Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Your Phone Is A Government Spy! | Andrew Bustamante [Ep. 442]

Episode Date: July 21, 2024

Join my mailing list https://briankeating.com/list to win a real 4 billion year old meteorite! All .edu emails in the USA 🇺🇸 will WIN! Is the CIA spying on Americans? How can we stay safe in the surveillance age? Is the government keeping secrets from us? And which covert missions have secretly shaped the course of world politics? I had the pleasure of discussing all this and more with Andrew Bustamante! Andrew Bustamante is a former covert CIA intelligence officer, Air Force combat veteran, and Fortune 10 corporate advisor.  After his career in the CIA, Bustamante transitioned to public speaking, training, and consulting, sharing his insights on espionage, intelligence operations, and personal development. He often discusses topics such as applying espionage techniques to everyday life, business strategies, and security practices. He gained recognition through his podcast, "EverydaySpy," where he delves into various aspects of espionage and how they can be applied to enhance personal and professional success.  Tune in!  Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:21 Does the CIA spy on Americans? 00:04:18 Are we entitled to classified information? 00:11:11 Science, scientists, and national security 00:25:02 What really happened in the Roswell UFO incident? 00:28:50 Missileers and hypersonic missiles 00:35:38 Which conflict concerns Andrew the most? 00:46:05 Best way to exploit an individual’s vulnerabilities 00:59:07 Privacy concerns in the digital age 01:11:07 Gathering intelligence on another planet 01:15:37 The definition of a classified document 01:21:21 Everyday spy tactics 01:30:10 Audience questions 01:49:03 Outro — Additional resources: 📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! ➡️ Connect with Andrew Bustamante: 💻 Website: https://andrewbustamante.org/  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Andrew-Bustamante ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Meta, who is Andrew Bustamante? Which covert missions have shaped the course of robotics? How does the CIA maneuver the complexities of modern conflicts? What secret knowledge? Does the CIA have of extraterrestrial life? And how can you protect your personal and digital security from all the electronic spies monitoring you 24-7? Today, Andrew Bustamante, a former co-examante, a former co-comer.

covert CIA intelligence officer with unparalleled insights into global espionage and strategic intelligence will join us today on Into the Impossible to answer these questions and more. In this undercover episode of Into the Impossible, we discussed the mysteries of global government security and the evolving role of intelligence and warfare and the strategies that drive global and personal security policies. If you value your security and safety, better watch this episode. is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, Andrew, thanks for coming down to San Diego to do this podcast.

I mean, it doesn't take much to get me to say yes to San Diego. And this is my first time at UCSD, and what an awesome campus. It's such an honor to have you here, and you're a fan favorite, requested for a long time. About two or three years ago, another San, well, a local San Diego by the name of Tom DeLong. I don't know if you ever heard of him. He was in Blink 182. He did a podcast live with me, and he now is associated with the,

to the Stars Academy, which is about finding evidence for aliens. And we did a podcast along with a man named Jim Semivan. Yep. You ever heard of Jim Simivan as well? Okay, so I'm going to do this. Jim Semivan, when I was sitting right over there, told me and Kurt Jean Mungle that the CIA is prohibited from doing psychological ops or spying or deceiving the American public. He got roasted in the comments.

Andy, tell me, is it true? Is the CIA allowed to spy on and do psychological operations on? ordinary civilians? It's a mixed question. It's not a clear yes and no. And here's why. There's two types of CIA. There's the pre-9-11 CIA, everything up to 9-11, and then there's the post-9-11 CIA. Pre-9-11 CIA was kind of the Wild West. And they did stuff that was not sanctioned. They did stuff that was kind of wacky. They did anything it took, essentially, anything it took to protect the American people, including, you know, drugs and experimental tests. experimental weapons, you name it. After 9-11, essentially what 9-11 showed us is that the pre-9-11 CIA

was not up to the task of protecting the American people. That's what we all learned coming out of September 11th. And that's when you saw a massive increase in funding, a massive scaling up in size, but also an increased amount of oversight that started to hem in what CIA couldn't, couldn't do. So to answer your question about today, 2024, CIA cannot unilaterally execute operations against American citizens in order to do anything against the American people or anything that involves an American citizen, which could include a foreigner who is undercover for a foreign country who gains their American citizenship. People don't realize, like, that is a very real thing. Seeding operations from Russia, from China, from Cuba, from Iran, they send people

here to gain American citizenship to gain the rights and privileges of American citizens because then they cannot be touched, right? So in order to combat that threat, CIA must partner with FBI or must partner with Customs and Border Patrol in order to do any kind of operation against a known or suspected U.S. citizen. There's a great deal of judicial support that has to be engaged in and there's a legislative policy that has to be engaged in. But all of that to say, Yes, CIA can operate against American citizens with proper authorities, partners, judicial review, and only when it's warranted. And the frequency of that is so low that you don't really, the average American doesn't have to

worry about it. But if you are the kind of person who is nefariously here, you're not really safe from us. We can find you. And when we think about things like the recent testimony by people like David Grush, who's also Air Force, veteran, I believe, they talk. they talk about data and access and who gets to see what. And I'm wondering, you know, to what extent does an ordinary citizen have the right or maybe the entitlement, perhaps the responsibility, to obtain data and access to things that the government needs to maintain secrecy perhaps?

And it's a great question. And I think, unfortunately, people need to accept that just like parents want to keep secrets from their kids, wives want to keep secrets from their husbands, you want to keep secrets from your mom and dad, and you do it for their best interest, right? Like, your mom and dad don't need to know the things that keep you up at night. Your kids don't need to know the things that keep you up at night.

You don't want to know the kinds of things that keep your teenage kids up at night. Right? That's right. The same thing is true with government secrets. The stuff that keeps senior administrators up at night, you don't fucking want to know that. You do not want to know.

Not only is it incredibly detailed, incredibly boring. It's also, usually, it's not something that's going to get resolved quickly. Right? The Iran problem that keeps people up at night is not going to get resolved in the next 24 hours. It's going to keep them awake for the next three years. So why bother the American people with that? First of all, you've got to think that the government looks at the American population as an economic engine. They don't see them as people. They don't see them as civilians or kids or innocence. They see them as a functional, productive entity, an organism. That's job. The job of that organism is to create economic power.

GDP. So the reason we keep America safe is to keep the economic engine safe that generates the GDP that pays the bills for the largest military, the most capable military, the most capable intelligence service in the world, which then protects the engine that generates the GDP and you can see how the cycle goes. It's just that's all it is. The problem is that the American people think that they should be seen as individuals. They don't realize they're a collective. once you accept the fact that your individuality, you have independence and freedoms that were granted to you by a government that sees you as one piece of a larger organism.

As soon as you threaten the organism like a criminal does, then you get taken out. You get taken out of that organism and put somewhere else. So you are not entitled to know what the government knows to keep you safe. You're not. You're entitled to know what it takes for you to do your job as the organism that creates the GDP. The same way that parents protect their children by keeping secrets and spouses protect

each other from keeping by keeping secrets. If you want to know someone else's secrets, look at the mirror, look at yourself in the mirror and say, are there, am I willing to share my secrets with the world? Because if you're not willing to be fully transparent with the world, you have no reason to expect that somebody else should be transparent with you, especially not the U.S. federal government. Yeah, to the audience members, you know, screaming into the, into their iPhones and computers So how dare he say that?

I remind myself of this Simpsons episode 20 years ago or whatever when, you know, something's happening and the CIA is like spying on, you know, Homer Simpson. And Lisa's like, well, who will watch the watchers if nobody you, and Homer goes, I don't know, the Coast Guard. But so in that case, I mean, who does watch the watch? If we are not entitled as the taxpayers who pay your salary when you're serving your country and it's a great, it's a great debt of gratitude that we owe people that serve the country, but it's also a responsibility.

So how do you balance that need for transparency and the need for secrecy, you know, to quote Jack Nicholson, A Few Good Men, Great Movie, You Want Me on That Wall, You Need Me On The Wall. Without Me on That Wall, you can't sleep at night. So how do you balance those tradeoffs between your right to know for something like aliens? Is that really rising to the level of, you know, something that the U.S. government needs to protect us against? Right. And so oftentimes your question is very valid. And I don't think there's a good answer for it yet. Who watches the Watchers is very much a, a, a, a question that's still being answered. Like we saw with 9-11, like we've seen with the overreaches of American privacy laws, as we've seen, with the overreach of social media, right? Like watching the watchers is becoming a very real challenge, especially because technology

is advancing faster than policy. It's advancing faster than human thought. It's advancing faster than social norms. And technology is giving us capabilities that 10 years ago, we didn't think we'd ever have. Do you remember Charlie's Angels? Yeah. Charlie would port in on a-

I'm going to stir them over my bed. Sorry, honey. I can see why. Sorry, honey. I can see why. But he would port in on a TV screen in their car and there'd be a video call. That was 1970 something. And we were like, that's never going to happen.

Now that happens all the time. You can have four video calls simultaneously, right? One from your phone, one from your tablet, two from your different computers in different windows on the same operating system. Remember when you could only have one window open at a time? Yeah. So technology moves so fast. society has a hard time keeping up with it.

So the question of who watches the watchers boils down to really two things. One, trusting the branches of government. We have a legislative branch, a judicial branch, and executive branch. Your intelligence services fall for the most part under the executive branch. The checks and balance to the executive branch still come from the legislative branch and the judicial branch. Your intelligence community is operating at the behest of the president, but funded by the legislative branch. So if the House doesn't agree with what's happening, they can simply cut off funding to the IC. The judicial branch is who holds us accountable. We can go to jail. What people don't realize,

every intelligence officer, when they reach full performance, which is a point in their career where they're deemed to be a full performance officer, meaning they can do all the various operational acts required of them in their role, the first thing they have to do is get professional liability insurance because they can be sued by any member of the public, by any member of the four entity, right? They are, they are individually culpable under the judicial branch. So who watches the watchers is largely the checks and balances of the state. But then you have what you were highlighting compartmentalization, which is also known as need to know. And there are many, many operations where need to know does not extend to the judicial or the legislative branch as a whole.

It only extends to a few minority people in those whose job it is to provide oversight. And oftentimes those individuals can be corrupted to the cause, right? If you have two or three judges and two or three senators who are all right in on the same operation, but everyone agrees that the biggest threat in the world is North Korea, you're going to see everybody kind of loosen up the rules a little bit to operate against North Korea. That's just human nature. So that is a problem that we're finding in that watching of the watchers. So yeah, it reminds me a lot of this guy over Here's Galileo showing for those listening out there, my famous finger puppet. I'm known for my finger puppets.

And here's Galileo with his telescope. But of course, you know, back in 1632, when he came out of his second, or fifth book or whatever, it was called the Dialogue on Two World Systems, which was meant to explicate the notion of a heliocentric universe versus the Earth-centered or geocentric universe that had prevailed for 2,000 years. And this was found to be in great, you know, contrast to what. the Catholic Church was willing to accept. And they were the equivalent of the U.S. government on Starra.

They were the most powerful entity on Earth at the time and still have great power, as you know. And so it was partially their duty to, you know, make sure that certain things were censored in order to keep the peace and keep. We look at it now as Galileo is this hero of science. He is my hero. And he's an incredible. He's the first scientist in many ways. I'm bent to the telescope. Or, you know, perfected the telescope.

We'll talk about that in a bit. But the fact is they needed to maintain secrecy in certain things. And so they actually allowed him to study the heliocentric model of the solar system where the sun was at the center. But they said, you just can't teach it. So do us that solid. Don't teach it because that would raise eyes of the public and start to maybe undermine their power. And so he said he agreed to that. And actually later on, you know, 20 years went by and he thought, oh, I'm famous enough.

I got the ego and the swagger. He could do whatever he wants. And by that time, he said, actually, what teaching meant was you couldn't teach it in the natural vernacular of the, of the, of the, of the. people, which is Italian. But the original research was done in Latin. So his first book is called Cedirius, Nunchius, which means stare messenger. And people were fine with that. Even though it promulgated the notion that the earth wasn't the center of the cosmos, as the Bible, allegedly, according to some, maintained. So there are a lot of parallels there. And only when he published in Latin, in Italian, did he really get subject of the inquisition. So it's really almost his

fault in a certain way, and, you know, that he didn't abide by those rules. But can you give tips to, you know, those of us in science that are working at this interface. It's not clear to me according to certain people. If I invent something that has, I have two patents. They've generated, you know, less than the cost of a postage stamp nowadays. Unfortunately for me and my kids' college tuition. But the point, Andy, is, you know, at some point, if I did invent something, you know, this diffusion reactor I built right here, does that become the property of the government? I mean, at a certain point, if it has natural security implications or what are my rights? and abilities as a scientist to maintain my own intellectual property.

It's a great question. There's two kind of parallel topics that we have to address simultaneously, right? The first is understanding how to predict the government's response to what they would consider to be a public threat. And a public threat does not always mean a security threat, right? A public threat can be a change of social norms in a drastic period of time. COVID was a public threat. Right? Even after it was confirmed that COVID was not like the, the super virus that they were afraid it was going to be, even after they knew it was most, it was most vital to protect the ultra vulnerable.

Even after that, it still posed a public panic threat, a public calm or ease threat, a public economic threat, right? So the government is, if you look at how the U.S. federal government and every federal government in the world, when you look at how they view their population, they view their population as an organism, as a herd, if you will, right, as an economic engine. You have to keep that economic engine focused on what it's supposed to do. As soon as it gets distracted by something else, you suffer from two losses. One, you lose the productivity that you would have had had they not been distracted. And then two, you run the risk of them hurting themselves. Right? So imagine like, why do we put that that lampshade on our dogs when our dogs have surgery or something? It's because you don't want them to hurt themselves, bite open the stitches, lick open the stitches, lick off the bandage. So you put this hood on them to protect them from hurting themselves in large part because the dog is ignorant of future consequences. Individuals, individual Americans are not ignorant of future causes. Society as a whole is ignorant of future causes. That's why we have mob mentality.

That's why you have public panic, right? As soon as masses of people get together, it's, I mean, it's energetics. People become, they have a shared consciousness. Yeah. And then they start making bad individual decisions in the favor of the public, the larger context, right? It's it's psychological. It's predictable. So the government has to protect against that.

So oftentimes they restrict access to information, or like you saw in Galileo's case, they will grant It's private discovery, but not public discovery. So to your point about what can a scientist do, a scientist who comes up with a patent that advances the economic engine, the economic organism, or can be used in a way to protect national security, which is why so much science happens in weapons research and military research first. You can absolutely assume that you will own that patent. You will be the sole beneficiary of all the financial benefits that come from that patent, as long as you adhere to the context of the contract that the federal government

sets up with you, you can't violate the terms of that contract because the federal government is concerned not only with the public disclosure of something that ruins their economic engine, but you also have to understand that if the public can learn something, so can our adversaries. So now your reactor that becomes public knowledge to the average Kentuckian is also public knowledge to the average Iranian, the average Chinese, the average Hong Kong, who can steal that patent and use it to improve their own country. And now we are now at risk. So now our economic engine is distracted and our threat, our adversary has gained an advantage because you chose to make your knowledge public. Now you are very much at risk of losing the privileges, not because you want

to be, they're trying to punish you, but because you violated the terms of the contract, just like Galileo violated the terms of the contract. Right. Well, she was. was well aware of. Okay, speaking of Galileo, and because you're called the everyday spy, it reminds me of everyday carry. You've heard of that, Andy. You've heard of everyday carry. I am assuming you have some sort of special skills like Liam Neeson that will allow you to open this gift that I've bestowed upon you here. This is for you. Do you have any everyday carry items? If not, I do, and stand by. So you have a knife on you? No, I will take, I will take your knife. A knife is actually not something that we everyday carry. No, I did. I was able to open. I was able to open

the gift without it so you don't your fingers are like knives there we go all right so let's take a look here oh i like this already yeah so i am an air force academy graduate and a proud aviator but i do i love the seat yes and the whole maritime element of this is quite beautiful yes i think you like what's inside if we can open it is there a latch on it or it's just magnets it could just be magnet i think it's there's a hinge for sure yeah it looks like there's not tape or anything just break it up there you There you go. Inside there. Oh, no way.

You will find. Now, this isn't research grade. This is not going to be good for you. You know, your wife and you to go out. Get this, dude. So this was what Galileo, it's effectively the same exact thing. So you can pull it out. It can extend it.

It's not very good, high quality again. But it looks nice. But the reason I bring that up is because Galileo, our friend, he didn't invent a telescope. But he had heard about it from the Netherlands. But as you point out, technology doesn't know. abide by borders, right? The Netherlands guy, this guy, Hans Lipper-Shea, he invented it in 1601 or something like that. He sat on it for a couple of years, never thought, and the reason that he invented it was because he was, the Netherlands was very good at making glasses for optic, you know, for optical

reasons. And he, but he never, you know, no one ever thought about taking the two lenses and putting them together and then looking up at the sky until Galileo did it. And then Galileo was able to scale up the size of the lens, the quality of the glass, the grinding. We take it for granted now. I mean, I got that, you know, I'll tell you my sources because I want you to really treasure that, Eddie. But the point is they called this device the spyglass because what it did is it removed the stealthy advantage that distance always provided. And the very first thing that Galileo did, like a good entrepreneur, is try to sell it to the Venetian government that he was abiding under at the time. And he had some patrons and they did offer to buy it from them. They didn't give him much money, but they gave him a full tenured position, which is what all academics want.

So he got full tenured track job and he got a couple of hundred. extra scooty per year or whatever. But the point is this technology, it didn't abide by borders, exactly as you're saying. And oftentimes we see it immediately made military, because you could see a ship at sea three days before you could see it in the lagoon itself. So it was incredible for advantage for the Venetian government. And that was before Italy was unified, et cetera. But the point is, we often think, as I just posed to you, this kind of paranoid question

of, well, if the government steals my research, I'm studying the cosmos, you know, they might steal some technology. oftentimes it's gone the other way where there's been military technology that then gets used for scientific purposes. Have you encountered that as well in your career where like something that was invented for the military then spins off and becomes useful for the scientist, eggheads, like me and my friends? Oh, I mean, absolutely. You've seen it in multiple different ways. So AI is one of those examples. I know artificial intelligence is something that's taken the world by storm in the last, what, three or five years. When I was still at CIA, we were using

rudimentary forms of artificial intelligence. Wow. Right. And that's back in 2000. 2008, 2009, because we had smart algorithms that were aiding us in the contextualization of massive amounts of open source information. It wasn't what it is now. You couldn't go to open AI and ask a question and have it respond to you like that, right? But you could save hours or days or weeks of research by using the right bullion term in the right engine, right? So that, the whole funding mechanism that made it so that you and I can talk about AI and use it for free,

that funding mechanism started with the federal government. And that's just one of multiple examples, right? Even things like dried food and pencils that were created for NASA and astronaut use now make our everyday life better, right? Combat boots, which used to be just only available to, you know, combat soldiers. Now the 550 cord, the types of rubber, the types of tread, those are accessible. for everyday people from tactical use to farming use and beyond. So just like you're talking about here with the spyglass, a big part of what I'm trying to do with my company

is to take the processes and the frameworks that we use at CIA to keep America safe by stealing secrets. Really, stealing secrets is nothing more than the art of getting people to disclose secrets. That's all it is. Well, there's no reason why you and I can't use the art of getting other people to disclose secrets. in our business, in our academic lives,

in our social life, right? If I go buy a car, the salesperson's trying to keep a secret. Well, if I can get the salesperson's secret, I can use that for my own benefit. There's nothing illegal about that. Right? And there's actually a technique. There's a framework. There's a system to get people to disclose their secrets

without knowing about it. That framework is called elicitation. So why not just use that? Hey there, I'm ashamed to admit that I've launched a sci-op on you. See, I've been trying for years now to get them all of viewers and listeners to actually subscribe to my YouTube channel and podcasts, but only about 50% of you are actually doing it. That's a worst track record that some government agencies achieve.

It feels like my manipulation is not working, so now I'm asking you boldly and out in the open, please take a second to hit that subscribe button or follow the podcast and your audio player of choice. It really helps a lot and helps me get these great guests like Andrew Bustamanti and many, many more. Let's go back, deep undercover. The thing is, there's an element of over classification that's very, very real in the federal government.

You mentioned earlier like, does the question of alien life meet the threshold of having to make it a national security secret? Maybe not. There are many, many things out there that do not meet the threshold of being a national security secret that are still classified. They're over classified. And that is a massive problem in the intelligence infrastructure. when in doubt, guess what your federal employees do? When in doubt, classify it. And then that's

just a way of saying, we'll kick the can down the road and let some other team in the future review it and determine whether or not it should be declassified. Just what, four years ago was the 50th anniversary of JFK? For people that don't know, everything that's documented and classified in the intelligence world is by default classified 2x25, which means two terms of 25 years. So if you and I have a secret conversation with some Turkish person, doesn't matter what we talk about, the default, 2x25. Why the hell is it then that after 2x 25, we still couldn't release all the secrets about JFK? That's right. Trump alleged that he would do it.

Right. He didn't. Is it because there's something in there that is actually so secret it threatens national security? Or is it because some bureaucrat was like, I don't really want to be the one that makes the call on this. So I'm going to kick it down the road to the. the next person. Hopefully I'll be dead with that happened. Right. Occam's razor dictates to us that it's more likely just a lazy administrator than it is an actual national security scene. Right. Cover up and whatnot. And then talk about what I call the conspiracy number, which is like how many people would have

to maintain this. Let's do a gunk and a thought experiment for the listeners out there. Because I'm a skeptic. I'm not only a skeptic about aliens having crash landed in Roswell or wherever. I'm a skeptic about life existing elsewhere in the whole universe. That's a podcast for another day. TED Talk for another day. But not to say it's impossible, I think it's eminently possible, but the question is how likely is it? And that's Occam's Razor has to be applied, as you say. But let's walk through it. Let's say there was, you know, space, this is James Webb Space Telescope, which is a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which is basically a KH-11 spy satellite turned the other direction, right? And actually, the newest

successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, it's called the Nancy Roman Space Telescope, that is literally like a KH-11 that the DOD said, we don't have a use for it. You got eggheads want to use it. And they're like, yeah, we're like, well, We'll turn around, we'll look for dark energy, which is astounding to me, but it's another benefit. But let's walk through it. Let's say this thing crashed and these guys got out, little green men walked out. How many people, and for how long, would such a conspiracy entail? And conspiracies happen all the time, right?

You and I conspired to have this meeting today, right? I mean, conspiracy just means breathing together, right? So the question is, how many people, how likely would it be from your perspective, knowing the tools, the tactics, the training that you have and that you use in your company? Let's assess it. How likely is it, you know, in sort of a Bayesian or statistical likelihood that these things actually occurred? Right. There's to really properly do this thought experiment justice.

You have to also ask yourself what's the baseline at the moment of the event, right? If a vehicle, if a space vehicle crash lands in the middle of a suburban neighborhood, the probability of that secret being maintained more than one or two degrees is almost non-existent. because nobody in that neighborhood is familiar with keeping a secret, has proper communication channels, has behavioral practices or expectations that are formatted. So all of a sudden, it's like 15 minutes later, the whole world knows of it.

If the same vehicle crash lands in the middle of a secret military base in Montana, then the opposite is true. Now all of a sudden, you can have reasonable confidence that it's going to be preserved for a long period of time because everybody in the area of that vicinity is undersworn oath to keep things secret. They have a written record. They know how to communicate. They have a procedure for how to respond to such an event, right?

They have even the UCMJ as a legal structure that can, that can incriminate them for disclosing what they've discovered. So the probabilities of the event happening in this thought experiment are significantly different depending on the baseline of the community in which it happened. So I just, I want to throw that out there so that people understand. Because to your point, training, structure, process, expectations. These are all things that feed into the longevity of a secret, which is why everything from CIA to DOD to NASA, they spend so much time vetting, training, and preparing their cadre to keep a secret because they know that on the other side of the fence, there are adversaries, but there are also journalists and politicians and business executives and lobbyists who are all actively trying to steal those secrets. So you have to know how to keep a secret and spot a secret stealer. in order to successfully maintain the confidentiality of an event.

And then they have to overlap over extended periods of time where this guy drove out to get the skids, you know, steer that picked up the spacecraft. You know, he had to not tell his wife and then she had to not tell their kids. This had to go on for quite some time. Sticking with space and military theme. So what's it like to be a missile leader? I mean, what does that really mean?

Is it really like we see, you know, there's two guys with keys inside of a bunker in Minot, North Dakota, or wherever you guys are? What does it really like to be a missile? So I will tell you right now, for anybody who's listening who is a missile officer or for anyone who's the child or nephew or uncle of a miscellier, the whole, every American owes a debt of gratitude to the men and women who sit underground every day. 24th. Waiting for what we all hope will never happen. That is their career, right?

You get to come to an office when you choose. I get to log into a computer when I want. Like some people complain about their two and a half weeks of vacation that they get, but nobody else. ever says no to that vacation. Missileers, the nuclear missile force, does not get to do that. They sit underground for sometimes up to 72 hours at a time, only sleeping for between two and four hours at a time because they are constantly interrupted with what's called an emergency access message, an EAM, or excuse me, emergency alert message, EAM.

And that EAM is just an exercise in what to do if a real nuclear missile strike occurs. Do they know it's a secret? It's a test? They don't. That's the thing. Like in order to keep the cadre trained and on their toes, every two to four hours, a new EAM comes in. Sometimes they come in rapidly.

Sometimes they come in slowly. They all come in encrypted. And I don't mean encrypted like your messenger is encrypted where you read it plain text. Right. They actually get the raw encryption. EA 32615W whatever, right? Some hex codes. And then they have to translate that through their machine because the machine has the, has the encryption key, not them.

So they have to manually put it into their machine. their machine then tells them a checklist to refer to. The checklist tells them what steps to take. And it's not steps like launch a missile. It's steps like, turn this key, press this button, right? And this is what they do. This is their rote memorization. We were talking about the importance of training.

This is what prevents a conscientious objector from ever finding their way into the missile force. Because you don't know what you're doing. You're just following the steps that are supposed to be followed until you hit enter at the end. And then the EAM turns off. And maybe you launched a missile or maybe you didn't. You have no idea. But that's exactly what life is like. Do they have keys?

They absolutely have keys. And they have cards. And they have qualification cards that they have to crack open with hidden codes inside. It's all very real. But it's a it's a mind trip because they don't see the sun. They don't sleep for more than a few hours at a time. They live underground with one other person. And an underground bunker is not a comfortable place to live.

It's cold. It smells bad. It's uncomfortable. Right. And that's their life. And the other thing is, I'm curious about is we see in the Ukraine-Russia war that most of the missiles are not fixed in bases. They're actually in mobile platforms, which seems to me, like just like we spend $10 billion in a submarine, isn't it better? Aren't these antiquated?

Like, do we really need people underground, you know, deprived of sunlight and not seeing their loved ones for weeks at a time? So, yeah, so it's a great point. And I would say, yes, we do need it. Because if you look at Ukraine, it takes tens of thousands of soldiers. to be able to carry out a hot conflict with mobile missiles. It only takes a few hundred with ICBMs in stationary static locations to be able to deter massive attacks, right? The strategy that's used in nuclear weapons

isn't an offensive strategy or a defensive strategy. Nuclear missiles are not there so that we can launch them. They are specifically there and specifically maintained so that we never have to launch them. They are a deterrent. It's just like people who have a guard dog at their house. Why do you have a guard dog at your house? Because you want to be attacked? No, because you want that guard dog to rip somebody's jugular out on your front door. No, you have a

guard dog so nobody will ever try to steal from your house. It's a deterrent. That's what the nuclear arsenal is. It's a deterrent. And then having a different portfolio of options from stealth bombers to, you know, and things do evolve over the decades. We've gone from, you know, when I was a kid, it was mostly bombers and so forth. And the stationary missiles. And now it's a whole spectrum. What is a hypersonic missile? And where does that fit into the portfolio of defense? Now, it's a great point. And it's funny because you talk about bombers and jet fighters, like as much as these things

should be deterrence, they are actually tools of a hot conflict. So to answer your hypersonic missile question in a non-scientific form, because I'm not a scientist, right? A hypersonic missile is essentially a missile that moves at lower altitudes, at high speeds, that can also oftentimes change direction and change speed and change altitude. which is something that your conventional rockets and missiles can't do. So because of the speed and deployment effectiveness of a hypersonic missile, it's difficult for the defenses, for traditional defenses,

to be able to prevent against the attack from a hypersonic missile. So if you, like the specific doctrinal use of where a hypersonic missile is so scary, the reason people are so scared of them. Because if you think about it, why is the lay person afraid of a hypersonic missile? Or I would argue the lay person is not afraid of a hypersonic missile because they're like, it's just another missile. I was actually walking on the UCSD campus

and I saw one of your buildings. And I don't know why, because I'm sick in the head, but I saw the building and I was like, you know, a J-dam, a joint direct attack munition would only knock out like 4% of that building, right? Like a well-placed modern-day attack missile. Surgical. Would only take out like 4%, 7% of that entire infrastructure.

And if it was actually 1% wartime, the missile would hit, the damage would be done, the other 90% of the building would continue to function, and a support team would come in and fix the remaining 4 or 7% in a week. And we'd be right back at full operational utility, right? So even when we talk about missiles, they're not that damaging. They don't do a large amount of damage. Hypersonic missiles are so scary because they can move at high speed, be deployed in moments with almost no ability to defend against them, and they can take out a specific target.

for example, an aircraft carrier. So now, a piece of machinery that takes a decade to build that carries the war abroad, that is the platform for an entire airbase, can be brought down in a matter of minutes from one hypersonic missile. That's what makes it so dangerous and scary and effective compared to your conventional rockets and missiles,

which can have to go through the air at a certain speed, they have to go through a certain trajectory, and all of our defenses are made to intercept that missile. Right? Where it would take a barrage of missiles, like you see in Israel, a barrage of missiles and rockets that all get shot down. Like it's literally a Hail Mary, we hope one of these gets through. With a hypersonic missile, one is all takes. And if they really want to get the job done correctly, they'll launch three or four, confuse all the systems.

And now you have two hypersonic missiles that just one, two punch and guarantee the end of one of our 11 aircraft carriers. Yeah. $10 billion, $4,000 people. Gone. A city at sea. Yep. Sticking on that theme, as you look at as an expert on various military conflicts, including just yesterday I saw that Russia is sending some guided missile cruisers to Cuba to do some exercises there. There were some off the coast of Southern California off the warning area out there last month doing exercises.

It feels to me like we're back in the 60. I mean, I wasn't alive in the 60s, but a lot of the stuff I heard from my parents and like, we went to bed at night. and we didn't know if we'd wake up in the morning. It seems like we're closer than ever to that point, even than it was back then, because there's so many people involved with so many different actors, and so many different motivations,

entanglements. What do you make of the global security? Give me your, you know, 30,000 foot view as an expert. What is the kind of hot conflict that concerns you the most that we hear, say, fat, dumb, and happy, you know, in my case, in San Diego, that we're just oblivious about,

but we should be concerned. turned about. So I think the world needs to realize, especially like you're saying, your typical fat, dumb and happy American needs to understand that we are already in World War III. It's already happening. We all think that it's going to look like World War II. It's going to look like bombers and submarines and alerts where you climb under your desk. Like that there's no rational reason to think that a war in 2024 would look anything like a war in the 1950s. No reason to think that at all. You have to expect that the war would evolve. So here's what happened. Syria, Libbyn, the conflicts that you saw in Yemen.

These were the beginnings of what we call proxy war. Proxy war is the term that you want to think of when you think about World War III. And a proxy war is nothing more than an intra-intrastate, like intramural means inside the state, a civil war, if you will. It's an intrastate war that's funded and exacerbated by external players. That's what happened in Syria. Internal war funded and exacerbated by China and Russia on one side

and the United States on the other side. Yemen is the same way. An intrastate conflict, a civil war, funded by Saudi Arabia on one side, Iran on the other side. It's the same thing to happen in Libya, right? And that is the model of the current age. Right now where we sit today, there's 116 hot conflict zones in the world. The vast majority of them are proxy wars, where there's a first world or developing world on one side and a first world or developing world adversary on the other side who are both funding internal

conflict, whether that's in Colombia or whether that's in Sri Lanka or whether that's in, you know, various parts like Myanmar or Burma happening all over the world. Those conflicts started in 2006, 2007, right? Basically, the last inter, or traditional conflict was us invading Afghanistan. When you look at Russia and Ukraine, Russia made a misstep because they violated the proxy war approach only because they shared a border with Ukraine. So they chose to go into Ukraine. But then immediately after they invaded Ukraine, what did the United States do? Used Ukraine as a proxy. So the war in Ukraine isn't a war between Russia and Ukraine. It's a war between the West and Russia. And the thing that's so frustrating is that when Russia first invaded Ukraine, Putin said

this is not a war against the West, right? This is a war against not. Nazism or whatever else, which was total bullshit, totally failed bad propaganda. But where Putin was smart is he knew that he just had to bullshit for a few months. Because after that, something would happen where he could tell the truth. And that's why within three months when Ukraine was using American weapons to fight on Ukrainian soil, and when Ukraine was using British weapons and Poles were teaching them, like, now it became very much a Western effort to contain Russia. And then that's when Putin changed what is this war?

And he changed it to this is a war against the West. Well, now this guy who was a liar is telling the truth. And that's hard. It's hard to be a Western person and look at the conflict in Ukraine and not be like, Putin's got a point. Putin's telling the truth sometimes. Right. There's a grain of truth, which makes it.

Which makes it even worse because now he can hide the lies even more effectively behind that grain of truth. And it's such a shit show because we all like. Like we may disagree with this element, but we can't deny that other fact. And the same thing now has evolved in between Israel and Hamas. So the point I'm trying to make is just World War III is already happening. What we are feeling as we feel like it's coming closer to home, what we're actually feeling is the escalatory effect, the escalation of proxy wars.

There are more than there were before. They are larger than they were before. More people are getting involved than they were before. And we see, just like when you watch a fuse on a bomb. you know it's getting closer and closer to blowing up the bomb. And the question is, are we going to snuff the fuse, clip the fuse, or let it go all the way? And that's the real question because it's, we are continuing to see escalation that is absolutely worrisome.

What are some of these terms that we've heard about color revolution, false flag operation? Can you talk about those? What are those mean? What's the relevance of those? Yeah. So a color revolution is, I'll start there because. that lives more on the conspiratorial realm than in the real realm. Okay, good.

Right. Are there certain elements that go into a color revolution? A color revolution is really the idea of an artificial revolution that's orchestrated by the government in some way. And there are multiple books out there by authors who have outlined what a color revolution, like the recipe and the process of a color revolution. The problem is that the recipe they outline is a recipe of ingredients that are always there. Right.

It's like saying my chocolate cake is a special chocolate cake because it uses flour, eggs, milk, and chocolate. Yeah, like, that's the level of it. Yeah, right? But, like, that's what a, that's essentially what a color revolution is. They say, oh, you need to have an unpopular incumbent and you need to have a way of swaying the people and you need to have a reason to say that the elections were rigged. Guess what you have every time. Right. You always have that ambiguity.

You always have those ingredients. So you can't say that a color revolution is something that's orchestrated when the ingredients are always there. Instead, you have to understand there's a cultural element to it as well. And that's why you saw the Arab Spring take off, not because somebody orchestrated it, but because culturally you had the intangibles that were at the right place in time. You had technology and a population base and a cultural motivator that brought everything to a head at the same time. So I just want to knock that out quickly because the idea of a color revolution, while color revolutions happen, the idea that they are orchestrated by a central government is silly.

They can be exacerbated by a government, right? Because somebody can always fund that defunct, you know, tangential, marginal cause. And somebody can always throw them an extra $10 million and make them all of a sudden more relevant. but it's very hard for a government entity to create something out of nothing, to create this cause out of nowhere. It's easier to just go in and fund an existing cause, take a marginalized voice and fund it and make it louder.

And that's what is really a traditional covert influence campaign. That's been used since the days of the ancient Egyptians, right? That's real. Color revolution is commercialized. Okay. Now that compared to... A false flag operation, false flag operations are very real.

They are strategically doctrinally trained to intelligence officers and military officers. And a false flag operation is when you claim to be someone you aren't while executing an operation. So if I walk up to a, if I walk up to somebody who's a weapon smuggler from Syria and I claim to be Canadian, and I treat them and promise them all these benefits. that they'll get in Canada, and I'll pay that, I promise them Canadian money and maple syrup. That's a false flag. I am not Canadian. They don't know that I'm not Canadian. They're cooperating with me fully thinking they're cooperating with the Canadian representative. And then when the time comes that I get what I want, I fall away, I disappear from space. They go to the Canadian government and

say, hey, what about our payment? And the Canadians are like, I don't know what you're talking about. That's a false flag. There are certain countries that execute false flag more effectively than others. and there are certain countries that use it more often than others. Tops of that list, the Israelis use false flags. Really, I was going to ask you about that. Because it seems to me that they could use it more, right, than they do. For example, I've heard, you know, they are my friends that are Lebanese, they're Christian friends. And they hate Hamas and Hezbollah as much as the Jews and Israel do.

But they are competing against, you know, a population that's providing schools. And Hezbollah does a lot of social services. That says Hamas has like a non-military wing too. So don't you think they could be much more effective? And how do you react to October 7th in the light of them being at the first, you know, country that you listed? Yeah, absolutely. So Israel and Massad use false flags often and effectively. But the problem is they most often replicate Western partners.

So they false flag as Americans. They false flag as Canadians. They false flag as British. Well, what happens when you're in the Middle East? Nobody trusts Americans, Canadians, Canadians? or the British. So you have to false flag as somebody else. So that's where it's hard. It's hard for Israelis to false flag as any Arab country because you have to speak Arabic. You have to understand the Quran. It's difficult, right? Inside the Middle East, you've got the Saudis and

the Emirates who are exceptional at false flagging as other Arab countries. False flagging as Pakistani or Omani or Bahraini or, you know, the list goes on or each other. Right? So very effective process there for false flagging. So could Israel use? use it more? Yes, except that they're so accustomed now. It's been 15 or 20 years of dominance by the West. They've perfected the art of mimicking the West, not mimicking Europe or someone else. What's the best way to exploit an individual's vulnerability, liabilities, et cetera? Is it sex or is it money or something else? It's interesting. There are, every individual is an amalgam of what we call four primary motivations, right? And those four primary

motivations fall into an acronym called Rice, R-I-C-E. R stands for reward, I stands for ideology, C stands for coercion, E stands for ego. So you, me, and everybody else, anywhere else in the world, we are an amalgam of these four core motivations. At some times in our lives, we'll do anything for a reward. At other times in our lives, we'll do anything to stroke our ego. At other times in our lives, we won't do unless there's a gun pointed at our head, right? And that's how you see these, what we call core motivations change over time. So when it comes to exploiting someone's vulnerability or or tapping into someone's motivation, right? Vulnerability and motivation

or rather manipulation, if you consider manipulating a vulnerability, manipulation and motivation are two sides of the same coin. Yes. So it's up to you which side of the coin you want to use. Once you know which side of the coin you want to use, it boils down to which of those four core. motivators are most relevant in the life of the person that you're talking to at the time. So if you're talking to a 44-year-old adult male with two young kids, they'll be at a different place than a 44-year-old female with two young kids. And if you're talking to a single 27-year-old male who is straight, they will be in a very different place than a single 27-year-old male who is homosexual, right? So you have to understand and assess your target through the lens of those

four motivations to understand, well, here's their top motivation. Here's their top motivation. Here's their bottom motivation. If I come at them with this, they will respond favorably. If I come at them with that, they may respond with hostility. Just as a quick rule of thumb, ideology is almost always the strongest of all the motivations. Doesn't matter if you're 27 or 57, if you're Christian, a Christian-based motivator will get you to say yes. If you're 18 or if you're 68 and you believe in the American flag and American ideals, an American affirmation will get people to say yes. So there are certain things that kind of transcend age and life experience,

and that's ideology. Similarly, the weakest and the least successful of all the motivators is coercion. Because once you coerce somebody once, they will never trust you again. And we've seen this happen ourselves in our own lives, and we've seen it happen in mistakes that we've made in the past. Once you hold a gun to someone's head, will you get them to do the thing they have to do right now?

Yes. But after you get them to do that thing, they will never talk to you again. And then ego, the last one. Ego. It's playing into the psychological reward, right? Correct. And ego is really the second strongest of all of them.

Right? Shortly on the heels of ideology is ego. And what's fascinating about ego is people, mainstream media makes you think that ego is the same thing as egotistical, but they're not. Exactly. Egotism and egotistical people are people who are driven by their ego. And oftentimes that ego is an ego where they want to be seen as experts or special or standout, right?

Yes. Where actual ego is nothing more than how you view yourself and promoting publicly how you view yourself. So Mother Teresa, Mother Teresa had an ego. Her ego was self-sacrifice and patience and tolerance and giving to the poor. That was her ego. Everything she did in her life to behave, all of her public behavior was based around that ego. No different than Donald Trump, who has an ego and everything in his public performance is for that ego. The difference is Mother Teresa didn't have egotism where Donald Trump does.

Absolutely. You know, it makes me think, I know that you are renowned and you command, you know, very significant speaking fees and consulting fees. You know, Fortune 10 companies, just the top of the top, justifiably so. on your many, you know, just incredible accomplishments. But I'm thinking right now I've got to apply, I'm already applying rice to raising my kids, right? So we're doing stuff. I'm just trying to down. You know, we have a reward.

I mean, who you cannot raise kids. Tell me if I'm wrong without bribing them. At some level you have to bribe them, right? And then you have to have some idealism. So, so we're Jewish. And sometimes my kids will, you know, we're at the checkout line on the counter at some, you know, kosher. At some, that's a regular supermarket gas station or whatever.

And they want this thing and this garbage and the total. process crap and I said, it's not kosher. Oh, put it down. They're not going to touch it, you know, where if it was anything, it was, it was plutonium, but it was kosher. They'd eat it, right? And then, you know, if I have to raise my voice at my, my kid to get her to go back to sleep, it's not going to work, right? You failed at that point, right? Yeah. And then lastly, appealing to their ego, you know, their sense of self and, and what this really means. And it really did make me think that maybe, you know, Time magazine might have made a mistake. You know, they selected this guy to be their, you know, person of the century, the first and only person

in the century so far in the 20th century. But really, Freud had a much bigger impact in terms of the skills and the day-to-day life than E equals MC squared, which, you know, someone would have come up with that anyway. I mean, I'm not dissing Einstein. Talk about the kind of traits and, you know, when you meet somebody that you know that they're cut out to be an intelligence officer, spy or, you know, something like that. What kind of common traits do they have and what kind of things can you teach them? I'm always concerned, like, can I teach someone to be a good physicist or are they born with it?

What's your impression? Can you teach someone to be a successful, you know, in your world? Yeah. So I would say that in the intelligence world, there's two factors at play. There's, of course, the individual's capacity, their capacity for learning. But there's something called the teachability index. And the teachability index combines someone's capability with their willingness. So if you've got someone highly capable and highly willing, you can teachability.

you can teach them very quickly. If you have someone highly willing with a low capability, you can teach them, but it takes longer. So there's always this element of time that goes into it, right? So I stand and I built a business around proving that anyone can learn intelligence skills. It's just a matter of the teachability index and how long it takes for them to master the skill.

Some people with high willingness and high capability can go very quickly. Some people with low willingness. And again, willingness doesn't mean I'm interested. Willingness means I'm willing to do the work to learn the skill. Someone might be interested all day long, but they work an 18-hour work day. They just don't have the time to commit to the capability.

So CIA has learned very effectively how to find people who have high willingness and high capability. And then on top of that, they've layered a very structured curriculum that's based in human psychology so that when they take that highly willing highly capable person and they bring it into their engine of training they know that they can create a weapon in a specific period of time and that time is classified but it sits between six and earth three and eight months somewhere in that range right so they know with high confidence that eight out of 10 of the right hires when brought through the engine and driven through the process they will the widget out the other end will be a high

performing intelligence tool. The same thing can be true for any hiring division. One of the reasons that I do consult for Fortune 10 companies is because one of their biggest problems is hiring. Because the wrong hire costs money. Firing costs money. The right hire yields, can yield immediate benefits, but then they want to learn how to prepare that person for future benefits. Because leveraging, yeah, leverage. How do you know when someone you've hired is at the point where they should be promoted when they've been promoted too fast or when they need to be promoted faster, right? Because for a company, having some, having a good person in the wrong position for one year can be the difference of millions of dollars. So they are always looking for how do we hire better.

A big part of how you hire better is just understanding the teachability index and understanding some sub-processes inside the teachability index like personality traits, like temperaments, like high-performance team building, understanding a few of those pieces and putting them together in the order, all of a sudden you're making more money, wasting less time and hiring fewer people. So for a professor, the same thing can be true, right? I would argue that something as simple as an assessment on the front end of any student applying to work with you, a simple, automated 15 or 30 minute assessment is going to expedite your success rate and reduce your wasted time probably by 20% in both directions. Meaning you have a 40% improvement,

net. However, we have to keep in mind the university system is also a revenue generating engine. You need failure. You need certain people to pay to fail in order to make up for the difference and keep the costs lower for the people who pay and succeed. Yeah, and I see that a lot. And actually, as you're speaking, it reminds me a lot of, you know, like athletics. You know, when you see somebody, you know, who has latent raw ability, I mean, most 18-year-olds that are healthy, you know, whatever, they could potentially, you know, be useful. But are they coachable? You know, that's a question that they are golf coach, tennis coach, football coach,

they're not coachable. They're useless to you, right? In the organization, talking about your, I mean, it seems to me like it must be very challenging because you have to not only kind of abide by the corporate, you know, all sorts of the protocols in the corporate world, but you're probably under some NDAs. You must be under some constraints from the government side. So how do you balance that as an entrepreneur to minimize, you know, the risk downstream to your to your clients, but also to give them maximum benefit.

So we are under a lifetime secrecy agreement. Everybody who comes from CIA is under a lifetime secrecy agreement. What people don't understand is that the lifetime secrecy agreement is because it's for life, it's actually very narrow because we're still American citizens. We still have all the rights and privileges of an American citizen. The freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, freedom of movement. We still have all of those, right? So they have to create a contract, a lifetime secrecy contract that's extremely,

narrow so that it can be justifiable in a court. So our lifetime secrecy agreement applies to sources and methods of active intelligence collection as related to our operational history. Outside of that, it's outside of the national, it's outside of our NDA, outside of our secrecy agreement. So what that means is it's very difficult for me to talk about my operational history, what I did, my credentials, where I traveled to, you know, the covers that I used. It's hard for me to talk about those things.

To talk about those things, I have to write them down, send them to CIA. CIA has to review them. They'll come back with redactions and suggestions. I have to change it again. I've had a book in the making now for almost two years because of this requirement. But for me to come out and talk about, here's my workout routine. Here's how I keep myself safe. Here's the way that CIA taught me to time my shoes.

And here was my breakfast when I was at the farm. Those things are not, they're outside of sources and methods. What shocks me, the whole reason I have a business. reason I can actually sit here and be one of the first millionaires in my family name, which is an incredible feeling. It's incredible feelings, right? Is not because I'm disclosing national security secrets. Yeah, I hope not.

It's because I'm disclosing things that were never intended to be kept secret, but never made it into the public light because previous officers before me over classified, right? Because it's a safe thing to do. Because it's a safe thing to do. No one gets fired for, you know, hiring McKinsey, right? And nobody wants to go to jail. And what ends up happening is the pre-9-11 CIA, which is the majority of retirees now, they grew up in a world where they were trained and indoctrinated to believe this is secret

and you can never tell anyone. Post-9-11, we were taught the power of disclosure, right? If you keep a secret to secret, you run the risk of having another tower come down. So you have to find what's truly a secret and share enough to prevent disaster. That's our whole mentality. So when I left CIA, my mentality was protect secrets that are worth protecting and share everything else. So as soon as I looked at my own operational history, I was like, well, shit, man, I can teach people how I protect my family. I can teach people how I get ahead in the workplace.

I can teach people how I outsmart my boss. I can teach people how to charge more money for the same product. I can teach these skills because they're based in psychology. They came from CIA. CIA uses them, but they were drafted by some, you know, psychologist PhD student. Like, I can do this without having to worry about. going to Guantanamo Bay. I come and visit you, Andy.

Let's do some, what do they call that? Red team, blue team exercises. Okay, so Andy, thank you. I've given you a telescope. I gave you a meteorite, some other swag. Give you some spyglass. I want to also give you some crypto because I'm so glad that you came down here. I want to reimburse your rental course.

So here's some crypto, Andy. What are you going to do with that? So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to find a computer that's not on a network before I plug this in. It's a USB. So I don't know what's on this thing. So if I plug this into a computer, I've got to consider that computer compromised.

So that's the first thing I would do. And because it's coming from you, I trust you enough to trust that there's probably not an intentional virus on this. It's probably not an intentional malware. But I don't know what your security practices were for acquiring this USB. So I've got to put that extra effort in there. So that is what I will do because it came from you. I'm telling you right now that if somebody on the street or some fan came up to me in a coffee shop and said, this is for you, I would throw it away right away.

But I will also ask you, if this is truly crypto, what is the crypto coin that you chose and why? Okay. So that's actually data from the web telescope, which I don't think you're going to want to analyze. But you would have to go through a PhD program with me, which I invite you to do. So that was just a joke. Give it back. I want this back. Someone, because we'll get to the end, we'll take questions from. my audience, but, you know, they, they said, you know, make sure you sweep your office for bugs after Andy leaves. I don't, I don't believe that. But, so getting back to like, my life as a professor, right? Now, you know, I have been to Moscow. I've spoken there and there were protocols.

I took a different laptop that it wasn't my daily driver. It wasn't a burner. I mean, it's pretty expensive on a public professor's salary to do that way. I get a burner laptop. So I don't really have that. But talk about other things like VPNs. Do you use them to use Alexa? Do you use these Facebook look shades that I opened, you know, the meta, meta glasses that I asked, you know, who was Andy Bustamante. And it could take video. These are great things. It has a little light. So, you know, it knows when you're recording. Hey, meta, take a video. So now, hey, meta, take a video. Okay, so it's good to go through. So it takes a one minute video. You can do anything. You know, I've gone, I've walked through protests with these on. I've taken video. Also with my kids,

just hanging out, because you really get that first person perspective. Would you use these things? I mean, what protocols would you take or precautions would you take for using things like Alexa or Facebook or Siri or these shades or, you know, VPNs, etc.? What do you use personally? This is a bigger question than I think most people realize. So let me start by teaching you what the CIA teaches us. There's a continuum called the security continuum. On one end of that continuum is security, right? On the other end of that continuum is convenience.

And then in the middle is imagine a wire with a bead on it, right? the more you push that bead towards secure, the more it pushes away from convenient. So for anybody who's ever had their wife lock them out of the house, you know what it's like to be very secure and very inconvenient. Well, similarly, the closer you go to convenience, the further you are from security. So when you talk about glasses or the Internet of Things is really what we're talking about, right? The Internet of things, the smart watches, the glasses that are smart, anything that Bluetooth tooths into your phone, whether that's your car or whether that's your ear pods.

Just about a light, like a just a color controlled light for the podcast. And it's like, what's your Wi-Fi password? And it's like, you download this app from China. I'm like, why am I doing that? Like for the $20 light. Forget about it. Well, the thing is you're doing it because you can now just press a button on your phone. Set up the whole studio.

And the whole studio is on. And that convenience comes at a cost of security. So everything lands on that spectrum. So what I would say is this. If you are somebody who is trying to live a secure life, you need to make a series of decisions that are very intentional that make your life less convenient and you need to accept the lack of convenience

and plenty of people do that. Remember when our grandparents used to put money under their mattress? Very inconvenient, but very, very secure, right? Or like my grandmother who used to lock the door with the deadbolt, lock the door with a switch and then stick a rubber wedge under the door too, right? Why did she learn to do that? Because her money was under her mattress. He was going to have a grandson that would be in the CIA.

But that's the world they lived in. We have been cultivated by a different world. And frankly, our children have been cultivated by a different world even still. So most children, most people under the age of 21 do not understand the risk of their phone. Even the people who are listening right now who are 23 and 25 and they're like, I understand the security implications in my phone. No, you do not. You do not. You do not understand the implications that exist from your call records that Verizon sells to the federal government and Verizon also sells to the Chinese. You do not understand the implications of

your Google Maps or your Apple Maps or your or your Waze maps that are recorded and saved and turned into avatar data that's then used for advertising purposes. You don't understand the term ad tech. I would be shocked if the average person actually knows what the term ad tech is and understands how ad tech uses geographical fences to be able to identify IP and ISME data so that they can create tailored experiences based on where you're standing. People do not understand the implications of just their one smart phone. Yeah, I've had an incredible experience where my copy editor for my first book, Allegra Houston, shout out to Allegra, the best copywriter in the world, a copy editor. And she wrote a book herself and, you know, she was my editor. She asked me to read it. It's honored.

So I took a picture of it and then, you know, and then like a few minutes later, I got an ad on Amazon to buy that very book. And I'm like, I didn't authorize this, you know, to use access to my photos. It wasn't like on Facebook. It was like on my photos. So yeah, now people, I think have almost no idea. But should you assume everything is fair game then? Basically, do we have the right, you know, to privacy or does David, past guest David Bryn wrote the book, Transparent Society kind of advocates no. We should just be radically candid and tell everything to everybody. to not expect secrets, but also demand that of the government as well. So it's, again, this is this is a double-edged sword. If you want to, if you want to live the most secure life possible, you need to understand you have no right to privacy. You don't. You have no right to privacy because you are giving that right away. When you log in to Google, you give the right away.

When you let Apple take your face and use it to unlock your phone, you give that right away. You have a federal right to remain private, and the federal government will protect that right. They will not violate the federal law to invade upon your privacy because they don't have to. They can follow corporate law and buy all the data they want about you from Google or Amazon or Apple or Facebook. And that's how they work, right? Remember how we were saying earlier that your patents are safe when the federal government use them for national security and military reasons? That's what they do. They use your tax dollars to buy your private data from companies that you give permission

to collect your private data. Nothing in this world is free. Every free app comes with a cost, but the cost is a violation to your privacy. So if you want to be the most secure person possible, you need to do two things simultaneously. One, recognize that nothing is private. You have no right or expectation to privacy because everything about the world around you that is convenient is there because it is being paid for with your privacy. And then the second thing you need to do is start putting things, putting practices in place

that stop the flow of new private data. For example, data brokers are constantly looking for new private data. Today you are a certain age, 52. That's right. Tomorrow. Did your homework. Tomorrow you will be a day older. You will have created all this new data between today and tomorrow.

You'll create a new podcast episode. You'll drive somewhere new. You'll buy something new. You'll talk to someone new. You'll post something new. You've just created whatever that is, 58 megabytes of new information. That new information is what they now call the newest natural resource, right? What you create and what I create every day is like gold or oil or silver.

It's a natural resource that somebody else can take, refine, sell, and make money off of. So if you want to keep, if you want to maximize your security, accept that you have no privacy now and then put things in place that stop people from getting tomorrow's natural resources from you. That means use VPNs, use block data brokers, stop giving permissions away on your phone. Buy a second phone. I'm a huge fan of people having two phones, one phone that they use for personal events, one phone that they use for non-personal. And the non-personal, you have a separate account that you log into.

Like, if it's a, I use Android. Heathen, heathen. Sponsored by Apple. I wish. Tim, look me up. Create a Google account that's just for your secondary phone. We call it at CIA. We call that a misattributable phone.

It means it can still be attributed to something, but it can't be attributed to you. Because my personal phone, which I use with my wife and my children and everything else, exists on this side of the table, where the misattributable phone exists on this type of table. Fun fact. Thanks to ad tech, those two phones, if they're literally on the same table at the same time, they can communicate. Hey there, sorry to break my deep cover one more time, but I have a special sci-up just for you.

It's an assignment to join my Monday Magic mailing list, and when you do, he'll be entered in a competition to win one of these genuine pieces of space dust. It's not a bug. It won't track you right where you go, unlike your phone. But if you haven't already, go to briankeating.com slash list and join. And if you have a dot-edu email address, go to briankeeting.com slash edu to enter.

Now, back deep undercover once more. Do, is there anything special on Android in all seriousness compared to Apple? I mean, I have, it's for me it's philosophical. Apple promises that they protect your data. Right. They sell it. Privacy is a human right. Yeah.

So Apple false advertises about what they do with your data. And then they choose political causes to demonstrate the promise that's not real. Like they will protect terrorists who are using Apple phones. Right. By preventing the FBI from getting access to the phone. Right. And they'll do that publicly because they want to advocate that they're protecting your privacy when in fact, they're still selling your data in the back end. Yeah. And they even do it when somebody loses something with two-factor authentication, someone can just swap in a SIM card, as I understand it, to an old phone.

And then it's brick, basically, for the user, even if you have access to, you know, if you lose access to the two-factor phone. And they advertise that. Like you said, I've never thought of it. It's actually a selling point because they get all this attention. Look how me and Apple is. But then it's like, we're so private. You know, we won't disclose the. and Bernardino's, you know, shooters, you know, mass murderers, you know, fingerprint, because that would violate our core tenants. And immediately you're saying there. And it's not just me that's not just me that stands on this, on this hill of hating Apple. There's a long line of FBI, NSA, CIA, like true protectors of American freedom are saying, it's one thing to be an American company and protect the rights and information of American citizens.

It's a completely separate thing to be blinded to the fact that you are protecting adversaries who are trying to do damage and hurt American citizens, right? You want to stand on a high ground of privacy and protecting data? That's great. That's fine. Don't do it selectively. If you're going to say you protect people's data, don't sell it to data brokers. Take the loss of revenue that comes from truly protecting data. You want to keep it from FBI? That's fine. Also keep it from Deloitte. Also keep it from Huawei. Also keep it from Brazilian companies. Don't sell it to them, but reject it for FBI. Strange question for you.

So imagine, you know, I tell you that my colleagues upstairs have, you know, discovered an exoplanet and there's intelligence on the exoplanet. What kind of, you know, tools, techniques, leverage would you bring to the fight, you know, to understand for peaceful purposes, but to understand what's going on, you know, gathering intelligence on another world? What kind of skills that you or your company could develop might be useful in such a situation? Think about language or culture and all sorts of weird things. There's so many cool things. So first of all, let me just tell you that if you ever identify life on an exoplanet, please call me. I will. I will.

Next time you go to Antarctica, call me, right? If there's an adventure to be had, call me. I will find a way to bring value to the adventure. You got it, brother. But here's what I would say, right? When you think about any living life form, there's a survival instinct, always. the question is what are the threat and non-threat indicators as viewed through the lens of that life form.

So whether you're talking about a dolphin, a monkey, or a human being, right? We all have threat, non-threat indices in our brains. And then we all through our own experience and through our worldview, we have an idea of what fits into the threat and non-threat category. Oftentimes, all that it takes in order to have a peaceful exchange with something unknown is understanding their point of view, their perspective of threat and non-threat, and then presenting yourself as a non-threat. It sounds basic.

It sounds simple. But that's the foundation of most mistakes that have ever happened between the human, like human race and when the human race engages with animal kingdom or when civilized human race engages with Aboriginal human race. Right. We just mistakes. Right. Is it dangerous to, I mean, we've been broadcasting our existence unknowingly for 75

years. Are you worried about that? I wouldn't say that I'm worried about it because, you know, the, for example, broadcasting our existence, right? We're putting out radio waves, which are one of the most basic forms of communication out there. They're non-aggressive, right? So unless we happen to come across some sort of intelligence or life force out there that is threatened by radio waves, which may exist. Like, here's little green men is a figment of our American human brain. Hollywood and, yeah. Radio waves are energy. Just like gamma rays can hurt us, radio waves might be able to hurt an alien species.

Well, if we're launching radio waves that are the equivalent of someone launching gamma rays at us, a fight may be coming, right? But the odds are relatively low based on what we understand about science. Fun facts, I don't interrupt you, but there's the first detection of what I call gamma ray bursts with these incredibly energetic phenomena in space. We're actually picked up by a spy satellite that was trying to detect the impact in nuclear tests on Earth. So that's another blend between science and technology.

But sorry, sorry to talk about it. No, but that's, I mean, what you're getting at is like, we're saying, we're saying very similar things, right? I'm not worried about us trying to tell the world or tell the universe, tell the galaxy, that we're here because we're doing it in what's as passive a way as our science allows us to know. Right? If we could flash a light that was big enough, we would.

All we're really doing right now is just banging a drum. And, I mean, if you've, if you've ever heard a drumming. in the distance. I've, I, um, I had the opportunity to do a, uh, a show with history channel. Uh, live documentary effort, like exploring the unknown and strange phenomenon with the history channel. It's called Beyond Skin Walker Ranch. Oh yeah. We got to add that in the background here. And we've spent time on Native American reserves engaging with Native American hosts who are explaining to us about their experiences with the unknown, unique phenomenon, the unexplained UFOs, UAPs, right?

because they look at it through a lens that's very, that's very traditional to them. And in the distance, you hear drums. Oftentimes you hear drums. Whether it's a drum circle practicing or whether it's a, you know, just a family doing something out by like a fire pit, whatever else it might be, there are drums. When you hear drums in the distance, it's up to your interpretation. If it's a threatening drum, if it's an inviting drum, if it's a war drum, if it's a dance drum, if it's a celebration, if it's a morning. you don't know. All you hear is a beat. That's essentially what we're doing for the universe,

as I see it, with most of our efforts to try to engage the unknown. We're sending out a drum, but we don't know how that drum is being interpreted. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carrano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry. And the best have you wait in the world, Francis Ngano versus Felipe Lins. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix.

Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Yeah, we can't be on the backside of the communications channel. It's being on communication. So Donald, we're speaking early June, 2024. Donald Trump was just convicted of, you know, paying off some porn star for some illicit activities that he used campaign. Anyway, there are other cases. is pending, including classified documents, which is also has been an accusation level against President Biden. But just at Trump, since it's the only active investigation, it seems to me

he could just say, like, I mean, he's being investigated because he claimed that he had these documents with him. But it always seemed kind of a little bit superfluous to me to say, well, he has these documents in his house at the time of the interview or whatever, because, like, he could just have memorized them, right? So, like, what is the physical document versus, like, me exposing, you know, some national secret, the nuclear football. I don't even know what there is, but just the point is he could have, you know, been some idiot savant. Savant, maybe he's not an idiot. I don't want to, sorry, Donald, if you're watching, which I doubt you are. But the point is, you know, you have this knowledge, but then there's stuff that's written down. It seems like,

oh, you wrote this down and in case of Biden stored it in a garage, you know, near Hunter Biden's, you know, revolver or whatever. And then, and then Trump with, you know, Mar-a-Lago in the toilet. near the golden toilet. Why is there a difference? Like, if he could have just, like, I could, you know things that you by definition can't tell me. So what's the difference do you have some document that also has that information that you also can't share with me? It's a great question. It's actually something that the intelligence community is struggling with. The intelligence community and the judicial branch as a whole is struggling with this question, especially like we were talking about with the advance of technology. So let's just imagine that one of the sheets of

paper you have right now is a classified document. In order for it to fit the definition of a classified document, two things must occur. First, it must contain information that fits the criteria to be defined as the classification, meaning grave damage to national security, significant damage to national security, or possible damage to national security. That's basically what defines your secret, your top secret, and your confidential. So the information must be confirmed to fit into one of those three categories. Then on top of that, the document itself must have a header and a footer, that say this is classified for this period of time at this level and authorized according to this code.

If those two things aren't present on that piece of paper, it's not classified, right? If there's no information in there that is of grave significant or possible damage to the fit to national security, even if it has a header and a footer, it does not legally qualify as being classified. It's enough to get a judge to look at it and make the call,

but the judge will most likely say this isn't classified information. This is someone's name and shoe size. It's not classified, right? Now, assuming it is classified, this gets to the heart of your question. If you read it, you now have that classified information in your head. But there's no classification requirement to you based on that document not to disclose what's in your head. It takes a different set of laws to protect what's in your head, some other commitment that you have to make.

Well, what happens if we take a picture of that document? What happens if we take a picture of that document and then crop out the header and the footer? What if we take a picture of that document and then black out the classification, like the actual parts that are classified? Are these things still part of classification? And then similarly, if you photocopy that document, cut off the header, cut off the footer, and black out the centerpiece and take it back to your home, is it classified? This is where we are right now and people don't have an answer to that. It seems so overbroad. There's so many, you know, it's like pollution.

Once you create it, you can't really undo it. But, you know, we're producing so much more information. as you said, like tonight I'll produce 58 megabytes of data, right? And, you know, none of it's classified except for, you know, what my wife wants to do on our date night. But the point is, yeah, it seems like we're just gone crazy. And for the point of CYA, not CIA, but CYA, but CYA, it's just like nobody wants to be the one who gave away the secret that, you know, led to some event occurring or taking place. And it only gets more complicated when you start talking about who. Yeah.

Because now you're talking about the commander in chief. The president of the United States is the commander in chief. Right. The former president of the United States is the former commander in chief. Basically, that person says anything and it's of possible damage to the United States national security. So every word that comes out of their mouth could be considered classified. Every text message, every tweet, every whatever, right?

Every side comment they have with their executive assistant could be of national security concern because Iranians would love to have it. The Chinese would love to know what Donald Trump's allergic to. Like, they would love that information. So it becomes potentially damaging to national security. So now the question is if the president has classified documents in their living room like all presidents do, are they showing a lapse in security judgment in doing so? Or is there some flaw in the security expectations of what should exist inside their home? Should the president have what's known as a skiff, a secure compartmented information facility?

Should they have a skiff in their home to protect that data? Should they have a safe in their home to protect their data? Those are questions the media is not asking. Instead, the media is getting all wound up about Biden and Trump having classified documents in their house. Well, guess what? So did all the Bushes. So did the Clintons. So do the Obama.

It's like, I guarantee you, Barack Obama, who's making movies and speaking in colleges right now has fucking documents in his house that have classification headers that he probably forgot or even there. Right. And what do you do with them? You just throw them out. It's the former commander in chief. Like that's, that is their toilet paper. In his mind,

right? I mean, that's the whole point. Like, they give him that men in black, you know, you guys have the access to. You promise me, you show me later.

Talk about what you do. You have a limited time. Let's say my dean, she's super wealthy. You know, she hires you. Your consult, she's an executive. She oversees budgets,

$20, 30 million a year. A couple hundred people, faculty down to undergraduates. Or she's responsible for. How do you treat? She's a brilliant person. What's the first thing you do? Situational awareness, you know, vulnerability, threat assessment.

You've got, you know, a week to do it. The university's paying. What do you do as a part of everyday spy just in that kind of, you know, CEO, basic CEO type functionality? How would you triage? What are the most important things for such a person to be aware of so that they can be, assuming that's trainable, coachable, et cetera. So honestly, and you may not like to answer this,

most people don't like the answer to this. The first thing that I would do is just sit and have a personal interview with the dean. That's all I would do. The interview would have specific questions that I'm asking, but the purpose of the interview is not to ask the questions. The purpose of the interview is to see the response to the questions, the physiological response, the verbal response, the stressed response. It's not about the content. It's about the context. And then from the context, I would have the majority of what I need to know to actually go to the board of trustees or the board of advisors who are the boss to the dean.

And then I would basically tell them what I assess. And here's the reason that we do it that way is because everybody works for somebody. And when my company is hired, my company is never hired because everybody's satisfied. My company is hired because somebody is uncertain. There's a fire. So when I go to that board of advisors and I say,

I had a great conversation with your dean, but here's what I see. I see somebody who's overworked. I see somebody who's a little bit less. and maintaining their security protocols. I see somebody who didn't lock their screen whenever I was talking to them and took phone calls and left their phone unlocked

and somebody who, you know, whatever else, I saw five different books on their table written by these people. I saw these thesises that were, you know, from these students. Like, clearly this is a person who gives me these concerns. What's going to happen is when I voice those concerns, objectively, the people in that advisory board,

they're going to say, that's the same thing we thought. That's the same thing we thought. We thought she was overworked too. We thought she was missing this too. We thought she was doing this too. And we didn't know what to do. We were debating whether we should fire her, whether we should put her on sabbatical,

whether we should replace her, whether we should put like an executive assistant who was going to give us an inside like spy on the dean, right? We were looking at all these different options. But you just figured these things out in a two-hour interview or one-hour interview. What happens is whenever you present a problem that somebody already knows is there and you present it in a way that, you present it in a way that. validates what they suspected, that's 80% of the challenge. Because now they don't feel alone.

They're not threatened. They're not threatened. Bingo. So now they come and they say, well, what would you recommend we do next? And then we can outline something. And what's beautiful about it is that when you can outline a solution, you can become a mediator, essentially a bridge between the dean who also feels all the same problems, also feels overwork. also knows they're not being as secure as they could be.

Also knows they're making mistake and they're self-conscious for those mistakes. But the Dean or the CEO or the CFO or the C-O-O can't go to the board of advisors or directors and say, hey guys, I'm overworked and I'm skipping some security protocols to try to make things work to meet our quarterly, you know, financial goals. You can't say that. Like they are not in a position to say that. But my company as the outside advisor coming in can. And when I can say it and validate the board of directors and sign up, simultaneously validate the executives in the C-suite.

Now everybody is on board with finding a solution. Right? And then that's when the real work starts. And how much technology can your company bring to bear? Can it bring in lie detectors, polygraphs, laser window reading, you know, scanners and bugs? What technology can you deliver and what's, you know, still beyond declassification, perhaps? So you would be, I would, most people would be shocked to know what we could bring to the table. Because our network is a network of all former intelligence. officers. So as an example, we're working an ultra high net worth case right now. Ultra high net worth

are people who are worth a certain amount of money. Usually it's in excess of $50 million net worth. So we have an ultra high net worth client that we're working right now on what is essentially a geolocation project, a geolocation project to find a person of interest to get that person of interest to take a specific action that benefits the ultra high net worth's personal and professional goals. In order to do that, we're using all kinds of technology that most people don't realize exists in the commercial sector. The reason that we get access to that technology is because we have Navy SEAL technician friends. We have FBI technician friends. We have FBI field agent friends. We have active duty police friends. Like we have a network that can reach into all of these different places

commercially to solve a problem discreetly for a high net worth individual who's got real revenue objectives on the other end, right? Your average layperson can't do that. And the reason that that is so special to the right kind of person is because there's no amount of money that is too expensive when you're trying to be discreet. And there's also no amount of money that you won't spend when you know the money that you're going to spend will generate more money in return or an ROI. That's the kind of sweet spot where everyday spy lives when it comes to supporting corporate clients. How do you maintain the confidentiality? Is it just that you are running things through, again, from the business to the CIA, check that for, you mentioned

the challenge with your book. But, you know, in a day-to-day basis, do you have to, like, call Langley every time you want to take on a new client? Or is it just a broad portfolio when you have some new technology or skill or a field asset or whatever? Then you have to call them in. Like, do you have a check? Like, how do you go through the process of vetting to, you know, people in the, in the, you know, a CIA, what's kosher or not for you to apply? Yeah. Well, that's the magic of the national, the, of our lifetime secrecy agreement. Because it's so narrow in scope, because it only applies to sources. and methods from our operational history, it has nothing to do with what we do in the future.

So anything I do now is outside of the context of CIA, unless what I am doing is trying to publish something that I did operationally when I was at CIA. So we sit at a very beneficial intersection where I don't have to tell CIA anything that I'm doing right now. I could work with the Chinese and I wouldn't have to tell them, right? Because it's current. I might be taking on other risks, but there's no mandate that says I have to. I see. But if I ever want their help with something, like if I'm ever working with somebody who might be being targeted by a Russian, I always have the ability to reach into CIA and say, hey, guys, I have a case that you might be interested in.

I see. So we actually get this dual benefit, which is funny because when you're part of the federal government, you get almost no benefits. But then once you leave the federal government, you have multiple benefits. So when I interviewed Hazard Lee, who wrote this book, The Art of Clear Thinking about a year or so ago, I asked him the following question. What's the biggest misconception that people have either about your life as a CIA officer and your entrepreneurial career? For him, it was as a former stealth fighter pilot and current fighter pilot in the reserves. And he was like basically that,

you know, hand-eye coordination. Like, you guys just have awesome hand-eye coordinate. And he was like, if I have to rely on my hand-eye coordination, I've effed up somewhere. Yeah, like, if you're the last minute, like split second, like imagine you're landing in the southwest today, you know, coming in. And like, the pilot has to have really good head. He messed up like miles and miles and she messed up. What's the biggest misconception that people get about your career? So the biggest misconception that people have about CIA officers is that we are somehow super smart. We're not. I mean, we are trained, we are disciplined, we are structured, but we are not super smart. When you have enough structure and discipline, you can get away with a whole hell of a lot more than just by

being smart. Any smart person out there knows. The problem with being smart is that you're easily distracted. Because if something isn't good enough to keep your current attention, you will move on to the next thing. For that reason, CIA hires people that we joke are too dumb to quit. Meaning, you bring in somebody, you teach them a structure, you teach them a framework, and you teach them that all they have to do is this simple structure and this simple framework over and over again and they will have success. Well, guess what that does to a not so smart person? It gives us exactly what we need to have high confidence in our success. So then we just do it over and over and over again,

and that's how we have success. Awesome. Okay, so now in the last few minutes, if you indulge me a few more minutes of time, it's just so fascinating and fun. Can't resist. How often do I get this chance? So I've got a lot of questions from my audience,

and I'd like to ask, and you can get in touch with Andrew at his, on Twitter, he's Everyday Spy. He's got a YouTube channel Everyday Dash Spy, and we'll put all the links down below. So first question, came from Gonzalo Chavez, who says, on Beyond Skinwalker Ranch, they've analyzed Chris Bledso's brainwaves as orbs were being manifested. Have you, Andy, ever considered reproducing

that study in Mexico with an individual named Juanito Wang? He not only manifests orbs, he also has flying saucers appearing at times. So here's what I'll say about Chris Bledso. First of all, Chris Bledso is one of the kindest, gentlest, most authentic human beings I have ever met. The fact that in addition to his kindness and generosity, he also has a measurable connection with a phenomenon is just incredible. But what we don't know is what that phenomenon is. Now, when I participated, when I agreed to participate with Skinwalker Ranch and the study of Chris Bloodsoe, my interest was not in finding connections to aliens or life forms or what Chris considers some of these orbs to be, which are almost celestial, right? Almost like in general.

in nature. What was interesting to me is, is this man a type of canary in the coal mine that can give us advanced warning of a threat? And by all measurable data, the answer is yes. Whether it is a secret spy satellite or a foreign drone or a UFO, Chris Bloodsoe can somehow see it happen before it arrives, and we can measure that with an EEG. That is a person to me who is of great interest, not just to the scientific community, but to the military industrial complex. Yeah. And of course,

you know, a lot of these things could be legitimate. I've had on Ryan Graves, the F-18 pilot, who, you know, is working now to, you know, have encounters declassified to, A, destigmatize,

you know, possible near-miss encounters, which, you know, according to him, are always accident. Basically, call it a near-miss, but it's effectively equivalent to an accident as far as the government is concerned.

And so at worst, he'll be able to protect pilots, airlines, civil aviation, et cetera, and at best, quote unquote, you know, from my perspective as an alien, you know, adjacent hunter. It would be incredible to learn more about those phenomena. Okay, John Anderson asks, this spy history book from 2021, Sleeper Agent tells the story of George Koval, an American-born Soviet spy who infiltrated the Manhattan Project. The top secret program developed the atomic war. So he's recommending that book. But it gives me a chance to ask you about what kinds of, what kinds of, vulnerabilities. You're not in the CIA anymore. What would you be telling, who's the director now?

I always forget. Oh. I lost it. Yeah, yeah. Brennan. But, no, it's not Brennan. No, he was. Who was Brennan. Well, we'll look at Burns. Okay. Director Burns. Yeah. So, um, director Brennan, you have his ear for 30 minutes. What kinds of things would you be saying, like, look out for that guy, Brian Keita? What would you be telling him? What are the kind of vectors that, you know, provide a surface area for attack in our modern, incredibly highly technological age? Is it, you know, plant someone at open AI? What would you do? If I had 30 minutes with Director Burns,

I would spend the entire time just telling him that he needs to refocus the CIA. Because CIA has been used now over the last four-ish years for things that it's not supposed to do, right? As an example, CIA is the lead negotiator with the United States between Hamas and Israel. Why is Director Burns the lead negotiator? He is not a diplomat.

He's a career intelligence officer. That's not what CIA needs to be doing. They elected to do that, right? Right. CIA needs to be focused on creating the kind of assets and agents that can keep us at the forefront of what's known as American primacy or American dominance in the fight, in the war, in the information conflict of the world. Instead, we're focused on woke culture and fitting into bureaucratic standards. Like if there's one institution where equal opportunity and woke culture and... Diversity, yeah, where these things should not be forced.

It's CIA because CIA has always been inherently diverse. It's been diverse before diverse was a thing, right? It's been accepting lesbians and homosexuals and gays and transgender. Because they're useful. They're useful. Exactly. Long before it was mandatory or cultural, they've already been doing it. But now what ends up happening is because CIA is a government agency and a government agency

has to be a tool of the administration and the administration wants to demonstrate its administrative successes to its electoral base, right? Now you see rainbow advertisements coming out looking for CIA officers. We don't need to hire gay people at CIA. We need to hire effective people at CIA. It's even better if the effective person is also gay. It's not the other way around. So Director Burns has found himself in an unenviable position where he's the director of an organization that's being manhandled by an administration coming off of a previous administration that didn't trust CIA at all. So it's been like six or seven years for CIA. Here's a salty one. Okay. How can we hear anything? This is from Sir philosopher. How can we hear anything he says without

a salt mind to go with it? There's no such thing as a former CIA officer. There is no such thing as a former CIA officer. I mean, that's that is the honest to God truth. Here's here's the thing. CIA doesn't pay my bill anymore. They don't pay me a paycheck. They don't give me health insurance. They don't protect my life. They don't protect my family. They don't promise me anything. But if I got called tomorrow to do something to help CIA, I would say yes. That's why there's no such thing as a former CIA officer. And here's the no kidding truth, right? Anybody who has a problem, understanding that my loyalty is first and foremost to my country and that my loyalty is first and foremost among all agencies to the central intelligence agency can go to hell because they've never

had a cause so worthy. They've never had a loyalty so true to something they believed in so much that their only option is to criticize me. Right. I don't care. They're the eye and rice. They're the ones that are lacking. They're the ones that are missing. It's not me. So absolutely. There's no such thing as a former CIA officer. Even the CIA officers who leave CIA and write books, shaming and damning and criticizing the CIA, guess what would happen if they got a call today from Director Burns? They would say, fuck yes, sir,

you tell me what you need me to do to protect my mother, my children, my spouse, my country. There's nothing we wouldn't do, right? And that is the nature of how they hire us and how they train us. So we are fairly unapologetic to all the naysayers out there.

If anything, naysayers, keep commenting on how you think we're fake because your comments create activity on YouTube and on social media that make more people find us who agree with us. That's right. So I love anybody out there who wants to be a criticism.

The ultimate for the algorithm. Yeah, I got a couple of ones. Once a spook, always a spook from somebody else. Yep. Is that a derogatory term? So here's what's hilarious, right? People use the term spook like it's derogatory. They don't know that inside CIA,

inside the intelligence community, spook is like the top premier thing that you can call each other. So it's not like a pig. Not at all. Cops don't call each other. No, like when, so when we talk to DGSE or when we talk to MI6 or when MI6 talks to Massad or when we talk to, you know, the BND in Germany, we're always like,

oh, that dude's a real spook. Like that dude is a ghost. That's a term of a fact. You don't even know where they're at. You don't know where they've been. They do amazing things. But then you get out and they're like, ah, spook this and spook that. And you're like, oh, wow, I didn't know I was good enough to be determined as a spook.

So children of chem-1618, I consider that for one of my kids names, by the He says, Mockingbird is still going strong. I don't trust anyone who gives this guy a platform. Okay, so he doesn't trust me. He's literally turning podcasters into useful idiots. Wow, I consider myself a useful, a useless genius. Not a useful idiot. This podcast is turning into way more control narrative.

Beware of those who come bearing gifts. So what is Mockingbird? Do you know what I'm guessing they're talking about Operation Mockingbird, which was a disinformation campaign. And it was a legit disinformation campaign. So speaking of pre-911 CIA, right? Not that this guy deserves whatever, child of the corn, whatever your name is. There was a very real time when I believe it was Director Colby at CIA who made it a personal mission to ensure that the American public was intentionally misinformed about the Soviet Union completely.

Like there's this famous quote out there, I believe it was from Colby, where he said something like, I won't read. until everything the American public believes about the USSR is is untrue because he was so dedicated to essentially creating a disinformation campaign against the idea of communism. But regardless, it's a perfect example of what this person is legitimately referring to, right? Disinformation is real. And prior to 9-11, the agency went recklessly into creating disinformation campaigns for whatever they thought was important, right?

Whatever the executive thought they should make an investigation. important priority. That's not the world we live in today. And disinformation, misinformation, misinformation, and malinformation are harder than ever to actually police because there's so much information, things get drowned out. So there's so much good information, bad information, and wrong information. It's so much of it. It's actually hard to intentionally create it because there's so much of it. Wow. Okay. Last audience question before we pivot to my final question. How do you maintain control of your specific goal for the direction of development through an large organization?

Is there some general tips besides the ones that you mentioned, of coachability, learn? Those are sort of on the receiving end. But in terms of being proactive, any tools from your work of the agency to apply to such situations where general advice for people to exceed, maybe making use of manipulating tools of human psychology? Absolutely. So it's a great question. And it's very simple, right?

the thing that most people get wrong is they're looking at the next step. It's an amateur move to look at the next step. Have you heard of what's known as a moving goalpost? The next step is a moving goalpost. Because just like we talked about every day we create new data, every day we create new natural resources,

well guess what that means about the next step? It changes every day. What we need to be doing is looking two steps ahead. So in the corporate workplace, let's give it a very simple example. In the corporate workplace, you have a boss. You shouldn't be looking at your boss for what you should do day to day.

You should be looking at your boss's boss. Because if you do something today that fits the needs of your boss's boss, guess what you do simultaneously? You make your boss look good. So you look good and your boss looks good and your boss's boss notices both of you. That's right.

So now, whether your boss gets promoted or whether your boss's boss reaches down to promote you, you have two opportunities for success. Everybody else who's just trying to make the boss happy, they're completely being overlooked by the boss's boss, right? And furthermore, because they're not contributing to the boss's success directly, the boss doesn't notice them either. So if you want to be one of the few that ride the coattails of the boss

and or skip the boss's office altogether and go direct to the top, you need to be thinking two steps ahead. How do I make not my supervisor happy? How do I make my director who is the responsible party for my supervisor? How do I make that person happy? because that makes everyone in the chain happy. And then when you start to build a reputation of being able to solve problems at the director level, now what ends up happening is people see you as a reliable, trustworthy resource,

and they want to incentivize you to stay. So how do they incentivize you? They either promote you or they pay you more. Regardless, you get what you want, right? You get more power, more responsibility, more successful operations. I had when I was, when I left CIA and I first went into corporate America, I had this fantastic senior vice president who was automating everything, right? So we were part of, I was one of like 15 analysts, and they made it very clear that they were

seeking to automate all of our jobs. And for me, I was like, awesome. Like, this is not a job that I want to do anyways. So let's automate it. And that senior vice president during a one-on-one when he was talking to me, he was like, here's the deal, Andy. We don't need 15 people. We need two.

And the two that we are going to find from all 15 of these folks are the two that realize when you work yourself out of a job, there's always a new job for you. Yeah. Yeah. The person who can't work themselves out of a job is a useless person. But the person who can work themselves out of a job is a person that you put into another job knowing they will work themselves out of that job too. It's funny. I mentioned the boss's boss just to add a little inside academia. So oftentimes we have to hire professors.

You know, they start as junior professors, 35 year old. and then, you know, it's actually, some of my older colleagues are jaded. They'll say it's worse than getting married because at least when you get married, you get divorced if it doesn't work, but tenure is permanent. So like some of these people, we spend more time at our workday than we do with our spouses, right? So you're actually literally around your whole life much more with your colleagues in the academia. So when I'm being confronted with hiring somebody or a position, we all get letters of recommendation, big deal, right?

But what I always do is go to the people that wrote the letter recommendation. I know what they're going to say. They wouldn't agree to write. No one's malevolent. know, is Machiavellian that's going to write a condemning letter of recommendation, right? So I always think, well, let's go to those people. Let's get the letter of recommendation for the letter recommendation writer. Sort of the same idea, not to please the boss as the boss, but actually just to a shortcut,

like, what is this person? What are their goals? Why are they motivated to promote? Are they trying to foist somebody off? I've done it. You know, I've had bad employees. I was like, you've got to get out of here. And, oh, this is a great employee.

Yeah, you should definitely go and work for, you know, Podunk State University. Okay. But you also brought up one more thing when you mentioned next steps. And I'm a chess player. You know, I have a lot of the exponent, you know, the third power of my rating is at 1,000. Yeah, I'm not very good at it. But I'm always thinking two moves ahead, three moves ahead, however many you can you can move ahead. It seems to me that, you know, this weekend's, you know, phenomenal raid, you know, rescue of hostages, you know, from the Gaza Strip, save four hostages.

You know, tragically, the mission commander was killed. But that was the only, you know, casualty on the Israeli side. This is being celebrated. Much needed win for Israel. I'm so glad I am glad the hostages were rescued. But A, did they think two moves ahead? I mean, now, what are the downstream consequences? Is Hamas going to now booby-trap hostages?

Are they going to, you know, do psychological warfare on the remaining hostages? Or on the families of dead hostages? What mistakes do you think Israel might have made in this, you know, raid on the sun, so to speak? It's bigger. It's the two steps is bigger than this raid, right? Hamas isn't trying to win hostages. That's not what they're trying to do. Hamas is trying to undermine international faith in the institution of Israel.

That's what Hamas is trying to do. And they're succeeding. Israel's more distant and isolated than it's ever been. The Hamas is no longer referred to as a terrorist organization. They are now referred to as the governing organization of Gaza. Right. Think about where we were October 8th. October 8th, everything that came out from the Gaza Strip was always caveated with this information cannot be verified because Hamas is a terrorist organization. Even though they're still identified as a terrorist organization, now in June, nobody talks about them that way. Now they're just the legitimate government of the health ministry. The health ministry. The casualties. Exactly. Right. That's what they are now. That's all evidence that Israel's losing the two-step game. Benny Gantz, right, stepped out of the war cabinet.

That's losing the two-step game. When the three people who constitute your war cabinet can't even agree, what is that, what is the message that sends to the world, right? How is it that Vladimir Putin, who we all thought would be unseated, who everybody said was going to be ousted from within, who they said was going to be killed and assassinated within the first few months of his invasion in Ukraine? How is it that that person, who is a true autocrat, how would, you? is it that that person has a stronger economy

and more power and more relationships than ever before. But the true democracy of Israel is calling for reelection to oust Netanyahu. Who has his problems? Netanyahu's got his problems, right? But the country of Israel is a secure democratic institution. Right. It's Western democracy.

And it's stellar in terms of its record of being a democracy, unlike Ukraine, right? But what's happened is we have, Israel has been successfully agitated by Iran through Hamas. And now Yemen's playing a role in it. And Hezbo is playing a role in it in Lebanon. And it's just, it's getting worse and worse because Netanyahu, as Beneghans is saying, has taken it in a very political way. Netanyahu knows that if they fix the problem, he's got political issues, but the country

of Israel is happier. So he's at a place now where he can keep things. agitated and the attention is on Gaza and Israeli safety instead of on Netanyahu's shortcomings. He can't avoid that forever. But the thing that for me is so sad, to your point, thinking two steps ahead, we need to get two steps ahead of Iran and what Iran is trying to do in unraveling Israel. The two-state solution and the respect of Palestinians, that's not what we should be worrying about right now. We should be worrying about how we keep Iran from creating this kind of a mess in the Western world so that we can give the Palestinians the opportunity for self-governance so that we can

give Israel the semblance of safety so that we can find a working solution, whatever that solution is. But right now we can't find that because we're dealing with a bunch of bullshit that's being kicked around by some assholes in Iran. Yeah. Andy Bustamante, this has been a great pleasure to have you down here in San Diego. Thanks for coming down. Sorry the weather didn't cooperate, but hopefully we'll have you back. When the world settles down and World War III is over, as Einstein

said, I don't know what weapons, World War 3 will be fought with, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones. Hopefully old Albert was wrong, and we won't ever get to that point. But Andy, thanks to men and women like you with the courage, the bravery, the patriotism, and just the skills.

We stand in awe and gratitude of your work. Thank you so much, Brian. Thanks a lot. Thank you.