I believe that some of this could be explained by a piece of his reading diet that was accidentally revealed in 2012. In 2012, Wikileaks released a ton of information from the intelligence group Stratford. Included in that dump of documents was an email chain from 2011 where Steve Pieczenik was complaining to customer service: quote, I bought several Stratford books several weeks ago, but have not received them. Could someone inform me as to what happened? From this, we learned that Steve is a customer of Stratford who produces intelligence assessments. And we also learned Steve's phone number and the fact that he uses an AOL email address, which you wouldn't think someone in his position would do, particularly when emailing with an intelligence contracting company. Seems weird. Oh, man, this is a guy who cannot turn his phone off and on again. Steve Pieczenik at SBCGlobal.net. Excuse me. Excuse me. Where are my intelligence books? All the books Steve ordered were the works of George Friedman, the founder of Stratford. In his exchange with customer service, Steve implies that Stratford has his visa number on file, which seems to indicate that he might be a regular customer and consumer of their products. This impression is strengthened by another email from 2009, where Steve is responding to a bulk email, like a mass email that got sent out by Stratford. It got sent to all their subscribers, and he's responding very snippily. It appears from his response that an auto-mailing that he doesn't like. It appears that he does not like getting spam. Of course. Of course. Also, he would like to know why there are so many toolbars on his browser. Another email from 2007 includes Steve on a list of, quote, premium users of Stratford. One email has him listed as the holder of a lifetime membership. In 2005, Steve sent Stratford the following email: quote, happy holidays. Continue the great job. Soon, we will not need our expensive, ineffective, bloated government agencies. I would venture to guess that someone who reads the premium content, including their daily intelligence reports produced and released by Stratford, reads them pretty regularly to the point where he interacts with them to wish them a happy holiday and wish for the downfall of government agencies, that's probably a person who would be able to sound really well versed in geopolitics and intelligence stuff the way Steve does. That's just a theory. But it would kind of tend to explain how Steve is able to sound like an expert in this field when he probably hasn't been involved in decades. He just reads a lot of Stratford publications who put out intelligence assessments professionally. That does explain how he sounds like he does.