Camp Gagnon - CIA Spy on Trump Shooting, Mind Control & 2024 Election

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Andrew Bustamante is a former covert CIA intelligence officer, and today he's in the tent to explain what he knows about the Trump shootings, if he believes in remote viewing and CIA mind control, & who the CIA wants to win the 2024 election. WELCOME TO CAMP!Intro, Edited and Produced: Christos PapastefanouS/o to our sponsors MDhair, Proton VPN, Morgan & Morgan and Bluechew!Customize your hair growth treatment with MDhair! Visit https:bit(dot)ly/camp-mdhairGET UP TO 64% DISCOUNT OF PR...

Watching Trump after the assassination attempt. I mean, it's a pretty remarkable thing. A former president, yeah. And why do you think the CIA tried to kill him? Nice try. This is Andrew Bousamante, a former CIA operative and a personal friend of mind. And today he's in the tent to tell us all the government's deepest secrets. We want politicians that lie.

We need politicians that lie because we, the American people, are fucking stupid. We're talking about the assassination attempt on former President Trump and how he thinks it was possible after he visited the site in Butler, Pennsylvania. There were three big findings that I would say were relevant to me. He's also going to tell us about the CIA within the CIA. Yes, that's a thing. And he also tells us what it's like to be married to a CIA spy. CIA is the first group to support you through a divorce and the last group to encourage you to get married. If you're interested in the secrets within our own United States federal government, this is the episode for you.

sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. Andrew Bustamante. How are you, sir? Dude, I am so excited to be here right now. Thank you, though. I had no idea that your set was this badass. Oh, thank you, man. This is actually awesome.

I appreciate it. And if anybody didn't realize how awesome it is, it's a tent. Yeah. It's an actual, like, only it's not a tent. This is the tent that every, I was going to say 13-year-old, no, it's not a 30-year-old.

It's what every 28-year-old wants. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I'm saying? I will say military guys are more excited about the tent. than anyone else. For real? Yeah, yeah. This is like tent city,

dude. This is the kind of shit that we used to sleep six or eight guys at a tent like this. Right? Yeah. And then you got

actual fake trees and leaves. You got a painted wall out here. Strippers. There's three strippers out there. A couple bad bitches up in the tent. And then there's a tree house. Yeah. A tree house with a pimp light

and it looks like shag carpet on the walls. Exactly. Exactly, dude. And everyone's always like, dude, you got to film something in the tree house. And I go, eh, not everything needs to be content. Not everything needs to be commercialized.

We don't need to make money and everything. That's what the strippers are. They're midget strippers because it's a small. It's a small tree house. Yeah, exactly. And they're actually elves. We call them elves when they're in a tree.

And naked, yeah. Exactly. But I was like, I don't know, I do think that the best human communication occurs in nature. I think that's ultimately where humans, where we come from, that's where we're going to go. That's where, you know, ash to ash. It's dust to dust. I think we all have like a response to nature. And so as a result, it was like, how do we create nature in the middle of Brooklyn?

So there's real science behind that, too, man. Yeah, I know. I think it matters. I don't know. I'm kind of a believer that like the two are sort of inseparable. That, uh, I don't know. To me, it's like, I want to have like a romantic evening, but like I don't want to go anywhere. You know what I mean? It's like, well, I mean, I guess you could do it at home, but like part of the, the allure of like the flirtatious element with like a lady of the night, I think is sort of intrinsic to this setting that you're in and that I don't think you can be in like some bright warehouse and be on like a romantic date. You know what I mean? Like you need a setting that is sort of conducive. to it. I don't know that you're on a romantic date with a lady of the night. I mean, I am right now. You know what I'm saying? Podcast is sex. People don't trust me. It is, all right? So I've got to say that, you know, since we've met, we met on flagrant. Yeah. And since we've met,

I've really come to appreciate the personality that you have, literally, like the scientific personality that you have. Oh, thank you. Because if you remember, that's one of the first things that you and I talked about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was being able to measure empirically your personality traits? I did that personality test you, I remember, and we talked about it the next time I saw you when I saw you down in Florida

and then again when I saw you guys up here in New York. So I really come to appreciate it. I love the fact that you, as an artist, as a creative, as a comedian, you are interested in the why? Because what happens a lot of times is artists aren't interested in the Y, people of your personality type,

introverted, artistic, sensitive types, right? Which I know sound all very masculine that I'd manly to you. Generally, the why is not what's interesting. It's more about the how, like how does it feel? Yeah, how do I use it? Yeah.

Not the why is it that way. But it seems like for you, there's a healthy dose of like, why? Why am I the way I am? Why does the universe work the way it works, right? And it's funny because I am a Y person too. Even though we are very, very different empirically, personality-wise, I am also a Y person. Why does it work the way it works?

Why does it happen to me the way it happens to me? Why does it happen to you differently than it happens to me when it's the same thing? Yeah, I think religious underpinning for me growing up was a lot of why. Because I think like thinking about God and like how we got here and why were created and what our purposes. Like I found that like through growing up in a very religious household that was very like academically religious, a lot of the questions were sort of surrounding why. So for me it was about authority. Like, why does this person have power over me? Why do I have to listen to them?

That's so funny. I don't have that at all. For real? I don't have, like, the anti-author, like... I look at a priest, and I feel sorry for them. I look at a teacher, and I'm like, you're an asshole. Like, that's... I look at a general, and I'm like, you're a dickbag.

I look at, you know, what a nurse, and I'm like, how did you make that choice? What about cops? So cops are a different story altogether. So cops land on my, like, thank you for what you do, because I don't have can want that job. Yeah. That's where I live now, but that's only because I've seen how their universe works now. Oh, yeah.

When I was a kid, I was like, oh, when I was really little, cops were cool. And then when I was like a teenager, I was like, oh, cops are just there to rain on your parade. These are guys that guys and gals, but when I was growing up, they were mostly just guys. Yeah. You're like, oh, they don't get to have any fun and they're just here to end my fun. But once I went to CIA, dude, I was like, thank God I'm an Intel. Yeah. Because law enforcement, that is crazy stuff.

Yeah, it's insane. You see the horrible things people do to each other. You see the bullshit that shows us that we are still animals. Like law enforcement officers, whether they're at the state level, a county level, or the federal level, that is a job I respect. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I'm coming on the road. That's right.

Pots Town, PA, Friday, November 8th, 2024. I'll be at Seoul, Joles. You can come see me do one hour. of stand-up comedy, nothing more and nothing less. It's going to be an amazing time. If you're not near Pots Town, don't worry because I'm coming to Stanford, Connecticut. I'm going to New York Comedy Club. That's right. They have a bunch of amazing clubs in the city and also an amazing one in Stanford, Connecticut, November 13th. If you want to come hang out, come hang with me, say what's up. I'll be talking to everybody after the show. We'll be doing an hour of comedy, guys, stand-up comedy.

It's my passion. It's what I love to do when I'm not inside this tent. So come kick it with me. A bunch of crazy stories. We'll have a great time. You can find the link at my Instagram. Get it in the story. I'll put it in the description. I can't wait to see you guys there. Let's get back to the show. Hey guys, really quick. Did you know that on this day in history in 1582, Pope Gregory introduced the Gregorian calendar, which most of the world still uses today? Or that in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite into orbit. This event triggered the space race between the USA and the USSR. I learned these facts pretty recently, actually, on the Smore Camp newsletter.

That's right. Smoor Camp, the Inner Sanctum. For this kind of show, we do a ton of research. research. I have different researchers and friends that help me find information and not everything can make the episode. Either it's like too crazy. It's too like weird or gory and it will get demonetized on YouTube. Or it's just additional and it doesn't always make it, but it always makes it into the Smoor Camp Inner Sanctum newsletter. So if you were interested in expanding your mind, learning new information and being the most interesting person into every room you step into,

check it out in the description or this QR code right here. Now let's get back to the show. But yeah, I don't know. I never had that anti-authoritarian street. So what is your relationship with authority now? I'm like, this is the whitest thing about me. This is genuinely, no question. If any black people listening, you're going to hear this and they're going to be like, they're going to think I'm joking. I'm not joking, okay?

If I go to like a music festival or some type of large public gathering and I see three or four police standing there, I look at them and I go, oh, thank God. I swear to God. Like, I love cops. I think they're cool. They've always been nice to me. ever been shot. You know what I mean? So I look at them and I go, sick. Some cops are here. I'll make sure I don't do anything illegal and I'll be, and they'll love me. You know,

like, I don't, it just never crossed my mind. Like, it could be bad. So, so you made a joke about the whitest thing about you. Can I, I, I'm constantly learning and I think you might dig this. Totally derailing the conversation though about. I think you're going to one of me, be like, actually, this is the whitest thing about you. You're wearing sandals and socks. I'm like, fuck, you got it. I think that makes you, I think that makes you browner than white. Oh, maybe. Yeah, yeah. Because if you go anywhere in the Middle East, like socks and sandals are the thing. Yeah, that's actually a good point.

It's pretty funny. I think Asians do that too. Yeah. They even have a sock with a spot. We stole that from them. There we go. Yeah, that was culture of preparation. Sorry, Asians.

All the way back to like imperial Japan. So I recently found out that black and white are actually recognized, well, technically black is the only recognized official term. white is not a recognized term when discussing a human being. So to say that a different way, when you look at college writing guides and political discourse guides, I just did it last night because the Democratic National Convention just started, and they kept talking about black people. So the DNC, very political event, they're nominating Kamala Harris as the new presidential

candidate for the Democratic Party. They kept talking about black people, black people this, black people that, black people, people this. I grew up where you called everybody African American and black was an inappropriate term. Oh, really? Do you remember that or no? No. Where it was inappropriate to call somebody black. That's where it. So then I Google it and I'm like, what, what is this? And all these official guides have capitalized the term black, like capital B, lowercase LACK. So what that means is in like a college text or an official legislation, you can say black people, whatever. It's a true term. Just like you would call somebody American or you would call somebody African or you would call somebody Ukrainian,

right? Black is a term, but white is not. There is no capital, W-H-I-T-E. You can't call people white. There's no term. There's no term. There's no term. And actually, in the guides themselves, it says, black people need to be recognized as a subset because there's people of dark colored skin that are not from Africa. Yeah. Jamaicans, right? Southern Asians. This is what happened. I was in I was like, what was it, fifth, sixth grade maybe? I just started going to actual school and Miss McCray. I figured what she taught, Black lady. But I remember we were having this conversation.

We were just reading like some racial literature as a kid. And I just asked her, I was like, is black offensive or do you prefer African American? You probably want African American, right? And she was like, I'm not African. And I was like, oh, that's a good point. Like, you'll hear people do this sometimes. They're like, oh, Idraselba, one of the greatest, you know, British, African-American actors.

And it's like, wait, what? He's not African or American. Like, he's neat. What, so what are we talking about? So that's where I'm like, oh, yeah, I just, I never used that term. And I just had like three black people. I'd be like, just say black. I'm like, all right, fine.

But I assumed white would be a thing. It is not. So the term Caucasian, the term white, when you capitalize either of those terms, the stated reason is that it brings legitimacy to, the racial history of the United States because slave owners capitalize the word white, anti-Semites capitalize the word white, members of the Ku Klux Klan and other parts of white supremacy groups capitalize the word white.

So by not capitalizing the word white or Caucasian, we are preventing ourselves from legitimizing the claims of previous people who did exercise racial abuses. Interesting. So it is one of those interesting things. So for me, I didn't have black authority figures to enforce on me. Other than Bob Marley. Other than Bob Marley, capital B. But yeah, dude, it was wild because, you know, here I am 44 years old,

and I'm learning new shit. And that's something that you learned in fifth grade. It's still new to me. That's an easy point. But also, you don't have to learn it because you're every race combined. All the ambiguously brown, forgettable character. Yeah, exactly. So you can be any race.

It doesn't even matter. You could be half black easily. What was, uh, you kind of looked like Kamala Harris, actually, now that you bring it up. I appreciate it. You know, she didn't get married till she was 49 years old? No. Yeah, dude. How old is she?

She's like, what, 50 something, 54 somewhere in there. Yeah. She might be older than that. That's wild. Married at 49 to, uh, her husband had two children with a previous family. So again, I'm not, I'm not big into politics, but it's, publicly. It's the DNC, man. It's like one of the biggest, most important races of our lifetime happening in the White House right now. So Kamala Harris, Kamala Harris, because you can't call her the wrong name. I always get that mixed up. Kamala Harris, she is part Asian, part black, which means these are the two largest minority groups growing in the United States today. She is without children.

33% of women have not had children, right, in the United States. she has historically been an advocate for for abortion rights, women's rights, etc., etc., even since she was, you know, young and growing up in California. She's married to a man with two kids, which makes her the mother in a blended family, which is the fastest growing family type in America. And she is more than two different races mixed together, which is how, like, 28% of Americans identify. So when it comes to politics, and when it comes to what people on the Democratic Party line care about, she basically hits every box. She's like an AI candidate. Yeah. They ask chat, GBT.

They're like, who do we need? Who can you create here, right? Exactly. Well, that's a good point. Isn't that wild? And she's a cop. Like, basically. She's an attorney, yeah.

Not literally, but like, yeah, but like as a DA and was like locking up people for weed. So who else? Who else to go against a convicted criminal, right? It fell in running for president. Exactly. So then I can imagine a bunch of like, you know, kind of like conservative Republicans be like, oh, you know, she is a cop. She has thrown some black dudes in prison, so I guess we can look the other way.

Capital B. Yeah, capital B. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, she kind of hits everyone. That's pretty crazy. Have you been watching the any of the, any of the, it started last night, the D&C stuff? Correct.

Yeah. So I watched a portion of it last night. I watched some of the speakers, AOC, here in New York, represented for Queens. Yeah. phenomenal speaker, a phenomenal job. And I watched Hillary Clinton give her speech. I watched fucking whack-a-doodle, the head of the auto union. Dude, if you want to, if you hear, I'm going to be honest. I'm apolitical, right? I wear, I wear purple cape. I'm independent all the way through

and through. When I watched the Republican National Convention, where Donald Trump accepted his nomination, I was like, these fucking people are crazy. Like, it's, there, there's some stuff that happens on the Republican side that you're like, are you even living in the same planet? Is everybody else? Colt vibes. It's weird. Yeah. You watch the Democratic National Convention and you're like, this fucking shit is scary.

Yeah. So it's like crazy on one side, scary on the other side. Because the head of the auto union starts walking, like he's up on stage in front of how many tens of thousands of people, right? And he's talking about taking down the elite rich and taking down corporate America. AOC gets up there and she's like, corporate America this and CEOs that and anybody who makes too much money should be penalized

and we need an uprising at the middle class and you're like, holy shit, like you guys are fucking scary. Not to mention the fact that your donors are oftentimes coming from that same class of elitists that you're now talking to these folks to say that you don't believe in. That's why I don't believe it.

Like if I hear someone that's like, hey, whether it's Trump being like, we're going to drain the swamp or whether it's AOC being like, we're going to get rid of people to make 200,000 a year. I'm like, the people that pay for this country that fund everything, that make the wars happen, that make all of us have a great lifestyle, they're not going to let it, they're not going to let this happen. You know what I mean? Like, we are, like, America is sort of supported. The backbone is this

corporatocracy that exists here for better, for worse. We are a capitalist nation with a strong corporate lobby. I don't think that these corporations are going to let, are going to let you just dismantled their regime. Rightly or wrongly, I'm not saying that we should or shouldn't, but I just don't see it happening. And so anytime I hear this rhetoric, I'm like, whether you are lying to get elected, because you're still going to be taking this, you know, corporate Silicon Valley money or whatever it's coming from, or you're, you don't know that you're lying and you think you're trying,

but it's not going to work. I'm like, it's one of the two. They know they're lying. They must, right? AOC stood up there and started talking about how she valued her experience. as a waitress in Queens serving omelets. Yeah. And then she was like, and, you know, I have Republican critics who tell me that I should go back to

serving omelets, right? And the audience started booing. And she's like, here's the truth. There's nothing wrong with working for a living. I was like, AOC, you get to vote on your own salary right now. You make $250,000 a year. And you can vote in your own promoting. motion. Yeah, you're not going to go back to the time. You're not going to go, yeah. You're not

the working class anymore, dear. I just want to throw that out there. You have people below people, below people who actually read the legislation that you sign off on. Yeah. You are not part of the working class. You're not even part of the middle class. Yeah. Like, you are now part of the very same elite class. And she started the whole thing by being like, you know, 10 years ago, I was a waitress. And I'm like, that's because fucking you've been reelected five times. Yeah. So you're having a great political career. Yeah. And rightly so. And you're talented. You're on the stage of the DNC, which means you're being primed to be a future candidate for president. Yeah. So it's just like, I'm like, oh, this is. Yeah, the political theater is so crazy. But it's to your exact point, right? Like,

are they lying to themselves? Or they line to the public? They're all lying to the public. Because what you said is exactly right. The corporatocracy that creates the United States is what drives the U.S. economy. The U.S. economy is the measure of success that defines a global superpower. If the corporatocracy declines, the economy declines, military spending declines, innovation declines, investment in both social and capitalistic endeavors declines, the United States is a superpower declines. Nobody wants that to happen. Yeah.

Right? It's crazy because even Joe Biden, when he was giving his resignation and endorsing Kamala Harris, went up on, on, you know, in front of the national public in his state of the union or his state address from the White House. And he was like, there was a time when it was inevitable that China was going to be, was going to outpace the United States. And now that's just not true. Because even at that level, Democrats and Republicans alike, both know we cannot let a country like China grow their economy to the place where they place a threat on global order. Yeah. And this is why I'm interested in, like, geopolitical affairs. Because I feel like once you kind of get outside the U.S. more or less,

like things become much more bipartisan. You know what I mean? Like, even looking at like, you know, foreign policy in the Middle East, like kind of both parties are sort of in lockstep, even though one of them is trying to repress it a little bit more. But in general, I'm like, yeah, it seems like there's a little bit more harmony amongst the parties. And that it's all the culture war shit in America that people will fight about that's completely bullshit that doesn't matter at all where anyone peas like it's all I'm convinced this is like a foreign sciop like all the culture worship we can talk about that but I'm curious watching Trump walk into the R&C after the assassination attempt last time I saw you Trump was had not tried to be assassinated yeah and

then now he has I mean it's a pretty remarkable thing yeah and pretty rare in the scope of you know, U.S. history that a president would get shot. A former president, yeah. Yeah, I mean, he got hit with a bullet. Like, that's crazy. And then he seemed shook. He seemed very shook. Yeah, it's interesting because one thing that you can count on with Trump is he understands

the marketing value of any situation. Because he's a business person. He's a reality TV star. Like, he understands the marketing value, which marketing value is just messaging value, influence value, persuasive value. I want to ask you about this. Because this guy understands the marketing value better than anyone on the planet. He gets buildings that he didn't even build and he puts his name on him.

Like he understands exactly how he fits into this larger landscape and how people perceive him. With that being said, since like 2012, even before he was running for president, anything that happened against him was a larger message about they're trying to silence me, they're trying to take me out, the Clintons are trying to shut me up. They don't want me to have power because they know what I'm going to do to them. I'm going to drain the swamp. They're trying to put this Russia thing on me,

which is bullshit, da-da-da-da. And then someone tries to shoot him, and he doesn't talk about it. If you were to ask me a year ago, hey, someone's going to try to shoot Trump, what do he thinks he's going to do after? He would go up on stage and be like, they tried to take me out,

the government tried to kill me, this government tried to kill me. Putin wanted me dead. This person wanted me dead. He hasn't said any of that. And that leads me to believe that he's a little concerned and a little shaken from the whole experience. And I think he understands the reality of what actually happened to him. So when I was at CIA, there was a brief period of time where General Petraeus became the director of CIA.

And General Petraeus was somebody who had a phenomenal fitness record. like he had a reputation of being stoic and kind of untouchable. So CIA went through a process of vetting all of its officers to find out who would be qualified to exercise with the general because he couldn't exercise with his friends because they didn't have clearance. So he would travel the world and some of our officers in different parts of the world would have to travel to train with him so that when he landed in London, he had training partners.

And when he landed in Germany, he had training partners or Africa, he had training partners Australia had training partners. So I was identified as one of his training partners when I was deployed in Southeast Asia. That was sick. It was pretty cool. So I got a chance to train with him. He would kick my ass every time.

Really? He was an old, like 60-something-year-old man. He would out-push up me, out-sit-up me. He was a machine, physical machine. Totally, yeah. All the rumors are true about his physicality. However, I will say, he did the exact same workout every day. So he had an edge.

So he had an edge. And he's been doing the same workout since he was like 38 years old. So it's just hard to keep up. with a guy who's got that kind of muscle memory. Either way, I had this conversation with him where I was like, you know, why is it that people are so focused on your physical fitness all the time? I was like, how, when you were in charge of all of CENTCOM, when you were in charge of the entire like military conflict through the global war on terror, it was like when you were deciding what we're going to do in Iraq, why was everybody talking about your physical fitness regime? Like,

Why did every troop in your command talk about that? And he told me, he was, and I was like, they talk about it, but you don't talk about it. I was like, why don't you talk about it? And he told me that one of the key pillars of influence for a leader is an understanding when you need to let the myth speak for you. And I think that's what you're seeing right now with Donald Trump. Really? Let the myth speak for you.

Because as soon as you say something, you're actually taking power away from the public, like, subconscious as it grows out of control. And you start to be the one that limits it. And the fantasy can be much greater than the reality of what happened. I was talking to a movie director, not that long ago. We've got a book that we're trying to get through CIA's review process so that we can get our book out. I was telling you about this on Flagrant too. It's still in motion. But our film rights were up for sale. So we've taken bidders. We've successfully sold film and TV rights to our story, even though our story can't be published. Damn, that sucks.

But I was talking to a movie director who was explaining to me, why is it that most new directors create low-budget horror films first? Have you heard this before? Have you heard this before? So why is it that most new movie directors create low-budget horror films first? And he was like, because it's cheaper and scarier to film an open door to a dark room than it is to film an open door to a dark room with a monster. in it. Right. This is Jaws. Yeah, it's every horror movie out there because once you can see the scary thing, it's less scary. But when it's just a black door, like an open door to a black room, we fill in the scariest thing in our minds into that door. And that's a big production company

inside your head. Yes. Billions of dollars that's making that movie. So you let the myth speak for you because it speaks louder. I'm with you, but at the same time, I'm like, when has Trump ever let the myth speak for him? You know what I mean? Like, I just don't see that in the character of this guy. And he's already 100 years old and I don't think he's changing. You know what I mean? Like, he is who he is. He's always let the myth speak for him, man. He's always called attention to distract so that the real myth, I mean, we don't know how much money he actually has. We don't know how much taxes he actually

pays. The whole time that he was on the apprentice, nobody knew what he was going to do, right? It's always the scuttle butt. Yeah, but to that point, I'm like, okay, he probably has like $2 million, $2 billion or whatever. And he went on stage and he's, and he's, like I have five billion, you know, 10 billion. Like he's saying numbers that are bigger. So like in my mind, I'm like, he would just go on stage and be like, the Clintons tried to kill me. They couldn't do it.

And then the arena goes crazy and he would just use that as his marketing. And he hasn't said a word. And that makes me think that he knows, oh shit, like this could have gone really sideways. And maybe it was like a, I don't know, maybe it was a security issue in a small town in Pennsylvania, which I think is completely reasonable. You know what I mean? Like these small towns are going to. have like worse security details. But I think he also knows a little part of him's like,

oh, this could happen again and maybe they could do it better. And whether it's just like a bad actor out there or maybe, you know, someone put this kid up to it, who knows? But part of me wonders if he's like a little shaken. There's also going to be an element of if you're going to play that card when you play that card. Right. So if you're going to play the card, and here's a thing, like there could be zero evidence to substantiate that any American organization had anything to do with it. Right? Like, you've joked about the Clintons. There could be zero evidence to substantiate it. But if he makes that claim in the last three weeks before the election, it plays different than if he makes that claim now three months before the election.

That's a good point. Right. So you never know what they're keeping in reserve to. That's a campaign manager thing. Keep in mind also, you haven't seen any Trump hate ads against Kamala Harris. but you've seen hate ads against Donald Trump funded by Kamala Harris. Yeah, that's interesting. And the reason for that is twofold. One, because everything, all of the budget that the Republican Party put into supporting Donald Trump was attack ads against Joe Biden. So when Joe Biden said, I'm not going to run for president, all that money, all those

ads all went obsolete. Yeah. So they had to now create a campaign, a strategy, and then create ads to go against Kamala Harris. Which is exactly why you saw Kamala Harris was endorsed by Joe Biden. Within 10 days, you started seeing Kamala Harris ads everywhere on YouTube, on TV, in magazines, everywhere, right? Her promoting, trying to get fundraising, et cetera, et cetera. You saw it everywhere, but you saw nothing from the Trump campaign. Because they strategically, campaign manager shit, the campaign manager for the DNC was like,

hey, if we can keep this quiet for 10 days or so, we'll be able to launch a whole campaign. campaign for Kamala before the Trump campaign can even react to the fact that that Joe Biden endorsed her. So we're still seeing that transition. Once those faucets are turned on for probably be in the next couple weeks, then we'll see more apples to apples comparison. Oh, that's so interesting. Do you know if it's confirmed that a bullet actually hit Trump's ear? Or was it glass fragments or was like a rupture? From my understanding, it was confirmed that it was a bullet. I just don't know if multiple different entities confirmed it, right? I think I've heard that the wound,

the wound shape and form was consistent with the bullet. I'm pretty sure I have also seen still shots where they captured the bullet on both sides of his head. Yeah, I saw that. That's crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that's, I mean, that's the only thing I had there. I haven't researched it closely.

I mean, it's crazy. I did get a chance to actually go to Butler, Pennsylvania, and be part of an investigative crew to look at what happened the day that Donald Trump was shot. Really? And it's fucking crazy to be there in person. To see how small the space was,

to actually see the different barn towers where the counter snipers were sitting, to see the, there was a slight obstruction from one of the towers towards where Tom Crook was shooting from. To actually see the roof, the crook climbed up

and see the path how he climbed up it. And then to think of the fact that it was like a 90, degree day, 110 degree heat index day, and he's laying on top of a metal roof trying to stabilize a iron site, AR-15 with his glasses on. And he had that big old dome head. It was pretty crazy, dude. Yeah, adrenaline going crazy, getting singed. Yep. And then I got to be part of a, the same investigative crew went and actually tried to take the shot. So, 140 yards in a cornfield away from a human-shaped target with iron sights on an AR-14 or AR-15.

So we went out there and tried to recreate the shot, and it was super difficult to recreate that shot. Super difficult to even hit the target, let alone hit the head on the right side, on the ear. Yeah. Because when you're at that distance, like, on an iron site, the front target is the size of the whole target, really. Yeah. I mean, it's insane.

And why do you think the CIA tried to kill him? I mean, I am curious though. Like, it is insane that that happens. So in your opinion, based off the investigation that you did, what was sort of like the main finding that you saw? Was it just a security breakdown in a small town that didn't have like, that had to rely on local authorities that sort of had miscommunications? So there was, yeah. So there were, there were three big findings that I would say were relevant to me. And two of them were covered on the actual investigation.

one of them really came to a head when I watched day one of the DNC. If anybody hasn't watched day one yet, I would recommend that they Google or YouTube search Democratic National Convention in 2024 day one and specifically look at the speaker who spoke on behalf of the United Auto Workers Union, UAW. Watch his speech because this is going to tell you everything you need to know. Finding number one from our investigation was that it was most likely a security gap, a security guffaw by the Secret Service because that shit's not easy. It's not easy to come up with everything you need to secure a president or a former president

in a rural county like what we had in Butler, Pennsylvania. So finally, number one, most likely a security gaffa. There were funding challenges. I was there with a team of people who were familiar with what it takes to provide security to an event like that. And when there's limitations on resources and funding, it's a challenge. point number two there was no training

no significant preparation on the part of Tom Crook before he took that shot he didn't have an escape route planned he climbed up on a tin roof like with no escape route so he was highly exposed so once he took the shot he knew he was going to die

he either knew it or he never calculated for it which both ways show a lack of training right because a trained person would have found a way to shoot from an area of cover so that even after they shot, they would have an egress route to escape. He didn't have that. So he was either straight up suicidal or totally untrained and unprepared. So whatever drove him up there didn't drive him enough to think through how to escape.

The third finding is my personal finding. And this is the one that really resonates for me. When you watch the UAW, the Auto Workers Union president's talk at the first day of the DNC, you can see why it is that myths are so dangerous because he had the entire Democratic National Convention. This is a formal convention hosted by the DNC to elect, to nominate the representative for the Democratic Party. And this guy had the entire room chanting, Trump is a. scab. Trump is a scab. Like, it's just incredible to see how much bullying behavior can come out of, that is a form, that is one of the highest forms of government event in the United States. And they're resorting to personal attacks. They're resorting to labeling. They're resorting,

like, Trump is a criminal. Trump is an abuser. Trump is a serial abuser. Like, holy shit, the stuff that they're saying, true or not, right? Accurate or slightly accurate, whatever. The myth is more powerful. So what happens when some 20-year-old misguided kid in Pennsylvania doesn't know the facts, but here's the reverberations of Trump is a scab, he's a serial abuser, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What does that make a unstable kid do? What does that make even just a confused 20-year-old kid do?

It makes them think about violence, and that's crazy. Yeah, I mean, I'm with you. I mean, in general, I hear like political rhetoric in the past 10 years has gotten like off the rails. I think probably particularly coming from Trump. And then I think it's now been imitated and replicated by the other side, which I just think creates like more political division, which in general, I think just helps our enemies. So I'm not a fan of it. But with that being said, could the same go the other way where, you know, people are like, oh, January 6th, you know, like you can't tell me that, this political rhetoric, oh, they're going to steal the election, they're trying to destroy America, da, da, da, da, da, da, like, I'm with you, but I do think it goes both ways. I'm like, I think the political rhetoric is leading two division in America that I think is generally unhealthy. Yeah, you're 100% correct. What we're seeing happen in real time is something that the intelligence world calls the

security dilemma, right? So the security dilemma is the idea that when one person takes an action that enhances their security, right, which is both offensive or defensive, when one, you know, side takes an action to increase their security, the opposite side also takes a equitable or an equal action. And then that's what leads to escalation. So if you consider like two neighbors, I grew up in a house in a cul-de-sac in Pennsylvania when I was a teenager. The neighbor had a house. We had a house. No fences. Our yards crossed each other. No guard dogs, no security cameras like we didn't even lock our front doors. Right. And to get to school a lot of times,

not to get to school, to get to the 7-Eleven so that we could get candy, we would cut through the neighbor's backyards. Well, then one day, a neighbor put up a fence. So guess what every other neighbor did? Put up a fence. They all put up a fence. They didn't know why. Nobody knew why. The conversation on the street was, hey, did you see that, you know, 158 put up a, put up a fence? I wonder if we should put up a fence. Oh, they probably got tired of the kids walking through the yard or they probably got tired of this or they wanted to protect that. So then everybody put up a fence. And then another house put up a security system. And then they had that little sticker on the window. Now secured by. ADT. Yeah. So guess what everybody else did? Security windows. Yeah. And then

somebody got a dog. So then guess what everybody started getting? Dogs. So the security dilemma is basically like when one person takes an action to protect themselves, other actors see that as a threat to their own security. So then they take a equitable action. But what ends up happening is by when this person takes an action to secure themselves and then this person takes the same action to secure themselves, guess what this one doesn't feel anymore. Secure. So then they take more and then they take more. And then you have this escalatory action. So we have seen this play out in American politics going all the way back to before the second Bush administration. And it really came to a head during the Obama years because Obama was the first, so Obama had two things that were transformative

to American politics. And I voted Obama. I was happy for Obama's administration. I was there on inauguration day, right? I was 2008. I was a year into my time at CIA. Like my wife and I, a girlfriend at the time literally took the train into Washington, D.C. to see the inauguration, freezing-ass day. But my point is, during Obama's administration, he signed more executive orders than any other president before him. So he set the trend that has now become normal. Presidents, when they can't get stuff through legislative, they just sign an executive order.

And then they assume that the next president's going to supersede their previous executive order. So that's the first thing he did. And the second thing he did is he was the first one to really hijack when you have the majority in the House or when you have the majority in the Congress and the majority in the Senate. He was the first one to force legislation through with Obamacare. So by setting that precedent, that's what made it so that, that every president since then is like, well, as soon as you have control of both, you just force

through your legislation and you let everybody else deal with it. Yeah, I mean, I remember hearing Trump doing that. Yep. That he like did a bunch of stuff. Like I think Obamacare, he based on executive order changing this shit around. Yeah, and it does create a harmful precedent, I feel like because it just really lacks cooperation. It's just like, hey, we're just going to push our shit through. Yeah, it creates a harmful precedent because it forces, it gives people the option to force their own stuff through, which is not what the American people want. But then it also creates this situation where when the house is divided, nothing gets through. Everybody just puts a full stop. So you've got this either we find our way around legislation or we freeze all legislation. And that's not getting us,

that's not moving us forward. Yeah. Hey, what's up guys? We're going to take a break really quick because you should be able to access the entire internet, no matter what country you're in. And furthermore, you should be able to protect the things you're searching on the internet and the people you're talking to because who knows what type of, you know, scammers are out there trying to access your data. Who knows who's spying on you? Maybe it's the government. Who knows, all right?

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Let's get back to the show. Something I wanted to ask you, I think we've kind of talked about briefly, but I'm curious. Has the CIA stopped doing international, like, I guess meddling with other governments? I talked to a guy recently, this former Green Beret dude, Curtis Fox, he's awesome. But I was like, yeah, you know, like, you know, coups and da-da-da, obviously the CIA has been involved in like a lot of different color revolutions around the world, Guatemala, Iran. And he was like, yeah, they don't really do that anymore. Maybe the Green Beret don't do that anymore.

So there's a couple things that are a play here, right? First, the nature of how the U.S. federal government medals in foreign affairs or foreign elections, that nature has changed significantly since 2001, since 9-11. We've talked about pre-9-11 CIA, post-9-11 CIA. That's the turning point. That's the turning point. So after 9-11, Congress got all up in CIA's skirts because CIA failed to prevent 9-11, so fair, right? And part of the thing, one of the big changes was that there's a ton of oversight now for CIA. So CIA, FBI, NSA, Homeland Security, all of the alphabet soup. They all now have a ton of oversight from the U.S. Congress. And one of the things that Congress mandated is that they created

intelligence subcommittees that have to review and approve operations or operational intentions before the operations executed. But the thing is, there are very real implications to who becomes the next president of Russia, the next president of China, or as we've seen, those presidents don't change, but also like who does win the election in Iran, who does win the election in Venezuela or Argentina or Brazil. So the idea that we execute coups and execute assassinations in order to ensure that American interests are met, that has gone away. We don't take that kind of action.

By political commitment to the intelligence subcommittees, we don't take that kind of action. However, we still meddle. There's still cyber activity. There's still covert influence ops. there's still the funding of both parties, meaning like when you've got an opposition party and an incumbent party, when you have those two parties, will fund activities in both to create chaos. That's essentially how covert influence is executed worldwide by top tier countries. This is exactly what Russia does to us.

That's what we're seeing right now. It's what we saw in 2016, right? They will find divisive topics. They will create, for Russia at least, they will create bots on social media. accounts that then create new content, fake news, viral clips, et cetera, et cetera, videos taken out of context, AI, deep fakes, they'll create whatever to foment opposition on both sides. And that chaos is essentially meant to undermine our democratic process. So that's the strategy, and that's how we meddle.

Green berets are unique, because green berets are the army's indigenous... combat capability, meaning you send two green berets into a country. In that country, those green berets are supposed to train, equip, organize, and structure their guerrilla forces to carry out their own internal revolution. So to your point about meddling, the green berets are exactly the kind of tool that we use to execute meddling. So if the army has been using less green berets for that purpose, that's a fair point that only a green beret can speak to. But when it comes to the overarching national security interests of meddling in foreign affairs and foreign election cycles and foreign powers, we have not turned that off by any means.

It's just sort of changed a little bit. Right. Everything adapts. We live in a world now that's very different. Social media has changed everything. Cybersecurity has changed everything. The flow of money has changed everything. The advent of cryptocurrency and blockchain has changed everything. The fact that you can become a billionaire in a matter of years with no college education. It's pretty wild. That's wild stuff, man. So we can't keep doing national security business, the same way we've done it in the past, that's how 9-11 happened, right?

So we have learned that. The problem is it's very hard for the government, and it's even harder for the organizations that are dependent on government legislation, like the Army, to adapt and change to the times. So there's this drag effect, delay effect, where you and I are living in a business world that's dated 2024, using computers and software systems that are up to date and resilient, the government is probably operating off of software and operating systems that are about four to six years old, right? When I was in, when I was at CIA in 2008, we were operating off of Windows 2000, right? So, I mean, there were even still units that were operating off

of Windows 98 in 2008. Because there's a lag effect. So you and I and people who live in the everyday world, we don't feel that lag, like the government and the army and CIA feel that lag. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I'm so curious about this idea of like the hybridized warfare. Like I had mentioned that a little bit earlier, like these sort of siops that are done from other governments to us. And I'm kind of a believer, and maybe I'm too cynical, but like anytime I see like some major cultural moment happening in the United States that doesn't really seem to have any bearing on anything or anything that matters. And again, not to say that these issues aren't important, you know, whether it's like some protest or something. But I just see these things and I go, oh, who does this benefit? And it seems like it always is benefiting some type of foreign power.

And it seems like, again, to me, a, I had this guy, Ryan Macbeth. I don't know if you're familiar with him. He's an analyst, cybersecurity guy. He works at a big government contractor. And he was telling me that he sort of did a thing as an experiment just to see if he could make it work. He started finding the profiles. like the demographic profiles, the people that were generally in support of the Palestinian protests. And he found that they were like women of a certain age, of a certain income bracket,

and he started targeting them with ads to try to shut down a breezeway or a highway in Baltimore. And it's basically like, I wonder if for under a thousand dollars I could get 50 people to want to shut down a highway. And according to him, he was like, I successfully amassed the people. into a WhatsApp group or a telegram group and basically just had to pull the trigger and then you deleted the whole group before he actually did it. And you just use it as a case study to say like for under $1,000, I was basically able to create a digital weapon.

And if I'm able to do it for $1,000, what can any other country do with unlimited money on our free channel? So I'm curious, how frequently does that happen? And do you have any advice for me as far as discerning which things are, you know, legitimate problems that people should be considering or just a sigh out from Russia. Yeah. So the first thing is that I'm glad that you had that guess. I'm glad that you made that

discovery. That is old news. It should be old news. But unfortunately, there's a lot of people listening to where that is new news. That Russia, this is why Russia has been a paper tiger, to use the term that we identified in 2003, a paper tiger for so long. Because they've known this for a lot. They are experts at covert influence. And that's what we're talking about. What your friend ran was a covert influence campaign. Right. It involved all the elements of targeting, messaging, persuasion, um, uh, narrative. And all that was lacking was action. Right. So he created an entire covert influence campaign on his own as an experiment, which goes to show how easy it really is, how inexpensive and easy it really is. Nowadays, we do that using telegram, Facebook, you know,

Instagram, TikTok, you name it. 50 years ago, it was the same thing. We would use newspapers, classified ads, pamphlets, leaflets, and junk mail. Like, that's where, when I was a kid, I'm 44 years old now. When I was 10 years old, there was no internet, there was no AOL disc that came in the mail yet. Like, there was nothing. But that doesn't mean there was no covert influence. It means that covert influence was ceded with local newspaper articles.

I mean, if you can think about it, think about it. Think about how difficult it must have been for a local community or municipal or district journalist to come up with a story every week for the local rag that went out to a thousand households every week. Multiply that across the entire United States. And now you can understand like, oh, all that Russia had to do back then was put an article on the International News Wire, which is just a one-way feed where all stories go from all journalists in the world. And some journalist in Ohio is going to pick it up and reprint it or repurpose it, reformat it, claim it as their own, or do research that pulls from that newswire to create a story that goes to a thousand American households in Oklahoma. So that's the way it's always worked. It's always worked. It's always worked most effectively when you find a very cheap way of spreading what's called dis or miss information.

Diss meaning lies. Disinformation is straight up lies. misinformation is factual information that's interpreted with falsehood so that like your name really is Mark Gagnon but if I say oh your name is Mark Gagnon it's based off of the Belgian Gagnon that's misinformation right right I don't actually know what it is it's probably not Belgian though right French Canadian yeah close enough so you're exactly right where it's always it's easy it really is that easy it really is something that could happen and it is something that need to be aware of. So now, how does the CIA deal with this? Because according to the CIA charter,

you can't be doing covert ops on the American public. That's like a part of it. So CIA doesn't do it to the American people. But can they investigate things like this? CIA cannot. Those, that investigative branch actually falls to Homeland Security and FBI. So this is part of the the fracturing of government, CIA's job is to collect secrets from overseas. FBI's job is to protect American interests here at home. So you can't really have FBI collecting secrets overseas. You can't really have CIA protecting American interests here at home. When there's crossover like that, they have to work together. But to your point, it's very, very difficult for the federal government to protect information in the United States because we are a freedom country. We have a freedom

of information. So the way that they try to prevent it is essentially by putting legislation and political pressure on organizations, on companies like Facebook and Instagram, or they're all meta, right, X, Google, Yahoo, they put the onus on them. And that's why you then start to see YouTube. That's why you then start to see those companies

control the content that's published on their platforms. So I mean, I spend a lot of time talking to YouTube creators like you, and I know that you spend a lot of time making sure that your content does not violate YouTube's guidelines. Well, where do you think YouTube's guidelines come from? You think they're created by YouTube? No. YouTube has created their guidelines to protect,

to make sure that no creator on their platform violates the government policy that controls YouTube. It's not that CIA is trying to control YouTube. It's that YouTube, which is owned by Google, is trying not to fall victim to a policy, of legislation that prevents the kind of content it can publish because then YouTube can be punished. That's exactly what you saw happen with Facebook. That's exactly what you saw happen with X. That's what you see happening across the board is this challenge where the company, the for-profit

company, meta, Google, X is trying not to lose its revenue stream by having its hands lapped by the federal government because the creators on its user content generated social media platform are creating content that stands in violation of U.S. policy that has been dictated to Yahoo. So as long as we have that kind of government oversight, you're always going to have content creators who are restricted, and they're restricted more than what the government wants to restrict them because the for-profit company has to protect itself. So from the eyes of YouTube, YouTube's like, do I really want to let somebody talk about conspiracies and run the risk of their conspiracy video pissing off the federal government,

or do I just throttle all conspiracy conversations and open the throttle on conversations that have to do with dancing teddy bears? Interesting. See, that's what I wonder sometimes with X, with Twitter, that to me it seems like there's a clear sci-op happening there, where I see so much crazy rhetoric, like anti-Semitic shit, pro-Hitler Nazi bullshit, like crazy stuff that's posted all the time from kind of like random accounts that are sort of obscure, that don't have that many followers. And I'm looking at this saying, okay, is this a foreign government that's posting things to try to create chaos in the United States by creating like neo-Nazi factions that then are going to cause, you know, problems? Is it done by the U.S. government or

like special interest groups within the United States to create some type of leverage and pressure to have more, I guess, like, I don't know, parameters on what can be posted on the platform. Is it possibly done by both at the same time? Or is it just actual anti-Semites that are on the platform that are just like posting crazy shit about Hitler? And then happened to only have 43 followers. Which is possible. Because they're anti-Semites. Nobody follows that shit. Or could it like could it be all three. happening simultaneously. Like, I'm curious if you've seen any of that or if you're familiar with this phenomenon, what you think it could be. Absolutely. So, and it gets to your second

question, which is what can we do, what can you do, what can I do, what can the average person do to protect themselves against that influence? Because now that we know how easy and cheap it is to be influenced, and now that we understand that the true throttle, the leash that's on creators, isn't the federal government, it's actually the for-profit company that owns the platform, what can we do to protect ourselves from the information that is spread on those platforms that we consume? So there's a couple things that I think are important to highlight. So first, it's really easy to fact check. It's shockingly easy to fact check. But even more than fact checking, what I would recommend people do is look for bias or slants. So if you type in the word bias or news bias,

If you type in news bias filled with any news source, news bias the independent, news bias the guardian, news bias Fox News, news bias Christian Science Monitor, if you look up any of those news sources with the term news bias in it, you're going to get three or five different hits that are all very reputable places that will tell you how that news is biased, how it's slanted. It will tell you on several different indices. It will tell you whether it's left leaning, right leaning, far left, far right or centrist. It will also tell you the quality of the reporting factually. So it will say slightly left, highly factual. Slightly right, highly factual. Or it will say slightly left, not based in fact, you know, far right, not based in fact, and a whole slew of different things

in between. And it'll tell you that for foreign news sources like Al Jazeera, BBC, The Guardian, it'll tell you that for local news sources, even down to, you know, your local CBS, channel 14 action news Saskatchewan you'll find it everywhere so that's one thing I would recommend all people do to understand the news sources that you're reading from

so if you see something if you see a story posted online and it's posted by whatever news source it is hurts yeah Reuters yeah anything look up the news source

who is this new source who is this random news source in Kansas who is this random news source in the Everglah the the Netherlands. Who is this? And you can see what their bias is. Second, a process that we teach at CIA,

we teach people to look at conflicting, like intentionally conflicting news, like look at two different news sources that are opposite and look for how they are covering the same story. Because all stories are covered from two different angles, at least. And when you find your CNN and your Fox News are both covering the updates on some battlefield in Ukraine, where the two stories say the same thing,

there's a high level of factuality there, high probability of factual reporting. Where the two news stories say different things, now you can't rely on that. The problem is that when you look at news that's coming from the same side, when you're a liberal, progressive, and you look at progressive news sources,

even if you look at four different news sources, you run the risk of circular reporting. This is exactly what the conservative fall into, this is the problem they have all the time. It is everybody, every progressive out there, every liberal out there knows conservatives fall into this trap. Conservatives don't realize they fall into this trap, but they do. And then liberals don't realize they also fall into the same trap.

One news story that's carried by a leading news source is then repeated over and over again by all the other subsources. So Fox News says, whatever. right, AT&T got hacked, 2.9 billion records got taken. Well, then every other smaller conservative news group will take that story, expand on it 5%, and publish it in their own journal. So journalistically, no one's vetting the original story. We call that circular reporting in the Intel world. So then you have five or seven or 12 different news sources, all saying the same thing, all based off of the same original source, which has never been vetted. So that happens on both

sides. So that's why it's important that if you want to really vet information, you have to be looking at two different news sources that don't have a reason to collaborate and don't have a reason to cooperate and where they intersect, you can tell that that is where the truth is. So by understanding the bias, you'll understand if there's factual evidence behind the source, and then by understanding the news source from that fact check, you'll be able to find more than one source that you can refer to to find out if the news you're looking at is real or not. that's on the news side. Right.

This is editorialized media. Correct. But user generated is kind of to me where the problems lie. It's where so it's where many of the problems lie. But the thing that often happens is that your your social media users are are sharing, posting, commenting on editorialized. True. Journalistic stories.

Right. So like when White Mask 2012 says something in like two sentences, people are like, oh, thumbs up, thumbs down, that's pretty much it. But when White Mask 2012 posts a story that's whatever, whatever, from some other source, that's the kind of shit that gets them a million views or 100,000 views or 200,000 years. That's true. They work in tandem. Correct. And you are exactly right that it's all it takes is an email address, a phone number, a SIM card. Doesn't even have to be real for a lot of these social media.

platforms to be able to give you an account. So it's very easy to create bots. It's very easy. And in many parts of the world, they're not bots. They're real people. If you look at India, Pakistan, Iran, parts of Eastern Europe, it's, people are so desperate for a job that if you'll pay somebody 50 bucks a month, they will create a genuine account with a real person and they will post whatever the fuck you tell them to post because they're getting paid. It's a job for them. So that's exactly how you see a lot of Russian disinformation, a lot of Iranian disinformation, a lot of Chinese disinformation in Taiwan. That's how you see that stuff gets spread. Real users just looking for a job. Right. But are you able to look at those accounts and be like,

oh, this is not a person acting in good faith or like a genuine human that believes this, but someone that's paid? A big, it's hard to tell if they're paid or not. But here's what I would say. You can tell a reputable user from a non-reputable user by looking at their account. behavior. At least this is what we do at CIA. If you look at someone's account behavior, you'll start to see patterns. If you see that somebody only posts on Mondays and what they post is either a, the re-forwarding of a story from one or two different news sources, or they're reposting some sort of comment that relates to a general theme. Now you know that that's not a user that you can trust. That's not a genuine user. You can see that there's scheduling going on. They only post

on Mondays. They only post between 5 o'clock and 7 o'clock. They only post forwarded stories from other news sources. That is a telltale sign that what you're dealing with is just like we talked about, a paid human to act as a bot. A sock puppet sometimes they're called.

Yeah. So they sit on a, they have a phone reminder that tells them every Monday at 2 o'clock you should post something and then the instructions are somewhere else. So look for that. The second thing to look for is look for the diversity of content that they are creating. Because if what you find is that somebody has a diverse amount of content, meaning sometimes they post sentences, sometimes they post links, sometimes videos, sometimes articles, sometimes just their thoughts, right? Now what you're seeing,

especially if that doesn't happen on a schedule, you're seeing somebody who is actively utilizing the account. We call that utilization. So when you see high levels of utilization, that generally suggests that that is a genuine user. When you see low levels of utilization, meaning they post all the time, but they only ever post one type of thing. It's always forwarded news articles, or it's always the same five or seven topics

with restated in a different way. That's low utilization. Low utilization lends itself to artificial creation. AI, pre-programmed, or pre-organized content that was given to them by a hand, So like the first of every month, I can give you your 30 posts for the month and the following months. So I create them in real time for real, but I give them to you to post, that sort of thing.

So when you see low utilization, that can be automated, organized, structured, systematized. When you see high levels of utilization, very, very difficult to systematize high levels of utilization. So if you think about anybody in your family who uses X or Instagram or Facebook a lot, imagine how hard it would be to put them on an actual system where you're like, hey, I need to review your posts and your posts need to fit this requirement and they have to be posted at this frequency. Like it's very difficult to do that for somebody who's truly prolific in their posting. So when you start to see this, the nice thing about all of these platforms is it's very easy

to look at the history because all I have to do is look at the user. If you just look at the profile, you'll see all of their history. And then you can see their patterns. And generally you'll see a pattern if you look back at least 60 days. For truly in genuine accounts, you'll see the pattern in like 10 days. You'll be like, this fucking person only does these three things. And what's nice is that you may not be able to identify intent, but you can definitely, you can identify purpose.

So fantastic example. I'm totally going to out him. My mom's current husband. Husband number three, I think, or four. Nice. Husband number four for my mom, her current husband has an incredible bias. Like, yeah, he's got an incredible bias. When you look at the history of his postings, he looks like a bot.

He literally looks like a bot. You can see the pattern of repurposed story, repurpose story, repurposed story, you know, handwritten post that emphasizes the same point from the previous repurpose story. Like, you can see it on a schedule because you know when he takes his breaks from work, you know, when his lunch hour is. Like, he's a real human being not being paid by anybody. Hilarious. But you can see the pattern of his bias and you can see that like this is not an

individual who is well rounded in terms of his views of the world and social requirements, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, I guess then it isn't kind of difficult to be like, wait, is this a bot or not? Exactly. That's where you need to engage with them. But you don't, if you want to. Like, and engaging with people who are that institutionalized.

is a chore on its own. But yeah, that's how everyday people can go about the process of vetting their news that they're reading, vetting the stories that they're reading, and knowing whether or not the accounts that they're looking at are genuine utilized accounts

or whether they're just platforms for people trying to parrot a message. That's so interesting. Do you feel like any foreign actors in some capacity have ever tried to engage with you using like bots or paid accounts? I mean, especially for me. So, I mean, I'm a unique case

because I'm an overt, now overt, which means the world knows about me. I'm an overt CIA officer that often talks about the problems with how the U.S. government handles foreign policy, domestic policy, et cetera. So, I mean, I don't even have, I have people who come to me with very thin veils. I probably get one or two WhatsApp messages a month that are directly from foreign influence agents who are offering me paid jobs to write articles for their news source, right? And they come to me as third parties, so I'll get like, hey, we're looking for people to write an article on American soft power in India. And we pay a dollar a word or $2 a word. Anybody who knows what the going rate is for writers knows a dollar to $2 a word is super high. It's a good deal,

right? It's a great deal, right? So who wouldn't say yes to writing 500 words about American soft power in India? Yeah, chat TV to you that immediately. Like, what are we talking about? But then you'll see that the third party, especially when you just do a quick Google search, the third party is some research organization in Kuala Lumpur or Thailand or Vietnam, and you realize like, oh, I'm writing for the Chinese government, or I'm writing for the Russian government, or I'm writing for the North Korean government, and they're just using a cutout to actually use, to get to me. And that's a common thing that, not just me, but many former government officers have to deal with. So yes, we get DMs on Instagram, yes, we get DMs on Twitter, but

But like when you're when you're that potentially valuable, they'll just go straight to a data broker. They'll go straight to AT&T or Sprint and just buy the records of every user looking for your name on that record. Wow. And if you think about it, it's a numbers game. Like right now CIA, the last number I heard, CIA loses one undercover officer a month. They leave. They quit. They resign.

They retire. One a month. it used to be two a year, right? And now they lose six times as many people because people just don't want to work for CIA anymore. So when they lose one undercover officer a month, that means there's every year there's 12 new people out there, at least, who are available for work. So if they, if they pull all the AT&T, Sprint and Verizon records, they basically have every record of every American in the United States. we are now leaving CIA. There's a history of resignation, retirement, paperwork, etc. Well, they've hacked OPM, the Office of Personnel Management. So now they cross-reference to two. They find all the names of

that month or that year. And they just start sending WhatsApp to all of us. Eventually, somebody is going to be going through a divorce, paying for college, losing a job, have a dental bill. Something's going to happen where they say, yes, I'll write that article for $2 a word. Wow. That's interesting. I mean, That seems like a big, like, intelligence gap. It is. And it's a major problem because what ends up happening is the only way that the federal government can actually, because the government can't monitor us because we're still

American citizens. So they don't have the right without criminal liability. They don't have the right to monitor our Gmail accounts or our phones or anything like that. So they have to rely on us self-reporting when it happens. I self-report when it happens all the time. And I never get a response back. I'm like, hey, guys, this just happened.

The few times that I've gotten a response back, it was, it was like funny government speak, where you're like, what poor intern had to write this email to me because it took 15 paragraphs to just say, thank you for submitting your thing, right? Either way, it's comical. But they have to rely on self-report. So about once or twice a year, we get a reminder. I get a reminder from CIA that says, hey, Mr. Bustamante, just to remind you, you are an overt CIA officer with access to classified information and you fall under your criminal liability of your lifetime secrecy agreement, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And as you continue to appear on podcasts and write books and appear on television, we want to encourage you to understand, you know, that if you violate these terms, you will be held criminally liable. So they do that for all of us. Wow. But it's only once or twice a year. Because they, they, they,

They know the only way to understand what's happening is through self-reporting. And when we self-report, it goes to some poor summer intern. Well, be careful. I don't want you to end up with some black site or something. Camp gaggon on. It all falls apart for me. Exactly. Dude, we should turn this into a black site.

Wouldn't that be sick? I mean, turning it into a black site, I'd be sick. What happens in a black site's not so funny? Yeah, not as good. Is that still a thing? What's the CIA position, like, publicly on black sites? Black sites have always been a thing. Black sites will always be a thing, right?

Because black sites are nothing more than a site that is, is heavily compartmentalized so that people don't know that it exists. So you might be the director of CIA and still not be read in on certain activities in a certain black site because the need to know is so strict. We will always have threats of that level. What happens at the black site is what the real question is. Torture or enhanced interrogation used to happen at black sites. And then some of those black sites were shut down because it was discovered that torture

what's happening at those black sites. But I mean, there's still black sites now where cyber activity happens, offensive and defensive operations happen, where you can evacuate high value assets. If you're trying to get somebody out of country A and trying to get them to the United States to keep them or their family alive, they're going to hit safe houses, black sites along the way. So there's still very, very much a thing, and they've always been a thing, because it's just a covert site that's highly classified where sensitive intelligence. operations can happen. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because it's 24. And it's time to talk about something important. When you are seriously hurt, your injury

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Do you think that the current CIA deals with the former reputation of the old CIA? And is it negative or do you think it's in some way positive? Like, what is your feeling on that? Because, yeah, my perspective is like I see the old CIA and I'm like, MK Ultra, crazy operations, coos, you know, like Alan Dulles was like a crazy guy, like Bay of Pigs, killing JFK, you know what I mean? Like there's all these things that are associated with it. But then I talked to people about the current CIA, and it's like, yeah, it's not as wild.

I mean, there's definitely still, like, intelligence operations that are happening all over the world, but, like, it's a little bit more deliberate. It's a little bit more, you know, digital, so to speak. So I'm curious, your position, like, how do you feel like that old reputation affects the current? Yeah, it's a great question, and it's a mixed bag. And it's funny because for anybody who's who is a former CIA, retired military, former FBI, or current, who's watching us right now, The truth is that most of the elite government forces in the United States have been neutered.

And we are not as effective as we used to be. We are not as powerful as we used to be. The bureaucracy, the policy implications, the politics, or what's known as real politic, has impacted significantly our ability to execute meaningful operations. So pre-9-11, when there was very little oversight, all sorts of stupid shit happened, for sure. but all sorts of really powerful shit happened too that the world can never know about because it's been classified. In the time from 9-11 till 2017, 2018,

there was a lot of real shit, really good stuff that happened that was slowly going through the process of being neutered, right? Being emasculated, being reduced, being throttled, being controlled because politicians started seeing that what CIA did had an impact on their re-election promises or campaigns or hopes. Really? Yeah, because nobody wanted to be associated with the next torture. Nobody wanted to be associated with the next, you know, flap in, you name whatever

country, right? Like, if you remember when the contractors were trying to run a coup in Venezuela, if you think about what happened when we started negotiating with the Taliban, think about what happened when the United States evacuated Afghanistan and people were falling off of the airplane who were trying to get out. No politician wants to be associated with that stuff. So from the politics side, it just makes sense to say no to all the intelligence operations, which then from the operation side, the operators are like, well, what the fuck are we supposed to do then? Like, you're telling us you want us to stop Iranian nuclear development, but you're not giving

us any approval to run operations that stop Iranian nuclear development. And then we know that if we don't spend the money, you're going to take the money back, and you're not going to give us a budget for next year. So then we're just going to blow money on stupid shit, right? We're going to see if we can't do some sort of convoluted newspaper article or some convoluted website or whatever else. Or, you know, we're going to take a cyber approach or we're going to take a drone approach or we're going to take a whatever. But we're not going to sabotage because if we sabotage, it might go wrong. And if sabotage goes wrong, then you're going to be all up in our ass. So that's what you're seeing. So there's a huge feeling in the intelligence community among current professionals

and former professionals, that we have been neutered, that we are less effective than we used to be because the tolerance for taking risks is significantly reduced by the chief executive, who is the president. And if you think about the last eight, 12 years, the president has either been someone who didn't trust the CIA or the president is somebody who's more focused on domestic social issues. Interesting. But then there's another to answer your original question about whether or not CIA kind of lives in the shadow of its past, the answer is yes. It happens, it makes sense, the suspicion that's out there, the speculation that's out there, the conspiracies that have come true. Like, we've earned the right for the American people to question whether CIA is

trustworthy or not. And the answer is, CIA was not trustworthy for many decades, right? Until it took on that position where it is being overseen by elected officials, it essentially, couldn't have been trusted. It was operating in its own best interest. It was operating in the best interest of it as an organization which was there to serve the chief executive, the president of the United States. It was his personal, you know, battering ram. Now it's a different, now it's a different world. Now CIA is under the oversight of the men and women that we elect. Now, granted, we may not elect very good men and women, but those are the people who really control CIA now, even though we respond or we report directly to the president, the people who hold the purse strings or the people in

Congress. So we have been neutered. We are under greater control. There should be a higher level of trust in the CIA by the American people, but that is going to be very slow coming because we have a lot of years of doing shit that the American people did not approve of. That's interesting. If I was the president, I wouldn't use the CIA. I would create a new CIA. And I would create a more covert intelligence operation that's not as overexposed and doesn't have all the baggage. Is that a good idea? Uh, it's, it depends on kind of what you're trying to accomplish there, man. Going more secret, going secret within a secret is not going to foment trust. It is going to make things more effective. That's what I'm saying. I mean, he gives a shit about trust from the president. You know what I mean?

Like, you got to trust me. Now you're thinking like the president. That's right. Now you're thinking like the president. And that's what people, when we go back to the lies that like are politicians just lying or do they actually believe their lies? This is why politicians know they have to lie. like America we want politicians that lie we need politicians that lie

because we the American people as a holistic group are fucking stupid yeah I want to believe that they're trying to get weapons of mass destruction that way I don't have to feel bad

for a million of Rockies dying correct I mean I want to believe the lie you want to believe the lie you want to believe that that they're like again going back to the DNC this idea that once the glass ceiling is broken,

like the DNC has a very strong female theme, which makes sense. We have a female candidate for president. So you can see at the Democratic National Convention, the audience is majoratively women. Like, you can just see it. When they scan through the audience, you see five women to every man in the audience, right?

So you can see that it's very gender charged. You can see that it's very racially charged. You can see all these things. So when they get up on stage, they're speaking to the concerns of the people in the audience. So they're talking about glass ceilings. Who are they talking about when they say glass ceilings? Right.

They're talking about women in power. That's the glass ceiling that they're talking about without saying it on the stage, women in power. Once a glass ceiling is broken, Hillary Clinton got up on the stage last night. It was like, once the glass ceiling is broken for one of us, it's broken for all of us. No. That's not true. It's not true. When one person gets through a certain endeavor, that person got through the endeavor.

That doesn't make it easier for the next person. that doesn't mean it's guaranteed for the next person. They also might just shut the gate behind him and make it way harder. Yeah, you have no idea. So it's a complete and total lie. But to your point, we all want to believe it. We all want to believe that what our politicians say,

whether it's about breaking glass ceilings or whether it's about weapons of mass destruction, what's nice is that we, as Americans, we vote once, once every two years for some, once every six years for others. We vote once, and then our hands are clean. It's like being a Catholic, dude. You can get drunk and you can bang hookers

And as long as you go in and say, Father, I got drunk and I banged hookers, You're forgiven. Yeah. Right? And that's exactly how we operate as a country. It's like, hey, one day we raise our hand And whatever that asshole does after I raise my hand is on them.

That's a very convenient way to keep your hands clean. Yeah, it's interesting. Or you just be so secret of the no one knows, which is why my genus idea patent pending the new CIA. It's called, it's called the office that you're talking about. But it's the secret organization within the secret organization, the paramilitary organization. So essentially, the way that that process works, when the president has a secret that he wants to keep secret, even from, like, higher echelon leadership at CIA, he creates what's known as a finding, a presidential finding. Presidential findings generally have to be delivered to a secret judiciary committee that says, hey, yes, this is a judicial, a just cause.

but that committee is like two or three people is very small. And then with that presidential finding, it goes directly to the covert action group of CIA, and that covert action group can then staff and fund using a pool of money that's out of the black budget to go execute whatever specific finding the president generated. And part of that finding process guarantees that the president always has what's known as plausible deniability, meaning that's plausible deniability to the whole world, including the American people. So if CIA gets caught carrying out that covert action, the process of the finding in the judicial review makes it so that nobody ever admits that the president was the one that initiated that covert action. So there is kind of a CIA within the CIA.

Sort of. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. But it's a specific group that CIA knows exists and CIA knows exists for that purpose. Right. I mean, that makes sense. Like, to me, like once these institutions get too big, there's going to be mistakes. there's going to be intelligence gaps.

Like, I just feel like they have to be recreated. I mean, there's going to be spies. There's going to be penetrations. There's going to be cyber hacking. Right. I mean, KGB in a way, did this, right? Like, where they dissolve and come FSB. And, like, they reinvent themselves.

And eventually, FSB will get too big. And then they reinvent again. And it just seems like we're overdue within the U.S. for that. And so that leads me to believe that it's already been done. Correct. And that's also the foundation, well, not the foundation, but it's one of the things that is coming to,

coming to head in the media is this idea of Proposition 2025. Yeah. That is a restructuring of government. And to be clear, like Proposition 2025 is a project. Project 2025 was created by the Heritage Foundation,

which is a far right-leaning group and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not like a federal mandate or anything. But that's their whole point. Their whole argument is we need to restructure the government to get back to a place where the executive has more power, the power to hire, fire, assign, delegate, keep secrets, more secrets, you know, take power away from the Congress. Congress has been giving away power for decades anyways, so yeah.

Do you think it'll come out in a certain amount of time, like, oh, there is a new, like, intelligence group within the United States government that is, like, doing operations either domestically or internationally? Or do you think it'll always sort of operate under, like, this title of CIA? I mean, that, the group that I'm referencing, the covert action group, within CIA, like they're already documented. There's Wikipedia articles about them, there's open press about them. The fact that they exist is not a secret. The fact that their operations, the details of their operations are the secret, so secret that even higher echelons at CIA

aren't really allowed to know about those operations. So that's the way it should be. Frankly speaking, that's the way it should be. That's why I am a fan of secrets because what Americans need to understand is that if we know what the government is doing, so to our adversaries. If we know a secret, the adversaries know a secret. So unless you want fucking Iran and China and Russia to know what we're doing, we shouldn't get to know what we're doing.

You and I should just focus on being a fucking good comedian and I don't even know what I do, but we just need to be good at what we do and let secrets lie because there's a purpose. I mean, I'm with you. Like, don't even wrong, I'll watch a history channel documentary and it'll be like,

the most cutting edge military weapons. And I'm like, all right, not the most, let's not talk about the most cutting edge. Let's talk about, you know, 10 years ago, cutting edge, you know what I, which I assume is always what it is, that there is a lag. But I just am curious, like, how intentional that is.

And if it is still being upheld in the way that I hope that it is, you know what I mean? The way that our security and, like, intelligence dealings are working. I'm assuming are operating with enough, you know, buffer that anything that my bitch ass knows about. You know, I mean, it's going to be, it's going to be three years late. But I hope.

I mean, I don't know. Oh, yeah. And even better, we are native English speakers. So if it's three years late for us, then it's at least three years and six months late for everybody else. Everybody else out there who doesn't speak English first. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I don't know. It's just a very interesting, it's a very interesting thing to think about, like, how the levels of compartmentalization of intelligence work. And, yeah, I'm just always curious, like, how deep it goes. And it goes deep, man. I mean, even when you talk about those levels of compartmentalization, like there's, if you just look at levels of classification,

there's confidential information. More sensitive than confidential is secret. More sensitive than secret is top secret. More sensitive than top secret is top secret special compartmental information, SCI. More secret than SCI starts getting into actual separate titles by pillar by topic. So there's categories for nuclear secrets, categories one through 15, I think. So category one, category two, category three, which are all more

sensitive than the top secret special compartment of information, but broken in different pillars. And then on the human side, human intelligence, you've got channels that are called like privy and, I can't even think of some of the other ones, but there's multiple different channels on the human side. The same thing exists in Mazint, the same thing exists in SIGM. So you've got all these compartments within compartments within compartments because the federal government is so large, right? CIA is, I think, estimated at 10,000 people. Yeah, it's too big. That's huge. The covert, the undercover officers at CIA are estimated to be somewhere between 10 and 20 percent. So between 1,000 and 2,000 people are undercover at CIA. That's still a lot of fucking people. Yeah. Imagine if

all 2,000 people knew or had access to all other 2,000 people. Now you just need one person to get access to all the 2,000 people. So that's why you need to have compartments within compartments within compartments. And that's just one organization, not even counting DIA, NSA, DOD, the Department of Energy. Department of Energy is the department inside the United States that handles all of our nuclear weapons. People don't realize that. It's not DOD that handles our nukes. It's not CIA that handles our nukes.

It's the Department of Energy. The same fucking group that makes sure your electricity runs is also the group that controls our nuclear weapons because nuclear weapons are tied to nuclear energy. Interesting. Yeah, this is a random thing. I'm curious if you ever heard of this. Have you ever heard that part of the movement within Greenpeace against nuclear energy, specifically in Western Europe, was funded with KGB seed money? I did not know that. I'm not surprised. This is something that I heard from a guy. But basically, that KGB seed money had funded the anti-nuclear energy action being done in Western Europe because the Russians wanted to control gas and fuel. Yule going into Western Europe. That makes total sense, man. I was like, whoa. It makes total sense. Yeah, because.

And they co-opted in an existing movement. They didn't invent the anti-nuclear energy movement. But they just saw it and they were like, oh, this can be useful. Yeah. Put some salt on that. I mean, it's still happening now. I mean, the KGB doesn't exist anymore. Now it's the SVR.

But if you think about what happened when the Nord Stream pipeline exploded, thank you, Ukraine. Thank you, Ukraine, for making it look like Russia so that you could get a bunch of support. and now you're fucked because how bad is that? How bad is it that like, oh, it just looks so bad that Ukraine was caught red-handed, blown up the North Stream pipeline. Yeah, why would Ukraine do that, dude? Right?

Ugh. It's just, oh. And Putin try to blame us. Well, that's what's funny. The audacity. Well, the thing that sucks is Putin, Putin is a liar that we keep letting tell the truth. That's what's fucked up. So he's like, I did not blow up the pipeline.

And then we find out, oh, shit, he didn't blow up the pipeline. Like, that was true. Yeah. He started the whole invasion into Ukraine by being like, we are fighting Nazis. That was a lie. Well, then the whole West started supporting Ukraine to repress Russia. So then that just gave him the reason to be like, oh, this is not a war against Ukraine. It's a war against the West.

And now he's telling the truth. Yeah. Right? So like it sucks because we keep giving him legitimacy by letting him tell the truth. And even worse than that, Ukrainian corruption in their military and their cybersecurity forces, whatever, like, that's what's really fucking them is. And to Zelensky's credit, he has tried to oust the corruption, right? For the last two years, he's been trying to get all the corrupt leaders out and get fresh blood in. But it's still gives a lot of legitimacy to Russia, which is

unfortunate. But before we got on that, we were on something much more important. Seed money and nuclear energy. Seed money. The Nord Stream pipeline, the big thing that created news after that was that Europe was going to turn its nuclear, it's going to leave its nuclear reactors on when it was trying to get off of nuclear reactors and it was trying to get onto fossil fuel, onto renewables. But they had such an energy crisis and to the sun, the winter of 2022, they had to turn on their nuclear reactors and or had to keep that program going longer, which caused all sorts of issues in Germany and France and across Europe. So what Russia knows is that there's a constant energy culture in Europe.

Europe. They wanted off of fossil fuels onto nuclear energy, off of nuclear energy, onto renewable energy, like that is a underpinning culturally of what's going on in Europe, so that Russia can constantly seed information into that space to keep that democracy on its heels because there's always going to be internal conflict, internal fighting over do we migrate off of old technology onto new technology that's unreliable or unproven, or do we have both technologies running in tandem. Hmm. Right?

And of course, Europe has its own concerns with nuclear power for just reasons because there aren't many nuclear capable, nuclear weapons capable European countries. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, it just, I guess the way that Russian intelligence operates is very sophisticated. So anytime something's happening that benefits Russia, I'm like, oh, this has got to be some type of intelligence play or something going on. It's a fair assumption. because they are very sophisticated.

They're far more sophisticated than we give them credit for. Right. And unfortunately, Western media likes to not only demonize, but like, ridicule.

They kind of belittle, right? Yeah, they like to belittle is a better word. Russia. You can't, like, that's a dangerous game. It's like belittling the hungry Rottweiler next door. It's still a hungry Rottweiler. It doesn't have to be smart.

Right. Right. To come in and do some damage. Yeah. Here's a CIA myth. slash sciop that happened back in the day. I'm curious if you ever heard of this, that they funded modern art.

Have you ever heard this before? No. This apparently is true. I don't know. We can fact check it later. But apparently during like the Cold War, the CIA had funded artists domestically, specifically like Jackson Pollock

and people doing like postmodern, very like abstract art as a soft power weapon against the Soviets to showcase how free America were. So basically looking at like, you know, these expressionist paintings or like these like very expressive paintings and saying like, look at America, look at all the freedom we have. Look at all the cool shit that we can do. Has like a way to like entice the Russians. It's interesting because what was the year? I think it was like 80s. Or decades, 80s. Yeah.

So again, pre-9-11 CIA. So very little oversight. Right. So it is feasible. It is feasible that the CIA at that time could do something whack-a-doodle like funding artists without having to tell anybody that they're doing it. And then it's also kind of in line with the fact that, you know, 1980s, Berlin Wall, hard to get operations going on in East Germany. So one of the best ways to kind of combat Soviet influence would be with an influence operation that's funded here in the United States and technically giving money to U.S. artists is not collecting info from U.S. artists, right? So it doesn't violate their charter. Yeah. So all of that is very feasible and plausible because, like, when that's the funny thing about black budgets, people don't realize

that when someone cuts you a check for a classified amount of money and they basically tell you as long as you keep operating, we'll keep cutting checks. But as soon as you don't spend all the money, we're going to take it back. Like, you're just going to keep spending it. And you're going to spend the crazy ways. This is what I'm so curious about with like CIA black budgets is that like sometimes I wonder if the old CIA ops sometimes get blown out of proportion because so many of them were like low cost, high impact. And they just threw a bunch of money at a bunch of different random things to see like what came back.

And maybe stuff came back. You're like, people talk about MK Ultra all the time. But I'm like, I don't know if MK Ultra really resulted in anything significant, but it didn't cost them much money to see if it did. And so it's one of those things where it's like. like, hey, let's put, you know, $500,000 in this thing that potentially could have massive outcomes. And I'm like, yeah, let's just do that across the board all the time. And so I think sometimes people deal with the burden of that now where they're like, oh, look at this operation that went on.

And I'm like, yeah, the operation went on, but there was also like 20 other operations that were equally bizarre. And maybe one of them had a finding that was useful, but it didn't cost that much money. Yeah. The American people look at CIA operations through a line, a lens of morals and ethics. What you're talking about is much more of what CIA thinks about, which is looking at operations through a level of effectiveness and outcomes. Effectiveness and outcomes stands separate from morals and ethics. Yeah. So M.K. Ultra. Our enemies were testing psychedelics. Our enemies were testing the ability for, you know, for people to astro-project. Yeah, remote viewing. Oh my gosh. All sorts of crazy shit. And they have

a long list of people of convicts in jail who had no rights. Yeah. Even by their own laws. So M.K. Ultra was just our answer to a threat. You know, all of our arguments about M.K. Ultra would be completely different if the Russians found a way to attack us using remote viewing first. If they would have actually found a way to take a convict, turn him into a remote viewer, so he could astro project his violent ass to the United States and start killing people in New York

city, then all the sudden Americans would be like, well, why aren't we funding MK Ultra? Why aren't we finding a way to get our prisoners to attack Moscow? Right. But that's the lens of history. Right. Because the truth is, no matter how principled somebody wants to say they are, they understand that ethics are defined by someone else, right? The code of ethics for you as a doctor. The code of ethics for you as a teacher. The code of ethics for you is a lawyer. Your ethics are defined by someone else. Your morals are what you personally commit to, but your morals that you commit to change based off of the situation that you're in. If you're fucking hungry and you're broke and your kids are hungry and nobody's eaten in a day, you're going to steal some food.

Even though when you're, when you've got a paycheck every week or every two weeks and even if you're just eating macaroni and cheese, you're going to buy your food. Right. Desper people will do desperate things. And desperate, I mean, it doesn't take much to become desperate, right? It doesn't take much to feel desperation, even if you don't have true desperation. So to your point, pre-CIA could have been highly effective, could have had fantastic outcomes. But now the lens of history, we sit here today and we're like, oh, it was so unethical. It was immoral what we did to those terrorists in Guantanamo Bay.

Right. Right? Well, fucking, remember how we felt on September, you know. Yeah, 12th. 2001. Remember how we felt then? Remember what it was like to turn on your TV and watch human beings jump from burning buildings? Right.

Was that, like, was our morality a little bit different then? Yeah. And I think the American public likes to hold government institutions like different standards and they kind of hold themselves. Over time. Yeah, exactly. Right. So now what's okay in one year is different and it is not okay in the next year.

Right, exactly. But I really do try to look at these things like R-O-Y where I'm like, yeah, if it's a couple thousand dollars to see if you can you know remote view while trip on an LSD oh for sure dude like I imagine a battalion of American troops could you imagine a a contingent of navy seals sitting in a fucking Marriott sleeping yeah under drug induced sleep astro projecting because it works right if it works into some remote fucking Burmese jungle you could use those soldiers until they were 95 years old right So the ROI is significant. This is why Hitler was looking for the ancient religious artifacts, because he was like, if they have the power, right? If the Ark of the Covenant could really be opened and like some power come out and nuke everybody. Like he wanted to be the first one to have that. It's an ROI question. You're thinking exactly like the government thinks. You're thinking exactly like a senior echelon leader should think, just like a CEO should.

think. Right. Yeah. Just like throw some shit at the wall, see if it works. Especially if it's, because if it's low cost, but high yield or high outcome, who wouldn't do it? Yeah. I just low-key wonder, though, about that remote viewing shit. I'm like, I wonder if there's something to it. Yeah. So Project Stargate, even in my own experience, like, I haven't seen that it's been fully turned off. I've seen that names change, but names change all the time, right? Like, Trump started the war against the trade war against China. Biden carried. on the trade war against China, right? Even though he said he shut down Trump-era policy, he just changed the name.

It went from being like Trump's anti-China something to Biden's regime migration something, right? Like the fucking politics changed, but the policy stayed the same. Sure. So like you've got to assume and account for the same thing happening. Yeah, I mean, that's how I look at it. And I've talked to some people that do remove you. And they're like, no, it's real. And I'm like, what?

And like, these are people that, like, I generally, like, trust. They don't seem crazy or delusional. And they're like, yeah, I did it. I'm like, okay. I did this investigative series with the History Channel. It's a show called Beyond Skin Walker Ranch. And we worked with remote viewers. And I will tell you full on, like straight up, the results that the remote viewers came

up with were shocking. Just totally shocking. Somehow they were able to remote view things that had been verified and vetted through history. They were able to identify characters, shapes, faces, objects that we had only heard about through eyewitnesses who were reticent to even talk to us. So I have personally seen how remote viewing can yield results that are consistent with what we're hearing from eyewitnesses who did not talk to other people and especially did not talk to the remote viewers.

and the remote viewers were like all over the world. We worked with one of the largest remote viewing teams in history to ever actually be assembled to try to carry out this investigative effort for Beyond Skinwalker Ranch. So I can tell you for sure that the outcomes of what they produce are shocking, like shockingly on target. What I can't speak to is how they get to those results. Is there some sort of corruption in the system?

Is there some kind of flaw? is there actual science behind it? Is it really working? I don't know how they got there. But it's fucking crazy when you see it and you're like, wait a second. That lady has never told anybody about this little three-foot shadow creature and she described it exactly the same way as these five remote viewers describe it and draw it on this piece of paper. Like, and where did these guys come from? Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, and Norway? They're like, she's where in Southern Colorado? Like, how does this even happen? Yeah, it is a strange thing. I mean, we were talking a little bit before we recorded about like consciousness and how exactly it, where exactly it exists and whether

or not we can use consciousness to affect reality. Yeah. And I don't know, I just think about the remote viewing stuff. And I think like, it's bizarre to me that it, that people independently can describe similar things. I mean, similar with like psychedelics. I've heard people have done, you know, I've spoken to people, again, this is anecdotal and completely unscientific, but spoken to people that have done psychedelics together that have been able to, you know, telepathically communicate. And I'm like, what? And they're like, yeah, we both were tripping on LSD and I looked at my buddy and we were talking. And then my other friend was there that wasn't tripping, that was watching us, and neither of us

were moving our mouths, but we knew what we were saying? And I'm like, you were just on drugs. And they're like, I don't know. But I hear these things and I'm like, what the fuck is going on there? Have you done ayahuasca? Never done ayahuasca. So I have multiple clients, high net worth clients. I don't know why, but like the wealthier you get, the more people start asking these

questions about like consciousness and connection to the universe and whatever else. So I've had several high net worth, ultra high net worth clients, clients that I serve that are worth, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. And over and over again, they go on some kind of journey. It's called a journey, journey. They go on a journey with ayahuasca. Sometimes they do it in Utah, sometimes they do it in South America, sometimes they do it in Europe, right? But the feedback that these guys have, guys and gals, is really incredible. It's just like you're saying.

They come to grips with the childhood trauma that led them to be high achieving. They realize things about themselves that can only be, that they describe as being like the shredding or the breaking of some sort of limitation that they built in themselves to keep them from the truth of what they, done, experienced, or never accepted about themselves, right? Like, all these things in the world of self-actualization, which lead then to this plane of consciousness, where now during the trip, during the journey, they can connect with each other without words, right? They can, they connect emotionally, they connect on spiritual levels, even though they believe in different gods or whatever else. So they connect on a consciousness level, telepathically, spiritually, emotionally, in the journey, but then also when they get out of the journey. Because now the barriers that they've had are shredded. So now when they are with each other, they're like, there's nothing to hide here.

And that gives them a level of freedom with the other people who they've journeyed with that doesn't exist with people who they haven't journeyed with. So it's been, for me, 10 years ago when I was part of CIA, if you would have talked to me about consciousness, remote viewing, ayahuasca, I'd have been like, you're a fucking hippie. Like, it doesn't make any sense. That's all hibbibbitty bullshit. Yeah. And now that I've worked with enough rich people and seen the output seat, seen what happens

after they go on their journey. Now I'm like, when am I going on a journey? Who's going with me? Like, who am I going to shed these layers with? And what is this consciousness thing? I've now investigated with History Channel. the question of consciousness. I've seen the energy exchanges that happen between people. I've seen the energy exchanges that happened between people and inanimate objects like fucking trees and dirt and

and grassy fields, right? It is so, the energy transfer is so real and so measurable, we are stupid to not be asking the question, what is consciousness and what is its implication for the future? What would be an example of something that you saw that you were like, whoa, this is bizarre? So on our research, we went to a haunted mountain, essentially, in an Indian reserve called the Navajo Nation. So I myself come from a Navajo background. We had clearance to work with a Navajo elder and a Navajo medicine man to go to this mountain that the Navajo people said was cursed and was off limits to all Navajo. So we went through the whole bureaucratic process of being able to get clearance to go to this

mountain. We did this in 2002, yeah, 2002, and went up on this mountain. I went up there the first time, early part of the day. I went up on the mountain with just the medicine man. We went up there. We took energy meetings, energy readings of electromagnetic activity, we took radio signature readings, we took radiation readings, we took communication readings from the top of this haunted mountain, right? It was called, what was it, the devil's something? I forget what they called it now. And we got all these baseline readings, right? High radiation, low levels of communication, not a lot of activity in the electromagnetic spectrum. We leave, it's like 10 o'clock in the morning, we leave, go get my partner, the Navajo Elder, and like two other researchers. We bring them up

on the same mountain, Satan's Butte. That's what it was called, Satan's Butte. Same mountain about an hour and a half later, right? Same day. We pull out the same tools to show them what the baselines are, but the baselines are all different. Now, there's higher electromagnetic energy, there's higher radiation, there's an incredible amount of activity on the communication spectrum. Like, and it's, it doesn't make any sense at all. Why is it that when there's two of us up there with the same four devices, we get one reading. An hour and a half later, there's five of us up there with the same four tools, and we get completely different readings.

We record everything. It's all captured on camera. It's all documented. It's all, you'll find it all on YouTube. I'm pretty sure if you YouTube, Satan's Butte, Beyond Skinwalker Ranch, you'll actually see that clip. We take it back to our science team in Utah, an astrophysicist and a career researcher. We take it back to them.

We can't make sense of this, right? what's happening here. And in our lead physics study, our lead astrophysicist looks at it and he's like, oh, I think what's happening here is that you're having a collective consciousness reaction with the environment, meaning that when it was just me and the medicine man, we created a level of energy between the two of us. Cerebral energy, literal brain energy. His brain creates an electrical signature. My brain creates an electrical signature. When we are in proximity with each other, the two electrical signatures collect. It's why you get along with some people don't get along with other people. It's why some people make you feel good. Other people make you feel sick to your stomach.

Right? That's energy. Hippy energy, but measurable, because it's measured in the brain, in the electromagnetic efforts of the brain. When the two of us were up there, we created a signature that did not react with the mountain, the rocks, the dirt, the foxes, the rabbits, everything else on the mountain, right? When we left and brought back three additional people, our five brains created an energy signature that did react with the mountain. And that's why the measurable readings were different, right? So that was the astrophysicists theory about why our readings were different, even though we were in the same place in about the same time with the same four devices. that is an example for me that completely turned the dial on this question of consciousness.

If not for collective consciousness, meaning the shared experience of five electromagnetically powered brains, all interacting with each other and interacting with the environment, if not for that, what could explain multiple energy readings changing in the same area? Yeah, I mean, that is awesome. Is that a thing? Like, is it, is this like verifiable in terms of like other research? Can you, can someone look this up? Absolutely. So not only did we, so we, we found that ourselves in Satan's

Butte in an area that was considered to be cursed by the Navajo people, right? But we have seen similar events happen in other areas that are also deemed to be areas of strange phenomenon, UFO sightings, haunted sites, whatever. It's starting to look like what's happening is we, overlay a label onto these environments that are sensitive to collective consciousness. We layer them, or we label them haunted, or we label them hotspots, or we label them UFO, or we label them whatever we have to label them to explain the fact that the environments change when people are present. Scientifically, that's the theory that we are starting to devise. It's not that ghosts are real. It's not that aliens are real. They may be.

But what we do know is measurably demonstrable, at least through our investigation with Beyond Skinwalker Ranch, is that we're starting to see that when people are present in these locations, the locations change. It's very similar to what you and I were talking about when you talked about the dual slot experiment, right? How is it that a light source, how is it that light photons streaming through a box with a slit in it? How is it that those photons respond differently when they're being looked at than when they're not being looked at? That observer effect. Well, if you think about it, once you observe something, you're putting power into the thing that you're observing. That power is energy. If it's your eyes or your mental state, you're putting your focus on it.

You're actually literally flooding it with your own cognitive electrical impulses from your brain. If you're putting a camera on it, if you're putting an audio device on it. Now you're actually directing a sensor at it. those sensors also come from legitimate power sources. So it's only when you don't put any observers on it that it responds differently. Why is that? It's because of energy, right? Just like, I mean, dude, you and I had, there's countless examples that people can pull

off the top of their head just like you and I were talking. How is it that you know what your dog is feeling when your dog can't speak to you? How does your dog know what you're feeling when you can't speak to it? How can you tell when you're being looked at? Isn't that weird? It is, right? How is it that we have these moments where we say something that somebody else is thinking? And then they are like, I was just thinking the same thing.

How do these moments happen? Is it really just that coincidences happen at that frequency? Or is it that there is some kind of shared consciousness? Something that happens on a level that's so animalistic because it's so natural that we haven't even discovered it yet. Right? Just like people don't understand how the human eye develops. They still call the eye America. people don't understand how like a baby's genome is defined by its two parents. There's all sorts of

things about science. We don't understand. That doesn't make them make believe. Hell, we used to call science magic. Yeah. Yeah, people are like, there's tiny little men getting in my body making me sick. It's like, yeah, germs are real. But for a long time, people didn't believe it. Right. Yeah, it's an interesting idea. And I, yeah, I just, I do, I was kind of telling you a little bit before, like, I sometimes extrapolate, like, life philosophy based off these ideas. Rightly wrong. I have no idea, but like I am very conscious about like the people I'm around and I try to be around like good vibes and it's like it sounds super dumb and hippie, but you more you kind of hear about these things, you're like, wait a second, are atoms being near each other? They start to like mirror each other and we respond to similar things or like, I mean, how often do you think of someone and then they text you and you're like, maybe these coincidences are just weird or maybe makes you wonder like, oh, maybe our atoms are in some way like, you know, and It takes me right back to a public school science class, man. When we learned about an atom and you got the periodic table of elements, and the periodic

table of elements tells you how many neutrons, protons, and electrons are in every element. But when you actually go to measure the electrons in an atom, you can't find them. Right. And science has always wondered, like, where do the atoms go? Why is it that when you try to observe and actually take a picture of or capture an atom, you can't see the electrons? but you know that the electrons must be there because of the laws of physics. Does that mean that if you can't see an electron, if an electron isn't where it's supposed to be,

where is it? And is it doing the same thing that we just talked about with the photons in that box, that slit experiment, are they somewhere else at the moment that they're being observed? Is the observation of them what's forcing them to be somewhere else? Could it be that on all that whole table of periodic chart, that whole table of elements, there's really only like five collective electrons and they're all just everywhere at once. Sharing each other?

You know what I mean? Is it kind of like a giant like men's group where they share five girlfriends? What is going on? Yeah, it's really strange, dude. I don't know. I wonder about these things and I also wonder like if there's, you know,

if these things are like becoming aware, if we're becoming aware of it, I'm assuming governments must have been aware of this and they're trying to figure it out. And I'm sure like different, you know, governments around the world and intelligence groups are trying to utilize this type of research to apply to their own means.

Even if it's just like group cohesion. You know what I mean? Like, hey, we have a super, super specialized, like special ops group. We need them to become best friends and, you know, communicate with their brains. I'm like, yeah, I would put these six guys into some type of like training regimen that would make them do, you know, a psychedelic drug

or something to, like, get them on the same wavelength. You know what I mean? Like, what does it take to make them, completely in sync as human beings. And this is what, I mean, getting back to our conversation about keeping secrets, right? The federal government is the largest funding source for innovation, specifically because they want new innovations to be created so that they can weaponize those innovations and use them for both defensive and offensive purposes of national security.

So new medicines, new vaccines, new weapons, new technology, new software. new software systems, new hardware systems, all of those things, the first funding source is the federal government. Everybody wants a federal grant. That shit is secret. It's secret because if it has civilian application, it will eventually be passed to the civilian sector. That's how we all got like pens and lunch boxes. Minutemate made lemonade and stuff. Yeah, we got that shit because astronauts needed that and astronauts needed that so we could win the race of the moon and we needed to win the race to the moon because we had to want to Russia for national security purposes. Shout out, skunk works. Exactly, right? So, I mean, there's, we have to accept secrets because those secrets are what give us the innovations that make America the preeminent military and economic superpower in the world. So we have to let those things happen. And just like you said, Navy SEALs learn how to be a highly effective small team. Well, then the civilian sector gets to benefit from the knowledge that the Navy SEALs were

able to get. And the only reason the Navy SEALs got that was because the federal government was able to pay a high price to fund research by cutting edge psychologists and coaches to discover exactly what it took to get people in sync, whether that was a psychedelic or whether that was just near drowning in ice cold water. Does it really matter? Am I asking too many questions? Is that the problem? I'm trying to reveal to me secrets. I think I love your questions and I love the fact that you're so transparent about your like your hippie good vibe artist nature i mean it's pretty clear i think sometimes i think i think i think it's pretty clear i don't know it's like there's a lot of organization here hippie is not what i get at like everything's level everything's intentional right like there's

white space between all your frames i got my flag behind me so you know what team i'm on hurrah you know what and it's not like a red white and blue flag it's like a white and green flag which is like is that eco-friendly or Is that like a shout out to the fact that, yeah. Exactly. Right. So I don't, but I don't see like flowers or anti-war posters. Like, there's some Jimmy Hendrick stuff, but that's just cool. Right?

So, yeah, I wouldn't say that, that the tent explains at all. Can I become a CIA asset? Sure. How do I do that? You're probably on a pretty good path right now. Let's go. By having a podcast channel that's in the top 0.01% of all podcasts. Like, you're going in the right direction.

Right? You're going in the right direction. Because this is like, I've always heard about these like baseball players. You know what I mean? You've heard about this guy. Like it was a Japanese, or he was a spy against the Japanese one over there. He was just a baseball guy. But he was really a spy.

And I'm like, how do I do that for comedy? Well, first of all, you're always what you really are first. True. You're a spy second. Right? So, I mean, you very well could be the first person do it for comedy. Right? Keep on the path.

And when you get the invite, don't admit it to anybody. And that's how you'll get there, right? But essentially, the thing to understand. is that, you know, professional athletes, entertainers, they're fantastic assets for intelligence collection. For two reasons. One, you don't have to have a formal relationship with the federal government at all, right? Like for me, when I went to CIA and was trained to be a core collector, when that process happens, there's a formal contract with the federal government, then it has to be obfuscated. It has to be buried after it's formalized. That's the problem. That's the problem.

with a formal relationship. When you're an asset, you don't have a formal relationship. When you're an asset, it's really just, I have information that can support national security. National Security then decides whether or not they're going to pay you for that information, support you for that information, you know, whatever, represent you or do something else. Do something beneficial to you. So 100%, and that asset is what a spy is. Right? So when you're a spy, you're an asset. When you're not a spy, when you're an operator, you're what's considered an officer, different than a spy, different than an asset, right? And there's a lot of on the books documentation when that happens.

Exactly. When you're an officer. Exactly. But when you're a spy, that all can happen off the books. So just, you know, one of the funny things to me, when I first learned how to handle an asset in the field, I always just assumed, like, the movies make it look like, hey, you give me some sexy piece of information. I slide you an envelope full of money. Yeah. And like, we fist bump and we're good.

It is not like that at all. Like there is a agreement, there is a receipt. Oh, really? There is a fixed amount of money that you have to meet certain criteria before you get. And the amount of money, it barely fits like in a straw, let alone in an envelope, right? So it's the real, the reality of how that stuff works is much less sexy than you think. But I'll tell you what, man, you become a comedian that you become like a Dennis Rodman. where you get invited to North Korea

to like do a private show for Kim Jong-un. Someone's going to knock on your door and be like, so, Mr. Gagnon, we understand? Yeah. Let's say, yeah, now we're talking. Let's do it. There you go. I'm curious, doesn't the CIA like having

spousal relationships? I know your wife was former CIA. Is that a thing that they endure on purpose or is that just coincidence? We have a joke at CIA that CIA is the first group to support you through a divorce and the last group to encourage you to get married. Because marriage is very complicated for CIA.

Marriage means that you're putting somebody else in your life. Your secrets become their secrets. Your vulnerability becomes their vulnerability. It also means that you're creating vulnerability in your life because now people could target you or your spouse. And then, of course, there's the expectation of children, et cetera, et cetera. So CIA does not like it when you get married. CIA really does not like it when two of its own officers

get married. Because when two CIA officers get married, now they have to go through all that bureaucratic heartache of trying to make the two backstories work and the two future stories work, and they have to find a way to like cover the connection that is now legal and overt because you're legally married and you have a marriage contractor certificate or whatever else, right? So they really don't, they really don't like that. They love it when people get divorced. because when you get a divorce, half of your net worth is gone. Everybody who, like, was your vulnerability, was your secret keeper, is gone. So it's like the perfect combination for CIA to swoop in and be like, hey, we're really

sorry about your marriage. Tell you what, we're going to hook you up with an apartment in Washington, D.C., and we'll make sure that you've got, like, whatever you need, and here's a counselor that's on call for you, and you take whatever time off you need because they know you're more secure than you ever were. You have to work harder than you ever did work because you got to rebuild the net worth that you just lost. And you're essentially going to remarry the job, right? So they love it when you get a divorce.

They hate it whenever you get married. That's interesting. So were you dating prior to being CIA? No. Did you guys meet in the agency? Yeah, my wife and I actually met at Orientation Day at CIA. Oh, wow. No kidding.

Yeah. So we met at orientation. It took us about a year before we started dating. And then it took us another year before we got married. and, yeah, a year of dating, a year of engagement, and then we got married. And during that whole process, like, it was a dog and pony show trying to get shit through CIA. It was really difficult to get stuff through CIA. But it ended up working for us, mainly because my wife and I came from two different operational disciplines. I was a field

operations discipline. She was a high-value target discipline, so targeting. Her targeting complimented my field collection, my field collection complimented her targeting. So that's how CIA ultimately ended up not only letting us get married, but putting us operationally together, as what's known as an operating tandem couple or a tandem operating couple. That's interesting. Had you been a vulnerability for the CIA, do you think they would have released you both because of your relationship? That was something they were considering. So they consider forcing you guys to resign. They also, they consider what's called administrative,

reassignment, administrative reassignment, which is when they put you in a different role that is not, like, sensitive to them. So, you know, you're in operations and you're in, you're in human operations, you're in technical operations, you get married, you both get administratively reassigned to logistics. And now you're like opening cardboard boxes for, you know, new batteries that come in, that kind of stuff, right? Interesting.

So they were considering whether or not to ask us to resign or administrative reassignment or exploring the option of whether or not we'd have operational utility as a married couple, which for us, we got lucky that that's, that was the way they went. That's interesting. How many married couples are there with operational utility? Is it like hundreds or is it like, oh, there's like five? Oh, yeah. There's not hundreds. There are many. I would say that at any given time, if you consider the fact that 10 to 20% of all of CIA is covert, so 2,000-ish covert officers, I would say that there's probably a solid 5% that are married, but that doesn't mean that they have operational utility. There's a lot of people who are married that are allowed to continue in the courses of their careers, but ultimately end up getting divorced. And that's why CIA lets them continue in the operational careers that they're in. Because as you climb up, up the ladder, you become, like marriage becomes less and less convenient.

As an example, if you're both equal, if you're both case officers and you're both of equal rank and you meet in year three, CIA knows that by year nine, you're going to have enough experience that you have to go to two separate countries on two separate operational tasks for a long period of time in order for you to qualify for your next promotion. So they're like, oh, you know what, we'll just let them keep having their assignments together and they'll make a hard decision for themselves in about nine years. Later on. Yeah.

And by then you've got one kid, two kids, you've got public school, you've got whatever else. They're anticipating that either one spouse will resign and then become a following spouse, or they will have a divorce, which CIA loves, because now you've got two hyper-dedicated resources. Wow. Okay. Bustamante. if that's your real name by the way

I ran a question did you get your tooth fixed yeah man I'm super excited huh when was that like four days ago five days ago

oh wow I got I was told my dentist man I'm going on camp Gagnon like like two years I've had a gap in my face

I'm going on camp gagnot you've this shit fixed also let the record show I'm sorry for saying fixed I shouldn't have said fixed it was never there was nothing wrong with it you're such a kind dude

there was nothing wrong with it this is what's beautiful about your soul man. It's true. You just had regular teeth and there was a little gap in there and you happened to get another tooth thrown in. I was born missing a tooth. Funny story. I was born missing a tooth. I had a bridge that the military gave me. So I had a fake tooth for 20 years. It was rock solid. It blew everybody's mind that the thing held. You could pop it out. No. It was in my mouth permanently, right? It was my fake tooth. Pause. Have you heard that before? Someone said pause. Oh, no. I knew you weren't black.

this is the thing capital B if someone says something gay then you go oh pause oh was that a gay thing that I said

well you say it's been in my mouth for 20 years gay is lowercase G I think that's inappropriate you said it was in your mouth for 20 years

you're a closet conservative mark gag on it's all out now it was in your mouth for 20 years I mean you were going expecting not to say pause that's so funny

you've never heard though for I love that okay sorry I'm old dude I'm fucking I'm an old father I'm in a bad place. But now you know.

No, I know. Thank you very much. If your kid ever says something gay, you'd be like, I'm going to go to my wife. I'd be like, I learned gay stuff on the Camp Gagnon podcast. Whoa, pause. Dude, that is pause to the end degree. You got to chill with that.

Wait, so you had a tooth in your mouth for 20 years. Yeah, I had a fake tooth in my mouth for 20 years that the military put there because I was born without the tooth and they were like, hey, no one's going to take you seriously if you have a giant gap in your face. this is 2001, 2002, somewhere in there, right? The fucking thing finally cracks and breaks

four days before I go on Lex Friedman. What were you eating? I don't even remember. I don't think I was eating anything. Over time, I think it had worn out. So then, like, one meal or whatever, the thing just popped. And I was like, what is this thing floating in my mouth?

I was like, oh, shit, it's my bridge. So I go to the dentist, I'm like, hey, take this thing out, put a new one in. I got a, like, I've got a podcast. In Austin with this guy who's a big deal. Easy enough. And the dentist was like, oh, you know what? You're a prime candidate to have this new procedure that's going to make space so we can put a fake tooth permanently in your mouth.

So you don't have to worry about a bridge ever again. So I'm like, okay, if that's going to work, then let's do the thing. So what was supposed to be like a four-month procedure to let me get an insert turned into like a two-year procedure that never worked. So for everybody out there who knows what it's like to have your dentist lie to you for two years, like we're all susceptible to it. it, man. We're all susceptible to it. Wow. So then after like I go to a new dentist, I just moved to a new city in Colorado, found myself a dentist and I told the dentist's story and they're like, dude, you got sold. And I was like, I feel like it. My pocketbook feels like it. I feel like it. I feel like it. Like I got lied to. So that new dentist was like, yeah, dude, let's just put a bridge on there

because you're never going to be able to actually get an insert just because of the way the, like the biology of your mouth is kind of built. So this is a bridge. So it's a bridge. So now. So now I have a smile again. Yeah, it looks great. I've got a tooth again. I don't look like a hillbilly. But I will say that it was, it was kind of a blessing in disguise for me because I had this incredible streak of like online virality. That's what I'm saying. With a missing tooth, looking like a fucking homeless person. I think it added to the allure. A big hair, one tooth down, who the fuck is this guy? That's what I'm saying. Like now I feel like I'm getting gypped. Yeah, now it's like by Samson. Yeah, exactly. Watch, if I just, if I just, if I just,

but if I become totally obsolete because I have a tooth, then that's how you know beauty lies. Yeah, exactly. Damn, I feel like I'm getting short-chance. Okay, last question. Is there just like a general myth about the CIA that you wish you could dispel? Like, if you could just like covertly drop this information

to everyone's heads while they slept tonight and it was just like, hey, this is a myth. It's not true. Is there anything that you would want people to know? Absolutely. The big myth about CIA is that everybody who, works at CIA as some kind of superhero. Like there's some kind of gifted students, super intelligent, they speak 15 languages, everything comes easy for them, like this idea that there's something

special about a CIA officer before they're picked up by CIA. That is completely false. CIA officers are just everyday people. They're just normal people that get an opportunity to serve at CIA and are then given skills and training that makes them amazing. Right? I've built a company because of that simple truth, right? My company, Everyday Spy, is, it exclusively exists so that I can give people a taste of what CIA gave me. Just a fraction of the skills, a fraction of the training, a fraction of the experience, because it is such a lie that has been permeated through spy fiction, spy movies, and spy TV, that there's something special about a spy before they become a spy, when in fact, they are just normal, fucking.

in people. They're teachers, their police officers, their, you know, they're entrepreneurs. I was just a military, I was a shitty military officer, right? But when CIA called on me and I met their qualifications for like minimum viability, then they trained me in the stuff that I had to be trained in. And then my life changed, right? So just giving people a taste of what that life change feels like, shedding a little bit of the lie that we all live in. Like, I mean, that's what we were doing today. It was just shedding lies, dude. Shetting, shedding myths and falsehoods and everything else. But just like General Petraeus taught us, there's power in the myth. Let the myth sit. Don't tell the truth about the myth, and the myth will grow out of control. Petraeus did it. Trump does it.

CIA does it. So I'm trying to be the person that breaks that myth a little bit because the truth is, like, you're much closer to CIA than you think, and the people who serve at CIA are much closer to you than you're willing to believe. And maybe I am CIA. Maybe you already are. Andrew Bustamante. Thank you, brother.