The world of vARIable: gAbrIel Series brings a gripping mix of AI warfare, espionage, and global power struggles to life. Author Chase Cunningham dives deep into the inspiration behind his latest techno-thriller, exploring how artificial intelligence, military tactics, and cybersecurity threats shape modern warfare. In this conversation with Juliet Clark, Chase shares insights on real-world AI dangers, the role of women in intelligence, and the fine line between fiction and reality. How close are we to AI taking control? And what lessons can we learn from emerging global conflicts? Dive into the discussion and uncover the chilling possibilities.
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vARIable: The Latest Installment In The gAbrIel Series
Our guest is one of our authors and he’s releasing the second book in his series, and it’s a scary book. We will get to that in a moment. Before we move ahead here, I want to remind you that we have an event coming up, How to Get Speaking Gigs Now with Leisa Reid, and you can sign up for that at BAMagTraining.com. If you are looking to figure out how to get booked for more speaking gigs, this may be the event or the training that you want to show up for. Remember, all of our training is free and you get to ask questions, which is a little frustrating sometimes when you look at recorded training.
Our guest is Dr. Chase Cunningham. He’s a retired Navy Chief Cryptologist with more than twenty years of experience in cyber warfare, gained directly from the realm of cyber operations. Dr. Cunningham worked in various operations by being on pose, doing cyber forensics, analytics, and offensive-defensive cyber operations within the NSA, FBI, and other government agencies.
He has authored a variety of books on cybersecurity and cyber warfare and hosts the DrZeroTrust Podcast, founded Demo-Force.com, and is regularly consulted on matters of national cybersecurity. Dr. Cunningham has an extensive background that provides him with unique and deep insight into all facets of cybersecurity at both the national and personal levels. This is his second fiction novel. If you read the first one, gAbrIel, you are probably pretty freaked out by the plane brought down by the drones, but it only gets worse in this new one vArIable. Stay tuned to learn about this book.
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Chase, welcome to the show.
Kicking Off: Chase Cunningham Returns To The Show
Thanks for round two here.
This is exciting. Your first book gAbrIel was a real shocker, like the opening and the plane coming down and I was blown away. Tell us a little bit about gAbrIel and why you wrote the series.
The interesting thing is that this whole AI space continues to evolve, and it’s going even faster. Honestly, mankind is rocketing down towards the path of uncharted territory. For me, I was like, number one, anyone that writes fiction, you should have a trilogy, in my opinion, so I had to go for two more books. There’s been so much more development in the space. I think I could turn some of this into a pretty cool topic, and I happen to be uniquely qualified to write about it.
You were talking about it. Your first book was in 2021, which we weren’t incessantly chattering about AI like we are now. It was like, “Where is it? What are we doing?” I don’t think people understood. You showed me a video that I was like, “That’s a training video. Help us.”
Nobody was talking about using drones as weapons either, but now we see what’s going on in Ukraine. My demented mind was ahead of the curve a little bit.
Look at what you did for so many years. Your job is to be way ahead of the curve for our protection too. The new book vArIable, this weaves the Chinese American military tech narratives. What inspired this clash of the superpowers and how does it reflect the water and anxiety we are all feeling?
If there’s underground saber-rattling that’s constantly going on and we have a new administration in place, China is working its way to become the global superpower and they are doing it via innovative approaches to the problem. For me, I was like, “How can I weave together a fictional narrative that’s based in reality where everything is technically possible? Then also throw in, potentially global conflict and see where it goes from there.” In this one, I was trying to start it off with the CCP doing things that are problematic and then it goes sideways from there and it turns into a pretty good narrative.
We are learning almost daily. We look at the things we hear China doing, but we are learning almost daily that with this new transparency, we are not so clean either.
Everybody’s got their fingers in dirty pies somewhere, for sure.
Very eye-opening. General Wei’s arc involves betrayal and disillusionment. How did you balance the personal strugglers with the larger political stakes?
The Evolving Threat Of AI And Cyber Warfare
One comment I got from folks that read my last book was they liked the character development side of stuff that I wrote. When I was writing about these high-level leaders, especially those in the CCP and whatever, it was natural for me to talk about how things don’t work out the way that you want. I have been in the military and the intelligence community, so I have seen how people deal with the loss that they typically find, whether it’s family, deployments, jobs, or whatever.
That was one of those ones of this guy who is a general, he’s running stuff. The CCP government that CCP takes everything away from him. If there’s ever a spot where it’s time to flip the script. Most people go bad when their family, their livelihood, and their reason for existing is taken, and this guy happens to be in a very special spot to do some very malicious things.
Not so far off. Didn’t we see Jack Ma disappear from the face of the earth a couple years ago.
You hear these stories all the time about people in that part of the world who do something that the party is not happy with and then disappear. It’s an interesting play on things that, in the United States, you have to do something hopefully pretty bad to go to jail or disappear over there. You piss off the wrong person and things can get bad quick.
Do people disappear here? Are you telling me something?
I’m not saying they don’t.
A little bit of good information there, guys. Be careful what you say. The Gobi Desert’s beautiful end of the world contrasts sharply with Blackwater’s gritty training sites. How do you temper that balance between isolation and warfare? Is that something you guys deal with all the time?
For folks that have deployed, we have been places and you’ve seen stuff where you’ll be in Djibouti, Africa and Djibouti, Africa is dirt, rocks, sand, and heat, and then you go transfer to some other place for another deployment and it’s lush, green, and beautiful and the next one you are out on the ocean and it’s just blue. It’s an interesting personal dynamic for people to experience the transition between those spaces. In my mind, everything that I wrote about is places I have been or pictures in my head that I have seen from deployments and places I have put my feet on the ground. I can close my eyes and see it in my mind, and then I wrote it.
When I used to write fiction, I would take pictures of places and put them on the wall because I don’t have that visualization skill you obviously have, but it was a tool to get the job done. That’s cool. gAbrIel, you guys all need to grab that first book evolved from an NSA tool. They thought it was dead, it’s gone rogue and it’s threatening all the global banks. Is that real? Could that happen?
The issue that we are facing, if you read the news about DeepSeek, was a Chinese AI program that the Chinese released to the world and people have installed it on their computers inside of government systems inside of banking. We don’t know the back door of that particular program. People have given this potential AI system access to everything because it does cool stuff.
It is a program written by members of the CCP. We don’t know, and the reality of the matter is everything in digital space does stuff because it’s told, and that’s what computers do. If you have a command control authority or a program that can execute, it can do a lot of crazy things. We are close. I read an article about a few AI-related programs that have started self-replicating. We are teetering on the edge of an intelligence that we are not prepared to deal with.
AI systems are already self-replicating. We are teetering on the edge of an intelligence we’re not prepared to deal with. Share on XOff topic here, but TikTok. I have never gotten on TikTok because I have heard it’s a Chinese psy-op.
The Intersection Of Technology And Global Influence
A Chinese propaganda engine is all that it is.
I verbally smack my kids around like, “Quit sending me TikTok stuff and get off there,” but they don’t. It’s too much fun. Can you explain for those who don’t know, what is the whole deal between if you separate their technology from the site, it’s worthless? What is that all about?
There’s not a whole lot to what makes TikTok TikTok. It’s Facebook plus Twitter with a bunch of algorithmic shenanigans going on. As far as the technology side of it behind it, it’s pretty simplistic. The truth of the matter is that if you look at the use of TikTok in China, like mainland China, they use it for education. They only use it at certain hours of the day. You have to be a certain person with a certain access to get it.
They are doing it because it does benefit as far as online learning and training. In the US, they gave it to us to be free and use for whatever because they know that we are going to put a bunch of dumb stuff on it and people are going to make themselves idiots because they are playing with things 24/7. That’s literally the game and you are starting to see that play out in the US in real time. That’s what I’m trying to also work into this whole series of books is the CCP and other nations, they play at a 50-year stretch. In the US, we are lucky if we can get through one election cycle without calamity.
Fifty minutes, we have no attention span. Maybe Pfizer needs to come in and give us all drugs. In both books, you have Violet McFerran and she defies the stereotype. We have special ops and people like that. How did you develop her background as a mechanic and an athlete to shape her resilience in this male-dominated field? I remember you told me before that you feel that women have better intuition around this as well.
Women are great in the intelligence space. They are great in cyber. We need more of them. I want to push my own daughters into that space. What a lot of people don’t realize is you’ve got special warfare operators, which are rangers, seals, and those cats and do those things, but they are always supported by other people that do very similar work, and a lot of times those are ladies, they are the fair or sex. They are there because they are good at what they do and they are as proficient at firearms and physical training in a lot of ways as those folks are.
Women are great in intelligence and cyber. We need more of them in this space. Share on XIt’s one of those ones of also trying to make people aware that, you see the guys in the cammies and their nods doing their stuff at night, whatever else, they are are people that are with them doing the ops that are as capable and as dangerous, but they are not maybe, some big muscled up dude. It could be a lady with a 9-millimeter or an AK-47. There are a lot of great females and women in the space who do good stuff, and they need some credit. If I can shed a little bit of light on it, because I have seen them and been with them, I will.
This highlights the importance of STEM for women as well because I don’t have math skills. I probably couldn’t be a cybersecurity anything.
STEM is super important, and that’s one thing I am trying to get through in some of this narrative. We in cyber are notoriously a closed community and it’s problematic because we can’t hire people to do the work. The way we fix that problem is to open up and bring in people from different backgrounds. We should bring in folks that are people that serve at restaurants, people that work in mathematics, people that drive trucks, whatever. If you’ve got to bring in your head and you can solve problems, I could care less what your gender, nationality, or background are.
It’s like the fire thing in LA. We don’t care, save me please type of thing, but that brings up a good point because I have a friend who does what you do and went through the programs when he was in the Army. He had no high school education, but somebody saw the potential for computer skills. It does not necessarily even need that high-tech background.
Most days now, between what you are doing and the tools that exist in the space, you can be someone who has a good, inquisitive mind and looks for ways to solve problems with good analytic capabilities. Everything else can be either given to you, built for you or deployed for you. There are ways to work through that. To be perfectly frank, a lot of these “AI systems,” which are not AI but machine learning, are available to make people where they can operate at that scale. There’s a sea change taking place.
Learn to code.
My son is going through some certs for cyber and whatever else, and when he asked me a question. My first answer is, “Did you ask GPT?” I want my kids to understand that they are for their future, and they need to get used to asking the bot, not asking Dad.
Would you mind sharing how old your kids are? Just so people know. You don’t have grownup kids, do you?
22, 20, 16, and 14.
You are starting them very young. I love that, but I don’t know what I would do if my kids didn’t come and ask Mom.
Navigating Parenthood And The Future Of Learning
When they come to ask me about other stuff, I’m there, but when it’s like, “Dad, how do I do algebra?” I go, “Did you ask the bot?”
Does the bot cheat for them?
It depends on your definition of cheating. For me, I want my kids to win in life. Whatever advantage I can give them, I will.
My son took a Computer Science class in college and he got an A and he kept saying to me, “I have no idea why I’m getting an A. I have no idea what I’m doing,” but I thought that was a little weird.
There are plenty of executives that get As that don’t know what they are doing, too.
That’s very true. I do agree with that. I have been in Corporate America for 30 years because of that. In your book, the NSA’s Menwith Hill destruction mirrors real-life fears about kinetic warfare and cyberspace. Did you do research or do you just know this?
I was stationed at Menwith Hill. I lived there for three years. I hated every second of it because there’s nothing out there but sheep, rain, and crappy British food. I hated Menwith Hill, and I took the opportunity to blow it up in my book.
Mags interrogation scenes are brutally visceral. Why was it important to depict her that way? It reminded me of the lioness. I had to turn it off in that bad scene where they are, I don’t know if they are hazing, but they are beating the crap out of her. It was uncomfortable.
I wanted to make that as gut-wrenching and visceral as I could because, as a character, she’s honestly my favorite character because she’s a villain but also not, which is cool, and she’s a badass, which is great. I wanted to put it through that she’s tough and it doesn’t matter what you do to her. You are going to make her madder and she’s going to find a way to get back at you.
The other point was breaking down the reality because I have been in those spaces too of how some of that interrogation stuff works where people don’t understand. It’s not going to be an American soldier that puts their hands on you. There are other ways that this system can be leveraged for people to coerce answers when they need to be asked.
You are scaring me now. I love the way, and I want you to explain a little bit of this book’s critiques of the bureaucracy, which we are seeing a lot of. Through figures like Hayes and Moreno. How do these affect? I’m imagining that you’ve had some experience with this. How does this impact your institutional views?
If you are seeing it, there’s so much fraud, waste, and abuse and stove piping and a lack of shared call cooperation between organizations that it’s problematic, especially for the mission side of things. I remember being at Fort Meade and having target stuff we needed to do on a valid target, and we couldn’t do it because we didn’t have some line of paper signed by somebody in an agency that wasn’t the NSA.
For me, it was always like, “You mean to tell me that we are going to let this person go and that we know they need to meet their maker because someone else over another agency did not approve the authority to do the op?” It was worth it for me to point out like, “There’s a lot of crazy shenanigans that take place and people give the government way too much credit for how effective they are.” It’s a mishmash of stuff that doesn’t work very well, even in the operational special forces side of things.
Do you think cutting back on that bureaucracy is going to tame that a little bit?
It’s going to help. What’s interesting to me, as a taxpayer, is to see the stuff where we are wasting money on stuff. That’s ridiculous for Americans. I’m all for helping people everywhere they need to go. America should be the leader for doing the work that we can do to help other people, and I do charity work all the time. However, it bothers the hell out of me that, as a veteran, we have veterans who can’t get healthcare or a place to stay, but we are spending $800,000 a year on research projects to study how Mountain Lions run on a treadmill.
Exposing Bureaucracy And Institutional Inefficiencies
I couldn’t agree more. I have seen some stuff that’s like, “Are you kidding me?” I would love to know every single time I see that, who sponsored that bill. I want to know who sponsored it. I hope that’s our next step.
I hope our next step is to do an investigation into the entire Capitol Hill Group and say, “How are you getting a salary from the American people of $150,000 a year, but you are worth $12 million to $15 million?”
Yes, I would love to see that too. As I recall, right out of college, I had a job at Hughes Aircraft on the EDSG side. I’m not understanding how those people aren’t getting audited because we used to have branches of the military come in and audit all the time. I don’t understand why they are not sitting in the NGOs the way that they sit in those corporations and audit every single piece.
The cool thing is that technology, AI, all large language models, LLMs are coming for that very reason and people are not ready for the fact that the kimono is going to get rolled open in a way that you are not prepared for.
AI and large language models are coming, and people aren’t ready for the fact that the kimono is going to get rolled open in ways they can't handle. Share on XYou could see that the first bill they tried to put through, they got it down to eight pages or something like that and AI did that and told us all about the waste.
I have already started putting some stuff together for book three, and I’m going to run pretty rampant with some of that.
I will name names for you. No, I’m kidding. There’s a reason I left California. Start there. Chase, this has been fabulous. Everybody, you’ve got to go read this book. gAbrIel is his first one and vArIable is the second. This is not just fiction. This is fiction with people who know what they are talking about.
It’s techno fiction. It’s realistic. Everything that I’m writing about is technically feasible and doable, and stuff that’s happened or is happening.
Wrapping Up: How To Connect With Chase Cunningham
Once I put this interview, they are going to be people reaching out for other interviews. What can they get ahold of you?
The best place is to reach out through me on LinkedIn. I’m also finishing up a website that’ll be available to people. They can get all the stuff off of that. It should be out here pretty soon, which will be DrZeroTrust.com. I’m getting there.
Thank you.
Important Links
- How to Get Speaking Gigs Now with Leisa Reid
- Dr. Chase Cunningham
- DrZeroTrust
- Demo-Force
- gAbrIel
- vArIable
- Dr. Chase Cunningham on LinkedIn
About Dr. Chase Cunningham
Dr. Chase Cunningham is a retired Navy Chief Cryptologist with more than 20 years experience in Cyber Warfare gained directly from the realm of cyber operations. Dr Cunningham worked in various operations by being “on pos” doing cyber forensics, analytics, and offensive and defensive cyber operations within the NSA, FBI and other government agencies. He has authored a variety of other books all on cybersecurity and cyberwarfare, hosts the DrZeroTrust podcast, founded Demo-Force.com, and is regularly consulted on matters of national cyber security. Dr Cunningham has an extensive background that provides him with unique, deep insight into all facets of cybersecurity at both the national and personal levels.
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