EverydaySpy Podcast - CIA vs. Delta vs. Navy SEALs: Who’s the REAL Top Tier?

Episode Date: July 5, 2026

FREE TEST: Find Your Spy Superpower HERE - https://yt.everydayspy.com/spot_20260705 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you win a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies? Would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad-free? Don't worry, we get it. Every $20 ticket could win you $3,000 a month for life and supports life-saving cancer research at the Princess Margaret. Feel free to buy your payday for life ticket today. Raffle number 155-214. Please play responsibly.

It's a great question, actually. and I want to frame it correctly from the start. So I understand that most people think that the Navy SEALs are the best trained, most capable killers in the United States. They're not. They're not. I would say there's two different levels above Navy SEALs.

The first most immediate layer above them is the Army Delta Rangers, Delta Force. That is so secret, they still don't really acknowledge that they exist, right? And these are people who, are capable of doing everything the SEALs are capable of doing and doing everything

that your clandestine services are capable of doing, all wrapped into one, like, individual. And then you put five or six of those individuals together and you send them to the places where not only is there plausible deniability,

but there is essentially complete and total deniability. Right? So those are, and those people are amazing. So I understand why Navy SEALs have become popularized in media because you're allowed

to talk about them, where you're not really let me talk about Delta. Right. But anybody who really is deep into that culture of military and who served in uniform, we all know like Delta is a whole different caliber. And then what's the top? And then I would say kind of adjacent to Delta becomes your CIA paramilitary.

Because CIA has its own paramilitary organization that pools the best seals, the best green berets, the best Delta Rangers, the best Marine Force recon. And then, again, trains them up to a CIA intelligence standard, while also maintaining their tier one or upper level echelon military special operations training. Okay. So for us thick-headed people out there, basically they're badass mothers. They can do wet work. They're fully trained to go into any part of the world. They can pick up your body. They can fuck up your day and they can pick up your mind. Yes.

Whereas your Navy SEAL typically can only really up your day and fuck up your body. And if I mean, I honestly, I know I'm going to piss a lot of SEALs off. Because there are a lot of seals. Right. Just think about that, right? There's like six different teams. All of them have hundreds of different seals. Like there's a lot of seals out there.

And they're, they're, when you talk to them, if you've talked to them, if you haven't talked to them, you should 100% invite them on your show. It doesn't take long talking to a seal before you realize that they are just a highly trained human weapon. Right. There's not always, there's not a lot of depth to them. Right. But when you get to like a green beret or a delta trained operative,

you're talking to a smart person, so scary because you realize for as smart and as kind as they seem, they're also lethal. Right. And that's, you start to get a humbling understanding of why we are the best most powerful military in the world. And so you've got the intelligence of the central intelligence agency and the physical capability of a Delta Force or of an ABC.

Right. Exactly. Right. And to answer your question, your original question was like, you know, when an extraction, happens, when an operation happens, how does it work? The formal term that we use is some, it's a joint team or a joint military operation, sometimes a joint strategic operation, but the word joint is the key word there.

And it means that you bring in experts in multiple different disciplines, and you use all of those experts simultaneously in an operation to master air land and sea, right? And then the fourth area is intelligence, right? So air land and sea and intelligence basically makes for a fulsome joint task. task force that would essentially make it so that you would have an Intel operative who can keep up with the SEALs, like a paramilitary person, embedded with a Navy SEAL team that's executing an

operation that's been fully built and planned by intelligence operators with airborne ISR, which is your surveillance and recon resources, and then some sort of littoral escape, which is a sea-based or river-based escape strategy, right? But now you have this incredible task force all coming together for one operation that might be an extraction of one or two people. And it's done professionally. It's done quickly. And it's done without discoverability. Right.

And so I assume that you were part of this paramilitary, this CIA. When I left CIA, I was in an office that was part of the paramilitary wing. That I can't acknowledge. Oh, I see. Okay. But you can't acknowledge whether you were on ground. Or, yeah, or like what role I had inside there. Okay.

There's some pretty amazing people. I am not an amazing person. I'm a pretty normal dude. I got a chance to work with some freaking incredible people who I hope are still there because it would make me very proud to know that they're still working and I get to brag about that. So you've got these incredible people, you know, in this very elite intelligence agency. That's like understating it so much. But yet it seems since you've had, you know, I don't know how many.

interventions, right? Whether that be, you know, helping topple governments through disinformation, or, you know, if you take Chile in 1974, overthrowing Allende, it was a lot of just supplying weapons to people and bombs. They were bombing the embassy or the, excuse me, the presidential palace, right? To, you know, Vietnam. I'm sure the CIA was in there early in South Vietnam, you know, trying to whip up dissent against the communists, right, and for the super corrupt government. And all of these interventions, really nothing has worked out. You see the conflagration that's happening in the world now. It's, in my opinion, because it's all fraying and it's all, we're becoming a multipolar

world again. So it kind of makes me think, if you guys have the ability to go and kill Castro when he was alive or go and kill the Ayatollah, you can get in and get out. And you could probably be more effectual if you chose to do it. Is that correct? So there's a couple things that are important for you to keep in mind because I appreciate your point of view. Your point of view is very clearly uninformed. Probably. Intentionally. And that's what's so important. The American people are uninformed intentionally, which there's a term for that. We call that misinformation, right? Misinformation is information that isn't a lie, like disinformation. It isn't intentionally wrong.

It's just incomplete or incorrect, right? So misinformation is an important tool that CIA uses that any secret intelligence service uses in the world. So to your exact example, right, there's all these examples of things that we've done wrong. Absolutely agree. Because every example that we've done right, you don't get to know about. You can't give us one example? I mean, like, how, in the few examples that have gone public, the bombings that get discovered and prevented, right? Sure.

The terrorists that get captured. The spies that get captured and put into jail. Of course. That happens every day. Yeah. Right. Right. Those stories, they don't catch headlines.

Right. They don't compete with the other news that's out there. So even the stuff that is disclosed, you guys don't care about. All the American people care about is the big sexy failure story. So the first thing to keep in mind is that all of your examples are true.

We have failed in all sorts of ridiculous schemes, right? Pre-9-11, trying to get Castro's beard to fall out of his face. Post-9-11, trying to prevent the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We fail all the time. We failed in Afghanistan just a few years ago after 22 years of conflict, right?

And it's because the success stories are not something that we talk about for lots of reasons, and we can get to the strategic value of why we keep those secrets if you want to. But that's the first thing. And then the second thing to keep in mind is, could we be more effective? Could we be more capable?

Absolutely. But don't forget that CIA is a government organization. Let's list off some other government organizations. Of course. Right. The DMV. When was the last time we had a good experience? The DMB.

The IRS. When was the last time the IRS was flawless? Yeah. And that's not even before you get into the government. housing authority, you talk about like the Department of Education. It's still a federal bureaucratic engine where eight out of ten people are not covert. So you've got all the same bureaucracy and all the same hurdles plus post 9-11.

Like I said, you've got so much more meddling from Congress, from vice presidencies, from senators and congresspeople and people running for office. It's just it becomes a huge bureaucratic stew. If anything, they are less effective because. they take fewer risks in the modern day. I see. Because there's so many more hurdles to go over. Well, you know, I like the, you know, finding bin Laden and, yeah, stopping bombings. That's, that's all good. That's like high-level police work. I think the rest of the world, though, it becomes a problem when you're trying to nation-build. Like, the CIA has been used as a tool,

basically, of the Hawks, the Warawks, since the end of the Cold War. And now we find ourselves literally today as close to nuclear war probably as we were in 1962 right before the Cuban missile crisis kicked off. So I guess what is your opinion? Do you think the CIA, because the world's

splitting apart into three different polls, do you think the CIA should kind of be brought home just to a more of defensive, you know, America first. That's certainly where the body politics going, right? It's going to like this

populist, hey, we're not going to work. We don't want to, we don't want to meddle in what's going on in the Middle East or Russia. We need to just fortify our own country and make sure that we're safe. Do you think the CIA should kind of like reshift its focus that way? Because that's kind of where the world's going. So it's funny. It's funny that you think CIA would shift its focus as if CIA was an independent organization. It's not. CIA falls under one of the three branches of government. It falls under the executive branch.

So who's the chief executive? Yeah. The president. So how up is CIA? It's as up as the president is above it. It doesn't get to choose its own course. So don't ever mistake the men and women who serve at CIA and the actions that CIA takes as being one and the same.

The men and women at CIA take the action. That's dictated to them by the executive and the policy set by the executive branch of government. Which means when Trump is in office, they do what Trump says. When Biden is in office, they do what Biden says. Because that's what a government servant is. Okay. So then the Russia gate hoax scandal where they say that elements of the CIA were working to spread

disinformation, I would call it, against Trump saying that he was a Russian spy. but this is while he was in office. So do you think that, what's your opinion on that? Is that a little too overblown as like a CIA hit job? So there's, well, there's multiple things happening, right? Because you've got the United States, and the United States, we have something called freedom of speech. People mistake what freedom of speech is.

Freedom of speech means that you can speak out about your government without being held accountable to any kind of government overreach through the judicial system. It doesn't mean, like, if I say something bad about, you, that's called slander. Well, you can take me to court, you can sue me, I pay you. There's no freedom of speech between people. Like we mistakenly think that freedom of speech means

we can say whatever the fuck we want. No, you can't. That's slander. That's covered by the court system. But when you say something bad about the government, it's a whole different rule. Right. So when you have 10,000 people, again, just throwing out a number,

10,000 people at CIA, and 20 of them decide to raise their hand and say, well, the president's actually a Russian whatever, sympathist. That's not CIA saying the presidents of Russian sympathists. That's 20 individuals who happen to work for CIA putting their name on a whatever. It doesn't violate their

contract. It doesn't violate their agreements. Somewhere it might violate the there's like a clause that we sign where we don't meddle in politics based on our position. So there's an actual enforceable rule in there that we sign contractually. But what ends up happening is the media gets a hold

of 25 people at CIA who could be dumbasses. They could be friggin, for all we know, they could work in the transportation office or they could be like a senior leader on some important country desk. We have no idea who they are. What we know is that they work for CIA

and they said the president can't be trusted. That's not the same thing as CIA saying the president can't be trusted. But are there not high level? Certainly within the CIA, there's high level actors, executives, that don't share that act roguly, right?

I don't even know if rogly is a word, that act rogue, and that obviously don't involve most, you know, certainly not the overt associates of the CIA, overt employees, and probably not most of the covert employees. It's really, I am shocked. I am shocked because you say things

as if they are true, when they are totally just, they're totally uninformed, right? You can't say, surely there are rogue officers. Let's be logical about this for a second. how does somebody reach a senior position at CIA? There's only two ways, right? How does anybody in government reach a senior position?

There's only two ways. You either spend enough time in government that you promote to that level or you're appointed and who appoints you. So if somebody at the senior level of CIA is there, it's because they've either learned how to play the game so well that they've promoted their way to the top or they were literally appointed by the executive

who they work for. So why would anyone think there's a rogue element at the top of the CIA? There's no, there's no rogue element because if you worked your ass up there, acting in a rogue way is going to get you kicked out and fired because nobody wants to work with you. Because it's a organization that does not promote the elite. It's an organization that promotes the loyal.

Right. Just like any government agency. So if anything, the higher you get, the less, like, less incentive you have to every, do anything other than the status quo. So it sounds like you don't really believe in the deep state. The deep state doesn't exist. The way that people talk about it, if anybody were to just do the mental exercise of how would you build a deep state, you'll find two things. An organized deep state is too complicated and it goes against human nature. Does that mean there isn't some secret

organization of people who are collaborating? No. It just means that they're not. organized, right? Who is making 90% of the decisions for the United States? Your senior company CEOs, like your wealthiest Americans. But that's not a deep state. That's not a group of people who are organizing together to intentionally direct foreign policy and domestic policy. That's just a bunch of rich people who are working in their own rich people best interest, which is exactly what the forefathers intended for the United States. This idea that we were somehow built to be like a democratic test bed, like we were supposed to be some free country. That's not what the United States was born to do. The United States was born to be a land

earning economically independent free zone away from the UK, away from Britain, away from England at the time. That's what we were born to do. And we were supposed to be a non-interventionist country. That's foreign policy. That wasn't that forefathers, the forefathers, the forefathers most likely did not intend for us to be non-interventionist, because guess how we won the Revolutionary War? With intervention. What do you mean? We have the French or the reason we won our independence.

They intervened. Like, the French were critical to American independence. And then from that point on, like the biggest question we had after we gained our independences, are we going to help France gain their independence? Right. Right. And there's all sorts of the forefathers. They participated in stuff in Mexico.

they participated in stuff against Spain and France. Like, we were always involved in foreign affairs as long as those affairs benefited the U.S. economy. What I'm saying is the... So you have a very Machiavellian worldview. Like, this is what you're saying is a, you're looking at the world, and you could be right, too. It's, I guess I'm an idealist, right? I'm like, there's got to be a way that we can all get along. There's no way we can all trade.

We can all. Hey, y'all's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust.

Visit wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. Benefit from free trade. Not that we can all be equal. We wouldn't want that. I'm not the furthest thing from a communist or a leftist or a collectivist. I abhor it. There's got to be a way that technology can move us beyond

this jockeying for like power. So like there's got to be superpowers can maybe share power. And I am we're going to get to get into it. I, I, we're going to get into it. Why is Iran? Why are Iran and Russia? Why do they have trade packs? Why is Russia now have trade packs with China and the East?

These guys aren't fighting. Nobody wants the smoke anymore. The only people to want to smoke are America and Israel. You know what I mean? The writing is kind of on the wall, in my opinion. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. We've all just been looking at different walls. Right?

That's the thing. Right. So it's not, can we all get along? Yes. Can we all get along as equals? No. Are there some people out there who still think that equality is what we're pursuing? Yes.

Are there people out there who know full well equality is not what we're pursuing, but they still promote it as an idea? Yes. Right? And that's where things start to get jumbled. As an example to your to the point previously where you were like, you know, how do we have all these failures? How could the CIA be so incompetent, whatever else, right?

Look at how we've succeeded. Basically the United States has done one thing over and over again very, very well since the end of World War II that has led to us being a superpower. And what we have done is we have made other countries dependent on us. That's all we've done. It's that simple, man. It's that simple. Because we have the dollar.

No. I wouldn't give that credit to the CIA. No, it's not because the dollar. It's because... It is. We can print the money and we are the reserve currency and we kept everybody's gold too. What does everybody pay us in? The pay us in dollar.

Foreign currency and gold. Right. They don't pay us in dollars. Why do you think the United States doesn't take payment in dollars? Because there are dollars. Because the dollars are worthless. Right. So it's not because of the American dollar that we're powerful.

We're powerful because coming out of World War II, How many Japanese and Nazi bombs happen in the United States? None. We weren't destroyed. Our economic capacity was maxed. Of course. We actually got women into the workforce for the first time ever. Absolutely.

But what was it like in the UK and France and Germany? Decimated. Decimated. What was like in Japan? Decimated. So who became the contractor of the world? We did.