where other people's sons were sent off to bleed and die because some politicians whose kids think about it all the time made that decision. I mean, the whole gwat, man, the.

[Cliff Sims]

Whole Iraq war I think was a big money grab for the Halliburton Cheney's organization, but in a lot of other wars. But that's a big one for my generation. What I was getting to though is I'm not talking about the separation of family, I'm talking about the scrutiny, the coming home and seeing your six year old boy overheard something on the media of them just ripping you apart. Maybe it's lies, maybe it's true that you never wanted to come out of a mistake that you made 25 years ago. Yeah. You know, and that's more what I was getting at is the slander, the defamation.

[Sean Ryan]

Totally.

[Cliff Sims]

That's that type of stuff.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. One of the things that I don't think I'll ever forget it, being at the White House, when you're, when you walk from the West Wing to the East Wing, the residence is in between and on one side, closest to the West Wing is the Rose Garden. Very famous. Everybody's seen it a million different times. But on the other side, in the same place where the Rose Garden is, on the other side, there's a small little garden on the East Wing side of the House. There's never any press over there. There's never any people from the outside, allowed to go over there. White House tours, don't, don't go over there. And I remember walking over there one day and seeing Barron Trump. Can't remember how old he must have been at the time. So now he just graduated high school, so he's 18 now. So this would have been. So he's probably 11 years old and there's a soccer goal set up out there and his Secret Service security detail is out there and. But they have their backs to him. They're looking out, you know, protecting him, they're doing their job. And it's Barron Trump there by himself, kicking a soccer ball into the soccer goal over and over again by himself. And I started thinking about exactly what you are right now that this 11 year old boy is, has to endure everything the left has thrown at his dad, at his family, the things that they've written, even about him, a little boy, whether he likes it or not. And I just couldn't help but like stop and like say a prayer for the kid that he's like going to have to endure this, you know, because of the life that they live and the sacrifices that they have made for the country. It affects families in a different way. I mean, I even think about like my stuff now. You know, I get plenty of criticism. People say wild things about me and, you know, whatever doesn't really affect me anymore doesn't really bother me, but it bothers my wife when she sees it. Yeah, so I get exactly what you're saying.

[Cliff Sims]

Yeah. I mean, so being a man of the word and a Christian, what do you think we're approaching end times here?

[Sean Ryan]

Well, I think we ought to live like we are.

[Cliff Sims]

I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things happening that are in that book.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. So the title of the book is the Darkness has Not Overcome. It comes from the gospel of John 1:5. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. And I named the book that because I do think that we're at a time where it feels very dark out there and there's a lot of really bad things going on. But the end of that book is clear about who wins. And so I think that we have a lot of hope in the midst of this darkness if we're looking for it in the right places. And even in Congress, State of the Union, not this year, but last year I went up there as well. A friend of mine in Congress invited me the next morning, 6:00 in the morning, to meet him at this House office building. And I walk in and there's eight or nine members of Congress there have a Bible study with each other and nobody would ever know about it. I write about it in the book. They weren't looking for credit, they weren't looking for publicity. Guys sitting there talking about things they wish they had done better the week before, opportunities that they missed, that they wanted to share the gospel. Colleagues that they were praying for, talking about things they were struggling with. Eight or nine guys. And I had such a cynical view of Congress and still do in so many ways, but it changed my perspective on things a little bit. Not because there are people in Congress that we should place our hope in, but there are people in Congress who place their hope in Christ. So I do think, even though it's a really dark time, that there is hope if we're looking in the right places. But we're not going to find it on the never ending cable news TV programs. We're not going to find it in politics at all. You know, the most important event in human history. Most important event in human history. It's a big statement now, so this better be good. Whatever it is that I'm going to say. The most important event in human history is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Tiberius was the emperor of Rome when that happened. Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea when that happened. But they were not the central characters of the story. Jesus was. So why on earth would we make politicians the central characters in our story today when politics has consumed everything, talk about it nonstop. Every aspect of life is politics, politics, politics. And the Bible's sitting there saying these politicians aren't the central characters. Jesus is sitting there waiting for you. That's where our hope is. So for me, it is a dark time. Feels like the end times. We better be living like it is. Because the Bible says no man knows the day or the hour that he's coming, but he's coming. So we should live like he's coming back today. But we have a hope in knowing that our God is still in control.

[Cliff Sims]

Man. That's very well said. And I think that's the perfect spot to end the interview. So thank you.

[Sean Ryan]

Thank you for having me.

[Cliff Sims]

I will ask one more thing. If you get to get back in the ring. Yeah. Are you?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. Stay in the ring, man. Fighter, man. I want it. I want it. Let's go. Let's get after it.

[Cliff Sims]

Right on. All right, Cliff. Well, man, what a. What a fascinating interview and which has covered so many aspects of your career and your experience in government and intelligence and with the books. And thank you for coming. And I just want to say, man, I'm very thankful that we connected.

[Sean Ryan]

Me, too. No, and thank you for this platform, what you have built. It's extraordinary. And conversations like this that never happen in the mainstream media could never happen, not just because of the format, but because they don't want to talk about the things that you're willing to talk about on here. And so, you know, I told you off here. I'll tell you now. You know the reason Tucker Carlson came on your podcast, he said, I was looking at this, and I said, this is an honest man. And I met him, and he is an honest man. And so you keep doing that, and this thing's gonna keep blowing up.

[Cliff Sims]

So thank you. I will. Thank you so much. All right, brother. God bless.

[Sean Ryan]

God bless you.

[Cliff Sims]

Hey, it's Rich Eisen here. Join me and my compadre Chris Brockman every Monday on the Overreaction Monday podcast.

[Sean Ryan]

Rich Jamis has taken the Browns to the playoffs. Dude, why can't they win seven, eight games to finish the year? Why not? I'm not saying that it's no why not, but this is a definitive statement that's clearly an overreaction, and it's perfect fodder for a show like this one.

[Cliff Sims]

I appreciate you coming out of the gate hot. Come react or overreact with us. Overreaction Monday, wherever you listen, it's game over over, man.