Julian Dorey Podcast - #334 - CIA Spy on Executed Mossad Spies, Dad's Murder & Infiltrating #1 Enemy | Andrew Bustamante

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

SPONSOR: 1) Minnesota Nice wants to help you find harmony—go to www.mnniceethno.com/julian and use code JD22 for 22% off your first order! 2) MOOD: Discover your perfect mood and get 20% off your first order at https://mood.com and use code JULAN at check out! 3) MANDO: Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get 20% off + free shipping with promo code JULIAN at https://shopmando.com ! #mandopod PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey WATCH MY PREVIOUS PODs w/ ANDY: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-ICwfCgQ-Z2EruJTo7F1LWSLJ1c6u8v8 (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Andrew Bustamante is a "former" CIA Undercover Spy & Air Force Nuclear Operator. From 2007 to 2014, Bustamante and his wife, Jihi (also a CIA Spy), lived abroad as undercover operators for the US Government. BUSTAMANTE'S LINKS: BUY BOOK: https://geni.us/ShadowCellBook YT: https://youtube.com/@Andrew-Bustamante QUIZ: https://yt.everydayspy.com/45xQhsA WEBSITE: https://everydayspy.com/ PODCAST: https://youtube.com/@EverydaySpyPodcast FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 - Intro 1:26 - Andy gets kidnapped 5:10 - Post-Andy Kidnapping Reaction, Tommy G Enhanced Interrogation Doc Reaction 14:54 - Inspiration Behind Shadow Cell, Country Andy Spied on, Failing “The Farm” at CIA 24:39 - Andy is his Most Vulnerable in this Book, Titling Andy on YT is crazy 30:51 - CIA Creates a Life of Lies 33:12 - The Murder of Andy’s Father & Broken Family Aftermath 41:01 - Andy’s Relationship w/ Grandfather, Air Force Fam Ties, Why Andy prioritizes family 44:40 - Andy’s Childhood: Why Andy’s Mom Was his Hero & Why She is Not Now 51:06 - Julian reflects on how Andy’s origins shaped him 56:45 - Americans’ Right to Privacy 1:02:46 - Andy Reacts to his argument w/ John Kiriakou on Danny Jones Ep 254 1:07:09 - Why Andy is leaving the US 1:13:48 - Does Andy fear being arrested in foreign countries, Mossad Sources in Iran 1:21:08 - Evan Gershkovich kidnapped in Russia 1:23:34 - Using “Cleansing Routes” to run Ops, Inside “The Farm” Training 1:34:01 - Post Failure Route at CIA 1:42:58 - Andy reflects on his lowest moment at CIA 1:44:34 - Jihi is a TRUE Believer in CIA, 9/11 created Targeters 1:54:38 - Andy’s first missions around the world, gathering assets protocol 1:59:39 - Andy & Jihi get assigned to Spy on America’s #1 Enemy Country to find the “Mole” 2:10:01 - How Andy used Bin Laden Al Qaeda tactics against #1 Enemy Country 2:23:55 - CIA reacts to Andy’s Bin Laden Model; How Andy & Jihi Built team 2:32:36 - Targeting “Converse” via Social Media & Spies 2:37:55 - Espionage, Money & Treason; Trusting Wife 2:45:50 - Andy’s “cover” company; How Andy entered #1 Enemy Country 2:50:05 - Surveillance Types in Hostile Country 3:01:32 - Andy escapes from enemy surveillance in #1 Enemy Country (FULL STORY) 3:24:19 - The final hours of Andy’s escape from Enemy Country & Aftermath 3:32:22 - Uncovering the Mole in CIA (Secret REVEALED?!) 3:38:50 - Andy & Jihi leave CIA (Allegedly) 3:44:48 - Andy tells the truth 3:47:21 - Andy’s work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 334 - Andrew Bustamante Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Espionage is a game because it's real-world chess. When you see James Bond on a beautiful antique wooden boat, screaming down a channel, shooting out of both sides, that's not professional intelligence. Professional intelligence, it's subtle, it's nuanced, it's invisible. So my 100% job was just to determine my surveillance status, where I knew that the next person who should follow me is the younger male on their team.

I don't know why things were different that day. It was winter, it was cold, it was nasty outside. Where's he gonna fit in, the arcade? You control every element of the game. I could play three, four, five games, give the whole team of 15 or 20 minute break so they don't think that there's anything suspicious about me. And that's how espionage worked. The thing that's so nasty about it is how fast it all went wrong. There's actually so much about that story that is truly classified, that really truly couldn't be shared.

Not even with your friend, Julian. You think I'm going to tell you today? I think you're going to tell us today. Let's see if you can stump me. Let it happen, Andy. Oh, man. This is payback. Oh, my God.

Let it happen, Andy. Oh, dear. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. this is like a manual as to how to stop it now in some ways. So it's been a challenge. It's been a challenge in so many ways, man.

Three years ago, that entire book was deemed a classified document by CIA. So it's taken three years of fighting, debating, and wrangling before they finally let us release it. And the only reason they let us release that is because we threatened them with a First Amendment lawsuit because of what happened inside the book. Technically, if they didn't let us release,

what we wrote here it would have been a violation of the first amendment did that lawsuit get settled i assume we never actually went into the suit yeah we we uh long story short we took it to an attorney the attorney understood the claims uh and the situation that the book details and uh and the attorney had a back a backdoor channel conversation with uh c a back door channel a back channel's way better than back door right back channel conversation with cia where cia said you know what we're just going to release the book then well there's one really disappointing part about the book you couldn't write the name of the fucking country i've been waiting for this for years so they told you you couldn't do that there's actually so much about that story that is truly classified that really truly couldn't

be shared so even as as excited and impressed as you are with what was shared there's so much more not even with your friend julian you're not going to tell me it's not it's not you that i'm worried about man. It's just you and me. Not when that thing, not when I think it's published worldwide. I think you're going to tell us today. You think I'm going to tell you today. I think you're going to tell us today. Let's see. Let's see if you can stump me. Vinay, Rocco! Let it happen, Andy. Let it happen. We've been, they're giggling. They're giggling. They're not supposed to giggle. This is payback. This is payback in this bitch. Oh man. Now I see...

Stop resisting. Now I see... Oh, nah, nah, nah, nah. Not over the hair! Not over the hair! Oh my gosh! Let it happen, Andy! Let it happen!

This is... they're working... Oh, it's not as easy as it seems, right guys? You dropped your twisty tie. You dropped your twisty tie. I really should have shown you how to do this, Julian, before me... They're getting there. There we go. Yep, go closer.

That's it, there it is. Yeah. Nice, there's it here. Oh dear. So you're going to love that firm where you're going to the bathroom. We're going to the bathroom. All right, let's go. Oh yeah, I guess I shouldn't help, Bob.

All right, Joe, that's enough. They make a team come in. What's the new in a fucking country? Philadelphia. It's not a country! What's the name of the country? Philadelphia. Get him in the fucking shower.

I'm scared of the fucking country All I can think of is Philadelphia You like that? No He's a tough cookie All right All right we're good Bro we had them in there for like 20 minutes

Just like I was like it's like Anne Frank's fucking addict Don't say anything That shit's hard They did good right You guys did respectfully For a 10 minute tutorial Pull that mic in

I just want to be clear I was not the zip talk guy dude i had them so you know what happened i had it flipped the wrong way and i went to pull it and it wasn't clicking that was my mistake the best part of that was andy like you missed an honor so i know for next time i need to i need to kidnap somebody i know i got to make sure my zip tides are in the right nobody thinks about like these are little things yeah yeah so a lot of times we'll actually line that shit in our pocket and we'll line it with the right side facing out we'll we'll pre-twist so that they're already bound so all you have to do is slip them over the hands

and then tie them together see that's why you know, almost like you were on the payroll. But you didn't see that coming at all. No, I didn't see it coming. You guys, yeah, you guys do well. You were very good Anne Franks. That was like, very good at it. That was like the last minute, like I'm teaching them how to zip tie people about five.

I'm like, he's going to be here in five. Come on, let's go. It's like, all right? I'm not going to pull it snug so we get. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't fucking choke. Yeah, no, yeah. Trying to cut it for 30 minutes.

But you grab this. Are we like yelling when we, do this, but how do you bust out of the closet? Yeah, you come out, I'm going to be like, so the tell is going to be, I'm going to say, so you really aren't going to tell us about the fucking country in the movie. Okay. And it's going to be like, yeah, CIA won't let me. I'll be like, we'll see about that.

Beda, Rocco! And then you bust out of here with the, uh, he's got to be sitting down. He's going to be sitting down. Okay. So Pat, you know, you're going to this side. Don't hit the camera. Like, just be aiming, Pat. Can we put him a little bit further to come in first?

have more room because he's on this side yeah he's gonna be right assume you don't have okay so you're gonna come in second because you're on the near side pat just aim your fucking foot for there yep grab them you'll be grabbing them at the same time you'll hold him down here you wait till he gets whatever i'll be bullshit in over there right i'm gonna be like let it happen andy just let it Yeah, you can totally Just like speak, I don't know Speak Italian or something Okay

And don't let Like just think about You can't let You can't know why You can't laugh No no no no no When I went back in there though And I turn around and they're wheeling you in

I almost fucking lost I didn't You're like Oh no I was trying to learn Italian in Spanish last minute it before he pulled up. His name was Rocco and his name was Vinny. We were like in Google Translate, like trying to come up with some lines to say.

Yeah. Yeah. They were just telling me they were laughing off camera when I was like saying before I was like, hey, if anything funny happens today, just go with it. I was dying. Dying back there. It's a good setup. It's an interesting intro to the Julian Dory Shell.

Kind of tough having a shoe on the other foot, huh? Yes. This was a bit of a flip-flop on the other foot, but it's all right. Oh. Oh. You want one thrown at you? I'll put this one straight up your ass. There you go. There you go. For anybody who's actually Latino, then we know that's called chancletta. What you just did is called chancelita. What's that? When a grandmother threatens to throw a slipper at you. I should have pulled out some Spanish. So how was the waterboarding? Was that as difficult as you thought it was going to be? It was refreshing. Thank you. Thank you for that. Your hair dried off very quickly.

And sort of my shirt goes great. Yeah. Wow. How did it feel to have someone say a city name whenever you asked for a country? I was trying not to laugh. I mean, that was the amazing thing. So for people who hadn't seen it, my friend Tommy G on his channel, we went and did something in June where you and Trevor Fortner had permission to kidnap us off the streets in Milwaukee and take us to an abandoned warehouse for seven hours and have your way with us. But anyway, so things got escalated and I got to say, man, I went through.

through all the, just the straight footage from that day. Because obviously Tommy's job is he's got to, you know, take the highlights and put it into a 40-minute documentary with interviews and stuff. But going through the footage and watching you and Trevor, but you were doing all the talking in character was crazy. Like I've said, Pat's seen the footage. All these guys have seen that footage. Like, you'd win an Emmy if that was put up.

Like, it was scary how into it you were. And Tommy and I would like, fuck with you. and like say some I mean we're muffled under a hood so it's like but we'd say some funny shit and you would not laugh and that was I don't know how it felt for you on the other end like how much you were just like in character or you know who you really are whatever you know but for us it was just like it was like unnerving because it's like damn he's really not going to break at anything well I didn't know I wanted to give you guys as close to the real experience as you could get. And people say all sorts of wild shit. People say shit that's not supposed to be funny,

but makes you want to laugh during a real interrogation. So when you guys were saying funny shit, it's actually easier not to laugh at the funny shit than when people say some whack-a-doodle stuff about who knows what, right? When people are panicked and fearing their life, all sorts of shit comes out of their mouth in all sorts of languages, too. And then you have interpreters. Man, there's so many funny moments where interpreters are interpreting real time. And their job is to interpret everything that's said. So they will literally interpret the gibberish that comes out. And then they'll try to verbalize what they think the person's trying to say,

which is just, it's like it's a comedy of air sometimes in a very, very serious moment. Yeah, that was the thing we were talking about with you afterwards at night when we were all at dinner. You know, like what your experiences were like witnessing anything close to this or being a part of that at CIA. And the thing that struck me was you were saying, Like, dude, it's like a Tuesday when this happens. And it's not this like drawn out eight hours. You're screaming at someone like the first scene is zero dark 30. You're like, come on, man.

And it's like 15, 30 minutes. And then, you know, you come back 10 hours later and see if they want to talk. Yeah. So the way you described it was not only like nonchalant. It was almost like, man, this is like the low light of my day. You know, it's not like this adrenaline situation. Correct. It's a job.

And there's a professional way to execute a job. You know, we're going to talk about my book today. And in that book, I go through an interrogation with a service that does not perform at the highest level of the game. And as soon as you see what an interrogation looks like when it's not intense, you start to realize that you have an advantage because you're trained to handle intense interrogation. If you have anything less than what you're trained for, you're good to go. That's part of the methodology behind not only CIA training but elite military training. they try to train for the worst that you'll ever see in the field so that when you actually see it in the field and it's far less than what you've trained for it's easy yeah that part of your book like you've told me

that story out of context like i never got that story fully in context off camera you know we've discussed places you've been and stuff you've done that you couldn't discuss until this book and some things you'll never just be able to discuss publicly but my heart was racing reading that probably like that was like 15 20 pages whatever that was because the way you guys did this book is like you'd have like one page or two pages of jehe your wife two pages of you like back and forth it was very good but when i got to this part you know you're the one reporting what was happening on the ground there and the number of places where you could have been as you described and i'd like you to explain this to people you could have been the panicked person in front of the bear that you didn't do that over like a full day is crazy to me did you know that one in the in eight Americans are currently prescribed anti-anxiety medications. It is a quiet epidemic that is sweeping the West right now. And people who start on these medications have a very hard time quitting. Recovering from benzodiazepine addiction or alcohol addiction is essentially like

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www.mnnicefno.com slash julian link in description below and use code jd 22 for 22% off your first order well i appreciate that man i think that's uh that's a big part of what i wanted the book to highlight for people was the professionalism that goes into intelligence what you see on TV in the movies and in TV shows is not professional intelligence. When you see James Bond in a very conspicuous outfit on a beautiful antique wooden boat, screaming down a channel, shooting out of both sides, that's not professional intelligence. Professional intelligence is it's subtle, it's nuanced, it's invisible. It's boring. Yeah, you had a great line for that back in episode 97. I can't remember it right now, but that was the first time you and I ever talked where you

were you were explaining like it's 99% like bullshit office work or whatever that's like and then there's like that 1% where you're like oh thank god yeah and that's like the action but it just goes to show you when you're working someone for months years sometimes you know you may just be watching this person talk to their fucking parents on the phone and recording it from across the street and hear nothing and then if you get lulled to sleep you're going to miss it that one time at 7.30 at night where they call the other guy and say, you know, spaghetti's ready. Exactly. You know. Yeah. It's something that intelligence officers understand. It's something that your highest level of law enforcement understands. And, uh, and hopefully

it's something that more lay people will understand with the release of shadow cell. Yeah. Now, what made you want to write this book in the first place? It's a great question. So back in 2020, 2019, 2020, you had the end of the first Trump administration, and you had the push for more transparency and the push for the release of more classified information. So during that period of time, CIA was not in a good place with Donald Trump, but we wrote in and we said, hey, in the best interest of transparency and sharing, we'd like to tell this story. And we know that the story has classified elements, but we also know that we're professional intelligence officers. We write around the classified elements. Would you approve of letting us create a book proposal,

a manuscript, etc.? And CIA said yes. Now, in that original request, we specifically named the country. We specifically named the name of the various characters in the key characters that are inside the book. And as we kind of made each request for approval, CIA said yes, every step of the way. We were in a great place until 2022. Everybody knows what happened in 2022 world. The whole world melted down and and then CIA came back they had received our manuscript in January of that year and they came back in March of that year and said everything in this manuscript is classified I remember because I met you in March and then you were recording with me in April went out a couple weeks later in May but I remember you being like what the fuck yeah because it was it was

like you'd been working on this and now it was all stonewalled and you know obviously you end up having to i guess like give legal threats and whatever just to get it out but the crazy thing is that in all seriousness with our little charade right there trying to get the country out of you if you have listened to andy on a podcast before literally any podcast and if you read 30 pages of this book and don't know what country you're talking about i kind of can't help you all right and i'm gonna repeat the line i've said this on the podcast before you said this i think on than Patrick Pet David podcast like four years ago you're like I'm not allowed to tell you where I was stationed but I am allowed to tell you it was somewhere in Asia and I speak Thai and Chinese

so you do the math so you know we'll leave that one there but Falcon as you call it the country of origin in the book is obviously a as you state a US adversary and all that and we'll talk all about that and get into kind of the strategy there and what you guys came up with which again that's why I was saying I can't believe you were allowed to write this at all just because of yes you did mention parts where you're like we're holding back intelligence of how this would have happened or what would have happened there but the actual strategy you and your wife gee he came up with it's pretty unbelievable like it's and to see it play out and like knowing you and putting it all together it's like wow it's very impressive what you did but i want to get to the

beginning which you guys we've talked about it in generalities on the podcast before and you've told some little stories without the full context but now we can give more context you've talked about many times you were at the air force we've gone through all that part of your life and then you applied to the peace corps you wanted to have 10 sex and whatever with with hippies and help people still want to have 10 sex with hippies hey listen that's a good thing good thing to have um but anyway so they intercept you and they give you a message that's like you may qualify for other parts of government service wait for our call boom boom boom someone in mclean Virginia calls you, they get you on a plane, they bring you out to tell you it's CIA. I'm good so far.

Yeah, good so far, man. Okay. So you get to the farm, which is where they train people to be case officers. And let's go through everything you did there and then how it ended. Because it ended up working out amazing for you, but it was a real challenge like in your life. You know, one of the things that I'm really excited about with the story, part of it is, part of it is like, cathartic it's like a form of therapy writing your own memoir because you have to face your own demons you have to face your own hardships and live them again and then fucking dedicate them to words on paper it's not a fun process but it is a healing process so as a part of it that's personally redeeming but then there's also a part of it that's professionally validating because I've received

so much criticism so much hate and so much anger and so much doubt like there's so much negative energy vibes, whatever you want to call it, that comes from the internet and from CIA itself. I was just sitting with somebody two days ago who had a contact that's active duty CIA. And they were like, hey, let me ask this contact of mine about Andrew Bustamante. And when they mentioned my name to the person that's still inside CIA, and who the fuck knows who that person is, that person could be a two-year officer, a person could be a 12-year officer. But when they were like, hey, what are your thoughts on Bustamante? Apparently the person in CIA was like, oh, fuck that guy. He hasn't done anything really.

real? Why is it even out there on screen? Like, this is my validation, because here's the truth of it. Inside CIA, everything's compartmentalized. Nobody knows what any fucking buddy else is doing. The people that you actually discovered did something significant inside CIA only happens when they reach senior echelons, and people start kind of passing what's known as rument, rumor intelligence, rument down the chain about what that person did. Now that I have a book that's actually going out, and the book, anybody at CIA will know that

a vernacular and the terminology and the settings and even as much as we've had to obfuscate specifics, they will know that this is all real. And they will know the cultural implications of it. And they will know the inside jargon. And they will know and they'll be able to relate to the story. Because one of the most important elements of the story that you just hit on is the fact that at the farm, I technically failed. I never became a case officer. At CIA, they're very, very particular about their vernacular. So if somebody becomes a case officer, it means that they are certified through what's known as the field tradecraft course. The FTC is what's commonly known as the farm by kind of general movies and TV. So when you complete the farm, you go up against a panel

that has to vote for whether or not you demonstrated the core competencies to be certified as a case officer. So it's not about passing. It's about finishing and having a panel of senior officers say, yeah, we think he's good enough. Do you have any contact with those senior officers before it gets to that point? You have contact with about 30% of them. It's supposed to be 30% of the people who work with you, so mentors, coaches, trainers, and 60% are other professionals who are who have not worked with you who are supposed to objectively assess your scores. So they know you through your scores and the other 30% doesn't. When I went through the farm, the first, farm was broken into three groups. There's an A camp, a B camp, a C camp. A camp instructors teach

A camp students, B camp students, et cetera, et cetera. And then the instructors for the different camps become the role players for the other camps. So you might be an instructor in C camp, but then be the role player for one of the students in A camp kind of thing. Right. And that's how they expose that 30% of instructors to the student cadre. But on the last day, That's supposed to be a moment when they look objectively at scores and they look subjectively at the instructor and role player interactions. It's a totally convoluted, completely broken system, especially done at scale, which is what was happening when I went through the farm. Following 2001, following the 9-11 tragedy, there was so much recruitment activity, so many new recruits getting pumped in that this system that was supposed to work for 30 new people every six months, became 300 people every four months that had to go through the system.

So it just didn't hold up well. So that's my long explanation of saying, I went through the farm, I went through the exercises, I went through the assessments, I spent the time there that you're supposed to spend. I completed all the tasks. I had the objective scores to say that I passed, but I pissed off one too many people, and I failed according to the panel. So one thing I was really, really impressed at throughout this book and also in that part as well was how vulnerable you were

talking about this and like as someone who's known you for a long time it actually surprised me a little bit because you are such a type a go getter fuck you i got this kind of guy and and there has a lot of good to it but as you know that can also have downside to it and you seem to have like a lot of self-reflection on where you could have been different to where, you know, your story would have ended up in some other type of situation, but, you know, obviously it might have worked out, but you caused yourself problems along the way. Was that, was that something that it was a little easier to talk about when you were sitting there actually typing it out and thinking it to yourself? Or was that something that was very much like the cathartic point of why you

wanted to write this in the first place? Now, the point that the reason I wanted to write this happens more in kind of the last half of the book when we talk about the team that we built because the team that we built to execute the shadow cell operation were just an incredible group of people. That's who I wanted to bring honor to. If anything, the first half of the book was just my editor and my agent

saying that these parts of the story are required to tell a memoir type of story. I didn't really want to hide it or otherwise. What I didn't want to do and what I still never want to do is make anybody think that I'm the story. I'm the story. star of my own story. I'm the fucking two-bit comic relief of this story. I'm not the star of this story. And again, it's my vindication in many ways against all the people out there who think that I'm fake, who think that I'm phony, who think that I'm what you have written there on the

on the cup itself. Right? Like, I've been saying this for years that if you think I'm anything other than what I claim to be, you're a dumbass. Well, now, hopefully, with a published book that if there's any good fortune in our future, becomes a bestseller, verified by CIA, publicly documented, with a legal case behind it, like, I am what I say I am, and I'm nothing more and I'm nothing less.

Whether you are at CIA and you hate me or whether you're on the streets and you hate me, it doesn't matter to me, it's demonstrable proof. And the reason that's so important to me is because my kids will one day be adults, and this is a source of truth that they can pull from, rather than all the criticism online that's going to exist about their dad.

Which actually, like, you're also like a great sport about, too. Like the very first time I had you in here and I was going to cut up clips afterwards, you know how crazy it was back then with the clips. I would get it all done and work on it and it'd be good and then I have to title it and I'd be like, ooh. And I'd be like, because normally I don't ask people about titles or whatever, but, you know, I'm a human and there's a line. There was certain things and be like, I'm going to ask on this one because I don't know about that.

Because it's accurate, but, you know, I don't know if they want that like that. So I remember the first one I texted you. It was like, it was a short and it was CIA spy, why I'm a criminal. And I was like, oh, he's going to say, know this. And you're like, sounds great, brother. I was like, okay. And like nine million views later, we were. But like, you've always been good about that.

And what I'm saying is the way that not only things end up getting. titled because of what you say but also then when people go in and click it and hear what you say you invite that in you invite people to be like especially people don't trust CIA to be like you know or not I shouldn't say don't trust the I the people who want it like abolished I mean to be like yo fuck this guy or whatever so it's interesting to hear that some of that like you know you're at least even paying attention to that because you've always been so open and just hey let it happen I mean we were still talking about titles two years later yeah on some clips and you're like hey no this is great go for it all right so i mean i appreciate what you're what

you're doing because what you're trying to do i think in my in my perspective what you're trying to do is is share information in a way that meets the the person where they are whether they dislike cia or whether they like cia the title shouldn't be the barrier for getting them into the content once they see the content hear the content they can come to their own conclusion but you don't want to block somebody at the at the point of the headline. It's almost the opposite of what mainstream media is doing, right? Mainstream media is actively trying to block people at the headline. So they use these radical alarmist terms that are very clearly politicized

so that their base will read it and everybody else's base will reject it. And they use that as a way of selling advertisement, right? So a big part of why I'm such a fan of what you do and I will always be here to support you is because I can see what you're doing and I can see why you're doing it. So you create an accurate headline. and then that opens the door to an accurate conversation that some people

you know get panty meltdown about yeah that is like behind the scenes with like cooking the sauce here with some of the other creators I'll talk with like Danny Jones and stuff like that you know we have to make titles that people will click but like the first thing we have to do at a high level is like is this accurate

you can ask Joe or a lessee all the time like we'll be bullshit in titles on like an upcoming video and they'll throw out one that's like great and I'm like it's not accurate like that can be misconstrued or whatever but once it's accurate sometimes they're still like whoa like people are going to click that but do we want to have that reflected for the people that are in here so it's interesting that like you've always had that perspective and there've been a couple times

before where like i've given a courtesy text to someone like hey you don't want this to you and and i knew it would have a 15 percent click through but they're like i would prefer not i'm like no problem you know because there's i don't know like there i hear what you're saying about people watching the content and you are right about that to a certain percent but then there are just people even with shorts they just look at the title and they're just so fuck this and they don't really listen to it and that's look if you don't like it in some ways that's the nature of the internet yeah absolutely the the point of all of it is just to say i am a big proponent of transparency because i spent so many years living in lies. Living in lies with family, living in lies with peers, living in lies, even inside the

agency itself, even inside the same group that had the same need to know. It's just lie upon, lie upon lie. That shit gets exhausting. And then at the end of the day, it's very hard to go back to transparency after you've had a track record of lying. Right. It's much easier to go back to transparency when you've always been transparent. When people accuse you of things, when people when people claim that you said things or claim that you did things and you've got a track record where you're like

I didn't say those things I didn't do those things and look at what's actually documented and you'll see that what I'm saying now matches what I said three years ago. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how we've talked about it before like can you ever really trust people

and like of course that's something you struggle with and I fully understand that coming from the world you're from but especially like even seeing the one tidbit like bullshit tidbit really at the end you were mentioning with the one guy who was always so nice to you at CIA or whatever and then was like advising your wife upon leaving CIA on what to do with

their resume and then went behind your guys back and said don't trust to Bustamante's report anything to me. It's like you can't even trust someone you've known for years in the organization that's supposedly trying to do the same things you are. It's hard. It's the reality. And when you everybody is everybody becomes what they are what environment they are kind of groomed in. So from from age 27 to age 34, we were groomed in this professional environment, right? And for me, before that, I was groomed by the military. So it was very absolutist in the military. And then you go into the agency where it's all malleable.

And you're just kind of like, holy shit, what's real, what's not real? So if anything, what I found is that reality is a mix of how you perceive it. And there's this thin, common thread that's always there about what's in the other person's best interest, which is exactly what CIA taught us from the beginning. But when you start to realize that of all the things you think are true, they all kind of boil away, like steam from a pot of noodles, right? It all boils away until you just have this little bit of truth at the bottom. And that's the only thing you can really navigate by. Now, you've made sense to me for a long time. Like, I think when we did it the last time I'm at parents' house, episode 150, and you told the

story about the pre what's at the air the the air course prep school is that what's called yeah so you do a year there you don't need to retell the story now but you go through the whole thing where like you supposedly had a job to do and then you did the job and you got yelled at for doing your job or whatever and you're like what even is authority what are rules so in a lot of ways like you are an anti-authority kind of guy but to be more specific on that you're an anti-authority when it doesn't make any fucking sense guy when someone tells you like like that wall is black and you're like sir it's clearly white and they're like no it's black you're going to be like fuck you i'm gonna the wall's white i'm painting it white right and i understand

that because i also there's parts of me i see in that too i'm i have a similar type idea did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal t hc right to your door and they've also found a way to combine t hc with carefully selected functional ingredients to target nearly every mood and health concern that you can think of of course i'm talking about mood.com and their incredible line of functional gummies. Today, you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com using promo code Julian at checkout. Forget one size fits all supplements that only get you high. Mood's functional gummies are optimized to kick in in as little as 15 minutes and take you to the mood you're looking for. Whether that's mind magic gummies for

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order using code Julian at checkout. So head to mood.com, link in my description below, find the functional gummy that matches exactly the mood you're looking for, and let mood help you discover your perfect mood. And once again, don't forget to use promo code Julian when you check out to save 20% off your first order. But you mentioned in the book, even before that, growing up, you know, you're born in Arizona, you quickly move with your mom when she married another guy to Pennsylvania, which by the way, I never knew this about you. Your father was murdered. Yeah. My birth father was murdered in California. I actually had a chance to go visit the block of California where he was killed. What was it? Maybe three years ago when I sat up in San Jose or Sacramento, it possibly was, with one of the big podcasters up there. I went down to the actual block where my father was killed. And it happened when I was so young that I didn't understand any of it. I didn't even understand English when it happened. But by the time it was explained to me, and I was older, there was like a weird disconnect.

So even though it sounds tragic and it sounds horrible, like it sounds horrible to hear that your father was killed by a stabbing, in a violent crime, at a bar, in the open in San Francisco. Do you know what happened, like what it was over? Yeah, so he was kind of a dick. Not surprising. Yeah.

Apple don't fall far from the tree. So my father, the story goes, and I have to say it's just a single source story. It came from my mom's side. of the family. My mom's side of the family did not like my dad or my father. But the story goes that my father was, he was going, he had left the military, left the Air Force in a huff, tried to find a job, couldn't find a job, decided to re-enlist in the Air Force so that he would have a job when his firstborn son was born, right? Reenlist in the Air Force. And then he was out at a bar with some

friends celebrating his reenlistment. So I can only imagine he was probably drinking heavily. I can only imagine he probably wasn't actually in a good mood to celebrate anything, right? Yeah. He was doing what he had to do to try to be responsible for a new baby that was on the way. While he was at the bar, he was approached by a drug dealer. And the drug dealer was basically like, hey, do you guys want to have a good time? And instead of just saying, yes, he decided to fucking mock the drug dealer in public, in front of his friends and whatever else.

Well, the drug dealer was tweaking at the time. So the dude left, got himself already, came back in, didn't say shit, and just started stabbing my dad at the bar. So I think it was 17 stab wounds to his back at the bar. My dad tried to, my father, tried to escape, tried to get off the bar, tried to flee, and couldn't do it. His friends started to jump up and try to fight the guy, but they couldn't get him off before the damage was essentially done. The drug dealer was immediately captured, immediately apprehended, sent to a prison, actually sent to a prison where my mom's brother was the warden. So that guy did not have an easy time in jail.

But nevertheless, the damage was done. So my father was killed because he had just enlisted in the Air Force, all of his survivor benefits went to my mom and I was like three or four months old at the time. So you, like you said,

you don't even know what's going on at three or four months. I don't know the guy. Like even when I was told the full story I was probably nine or ten years old, it was just a story to me. It's not a dude I ever met. I never met anybody from his family because his family and my mom's family didn't get alone.

So like this was just a character and a story for me, even though it was real for my mom. It was real for my grandmother. When I later met my father's side of the family, it was all very viscerally real to them. But when was that? I was 20, 22 years old. 2002. I was at the Air Force Academy in Colorado and I had access to the the official Air Force National Cemetery database. And I decided to look up to see if my father, where was he buried? Because I never knew where he's buried. My mom never knew where he was buried. She always told me he's buried in some national cemetery somewhere. So because I had access to this international database that I knew that my dad was Air Force, that's when I looked it up. And I saw that he was actually interred and buried in Denver when the Air Force Academy's in Colorado Springs. So the first weekend I had, I went up there to the actual grave site and got to see him, he said, see his grave. And it's a really emotional thing. It was a very emotional thing. even though he was just a character and everything else.

Like, you're looking at a gravestone with a name and dates that match the story and the last name is the same as your last name. And, you know, I'm in my 20s. It was a very strange, surreal kind of moment. But that was when I discovered him. And then I went to the little on-site funeral parlor thing where you can look up next of kin. And his next of kin was his mom. And his mom lived there.

in Denver also. So then I connected to the mother and everything kind of connected from there. Do you have a relationship with her today? She, I think she actually passed away. After I met her, I realized why my mother's family didn't like my father's family. Because there's, everything's fucking shattered. Everything is a broken family. My mom's family is a broken family. My father's family was a broken family. Not surprisingly, when my mom and dad, my mother and father were together, they had challenges that would have ultimately probably broken them up to. My mom's been married four times. Right. So there's just, there's not a lot of cohesiveness in either side of my family. So when I saw and I met my father's family, every time I met a new person, I was always

asking myself the question, like, do I even want to get into this swamp? Do I want to deal with another divorce of a divorce and another third marriage and another, you know, adultering spouse, and another person with alcoholism, and another person with drug issues? Or do I want to just leave it all out so if i left most of it out i stayed in contact with my grandfather who was not my birth grandfather but was like a second or third marriage it was kind of crazy i kept in touch with him for a while what made you want to keep in touch with him he he was just insistent so he was he adopted my father when he met my grandmother so he loved my father my father was like his favorite child and then when my father died he was devastated and he knew that my father had a child but everybody

kept him from that child so when i met my grandfather i was 24 years old and i was like a prodigal son to him whoa yeah and even though he was also he also has passed but he was also not healthy he was not like on the up and up he was he was a you know former alcoholic retired military three wives himself like he was all kinds of different military though another military there's a lot of military in my family that's interesting yeah a lot of military in my family because you're you ended up going air force your father who you never knew and was to quote you just a character in your story when you went to the air force you hadn't even been to his grade before right he was air force the the man who adopted him who was my grandfather who i stayed in touch with retired air force

so there's there's a lot of military ties in my story did you know that did so when you were told the story when you were nine or ten where you told specifically he was in the Air Force? No. So you just ended up at the Air Force. I ended up in the Air Force because the Air Force Academy offered me the best deal and my mom was former Air Force and my mom was kind of my hero at the time. So I was like, I'll try that out. Okay. And I'm one of those people that thinks it's ridiculous that we now have a space force because it was always the Air Force. And now to make an Air Force I'm just I'm old school. Yeah. Technically I would have had to be in the Space

Force to do the job I did for the Air Force. Well, space is above air. I got the scientist over there, I don't tell you. There we go. Anyway, speaking of which, you're supposed to be working on my company. What the fuck? I'm just kidding with you. But anyway, so that is fascinating that there's that strange pattern that forms without you even knowing them. And then it's also interesting that, you know, you put together that there's broken families everywhere.

because I know how important it is to you, like your personal family now with your wife and your kids. And it's always been priority number one to put that before everything. We'll get to it. You put it before your career technically and all that as well. So do you think that a lot of that comes from you seeing these examples and saying to yourself, I definitely don't want that? Therefore, I'm going to make sure I put all my focus in this because I feel like predisposed to something like that happening. know what i mean you know there there are people in the world who know what they want and who

have always known what they want and they've pursued it since they were kids and they did it in middle school and they did it in high school and they went to college and they've been success stories because they pursued what they wanted and then there's people who have always known exactly what they don't fucking want and they have crafted their life exclusively by going away from what they don't want i am one of the latter half whatever the fuck i don't want i just run as fast as I can run away from that. And whatever I run into, I know is better than the shit I'm running away from. And that's served me well. Why was your mom, your hero? It's such a disappointing story. So I think my mom was my hero because in my household, I knew I wasn't my

dad's favorite, my stepdad. My stepdad was clearly favoritist towards my sisters who were his whole, his whole blood, right? They were my half-sisters. And there was just a very clear preference that my dad didn't really care for me and he cared very much for my sister. So it was easy to just bond with my mom. My mom was the one that was the more driven. My mom was the one that looked like me. My stepdad was white. My mom was Latina. My mom had curly hair and dark skin. I have curly hair and dark skin. So in a white Pennsylvania neighborhood where we grew up, it was basically my mom and I that looked the same. And I could just really appreciate she kept going to school

and she kept getting promoted and she kept climbing the corporate ladder and she worked her ass off all the time. She worked night shift as an ER nurse and I could look up to that and my stepdad like he spent 30 years working for IBM and came back and played solitaire on the computer and took my sisters out

to donuts every Saturday and didn't take me and that kind of shit just it creates a favoritism in a child. So I looked up to my mom and then as I went through the process of choosing a college, my dad never had faith that I would go to college. He was just like, you're out of the house at 18.

I don't care what you do, but you don't have a home at 18. What did your mom say to this, like, to how he treated you? She was old school, too. My mom was old school, like, Catholic, Mexican on her second husband. She was of the opinion that she had to do whatever he wanted to do because, and she told me this when I was young, she was like, I love your dad more than I love you. and in her way of rationalizing that, she was saying, I choose to love him every day. I don't have to choose to love you because you're my child. So therefore, because I have to put effort

into choosing to love him, I must love him more. And that statement doesn't go away. When you hear it once, you never, ever forget it. So I learned early eight years old, nine years old, I don't put myself between my mom and my dad. Because if I do, I'm going to lose 100, percent of the time. So I just put myself behind him, but next to her. And I looked up to her for a long, long time. I didn't stop really seeing my mom as my hero until she divorced my stepdad when I was in my first year at CIA. And that made you stop? Because I was like, what the fuck is this? You've been married 25 years. I remember clearly being told that you love him more than you love me and you're choosing not to love him anymore. So what does that mean for me? And what is important

to you? How do you prioritize? Like, what's optional? What's required? Like, it doesn't make sense to me. At 25, it for sure didn't make sense to me because I was like, this is just fucking crazy. I wasn't old enough yet. I hadn't become a parent yet. Once you become a parent, you start to understand that your parents were just parents too. Confused, lost. I have way more. resources than my mom or dad ever did. And I still struggle with parenthood. So they were they were poorer than me, less educated than me. Like that shit was hard. Yeah. So my mom was just trying to figure it out at the time. But just like when you have that moment where where you learn the reality of how much somebody does or doesn't love you, when you see a hero naked in the bare light,

they're never really your hero again. So my like, whether I like it or not, I, I'm not, I I can pity her. I can accept her. I can do whatever else, but she's not my hero anymore. How much of a relationship do you have with her today? It's there, but I wouldn't say it's particularly strong. I love my mother. You do. I absolutely love my mother. Define love. She gave me life. She sacrificed decades of her life to bringing me up. She put real effort into my education. She put real effort into creating a person that was independent that, as she

always told me she always told me her job was to create a person who made good decisions that was her job just to teach me how to make good decisions her job was not to love me her job was not to to make me feel safe her job was not to make me a contributing member of society her job was not to like turn me into a future husband or a father her job was simply create a life that makes good decisions and once she did that she was done and that is something else that stands between us once I went to a military school on a full ride scholarship she was like

my job here is done and every time I tried to share with her a second thought about maybe I should leave the academy maybe I'm not a good fit here maybe I'm bad in the Air Force I always knew that I shouldn't ask her her opinion because I already knew what the answer was going to be but every time I called mom to ask her opinion

it was always exactly what I expected the opportunity is too great your future is going to be made just stick it out just stick it out just stick it out just stick it out. And she wasn't wrong about the opportunities and she wasn't wrong about the future. But in that moment, the way that she communicated it to me, it just made me feel like I can't, I can't take my true feelings to this person. And now as an adult, with my own kids and my own wife, my own business, and my own everything, it's still like, mom is there and I love her

and I know she loves me, but she's not what I would say is a, heavy contributor into my life, and she makes it so that I'm not a heavy contributor into her life. She's got her thing that she does, and I've got my thing that I do. And even when I take my family to her house, she still continues to do her own thing. She'll go out with her own friends, and she'll go to her own concerts, and she'll just leave us alone at the house, even when we're visiting, which I know to her doesn't sound weird. But pretty much everybody else is like, that's kind of weird, right? When your family from out of town visits you, you leave them, to go have your normal Wednesday dinner with your friends isn't this one Wednesday worth skipping

right that's not how her mind works it's interesting every time i talk with you i learn new things about you and like who you are and as we already outlined a little bit ago there's people who fucking hate you on the internet and there's people who have severe problems with things CIA does i'm one of them you know and we've talked about this openly before and you and you and i have come down on the opposite side of some controversial issues and that's fine i think i think you're a good sport for talking about it but when people i will say this as your friend when people kind of dehumanize you because of where you worked and i think that's what happens i wish they would listen to where you came from and what you're about because i i remember when

we did episode 150 that was the fourth time i sat with you two times in my place and then one time danny you me and jim and after that one that was like november 22 i remember i was just like god he's so confusing to me like there's just there's something i'm missing there and then when we did 150 and you told the story about the air force prep school i looked at a lessee and i'm like oh i get it now since then we've added so many layers that match that pattern with who you are and what you just described there is beyond what you went into in the book about this yeah because i believe in the book correct me if i'm wrong here what you specifically were saying was i had a mom and two step sisters and a stepdad who didn't like me and i was always trying to win his approval or something

like that but what you just talked about was trying to win your mom's approval which no disrespect to him a lot more serious than him because he wasn't your blood it was it was married into and so i'm trying to imagine the kind of harry potter element you had to you where you're the kid living under the cupboard to one parent and then the weird and that's what i don't have another word for it the weird like love relationship you have with your real parent who's decided she likes the guy she married better than you which i you know we all made a face when you said that because i that doesn't even register to us i understand where you come from i see where i see where i don't think there's any way i can fully understand it but i understand based on as best i can from what you're telling me

I see where your motivations come from. I see where some of your shortcomings that you talked about in here come from. I see where your need to prove to people things comes from. I see where your ego getting in the way sometimes like, fuck this. I'm going to do it my way comes from because in a lot of ways to me, like down to where it started before you even knew what was going on with your dad being killed in a bar. like you are the you're kind of the kid in the corner shaking and trying to figure out all right how do i survive and that kid had to grow up and i have a tremendous as a friend i have a tremendous amount of respect for that well i appreciate you man but again it's not about me i think what's so

powerful to me is that there's many many of us many many people who can relate to those stories many many people who know what it's like to idolize a parent and then not idolize them as you get older many of us who know what it's like to have a parent in our lives as adults that we are we long for, kind of, but we also maintain distance from. That's not uncommon. I really appreciate the fact that you are verbalizing me as a person, because that is absolutely not what the Internet does to any of us. The people who watch you, the people who follow you, the people who criticize you, don't

see you as a person. Same thing with me. Most of the people don't see me as a person. We don't see Joe Rogan as a person. You don't see Will Smith as a person. you don't see the people who appear on screen whether they're on your feet or whether you're paying to see them

and eat popcorn. It's not common. It's not average. It's not typical that people see those people as people. They see them as something else, as the artificial thing they are presented to be. So it took four conversations before you kind of

got into me as a person, but I would have shared the same vulnerability with you on the first time we talked if you chose to. But I understand we have people have to be interested in you before they care about you and what people are interested in even now to this day people are interested in the CIA I am the CIA guy with the hair I get approached a dozen times a day who made you do that you're the CIA guy with the hair yeah I know I know you take credit for it but that's and that's what I am to people and that's fine

right and that's what I and that's what makes it so easy to disappear from people too because once I'm another brown guy without long hair no one's going to fucking recognize me you got to get you some face tats too that's what i'm looking forward to i mean you're gonna take the mask off as well so you're gonna look totally different there we go like i told geo when he was zipped tiny and give it a little pull because the hair is real like i have pulled on it i pulled on in a taco bell yeah a taco bell yeah that's how classy we are julian that's right yeah i don't know what they're putting in that food i don't think rfk would like it but either way either way no but it's like the first the first couple times we talked you're right it's it's

We're talking national security. We're talking, what's it like being a spy on the ground? And frankly, that was You know, probably about seven hours, give or take worth of content in those two episodes We could have done another fucking 20 on that for sure and then when we went and talked with Danny That was the whole point of that because we had Jim in there. We're talking about the national security state and everything So it was really the fourth time where I was like I thought about it before and I'm like I want to know him as a person today Because after when we talked with Danny and Jim like I was saying I walked out like who is this guy? I Because like you and I used to go at it a lot. And it was funny. It was like good content and whatever. But it was also like honestly like the two of us going at it. And I would wonder why there were some things that would just like piss you off more than others. And it didn't make sense to me. And then it all came together. And I'm like, yeah. Because then I, you know, I remember I sit in an armchair. I didn't do any of the shit. I don't really know how. I know what people like you tell me. I know what I can read in books or whatever. But like I didn't live in the middle of that stuff. So there has to be like a separation with that. And someone like you.

who's especially like hard-headed and wants to go get a job done. When you hear someone like me talking about something that I couldn't possibly understand in a way that it's like, well, shouldn't it be this way? Yeah, I can imagine I'd probably have that reaction too where it's like, the fuck do you know. You know, and you do a lot of these shows, and you probably have the same reaction to pretty much everyone. Because there's a lot of people out there who talk about shit that they just don't know. I actually, I spent most of yesterday on set with a very smart lawyer talking about privacy. Okay. Here's something that most people don't know.

You have no right to privacy. Here we go. But seriously, seriously, that term, right to privacy does not exist anywhere. There are only 12 states in all of the United States that have a constitution that say anything about what you can expect with your privacy. The rest of the states don't even have it in their state constitution. Right to privacy doesn't exist in the Bill of Rights. Right to Privacy doesn't exist in the Constitution.

We have founding fathers like Ben Franklin who warned us about how important it was to have privacy. And even though the founding fathers warned us and thought about it, when they documented that shit, they didn't give it to us. Why? Because they know that the reason they won the revolution against Britain was because they had secrets. And they were allowed to keep their secrets. And they hid their secrets from the government. and they didn't want the future people of the United States to be able to hide their secrets from the government.

So there's no right to privacy. We all talk about it, but at best, at best, and even the best privacy attorneys in the world will say that. What were they saying about this? At best, you have an inferred right to privacy that is 100% up to the judge at the moment that a prosecution comes to bear where they determine whether or not

your privacy has been unreasonably or unlawfully abused. That's it. So everything we have in terms of what defines our right to privacy is truly up to the interpretation of the court

on a case-by-case basis because it's not defined anywhere else. This podcast is brought to you by Palantir. All right, yeah, see, this is what I mean. Now, there's going to be

a lot of comments on that because people get upset about that, and my first reaction is get upset about that too, but I also don't want to argue with some things that could be factual. So to look at the, this semantically because you are coming off a conversation where you got to discuss this very

legally yesterday. So it's fresh. Like when you talk about right to right to no search and seizure from the government without a warrant. Unreasonable. Unreasonable search and seizure. Now how to, but so that's exactly it. How do you define what's not reasonable and what is reasonable? Right. This is why I say so openly. And this is what people can can understand from stories like the book, service like what I share in Shadow Cell and any conversation from me. I'm not here to make you happy. I am just here to tell you what is actually true about how the government views its relationship with you. Is it my opinion? Sort of. It's also my experience in what I was trained. My opinion is that a lot of this stuff is fucked up. But my opinion is not what you care about. What you care about is

what's actually different. If you pull it up on your screen right now, do we have simple questions is you can look up. Do we have a right to privacy in the United States? It will most likely come back and say, the right to privacy is complicated. It does not exist in the Bill of Rights. Right. So pull it up. But, and I'm not saying that because I want to one up anybody. It's because it's so important to understand because how many times do you find somebody who argues that we have it when we don't. So what you're saying is technically right because the word that's used here is implies. And I'll read this from the AI on Google, which some people might not trust that. But it says, yes, while not explicitly stated,

the U.S. Constitution implies a right to privacy primarily through Supreme Court interpretations of the first, fourth, fifth, ninth, and fourteenth amendments. And actually, you know what? I'm just thinking of this. And maybe people in the comments section can help me out here. But wasn't there? I hope I'm not getting this name right. Maureen Brown or Marine Dowd or something like that. Wasn't there a New York Times reporter was thrown in prison for like a year for the Scooter Liberty Affair for not giving up her source? or something like that and that was a court interpretation which i thought was fucked up and i think it later got fixed but that i imagine would be an example of what you're talking about where a judge whether they're normal corrupt or whatever there's still a judge they're in that position where they were able to do this thing they were able to imply that her as a journalist had a source where the anonymity of that source did not supersede the government's right to know right and that's that's the most important thing to understand is the government determines what rights we do and don't have. We may not like the way that sounds, but it's the truth.

The government determines what rights you are granted. We might say, we have a right. Well, yeah, you do have a right. Who gave you that right? And then I love the people who argue like, oh, we were granted these rights by the creator. These are core human rights. God given rights. And I was like, you're human.

God-granted rights are not the same for every human around the world. So how do you manage that? There's a practicality and a pragmatic element that we have to respect. Whenever we talk about the government's relationship with the people and vice versa. Well, you had an amazing conversation with John Kyriaku in Danny Jones, 254, which is like, if people haven't seen that podcast, you guys were electric in that. You're two of my, like, just as far as like having an amazing conversation, two of my favorites to talk with for wildly different reasons, by the way.

But I was very impressed with the fact that probably 80% of stuff you guys agreed on, like, almost wholeheartedly. And you wouldn't think that if you heard where John came from on things and where you come from on things. The 20% where you didn't, you know, there were some good fireworks. And one of them where I was totally on John's side, but it was just wild to hear you go through was, and I'm paraphrasing here, was you were saying, you said something along the lines of the U.S. government is what. gives you your freedom or something like that. I don't want to go into all the semantics myself. Why do you say that? And to preface that, why do you say that as a guy who says, A, openly, and I believe you, and we've talked about this before, you're going to leave this country at the first opportunity you get here in the next couple years. You know, B, you took your kids

out of the school system. You homeschool your kids. You don't trust the very system that the government provides to our kids, which is the future of the country. C, you weren't huge on the vaccine and all that like all these other things it would suggest that you look at it the opposite way yet you have that stance why because i what this is a perfect example of what i um what i know versus what i believe right what i know is that when you reverse engineer civil liberties when you reverse engineer rights when you reverse engineer legal construct it all goes back to the same thing definitions that came from the u.s federal government so whether i like it or not is a different thing but the truth is it all comes from there keep in mind that

everything that happens we always run it through the lens of is it constitutional who wrote the constitution the forefathers of the united states who were politicians who were people who became the leaders of the country the government right before the government who wrote the declaration of independence The guys who became the government? Like, it all goes back to the same thing. And even though we do progress and even though we do evolve and even though things change and we don't have sweatshops for children and we don't and we let women vote and we see. You look disappointed on that one when you said that.

Switch shots for children? My children need a job. My children need a job. Like we let women vote. But we have civil rights. Like we have all of these things that we've evolved and we've progressed into. Only because the government turned it into legislation, right? We have to accept that they also have the right to legislate it all away because that's what they do.

Our job is to vote for the people who we trust to make the right legislation. Their job is to actually make the decision. Now, there's a silver lining around this cloud that I don't think people understand. What's that? The government's job is to incentivize people. to come to that country and stay in that country. That's their true job. That's where you have control.

So people who want to leave the United States are just people who have been incentivized to go somewhere else. And people who want to come to the United States are people who have been incentivized to leave their current conditions and come to something they believe is better. That's every country in the world for as long as the countries have existed.

There's always been migration because there's incentives and disincentives for people to stay. or move or go. Just because we're the world's largest superpower, just because we have the U.S. dollar, just because we are the pillar of freedom of the free world,

for some people, that's still not enough incentive for them to leave their home, which is why you have plenty of people who live in their other countries. There are plenty of wealthy people. There are more millionaires leaving the UK to come to the United States than ever before. They're leaving the UK to come here.

Correct, because they see the structure in the UK. and they're incentivized to leave that mess for our mess, which they know is a mess, but it's the best mess. It's a different and better mess than what they're coming from. Likewise, you also have more millionaires in the United States than ever before pursuing second citizenships and golden visas and buying property in other countries. I got a lot of problems with things we're doing here.

I got a lot of problems with the government and the people that we have elected, you know, and all that. But like, you're a guy who's been all over the world. Where is overall, not on a one issue here or one issue there, where would I be luckier to live than here? I mean, I literally wake up some days, and I'm not kidding. I'm like, oh, my God, I'm so happy I was born here. It depends on what you prioritize. It depends on what you prioritize.

So keep in mind, you are a single, unmarried, how old are you, 28? How old are you thinking? 14. However old you are. Unmarried, no children. that I know of run a business but your business is a creation business it's not a product business it's not like you have to worry about tariffs or anything else so in your calculation you wake up every day and you're like thank god I live here there are other

people who who are married with multiple kids maybe they're after maybe they've been through a divorce already and they lost half their net worth in the divorce the kids are in college which costs a lot more than kids that aren't in college and that person might be tied to a that's literally based in the in products products made in China sold to the United States that person could be looking at this situation being like I got to get out of here I can take this business turnkey to Brazil and be fine and still sell on American Amazon right you've you've got to look at it you've got to recognize every person looks at the calculation differently so I don't disagree with your

point of view but it's not any less American for the person who's like I need to go somewhere else so what makes you someone who sells a service as a product. You don't, you don't sell like a physical product or something like that. And as someone who literally can't go to certain countries around the world for the rest of your natural life, however long that may be, what makes you say it is better for me to not be here? I think it's better for me not to be here in the short term. I don't know what's going to happen in the long term. But as I watch what's going to happen, to decide when and if I come back, it's going to be better to do it somewhere else. Why? First, I have an international business

so I can really create more business in any place that I choose to land. My largest audiences are the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia. Anybody who speaks English is someone who can benefit from my services. And that's just in English. Falls here, guys, football season, yard work, maybe even some hunting trips. But let's be honest, staying fresh can always be a challenge. That's why you need to hear about Mando deodorant. From your pits to, well, everywhere else, Mando has high performance odor control and sweat control that actually lasts all day. Forget those colognes that just mask the stink.

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And we'll still be tied to the U.S. dollar. And wherever I go, I can essentially create a second business on the local economy, which is going to give me unlimited visa renewals because all any country wants is somebody to come in and build a business that keeps people employed. You could run a bodega. You'd pass, for sure. And if I knew what a bodega was in the way that you're talking about it, I don't have all sorts of ideas. So it makes sense.

And then I want my children to have a second language. I want my children to have a second passport. I want my children to have the opportunity to see the United States from afar. Yeah. Because from afar, I mean, the United States is a little bit like an ugly girl in a bar. After a couple drinks, it looks really good. But when you first show up, you're kind of like, I'm going to sit on the opposite side of the bar. But again, what about, is it one of those situations where you have to go like this?

And then the girl's not so ugly because all the other girls around them are fucking mega-trolls. It's a lot of different situations, right? It really does matter. Are you looking for a spouse? Are you looking for someone to spend the night with? Columbia. You're looking for somebody to just say something nice to you in the next 15 minutes? Like, what are you looking for?

You got to know. Columbia. Yeah. It'd be a good spot to go. No, but future proofing makes sense to me, especially like trying to pass that on to your kids, have a worldly perspective as well. Like you said, their school can go with them because you guys are homeschooling them. That makes sense and the idea that you would plan to return, I guess, kind of answers the question as a whole for how you still view this place. Even if things are messier than they have been in a while and, you know, are a little rowdy here.

It's important to understand, yeah, it's important to understand that. We are Americans and all Americans have advantages. The question is, do you think that your advantage being an American is better in the United States? Do you think your advantage being American is better somewhere else? Do you think your currency goes further somewhere else? Do you think your health care would be better somewhere else? Do you think that you would have better experiences somewhere else? Do you think education for your children might be better somewhere else?

And if so, we have the right and the freedom to travel, whereas many countries don't give their citizens that freedom. do you worry about going to countries that aren't on your list of like countries I can't go to and not realizing that it is a country that should be on your list of countries you can't go to? Sort of. I'm not the kind of target that most intelligence services want right now. I don't have any gravity. It doesn't make any sense to seize me. So if I went to Armenia, it doesn't make sense for the Russians to come to Armenia just to take me. It doesn't make sense for the Armenian government to take me and pass me over to the Russians. there's no there's no pawn there's no value there wait a minute i don't know if i buy that okay

here's why and you can shoot this down but i want to throw this by you in this book you outline what you and your wife and your wife's going with you as well so you guys are like a tag team right what you and your wife were able to come up with that is now used around CIA widely and has probably been expanded upon number two you also have insight into without saying the name of the country, a very dangerous place with a high GDP that other countries would be interested in. Number three, let's call it what it is. You've run a business for the last seven, eight years, whatever it is, where your job is to get clientele at the high C suites of Fortune 500 companies that are multinational organizations that have all kinds of patents or information or things

that people like you who know how to snoop around have access to, that if I, I were a foreign intelligence service of any country, but particularly powerful country, I'd be very interested in what this Alex Hernandez guy has to say about things. That was your name undercover. But like, do you not see that as a possibility that you might have more value than you are putting on yourself? No, I understand the value that I have. What I'm saying is no one, I don't believe that I meet the warrant for seizing. I don't think for a second that I'd live in Armenia and not be surrounded by Russian friends who want to talk about my background.

But I don't think that anybody would seize me, take me, apprehend me out of a third country, and then take me to their home country, and then in some way, shape, or form seriously affect my life. I was reading an article two weeks ago on a totally separate story that had nothing to do with it where they were talking high level about espionage and the dangers of it. And one of the things that was mentioned in there was how in 2011, 2012, I want to say, check name in the case. comments on that you can probably Google this there was like 10 to 12 people working for CIA who were executed in China right so blatantly executed it's talked about in news stories my ass read it somewhere or whatever and you know I don't remember ever hearing that at the time I don't remember hearing that a few years after it this was like a side mention wasn't even on Wikipedia or something like that I'm sure I could find it there if I really went

looked but like well joe found it there 20 2010 and 2012 killing of CIA sources in china this wasn't like a major thing though right so you know this is just one world power of many but like we've seen what russia does on uk soil on fucking security cameras dumping polonium on guys or whatever like there are places that are as you've talked about before brazen i'm not saying they would do this to you i'm not saying you're wrong and that maybe it's not worth worth it, but like, what if it is? You know, there has to be a percentage possibility there. Maybe it's not high, but, you know, maybe there's a 1% chance. So, like, you know, I'm going to go to fucking Georgia, the country, and get marked. Yeah. There's always a possibility. And what we have

to do, all of us have to do, is decide what actions we take based on the possibilities versus the probabilities. It's worth noting, right, that with this example specifically, those sources that were killed have never been reported to be CIA officers. They've never been reported to be American citizens. They could have been sources, meaning like people on the ground I don't even think could. Well, I mean, if this is a real

demonstrable thing, which I'm not allowed to talk about one way or the other, right? Because it's CIA specific. But a source in common vernacular in the espionage world, a source is usually a national of that target country. So this means however many Chinese people, people were killed. And those Chinese people were committing, according to the Chinese government,

espionage, which is punishable by death. Yeah, this said, and again, you can't comment on this. I'm just going to say this part here just for semantics. This says casualties 30 to plus killed or captured. And then it talks about specifically 18 to 20 sources were killed. Now, casualties includes people that aren't killed and people that are, you know, hurt. But, you know, what I was reading was they talked about 10 to 12 people working for CIA who were killed. And the way that it was i'm going to go back and look at that afterwards i'll find that article the way it was stated my mind did not go to sources whereas the full number here 30 plus this would absolutely there's no way there were 30 case officers killed in china in a two year period that's like there's no way

that happened but like this would absolutely include what you're talking about which is that there's a high proportion of it where it is just people on the ground who you know this is the same thing that's happening in iran right now right after what happened when Maasad launched drones from within the Iranian border and they neutralized leadership and the United States flew in with stealth bombers. In Iran, Iran's on a hunt right now for Iranians who they believe are sources of information from Assad.

And I think if you look in the last, I don't know, last 45 days you're gonna find dozens, if not more, that were at least arrested and possibly executed. Probably all headed that way, for sure. All headed that way. But, yeah, but I mean, what are they actually letting the headlines know? What are they sharing right now? I don't know.

Yeah, those guys are probably missing some fucking fingernails and teeth. But the whole thing is a game. Espionage is a game. And it's a game of how much value do you have and how much value do you not have? Are you valuable now or later? Are you increasing or decreasing in value? What's your strategy? What's your move?

And for someone like me who's been out, who does not have access to current secrets, I have historical knowledge only. is it worth creating an international incident over me if I fly my dumb ass to Ukraine to go speak to the Ukrainian government then I'm a fucking idiot if I take a trip to Taiwan and I decide to just go be a tourist in Taiwan

and go visit like the anti-China shrine yeah that's a dumb ass move right let's bring a free Hong Kong sign there too like these are certain things go Uyghurs right these are there are some very bad ideas that would be worth an international incident, right? Because now Russia can say that they arrested a CIA officer in Ukraine and China can say they arrested a CIA officer with anti-Chinese sentiments in Taiwan. Those things make sense. But if I go to Hungary, does it make sense for Russia to pull me from Hungary, even though those two get along? What's the claim? A former CIA officer touring Hungary, now we have him in Russia? No, it doesn't make any sense. And it's going to piss off the United States because it's a huge violation of American citizenship. We actually have patent here right now.

and I might ask you this just because you were talking to, I see you're not over there. You're talking about this just before. There's a new book that came out about Evan Gershowitz. Is that right? Yeah, the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, so a book came out. It's called, it's called Swap.

And it's basically the Evan Gershkevich story, the Wall Street Journal reporter. And it's interesting to hear you talk about this because they talk about how it's all intertwined with like Paul Whalen and Brittany Griner and kind of how, how the Cold War era like spy swaps sort of emerge now and how, how because the U.S. changed their policy from not negotiating to now negotiating for people, Putin was like, okay, well, let's do it. And so it's interesting to hear you discuss this because, for example, Brittany Griner, they released, there was, when Britney Griner got locked up,

there was another guy, Paul Whalen, who was also locked up at the same time. And Biden got a lot of flack because, like, Brittany Griner was an athlete, and Paul Whelan, you know, was some white dude that was a former Marine, and Britney Griner got out like that. And Biden took a lot of heat for that, but the reason why, and this is relevant to what you were talking about, is that Putin and the Russians said,

that guy is a spy. So only if you give us a spy will we let him go. But they let Britney Griner go from Maria Butina, and that was a quick swap. Wasn't it Victor Boot? Well, I think Victor Boot was who they let go for Paul Whalen, I believe. Or maybe it was Victor Booth. Oh, no, the can.

I think it was the other way around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they gave up somebody for Britney Griner, but they forced Paul to confess to being a spy, even though he wasn't in Russia. And then in return, Biden, everybody was like, oh, he's a white guy. You know, that's why they're not giving him up. That's why Britney Griner got the attention because Biden's a, you know, a Democrat. When in reality, Putin, I mean, Russia gets a say too. And they wanted a spy in return. So I'm curious from your perspective, like, you know, you don't think that you could kind of fall into the same sort of thing where it's like that, you know, they require a spy. it's like, well, we got a spy now. It's just, it's pieces, right?

It's, it's leverage. Correct, but you got to keep in mind, was Paul Whalen apprehended in Russia? Yes. Oh, that's, that's the big difference. Yeah. That's the big difference. Is it worth creating an international incident to reach into another third country, especially a country that might be NATO or a country that might be neutral or something else,

right, to just to seize what you need? If it's a true CIA, if it's a true CIA officer, right, for example, in Shadow Cell, the operational structure that we developed, which is why Putin is doing what he's doing now, the operational structure we developed was called a cleansing route, meaning we're going to operate in one place, but we're going to actually live in a different place. And then when we travel between where we live and where we operate, we go through a third place. We do the dock swap in the third place. We change alias in the third place.

We make all references of travel one or the... the other, binary. So either it's traveled to and from our place of living or it's traveled to and from our place of operating so that no matter who reverse engineers us, they never see a connection between all three spaces. Right. When you've built that kind of operation, 100% it becomes worth it to palladium poison somebody in the third location. Because you have no legal grounds to stand on. You have no way of dodging the international incident if you apprehend them from a third country. You're basically doing what we did to Osama bin Laden. You're invading Pakistan. You're invading Pakistan, an ally.

Well, they got some explaining it, though. They got in trouble for that, so you're right? So you're invading a third country to apprehend a threat that's a threat to you, but not threat to that country. And then you have to explain it on the back end. When you have your operational outcome completed, when, you know, bin Laden's dead, who cares? Now you're like, ah, Pakistan, we're sorry. We'll spend the next two years saying we're sorry. And here's a little bit of extra aid.

And here's a little bit of this. And here's a little bit of that. And here's some favorable trading agreements. And you're good. but when in when it's something where you're caught in the act it's a whole different ballgame yeah it's also like the bin Laden one's kind of an extreme example it is fucking Osama bin Laden you know right which matters to us he was living next to maybe I'm misremembering this tell me if I am but he was literally living within like eyesight of their military base it's like our equivalent of fucking Fort Brack yes yes I've heard the same thing like they knew they knew they knew it was there Yeah, it's great. Yeah, there it is. Osama bin Laden was living in a large compound at Badabad, Pakistan, less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy, West Point. So if you're going to go into a third country to carry out an operational objective, you better have a really good reason because you know you're going to have to defend it afterwards. That was the very first clip I ever made to you. That was the first one that went where you were talking about you'd be in a third country so that you can go into a second country to get into the main country.

And you can clean the route the whole way, man. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's, uh, it's just so much fun to me. Espionage is so much fun to me because it's real world chess. And you know that they're going to find you and you know they're going to back track you. And you know that they're going to look all the way back through the flight records. They're going to find you. They're going to find you in fucking, you name it.

Let's say that you're, you're American living in Canada, targeting Russia, traveling through whatever, Sweden. They're going to find you going back to Sweden. They're going to see that it's a dead end. They're going to know it's operational. But there's nothing they can do about it. What happened in that last mission at the farm? Because like you said, you were saying this a while ago, but you went through the entire thing.

Every part of CIA training, surveillance, detection, regular surveillance, going into a city, doing all the stories you've told in the past. And then something happened on the last one that then eventually led to someone on the board not liking you and stopping you from being a full case officer. Yeah. So in the last and one of the final exercises, you have what's known as a multi-meeting exercise where you develop the full life cycle of a target source. So whereas other exercises are different lifespans or they're like segments of the lifespan of a asset development case, this one was a full lifespan. So from beginning to end. And shortly, like right towards the end of the actual developmental cycle, you're supposed to learn how to pitch and recruit. and start setting up clandestine meetings with a target and clandestine meetings are different than public meetings and there's all sorts of tradecraft stuff in there that that we can talk about but in that meeting in that session i let my target take control of when and how we would meet which is a clear violation of who's in control of the relationship but at the time i was so excited because i thought i was like nailing it just like anybody who's ever been excited

because they thought they were doing a good job and then they fucked up at the end. I thought I was doing a good job. And then as we were kind of agreeing to the terms of our relationship, I let him take control of when and where we were going to meet next. Because he's not a real asset, he's a role player. As a role player, he could take that back to the other role players and say, my guy fucked up. Here's what he did wrong.

And then to teach me the mistake that I made, they set up an apprehension and an interrogation for me. So when I went to the next meeting, I was essentially arrested in character and then I was interrogated in character by my own teachers and my own staff. It's kind of strange to think about I don't know, this one was different

than other stories like when they literally drop you in a city and yes, there are role players but you're running from them and so you literally really have to steal things out of real stores like it's real. Right. Whereas this one, the person is a trainer who has to put on an Academy award-winning performance to make this real enough for you to feel like you're

actually playing the psychological game. Like, it's a very strange thing. It's a strange thing, but you also have to remember that we live in a false reality the whole time we're at the farm. We have no access to the outside world. The outside world has no access to us. The only time we exist in the outside world is when we get a pass to leave the base where the farm is held, or when we literally carry out an exercise outside of the borders, of that base when we go into a downtown city area to meet somebody in a coffee shop. But it's not like we're going to have a conversation with the barista or meet somebody new on the walk because we're running a surveillance detection route the whole way there.

We're running a surveillance detection route the whole way back. So we're never leaving our bubble of reality. So it's the weirdest thing to admit to. When you go into a contrived space for about 14 days, you're kind of chuckling. under your breath like, oh, this is so cheesy. Like, look at the, look at the bad tape player news broadcast that they're playing. And they've played that same news broadcast for the last 20 years. And look at how cheesy it is. And here's like the fifth time that we're reading a newspaper that's just printed out of the printer in the office. And all these fake incoming

sources of information. And you're like, oh, this is kind of like cheesy. For about 14 days, that shit's cheesy. For 14 days, it's about 14 seconds when you took us in that fucking warehouse. that was never cheesy because because you start to adapt to the reality that you're in so after 14 days of you know you eat at the cafeteria you do this you do that whatever else you've still got months of training ahead of you so by the time you're four months in the fucking newspaper is the printout from the office and the bad tracking that's happening on the tape player is the real news story from today and it's all anybody talks about and everything that you're doing. doing inside your station, inside your studio, inside your peer group, it's all so real. So when an instructor pulls you into a classroom to interrogate you, it's fucking real. It's the, it is so strange, man, but think you've had the experience now to know, like, you knew you weren't going to get hurt. Back in the back of your brain, but in the front of your brain, you started convincing

yourself of something very different. Oh, there were a few times where I was like, oh, I don't know, not sure what we saw. up for here when they were I didn't know they were coming up we'll talk about it later I want to get into this now but when they for example when they were coming over to check the pulse on the fingers which you know I didn't know that was like a thing I thought he was I thought Trevor was about to break my fingers and I was like oh fuck I need those now wait a minute I was I was almost like cut but I couldn't do that because you're so disoriented that's maybe it's different like when you're being kidnapped right away or whatever but I'm almost now that you explain it I'm

I'm almost surprised it would take 14 days just to kind of get yourself immersed believing that atmosphere because the human mind, to your point, does adapt quickly to surroundings. It's about how it's resourced, right? When you are well-resourced, and we were all very well-resourced, remember, we were going into multiple months of training. And in those multiple months of training, we're exhausted by the end and were cracking by, like, the last 30 to 45 days. but they need us to make it through hundreds of days of training.

So we come in well-resourced, and for the first few months, you stay well-resourced. You get full nights of rest, you get really good meals, you get, you know, you're taught academically something in a classroom that you can adapt to, you can take on, you can practice. So you're kind of like walking, or you're, what's it called, crawling, before you can walk so that you have enough energy barely to run at the end. Right. That's why it took, that's why for 14 days we were fine, because we were well resourced, we knew enough.

We could still remember what happened five days ago. We still knew that there was a new movie coming out. By month four, you have no fucking idea what the new movies are that are coming out. You don't even know that there are movies out because there are no movies that get advertised on the internal CCTV. And how, was it four months total?

It's many months, it's a classified number. Classified number. It's a classified number, so I can't share it, but there's all sorts of easy Google searches you can do that will tell you what's popular. It's so funny that like people on the canal go Google that, but you just can't say it right now. Well, what I love is that I promise you CIA is going to be watching this.

They're going to watch all the promo stuff for the book. Yeah. And they're going to literally hear you say, like you said earlier. I've been talking to you for a long time and you've never explained these details. Like, fucking there you go, CIA. I told you I wasn't doing it. I was paid to say that. I just want to point that out.

Gave me $1,200 and I accepted. There's the bus. And I work for Russia. Just kidding. Don't ever. Don't ever air that. Don't, don't air that too full. are because that'll be taken out of context real fast.

But either way, either way. So you got in, when you get to this last one, you've been immersed into it for however fucking long you were. And you describe it. You were feeling really good about yourself. You felt like, I'm in control. This guy's doing exactly what I want. And then, you know, the air gets sucked out because, like you said, they end up abducting

you and taking you back for interrogation. And it was like, you describe it in a way in your book, this is almost like, you're like, fuck like just got the wind knocked out of you and you know there's nothing else after this were you thinking to yourself at the end of that interrogation like oh my god they're not going to let me be a case officer now there was a there was a big piece of me that was thinking that as time passed as like hours turned to days that became the stronger thought but if uh the closest thing i can compare it to is anybody who's ever been on the cusp in college between making it or not making it to the next year passing or not passing a class and you're like did I get that C minus or did I

get that B plus? Did I hit the score that I needed or am I fucked? That's really what it felt like. I was like, okay, I fucked up. I know I fucked up. I know this is bad. But is this like D minus bad or is this like C plus bad? How bad is this? Because I don't know because it's all subjective to the fucking instructors. And I know that if enough instructors like me, they're going to make it more C plus. And if enough instructors don't like me they're going to make it fucking d minus right so i don't know where i land right now on this pivotal massive exercise that was worth the majority of my you know of my college grade if you will so it's super super parallel to what we've all experienced in college and and that's where i sat like am i about to graduate or do i have to do summer school except there is no summer school so am i about to

graduate or am i about to spend the rest of my life without a degree where is gee he in the program during all this because she became a targeter so how does how does what's her track she aced everything yeah gee he was a superstar and she's

she's smart enough not to appear on the internet very often that's that's how smart she is right so um case officer training is probably four times

longer than any other training that happens at the agency longer than analyst training linguist training um staff operations training tech training anything because there's so much of it

that goes into keeping you secure keeping your assets secure keeping the information secure and then how to operate in different different environments so ghi went through her training course months before or she started her training course while i was still at the farm and finished months before i was done but you guys came in at the same time okay we started just a totally different track correct totally different parallel track she's a targeter yeah yeah but

is that under another subcategory or is it literally a category just called targeting exactly so under the national clandestine service which is now known as a director of operations of operations. You have multiple title tracks underneath there. There's special skills officers. Those are kind of your paramilitary guys as well as some other various special skills like doctors. Then you have your targeters. You have your mission planners, which are called staff operations officers. You have your tech ops officers. You have your logistics officers. You have your budget and finance officers. You have your targeting officers. So all of them fall under the clandestine services. And they all have their own different training tracks underneath with the idea

being that once you kind of finish your training track, you're able to all play nicely together in the real world. But like what a budget and finance officer does in the real world is completely different than what a targeter does in the real world. Of course. So you're under the case, you were at the farm to be under the case officer part, and then they come out to you at the end and say, board didn't pass you. Yep.

So. So you go back, like, it's the walk of shame, dude. It's the, it's a horrible feeling because everybody else there is passing. By the time you get to the end, the real riffraff get cut about halfway through. The people who really can't keep up get cut at what's called the first round of murder boards halfway through. So the second half, everybody's close, everybody's friends, everybody can do the tasks. It's just whether or not you meet the subjective desire of people wanting to work with you.

And just like you said, like, I'm kind of a dick. People don't want to work with me. So I'm not surprised they got cut at the end in hindsight. But at the time, I was, I thought I was pretty shit hot. So I get cut and it's the walk of shame. I call Jehe and I tell her what happened and she's like, I can't believe that happened. In my group, in my classroom, only one other person got cut out of the, say, 25 of us that were there. And he was so devastated.

He just walked into the woods and didn't come back. He took a bottle of scotch and a fat cigar and walked into the woods. Like at the farm. At the farm. And the fucking security people had to go find him after he didn't show up. for like the rest of that day or the next morning's checking or in it and he wasn't in his hotel room because we all live in like this mock hotel room

he just walked off the fucking campus and then was deemed like what's the word I'm looking for psychologically unfit unfit for retention yeah I don't think they use the word psychologically but unfit for retention so they took him out of the NCS and they're like hey would you rather do something else in the agency

like would you rather make fake passports or be a courier or something like that and he was like i'm fucking done with this and he left and he went and created an incredible life for himself as like a uh he uh goes back and forth between miami and paris putting together these badass nightclub parties and uh and so he works for fucking ditty this you're telling me this was a CIA operation i feel like he made a better choice than uh than i did because he's he's been making a lot more money for much longer time we had that on camera that wow yeah geo was a little that one.

I do. All right. That's a rabbit hole. I feel like that was staged. I feel like he walked off into the woods and they're like, oh, Jimmy's crazy. And they go in, they're like, son, you ready to work for the interracency now?

And it's, did he like, yeah, get over here, boy. Back in the day, back in 2007. That's so funny. Miami to Paris. Wow. Okay. So did it all, after they say no to you

and you walk back to the hotel or whatever, was there I don't know it was tough to tell what was like 30,000 in the air feet in the air you writing it now thinking about it versus what you were thinking in the moment were you immediately thinking those things to yourself

like I'm my own worst enemy I got in my own way my dick got too big and that's why this happened no just like most of us don't think that when we fuck up yeah I'm thinking this place is so unfair I've got to escape the shame I'm not gonna like we all get bust in and we all get bust out like it's a fucking summer camp right and when we get bust out there's no

fucking way i'm going to sit on a bus with hundreds of other people who have all passed and they're all going to be talking about their next assignment and their first assignment and they're all going to be making plans to talk to their their assignment officers and the office that they're going back to is and i don't have any of that shit because i'm going back into a bucket of of people where the question is do we even retain these people that's where i'm going back to i'm going back to check into an HR office under an HR officer who's going to be like, we're going to see if we can find a place for you to land, right? What the fuck? And in my mind, I'm like, I've finished all of the training. I've been through the hardest thing you guys can throw at me. And it was just whether

or not seven fucking old men, all of which were men, seven old men chose whether or not to keep me on as a case officer, certify me as a case officer, or not certify me as a case officer. And You're telling me that because one of them voted on the wrong side, that I'm not only not a case officer, but I'm not even useful, not even worth keeping? Like, it was a horrible feeling. So all I was like is I got to get the fuck away from this, and I'm, I'm on my own. I got to get away from this. I can't trust these people.

If this is how the whole system works, I can't trust this place, I got to find a way to make my own life. But I'm in this serious relationship with Ghee, who's a fucking rock star? And when I come back, she understands the system. She understands the process. She understands how flawed it is. I take this long kind of minute to not go back to CIA. They're smart enough to grant us an extended leave after we finish the farm. They give us 60 days off.

And they're like, you have 60 days off to kind of prepare yourself for your next assignment or to get over your fucking hissy fit when you don't make it. And that's exactly what I did for my 60 days. And gee, he was just there with me every step of the way. supporting me one way or the other, and I just, at the end of those 60 days, I was like, if I do anything else, if I go work for Booz Allen Hamilton, if I go be a barista, if I go do something else, I'm going away from Jehe. So I might as well go sit in that little pool at the HR office and see what shit job I get. So this, we're going to explain how this happens in a little

bit, but this ends up coming full circle. And you end up getting to do these things under a different title effectively and you get to test the same kind of thing in the field in the scariest of ways and pass the tests with flying colors which I think is cathartic for you however in the short term at this point before any of that happens I can only go off what you wrote here but it would seem to me that minus you know some regular human flaw people on the board don't like you and relationships and stuff like that this was a situation where they probably looked at you they probably looked at all the other stuff you did at the farm and you probably had very high grades they looked at you physically and said this dude can pass as every race known to man including like

if i pulled your eyeballs a little bit asian like you could do literally anything like you're and you got a lot of the right emotions the anxieties all of it like you you're like almost an ivf test tube like genetic baby of what they would look for right in a case officer but there's one thing that's a problem and that is you had a high probability of being a star on that wall because you didn't follow orders you were exactly you were a cowboy and you and when you wanted to do something you would do it and just go a thousand miles an hour and it cost you on the last drill and they're like well i that might cost them in the field so in some ways that could have been it do you think that that could be an explanation

I absolutely do, but it took me a long time to come to any explanation where CIA was acting in my best interest. Right. Just like every American out there is going to take a minute before you stop to realize that CIA might be acting in your best interest, right? So that was the same thing that I had. The benefit that I had is that I had my wife, who was my girlfriend or fiancé very shortly thereafter, was a true believer. She still is a true believer. True believer, right? where she still looks at CIA and she still feels more like pity than she feels outrage.

And she still looks at CIA and she sees more honor than she sees frustration, right? She is very much. So she doesn't like JFK. JFK? Oh, I get you now. Oh, it took a minute. Took a minute. Took a minute.

I don't know. I don't know my wife. We're going to have to ask her. Yeah, you're going to have to ask her. But my point with all that is just she planted that seed and she kind of kept trying to fertilize it for a long. long time. Like, they did you a favor. They did you a favor. Especially when we found out, we found out what my assignment would have been had I graduated. If I would have graduated and certified, they would have sent me immediately to a war zone, to your exact point. And then because

they didn't, I ended up getting sent into Africa instead. Because as silly as this is, Africa is where you send all your trouble children, because nobody cares about what happens in Africa. Nobody's, there's not a lot of money in Africa. No matter how much you, screw up, you can't really make a big splash in most of Africa, right? They're not going to send me to the sweet places in Nigeria. They'll send me to some shithole place somewhere else. So I end up supporting, just like to your exact point, he's got all the makings, he's got all the physical attributes, he's got the scores, he understands the skills, he's just not a case officer. Well, once you're not among case officers, all of a sudden having all the same skills as a case officer without

the title becomes a big advantage. Where did, so they put you at SOO. So can you explain like because the way i i think a lot of this had to get skipped over in the book because you had to the yeah just the story so let's get to some of the things that aren't in the book here when when you become an s s an s o the way you described it this was one of those buckets you talked about a few minutes ago it's like you are all the mission support you very often are working from langley and you're working with all the case officers in the field and you don't go into the field a lot but you ended up coming up with some ideas that then led to them being like oh yeah put this dude in the field and that doesn't happen often

It doesn't happen often, correct. So a SOO is called a staff operations officer. So if you, the official term for case officer is actually called operations officer, OO. Case officer is really just the more common term outside of CIA. Inside of CIA, you're called an ops officer, OO. A staff operations officer is essentially the staff support to operations officers. You're supposed to know everything that they know, understand their needs, and then essentially look around corners to make sure they get what they need before they ask for it. So you're getting

them money before they ask for it. You're getting them alias stocks before they ask for it. You're anticipating all of their needs because you know what they're going to need, but you're not a direct competitor career-wise because you're not out there doing the job. So they make me a staff operations officer because the board, the staff operations officer board, different than the case officer board, the sue board understood that I was a shoe in for a staff operations officer. I could speak the lingua. I could speak the lingo. All of the next generation of case officers were coming out of my class. So they already knew that I was going to know more than half of them. So they're like, this guy is a shoe in. Let's just set them up there. And I did a good job because they were from my

class. They knew I was good at what I did. They listened to me. I trusted them. I wanted to keep them safe. I only hated the leadership. I didn't have any problem with the men and women who were out there doing the job. So I poured myself into helping them and kind of pissing off everybody who was a leadership above me. And one of the things that people don't know about CIA is there's often pressure back and forth between what people want and need in the field and what headquarters wants to give them the field needs money headquarters doesn't want to give you money they want to retain their money so they can make what if somebody else needs it later on right right they need new docs well how are we going to get you those docs and what's the logistical

headache and blah blah blah blah blah so there's this weird sort of push and pool there's like a conflict between the field and headquarters all the time and i was sitting on the headquarters side supporting the field. So anybody who worked with me didn't have that pressure because I would fight that fight for them. That made me a well-liked sue in the field, but not well-liked at headquarters. And I didn't really care for a long time. So I went, I had success because I would make sure that my case officers got what they needed. That success in the field speaks more than your reputation at Langley for a few years. So I ended up having a lot of operations that came my way where I got to exercise my skills and exercise my knowledge and exercise my relationships

across human trafficking, counterproliferation, counterterrorism, money smuggling, like all the bad shit. But I never got to do anything that was high profile or high threat because leadership couldn't trust me. On the other side of this, my wife is doing the exact opposite. She's getting all the high profile, all the high sensitive operations that a targeter can get because, the leadership trusted her through and through. And targeters were carved out so they really couldn't talk directly to the case officer. So they would send dossiers and they would send targeting packages and leaders would decide whether targeting packages are kinetically acted upon or targets of intelligence. And then the case officer would be told what to do from there. But

the targeter was cut out of it. So she had this dream job for her of living in a skiff, in a in a larger skiff, in a larger skiff, in a contained building, and never being bothered, right? Outside of people... She's got to form patterns all day. All day. Find patterns, form patterns, and push, push, push information out. And she loved it. And that was a

job that was really, I don't know if the right word is invented, but it metamorphosized post-9-11. Correct. Before 9-11, it didn't really exist. You know, minus the technology that we have now or even then that we did

didn't have pre 9-11, why would in a job like that, which is basically, to put it at a high level and correct me from wrong here, it's like taking a lot of data and making sense of it. Why wouldn't that exist? Like, why didn't that exist pre-9-11? Because it's very expensive. Hiring a person whose job is just to create 25-page targeting packages like they do in the movies, right? Here's the person's favorite drink. Here's where they hang out. Here's where they went to college. Here's their second roommate and what their roommate did. like those packages prior to 9-11 were unnecessary they're very very expensive they're very slow and then even though you might build a package on a person that's not the same thing as having somebody successfully recruit the person it just gives them a benefit for the first meeting after 9-11 congress came in and basically said hey CIA and FBI you guys fucked up we're going to create the DNI we're going to flood the DNI with money and the DNI's responsibility is to staff you guys up to like 300% your current size. Well, now they're flush with money, flush with billets to hire people. And this idea that was an idea for the previous director, hey, let's create these operational support professions. All of a sudden, that idea took off and got funded. So now professional targeters didn't ever exist.

They were something that kind of accidentally happened. Well, now my wife became one of the first professionally cultivated targetors. And they've gone on to be very successful since because CI continues to be well funded, until what I most recently read about Tulsi Gabbard, but they continue to be pretty well funded and it became worth it because the success rate, when a case officer targets a target with a targeting package, the success rate is, it's multiple echelons higher than when they just wing it and go shake hands at a diplomatic event. all right so we'll get into some good examples of how gee he was able to leverage or targeting expertise to help the sell out here but in in the meantime when you were saying you became soo and they sent you to like kind of support a lot of african missions and stuff like that what was the context of the first time without going into exact details where they said all right you got to actually come here you're not going to be at the desk you're coming here and going undercover and doing something so there's a there's a culture at CIA where everybody hates being at Langley. And it's true. It's a very real culture. If you're at headquarters, you're kind of second class, you're a second class citizen. You don't know what it's like to be in the field. You don't know the realities of the field. You can't keep up with the tempo in the field. So you're second class. And the real tip of the

spear is in the field. So because of that culture, the men and women who operate in the field always have this Benny, this reward they can give you, which is basically called a TDII, a temporary duty yonder. They'll invite you to come be part of the field operation. And even if all you do is come out to the field and sit in an office for five days, you get to not be a second-class citizen for that week. And as you build up those TDIs,

your actual career category sees you differently because every day that you spend in the field counts towards an early retirement. So if you get enough days in the field, you can actually qualify to retire 10 years earlier than anybody else. Right? It's not, you don't need 10 years of time in the field. You need two years of time in the field. So if you can get two years of time in the field, you can retire 10 years earlier than anybody else at the same rate.

So everybody takes these TDIs. Everybody wants them. Everybody loves them. I didn't really want to go on TDI because I was never going to retire from that fucking place. I just wanted to be with my, my fiancee, the girl who gets me, the girl who's a rock star, the girl who's cool. everything else I was doing was just so that I could be with her. They start sent, the field starts requesting me to come out to the field. My wife, my fiancee, of course, at the time is encouraging me to go. She's like, you got to go. Like, you got to go. Just show your face. It's going to be good for your

career. They like you. They want you there. And don't forget that the people that you're helping in the field today will become the leaders of tomorrow. And they will decide your future then. Again, she's wise. It makes sense. So that's when I started going out. And sometimes I would go out and I would do nothing. I would just sit around in the office. Sometimes I would go out and I would procure a cell phone or a SIM card or like drop money somewhere. Like I would do little things that I could do because of my suit, my training at the farm, but I wasn't qualified to ever recruit an asset. That's what a case officer and operations officer is technically certified to do, is to say, hey, why don't you work for us? And in exchange for you giving us secrets, we'll give you

whatever. Johnny Walker, Green Label or cash or whatever else. That's the only thing I couldn't do according to the certification rules. So every time I went out in the field, they liked me, they wanted to reward me, and they love the fact that I would go do the shit jobs that no case officer wants to do. No case officer wants to run a 90-minute SDR to buy a cell phone and then another hour-long SDR to come back just so that they can have an extra cell phone that's off the record. But when I go out into the field, I can do that shit all day. protection route you're talking about correct so there was every time i went out people loved having me there every time i went out i got to meet cool people i had more fun than i expected i would have

and that built up over the first two years of my career okay so you're working primarily across africa when you get cold well before before i get there was there a party you it seems like you and Ghee have like an amazing relationship and everything and actually have strongly support each other's careers her it's clear like her advice to you and how to handle some of these situations was you took it and trusted it and it worked out and like you encouraged her to continue being a rock star and all that

but like as a human being was there ever a part of you that felt like you during this time period like you were a second fiddle to her? Yep. Yes. But it was a comfort. It was a comfort because I didn't have, my ego was crashed. I didn't look at myself and see myself accurately.

I looked at myself and saw myself kind of victimized. But at the same time, I was like, this is easy. This is easy work. I don't have to do more than eight hours a day. I don't really have to stress out about bringing work home. Like she would work 12, 14 hours a day sometimes because she cared so much. I didn't care that much. I was like, fuck it.

I'm going to go hit the gym. I'm going to go get us some takeout Thai food. And by the time you get home, I'll feed you, we'll watch a movie, we'll bang it out. We'll go to bed. Like, it's a good deal for me. And that was how I viewed life kind of day to day. And just like most 27, 28-year-olds, I didn't really have a clear vision of the future. I was like, this is pretty good.

We'll keep doing this. And it's not getting worse. Might as well keep doing this. And one day, an opportunity will present itself. And one day we'll figure it out. And you always have this question of what's the next assignment. Every two to four years, you can get reassigned. And my wife was getting reassigned like every year, year and a half.

So she was climbing the ladder quick. So I was like anything could happen the next two years. So let's wait and see what happens. Maybe we go to France. Maybe we go to Rio de Janeiro. Maybe we go to, you know, New Zealand and live there for next tour. Who knows? Who knows where we're going to go?

But let's just, let's go. So second fiddle was a very convenient. place to be. You didn't have to practice as much as first fiddle. And you still had it in your mind, if I heard you correctly a few minutes ago, like you would just work there, forever? Well, not forever. I never thought it would be forever. But there was nothing better I could do right then. So I always, what I always thought would happen, what I always was kind of talking to Ji about, was that she would get some sweet assignment overseas. And I would quit, officially, follow her and then become an English teacher

wherever we went. And then she would spend however long she was going to spend there while I'm building our local network as an English speaker, not an Intel network, but an actual professional network. And then she could quit. And then we could just live where we want to live. And we had our favorites. Like we knew South Korea is a great place to be an English teacher. So we're like oh, maybe we'll go to South Korea. Nigeria is a great place to be an English

teacher. Croatia is a great place to be an English teacher. Croatia's sick. So we were like if we could if if we get one of these assignments then I'll become an English teacher and I'll build our escape plan for two years and that was always something she was willing to entertain. So what how did Falcon come up? Falcon is the country you refer to in this very red book about a country with very high GDP. Your word's not mine in Asia. How'd you get pulled in there? So there's a multiple kind of answers to that.

So as people read the book, they'll discover, partly we were pulled into a conversation with leadership because they wanted to create a new way of handling operations. They wanted to find a new way to collect information. The reason they wanted to collect information a different way was because what the world didn't know is that CIA had a mold. So there was a mole in their midst, in a leadership-level position, who based- In that specific part?

Like in that specific part, in the area that controlled Falcon, which is a very sensitive area. It's so sensitive, it's got its own office called Falcon House inside CIA. The most sensitive areas are all houses. They have their own house. Is it actually codename falcon house, or didn't you change, I was going to say, you changed even the name of the code name. Correct.

So every synonym, I'm sorry, every, every cryptos, that we have in the book is different than the kryptonum that we have in real life to further kind of insulate against anybody using it. But Falcon House had a problem. They needed a new way of creating operations. So they called us in and they said, hey, lucky you guys, you're going to go create new operations for us. What we didn't realize is that we were going to go create new operations because they had a mole and they were trying to use us to flush the mole out. Because if we started creating new operations, the mole would want access to our operations. And then that would make the mole make some kind of mistake that they would be able to catch, snare, and use as part of a case. And this is just one mole that you guys knew existed, but hypothetically, there's other moles in other, not even just here, but in other types of houses that exist at all times that you don't even know about. Absolutely. We have a rule of thumb at CIA that every time you find one mole, you have to assume that there's four others. So that there's a, there's five at any given time. And that's what kind of inspires us to keep up the hunt. Always be looking over your

shoulder, always be speculative, always be suspicious, always be thinking that if you found one, that's proof, there's more. But you can't ever trust anyone doing that, anyone to your left or right, whether they've been in gun fights with you or not. You have to assume anyone, including the people around, you have to assume you could be a mole for somebody. And that's the culture at CIA. You don't trust anyone. You don't trust anyone to back your career up. You don't trust anyone to back you up in the field. You don't trust anyone not to be a double agent. You are always kind of watching and thinking

what have they done most recently is there a change in their behavior what could explain the change that I see but you're always suspicious and even at the end of all of this effort just like you were saying earlier one of our closest friends

suspicious was skeptical of us for trying to leave CIA apparently you're not allowed to do that that's probably why didn't know how to do it for sure It's like, wait a minute, no one leaves here. So we get called in by leadership, and they say we want you to build a new type of operation. You were called in separately, right? So you didn't know Ghi was being called in at the same time?

Right. We were called in separately based on the leadership that we had at the time. And then after we both got called in, we went back home and we were like, or basically over a phone call. And we found out that we had both had the same conversation at almost the same time by our two different supervisors. Now, even though you both work for CIA, you felt that wasn't something that, Is classified specifically for either of you to share that? Because the need to know is defined by the operational area. So when we were briefed and said, hey, we want to bring you to Falcon House.

That's not classified information about Falcon House. So we can go back to each other and say, I just got offered a job at Falcon House because we're not divulging anything sensitive to each other. What we didn't expect is that we were both going to go back and have been offered jobs at the same time. so then we got to have a conversation where we were like hey falcon house knows they're approaching both of us and falcon house knows that we're engaged and falcon house knows that this is the date of our wedding because we've had to clear all this stuff with the entire CIA so they're not stupid why are they doing this why are they bringing us both in and more importantly why are they bringing me in as a dumbass

it makes sense why they'd hire my wife because she's shit hot but why would they bring in me I've never done sensitive operations. I was never deemed qualified for that. And I've had success in the shitholes of the world. Wouldn't it make sense to keep me in the shitholes of the world? Does this change your title, too, technically, when you do that? So you're not an S-O-O- anymore? No.

It kind of cements the title because the positions that are created are positions defined by title. So what Falcon House did is they basically created a whole new title, a whole new operation. that was staffed with a sue and staffed with a targeter. So where did they call you from? Like take me there that day where they're like you got to show up over here to this thing.

So every office, CIA has two buildings. Each building has, I think, seven floors. There might only be six floors in the new headquarters building, not counting basement floors. Al-Qaeda might be watching this, bro. Come on.

Well, they can also see that on Google Maps. But there's two buildings and there's multiple floors. And depending on where, you're assigned geographically, you sit in a different floor in a different part of the different buildings. We communicate with each other all day through a encrypted messaging system that lives on our computers. It's not that different from like WhatsApp or signal. It's just on your computer. And then you communicate all day to anybody who is on the same index for CIA as you are. So if you

need to talk to somebody in a different office, you just look up their name and you talk to them. It's no problem. But that's also how we get most of our alerts. We have emails and emails are official correspondence, but messages are how we tell each other where to go. So about the same time as Jehe, I get a message on my instant messenger device tool that says, hey, you've been scheduled for an appointment with our group chief, which is on the same floor in the same office, just the bigger office down the hallway at whatever, two o'clock in the afternoon. I don't remember the time. So I'm just doing my shit, doing writing my cables, doing my research, doing whatever I got to do, you know, probably trying to stay awake at one o'clock in the afternoon when I get this

message and I'm like, oh, I don't think anything good's going to come of it because there's no reason that the group chief should want to talk to me. There's like four people between him and me that he should want to talk to. But I get the message at 2 o'clock. I'm outside of his office. I probably wait 15 or 20 minutes because he's not going to talk to me right away because they're dicks that way. But then I go in and I have the conversation and he explains the intention. He explains, hey, we're going to move you to Falcon House. So you have to tell us, you have 48 hours to decide whether they're not you're going to take a Falcon House assignment, they think that you'd be a good fit for something over there. What was your first thought when you heard that? Because this was...

It's a mistake. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a mistake. I was like... You're like the Druskin name? I was like, yeah. Who? Me? At first, I was like, you guys... I think you're looking for somebody else, but I mean, I'll think about it. And then the second thought I had after they made a mistake, the second thought was, it's just something stupid. They must need some courier to run, like, casino chips from one place, to another place. It's probably something stupid, right? It's not the big leagues. It's the smallest

thing that you could do for a major league team. They need someone to like, you know. You're the hot dog vendor. Yeah, someone needs to hand dry the fucking cups. I don't know what it is. When did that, when did that change? When my, and I talked to Ji and she had the same conversation, we got called in together

a few days later when we accepted the operation. We got called in and then they gave us more context. And what did they tell you then? That was when they told us that they want the two of us to create a new way of operating and they wanted us to do it because we had a sue background and we had a targeting background and we were actually legally married and our cover identities were legally entwined with one another. So it made us kind of a unique pair to go out and build this

operation. And they've told us that they wanted us to have a blank check for the operation that was still going to fall under approvals for spending, but they trust them. that we could do it. It was very clear in that conversation that they trusted Ghi to be responsible and they trusted me to keep Ghi safe. That was basically how I put it all together. It's like, oh, so you guys, you're going to send us somewhere. And it's a posh somewhere. We didn't go somewhere harsh, right? When they assigned us to our third country location, when they assigned us to Wolf, what we codename wolf in the book, Wolf is not a hardship place. It's a pretty comfortable place to be. But it's not necessarily safe. So it was really clear to me, Ghee was supposed to be

a superstar and I was supposed to just help her. Yeah, did you like do that consciously where you named the safe country like something bad and then the bad country like something kind of cool? So here's here's the funny story. We had named everything the real country names at first and then it was classified and then as part of the negotiation to try to reach a common ground, they let us encrypt everything. So we encrypted stuff with really obscure names. I think we were using like flowers and trees, right? Really obscure names. And then CIA came back and they were like, we don't like your encryption. They're like, that's kind of gay. They were like, we don't like your, we don't like your encryptions. We want you to change your encryptions. And we were like, what the fuck do you

want us to change them to? And they were like, we want you to use North American predators for all of your cryptos. Oh, okay. I mean, a falcon is a predator, but it, you know, I'm not worried about a falcon attacking me. I am worried about a wolf attack me. A falcon's, like, kind of cool if I see it. Like, I think Theo Vaughan owns Falcons. He seems like a nice guy, right? Like, so you named the safe country wolf and the not safe country falcon. Again, what's the logic? There's no logic there. We just named them North American animals.

And we didn't know if CIA was going to approve the book or not. And they didn't. But we never had them. They never argued with us about the different names. I think Badger is in there. Yeah. Badger was hard. I like that.

That was good. Okay. So you guys, what year are we in, like 2010 at this point? We're actually not allowed to disclose the specific years, but we're mid-career for me. Okay. So I'm going to say it's somewhere around 2010, somewhere in that area, whatever. But you get sent over there. Again, this isn't going to be one where you're back at Langley. You are sent over there, and they've told you there's a mole. It's here, like where we're sitting, someone high up, we don't know where. And your job is to be able to manage things on the ground, set up something on the ground that involves, you know, undercover work to try to root this out. and also acquire intelligence on Falcon. So what you guys set up here is really amazing with this whole cell concept.

And rather than me try to explain it, can you just tell me how that even came up, like where you and G, he were, where suddenly it was like, oh, Eureka, we got it. Yeah, so we were in Wolf. We had already arrived in Wolf. And we didn't get much of a warm greeting from anybody because we were outsiders coming into their location.

And, of course, it's a posh location. It's a great location. Everybody has a friend that they're trying to get hooked up with Wolf. And here we walk in, you know, two second tour officers, 29-ish years old, like whatever. And we're jokes. So we walk in and we introduce ourselves and we tell them what we're there for. We're here to create new operations.

But we're not case officers. So guess what we need? We need case officers. And all the case officers that are there at Wolf, are supposed to be doing stuff for Wolf. So all of the leadership at Wolf was like, fuck you guys. You can't take our case officers off of our tasks to bring them into your fantasy.

It's kind of weird that CIA would just like kind of send you and no pun intended into like the Wolf's Den here and be like, yeah, you know, talk with people there, figure it out, like make a team and they're looking at you. They're like you guys aren't case officer. Like you're in a different lane anyway. So what does that lane have to do with us? And that's, I mean, you would think that that's silly,

but that's actually how a lot of CIA works. Like, the left hand doesn't talk to the right hand. Remember how we were talking about the conflict between headquarters and the field? To headquarters, it makes sense. We're headquarters. We're sending you to the field to do this important thing. The field is going to follow our orders.

And then you get to the field, and the field's like headquarters has got their head up their ass. We're not helping you. So we get there and we can't get support from leadership. So my wife starts doing everything she can to support local wolf operations to build a good reputation there.

She's anti-conflict and she's anti-confrontation and she's got anxiety anyways, which we talk about in the book. So it's a very easy way for her to kind of integrate because she doesn't fight anybody. So she's just allowed to do that, join some of the active missions there, just because she got sent there.

And she's a targeter, and a targeter is something everybody wants. Right. So it's like a thneed, right, if you read Dr. Seuss. But everybody wants her, so everybody's giving her assignments and she's finding her,

she's finding what they need. And she's a superstar at what she does. So she's having this excellent success, and she's winning this excellent reputation. Meanwhile, I'm sitting there, and I'm just kind of like, well, what can I do? What can I do? And one middle-ranking case officer, a guy named James in the book, James finds out about us, and James actually has experience working against Falcon. He's the only one in all of Wolf that has experience working against Falcon.

And he starts to talk to us about why we're there. And we explain, hey, Falcon House picked us up. when we're out here to build new operations against Falcon. And he's like, that's pretty cool. And then he tells us some of his experience working against Falcon. And he's like, the hardest part is the bureaucracy. You got to go through five lanes of approval before you fucking talk to a guy. And we tell him that our charter is actually the opposite of that.

We don't have to tell anybody what we're doing. And we have a blank check. And then he just gets excited because he is an aggressive officer that wants to go after that country anyways. And he's senior enough that he's like, why don't we just try a couple of things? and we won't tell management until after it's successful. So he can just make that kind of call. Anybody can make that kind of call, but you have to have Wasta, what we call Wasta.

Wasta is the Arabic word for influence. If you have a few tours under your belt, you don't mind going toe to toe with leadership because leadership also, most likely, has the same amount of tours as you do, or they've worked with you in the past. And James is Falcon House. He's come from Falcon House himself.

So the leadership at Wolf knows that he's got connections and he's a pretty shit hot officer on his own. So when he gives us a little bit of leeway, we're like, let's do it. So we put together a little package, we do some initial research, we send him out to find somebody. And it clicks

and it works. We save one of his cases. He brings it back to Wolf Leadership, and he's like, hey, these guys are on to something. They just made a case that headquarters was going to close. They just made it active again. Was this the bridge guy? correct okay so can you just give the context on him and and where he was situated such that

james thought he had already kind of brought him dry yeah so CIA can only collect intelligence based off of priorities that are set by at the time the DNI so the DNI says I want information about this and if you have a case you have to basically say hey this case is producing, you know, line 7, 12, 28, and 200 of what the DNI wants. Bridge was this engineer from a third country, a non-Falcan country, but he was this engineer who was helping the Falcon national government create military technology, steal military technology, essentially, from the United States. So he's kind of the middleman helping them get information from the U.S.

The problem is that what he was stealing from the U.S., the U.S. already knew was being stolen. So according to the lines on the DNI, Bridge had no value. He wasn't giving secrets that we didn't already know about, so they couldn't approve CIA technically couldn't approve James to keep meeting with Bridge because there's no new information that's coming out of it. And James hadn't really worked with targeters much in the past, right? Correct, correct. So James is sitting here and he's just, he meets a guy and he's like, this guy's an engineer against Falcon. I hate fucking Falcon and Falcon stealing our shit. How could this not be a good case? And, of course, headquarters is like, it's not a good case. So we're not going to pay for it anymore.

And you can see that conflict between headquarters in the field again. Ghi and I walk in, more specifically, Ghi. And she comes up with the idea. She's like, hey, if he's an engineer in Falcon, he must know other engineers who are actually falconian, like in the country. So what if we stop thinking about what information bridge has? And we start thinking about who the other people are

that he's connected to because he must be connected to Air Force generals and Navy colonels and whatever else. He must have connections. So we can get to them. So Ghee does her targeting thing and she finds five or seven connections that are connected to Bridge directly from his cell phone. People he's calling.

She sends that back to headquarters. Headquarters comes back and it's like, holy shit, we really like these guys. Can you target these guys? And Ghee's like, yeah, we can target them, but you need to keep running bridge because if we lose bridge, we lose access to this source of information. You had access to his cell phone. because James was meeting with him.

Was that James, like, slayed a hand, like, unlocking his phone when he wasn't looking? Or was that... That was... Microchipping his phone. Technological tools that I am not at liberty to disclose. But... Guys, we're good. There's nothing bad happening here.

I just want to throw that out there. Thank you. So we were able to start targeting new targets that are... of interest to CIA that do fit under categories of the DNI's notebook or the DNI's requirements list because of bridge and because of James, which makes everybody happy, makes leadership at Wolf happy, makes James happy, happy, makes Falcon House happy, makes me and Ghee happy because now we have a case officer. Proof of concept.

Proof of concept. Now, is this when you actually come up with the wait a second, fuck, we could do a cell model type thing? Yes. So what ends up happening, so Ghee and James are having this conversation. and James is geeking out because he's just a fun guy. And Gee, he's a giant dork, so she's also getting excited. So we got this whole nerd fest going on in James's office where we're like,

holy shit, we have almost unlimited money, approval from both sets of leadership. You have this case that doesn't have to die right away. This is all good news. So, of course, James is like, how do we get more? How do we do more? What can we do that's different, right? What can we do that's new? Because, you know, two days ago, I would have thought this case is dead and now it's got

new life. Well, Ghi starts talking about how the biggest challenge that we had in back at headquarters was dealing with terrorists. And I'd start to chime in the same way. I was like, yeah, terrorists are like, they're the fucking worst thing in the world to try to fight because they're ignorant and they're broke. But they have this model of communicating with each other where 10 terrorists don't know who nine other terrorists are. they only know who one person is and that one person might know 10 people on their side but the other 10 people don't know each other so the courier for bin laden exactly the courier for bin laden knew got orders from one person and took his orders to one place like that's that's how it worked he was super cut off from everything so even if you were to access the courier and try to get intelligence from the courier they wouldn't know dick i get my info from here and i take my info there that's pretty much it it just so happens that they found out that that curio were to he took his info was to bin Laden to like you know enemy number one that's how terrorist networks work everywhere no terrorist knows everything except for one kind of cell leader and that cell leader is disposable

because as soon as that cell leader is killed they know they're going to be killed and they already know who's going to replace them so when that cell leader is killed a replacement pops up and we don't know who the replacement is going to be only they know who the replacement is going to be so it's a game of whack them all every time you fight terrorism, which is why we didn't beat ISIS. It's why ISIS still exists. It's why Israel can't beat Hamas, because Hamas is going to continue to exist. It's why Hezbo is weakened, but not gone. It's why Al-Qaeda still exists and has splinter cells all over the world. It's so fucking hard to fight these guys because of the way they communicate and the way they plan and execute their operations. So after kind of verbalizing this back and forth between me,

Ghi and James, Ghi kind of had this light bulb go off and she was like, We're the only ones that know that. We're the only ones fighting the war on terror. We're the only ones that know that this is how terrorists work. Nobody, China doesn't know this. Russia doesn't know this. North Korea doesn't know this. Turkey doesn't know this.

France doesn't know that. Nobody else fucking knows. Because they're not spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the global war on terror. To them, they're just watching us beat our heads against a wall. But we actually can understand the modus operandi of a terrorist set. cell. And of course, I'm like, that doesn't do us a lot of good. James looks at GE and he's like, I think I know what you're saying. And gee, he's like, yeah, what if we start

building a terrorist cell right here in Wolf? So that if you have Falcon headquarters knowing they have a mole, the mole only may know who the courier is and they have no idea who the courier's talking to. So you guys set up your own splinter cell where you guys recruit, lead and manage case officers underneath you to go in and do missions that only you know the results of and and the people they're talking to and then you just give the amalgamation report back to headquarters bingo so now in theory we have another situation like we did with bridge where everybody's happy because our case officers get credit for the cases they're running because the reports that they write get communicated to wolf leadership. Wolf leadership can basically say, yes, so-and-so contributed 30 reports this

month. Wolf leadership gets to take credit for those reports going up to Langley headquarters. And Langley headquarters is like, Wolf's kicking ass. Everybody's getting that pat on the back all the way up. Meanwhile, in Falcon House, Falcon House is getting the reports that they need. They just don't know where it's coming from, which means the mole can't find who it's coming from. So the mole has to step out of line to reach somewhere else to try to find the information. he's looking for, which is baiting him into making the mistake he needs to make for Falcon House to find him. Hey, before you came, before the day where he came up with this idea, obviously you had known

for a while because they told you there was a mole and gee, he's a targeter. Had she spent any time, like, trying to figure out who it was? She spent a little bit of time wondering, but the thing is we don't have all the information. We don't even have enough information. We know that somewhere there's a leak, but we don't know what that leak is. So just to give you some context, right, is it a person who's stealing information from a classified database? Or is it somebody who's not stealing anything because he found a vulnerability or a weakness, a backdoor into the technology and the information is just there to grab? Or is there like some penetration, some technical element where he is surreptitiously gained access to the system and is using that surreptitious access intentionally?

So is this malicious, is it active, is it passive? We don't know. And how do you even start to reverse engineer a case that you don't know? What was the reaction at Falcon headquarters when you took this idea to them and said, you know, can we get permission to set something like this up? So it was actually Wolf first that we took it to. So our local leadership first. And we were like, hey, we're going to build a model that's based off of Al Qaeda. And we're going to use it against Falcon.

And Wolf leadership was like, the fuck you are. They're like, we're not going to be the ones that approve this. That's fucking crazy. There's no way you're doing that. Relax, Osama. So you kind of look like them, too. So we got knocked on our heels a little bit there, but we still had the right to take conversations directly to Falcon House.

So we sent a separate cable to Falcon House. And we're like, hey, we have this idea. And we're not getting a lot of leadership support here. and Wolf, what are your thoughts there? Falcon House, again, they were less interested, we didn't realize this at the time, they were less interested in the new operations as much as they were interested in us creating

something that worked so that we would smoke out the mole. So they came back and they were like, if you need support from headquarters, you'll get support from us formally. So go back and tell your leadership team again that if they need formal direction from headquarters we'll provide it, but we think this operation would be better handled

in the field. So they're kicking the ball back and forth for all intensive purposes. So we go back to Wolf leadership and say, hey, Falcon House would like to see this happen. They're giving you first right of refusal, which is basically a way of saying, do you want to make it your idea, or do you want to be told by mom that you have to do it? And that's when Falcon House, or that's when Wolf caved to us. And Wolf was like, okay, you guys, you guys can have 60 days and James, 60 days in James to show us what this creates. The case officer. So how does this work then?

Is it like a fantasy football draft now where you get to look at case officers around the world and say, oh, she'd be great or he'd be great. And you call them and say, you know, the Philadelphia Eagles would like to select you with the fifth pick in the draft. Like, what's the layout here? I wish it was that way.

No, it was more like backyard kickball. Where who's in the neighborhood, who's allowed to come out and play, and then who wants to be on your team. That's basically what it was like. So we had proof of concept with James, and we started to have more success with James. like I was telling you earlier, between every one and four years, there's a rotation.

Always new officers coming in, always new officers going out. Always new case officers coming in. Always new case officers coming in, always new case officers going out. So new case officers were coming in about every six to 12 months. So as new case officers came in, we had a chance to basically say, do you want to come play on our kickball team? Here's what we're doing. Here's how it works.

And we had James, who was this mid-tier, like, shit-hot case officer, who was like, hey, we're doing some cool, shit. And what we do here, nobody gets to know about, which is just really appealing, really attractive to the right kind of case officer. Kind of like Ocean's 11. Like, we got a job here. We got a job for you. Yeah. The problem is, anybody who comes to work for us is essentially going to have to work twice as hard because they still have to meet all their requirements for Wolf. So we're kind of like, we're a second job. And not everybody wants a second job. So we had a lot of people who were like, we're not interested in helping you. So you got to meet, you still have

meet your quotas. You have to meet your quotas for Wolf. Yep. And then everything you do for us is on spec, if you will. Interesting. Okay. So we had a couple. We had a couple that came on really early because they liked the idea of a challenge. This was Beverly and, what was his name of Luke? Yep, Beverly and her husband, Luke came on early because Beverly is a high flyer, hard charger, go-getter kind of gal. And Luke does what his wife wants. They were also married. That works. Yeah. And then and then we also had Tasha come on board and Tasha was like this complete like the flower girl like hippie

yeah she was like a hippie at heart but she was just a complete outsider she she I don't she's so good at CIA because you would never think that she belongs at CIA you would think that she was going to be selling soap at some like farmers market somewhere what made her want to do it like what made

because she was really like that as a personality the way you describe her in a book like what made her want to be a spy I don't that's a good question actually I don't know. I don't know why she chose CIA. I don't know if she's kind of like Jehe, where she would have never chose CIA, but CIA chose her.

And she was like, well, why not? Let's give it a whirl. Interesting. But I think she chose to work on our cell because CIA was never a family for her. Like, she didn't have a lot of close friends at CIA. The, they didn't believe the same thing she believed in. They didn't jive with her.

She, her husband was unemployed and he followed her around. So, like, it was just so much different about her. life than the typical CIA officer. So inside the cell, she found a family. And we all, we all loved each other, took care of each other, backed each other up, helped with kids, helped with spouses, etc. So I think with us, she came into a new place where she already felt ostracized. And we were like, hey, we're building this close-knit group. Do you want to be part of it? And she was willing to take guess that we were going to do the right thing because she already believed everybody did the right thing until somebody stomped on her flower. So James, Tasha, Beverly, Luke,

anyone else in there so those were our case officers yeah and then we had a regional tech ops person who came and went depending on where he was needed in the region and we ended up having a local interpreter local translator who was also assigned to wolf in a rotation and who was previously friends with Ghi yeah so Ghi was able to pull that girl aside and say hey you're amazing at languages and we could use you for our work and for friendship reasons she was like sure let's give it a world. And that became our cell. It developed over the course of four or six months and we had success that grew slowly for each of our case officers as we kind of built

the rails for this train largely on Ghee's back. Now there were all different people. You go through a bunch of different cases in the book of sources that you targeted who were, you know, people you wanted to turn effectively within Falcon. let's let's start with the converse one this one was fascinating to me so this was someone who was not on any flow charts anywhere completely unknown in any agency records probably anywhere else within u.s. government who you found basically she was a girl following around this other known guy correct so what how did you figure out who she was and and who was she so this is all this is all targeting magic from Ghee, right?

So one of the things that makes a very good targeter is somebody who can see a pattern in a lot of noise. And Ghi is capable of seeing the smallest pattern in a very large footprint of noise. And what she found was a series of flight manifests where this known falconian intelligence officer was traveling. And this other name would appear on the same manifest, unrelated, not in the same. same seat. It wasn't his guma, his mistress or something like that. We didn't know. But what we found is that there's this person who's appearing over and over again. Same manifest, different seat, same locations. Is that a mistress? Mistress is normally sit close to the person. Is it somebody else on their team, some junior officers, some minder, some something else? We don't know. So we see the person

multiple times and we decide, you know what, let's let's have someone target this individual. So Ghee starts to run as much information as she can on the person. There isn't anything on our formal records. So Ghee turns to social media and open source. And then she starts to see that this girl is a girl. She sees that she's active. She sees that she plays tennis. She sees that she's sporty. She sees that she's girly. And she's like, if we're going to target this person, I think we should send Beverly to target her. Because

Beverly is like that. Tasha couldn't have a conversation about had a curious if it killed her. But Beverly could, right? And Beverly's older, right? And Beverly's older. We didn't know that the older thing was going to be a big deal until after they actually started talking. But that's kind of the magic that a targeter can bring to an operation, is they can say, here's what we know about the person, and here's the, here's the talent that we have on the team. So let's pick this player to go after that target. And you guys talked about something interesting here that relates to spies all around the world at all these different

agencies which is that by this point in the story social media is a part of culture and you would think oh a spy is going to stay off that but it got so mainstream in countries around the world that a spy you know needs to be on that to kind of maintain my normalcy cover or whatever so to speak if they're looking at it like well i'm going to go out there and i'm going to be getting information from other people so if i'm doing that they can't know who i am so if i have an instagram then, you know, we're all good. Right. So it seems like this girl was kind of a bit of a almost like represented a symbolic pivot

where you guys were realizing that like a wait a minute. So she's got this Instagram that shows her traveling places, playing tennis, doing normal stuff. That's a good cover story. Well, what's great about it, and I love that you're bringing this up, because there's a difference between a cultivated account, as we call it, and an actual account, a genuine account. because a cultivated account demonstrates operational security within the content that it shares, whereas an actual open account, a genuine account, does not. So, for example, a genuine account might talk about where specifically you are at a specific time, right?

I'm going to tag myself at Giovanni's restaurant, I'm going to say I'm here right now, here's a picture, timestamp says it's 545 and I just got here at 540. That's not operationally secure. Somebody could see that you're at Giovanni's restaurant, see that. at the time was five minutes ago, and then boom, they're going to Giovanni's restaurant. So that's how a genuine account generally works.

A cultivated account obfuscates that. They take a picture at Giovanni's, and then in the comments, they're like, I really enjoyed my dinner at Giovanni's yesterday. They don't even post it within a 24-hour period of time.

Or they don't say, they don't tag Giovanni's at all. They say, really appreciated my Italian dinner at this great place and whatever, right? And that's how you create an account that looks genuine to the average viewer, but when you put it under scrutiny,

you can't reverse engineer it. And that's what we found with Converse, with Converse's account, is that as she continued to post, it was crafted, it was good. You didn't know where she was, when she was. You knew that she had friends. You didn't know who her friends were.

You knew that she liked sports. You didn't know exactly which sports they were. You didn't know where her favorite tennis shop was, where she liked to play tennis. You didn't know her favorite tennis team. You didn't know her favorite drink. You didn't know if she drank. You didn't know where she hung out, what nightclubs she went to, where she went to church.

You knew nothing. Err mystery. But to the average person scrolling through, she looked totally normal. Now, it would turn out she was an intelligence officer training under this guy effectively. Correct. He was different intelligence agencies around the world work in different ways. CIA has a very formal pipeline and a training program and a protocol and a group of old people who decided what young people become the new case officers.

Other places, it's more tailored. It's more mentor-based. In this case, she was mentoring under the senior case officer, or the senior case officer above her. And that was the hypothesis you guys had come up with. Well, that was correct. Correct. That was the hypothesis that we had come up with as we started to meet her and learn more about the relationship between her and the other case officer. And then we became the ones that built the foundation for her case. Now, why? would this is what I can't really wrap my head around why would someone like that who's learning under such a senior person is clearly talented and has been picked up to be talented living in a world of spies where you're not supposed to trust anyone why did she

go for Beverly's advances so hard and like actually become friends with her and Beverly is very clearly, you know, an American and trying to ingratiate herself in her world. So this is where culture plays in. And this is why it's so going back to the beginning of our conversation, how people are people. And oftentimes we're not interested in the actual person. It takes us four hours of conversation before we care about a person. We care about everything else about them, but we don't care about them as an individual. In the case of Converse, converse was a female and she was younger and she was single and all of those things worked against her in the culture she was coming from so when she met beverly beverly's older married

to a younger guy who is attractive and younger and they are both successful and powerful to converse she was like how did you do that i got to follow this old guy around everywhere he goes i have to make him feel special. I can't even verbalize the fact that I ever want to get married. If I admit to ever wanting to get married, they're going to kick me out of, out of my job. Because what they want is somebody who loves the job. How do you have both a job you love and a person you love? Like, there were all these mentoring moments that were almost like, like, sisterly. And that was something she couldn't get. Yeah. Wow. Okay. And that's how espionage works. Espionage is very few people commit treason for money. If you were to just look at

the surface level, it would look like everybody commits treason for money. It's what they're going to do with the money they get from treason. Saving for retirement, helping a kid, helping a parent get through a cancer treatment, you name it, right? Buy an investment property somewhere else that's going to be there for them as a social security plan. Nobody just, nobody is greedy and betrays their country just for greed. They want to do something with that money. Even the biggest traders in the United States, your Robert Hansen's and your Aldrich Ames, they didn't take just money. They were playing a game where they were beating their service. CIA underestimated Aldrich Ames.

So every time he took money, he was sticking in their face. That's why he drove Jaguars and wore fancy suits to work. He was basically saying, fuck you, I'm so much smarter than you, CIA, that I'm giving secrets to the Russians and making more money than you can give me. And you need to know that. And Robert Hansen and FBI was doing the same thing. They didn't care about the money. They cared about what the money represented.

All right, real quick, I go to the bathroom. But we'll be right back. Yeah, Gio was actually just asking, we're back now. But Gio was just asking off camera, like, how do you trust your wife? Because the whole time I was reading this, I was kind of thinking that. I'm like, is G. He just working Andy? Are they like, you know, we got a real fucking case of cowboy fever here?

So you just, you know, you keep an eye on them. I've heard of that before. She may very well be working me for all I know. But I think the way I trust her is I feel like I don't have an option. She's smarter than me and more successful than me. So I'm not going to outsmart her or dupe her or trick her. So if anything, it makes for a very easy way to be very honest and transparent with my wife, which has been all the difference in our relationship to.

Whenever I have an insecurity or a doubt, whenever I see a hot chick on the street, it's just so much easier to tell her the truth because whatever comes next is going to be easier than if I lied to her. Gee, you see the rack on that kick? I need you guys to

like put a GoPro on and just like walk around time. I need to see this in action. What it looks like? Yeah. Yeah. You just see Andy's head turn all the time with the goprop. Bro. Turns back to Jehe. Come on. So it's worth noting. I mean, and we talk about this in the book as well, my wife has an anxiety disorder. She has, she suffers from depression. She has mental health issues

that made her almost ideally suited to work at CIA. As long as I don't violate her own mental health challenges, it's actually more comforting to her. What drives an anxious person crazy is when they wonder if you saw the girl with the nice rack. As soon as you say, I saw the girl with a nice rack, it's like talking to Rain Man. Oh, yeah, it was a nice rack. It was a good rack. It was a good, definitely a good rack. And that goes way better than, did you see the rack?

Are you lying to me? You're lying to me. I can see that you're lying to me. Sorry, that's so good. Well, I'm happy for you. That's a great relationship. There's a lot of guys out there right now going, I need that. Do you have anxiety?

A little more anxiety in my life. All right. So back to the cell, though. You are the go-between, like we said. So you're going to be the guy who's now as SO-O even. You've had a lot of experience on the ground doing things there. So you have that skill set as well as managing the cell with Ghee. But you're going to go into Falcon, as you said, always through a system.

second country under an assumed identity, which you've talked about out of context on a lot of podcasts with me before, where you're like, yeah, I work for a business or something like that. So I think in the book you said you worked for Acme and like, what was it, procurement or something like that? Yep. Yep. Okay. So you would go in there and what was your, you're doing some different things every time,

but high level, like what was your main job when you would go into Falcon? Whenever you enter into a hostile country, and by every country to a certain extent is hostile, but the definition that we're talking about when we talk about denied areas, or we talk about these areas that are the most aggressive adversaries to the United States, when you go into those countries, you can't do more than one operational act at a time. So if you were to go into a more permissive environment, then you would be able to go in you may be able to do two or three things in a day because nobody's really watching. That's what we're like here in the United States.

Foreign adversaries can come here and do whatever they want to do because we don't have cameras on every intersection. We don't fund our police enough to make them anything significant to a foreign intelligence threat. We treat everybody who comes into the United States essentially as a U.S. citizen first. So they all have privacy and they have the benefit of innocence until proven guilty. Like they have rights and privileges that are essentially granted. to them because we give them to our own citizens.

Other parts of the world are not like that. So what that meant is that inside Falcon, our case officers couldn't go to Falcon to execute an operation and also on that operation procure their operational support requirements. If they needed bulk cash deposits, if they needed special watches, if they needed certain SIM cards or batteries that were specific to Falcon, they couldn't do that on their own. They couldn't show up and then procure those things. and carry out the operational act, it would create a trail that would identify

that what they're doing is espionage. So I would go in ahead of them, I would do the actual procurement part of espionage. I would buy a cell phone, I would buy a SIM card, I would make a mass depositor, a withdrawal of cash. And then I would essentially cache those things or dead drop those things somewhere where a case officer could pick it up when they arrive.

So did you really, you really had a cover working for, in this case, Acme? Acme? Yeah, I really had an identity that allowed me to transit Falcon without coming onto suspicion. There's a lot of roles that are immediately suspicious and not always suspicious for espionage reasons. Sometimes people are interested in you because they think that you're wealthy. Sometimes people are interested in you because they think that you have access to IP. Sometimes people are interested in you because they think that you have familial connections or celebrity connections. So it's actually quite hard sometimes to build a cover persona that doesn't catch anyone's interest.

So in this case, Acme Corporation was one corporation that does something mundane. They do something that has to do with everyday needs. Think like souls on shoes or printer cartridges and printers or the person or like the nail clippers, right? Something stupid that nobody anywhere is concerned with the IP of nail. clippers and nobody anywhere is concerned with the celebrity connections of a company that makes the souls for shoes and like it's all mundane and silly but it's big business right it's big enough business that you want to have the natural resources that either provide the beginning or you want to have the trade route that carries them or you want to have the manufacturing that builds them

so there's every reason in the world for a real world business person to do that job and there's also every reason in the world for local businesses to want to meet with you, but basically police, law enforcement, and intelligence don't care about you. But you really had to have that cover because you had to represent this, whoever the actual real company was. And you really have to learn about it and you really have to know the lingo, right? So you literally reported to a guy working for that company in another country, or was it you were disconnected and just said you worked for them and would approach it that way. So this is getting into the sensitive side of how these operations are built. Okay. So what I will say is that I was not alone. There were people that I

had to speak to and people who had to speak to me. That's part of what makes it a backstop cover, what we call a backstop cover. So I could send emails, emails would come. I can make phone calls and phone, inbound phone calls would come in. So everything is legit. Actually a registered business, actually registers a profit and actually has regular revenue and P&L, like, it's all a very real thing. But where that person was located and how much that person was dedicated to my cover versus, you know, multiple businesses or whatever else, that gets into the classified area. Okay. All right. So I won't, I won't pull on that.

But essentially how, I don't know if this is classified too, but like how often are you going there to do this kind of stuff? So I would go maybe once every 40-ish days or so. I would go frequently because I'm supporting four case officers. And not only am I supporting those four case officers, I have a very active targeter who wants more information, more restaurant locations, more intersections, more street names, more maps, more, you know, IMEIs and ISMIs from different cell phone manufacturers.

Like there's just tons of information. There's tons of collection that needs to, to happen on the logistics side of a CIA operation. So there's always a reason to go. And the more you go, the less suspicious you are. Right. Because the more regular your passages, the more you look like a regular business person, you always stay for two or three days, you always stay in the same hotel, you always do the same like things in the same city. You go to the same restaurants, you know, rent the same car from the same rental car agency. All that stuff's very common. And now all of a sudden, And it puts you almost above suspicion.

What about for someone like Beverly, though, who I believe met, you said it's Converse, not Converse. I think Converse is better. I always thought Converse is better, too. This was literally a conversation I had with my wife. I was like, why don't we call this person Converse? And she was like... G. He just call it Converse.

It's better. So cool. You see like the black shoe and the star and everything. On the Julian Dory podcast, we're going to call Converse. So you meet Converse in, or Beverly meets Converse, I believe. in Wolf, not in Falcon. So is she straddling between Wolf and Falcon? Correct. How does she manage that and not, you know, because it's a different role than you? Right. So every case officer has their own justification for going into and out of Falcon. So their frequency is something that we

schedule, we plan to make sure that there's never two of them in the country at the same time. Their routes, their third country cleansing routes are all different. We have a specific plan for everyone to make sure that the operations don't overlap or collide. We're also carefully controlling what geographic regions they're going to to make sure that they're not in the same city, possibly staying in a hotel that's on the same block. We want to isolate as much as possible so that if Falcon intelligence does spot one of us, it doesn't lead to the others. Right? So while Converse is happening inside of Wolf, the information that Geehee is collecting that she gives to Beverly, some of those cases are happening inside falcons

some of those cases are happening in third country locations where the falcon target comes out of falcon for a day or two but we're trying to build an excuse for beverly to meet the person in falcon later oh okay but you're going every 40 days is like the CIA's own bin laden courier effectively and you're as you said you're doing things from procurement that can't be traced back to literal dead drops it was kind of cool like the spy craft you were talking about and you know why you would pick this type of park over that type of park you know versus how many people are going to be here versus there is wild but every time you would go in falcon in this country that everyone out there should be able to figure out they had like every person that's coming in from the outside it sounds like they send starting with like low level minders on to them meaning like literally dudes they pay five bucks you know to go buy a coffee if they go through you through this person's you know drawers in the hotel or something like that so you knew that going in

and when you're first going in under code name alex hernandez you know on that fake passport and everything you were encountering always these kind of low level minders so that meant and correct me from wrong here you didn't think they were suspicious of you it was just that's just what you should expect as a foreigner going into this place staying at any decent hotel correct if you in every business owner, every mid-level to high-level executive who has traveled through a country that is not on good terms with the United States. And there's many, many countries beyond just like the big two or three that you would think of, when you travel into a foreign country that's not in great terms with the U.S., they watch you. And they watch you with what I call bumbling surveillance. And that's

what you're talking about, the low-level minder. Like, this is a dude or a gal who they run like a food cart 14 hours a day. And they don't make enough money to keep their family alive on a food cart. So then they work a few extra hours every night by watching foreigners. Sometimes they're assigned a foreigner. Sometimes they voluntarily watch a foreigner and then go to local police station after they watch them and try to sell their information. Right? Sometimes if they can't sell their information to a local police officer, they'll sell their information to like a local gangster and be like, hey, you got a guy staying at the local Radisson who wears a Rolex, but they're always trying to peddle what information they can to make a buck just to make ends meet. These individuals are

really easy to spot. These bumbling surveillance are really easy to spot. And when you see them, it's a comfort because that's all that's all that's covering you. It's when you don't see them that you have to ask harder questions. Why am I not being watched now? Am I more interesting that I think I am, did no mind or show up today because they're hung over because they drank too many beers last night? What's the explanation? Yeah. So you would describe back the first time we ever talked in episode 97, the three types of surveillance. There's like discreet to lose. What's the terminology for the other two? Yeah. So there's there's discreet to lose surveillance. There's close surveillance and discrete not to lose surveillance. Okay. Can you just redefine all those

real quick for everyone. So we have that. Absolutely. From the, the simplest, least sophisticated form of surveillance is called close surveillance. It's when the person who's following you essentially wants you to know you're being followed. They stay right on your shoulder. If they're driving, they stay right on your bumper. When you park, they try to park you in. Like they're trying to intimidate you and they are also following and watching you. These are more the bumbling guys. Close. A lot of the time. Close. Close. What, these are is these yeah i mean when it comes to training these are your bumbling guys yeah but we're talking specifically about trained surveillance okay when a surveillance team is trained for close surveillance

that might be more like a police surveillance team they they know a drug dealer's coming in they don't want that drug dealer to do any drops so they're going to follow that drug dealer they can't arrest him he hasn't committed to crime there's no proof but they're going to stay on his ass everywhere he goes they're going to neutralize his ability to do anything okay that's a close surveillance team the next step down in terms of or the next step up from in terms of sophistication is something called discreet not to lose discrete not to lose means you don't want your target to see you but you also can't lose them so if they make a left turn when they shouldn't make a left turn when they make a U-turn and they shouldn't make a U-turn when they run across the street and there's no crosswalk you have to go with them because you cannot lose them

So you might stay farther back, but if they do something stupid, you're going to do something stupid, too, because you can't let them disappear. So you're watching them because you're confident that they're going to execute some kind of operational act. And when they commit that act, you have to be there to catch them, apprehend them, or collect evidence. That's discrete not to lose. The third most sophisticated form of surveillance is called discrete to lose. discreet to lose means you don't ever want your target to know you're there you want them you want to be completely invisible to them because you're being so discreet that if you lose them you're going to escalate the case to another resource that will pick them up so i'm following you down the streets in

hoboken you turn left you turn right i lose you into a coffee shop i don't know where you went i can make a phone call and all of a sudden i've got a helicopter above head looking for you or i've got a series of drones that are triangulating you or i can find someone who's going to ping your cell phone from a local tower and we'll find you and I'll get right back on you two blocks from now, right? Discrete to lose is the most sophisticated former surveillance because it's the most dangerous. Scariest one. It means that you're so interesting, they're willing to spend the money of almost infinite resources to see what you're doing.

So you had been going and doing these trips for a long time, how long I guess you're not allowed to say, but a while you've been going in roughly every 40 days. you're doing all these different things to manage for your people on the ground depending on which two are in the country at the time and then you have this three-day trip plan where you know the cover is you're going to be going a meeting with these different procurement companies for your job but you're going to be doing some of your regular things

and you notice I guess day one when you come downstairs into the hotel lobby something's off why why was something off to you I don't know I don't know why things were different that day. But for whatever reason, I couldn't find a minder. I couldn't find a bumbling surveillance. And it was winter.

It was cold. It was nasty outside. But that had never stopped, that had never stopped minders from being there before. So in that moment, it felt, it felt comfortable. It felt like victorious. I felt like I am fucking so good at this here we go

this is what I've been this is why I'm coming here every 40 days so that nobody thinks that I'm suspicious so that I can be free to do whatever I want to do so that like this is what it's all about I used to joke with James back in the building when we were back at Wolf together we used to joke about the day

that we would become invisible inside Falcon the day that we were so commonplace so boring so dull so predictable that they wouldn't even follow us it wasn't even worth the wasn't worth paying the homeless guy $5 to watch us right

and I was like today is that day I mean I finally I'm here and I'm going to tell James I can't wait to get back and tell James that I beat him to the punch right like that's that was what was going through my head and it didn't last long before the second thought came to my head that that if they're not following me

with a bumbling surveillance they might be following me with something better because it doesn't take a lot to follow somebody without a person. You can follow them by following a cell phone signal. You can follow them by following a driver. You can follow them by following, you know, a series of static surveillance that stand along their route. And remember, we do the same thing almost every trip, so it wouldn't be hard to set up a series of static surveillance that just watch you go from point A to point B to point C

and you never see them at all. Did that thought come into your head where you're like? could this be major bond oil all over again it didn't come into my head in that moment it just struck me that i could be wrong which was not something that the younger version of me would have ever thought the younger version of me would have been like i am so fucking good but instead i had a few years under my belt and a little bit more like humble stew and i was like this could be something else too. Just having the ability to recognize that there could be an alternate explanation than what you think is a lot harder than most people realize. Most people are so sure that their

opinion is right. Most people are so sure that their perspective is right, that they don't even entertain, seriously entertain, a second point of view, right? You can count your religious extremist activities on the backs of people who do this. You can see how many people have lost their fortunes because this is what they did. You can see how many people have lost relationships because they truly believe that they were so right, there could be no other alternative. All that I had learned in my life and up to that moment

at least gave me the sense to say, what if I'm not that good? What if this is just something else? But here's the other thing, too. There's two other variables here. Number one, speed of processing, because something could go wrong at any instant and, you know, worst case scenario.

but also like you take this for granted if i'm sitting out there with joe trying to like cook something up when we're not recording and come up with a title or whatever and then or you know some type of idea i might be like wait a minute ah i don't know about that let's back it you see what i mean like you almost have like a physical reaction to it in tone and shift it's not like you're talking to someone necessarily in the hotel lobby but you can't be like you know or show any that you're even thinking. But in your head, you're running these like algorithmic calculations of like, okay, well, those 13 people over there weren't doing this. The two guys over there aren't looking at me right now. That's not the norm. You know what I mean? Like, you have to

put all this together and you have to stand there like this. Yeah, it's true. It's true. And that's part of the reason why you don't have anything else you have to do, right? The reason you schedule your day on this day in particular, I had scheduled the day so that I had two business meetings in the day. And I knew that there would be someone else driving me from business meeting to business meeting. And I knew that the drivers had already known what time to pick me up and drop me off because that was all pre-determined in email correspondence to the backstop cover organization. So my 100% job from point A to point B was just to determine my surveillance status. And that's what a surveillance detection route is supposed to do. Nothing else except determine your surveillance

status. You know what the route's going to be. You know what the turns are. going to be, you know, how long you're going to be on a certain side of the street. You know everything. And there's always room for streetlights to go along or for some traffic accidents to slow you down or whatever else. So you leave space for variables, but you're giving 90% of your resources to one task. So you are correct. You have to process quickly, but you don't have to prioritize between processes. You're doing one thing and one thing only. So you can have those processes without biting your nails or looking around the room or awkwardly scratching your belt line.

So how did you catch the initial surveillance in this case? So there's a process for surveillance detection and we get to go through it almost step by step in the book. I'm really excited about that. That's one of the things that CIA didn't like about this book. There were several that they didn't like, and we could talk about this some other time. But one of the things they didn't like

is that I expressed how we detected or how I detected surveillance on this route. As I went from point A to point B, as I went from the hotel to the first business meeting, someone else was driving. My entire focus was just on finding surveillance, which means that I could observe the environment around me. And when you are looking for surveillance, what you're really looking for is a change in the environment that doesn't make sense. When you move, let's just say you move from Hoboken to New Jersey, or Hoboken to Manhattan, whether you're driving or training or ferrying, you, if you, if you, if you do it enough times, you know what to expect. You know what normal looks like. Surveillance happens when normal doesn't look normal. When you see one face too many times,

or when you see one card too many times, or when you make a mistake and you take a U-turn and somebody follows you through the U-turn. And then that same person that follows you through your turn just happens to be the person who walks into the deli on 37th that you walk into. You're looking for strange patterns that don't fit the chaos of normalcy. And that's from point A, to point B. I also had a second meeting schedule that day, and in between those two meetings, I was going to take kind of a lunch break. So again, I get out, I leave from point B to go to my lunch break, and I'm looking for the things that don't look normal from point B to point C, but I'm also looking for anything that repeats what happened in the first leg. We call them legs. You have multiple

legs to a surveillance detection route, sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes seven. What you're looking for is how often do you see the same outlier from leg to leg that's how you truly determine if you're under surveillance and that's what we detail in the story yeah that's how i found out not just that i was under surveillance but who specifically was following you were seeing some of the same people and you were seeing it there were multiple different people multiple different cars which now says it's been in your head this has been escalated correct at what point did you start shitting yourself. Second leg,

second leg, picking up the same vehicle from the first leg, identifying, identifying people who when I moved from driving to walking and seeing the same people again,

both in cars and on foot, that shit's scary. That shit's scary because now you realize there's a team, the team has resources. Like, it's easy for one person. When you learn

surveillance detection, you learn that all the advantages do not go to the surveillance team. The surveillance team has all the disadvantages because they have to react. Yes. So they're always one step behind. They don't know where you're going next. They don't know when you're going there. If they lose you, they have to find you again. So you might think that the surveillance team has all the advantages. The only advantage the surveillance team has is technology and resources. It's actually the field operator that has all of the advantages in a surveillance detection route.

You're the wide receiver. They're the cornerback. Yes. You choose everything, right? So you become acutely aware of these advantages and disadvantages because if you fuck up and you make them suspicious of you,

they can plus up with more resources. They can fall off and come back on you the next day. They can escalate you even higher and all of a sudden you have a SWAT team or a takedown team rather than a surveillance team following you. So it becomes this really difficult dance where you have to act in such a way

that's so calculated that they don't realize it's calculated that's so predictable without seeming predictable that they just watch you and don't care. They don't escalate, they don't chase, they don't worry. And this is one place you said the movies get wrong all the time. All the time. Because in the movies, what does somebody do when they're under surveillance? They fucking run, they try to do crazy shit, jump on buildings.

You're basically saying, I love the visual you gave where you're like, it's like when you see a bear. You don't run because it says that's danger, so it's going to come after you. You have to, like, very cautiously look at it and back away. So you're like, hey, Amigo, I ain't here, do anything. I'm not here. I'm not worth your time.

That's the whole goal. We call it lulling surveillance. You're trying to lull your surveillance to sleep. You're trying to lull them into making an error. You're trying to lull them into, into giving up on you right it's a job for them too it's a job for them too they woke up at some time got their kids off to school ate their breakfast took their coffee they're going to have to take their morning shit at some point too so the whole goal is to make their life so simple and predictable

that when four o'clock comes around they're like nothing here folks and they go home that's what you want to do you don't want to be interesting enough that at four o'clock they call in and they get overtime and they're like hey we're gonna stay on the sky for another three hours what made you want to go to an arcade once you knew that this stuff was going down it was it's really cool people are gonna have to like read to get all the details of different places you were picking and what you would have to think about going into them like plan out why would be there and why it would make sense to be in this place like down to the microscopic type shit but what made you say you know what i'm gonna stop and you know shoot badly in an arcade so they know i'm not a good shot

So surveillance teams are made up of people, and every one of the people on a team is creating a surveillance persona for the day. So if you were to come to my surveillance training course, one of the things everyday spy teaches is it certifies people in discrete to lose surveillance. If you were to come, I would teach you about how to make a profile and how to change your profile to fit into different environments for different purposes. Professional surveillance teams know how to change their profile for different circumstances because at the first hour that you're following somebody, you might need to look a certain way. But by the fourth hour that you're following somebody, you need to change your profile.

I was at a point in the surveillance detection route where I knew that the next person who should follow me is the younger male on their team. You can literally see the pattern in how professional surveillance works. So to lull them to sleep, you try to make it as easy as possible for them. So I didn't want to go into the quilting store.

Because if I went to the quilting store and some fucking 22-year-old kid followed me, he would feel awkward. But maybe the 60-year-old woman or the 55-year-old woman wouldn't feel so awkward. But she wasn't the next one up on the rotation. Oh, you had that calculated. Yeah.

I knew the next person up on the rotation was the young kid. Well, where's he going to fit in? The arcade. And one of the other things you always want to do on a surveillance route is you want to be able to control your time. So if you walk into a coffee shop, for example, logically you think oh copy shop's going to be quick you don't have any fucking idea the barista could be lazy they could be slow there could be a long line there's all sorts of reasons why you might walk into a copy shop

and you think you're going to be there for two minutes but you're there for 15 minutes instead that's that's a showstopper for surveillance detection route because you lost control of time you walk into an arcade you control every element of your time do you play one game do you play four games do you die quickly in the game Do you just walk around? Do you go buy a coffee or a Coke if the line is short? Do you just use the restroom? You can control every element of your time. So I knew I wanted a place for a 22-year-old guy to follow me, about 22-year-old to follow me. I wanted it to be a place that only he would fit in in the whole team. So it makes it very easy for him. And a place where I could loiter so that as soon as I saw him with me, I could play three, four, five games, give the whole team a 15 or 20-minute break so that they can smoke a cigarette. They can restructure who's in what cars. Like, I want them to have a really easy life so that they don't think that there's anything suspicious about me.

And that 22-year-old guy can follow me anywhere in this arcade he wants to because he doesn't even have to be close to me. He can be on the second floor and watch me on the first floor. He can be on the first floor and watch me on the second floor. It's easy.

That's why I picked the arcade. But you don't want you or him to make each other. You never want to make eye contact with these people. and that's what that's what happened here I'll read this little passage you were you were in the

in the arcade and you said I squinted down the barrel of the plastic rifle you were playing some fucking dinosaur game shoot the dinosaur the T-Rex was looking right at me clawing at the dirt with its hind leg I had a good clean shot at it

my finger hovered over the trigger at that moment a figure appeared around the right hand side of the arcade cabinet little more than two arms breaths away from me it was someone I recognized from earlier in the day but it wasn't Puma it was bomber man the guy from outside the knockoff shop hours ago and miles across town in the confusion of that moment there was no time to calibrate my reactions we locked eyes each of us visibly

recognizing the other my heart stopped i had been made now they knew for sure that i had intelligence training bomber man's mouth hung open on impulse i squeezed the blue plastic trigger my shot went wide the t rex word and charged me its jaws clamped shut and blood red text filled the screen came over there's no way the timing was that perfect i this was one part i didn't buy like you definitely shot and that was I don't know five minutes later but you locked eyes with this guy you know

that's horrible yeah it's horrible I mean it's the thing that's so nasty about it is how fast it all went wrong yeah I mean I'm in the arcade I'm playing the fucking game first of all if anybody's played like these I think this was like a Jurassic Park game nobody ever beats the fucking Tyrannosaurus in the actual game

it costs like five dollars but regardless. Regardless, I thought I was doing everything right. I was like, oh, yeah, they've got the team out there. They're going to send the young guy in. You know, the next person up on the list is earmuffs. I'm going to be good to go. I've got four more hours to kill and then they're going to be off shift. I thought I had it all on lockdown. And, and then my peripheral eyes caught somebody familiar that was not the right person. Had I had my periphery caught Puma, the guy wearing the Puma suit, I would have been perfect. I'd have been like, like, got it. Like, that's exactly what I expected. But instead, it's like when you see something that's just out of place and you do a double take, fucking the wrong person was there. And I looked at him, and I was like, what?

And then clearly, he was also surprised to see me because there, he was looking at me. If you've ever been to an arcade, this is what kills me. Every time I go to an arcade now. He's got arcade PTSD. In a way, it's ridiculous. But the next time you're in arcade, the next time you go to, you know, whatever,

the adult arcade is or anything else, you'll notice nobody makes eye contact. Nobody looks at anybody. You're there with your friends. You're looking at the bar. You're checking out asses and tits. You're doing whatever you're doing, but you're not making eye contact with strangers.

And it felt so horrible in that moment because I was like, we're looking at each other in this fucking place where nobody's looking at each other. How long was it? Like two seconds, five seconds? I think in reality it was probably a second to a second and a half. But it felt longer. But it felt so long.

Was it kind of like that scene in the town where they, like, get out of the car after they did the big getaway and the cop staring right at him? And they're like, just look at him like this. And then the cop goes, you didn't see anything. And he just walks away because he's like, that wasn't supposed to happen. I don't remember the town, but probably. Oh, you got to watch that movie. Yeah. But it doesn't feel good.

And it feels so naked and dirty. And then however long it was. is irrelevant because what it feels like is I just I just stepped on a hornet's nest like this whole thing is going to explode I thought for sure that this dude he saw me I saw him he's going to step away and he's going to call it on the radio and he's going to be like I got made and as soon as he says he got made the commander of the unit is going to be like this person's intelligence trained because you can't in the game of espionage you can't be on the surveillance team and claim that you got burnt or claim that you got made

and have it be because of your own error. They all cover each other's backs that way. So it can't be your mistake that made you get caught. If you got caught, it's because they were trained and they saw you. That's how you always escalate cases. That's how you make sure that nobody ever questions a surveillance report, right?

So I was like, oh, this is a standard procedure. This person's going to get out. He's going to say, I got made. Commander's going to call in to command and say, hey, we've got an intelligence trained operative. at that point either they're going to send in the capture squad because they've been waiting for me to give them a cue that I'm intelligence trained

or they're going to escalate the case and I'm going to have a new team on me in the next two hours or I'm going to have a team that picks me up in the morning like it's going to get worse there's no way it goes from this to better it only goes from this to worse and I don't even know what worse is going to look like which is just incredibly disheartening

you were saying that you were doing some things during this time that i guess you were trained on like at the farm or at cia to reduce stress yeah and prepare your body for what's coming next like is this strictly like breathing type things or they're also thought exercises they're both yeah it's a great point there's there's breathing exercises i mean things that you can learn in in anybody who's been through adult therapy has probably learned breathing exercises that we learn at cia from box breathing to deep breathing to resistance breathing where you take a deep breath and then you resist as you exhale it. There's all sorts of ways that you can artificially slow your heart rate, which reduces your blood pressure, which allows for clearer thought. So of course, I'm doing that

as best I can without looking like I'm doing that as I'm in like a crash bang, wreck up car game trying to burn more time. But then you're also going through thought exercises where you're creating multiple hypotheses about what may have happened and what may happen next, and you're trying to identify what's the most probable, what's the least probable, and what can you do next? Because you want to create the most important thing when you feel overwhelmed with emotion, the most important thing is to create time. Because your logical brain works much slower than your emotional brain. So when you feel emotional, you feel the pressure to make fast decisions. When in fact, what you need to do is you need to give your emotions time

to do whatever they're going to do. But don't make a decision until you give your logical brain a chance to catch up because your logical brain will catch up. I think I've given you this example possibly, but at some point I'm sure when you were a kid, you were walking through a dark room and you saw something in the corner that spooked you.

Oh, it's a rat. Oh, it's a snake. Oh, it's a monster. And then a split second after that, you realize it's just a crumpled up t-shirt or it's just a book that fell off the bookshelf laying open, right? And then after you have that, you feel a sense of relief. That's exactly how the brain works even as an adult. Something triggers you and you jump or you startle

because your emotional brain works so fast. It takes a half a tick or two before the logical brain is like, oh, wait a second, that's not a monster, that's a book. That's not a rat. That's a T-shirt, right? The same thing happens when you're making decisions in business, when you're making decisions in the field.

It's never as bad as you think it is first. You just have to give yourself time to work through it. So that's what I was trying to do is give my logical brain a chance to catch up so that instead of just thinking a SWAT team's going to show up and I'm dead, I think, well, maybe not. Maybe something else will happen first. When did you start to process

that maybe you had dodged a bullet? Like how long after that? I didn't think that I was safe. Yeah, you never thought you were safe, but when did you think, like, oh, they're not literally sending in, like, the SWAT team to take me to the torture chamber this instant? Oh, this instant? Yeah. I would say, the last stop that I made before I called it a night was at a men's clothing store.

And when I walked into that men's clothing store and I still had surveillance behind me and it was still the same team with the same people and the same vehicles, that's when I started to think, like, it's not game over yet. something else is happening there's still there's still room somewhere there's still room for flexibility you were trying on belts you were saying belts

jackets you're trying them around the neck or no there's uh there's uh if you've ever traveled it's just shocking how predictable men's stores are they all have the same

thousand options for belts and jackets and hats all right so you get back to the hotel and you're still thinking like oh, maybe they're going to take me at the hotel. And it was cool. You were calculating, like, the most logical times they might, like, burst through the door to take you based on what the attention would be from the people

on hand. And you thought it was going to be between 10 or 11 o'clock at night? Why did you think that? Because it's the right time of day to make the biggest scene with the least reaction. Here's what was so fascinating to me in hindsight as I was going through writing the memoir. You know, everybody makes a big deal. especially in the United States. We all promote training. Like, oh, get training and we've got the best training. And, you know, we go out of, we spend money out of pocket to go through, you know,

survival training and seal training and all this other kind of training to try and make ourselves tough. What nobody ever talks about is how that fucking training can work against you. And what happened for me as I was reviewing, as I was going through my memoir, as I was writing the memoir, I was like, holy shit, man, my training in a lot of ways created a whole hell of a lot more stress and effort than if I would have never been trained. Don't get me wrong, the training saved my life. But nobody talks about the fact that when you actually need to use that training, all the other shit that's going through your head is just burning and burning. It's burning resources. It's burning cycles. It's burning speed. It's burning all sorts of stuff. So I thought, like, I, I'm exercising

my surveillance detection route because I think I know how to do it, because I was trained a certain way. And then they actually reacted in a way different from my training. And now I'm going through this exercise in the hotel room where I'm like, well, if they're going to burst into my room, here's how I would do it. So then I'm building up this reaction to something that's going to happen in my mind at a certain time because that's how I would do it. Doesn't happen that way. They did it differently. And it's like there's these instances throughout the memoir where I'm like, I was trained to do it this way. They did it a different way. I was trained what I would call best in class.

They were clearly not operating best in class. So then that makes it really difficult to predict how someone's going to operate. Because what's their training school? Yeah. Now, were you already thinking to yourself? Because you're sitting on your bed in the hotel room and kind of sweating this out.

But it's a long time you're sitting there, sweating this out. Had you already accepted in your head that this was the last time you're ever going to be coming to this place? Yeah, I think I, I mean, Even before that, I knew that this would be my last trip into Falcon, probably for the rest of my life, which I'm not super sad about. Falcon's a cool place, but it's definitely not that cool a place. But yeah, it was a little bit of a bittersweet moment because the last, there are still places I would have loved to have gone. Like there's my favorite restaurants, my favorite coffee shops, my favorite tourist stops, my favorite museums that I,

that I came to love while I was there and now they're gone to me forever. Like, I could have had one more chance. I was at the MoMA here in Manhattan yesterday. And I had no idea that Starry Night by Van Gogh is on the wall in MoMA. I'd never seen it before in my life. And I'd seen hundreds of pictures of it just like everybody else has. But nothing compared to standing six inches away from

the starry night by Van Gogh. And seeing the paint and seeing the, and like, seeing it. And I know I can always go back and see it again. Right. The stuff that I saw there, I'll never get to see it again. Yeah, you'll never go there. Yeah, I mean, you do kind of know, though, going into the job, there's a D-Day at some point.

Yeah. You know, even if you don't want it to be as dramatic as yours ended up being, but there's a point where something gets revealed afterwards or, you know, you have a successful mission and now they're on to it and you're not going to be able to do that. So in some ways, I mean, mentally, you had to be prepared for that. Yeah. I mean, I would say yes, but that's another kind of sign of my age and ignorance. I didn't expect it to happen so soon. I didn't expect it to happen second tour. I didn't expect it to happen when I was still like, you know, in my early 30s. I thought that's the kind of thing that happens to you when you're mid career, 15 years in the job, right? Right. So you were still nervous because it was supposed to be a three-day trip, but during this whole day where you're doing SDRs and trying to evade these guys, you were also getting. getting your flight change to the morning to basically get out of there and you had in your head a cover story that you know you accomplish what you needed to at your meeting so you're going back home to the third country that you always go home to and it was an early flight you

get out of there and you go to the airport but you're thinking to yourself the most logical way for them to take me even before you were going there is to have them pull me out to get a second security check at the airport because you go into a room no one sees and they never have to see you again. So did you, it seemed like you thought that was probably going to happen. Yeah, so, you know, it's, let's, this is a great opportunity to talk about how different the movies are from real life. Hopefully, even just the people listening to the conversation who haven't had a chance to

read the book yet, or maybe we'll never read the book, read the fucking book, but. Link in description. Even the people who don't, I hope that by now they've come to realize professional intelligence is a game of disappearing, of not acting suspicious, but having nefarious intent nonetheless. So when it comes time to self-evacuate or self-ex-fill out of a country, you really only have two or three options.

You can fucking run for the hills and do whatever you need to do to escape through a jungle on a boat over a mountain and get out. Problem is you're being followed. And as soon as you make a break, everybody knows what you're doing that's it yeah that's it and then they just call in a fucking wilderness team

instead of a downtown urban surveillance team and they wrap you up in the wilderness or you try to go some route where you have somebody else facilitate your escape you try to rent a private boat charter you try to rent a private plane you try to hide yourself in somebody's trunk problem is you have a fucking signal

in your pocket in your cell phone everybody is helping you has a signal that's coming out of their device once again they see you make a break for it, they watch you fall off the cellular map, and they're like, we got a runner, and then shoon, all the teams come in. The strangely, the way that you get out easiest, the way that you get out with the highest chance of success is to actually use all the formal borders that are in your place. So for me, I did the calculation of my head. I was like, you know what?

I got made in the arcade. They haven't wrapped me up yet. I still have the same surveillance team on me outside that I did for the rest of the day. either they're not communicating or they're communicating poorly or there's something else going on here. Maybe it's budgetary. Maybe it's logistics. Who knows? But I don't have any reason to try to run. So let's just try to cross a border.

Let's see if the best chance is actually just to cross the border because I know if they suspect me, they'll wrap me up at the airport anyways. And at least if they wrap me up at the airport, it's in front of everybody. It's a formal government thing. like now all of a sudden it's going to be an international issue because they took me at a legal border. Public, yeah. So that's why I chose. We made as big of a splash as we could.

I sent emails. I made phone calls. I sent out lots of signals that said, hey, I'm leaving early, leaving tomorrow, 6 a.m. leaving from, you know, this airport. You guys, I'm not trying to hide it. And that was the best I could do until I got to the airport

and got pulled aside into secondary. What happened when you got pulled aside? Obviously, you're like, oh, fuck, but what went down in there? Yeah, all fuck, fuck me is right. And then on top of that, I'm glad I was right about this. At least I knew that this could happen. So here are the chips that they have. Here's the chips that I have.

And then it got really strange. And I love this part of the story. And I really, if there's no other reason to read this, it's almost to read this for the story that happens at secondary. because I was just telling you how training works against us sometimes. This is one of those instances where the training that I had received in handling an interrogation, countering an interrogation, resisting an interrogation, all of those things were very useful. But what was the most useful to me was understanding how the interrogation I was being exposed to

was so different than what I was trained. It was so much less professional. It was so much less specific. it was so much less intentional. It was almost chaotic. And if anything, what that did is it gave me confidence through the interrogation. I was like, holy shit.

What I went through at the farm was worse than anything I'm going through now. Right? What I went through after I fucked up with Major Bondoi, however many years ago, four years ago, is worse than what I have now. And I could actually walk away from that and I can't walk away from this.

It was just so wildly interesting to see the training really come full circle where I was like, this is why we do what we do. we do now if only i can tell somebody this and i have to not fuck this up right now but they you felt like the guys who were questioning you were either like out of the loop or under trained and when they were doing it like you're saying it wasn't up to par so how quickly after you sat down did you realize like oh i might be getting out of here i mean it was fast so here's what's in well

i didn't know how fast i'd be getting out of there but here's what i will say i sat down and it was just within a few minutes of sitting down that the interrogation started. That's a no-no. That's a no-no. In real interrogations, you let them sweat. Well, you got a flight that catch. They don't care about my flight. I know. Yeah. I mean, think about what you went through when we interrogated you.

Right? We at least let you, we were literally on a filming schedule, but we still let you sweat it out for five or seven minutes. There was no sweatshop at all here, right? You're supposed to force a person to sweat and let the time do the work for you. You're supposed to sit them in a room that's uncomfortable. I sat in a room that was perfectly comfortable. You're supposed to sit them in a room that intimidates them. I got sat in a clean, bright, white room. It's nothing

uncomfortable here, folks, right? Like, it just wasn't up to snuff for what we do in the West. Now, either we're monsters or these guys were not prepared to be interrogating a potential suspected intelligence officer. One way or the other. How long was it? Overall, it's took about 90 minutes, right, for the entire interrogation to happen, which was plenty of time for me in an air, well, not plenty of time, but it was, it was enough time for me to still get to my airplane, but it was just another example of that's not how it would have worked for me, right? I would have let the dude sit there for 90 minutes with no food, no water, and I would have turned the fucking heat up or down, and then just check in and be like, oh, we haven't forgotten

about you, or are you doing okay? Is there anything I can get you? Dump a little water on them. Zip down to the chair. Right. It's little things. Yeah. The little things. Let them know you care. So they, you get through this. They're obviously like somewhat out of the loop,

but they had been told at least to flag you. And then they let you go and you were like, you got to act normal going to the, even though you're trying to catch this flight, you got to just walk to it and you get there. You get on the plane. And then you got to think about how long it takes to get out of the airspace of Falcon.

Yes. It was the worst flight I've ever been on because it's never far enough. Every time the fucking plane turns, every time it's like, it's just doing what a plane does. But in your mind, you're like, I had it going back. Sir come with us. What is going on? And then, you know, you finally, it wasn't until I entered my third party, my third country location.

I was actually on the ground because I'm on a country carrier, a country controlled aircraft for Falcon. So it's not until I'm off that fucking airplane that I feel like I'm actually not on the ground in the country. You kiss that fucking ground when you get down there. Dude, I don't even care if it had someone homeless guys piss on it. Just made out with it. I've never been so happy to be in this shit all of my life. And then you celebrate and then you realize that you're hungry and then you have a fucking giant diarrhea shit.

And then you're all fucked up because you realize all the cortisol dump and you're just like, I'm not a Superman at all. I'm just a frail, weak little man. It's got to be an insane. sane rush. You've got to be like, I got those motherfuckers. I mean, there's a little bit of that. That's only a little bit, though. The most of it is like, holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck. Yeah. And then you start the whole explanation to CIA. And guess how many of them believe me? Zero. I mean, James, James and the rest of the cell had my back. But once I

started telling people like, this is what happened to me. Everybody was like, you fucked up. And you need to report how you fucked up. Because we don't know because we weren't there. So, And then that turned into a whole after-action report. And the whole cell had to start... We had to scrub everybody's records, everybody's files, everybody's cases to see where the fuck up had happened because we had to assume that the reason I was under surveillance was because somewhere we had made a mistake.

Did you ever find it? We never found a mistake on our side. So that left the only other explanation... The mole. So even though you guys were a cell set up so that the mole wouldn't have access to that, something happened to where they at least knew who you were. The mole.

And we had set up the cell so that I was exposed. Right, you're the courier. I'm the courier. So that's how we had set it up, and we set it up that way intentionally, and setting it up that way was beneficial to the CIA mole hunt on their side. So even after we had done our scrub and Langley had done their scrub, everybody came back and was like, there was no error in operations. this was this was the mole found you and the mole reported you and the good news happy story at the end

they found the mole and they were able to operate on the mole in large part because we got the right person to make the right mistake at the right time that was was confusing man I found the mole in one Google search so everyone out there can I don't know like are we allowed to do that if the camera's on me and I say search something and then it pulls up try it and you don't confirm I'm not going to confirm or deny all right All right, so I'm going to use, let's get the camera on me. Joe, Google this, because I'm going to use the words in the book. CIA, informant, arrested, O'Hare Airport, cash. first one camera still on me right can I read the headline andy go ahead man

all right how with two hundred thirty thousand dollar debt and a LinkedIn message led an ex-Ci officer to spy for China Kevin Mallory went years without a steady job making him a right target for recruitment court documents set now you're not gonna confirm or deny but the person that you write about in the book is named skimitar and what was confusing to me is that the guy had a cia background according to what you write but had been outside of that for a long time so i think you wrote at some point he tried to get back into but didn't necessarily get in so how did he get access to like clearly some of the highest people in falcon house to be able to get information you know so one of the

things that we find with moles, we found with what we call internal penetrations, is that they have a ability to tap into networks of persons, people that they know, and then they also have the ability to tap into physical controlled networks that they have access to. So whether or not Kevin is the right scimitar or whether it's somebody else, what we found is that the person who was able to report on Falcon House had both access to the systems at some point to some level and access to the people at some point and at some level and that was you said this in the book he wasn't discovered till after you guys had left CIA and if you think about it let's just i mean let's talk about the the meta strategy behind the book we created a book that was transparent because

that's what we wanted to give. CIA read our transparent book and said, the American people will never see this. So then we asked them, how do we make this story? How do we make the details of this, the important parts of the transparency that we want to share? How do we make this available? At first, they said, no, no ball. Later on, as we got into more legal back and forth, and we started exploring the option of suing CIA, then they started to play ball a little bit more. So what is in this book is still what CIA would have considered to be classified from three years ago. But it also allows for the areas where they have reviewed it and they have said, you're allowed to say this.

So whether the O'Hare Airport was something that we intentionally intended to say at the beginning or whether that's something CIA came in with at the end is up to the reader to determine. But either way, it was allowed in there. Correct. That we can pull on that kind of threat. did you like while you guys were still there though first of all when once you get made and get out of there and have this daring escape and then report it back and it gets handled and whatever what happens to the cell after that because now they don't have a courier they find a new courier when we built the architecture for the cell model we made it in such a way that couriers the nodes as we called them could always be replaced and that the scale the model could be scaled in other places So Wolf found a new, a new courier.

And when when Ji and I both left Wolf to go on to our next operation, they found a new targeter too. And then we helped start to train other units of CIA around the world how to build their own cell model. Some people picked it up. Some people hated it. But everybody that picked up the cell model had their targeter, had their case officer pool, had their courier.

Curier wasn't always a sue. sometimes a courier was a junior case officer or a tech person or a logs person logistics person but we all had the same kind of model with the same idea in mind so you this mission was clearly a success because you invented something new by using something that previously like an enemy had used against you and eventually part of the work leads to them actually uncovering the mole and also along the way you're getting a lot of intel on falcon that you wouldn't have been able to access if the people that need to get that information had you know some sort of direct connection to the mole right it's actually funny because from CIA's point of view the success was for the exact opposite of the order that you laid out what do you mean the first reason we were successful was because we got information on falcon that we didn't previously right okay and then and then because we also got them all we we also got them all. Okay. So you see that later there's people from CIA who are publicly talking about not necessarily the detail you did, but the model of like having compartmentalization,

which is kind of what for case officers, which is kind of what you invented here. So clearly in the modern day, some version of this has been adopted at a high level across the agency around the world for different missions. Right. So what's fascinating is in the immediate aftermath, The last few years of my career, I trained other people how to do this. My wife was also called in to train other people how to do this. We very quickly rose through leadership ranks from middle managers to senior managers based on the success of operations and our success exporting this model. But then we left.

And we left for personal reasons. We wanted to raise a family. We had been promoted so fast in CIA that we were basically being pulled off of operations together. So there was, it just wasn't conducive. If CIA is not an organization that really cares if you want to be parents or really cares if you want to be married, they want you to serve the American people. So we came to the conclusion, I'd always come to the conclusion, I'd rather be married and be a dad more than be a public servant. So once my wife kind of landed on the same shoe in our success, we left CIA.

When we left CIA, we... Allegedly. When we left CIA, we didn't take relationships with us. didn't stay in contact with our friends who were still undercover. To do so would have been to risk their status. It wasn't until I think 2017. It may have been 2019 when the director announced publicly that CIA was going to reorganize and he was reorganizing the entire agency into the same model that we had built in our shadow cell and the same model that we had taught around the world. So it's almost like our model went from the field to headquarters,

which is exactly how we would expect change to work. Because the field drives the operation, headquarters reacts. And that conflict must have continued for years. And to my understanding, it still continues because after the reorg, most of the NCS was angry. The only thing that, it's not the only thing, but one of the main things that I am a little concerned about with this book coming out is all the angst and all the ire of CIA case officers who hate John Brennan's reorganization of CIA they're now going to know we were part of what contributed to that reorganization that they all hate so much John Brennan's not a well-liked guy and I'll go so far as to say he's not a good guy very very clearly I can't think of one thing I like about that guy at all but

him taking something that was successful and putting it into operational planning is what you should do and I don't understand why I could see why this wouldn't be useful absolutely everywhere but when you need to compartmentalize things to basically create a safety outlet where you're still not only are you still able to do your job you actually really have more freedom to do it because no one's looking over your fucking shoulder. I would assume as a case officer, that would be something that you're like, well, fuck, yeah, sign me up. So why are people like, no, we don't want to do this? It's like they're saying they want a daddy at Langley. It has no, it has nothing to do with the operation. And that's

what's so sad. And this is one of the few things that I will say is really, really sad about CIA. It is a careerist organization. So everybody who's there and who stays there is always thinking, how do I get up in my career? How do I climb one rank higher? How do I stab my friend in the back so that I can be the next GS-14 or GS-15? Because they all know, they all know that at the end of a 20- or 30-year career, only a few people will be making $200,000 a year. The rest of them will be making $90,000 a year. So they have to stab and climb and scratch all the way up that pyramid. It used to be that you only had to compete against other case officers. Well, now, thanks to the cell model, thanks to John Brennan's reorg, anybody can become a leader. Anybody can be a courier, anybody can be a mission planner,

anybody can choose to start a new cell. You could be an analyst, you could be a targeter, you could be a tech person, you could be a... It's politics. It's politics. And now, if somebody runs a good operation and they're an analyst, they're dictating operations to a case officer. When it used to be, only case officers could ever do operations. The fact that I was a sue dictating operations to case officers. They didn't like that. They hated it. People back at headquarters hated it. The people in my cell were like, fuck, yeah, man.

Andy has an idea, and we all decide if we also like the idea. It's a very collaborative environment. I had lots of bad ideas that never saw the light of day because my case officer peers were like, we don't want to do that. I also had lots of good ideas where my case officer peers were like, fuck, I never thought of that. That's not the way it works at headquarters. At headquarters in Washington, D.C., it's a game of

fucking how do I get out of this bow tie and how do I stab somebody in the back so that I can get back out to the field and do real work and they don't like it when when anybody else gets promoted ahead of them yeah you've always hit on the bureaucracy point with CIA and how that fucking gets in the way and I I get it because it's not that's where it's like how would it be different than the DMV makes sense to me yeah because you just have enough people like the Jim DeOrio one-thirders you talks about, there's enough of those at a big organization that it just fucking pulls down a lot of weight on the ship and stops things from happening. Yeah.

So there's, again, it's a little bit bit bittersweet. Even the release of the book is bittersweet because for all the CIA people that think that I'm worthless or think that I'm a faker or think that I'm overstating my success, which I've never overstated my success, I've always just said I'm a guy with a, with a voice. That's all I am. now they'll see guess what I'm really not a success

I fucking am a farm flunky I'm not a case officer people have called me case officer you'll never see me once say I'm a case officer I think we've always referred to you as just CIA spy yeah a record a lot of people have just referred me what I call myself is just a field officer

right that in many ways yes all you haters on the internet you're right I'm not great I'm not God's gift to CIA I never said I was in fact I wrote a book telling you about how bad I was at being a CIA officer.

But I actually did get to do some cool shit. I actually did get to work for CIA. I actually did get to impact the safety and security that we used to get to enjoy that is now depleting every week. But it's not about me. The really impressive people were the people who were in the cell with us. And this book talks about how awesome all of them are. Even in this conversation, I don't talk about me as much as I talk about how awesome they were.

My wife was so awesome. The operators, the case officers were super awesome. We haven't even touched on how badass the tech ops and the linguist were that worked with us. The people that work at CIA are incredible. And the few of us that get to talk about CIA, I have no problem being the target of your jokes because these people aren't. Are you happy with how your career went? In hindsight, if it didn't go the way it went, I wouldn't be where I am now. I can't argue with that.

There's some famous inspirational quote out there that I don't remember talking about how your darkest moments or your greatest opportunities or something along those lines. And that's certainly true. I wouldn't have my two amazing kids. I wouldn't be living where I live. I wouldn't have the wealth that I had had I dedicated my life to that joint. All right. There's a lot more on the bone here, but we've been talking for like three hours and 35 minutes or something.

So unless you wanted to do a second podcast, and I think. think you got places to go. We'll have to do that another time. But your book, we're putting this out, I believe, like, the day the book is coming out. So the link is in description below. It is excellent. You have another one coming behind it as well. And I think what we should do, it would be better if, like, you came in here and I had both you and Tommy G. in here. And then we could do, like, a full recap of that and really get, like, Tommy's perspective on planning this whole thing out and how it went down. Because in hindsight, it was pretty wild. I mean, I wouldn't do it again, but, you know, it's nice to say we did it once, and, you know,

we can react to some of the footage from short, too, but that was a, that was an interesting experience, and I was very impressed with how in character. Yeah, I think they were all impressed, too. You were the entire time, because it was, uh, there were a few oh shit moments in there. I had your back, man. I knew you weren't going to get hurt. Yeah, but still, I was like, I can't let Andy break me for clout. So, you know. I'm going to have to feel some pain today, and I hadn't really thought about that this morning, but here we are. So, anyway, thanks as always for coming in. Everyone go check out the book, and I'm sure the comment section will love you, as they always do.

Thanks, brother. All right. Everyone else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video.

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